19th Level

After a number of tries, I think the DC Universe films have finally managed to release a film firing on all cylinders. I think Man of Steel had a lot of good points but I think it was a missed opportunity, not showing just how good  Superman is. Batman v. Superman  was in my mind an improvement but I think it would have benefited from some tightening - the distrust of Superman seemed forced, the incident that caused the Congressional Inquiry was a bit confusing, and it really packed an awful lot into it. On the plus side, Ben Afleck made for a fantastic aged Batman and Gal Gadot's debut as Wonder Woman was a highlight. Suicide Squad  seemed primarily to suffer from not knowing what kind of movie it wanted to be, though my younger daughter Jasmine loved it - Harley Quinn is her favorite comic book character. Jasmine and I saw Wonder Woman today and while Harley remains her favorite character, she definitely liked Wonder Woman better than Suicide Squad or any of the DC m...

I've been on a bit of a dystopian kick of late. One of the works I've read, for the first time in ages, is Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons' Give Me Liberty . Originally published in 1990, Give Me Liberty tells the story of Martha Washington, born in the year 1995 and primarily taking place in 2009 through 2012. It takes place in a dystopian America, ruled by the initially popular President Rexall, elected in 1996. Her father is killed in protests following his election. She and her family live in the Carbini-Green housing of Chicago. In this America, it is essentially a prison for impoverished African-Americans. Rexall, a strong conservative, is re-elected in 2000 and 2004, with the 22nd Amendment being repealed. Elections are suspended in 2008 due to the possibility he might lose. The Green is a hellish environment for young Martha - and for anyone else. She eventually finds her way out after she suffers a mental breakdown after witnessing her favorite teacher murd...

"It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel." - Jasmine (my 11-year old daughter) Today Jasmine and I went on a comic hunting expedition. While my daughters have accompanied me on comic books in the past, this was rather neat in that she was the one who wanted to go on it. Over the past several months she's begun reading comic books. I have to confess to being rather proud. My late uncle told me used to be a comic reader in the late 1950s, being a big fan of the Flash. It's nice to see a third generation enter the hobby.  Jasmine is quite the fan of Harley Quinn and has begun branching out into the Batgirl of Burnside series. I think the nonconformist nature of Harley has a certain appeal to her. She dressed up as Harley Quinn for Halloween this year. I've been steering her clear of the more intense comics for the time being - she'd asked about The Killing Joke , knowing it featured Barbara Gordon (though not as Batgirl) but I suggested that tha...

"One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the twentieth century." From Hell is a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It concerns itself with the murders committed by Jack the Ripper in the late Victorian era. The story is not a mystery - we are privy who the murderer is from the very start. It is William Gull, physician. There is a theory that Gull was indeed the murderer, though it is not one that Moore says he found credible - he did, however, find it made for an interesting story. In the story, Prince Albert Victor ("Prince Eddy") secretly marries Annie Cook, a shop girl. She has a child by him. Needless to say, when his grandmother, Queen Victoria, finds out about this, she is not amused. To stop her from talking, William Gull effectively lobotomizes her. However, her friend, Mary Kelly, already knows of the royal baby and she and her friends, all prostitutes, attempt to blackmail the royal family, Which sen...

The news worked its way through my newsfeeds this morning - Darwyn Cooke had passed away at the age of 53 due to an aggressive cancer. Cooke was one of my favorite writers and artists. When I discovered DC: New Frontier  I was in absolute awe. He took the Silver Age of DC Comics, an era renowned for its goofiness, and ran with it, telling a mature story while someone remaining true to the original tales. New Frontier is the main reason my current superhero RPG campaign is set in the late 1950s. Earlier this year I reviewed that work. Though comic books exist as a visual medium, I tend to look first for writers before I look for artists. Cooke was an exception. I'd read anything he was involved in. His drawing style was distinctive, unlike anyone else I can think of in the industry. His tales were of real people - real people even if they were from Mars or Krypton.  My deepest condolences to his family and loved ones. His creative efforts brought me many hour...

As I work on mapping out Port Henry for our Icons game, I'm finding myself reminded of a challenge I often have when setting the scene. How much detail is enough? What is too little? I myself tend to be a bit on the sparser side, something which has its advantage as it allows players to fill in blanks, but presents its own challenges, especially if different players have fundamentally different views of what something looks like. At times like that I really wish I had some talent for drawing. I'm pretty handy at maps, especially when using digital tools like Campaign Cartographer. But my ability to produce a non-schematic/map-type drawing is limited to Risus-like stick figures. I'm not sure the diagram here is quite evocative enough to use as a visual aid tool during a game. What I'm thinking about now is how to best give a feel for the environment of the city. As an example, I'm picturing the various incarnations of Gotham City, each of which has its own person...

For some reason I've got myself wondering... If I'm kicking off a superhero game set in the late 1950s, what is the future of that world like? The ability to predict the future is challenging. A high school student in the 1980s, all the science fiction I read and watched pretty much assumed the Soviet Union would be around in the year 2016. Either that or the USA and Soviet Union would be competing to dig themselves out of the rubble of a thermonuclear war. I'm not certain how much people really believed in the idea that we'd have flying cars, though as a kid who grew up obsessed with the space program, I'm massively disappointed about our lack of space colonies. One area where we pretty much decimated the predictions of the past is the prevalence of computer technology. I've been using smart phones for years and I'm still amazed at the computing power in our pockets. I remember in the 1980s coordinating with friends to meet at the mall to see a mo...

Probably my favorite of the "ages" of comic books was the Bronze Age - it's not a rigidly defined time, but generally considered to span from 1970 to the mid-80s - often with The Dark Knight Returns  as being considered the dawn of the Iron Age. Though the Bronze Age is my favorite, I started reading comics as it was ending - Crisis on Infinite Earths  was just about to appear on the shelves. So most of my initial collecting was in the Iron Age. I'm pretty sure in my parent's house in a box are multiple copies of X-Men #1 and Superman #75, just waiting to be cracked open to fund my kids' attending Harvard, MIT, and Yale. And maybe Columbia for good measure too... Joking aside, I enjoyed the early efforts of the Iron Age. Though I don't particularly care for Frank Miller's more recent works, The Dark Knight Returns was an interesting examination at Batman, suggesting there was something very seriously wrong with him. In all honesty though, I bel...

Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier is a somewhat unusual concept. It bridges DC Comics' Golden Age and Silver Age. It makes the assumption that characters first became active the year their first appearance was published - for example, Superman began his career in 1938 and Batman in 1939. The comic takes us from 1945 to 1960. It does not suppose parallel Earths - there is no Earth-1 or Earth-2. The Batman of 1960 has been active for over twenty years (as a 40-something year old myself, I wish him luck). New Frontier begins very dark, with superheroes becoming distrusted - the Justice Society disbands in the face of the paranoia at the start of the Cold War. Some heroes try to continue operating in this environment and we see the grim end of one of them. The only three who continue operating are Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Superman and Wonder Woman work for the government, enforcing US foreign policy, while Batman is rogue. However, things slowly improve. The Martian Ma...

It might be that I'm becoming an old fogie (old enough to have seen the original Star Wars in the theaters) but I'm coming to feel when I want "comic book" type entertainment, I get the best value for my money and my time in the television and movie form. For me it comes down to the ability to enjoy a story without worrying about untangling the tendrils of crossovers and reboots. (Though some superhero film franchises are overdoing the reboot concept.) Take Guardians of the Galaxy . Over the past year, you'd have your core comic. Comics for the members. Crossover events, including of course into comics you don't read. And every once in a while you get an extreme crossover, usually followed by some sort of reboot. On the Spider-Man side of things you've got Ama zing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, and Silk . Plus one of more Avengers titles he might be in. This isn't a bitter "they're just in ...

I've enjoyed reading comic books since the mid-1980's. I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman Overture , a series which featured Gaiman returning to his most famous creation to tell the story of what transpired before the events of Sandman #1. It reminded me of how much Sandman shook up the market and made me think about some of the comics that had a big impact on me, that made me say "whoa" and reconsider what was possible. I'll focus on both comics and stories. Daredevil: Born Again  - I caught pieces of this when they first came out in 1985 and 1986 but didn't get the full story until it was collected in the late 80's, one of the first collections I acquired. It was an amazing story of a superhero who had everything stripped from him. Who had to figure out who he was again, not in the space of one issue but over several months of story. Whole issues would pass without Matt Murdock appearing as Daredevil to the point when he finally suited...

"And now, my young apprentice... Your father is dead. Have you come to join me? Will you take the place that rightfully belongs to you–at my side." - Emperor Palpatine I first saw an advertisement for Star Wars: Dark Empire  in a book previewing upcoming Marvel comics, either in 1989 or 1990. Marvel had  produced a Star Wars comic until 1986 and kept their Ewoks  and Droids  comics going until around 1987. And then nothing. So I was greatly looking forward to Marvel's Dark Empire . As it turned out, Marvel wound up not releasing Dark Empire  and Dark Horse Comics gained the license to Star Wars. For the most part, they did some great stuff with it (along with a few misses). When Marvel and Lucasfilm both under the Disney corporate umbrella it was no surprise that the license went back to Marvel after over two decades at Dark Horse. Overall I think Marvel has done a good job with the license - the Darth Vader comic especially has been fantastic. W...

For some reason I have to chuckle as I consider the first of Art Spiegelman's creations I encountered was not his masterpiece Maus  but rather his Garbage Pail kids - hideous trading cards that my brother and his friends obsessed over in the mid-1980's. I think that goes to show we're all capable of all sorts of creations. I might be delaying diving into what I'm planning on writing because Maus is not an easy read. It is a story within a story, telling of Art in the 1970's and 1980's interviewing his father  Vladek about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Art was born after the Holocaust to his parents who both survived - though Art finds himself competing with older "ghost" brother Richieu, who did not survive the war. Maus  makes use of a convention of assigning the various ethnic groups a type of anthropomorphized animal. Jewish characters are mice, Germans are cats, Americans are dogs, Poles are pigs, etc. It's difficult to describ...

Cover to Black Goliath #1 [1] I seem to be on my "Social Justice Warrior" kick and my previous post on Diversity in Comics got a decent amount of traffic (well by my blog's standards) - with some interesting comments, both here and in other places I posted links. One thing that showed up in some discussions is the absolute possibility of being extremely clumsy in the well meaning attempt at including diversity. The 1970s is rife with this - an era when diversity often meant tacking the word "black" in front of a character's name. Black Lightning is perhaps the most notorious example and Black Goliath comes to mind as well. The character Black Panther headlining a comic book entitled Jungle Action  just seems terrible in retrospect. What you're running into in those cases is creation of a character whose entire reason to exist is their ethnicity. We don't live in a color-blind world so totally ignoring a characters ethnicity is untrue but mak...

Green Lantern  Spider-Man Marvel and DC Comics have, over the past few years, increased the diversity in comics characters. Earth 2  has featured a gay Green Lantern leading character. The current Ms. Marvel is a Pakistani-American teen-aged girl. The lead of Ultimate Spider-Man  transferred from white Peter Parker to mixed race (of African American and Latino descent) Miles Morales. I've read some controversy as to whether this is "pandering". I've also heard some people upset that iconic characters who had been white males being replaced by other types of characters - "why not make an original African American character?" for example. I'll start off with the second comment - "why not make an original xxx character?" From one perspective, I get the question. On the other hand, legacy characters have been a tradition in comics since Barry Allen was struck by lightning and become the second Flash. Looking at new Marvel comics that ca...

My gaming group has been experimenting with Evil Hat's Atomic Robo RPG. I've been itching to try out Fate for ages. I'm somewhat surprised to discover Aromic Robo as the setting, being as it is a comic book series I only had peripheral awareness of. Essentially, what I'd heard of the RPG as a good introduction to Fate got me to check out the RPG, figuring even if I didn't use the setting I could mine it. But the RPG is designed to greatly emulate the comic which caused me to go on a Comixology binge and obtain all of the digital Atomic Robo collections. I was hooked pretty quickly. I'll be talking about the RPG in the future (I hope - I also still plan on writing about some of the Delta Green stories I've read and my update frequency has been horrible of late.) Here I'll want to talk a bit about the Atomic Robo comics. Atomic Robo is the creation of writer Brian Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo is the creation of Nikola Tesla, "...

Back in the 80s and 90s my brother and I were perplexed by a frequent letter-writer in comic books, one "Uncle Elvis" who used to close his letters "see you at Munden's". What the heck was he talking about and why was the editor replying as if she knew what he was talking about? You know nowadays one simply Googles for the answer to such questions... Eventually my brother discovered that Munden's was a bar in a city at the nexus of realities, Cynosure. Cynosure was the setting of the comic book Grimjack, published by First Comics and created by John Ostrander and Tim Truman, both still active in comic books last I checked. At the time my brother discovered all this First Comics was either out of business or about to go out of business, though over the years (and with the help of eBay) he was able to get a complete collection of Grimjack comics. I've inherited that box of comics and I've also been purchasing the collected versions from IDW, though...

Batman is not impressed with my genre emulation issues. Despite my loving comic book superheroes I've had limited luck in long-term superhero RPGs. I've been thinking that a bit of late with the summer movie season in full swing with an allotment of three superhero movies (I remember a time when there would usually be none...) Sooner or later I'll want to try my luck at another one so it's with a little bit of self-interest that I give some thought as to what it is that makes superhero campaigns challenging, at least for me. I think that genre emulation is something important to the superhero RPG, typically balanced with how it handles action. In games such as   Smallville  genre emulation is the most important thing, even linked to the action. Why you are using your powers and for whom plays a huge role in how effective you are in a game of Smallville . The game I think handled genre emulation best while keeping the action level high was TSR's Marvel Super...

I've been in a bit of a superhero mood of late. This summer has seen   The Avengers  and The Amazing Spider-Man  in the movie theaters and The Dark Knight Rises  is just being released to theaters at the time I'm writing this. My introduction to superheroes was through cartoons. Being born in 1971 I used to watch reruns of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon ("Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can...") as well as The Superfriends . We used to always mock the Wonder Twins. Now that I think of it, I also used to see a very silent Spider-Man on The Electric Company  television show. 1979 saw the release of Superman: The Movie.  To this day it is probably the Christopher Reeve incarnation of Superman that I think of when I picture Superman. You'll note I've not yet mentioned comic books. I began slowly discovering comic books after a bunch of us started playing TSR's Marvel Superheroes  RPG. We had familiarity with the characters from shows l...