Julian Perez Conquers the Universe!

The Trill would make great Star Trek bad guys

2012-01-28T03:13:00.000-05:00

I always thought it was a mistake to make the Vulcans the heavies in Enterprise. The writers did it, I suspect, for the worst possible reason: rationalism is very threatening to a lot of people.

By that same token, you know one Star Trek race I suspect is either secretly evil and has potential to be a great bad guy race...or at the absolute least, is a concept with a real dark underside the series hasn't really explored yet?

The Trill.

Hear me out, here.

What was your first, visceral, initial reaction on hearing about the joined Trill race? Isn't the idea of surrendering a portion of your personality, memories and will to an immortal superintelligent parasite that lives inside of you, which needs you to get around, a little…well, creepy? We're told over and over by main characters like Dax and others about how being home to a symbiote is an honor over which there's a lot of competition, but isn't it entirely possible the initial, visceral reaction is correct?

Let me put it another way. Would you want to be a Trill host?

Trill society, as we discovered in the Deep Space Nine episode "Equilibrium," is fundamentally based on a lie, and a lie that as yet, hasn't been exposed. According to the Symbiosis Commission, only one in a thousand humanoid Trills is suitable for joining, and they're usually chosen from that race's overachievers and geniuses. Yet the truth, as discovered in "Equilibrium," is that over 50% of the humanoid Trill could work as hosts. In fact, in a pinch, when the Dax symbiote was near death, the eminently unsuitable Ezri, as the only humanoid Trill nearby, had to become joined after a 15 minute lecture by a non-Trill doctor.

What's more, Trill history suggests a furtive secretiveness that could suggest a malevolent purpose - or at the very least, they're not exactly totally honest with their allies. The Trill had contact with and knowledge of the Federation, yet the Federation had absolutely no idea the Trill were a joined race at all until Beverly Crusher had to save Odan, the first Trill we ever saw (that we know of) in "The Host."

Consider this: Dax was alive and kicking all throughout the history of the Federation, and in one funny moment she even implied she had sex with Doctor McCoy when he was a med school student. "Well, he certainly had hands like a surgeon…"

Curzon Dax, at one point, was even the Federation ambassador to the Klingons.

Yet, the fact the Trill had a unique symbiotic relationship was totally unknown to a genius medical researcher like Beverly Crusher, who had a history of working with aliens. Odan himself in "The Host" only revealed it in a moment of absolute desperation when he was about to die. He didn't tell the Enterprise crew about it, and kept the matter a secret even though being a Trill was the explanation for a life-threatening condition (he couldn't be transported). In short, Odan kept being a Trill a secret for some unknown reason.

All this doesn't mean the Trill are evil, it does mean though, that the Trill have not entirely been forthcoming and honest all the time.

It may be possible we have encountered the Trill before TNG's "The Host." There was one eerie episode that stood out from the entire first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where evil insectoid, superintelligent worms able to bond with humanoids tried to take over Starfleet Command in secret.

This episode was all the more shocking because its scary resolution implied a follow-up that just never happened. We never got an explanation for who the parasites were, their ultimate goals, and what happened to them.

(In real life, this is because the original concept for the Borg were as insectoid hive-minders. Because the Borg became cybernetic for budget reasons, this original intro was unfortunately orphaned and forgotten.)

One of my favorite explanations for the insectoid parasites was they were advanced scouts for the Dominion.

Is it possible the possession aliens from "Conspiracy" were actually a version of Trill symbiotes?

Granted, the Puppet Master aliens are very different from the Trill, but then again the Trill have subraces. For instance, some die when beamed up and down, whereas Jadzia never had a problem.

The similarities between the Trill and the Conspiracy-aliens are numerous enough even non-Canon novels have mentioned this.

By the way, I did my best to avoid mentioning some of the key divergences between "The Host" Trill and DS9 Trill, because it was obvious in the TNG episode they were still trying to iron out the kinks of what the Trill are, including something that might be the strongest case for my "Trill are evil" argument: in "The Host," the Odan symbiont is the only thing responsible for the personality of the final being.

(This cool/rare image, by the way, is an early makeup test of Terry Farrell in "The Host" type TNG Trill makeup.)

Bear in mind I'm not saying all Trill are evil infiltrators or that Jadzia Dax was a sleeper agent or anything like that. I am saying as a whole, there's something kind of malevolent about the concept of the Trill that would lend themselves to being natural bad guys, and there is also a feeling we've never gotten the whole story.

And look at it this way: a future project that uses the Trills in a big way as heavies would be the greatest gift ever given to convention cosplay girls, who love the heck out of the Trill spot body makeup.

Jerry Ordway's "Power of Shazam" (1995-1999)

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

One thing that surprised and amused me about the Jerry Ordway "Power of Shazam" series were the surprising number of jokes built around incest-related misunderstandings, to the point it reminded me of a slightly more innocent version of "Arrested Development."

When Mary Broomfield (really Mary Batson) disappeared for days at a time with Billy Batson, there was a joke about how the suspicion is the two eloped and ran away together. And someone points out an entirely logical theory about the Marvel Family the general public might have: it is often assumed Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel are married and Captain Marvel, Jr. is really their son.

Another running gag in "Power of Shazam!" is centered around another squirm-inducing premise that's perfectly in keeping with the "how'd they get away with that?" Arrested Development sense of humor: Captain Marvel, as a boy in the body of an older superhero, has aggressive older women throw themselves at him. This always results in awkwardness on the part of the poor Captain, but the crazy part is, only at first. By the final year of the series…he actually starts to like it!

Gee, I wonder why that could be.

There are a few things I like about the 1995-1999 series.

One desperately needed key difference between CM and Superman: Billy Batson's powers come from the wizard Shazam, and the wizard Shazam can take them away if Batson goofs off with them. Also, Shazam can do things like wake Batson up at four in the morning to take care of a crisis.

It does have a few weaknesses, however. One is plotting, in that a lot of the long-term plot threads have resolutions that I either missed or don't make any sense. A big plot point: Mr. Tawky Tawny is a stuffed tiger doll who is able to come to life and give advice to Mary. The story takes a somewhat mysterious/sinister turn when Tawky Tawny tells Mary the wizard Shazam didn't send him, and that she shouldn't tell Shazam he's able to come to life.

Kids? Never trust an adult who says "let's keep this our little secret." Danger, Will Robinson!

I was very excited by this development, because Tawky Tawny is one of those characters Captain Marvel historians – who in general have a way higher tolerance for Casper/Richie Rich/Wendy Witch type kiddie stuff than I do – specifically finger Tawny as the shark jump point for CM's classic era. The guy is, in short, Captain Marvel's version of Jar-Jar Binks and Scrappy Doo…even by the terrifyingly low standards of occasionally nostalgia-blinded classic Captain Marvel devotees.

I expected them to deconstruct the character a little. Remember how it turned out a megalomaniac Scrappy-Doo was really the villain of the Scooby-Doo movie? To my mind, that's the only way to do something like Alvin and the Chipmunks in live action, have them be malevolent little imps whispering evil thoughts to Dave Seville, and when he isn't around they assume their "true forms."

Alas, the resolution to this plot makes no sense, because when you ultimately learn exactly what Tawny is, there's no real reason for him to have hidden his identity from Shazam.

Another plot thread resolved to absolute confusion is Ebenezer Batson's son, who, if I'm keeping track correctly, was mind-controlled simultaneously by Sivana, the Devil, space invader worms, and a Dick Tracy crime queen (not making this up).

I do appreciate the attempts to try to connect the Marvel Family with DC's continuity, and the other Fawcett heroes specifically. For instance, remember the long-standing Superman enemies Blaze and Satanus going all the way back to Marv Wolfman's tenure on the book in the early eighties? The ones who played a big role in, among other things, Death of Superman? Well, turns out they're actually demonic twin children of the wizard Shazam!

It was a treat to see an old school talent as enormous like Curt Swan doing the flashback stories to World War II with Spysmasher and Bulletman fighting Captain Nazi. Nobody paid attention to this series because Ordway only did the covers; the interior pencils were done by Guy-With-A-Familiar-Name.

It was even more of a delight to see all these Fawcett guys show up in a book as supporting cast. It made the Marvel book feel bigger and more peopled, and gave the book a stronger sense of identity. "Power of Shazam" was about the entire Fawcett corner of the DC Universe.

At one point, the wizard Shazam even briefly retires, leaving his duties in the hand of Fawcett character Ibis the Invincible. Incidentally, Ibis happens to be the only Golden Age character I can think of who has after his original appearances, was since presented as a non-Caucasian.

Another big problem with the series? There was no "Sivana" story. In 46 issues, there was really no tale where Sivana was the main villain where we see why the guy's an interesting baddie. Considering there was a whole story arc around Mr. Atom, I have a hard time believing this.

I always had the feeling Mary Marvel makes a heck of a lot more sense in the Spanish-speaking world, where, considering how common the name "Maria" is, a "Maria Marvel" would hardly be a dead giveaway as to her identity. The name Mary isn't as common as it used to be, at least among the non-Irish. These days, if she wanted to be incognito, she'd have to be called "Jennifer Marvel."

There was a lot of resistance to the idea of Mary Marvel's corruption by Black Adam a couple years back. Actually I think it's a rather interesting idea, and one that can actually make Mary grow and be a different character at the start than at the end.

And this was also the greatest gift ever given to cosplay girls.

I don't agree with the objections but I understand why people make them. In fact, the writers should have anticipated that very reaction, if they were at all in tune with how fans think: the fan-boy overprotectiveness of female characters.

Here's an example of what I mean: remember that slimy creep Terry Long, an older chest hair and gold chain wearing community college professor divorcee who oozed and sleazed his way into the heart of Wonder Girl with Saturday Night Live quotes?

Reading Teen Titans, I kept on waiting for a plot twist that just never came.

I can totally understand why they felt the urge to have someone like Terry Long in Teen Titans, who is just a regular guy. One of my problems with X-Men is, nobody anywhere is ever really "normal." Even Nightcrawler's girlfriend turned out to be some kind of sorceress.

But fans didn't like Terry Long because he was not only an annoying creep, he was marrying Wonder Girl. This kind of reaction didn't happen when the Vision and the Scarlet Witch or Green Arrow and Black Canary got married, since both the Vision and Ollie were heroes, worthy of their respective women. Notice Steve Trevor hasn't really returned in Wonder Woman continuity.

And look at how Spider-Fans get ludicrously jumpy about the virginity of Gwen Stacy. We care more about the guys she's dated than her father probably did!

Thus, a savvy editor should have shut the idea down, even if it might have resulted in a great story, the same way editors shut down interesting but problematic proposed stories like the one where Daredevil became mayor of New York or Bill Mantlo's idea in the 1980s for Spider-Man to have an illegitimate baby.

Here's another piece of advice I have for writers who want to do Captain Marvel in the future: don't listen to the Captain Marvel die-hards like Erik Larsen. What, you think they'll be grateful to you for doing anything with Captain Marvel? Ha!

The reason it's pointless is this: Captain Marvel, unlike Superman and Batman, was denied continuous publication. If you look at the stories told in say, Superman in the late 1940s, they were very similar to Captain Marvel stories, with Superman fighting bad guys who were practical joke themed. However, Superman was continually published, and eventually the practical joke baddies disappeared, replaced by a kind of science fiction epic grandeur that drew from space opera which reached a high point in the Schwartz years.

The Legion of Super-Heroes started off as an Otto Binder-style cute gimmick story. Would you have believed it if I were to tell you they'd one day be the subjects of grandiose, epic space stories like Earthwar and Great Darkness?

Because the only image we have of CM is from the Bad Old Days, unlike Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, our very definition of what makes CM who he is comes with the demand his stories be "wacky."

What's more, since the 1960s and Marvel comics (the other Marvel comics), there's been the requirement characterization and consistent continuity will be a part of any comic, just like there's the requirement every movie made since the 1920s will have sound and every movie made since the 1950s will be made in color and widescreen: these things are a non-negotiable expectation.

Ask any comics fan you want, or even members of the general public on the street, what the appeal is in Captain Marvel, and they'll tell you it's all about a kid who gets to be an adult superhero by saying the magic word. It's the "hook" the entire character is built around.

But ask die-hards like Erik Larsen and he'll tell you a different answer. Captain Marvel is a totally different person from Billy Batson! And anyone who says he's a kid in the body of an adult doesn't understand the idea at all!

Do hardcore Captain Marvel fans think it's really that important that CM be a different person from Billy? Consider the disturbing implications of that. It means when not summoned the Captain really exists in some negative zone. What if Captain Marvel wants to stay on earth, or falls in love? He's entitled to a life. It also means Billy is not really important at all: he's just a "bottle" Captain Marvel is stored in. Captain Marvel's heroism, courage and resourcefulness doesn't really come from Billy because they're different people. Anybody could be Captain Marvel.

Alan Moore's Miracleman showed the horror potential in very powerful heroes, and even used the notion of separate people to create chills. Miracleman had a contempt for his ordinary identity and said "I don't trust Mike Moran in a crisis." If you want to make Captain Marvel creepy, this is the perfect way to do it.

Why do types like Larsen say something like this? As a Superman fan, and someone with experience with the worst kind of Superman fan, I can provide an answer. A lot of Superman fans, in opposition to the now-undone Byrne/Helfer reboot of 1986, made a big point about how in every past version of the character, is actually Superman that is the true identity and Clark Kent that is the disguise.

That was just never true, though, even before the reboot: many writers had different opinions on the matter, and one famous Maggin/Bates story insisted triumphantly and explicitly Superman was both Superman and Clark Kent. Heck, Schwartz-writer Len Wein even insisted that it was Superman who was the put-up job, not Kent.

The reason classic Superman fans say this is not because it's true or accurate, but because of contrariness that leads them to misrepresent what they're defending. Know how lots of Superman fans demand the return of Super-Pets? Then you have the emphasis on the Lieutenant Marvels, who only had appearances that could be counted on the one hand of a wood shop teacher who raises piranha. This isn't nostalgia, because nostalgia is something you feel for something remembered fondly, impossible in the case of such negligible nonentities. The reason they're big on the pets is because they piss off what they imagine modern age fans are like. In short, contrarianism.

I must admit, I've seen fans be contrary, but to negate the entire hook of a character just to be oppositional to the modern age is really breathtaking.

Get it? They will literally never be satisfied ever with anything you do for all these reasons. There is no point in second-guessing yourself, no point in wondering if you might produce something that would please older classic Captain Marvel fans. Their voices can be ignored and discounted because their demands are not reasonable.

Christopher Hitchens died – it's gloating time!

2011-12-16T09:13:00.001-05:00

This has been a truly terrible year for comics fans. Living legends of the Golden Age like Jerry Robinson, Joe Simon and Eduardo Barretto have passed on, leaving with their tremendous talent and connection to our history. It's natural to be a little depressed as a result, and I sure am.

I thought nothing could take me out of this funk, but I was wrong. Vile Iraq War cheerleader and Bush toady bootlicker Christopher Hitchens just croaked from throat cancer.

This video should about summarize my reaction to the news.

This has truly been a great day. I feel like tap dancing. I'm more cheerful than when Bin Laden died.

Even in death it's impossible to muster sympathy for this bloated toad because his death was so obviously his own damn fault (constant cigarette use = throat cancer) so it's impossible to cough up the obligatory crocodile tears. It has a beautiful note of poetic justice. At least cancer got the guy to shut up.

Why does Christopher Hitchens deserve this kind of ire? Lots of pundits argued delusionally that Iraq was a clear and obvious danger connected to international terror with terrifying weapons ready to use at a moment's notice and any possible invasion and occupation would be one-sided, brief and cheap. He tirelessly suckered the public into a war I said from the beginning would be a giant clusterfuck…but a lot of other members of the scumsucker pundit class did what he did, too.

Why does Hitchens merit so much scorn?

Chris Hitchens wasn't just another arrogant talking head who was totally wrong about Iraq.

He was a self-appointed "leftist radical" (because he said he is one, not because of anything he'd done or views he's held, in that respect similar to his hero George Orwell) and because of that self-description he had a lot of credibility with hardcore liberals and moderates, and he lent that credibility to bootlick Cheney's scheme. Chris Hitchens made it possible for moderates and liberals to support the Iraq War. He was the sole example that could be pointed to in order to show all sides of the political spectrum supported invading Iraq. And finally, he demonstrated it was possible to be an "intellectual" and support the conflict.

His tireless support, in short, created the illusion of broad consensus, an illusion that made the Iraq War both possible and inevitable.

And Hitch has never apologized or admitted error for the bloody history his arrogance helped author.

I sincerely hope Hitchens is wrong, and there is a God, because the idea of a supreme being who holds human beings totally accountable for deeds they escaped punishment for in life is an extremely appealing one right about now. Did any neocon toady ever suffer even slightly for supporting Iraq? Have any of them lost any credibility for being totally wrong about everything?

I'm a patriot, not a sucker. Learn the difference, huh?

Oh yeah, atheism – the real reason faux liberals are crying crocodile tears over this sycophantic warmonger. Hasn't it even occurred to anyone else the two main targets of Hitchens' ire were the Catholic Church and Islam? Hitchens' atheism was nothing more than every petty hundred year old prejudice learned by the English in the nursery room, hatred of the Pope and the Irish, and hatred of immigrant groups.

His atheism wasn't Star Trek-style rational clearmindedness. All he did was drag rationalists into a long-standing, picayune tribal gang knife fight.

If all the shameful and disgusting eulogies have got you down, try reading this one. It was written a year before his death...but why wait?

I wonder…were Hitch's final moments rather like the death scene of the bad guy in the 1990 movie "Ghost?"

Review: Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo"

2011-12-11T19:36:00.001-05:00

Rocket Ship Galileo was written in 1947 and yet it spoke to me for many reasons.

The book is about some American kids who, with traditional Yankee know-how, develop a rocketship in their own backyard to travel to the Moon. As astounding as that premise is, Heinlein makes you believe in it and here's why:

The boys are shaped by a defining event that changed their entire worldview. A couple years before, they heard about the atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The boys are "bitten by mathematics, science and engineering like it's a bug," with a rapacious, devouring hunger and greed for knowledge. As a person with a science background I've never heard it put better.

The boys have clueless parents that just don't get it, though. It's not that their parents are stupid, it's that they don't understand how the world changed in 1945 with the power of the atom and still have that old way of thinking that means they just don't "get" the boys.

The book was written in 1947 but it's easy to see how a lot of people today can identify with it. I certainly can. I have absolute genius and brilliant parents with PhDs…but who need help plugging in their wifi network and they think everyone on the internet is some kind of rapist. People that are older and younger than myself probably had and (are having) similar epiphanies about science and technology those more set in their ways don't get.

In fact, when I went to visit older relatives for Thanksgiving, I remembered it's been a while since I've seen anybody with actual DVDs in their home. The technology seems so old fashioned. Not because it's been superseded by some other format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, which are just steps sideways and equally old-fashioned. But because of streaming, technology like the iPod, and online software purchases, it seems downright retro to require a physical format at all to "own" some media.

Reading Rocket Ship Galileo, Heinlein's first novel ever, is a little shocking because it's hard to imagine Heinlein as a young person. I'm so used to him being the dignified, classy old man of science fiction not unlike his wise old man characters. For one thing, it's one of the few stories of Heinlein's to show the energetic fan-boy enthusiasm and influence of E. E. Smith, with the plot having some similarities to Smith's Skylark of Space, another novel about All-American amateurs who build their own rocket ship.

Smith had a lot of passion but he was very amateurish – Skylark was an awkwardly written adventure story. "Rocket Ship Galileo," even at that early stage of Heinlein's career, was about something.

(Interesting side note: Smith published "Skylark of Space" in the same issue of Amazing Stories as Phillip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419," the first Buck Rogers novel. In fact, Buck Rogers even got the cover over Skylark!)

Even Heinlein's usual stock character of the wise old man the hero bonds with and learns from was (are you ready?) a recent college graduate, a cool, hip younger relative who "gets it." You know how they say old age is always 15 years older than you are now?

The main plot comes when arriving on the Moon, where there are Nazis who used advanced rocketry and went to the Moon to plot their return and revenge, which isn't farfetched considering how advanced Nazi rocketry was towards the end.

Recently, I saw the proof-of-concept special effects reel trailer for "Iron Sky," a low budget movie about the Nazis returning from space, a project the creators are trying to get money to fund. This reminds me a little of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, another big budget movie that started as a five minute special effects reel, a film that was tragically overshadowed by the release of Sin City a few months later.

I'm withholding an opinion on Iron Sky because…how can you have an opinion based on nothing? A special effects/proof of concept reel, even a viral one, is just that.

Still, a few warning signs jump out at me from the trailer. One of which is, there aren't any characters in it. Who's the main character, the hero we're supposed to root for? His girlfriend? Is there like a main Nazi leader, like a "Darth Vader" type?

We don't see that, and that tells me the people making this are too much in love with the idea of the story (Nazis from the Moon, an idea which was cribbed from Rocket Ship Galileo anyway) as opposed to the stuff you need when something becomes an actual movie as opposed to a demo reel.

Review: Dynamite Comics' "Buck Rogers"

2011-11-30T22:17:00.001-05:00

November is Buck Rogers Month here at "Julian Perez Conquers the Universe," and in that spirit, here's a look at the recent (2009 to today) Buck Rogers comic from Dynamite Entertainment by Scott Beatty and the incredible Carlos Rafael, an artist with a tremendous amount of talent for a guy with two first names.

The Dynamite Entertainment Buck Rogers comic has just the perfect tone: it is fun and kitschy and doesn't take itself too seriously, with cyborg bear-men hunting humans and giant single-celled paramecia invading earth.

By contrast, the TSR roleplaying game Buck Rogers XXVC was Buck Rogers if Christopher Nolan ever did Buck Rogers: it tried to be a gritty hard-science reboot emphasizing plausibility. While the gritty-reboot-of-a-goofy-pulp-character idea was very original and unique in 1990, it's since become overdone and all the creative power has been sapped out of it, so it's actually great to see someone do something very different.

A while back I compared Buck Rogers to the Final Fantasy series, in that nearly every version of Buck Rogers in existence are totally different to the point of total unrecognizability, with zero in common except a hero who is a man from modern-day.

This variation is shockingly far beyond even the usual tweaks made with a long-lasting pop culture hero with different media adaptations. James Bond, the Green Hornet and Superman may have crucial differences in every radio, movie and television version, but at least there's something recognizable about say, every Superman take, even wildly divergent ones like Smallville or the 1940s radio show.

For that reason the comic is interesting in that it tries to put all of the different versions together. Wilma's younger brother Buddy from the 1940s comic strip is here, and serves very much a similar function as a firey little sparkplug teenager keen to mix it up and not get left behind. Twiki's head can be seen in a cameo. Thankfully, he's a 16-20 year old and therefore doesn't violate the greatest of all science fiction commandments: thou shalt not have a cute little kid.

(The second greatest science fiction commandment? Thou shalt not have a cute little kid supergenius.)

There are even some references to the version of Buck Rogers I'm most familiar with, the Buck Rogers XXVC roleplaying game, including the presence of monstrous, muscular deformed creatures called "Gennies" including some who actually look like the monster from the cover of a Buck Rogers XXVC adventure ("A Matter of Gravitol," which had a pretty cheesy resolution but was a good adventure overall), and earth is divided into city Orgs, just like with XXVC.

The Han Airlords from the original 1919 "Armageddon 2419 AD" novel are here, though they're not the main bad guys. It is pleasant to discover they still have their Gernsback-esque, spotlight-like Dis Rays. This blew me away because I never, ever thought to see the Han in any Buck Rogers project, although this time they're not Asian anymore…not even the politically correct green-recoloring given to space Asians like Ming the Merciless and Jonny Quest's Dr. Zin so they don't look like super-racist chrome-yellow comic book Fu Manchus.

(Anyone else think of the Shaver Mystery when they hear "Dis Rays?" That's why I always had trouble ever accepting anybody ever thought Shaver was telling the truth: everything about the Shaver Mystery was way too 1940s to be about a real interior civilization.)

One new addition is that of hyper-evolved animals who occasionally hunt humans. This has a lot of great imagery and leads to some fun moments, including a twist reveal that average people will find surprising but people even moderately into science fiction will see coming from a mile away.

By the way, the minute I found out about the animal-people I kept thinking "okay, this is the context the Martian Tigermen will show up" (hopefully this time not as a lame scarred bald guy). I mean that makes sense, right – especially since this comic is full of winking little nods to previous takes on Buck Rogers?

It never fails to amaze me how Buck Rogers creates big science fiction ideas in which new takes on traditional characters would totally make sense, and then fail to use it. For instance, in Buck Rogers XXVC, it's established uploaded minds reside in computers, ghosts in the machine called Digital Personalities, exist. So…wouldn't that be a logical way to throw in Dr. Theopolis from the 1970s show? The idea never really seemed to occur to anybody at TSR.

One thing I did really like about the Dynamite Comic take is that it looks visually different and distinctive. Future technology emits light constantly, even the rocketships. This is the first time I can think of where science fiction has caught up to the iPhone and iPad aesthetic, emphasizing organic lines, single button intuitive interfaces and all-in-one personal devices that do everything instead of specialized devices (speaking for myself, since I got a cel I haven't owned a watch). The Buck Rogers transsuits are so high tech they make Iron Man's armor look like a 1992 CD-ROM PC clone with a bubble jet printer.

Unlike the comparatively dated Star Trek, this is definitely what the future will look like…at least from the perspective of right now.

On first reading, I had no idea what the world of Buck Rogers would be like this time (because it's always different) and so the first few issues do a great job of actually being disorienting and creating mystery. Figuring out what things are really like in the 25th Century is the most interesting part of the story.

With that in mind, my favorite character in the reboot is Wilma Deering because in the first few issues, Buck arrives with no idea what's going on or how to deal with the situation, so the savvy amazonian Wilma does all the asskicking and has to protect Buck from danger. This totally sidesteps one of the greatest problems with female action girls, who we're constantly told are action heroes but turn into hostages and never really manage to beat anybody (see: Kevin Costner's Robin Hood).

Like Princess Leia, every time Wilma shoots, she hits something. Not bad for someone with a fat chick name like "Wilma."

Above: NOT a fat chick.

By the way, I'm in love with Angelina Jolie as much as every other guy in the whole cosmos, but it was a real mistake to make Ardala and Wilma both blue eyed, black haired thick lipped women, because in panels where they're together it really gets confusing.

Also, with the addition of a black-haired Wilma, Colonel Deer has officially had every single color hair in the entire spectrum!

The comic's Dr. Huer was an incredibly likable, classy, scatterbrained old chap who stays pleasant even when threatened with danger, and the comic has some powerful moments about a time-lost Buck Rogers who lost everything that ever mattered to him. These moments get all the more poignant because they don't overdo them.

Ardala is absolutely great in the series: she's manipulative in a coy way, pretending to be a lot less competent than she really is so men protect her. She's too important a character to just be peripheral to the evil schemes of other villains, though. She should be a Big Bad and master villain, instead of some schemer on the periphery who takes advantage when the Big Bads do something. If you read the first story arc, Ardala doesn't actually do anything at all.

I also did not like their take on Killer Kane, who just like in the 1970s series, was a henchman of Ardala – a position that always diminishes his importance to the Buck Rogers mythos. Kane should be a villain in his own right, who hooks up with Ardala, attracted to each other by their mutual evil.

Apparently, this series works under the logic moustache = criminal type, so Black Barney's got a killer 'tashe too. In the comic he was yet another stock character dashing rogue who is theoretically supposed to be scene-stealing.

My all-time favorite version of Black Barney is the Buck Rogers XXVC version, but that isn't too hard, though: Black Barney in the 1970s show looked and acted like homosexual community theater version of Sinbad the Sailor hamming it up.

In the 1991 RPG, Black Barney was a combination of the Captain America villain Crossbones with Ice-T, Gully Foyle, and a heaping extra layer of pus, trash and grime, a cynical, black humored, intimidating crook, not too intelligent, not too talkative, but with a totally ruthless cunning like a predatory animal, with absolutely frightening strength and agility, an inhumanly deep and menacing voice, a killer instinct, and zero hesitation to fight dirty. He doesn't smile, laugh or joke around. In the game Barney was a terrifying fighting machine, a scarred, ugly thug who did time, which I always thought was more interesting and truly intimidating than this tendency to make him either a dashing rogue like Han Solo or a sanitized, family friendly Ben Grimm-type tough guy that's really a softie deep down.

Black Barney in the TSR game became a good guy only because he respects power, and therefore respects anybody that can beat him, which Buck Rogers did - that, and curiosity too. After all, Barney was surprised after his failure he wasn't immediately killed. Black Barney gave the setting a badly needed Boba Fett type antihero compared to the squeaky clean and optimistic Buck Rogers.

The Dynamite Buck Rogers comic got that tone and spirit right and does have a few original ideas, but despite all that, it occasionally has the feel of "been-there, done-that." The new Buck Rogers reminds me of a meal with leftovers you have at the end of a week with your family, where it can be a game to spot what dish there came from what meal. The liberal borrowing becomes so obvious at times the pop culture savvy Buck Rogers, even in the comic itself, points it out.

For instance:

The idea of animals evolved to superintelligence comes from David Brin's "Uplift" novels and the idea said hyperintelligent animals would return after a long time from deep space to menace the human race comes from Leonard Nimoy's "Primortals;"

The main villain having a wolf tracker henchman comes straight from Maugrim from the Chronicles of Narnia (the guy in this comic was killed off way too fast, by the way – he could have been a recurring baddie);

The Han Airlords ditched their Zeppelins and have a flying city that looks just like the Hawkmen's from Flash Gordon (seriously, LOOK at it!);

Ardala and Killer Kane started off as traitors to earth who after being rescued by other humans spend the majority of their existence disguising their guilt and treachery, just like Baltar in the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot;

Buck and Dr. Huer encounter a race of albinos who live under caves in a hidden vault after a cold war-flavored atomic exchange they believe destroyed the surface, an idea that is the premise of the Fallout games…and they worship unexploded atomic bombs. Even Buck can't resist a wisecrack at this similarity. They're even undone by bright lights, just like "The Mole Men."

All in all, the comic is above average at its best points, and is worth reading if for no other reason than Carlos Rafael's astounding pencils. There are even some bits that are actually funny, like how a plot point revolves around how nobody in the future can read cursive writing. Looking at Carlos Rafael's art I find myself saying...why have I never heard of this guy before?

Also - keep your eyes peeled for the bit where Buck and Wilma put on their 1930s comic-strip inspired suits!

Game Review: Buck Rogers XXVC (1990)

2011-11-17T13:53:00.002-05:00

Now here's an oddity I have trouble believing even exists: for a whole generation, the primary form we even knew about Buck Rogers at all was as a roleplaying game, and one that was a edgy reimagining of a goofy pulp character...before that was even a thing! It even does that word-salad XXVC subname, before hip, marketable undertitles shortened to the point of meaninglessness became a trend. In short, Buck Rogers XXVC is a game that was ahead of its time (though behind ours).

Of all the gritty reboots of a previously goofy pulp character, Buck Rogers XXVC, a roleplaying game produced by TSR back in 1990, has a certain logic I agree with: many science-oriented pulp characters were created with the intention they would be "state of the art," written with the best scientific knowledge available. This is undercut somewhat by artists and writers resurrecting pulp heroes with nostalgic, kitsch 1920s imagery like zeppelins and fin-helmets.

Buck Rogers XXVC is about a polluted earth inhabited by gangs exploited by a villainous, arrogant Martian megacorporation. This isn't as crackpot as it sounds for two reasons.

First, Buck Rogers still has alien monsters, space battles and ruthless villains, but in the words of the game manual itself, "while the flavor is the same, the ingredients are different." The unusual monsters and aliens are now products of genetic engineering, Mars and Venus are terraformed worlds.

Heck, the main means of interstellar travel in this game are rockets. It brings to mind how undervalued Goddard's invention is in science fiction, as rockets are the one vehicle that in real life has actually taken mankind to the stars, yet they're the least seen in science fiction these days. Making rockets the means of transport in the game is nothing short of a stroke of genius because with one creative choice it encapsulates the entire spirit of the setting: rockets are simultaneously plausible hard science, yet also evoke retro, classic science fiction.

Second, Buck Rogers is no stranger to varying takes. What's amazing to me about Buck Rogers is this: every single adaptation and version of the character is wildly different. It's like the craziest game of telephone ever played. The only other property I can think of where absolutely everything changes with every single new "take" would have to be Final Fantasy.

Take a look at the Dynamite Entertainment Buck Rogers comic. I haven't read it yet, but they're wearing friggin' Tron outfits so how similar can it possibly be?

Contrast that with Flash Gordon. It's shocking how almost every single version and adaptation of Flash Gordon from the 1930s serial, to the Filmation animated series, to the 1980 movie, have basically the same story structure and opening with barely any variation: Flash Gordon is caught in a plane crash with Dale Arden onto Zarkov's property. Zarkov captures them for a rocket launch toward Mongo. They crash and encounter Ming the Merciless as prisoners, where Princess Aura falls for Flash and Flash is sent to a gladiatorial arena to die, etc.

Heck, Mongo even looks similar in most versions of Flash Gordon.

Contrast that to the varying versions of Buck Rogers, where the basic relationships and even the location, enemies and setting aren't even permanent. The pulp novel Buck Rogers was based on, and the initial run of the newspaper series, didn't even actually have space travel. Can you think of anything more fundamental to the perception of Buck Rogers than space travel?

The villains were the Airlords of Han, Mongols who destroyed white civilization with superior airplanes and zeppelins. Yes, that's right: the original comic strip and novel version of Buck Rogers were based around a futuristic Race War with whites against the Yellow Peril.

And shockingly, our hero wasn't even called Buck Rogers until the comic strip!

We could be here all day listing the different versions of Rogers but the point is this: Buck is so wildly divergent, beyond even the normal variability of long-lasting multimedia fictional characters, that if somebody wants to do a state of the art, scientifically accurate version...why not?

The Setting

The principal conflict in the game is between a conquered earth ruthlessly lorded over by a Martian evil corporation, RAM, who arrogantly view earth as a mudball only fit to be exploited for natural resources. In the minds of the Martian RAM executives, they're the only good thing that ever came out of the earth.

The guy who wrote the series bible was Transformers/GI Joe writer Flint Dille, and that is something of a surprise as he's a conservative. It's surprising to discover a setting created by a conservative would have the bad guy be an evil, powerful corporation. After all, wouldn't Buck Rogers and the rest saving the Earth from RAM's rapaciousness be nothing more than interference with free market forces?

Get a job, hippie!

One of the pirate bad guys has a rocketship named "The Free Enterprise."

The kind of science fiction conservatives like is Starship Troopers, Honor Herrington or Halo: reveling in militarism, with a monocultural society that is presented as morally superior to an enemy group that's a multicultural, visually diverse Federation. Along the way there's usually some metaphor about how appeasement never works and how it's always 1939 and every enemy are always, always the Nazis.

Another big theme of the Buck Rogers XXVC setting is genetic engineering, and how "Gennies," or genetically created people, are just as human as the rest of us but are treated as property. Sympathy for oppressed minority outsiders (who often stand in the way of good land with resources on them) is not exactly a theme one would expect from a conservative author, although Flint Dille only wrote the bible and the game was developed by other hands.

Thanks to Gennies, despite the setting being humans-only, the world is nonetheless filled with weird Star Wars cantina creatures.

My personal favorite Gennies in the setting are the Venusian lowlanders. On terraformed Venus, only the highlands are inhabitable to human-type life, yet a crucial cash crop can only grow in the lowlands. So humanoids were created to survive in that environment, Lowlanders, who look like the scarier brothers of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The rub is, the highland Venusians are trying to terraform Venus…which threatens the entire existence of the Lowlanders. Despite their rebellion and the fact they look like scary monsters, the Lowlanders have a pretty sympathetic position.

Instead of stormtroopers, RAM use berserker, genetically engineered soldiers called Terrines, who look like the kangaroo supersoldiers from Tank Girl. In the minds of the Terrines, the highest form of life in the universe are Martian RAM corporate executives, with themselves as the second highest, and everybody else beneath them.

The canon characters

It's interesting to see what shape the traditional Buck Rogers characters take. Ardala Valdemar for instance, is a highly connected, high-status freelance Martian RAM agent who functions as a double-dealing information broker and espionage agent. In one of the sample adventures, she seduces the sample player character, slips them a drugged drink and makes off with a valuable information disk.

Killer Kane, though, is a heck of a lot more interesting: he was a former earth rocket jock who was a lover of Wilma Deering, who after being captured by RAM agreed to work for them so Wilma would be released. Along the way though, Kane's enormous ego got the best of him: he believes he's actually working for the betterment of Earth, which would be a lot better off with him as its RAM administrator…and there's the tremendous ego-wound of possibly being the second best pilot in the solar system to a fossil from the 20th Century, who also might take Kane's girlfriend, too.

"Doctor Huer" is a digital personality, a kind of artificially intelligent computer program.

There are no Tigermen, but Mars does have a nomadic cat-race who vaguely suggest the Martian Tigermen.

If there's any complaint, it is that NPC characters defining the setting are never used in the adventure supplements the game puts out. You never really interact with Ardala, Killer Kane, space pirate Black Barney (who is obviously this setting's scarred, sardonic answer to Boba Fett), but rather with no-name, who-cares characters like Carlton Turabian and RAM security chief Marcus Wolfe. Not getting a mission briefing or scientific pointers from Doctor Huer is especially inexcusable, since it's not like a computer program is ever going to overshadow the player characters – the whole point of the character is to give quest missions and provide exposition, after all.

The failure to use the signature characters gives the overwhelming feeling the Buck Rogers elements are awkwardly welded on a totally different setting.

**Why does this game even exist?**

Buck Rogers is an IP that is frankly, overvalued. If anything, the association with Buck Rogers might have damaged the future of Buck Rogers XXVC, because a lot of gamers avoided this game thinking it was "cheesy."

(See also: the Lone Ranger. Recently, Gore Verbinski refused to direct "The Lone Ranger" starring Jonny Depp as Tonto because Disney wouldn't cough up a $250 million budget. Now, what, I ask you, about the Lone Ranger could possibly make it cost $250 million, unless Depp and Verbinski were straight up skimming $150 million straight off the top? And can anyone imagine any possible scenario on this or any other planet where a Lone Ranger movie makes more than enough to recoup that Waterworld-level cost?)

If calling it "Buck Rogers" hurt the game, why call it that at all? It's not exactly like the character has a built-in fanbase the way Indiana Jones or the Marvel superheroes have. Buck Rogers is one of those characters, along with Paul Bunyan, where everybody's heard of him, but nobody really cares about him.

The reason this game exists at all is, it was created to be a borderline-illegal money pipeline out of TSR, Inc. into the pockets of its chairwoman. I'm actually not making this up.

It kills me to say that, because this was quite possibly my second or third RPG ever (after Top Secret and the Palladium Ninja Turtles game) and discovering its reason for existence was un-kosher business practices is like discovering the show Sesame Street was created to be a cover for a pedophile ring.

Rather, the game was created because the former president of TSR was Lorraine Williams, known as the woman who led a hostile takeover that kicked D&D creator Gary Gygax from his own company, for suing fans in the 1990s who created AD&D fan websites (giving TSR the name "They Sue Regularly"), and for her nickname among rpg fans, "the Wicked Witch of the Mid-West."

You see, Lorraine was the granddaughter of the rights-owner to Buck Rogers, and so she could allow TSR to pay for all the expenses while her own company received the profits. Lorraine essentially paid herself royalties based on 60% of the print run, despite the fact that by all reports the game didn't sell and unsold product was everywhere.

I'm not a finance attorney, but that doesn't sound entirely legal.

How is it as a game?

It uses THAC0. Oh dear God, THAC0 – the most annoying calculation in RPG history. Old school gamers lock up with PTSD when it's mentioned, and it turned 2nd Edition into not so much something you play, so much as as something you survive.

As you might guess, Buck Rogers XXVC uses a variation on Second Edition AD&D for its "engine," and so it's a class and level based game with classes like Rocket-Jock, Rogue and Warrior. In yet another respect that makes it ahead of its time, anticipating the way, years later, the d20 engine would be appropriated for even wildly inappropriate high-tech genres. After all, if a game is barely functional, it is vastly improved by the addition of street slang and zombie apocalypses, right?

Buck Rogers XXVC game commits a faux pas common to early class and level games, one inexcusable for a game made at its late date: it makes necessary to group survival some un-fun to play support classes, Medic and Engineer. These classes are a great idea for everybody but the poor schlub player that actually has to suck it up and be the healer, that is. Yeah, that's exactly what I imagined myself as a buttkicking space hero: medic.

The big difference between the Buck Rogers game and AD&D is a surprisingly modern and progressive skill system using percentile dice. The relevant ability score is added (Dexterity of 17 adds +17%) and a chunk of points are given for class skills and outside of class skills.

Here comes the biggest hole in the entire system: there isn't really that much of a space combat system except for assigning statistics to vehicles.

There's a whole class based around skill with rocket piloting (Rocket Jock) but there's actually no bonus whatsoever in space combat for having high skill with piloting! There is no way to use pilot skill to coax speed or performance, no way to dogfight, no way to position oneself for a chance to hit, no way to perform evasive maneuvers.

Two ships with the same hit points, weaponry and dexterity bonus, but one with a 1st Level Rocketjock and the other with Buck Rogers, will have no discernable difference in combat statistics other than THAC0 for gunnery.

They mumble something about "special movement at the GM's discretion," an afterthought with no concrete functionality.

In the published adventures, the only times there are any actual rolls required for Piloting are for landings. Not even exciting landings, either, like gliding a crashing rocket safely…just regular, routine consequence-free landings, of the kind airline pilots make daily. In terms of drama and excitement this is somewhere up there with requiring skill checks for bathroom use.

The game lore makes a big deal out of Killer Kane and Buck Rogers' rivalry to determine who the best pilot in the solar system is, but considering piloting skills aren't a factor in ship-to-ship combat at all I have no idea how they could ever make that determination – or why it matters.

The damage done by futuristic weaponry in Buck Rogers XXVC is shockingly unimpressive. Laser guns deal 1d8 points of damage per successful shot. Considering that's the exact same damage as a sword in AD&D, and how lasers are just as subject to AC as swords are, and swords receive additional bonuses from high Strength and so on average do more damage than lasers...well, it's strangely pleasant to discover there really hasn't been much in the way of improvement in weaponry technology over the past 2,000 years.

(Didn't a Katana in 2nd Edition AD&D do something like 1d10 or 1d12 damage, depending on the sourcebook? A lot of games suffered from Katanaitis back in the day but this kicks it up a whole new level if the katana does the same or more damage than both a laser gun and a 1d10 monomolecular blade from 500 years in the future.)

That said, there are a few extremely cool parts of the system. The boxed set comes with a map of the Solar System, and it's an ACTIVE one. The orbits of the planets have ticks around them, with the position for January 2453 given, with each tick representing the planet's movement in a month. To determine where a planet might be at any given time, just advance (or subtract) its position by one tick for every month. So, if you want to know how far Mars and Earth are from each other in February 2454, just advance earth and Mars by 13 notches.

The system even comes with a transparent ruler you can put on the solar system map to measure how much fuel (measured in hit points) it takes to make a trip. As communications are far from instantaneous and happen at light speed, it can even tell how much delay there is between signals (it usually takes 13 minutes to send a message to Mars, which is 13 light-minutes away).

Overall though, the game has gaping flaws, though it is enough of a curiosity that I'd recommend it to the interested. I've never seen game art in my life where it's obvious the artist is just bored. Every problem I have with this game would probably be solved by a second edition – but considering the crazy reasons it existed at all, that's a guarantee to never, ever happen.

It will never be reprinted and so apart from secondhand on ebay it's impossible to obtain it legally. However, I would never, ever, ever, ever advise downloading it. Because that would be WRONG, you see… :-)

J.J. Abrams is producing a Micronauts movie

2011-10-24T09:35:00.004-04:00

It's official: geeks now rule the entire world.

J.J. Abrams is in talks with Hasbro to make a "Micronauts" movie, and he's bringing with him the writers from the likeable "Zombieland."

Was something like that even thinkable so much as five years ago?

By the way, that nerd-hating Brit Warren Ellis used to slam superhardcore fans of comics by saying "the reason us big time comic creators never listen to you is because all you do is talk about how you want the Micronauts back."

Well, who's laughing now, you limey beardo?

Ellis used the example of the Micronauts – the nerdiest property imaginable – to point out how hardcore nerd fans only like what they're comfortable with, and never support new ideas. I've always found this case to be meaningless because it's possible a clever redoing of an old property can have tons in the way of creativity and novelty, but an "original concept" that isn't all that original can have absolutely no creativity, soul or heart in it whatsoever.

Ellis made his case in 2001 or so, when Micronauts, like Tron, was a punchline: a forgotten eighties property beloved only by the most hardcore nerds.

How things have changed in the past few years. Tron received a big-budget sequel that did relatively well, and comic book movies, which previously worked by ditching the high-concept stuff cowardly studio heads feel turns off the Joe Sixpacks and Jane Wineboxes, have instead embraced the stuff ultra-hardcore fans love: genre-bending worldbuilding and continuity nods.

Maybe I'm gloating a little. Well, I can't stand Warren Ellis and others who demean the hardcore nerd fan audience in favor of "newbies," and besides, one of the great things about being ahead of the curve is you get to brag a little when everybody else catches up.

As for the Micronauts movie, I'm excited as hell if this happens...even if it does mean, if it's based on the Hasbro property, that Bug, Arcturus Rann, and Marionette are going to be absent, as will the cameo by the Marvel Universe's Psycho-Man, who was a major villain of the series.

If the movie has the robot Biotron, serpent-tanks and Baron Karza transforming into a rocket centaur….baby, I'm there on a bear.

Micronauts was an imaginative and impossible to dislike Star Wars-esque space opera property about a "microverse" inside an atom conquered by a black-armor wearing malevolent scientist named Baron Karza with an alternate mode as a cyborg centaur, and the rebel heroes on the run who oppose him. The heroes include Arcturus Rann, a Buck Rogers-esque space explorer unfrozen after a thousand years; Marionette, a princess who survived by pretending to be a robot, Prince Acroyear, an ultra-strong prince of a proud, martial warrior-race who never removes his helmet and armor, Bug, a fighter, crowd-pleasing wiseass and master thief from an insect race with cool bug powers (I'm sure the fact Bill Mantlo is well known as a Spider-Man writer is entirely a coincidence), and Microtron, an R2-D2 esque feisty, courageous "cute robot" who finds himself in the midst of battles saying "this is no place for a little robot!"

The "hook" is that when entering our world from the Microverse, the Micronauts are several inches tall…the size of their action figures.

The series has a lot of cool science fiction ideas and visuals. The planet of the Acroyears is a living rock-world, and Bug has a bug girlfriend who shouldn't be sexy…but thanks to Howard Chaykin, totally is!

My favorite character is probably everybody else's favorite, too: Bug, a cutpurse, cocky wiseass insectoid who was a former gang-leader on his bug home planet. The best story of the series comes when Bug returns to his homeworld and leads his gang against his own crooked father who took over in his place, and then urges his gang against their planet's colonial garrison. A lot of women have told me they think Bug has a lot of sex appeal, in the same "unusual" way Nightcrawler has a lot of female fans.

With a lot of stories about an evil, tyrannical empire, I always wondered what could possibly compel anyone to become their cannon-fodder, disposable stormtroopers who's lives are basically meat for the grinder. Here in Micronauts, there actually is an explanation. The villainous scientist Baron Karza achieved power over society by inventing cloning and organ transplant technology to keep people young, healthy and immortal (at the expense of the body parts of others). In other words, becoming a soldier of his is an easy way to achieve immortality.

There was one element of the original Micronauts series I think is deeply relevant in the age of Occupy Wall Street and the protests of the 99% who can't get by: the wealthy and elite supported Baron Karza and in return lived a parasitic existence, kept immortal and young by literally stealing the body parts of the poor.

See that? Damn, not even Sergei Eisenstein got that hardcore.

It helps, by the way, that Bill Mantlo had a social conscience became an attorney and public defender for the Legal Aid Society, which provides legal counsel for the indigent and homeless. A good counterpoint to many comic authors, who, just like science fiction writers, tend to favor a self-absorbed Heinlein-esque libertarianism.

I've often wondered why vampires have become so popular and their portrayal so alluring and sympathetic since at least the mid-1980s, and the answer occurs to me: since the rise of the "greed is good" Reagan eighties, our sympathies have first and foremost been with predators.

One of my favorite bits was how Mike Golden, without consulting anybody, actually created an entire alphabet for the Micronauts comics.

Bill Mantlo loved Micronauts and its concepts enough he took its ideas and applied them elsewhere. For instance, Peter Parker once assumed the Captain Universe identity.

By the way, I always wondered if the race of Acroyears inspired the Mandalorians in the Star Wars expanded universe. Sure, the Acroyears are hardly the first proud warrior race ever, but they certainly are the first proud warrior race to wear distinctive and individualized armor and helmets and never show their faces. The Acroyears first appeared in 1978, two years before Boba Fett's first appearance. Hmmm...!

If so, that would be hilariously karmic because of numerous accusations of plagiarism levied against Bill Mantlo over the years, including his theft of a Harlan Ellison "Outer Limits" story. According to legend, Jim Shooter prevented a lawsuit by merely giving Ellison a lifetime subscription to all Marvel comics instead. The accusation was also made that Mantlo borrowed from an in-production graphic novel about the Hulk which would debut a background with Bruce Banner's abusive childhood resulting in pent-up rage issues. Mantlo took that background and beat its debut to the punch in issues of the regular comic. In fairness to Mantlo, he might have seen the photostats for the graphic novel and just figured that was the new continuity and status quo.

Likewise, Micronauts is very similar to Star Wars, but that's so ridiculously obvious I don't need to say it. Arcturus Rann's background in particular as a space explorer in suspended animation for a thousand years whose voyage was superseded by faster than light travel discovered in the interim, reminds me of Steve Gerber's Vance Astro in Guardians of the Galaxy. In fact, there couldn't be a character with more Gerber-esque, trademark poignancy.

My Branch of the Wold-Newton Tree

2011-10-21T13:57:00.006-04:00

I have a pretty distinct physical feature: a superfluous third nipple.

I don't have any other relatives with it I know of, and I didn't think about it much, until I received a weird request for an interview by Phillip Jose Farmer in 2007, a couple years before his death. PJF wanted to ask me some questions about family history.

This surprised me because #1) I'm not the family historian, #2) my father is, and he's a better known public figure. It only occurred to me later that PJF would get in touch with me first because I sent him some fan mail.

Man, what a thrill, and surprise, to have the macho post-pulpster author of "Riverworld" in my apartment!

I told Farmer how, as a kid, I read "Venus on the Half-Shell." My favorite scene was where, trapped in a Cairo museum in an upended sarcophagus after a flood that kills mankind, the hero is forced to feed the penis of the mummy of Ramses II to his dog in order to survive. Ever since then, I've always speculated what mummy flesh tastes like. I've come to the conclusion it's like a really dry, excessively spiced beef jerky.

At first I wondered if PJF meant to ask me about my distant relative, Lisandro Perez, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury of the Cuban Republic. But no…PJF was trying to compile a timeline of the real people whose identities were obfuscated by fiction. Previously, he'd connected the backstory of fictional characters like Tarzan, Doc Savage, Fu Manchu, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes together in something he called the "Wold-Newton Tree."

The first question he asked me was about a great-uncle, Hector Francisco Perez. I was unfamiliar with the name, until I remembered my father mentioned a "Tío Paco" a couple times. My grandfather was one of ten children – five of which migrated to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, one of whom went to Spain, and four who stayed in Cuba.

According to Dad, he barely remembered his Tío Paco, who was one of the youngest of that generation, because like my great-Uncle Rubén, he got along badly with his father (my great-grandfather) who was a notoriously serious, authoritarian man from an authoritarian, serious generation: a circus and tobacco company owner.

According to all accounts, there were very serious rumors about why Tío Paco ran away, including that he shot a policeman.

Dad only met Tío Paco once, when he came to visit the family in the city of Miami for a brief time in the early sixties because of his job: teaching trick shooting to a wealthy expatriate Latvian. According to Dad, Tío Paco talked about how he did more than that on occasion, killing on command, and even passed on to his employer his own unsettling habit of shooting through the right eye. This was the way where Tío Paco killed a policeman, his first and most meaningful murder in Trieste, Hungary.

The early sixties meeting in Miami was extremely disturbing, but not an extraordinary one in a family of crazy people. And anyway, it was well known in the family Tío Paco did work for the Batista Regime and later for Castro, and had unwholesome Mafia connections. This background is relatively common to people who were unfortunate enough to grow up in interesting times, and anyway, when it comes to the Mafia most Cubans and Cuban-Americans at the very least know a guy who knows a guy.

That was all Dad knew, though it seems PJF put together some of the pieces together.

"Hector Francisco Perez," according to Philip Jose Farmer, was the real name of the Cuban assassin author Ian Fleming later fictionalized as "Francisco Scaramanga," also called the "Man With the Golden Gun."

Even more incredibly, Farmer turned up proof the "Man With the Golden Gun" appeared once before in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. On that previous occasion, he was under a cover identity incorporating his real name, as the hired assassin Hector Gonzales in the short story "For Your Eyes Only." There, Hector Gonzales was the killer who, under orders from von Hammerstein, murdered the Havelocks. James Bond did shoot Gonzales, but under the chaos of the shootout Hector's death was never definitively confirmed.

An innately vengeful person good at keeping grudges, but unsure which MI-6 agent shot him during the Batista years, Hector Francisco Perez took special relish in killing every double-0 agent he would later come across just in case it might have been the man who shot him in Vermont.

Based on what I told him from family history, PJF put together one later occasion where "Hector Francisco Perez" just missed interacting with the famous 007. The "wealthy Latvian expatriate" he worked for in Miami was Auric Goldfinger, who "Scaramanga" taught in shooting. Hector Perez and Goldfinger first met through the Spangled Mob, who were, at the time, assisting Goldfinger with Operation Grandslam and who also regularly made use of Hector's assassination skills.

It was from "Scaramanga" Goldfinger later picked up his distinctive means of execution: shooting through the right eye (the way Scaramanga performed his first kill). In turn, it was from Goldfinger "Scaramanga" picked up his trademark gold bullets. The gold-plated firearm, incidentally, was a gift from Goldfinger to his shooting instructor.

Additionally, I speculated that Tío Paco's strong Catholic streak might have come from his sister (my great-aunt) who was a Catholic Nun in Cuba.

Here's another interesting coincidence I only discovered later: my friend Alex Niquette in Vermont lives by Echo Lake…at the very property owned by the Havelocks prior to their murder at the hands of "Hector Gonzales."

All of this was a lot to take in, and I thanked PJF both for his enlightening visit and the fiction he produced over the years.

I thought a lot about that meeting in the weeks to come. I'd never considered owning a gun before that meeting, for instance. I didn't worry about personal protection much, and I don't hunt either...mostly because I hate nature and don't like being anywhere near it. Right after that meeting, I felt the urge to get one.

And holding and shooting a gun...well, it just felt right, somehow, that's all.

The misplaced criticisms of minority characters in historical movies

2011-09-26T16:34:00.000-04:00

It seems every time historical fiction attempts to show a different era of the past with the occasional minority here or there, a segment of the population labels this as just inappropriately or inaccurately reflecting our modern society, instead of those of the past.

Over 10,000 Mexican-American troops fought in the Civil War, on both the Northern and Southern side. One Latino made it to the rank of Colonel in a CSA Texas cavalry regiment, Col. Santos Benavides - who, incidentally, remained undefeated in battle.

I would love to see a Civil War film that features Mexican and Tejano fighters on both sides particularly in the Western theater, but if a historically accurate movie like that ever came out, it would be denounced as "PC grandstanding" by many historically ignorant critics unaware of the lengthy presence of Latinos in the United States (it seems like many just started noticing Latinos existed here in the 'states in something like 2007 despite being one of the most historically established national groups).

This is my general point: the presence of minorities in historical films is not historical inaccuracy. It was their absence in movies of the past that was inaccurate. Today's movies, for the most part, are getting it right and it's movies in the past that whitewashed and ignored minorities, like old Westerns, which were the less historically correct depictions. Black cowboys and cowpunchers were normal in many places and it was Hollywood that overlooked them for generations.

Recently "The Shakespeare Code" was a Doctor Who episode set in London in the 1590s which featured black extras. Predictably enough, this prompted an outcry. However many black slaves and descendants of slaves were living in London in that era, to the point where Queen Victoria wrote a letter to the mayor of London in 1596 where she expelled slave descended blacks from England, with "there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie."

This criticism is a little weirder when applied to adventure and science fiction movies. Captain America's handpicked Howling Commandos struck a lot of people as unrealistic because it had a black guy in the era of the segregated armed forces, and a Japanese-American. In the words of Mike Stoklasa, "shouldn't he be in an internment camp?"

I'm sure the notion a Japanese-American couldn't be a vet in the European theater must come as something of a surprise to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, aka the Buddhaheads, with their gutsy patois motto, "Go For Broke!" You know, the 442nd Combat Regiment, the most highly decorated regiment in the entire history of the armed forces, including 21 Congressional Medals of Honor?

In the circumstances of the movie, the black guy (Gabe Jones) was a prisoner at a POW labor camp. As the Howling Commandos are an eccentric, unconventional team made of people Captain America trusts as opposed to a traditional armed forces unit, not only is this criticism unbelievably petty, but totally unfounded in the internal logic of the movie.

(Also, it's worth pointing out Peggy Carter, Cap's tough girlfriend, was not a Howling Commando and was a more historically accurate intelligence and scientific officer in a noncombat position.)

The expedition in Atlantis: the Lost Empire were specialists collected together by an eccentric, weirdo millionaire who was crackpot enough to look for Atlantis. Is it really that unbelievable the group he selected would break a few social conventions? After all, Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, another group formed together by an awesome, eccentric rich weirdo, featured black boxers and other crazy characters.

Bear in mind I am not saying there are no such things as slip-ups, because sometimes historical fiction, without meaning to, can reflect our own society instead of those of the past. For instance, a friend of mine remembers a few detective stories written in the past few years features a female police officer in the 1920s. Women cops are such a part of our world it seems unbelievable there was a time when there weren't any.

Why do so many people instinctively rebel against portrayals of minorities in historical fiction even when that portrayal has a grounded historical basis? The easy answer is a kind of subtle bigotry, but I don't think that's it at all. Rather, it can be found in the way the history of minority groups is taught, as a story about the fight against poverty and oppression, instead of as a story of achievement.

The strange case of Elizabeth Brady Cabot Winslow, Part II

2011-09-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

You might remember me discussing the strange case of Boston Brahmin genius and model turned tragically mentally ill woman all the way back here. Since then, there have been several new revelations.

What interested me about this unusual internet phenomenon was how specific she got, all of which were details that could be double-checked and examined more closely.

There's a single brief, glib line in the "Crimes and Malice" section of her lengthy resume/rant, that goes as follows:

C 1974 Seth Baker in New York City in a financially ruinous, devastating, severely damaging theft for me stole a very valuable irreplaceable heirloom from me.

Special thanks to blog reader Mike Justice for bringing the following news article to my attention, from the New York Times, June 26, 1974:

Unlike the rants of other homeless, not only are her claims based on something, but the reality is typically more interesting the more you examine. For instance, on her site, she didn't mention Seth Baker "took the heirloom from her" by spending the night with her at an upscale hotel. Though she did mention Seth Baker as an "international playboy." Now there's an upscale job I haven't heard about in a while.

In addition, Liz Winslow claimed to have been a model, and recently, the Wilhelmina agency uploaded online their back catalog of model cards. There were even some for a Liz Cabot Winslow, which coincides to the year with when she said she worked as a model for Wilhelmina.

And some of the shots are really glam. All I have to say is...woof! Ah, if only I was an international playboy in 1974...

In addition, a passport collector has in his possession the passport belonging to Ms. Cabot Winslow's father, Colonel Hugh Whitaker Winslow, who was nothing short of an interesting and extraordinary man in his own right. Check it out!

The WNBA really is as bad as everybody says

2011-09-10T08:08:00.006-04:00

Though ordinarily my mockery is merciless and without pity...to be honest, I feel terrible, and a little guilty too, in laughing at the WNBA.

Why? Because they're underdogs: unappreciated, ignored athletes working for very little money and attention, and it's natural to root for the underdogs to succeed and prove everybody wrong.

It doesn't hurt that the two groups that goof on and snigger at the WNBA are two of the most insufferable kinds of jerks: an unholy coalition of stand-up comedians and male chauvinist types.

It kills me to say it, but those jerks are absolutely and totally right.

Take a look at this clip reel of the 10 best WNBA moments of the year. At first I thought the clips were making fun of the WNBA, but this is actually a real highlight film from the WNBA itself.

If you want to skip to the end, go to #2 and #1.

#2 is the third slam-dunk in WNBA history – the first being in 2002, five years after the league was founded, and the second in 2008. By that logic, the next one will be three years from now. This one I have trouble believing, since most guys that are six feet tall can jump high enough to make a dunk, and most of these gals are six-foot and above. King James dunks more in one game than the WNBA's entire history.

As depressing as that sounds, #1 takes the absolute cake.

The single best play of the year was a depressingly basic reverse-layup any high school team player can do. The over-reliance on the unbelievably rudimentary layup inspires the WNBA's nickname, the LDL League: Lesbians Doing Layups.

The WNBA is such a fertile and obvious target that even the obtuse "mind" of nitwit Family Guy creator Seth McIdiot picked up on it as a subject for parody.

On related news, Gina Carano is getting a movie, finally. She's like the reverse-WNBA. On the one hand she's a really good martial artist and Thai kickboxer; when tested she hit with 650 psi and out of 14 fights, won 12, lost 1 (that one being relatively recently) and another was considered a draw by decision. She's got some glamour, but at least we don't have to be subjected to the indignity of pretending some supermodel like space-cadet Milla Jovovich is an asskicker. Gina's basically what Black Canary would be if Black Canary was a real person. It'd be great to see an action movie with a woman who is actually a very gifted physical athlete.

Wait...why are you considered a good guy, again?

2011-08-31T04:56:00.010-04:00

There's a category of hero in the Marvel Universe who have no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, yet we're told over and over they're good guys – despite the fact they have a clear, real history of actual villainy and no real heroic characteristics.

To be clear as possible: I am not talking about "cool jerk" characters who end up extremely likable because they're badasses that don't take guff and they play dirty, like Wolverine or especially U.S. Agent. Likewise, I'm not some Spanish Inquisition lunatic (the type Superboy-Prime was created to parody) who thinks anyone who so much as uses bad language is a bad person forever.

I'm not saying every character needs to be the same to be considered a hero…but at least give us something, anything, to make a hero someone you can root for.

Remember this moment from the Bloodstone Hunt storyline? Arguing U.S. Agent's not as cool as other heroes because he's got a lot of swagger and doesn't behave himself is a little like arguing Vincent Vega from "Pulp Fiction" was the cooler of the two hitmen because he was more polite.

Besides J. Jonah Jameson, John Walker Lyndh may be the only conservative Republican in the entire Marvel Universe, a guy who, unlike the typically rebellious Marvel heroes, was a patriot of the "love it or leave it" variety who had more in common with Oliver North than Steve Rogers, a guy who was totally okay with being a full-time civil service agent of the government.

Then again…and here's my point…U.S. Agent is a guy who occasionally shows signs he can be redeemed, some of the other people I've mentioned haven't. Take Spectacular Spider-Man 137, where the Latin American assassin Tarantula was trying to kill politically inconvenient asylum seekers in the United States with the consent of the U.S. Government. Good old U.S. Agent showed he had something of a glimmer of a conscience and helped Spider-Man against orders to stop the Tarantula.

Besides, U.S. Agent brought a lot to West Coast Avengers, a book referred to as the "Wackos" because unlike the east coast team they were, like their leader Hawkeye, wilder, prouder and more unorthodox. U.S. Agent was the "heavy" who was all for following the rules, which made him personally unlikeable, but meant he brought a lot to group dynamic and reminded us that Hawkeye only learned how to "turn off" his brashness because of the responsibility of leadership.

Moondragon

Defined by her baldness and desire to have sex with Quasar and the Mighty Thor because they were the only guys good enough for a true goddess like herself, Moondragon's massive sense of superiority, haughtiness and arrogance alienated everyone she met. The primary characteristics defining Moondragon's interactions is a haughty disdain for most of the earthbound Avengers, intrusion on their private thoughts, and her revulsion with human sensuality.

Moondragon was also "religious" and raised by monks, and she had all of the vices but none of the virtues of religious people: a simultaneously depraved and sexually repressed egotist who is sanctimonious but without compassion.

On first joining the team, Moondragon's first acts were to try to undermine Thor's status on the team by wondering why a god like that palled around with lesser beings…an action typical of her winning personality.

Moondragon is, in a historical footnote, the first Avenger to actually turn evil: in Avengers 219-220, she used her mental powers to enslave an entire planet.

Let that sink in: Moondragon was actually the villain of an entire story-arc where she used her mind powers to enslave an entire planet "for the greater good," and then betrayed and lied to her former Avengers team-mates when they came poking around. She then used her powers to make Thor love her and then set him against his friends.

What's more, she even attacked her own father when he realized the full extent of her plans and influence, and she used lethal force and killed him (it didn't take, but that's not the point). The full scope of her intentions beyond Ba-Bani was not known, but she and the mind controlled Thor used creepy language like "bringing order to the universe."

How is it possible after a morality-horizon crossing event like that Moondragon can be taken seriously as a superhero? It absolutely shocks me how much effort has been spent in Solo Avengers and elsewhere trying to "redeem" her.

A lot of time and effort was spent rehabilitating Wanda Maximoff to a whole generation that knows her only as the psycho bitch who pulled "no more mutants," but Wanda was a beloved character that was one of the mainstays and longest serving of the Avengers. On the other hand, I've never met a Moondragon fan in my entire life.

I understand they tried to say the devil made her do it, but when they pulled the "devil made him do it" card when Iron Man had the Kree Supreme Intelligence executed after Operation Galactic Storm, it made sense as that was obviously a real lapse and really unusual, out of character action for Tony. Yet Moondragon betraying her team-mates, and using her mind powers to take over a planet because she knows better was perfectly in character: arrogant, snotty, with an elitist view of her own importance over lesser mortals.

The only other character I can think of where so much effort was expended on explaining away evil actions was Hal Jordan. In fact, I wonder if the "dragon of the Moon spirit made Heather conquer the planet Ba-Banis" explanation in Solo Avengers might have been the inspiration for the Yellow Fear Monster.

I can't think of a single other Avenger that everyone on the team hated - even the otherwise alienating U.S. Agent earned Captain America and "bleedin' heart" Hawkeye's respect eventually. The other Avengers feel the same way about her that the audience does. The single most shocking thing about Moondragon's turn to evil in Avengers 219 -220 is that nobody, except Thor and her father, were all that shocked or surprised...and how none of her former teammates really were choked up or conflicted at all about having to slug her, either.

Oh yeah, and Moondragon is apparently gay now, a fate usually reserved for unimportant, minor-league, unimportant X-Men supporting cast members like Richter, Karma and Shatterstar…despite the fact that 1) Moondragon was revolted by sexuality, and 2) most of her master plans involved getting laid with Quasar or Mighty Thor. As nonsensical as that gay revelation sounds, it basically means Moondragon will never go full villain now as she ought…because how would it look if one of the few Marvel homos is a bad guy?

It is for this reason the now badly "Flanderized" out-and-proud Northstar will never be an interesting or edgy character ever again. The whole point of Northstar is that he was a pompous, pretentious guy who had an intriguing political past as a former Quebecois nationalist-separatist – a terroristic past Northstar was utterly unrepentant about.

Now the only thing anybody knows about someone as cool as Northstar is that he's gay – an incidental and minor element of the character – especially since Northstar had been around for a decade as a regular part of a team book before he outed himself. Northstar is a jerk, but a cool likeable jerk who you love to hate. How does it look if the one well-known Marvel gay character is a jerk…even if that's kind of the whole point? Not looking bad in the press trumps consistent characterization, I guess.

Juggernaut

There are some bad guys it's impossible to accept they'd ever reform because they don't have any redeeming characteristics or glimmer of a conscience. Crossbones is evil trash, the Red Skull is a depraved sociopath megalomaniac, and Viper/Madame Hydra is a cold, casually murderous nihilist and terrorist.

Juggernaut is one of those villains. A brutish criminal who happens to be totally unstoppable, Juggernaut is a mean, dumb thug and bully who worships power and does what he feels like: in his mind everybody else is a "pencilnecked geek" and "twerp."

Juggernaut made for a good protagonist during the "8th Day" storyline because unlike the other avatars of the Octessence for whatever reason his original human personality was dominant. He was a goon, but he was a normal person that wasn't a crazy fanatic.

Chuck Austen, that human disaster area, seriously wanted us to believe the Juggernaut would stay a good guy…because he made friends with some mutant kid that thinks he's cool? That's absolutely unbelievable. The only way that story could have been more emotionally manipulative was if it involved cute kittens, good hearted blue collar people, and possibly Forrest Gump.

Of all the low points of his Marianas Trench-like X-Men run, Chuck Austen's "Juggernaut befriends a little kid which makes him turn good" was not the worst, but it definitely was the sloppiest and most sentimental. The X-Writers have for the most part collectively agreed to never discuss anything from his run again, so why is it the Juggernaut reforms bit of crap is still sticking around? And it gets worse: Juggernaut has thus far been in more superteams than any other X-Character other than Wolverine, including not only the X-Men but the renewed Excalibur and Luke Cage incarnation of Thunderbolts.

There are so many villains in the Marvel Universe who have redeeming characteristics and who could possibly reform, that I have no idea why Juggernaut was the one who got this plot, other than the subhuman hominid Chuck Austen fails at everything from writing to walking erect. Batroc the Leaper would be a great choice to reform: a man of honor with lines he would not cross, he once helped Captain America against Mister Hyde when it was obvious Mr. Hyde would have destroyed Manhattan, and once saved Steve Rogers when he was outnumbered and attacked by sharks, for instance.

Sunfire

Wasn't Sunfire raised by an arch-fascist who never forgot Japan's loss in World War II and trained his son to bitterly continue the struggle against his American enemies? I mean, wouldn't that basically make Sunfire a Japanese version of the second Baron Zemo?

Sunfire's major role in stories tends to be abandoning fellow heroes in deadly situations with a forced apology because his responsibilities to Japan outweigh trying to help them fight for their lives.

Macho, proud, arrogant, prejudiced, inflexibly traditionalist, cynical, easily insulted, vengeful and woman-hating, if there's a single redeeming characteristic there that justifies his consideration as a hero, I'd love to hear about it, yet this guy shows up every so often in the X-Books because people remember his short-lived appearance in Giant-Sized X-Men #1. It says something that even among the many snarly, short tempered characters in that book like Wolverine and Thunderbird, Sunfire was distinguished enough to be the only one that couldn't even complete the mission. That's like winning the chode Olympics!

Namor is an arrogant, proud guy who has a legit grudge that leads him to be prejudiced against outsiders, but Namor is occasionally very courageous, fights fair, and has a tremendous personal dignity, regality and other traits that make him a compelling and fascinating antihero. And every so often Namor fought alongside the good guys and been instrumental to their victories over enemies like Doctor Doom and Magneto, whereas every word from Sunfire tends to be "I am sorry, because of my duty to Japan you're on your own."

Look, Marvel – Sunfire's a dick. Why not just admit he's kind of a bad guy? He's basically a mutant version of every single jerk Asian Dad.

Sunfire is an especially tragic victim of the Marvel sliding timescale, since his origin is that he was born a mutant as a result of his parents getting rads thanks to Hiroshima, which caused illnesses that eventually killed them and filled Sunfire with wrath at Americans and Westerners. In the mid to late 1960s, he'd be about college age, the same as the original X-Men...but a lot of time has passed since then. Unlike Baron Zemo II, who kept young as a result of his father's Chemical X, there has, as of yet, been no explanation for Sunfire's longevity.

Sunfire can be born later, even as late as the 1970s assuming his parents were younger than supposed and had children late - and Hiroshima could still have cut their lives tragically short. After all, contrary to Hollywood voodoo science, most people exposed to huge amounts of radiation don't die right away. Some can live for decades before developing serious and lethal illnesses.

Review: Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men"

2011-08-18T12:40:00.008-04:00

A lot of people have criticized Stapledon's "Last and First Men" for having no characters, but that doesn't mean it has no characterization, because his characterization is of entire races and peoples. That's the ambitious sweep of Last and First Men, which gives us the entirety of human history, over 2 billion years worth.

Robert Bloch once described horror as a kind of mystery story where God is the detective. If that's true, then "Last and First Men" is a tragedy where the main character is the entire human race. Not just one human race, but several: in the enormous span of time the book glibly and speedily covers, the human race assumes many weird forms, some naturally evolved, but others as the products of genetic engineering (though that term is never used) by the previous race.

Here's my favorite part of the story, and it is not only one of the high points of the book but also typical of its storytelling, and based on this you can determine for yourself if the book is for you.

After the destruction of the earth and mankind moves to Venus, the Seventh Men develop, a carefree, child-like race of graceful fliers with arms that have batlike wings. Of all the races of humans, the Seventh Men emerge as the most sympathetic: the most content, pleasant-spirited…no matter what terror happened, the sheer exultation of flight made them forget their troubles.

After thousands of years, because of an environmental problem, many Seventh Men are born without wings. This crippled race are sent to do hard work, but as they're of a race psychologically made for flight, the flightless crippled race were bitter, angry sorts cooped in labs incapable of happiness, a race of miserly industrialists who clutter up every inch of watery Venus's land space with their factories, who over time vow to eliminate flight as a pointless, dead-end future.

The final conflict is an awful genocide, with the carefree flying men mowed down as they futiley attempt to escape enemies in speedier airplanes with machine guns. The last of the Flying Men were a slave race to jealous masters who ordered all winged infants destroyed.

The defiant rebellion of the last Flying Men ended in tragedy, as related here:

Their leaders, conferring together, saw clearly that the day of Flying Man was done, and that it would be more fitting for a high-souled race to die at once than to drag on in subjection to contemptuous masters. They therefore ordered the population to take part in an act of racial suicide that should at least make death a noble gesture of freedom. The people received the message while they were resting on the stony moorland. A wail of sorrow broke from them. It was checked by the speaker, who bade them strive to see, even on the ground, the beauty of the thing that was to be done. They could not see it; but they knew that if they had the strength to take wing again they would see it clearly, almost as soon as their tired muscles bore them aloft. There was no time to waste, for many were already faint with hunger, and anxious lest they should fail to rise. At the appointed signal the whole population rose into the air with a deep roar of wings. Sorrow was left behind. Even the children, when their mothers explained what was to be done, accepted their fate with zest; though, had they learned of it on the ground, they would have been terror-stricken. The company now flew steadily west, forming themselves into a double file many miles long. The cone of a volcano appeared over the horizon, and rose as they approached. The leaders pressed on towards its ruddy smoke plume; and unflinchingly, couple by couple, the whole multitude darted into its fiery breath and vanished. So ended the career of Flying Man.

In the middle of all this there are some outright fantastic bits of imagery, like for instance, an era when a subspecies of man devolve into baboons, or a weird speciation on the high-gravity of Neptune which forces men to all fours, one primitive race of quadrupedal men who have tusks and another quadruped human race hunts them to extinction for their ivory. The most nightmarish were the Fourth Men, a race of superintelligent, immortal and terrifyingly unsentimental, coldblooded and casually genocidal brains the size of Volkswagens.

Because there are different human species, and the book takes a lengthy "God's-Eye-View," the book does not concern itself with even the character of individual civilizations, but rather the character of entire races.

For instance, the God's Eye View reduces the history of our own race, the First Men, into a story about the conflict between our brutal, animal nature and our better and more civilized instincts. Just when one is about to be prominent, some accident of history results in the other side of our nature taking over.

The person giving us this story is a being of tremendous intellect billions of years in the future. I was absolutely dreading this, because an author's true philosophical and personal views are ironically, never more on display when they try to write a person above human understanding giving a comment on modern times – these beings may be above human limits in thinking, but their writers sure aren't. That is, 19th Century novels with characters of this type always come off laughable because their "like unto an amoeba" beings are still tight-assed 19th Century people to the eyes of modern readers.

In fact, it's often difficult to read for this reason, of all things…the Bible…and not come away with the idea that God is a cruel and vindictive bully. But then, what do you expect from Bronze Age nomadic cultures?

In "Last and First Men," sometimes this perspective works and sometimes it doesn't. It was written at an interesting time in history, when the Western neurosis about sex was obvious for what it was and actually could be talked about. A gigantic world war between France and Britain for instance, began again when a beautiful young Princess was the victim of an airplane accident, which brought from the British a cry for revenge against the totally innocent French. In essence, the sensationalist press used sexual imagery to create fear and a desire for aggression and revenge, in much the same way "missing white women" are overhyped in Fox News and other media.

The idea this kind of primitive sexual fascination is a really a primeval rage trigger-instinct would never have occurred to a Victorian mind, and is often invisible to easily provoked people today; it does sound like an observation a more intelligent being from the distant future would make.

Then again, there was the usual Brit science fiction stuff about how a world dominated by Americans (by 1932 a foregone conclusion) would be awful, cultureless and money-mad. This is a British Isles prejudice as petty as their nursery-hatred of Catholics, which I can't imagine any superior mind from the future ever subscribing to – it's bleed over into the character from the author, the literary equivalent of spotting a zipper in a monster movie.

Judging by the writings of their intellectual class across the political spectrum from Tory V.S. Naipaul or liberal Roy Arundhati to C.S. Lewis (whose petty fixations and snipings at the American education system prove what I've always thought: he was an innovative storyteller but a very limited mind), no other nation hates America more, and yet no other nation is considered a close American bosom buddy despite the fact the Brits had one of the evilest empires in history, invented the concentration camp (what, you think it was the Germans?), and in their front and center writings available in public for anyone to read, hate us like poison actively to this day in a way that makes the endearingly contrarian French mind's prejudices look downright innocent in comparison. Maybe those limey bastards are right: Americans don't really read much, or else we'd know how much they loathe us.

On the other hand, a few other details are so forward thinking it's almost shocking to imagine this book was written in 1932. For instance, the ultimate disaster that destroys our technical civilization is the end of fossil fuels. Also, he laughed at the idea World War I would be the "war to end all wars," and even called it one of the least destructive of the later conflicts, put forth a scenario where Americans and Chinese dueled over world influence, and in the days before the atomic bomb, put forth the idea of a superweapon that would destroy all mankind. And all that's in the early chapters dealing with us, the First Men.

Some of the alien-minded human races in the distant future had incredibly inhuman cultures and thought-processes. For instance, the Second Men were doomed by a sort of existential crisis and lack of confidence that honestly, I actually don't even understand.

The most fascinating of the human species - other than the childlike Flying Men and their tragic final fate at the hands of their more pragmatic, industrialist-minded yet bitter and envious brethren – was possibly the Eighteenth Men, or the Last Men, who look not like one race, but many, and have an incredible diversity of appearance.

We are both more human and more animal. The primitive explorer might be more readily impressed by our animality than our humanity, so much of our humanity would lie beyond his grasp. He would perhaps at first regard us as a degraded type. He would call us faun-like, and in particular cases, ape-like, bear-like, ox-like, marsupial, or elephantine.

Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species. He would perhaps say, "These men that are beasts are surely gods also." He would be reminded of those old Egyptian deities with animal heads.

I wonder if the idea of the Last Men possibly inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's the Inhumans from Fantastic Four. After all, both read widely and it is possible to see a lot of early 20th Century science fiction influences in them.

Like John Carter of Mars, this 1932 novel is a book of incredible influence to early generations of science fiction writers and is due anyday to be rediscovered. Though some could be accused of missing the point, like C.S. Lewis, who loved this book but felt the need to talk back to it with "Out of the Silent Planet." Lewis even called the book Satanic – a laughably embarrassing insult for a 20th Century person to slug, right up there with accusing someone of being a witch.

In a part of the book that Lewis did not like, the Fifth Men – a race of moral and intellectual supermen – discover the earth will be rendered uninhabitable, and so they construct a plan to move to Venus. The trouble is that Venus already has an aquatic intelligent inhabited race who fight against the human attempt to make it habitable, as that would be the death of them. Therefore, in a choice prompted by survival, the extremely moral Fifth Men are responsible for the crime of exterminating an entire intelligent race, a black deed that weighs on their guilty consciences.

It was an awful situation – extermination or survival - especially for a race as enlightened as the Fifth Men, and a crime that Stapledon presents without judgment or comment. It was far from presented to the audience as a "correct" course of action, but a bad situation. Nowhere in the book was it presented as a "good" thing to do.

This is a common mistake made by people that choose to police our culture who have no understanding of how art works. They're so used to moral judgment they assume that merely by having something in a story the creators must be in favor of it. A story with violence? They must be gorehounds. A story with rape? The creators must be sickos that like violence against women!

I'm looking squarely at you, Gail Simone. You have great storytelling gifts and your comics are a delight, but your "Women in Refrigerators" site (to which I am not linking because that site does not deserve even any miniscule traffic I can create) is pointlessly incendiary, and presented out of context, all this so-called violence is as meaningless as mentioning the existence of violence or sex in movies. Context tells us whether sex is drama or pornography.

C.S. Lewis was against genocide motivated by greed, eh? Well, I'm sure he had plenty to say, then, about the artificial famines created in India which killed millions in times of plenty to drive up the cost of British grain, or the entire history of abused Ireland, or the hundreds of thousands of Dinka killed to clear settler rights in Kenya, right? No? Didn't say a peep? Well, that's the Brits for you – buttinsky critics of every empire except their own, which ironically (or perhaps predictably) is the worst one of all.

In Out of the Silent Planet, an overly ambitious scientist wants to save the human race by killing all the Martians and settling humans on Mars. The book portrays him as not a very nice person and tries to condemn this viewpoint – except it's not one that Stapledon had!

Sheesh, Lou. You gotta read what the guy says. And that's advice for everybody else. This book is definitely worth reading.

Zeroids: the Return

2011-08-13T23:34:00.005-04:00

Moonstone Comics, a printer that specializes in books based on pulpy pop culture artifacts like Buckaroo Banzai, the Captain Action toy line, and Lee Falk's Phantom, are right now publishing a comic based on the robot toy line the Zeroids.

The Zeroids were basically early 1960s predecessors of the Transformers. If the Transfomers had versions on Earth-2, this is what they would look like. And from the sound of things, the Zeroids were even cooler as toys, with vehicles that came right with the figure, crazy-powerful interior motors, magnetic power-actions, and one even has an interior set of wires and batteries to make a playset light up.

What's strange is that the Moonstone Zeroids comic basically follows the blueprint of the Michael Bay Transformers movie, which might as well be called "People Who Know Transformers," with the main characters being a couple of military guys and Megan Fox. In the case of Zeroids this is a little more okay, since while Transformers was wonderfully peopled to the point there's no excuse for pointless human characters, there's a lot less for Zeroids to work with, a barely filmable toy "line" that has a huge gaping deficiency: no real villains.

I never understood why you can't have the robots be the main characters. Children have an instinctive sympathy with unusual creatures. There was a story where C.S. Lewis got a letter where a concerned mother told him her son preferred Narnia's Lion-Jesus Aslan over the actual Jesus. C.S. Lewis's response was surprisingly rational, along the lines of "of course he does, that's how the minds of little boys work." The logic behind emphasizing human characters is the same mistake that people make when they put little kids in adventure stories: "in order to appeal to little kids we have to have little kids in the story."

The main human hero is basically Megan Fox in every way: a sorority girl who is the daughter of the scientist who originally built the Zeroids. This is unsurprising. If they ever do a remake of the caveman movie 1,000,000 BC, you can bet the main character will be a woman since the only thing anybody remembers about the Hammer film is that Raquel Welch was in it...despite the fact she doesn't really do anything and was a supporting character.

As an aside, I don't actually have a problem with Megan Fox, who was overexposed to the point of annoyance, but was not really a terrible person or actress. Yeah, she didn't turn out a great performance in those movies, but what did you idiots expect? Oscar-caliber performances produced by that well-known actor's director, Michael Bay?

The comic Zeroids: the Return basically duplicates the Michael Bay school of film-making down to very unusual and idiosyncratic elements like uncomfortable race-humor that ends up being borderline racist itself. The book is trying to sell itself on camp, including a zombie invasion (something I doubt was a part of the original toyline). I appreciate it is self-aware enough to understand a book like this works by nostalgia, so get as nostalgic and campy and don't take yourself too seriously. You can either be campy or play it straight, not both, and certainly not a muddled mixture of both like the Bay movies, and I doubt robots that look like this would lend themselves to being played entirely straight.

Because of the emphasis on the human characters and the disaster movie elements, I wouldn't recommend Zeroids: the Return unless you really love the toys and were waiting for something to be done with them like manna from heaven. Still, one thing did interest me: a Zeroids-website owner cropped every picture of the comic cover to exclude the sexy girl, a hilarious act of Calvinist prudery that defies parody.

Sincerity as a Marketable Product

2011-08-11T01:53:00.005-04:00

"The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." - George Burns

Pop quiz! What is the one thing you probably know about Jewel?

Bzzt! Time's up. The answer is "while she was a struggling musician from Alaska she lived in her van."

Interesting, but living in your car is practically universal among musicians: Kurt Cobain, the founding members of Aerosmith, Kelly Clarkson and Eartha Kitt all did the same thing. In fact, musicians having it rough is the subject of a whole genre of jokes.

Q: What do you call a drummer with no girlfriend?

A: Homeless.

Yet with Jewel all you hear about over and over is how she lived in a van, which is really not that special or distinguishing as far as musicians go. By Jove! It's almost as if…call me crazy here…Jewel's van days are used as a part of her image, to make her sound sincere and arty.

Jewel, who proved with her poetry she's about as deep and arty as a pizza box, is one of the more offensive examples of a very offensive trend that suckers otherwise smart people: the persona packaged, sold and marketed of an authentic artist who isn't packaged, sold or marketed. I don't know what offends me more: this kind of hypocritical doublethink or the fact people fall for this kind of obvious fraud.

Paul Giamatti

Jenny: "Everything about you is a lie."

Neville Sinclair: "It wasn't lies, it was acting."

- The Rocketeer (1991)

Paul Giamatti is the ultimate example of what I mean. If you like Paul Giamatti because he is a regular guy and everyman actor as opposed to some blow-dried, image-centered and manufactured Hollywood phony…well, I hate to say it, hipsters, but you've been had! I mean it, you've been tricked!

Sincerity? "Regular guy?" Give me a break! Blue blood Paul Giamatti is as much a "regular guy" as George W. Bush, a scion of privilege, with a Dad that was a former commissioner of Major League Baseball.

What I find so offensive and hateful about Paul Giamatti is, not that his success was made possible by wealth and family connections. After all, success in life is about who you know, and I am fine with that and most grownup adults are fine with that. Only lobotomized permanent children like libertarians believe the world is a meritocracy all the time. As a counterpoint to Giamatti, take Sigourney Weaver, who in addition to her incredible talent and obvious professionalism, came from a wealthy showbiz family with her Dad as a former president of NBC who created the Tonight Show.

But Sigourney has never lied to the public and tried to be anything else; she has never created a fake Giamatti image and she revels in her obvious sophistication. She's proud of being Ivy League, with shout outs to Stanford in everything she does. And good for her, I say.

Rather, what I hate about Giamatti is his fandom is based on bamboozling the public into thinking blue-blood Giamatti is a regular working "real" schlub audiences can identify with who achieved in spite of Hollywood's shallow image and marketing machine, when he is in fact a pure creation of that image and marketing machine. He's the George W. Bush of movies. And like Bush, his cult of personality is centered around the worst attributes and vices of the public.

Envy and Spite at Work

There's the factor of envy and spite. Paul Giamatti is not handsome in the traditional, classical sense (although I've found no shortage of women that wouldn't want to get with him), so men aren't threatened by him. Remember how all the women of America hated Baywatch all through the 1990s?

This brings to mind another, crucial question. Who is manufactured? Who is sincere?

When I was a lot less self-aware and honest with myself than I am today, I found myself asking a more mature friend why I hated Leonardo di Caprio so much.

His response?

"You know exactly why. You just want a rational explanation."

To show the reasons people have for liking Paul Giamatti are totally illegitimate, based on a phony image, and utterly hypocritical, try this exercise. Why do you hate Justin Bieber so much?

Now, I'm not a fan of the Bieb since I'm hardly the target audience of his music and stage shows, but consider this. Bieber came from absolutely nothing, an unconnected non-showbiz family in Canada. He achieved fame as just another kid making videos on the internet, and he didn't get attention through slick advertising or marketing but by a sincere and spontaneous outpouring of viral support and attention.

If you can think of a beginning that's more Indie, I'd love to hear it, yet the hardworking Bieber is a "phony" because he arouses spite and envy the way the blowdried Leo di Caprio did before him, whereas rich kid Paul "Can I be an actor now, Daddy?" Giamatti, who really is a manufactured product and insincere phony, gets to be down to earth and authentic. The hypocrisy and spite of it all makes me absolutely sick.

You might say it's a matter of talent, but I don't think so. Caprio was obviously a gifted young actor even back in the day even if he did go "full retard" in Gilbert Grape, and look what happened.

Dane Cook is terminally unfunny and horrible, but you know, there are bushelfulls on bushelfulls of annoying stand-up comics – in fact, "obnoxious stand up comic" is practically a redundancy. Why is he singled out for hate? At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the reason is because he's good looking and confident in his delivery. Stand up comics, even the women (especially the women!), have to be slouchy, slobbish and have a sense of humor that is self-deprecating.

The power of envy and spite goes beyond showbusiness into the realm of politics. Ask yourself this: when was the last time someone with military experience or decoration beat a draft dodger or civilian in a presidential election? I'm just saying: decorated World War II heroes like George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole lost against dodger Clinton, and medal-wearing, heroic Vietnam vets like Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain lost out to Ivy League AWOL civvies. The truth is, the majority of the American population have never been in the military and because of their own cowardice, resent vets for their service. I figured it was unwise of Kerry and McCain to trumpet their own record because it would only make the cowardly masses hate them more, and I was proven right in a way that can't really be argued with.

The Hipster Contrarian's Quest for "Authenticity"

The other factor at work, other than spite, is the hipster fascination with "authenticity." Here's a good working definition of indie music that just might apply to indie film, too. Indie music is whatever the mainstream doesn't like. Seriously, that's it. Remember former hipster fave Death Cab for Cutie, and how everyone talked about how they "sold out" when they were picked up by a big label, their sound was never the same? This is an especially ludicrous claim because every Death Cab for Cutie album sounds identical!

As Dr. David Thorpe put it:

"Upon the release of 2005's Plans, DCFC were immediately disavowed as sellouts by the same kids who'd called them rock's saviours the previous year. This of course is not unusual for indie culture, but often there is at least some legitimate complaint, as slick new producers and hot-shit session musicians are brought in to fag up a band's sound just enough so some 17-yr-old mall troll will buy the cd for his sister's birthday. But with Death Cab, indie culture's back-turning rings exactly like the pompous, exclusivist whining it is--because every Death Cab record is exactly the same."

In short, Death Cab didn't change one iota but their authenticity-obsessed and insecure hipster fans abandoned 'em because they became commercial and popular.

I'm reminded of this attitude a lot because Super 8, a Spielberg-inspired romp is raking in oodles of dough at the box office this summer, so it's now time for insufferable film pedants and contrarians everywhere to beat the deadest of all dead horses, how Spielberg and Lucas and William Friedkin and others are responsible for an "infantilization of cinema," as ghoulish bonershrinking harpy Pauline Kael put it years ago back when anyone listened to her.

In the contrarian mind of the film pedant, Lucas and Spielberg are guilty of the greatest crime imaginable: namely, they are successful.

Seriously, at the end of the day, that's what it is: resentment they made movies mass audiences love.

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when even oddball director David Lynch made blockbusters. David Lynch's Elephant Man was a bona-fide hit, and George Lucas even approached Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. Lynch's Dune bombed so badly that era of his career came to an end. Lynch never did blockbusters, but instead chose to do gonzo, surreal pictures like Blue Velvet later on. Many of those films were truly great, and more power to him.

Lynch and Spielberg both made the kinds of movies they wanted to do. The only difference is that Spielberg's movies made hundreds of millions of dollars. Why should Spielberg's success be held against him, especially since he never "sold out" or tried to be desperately popular? This is undeniably true since Spielberg's always done the same kind of thing he's always done.

What can we learn from all this?

The quest or "authenticity" and hatred of image and "Hollywood" is a phantom, ephemeral chimera that goes nowhere, an intellectual dead-end that leads to nothing except pointless contrarianism. It also makes a person vulnerable to being tricked by frauds like Neville Paul Sinclair Giamatti. After all, the more you think you can't be manipulated by marketing, the more likely you are to be unaware of how it works and therefore vulnerable to manipulation by marketing.

One day, Paul Giamatti will steal that darned rocket pack, though!

8-Bit Video Game Reviews: "The Krion Conquest"

2011-08-08T17:22:00.006-04:00

The Krion Conquest is one of the most intriguingly unique games I've played, which is ironic because the only thing any reviewer ever says about it is that it is a Mega Man rip-off. Well, Krion Conquest was obviously based on the engine of Mega Man…but isn't that in and of itself pretty unique? A whole 8-Bit library could be filled with nothing but Super Mario Bros. and Contra rip-off platformers, but there are other games nobody ever borrowed from, so it's interesting to encounter one that uses similar mechanics. Remember Battle for Olympus, which was a gameplay copy of, of all things, the odd one out of the Zelda series, the side-scroller Zelda 2: the Adventure of Link? If you rip off something nobody ever rips off, that's an act of creativity in and of itself.

First things first: you play a female. In the eight-bit era. Wow.

I'm straining my brain and I can't think of any other game with a female playable character at the time, except maybe the bizarre "Athena." The main character, as seen in the gorgeous box art, is a foxy female witch.

The box art sold her as some curvaceous 1940's Betty Page type, which is odd because the actual game art shows her as some anime creature. This goes back to the days when Japanime seemed weird and unwelcome as opposed to being a selling point because it's "different" and "exotic," like French cinema.

Me, I've always been a red-blooded, meat-eating American, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's the conventions of Japanese cartoons and video games, with androgynous heroes, talking rabbit sidekicks, and fifteen year old, flat-assed schoolgirls. So the way I see it, bring on Witch Betty Page!

The difference between Krion Conquest and Mega Man is like the difference between teaching someone to drive and getting hit by a car. The same ingredients are there in both cases (a car, wheels, a road, etc.) but they're all doing something totally different.

In Krion Conquest, unlike Mega Man, you begin play with all your weapons. What does that mean? If you only take away one thing from this review it is this: the game is not a traditional platformer like Mega Man or Super Mario where you run, dodge jump and shoot, but rather, you have to keep your thinking cap on because the game actively requires you to think about how to use your different powers.

That is why I find Krion Conquest so interesting: you don't just run and jump, but you have to actively use your brain and defeat enemies like a puzzle game. No critics of the game ever mention this, which is what prompted me to write this review: one of the most unique things about this gameplay go totally unmentioned. In this regard it's a predecessor of thinking games like Portal.

I wish more games like The Krion Conquest had been made: action games that aren't just spaceship-shoot-laser but also require some mental adroitness.

Take for instance this scene. There's an enemy in a pit up there you can't jump and reach, but he's quite capable of dropping bombs on you below. How do you get him? You have to perform a bit of billiard-ball trigonometry with a bouncing weapon, which works not unlike Captain America's rebounding shield.

There are other occasions where you have to cross distance on a broomstick, one of your many powers. A lot of critics of the game have slammed it because the control on the broomstick is so bad, you're better of setting the controller down and making it move by shouting bad language at your Nintendo. Well, yeah! The control on the broomstick is supposed to be hard, because that's part of the point of the broomstick, as a part of the puzzle-solving element of the game: you're supposed to know where to go in advance and place your broomstick in the perfect spot.

The point of this game is patience and using the right power at the right time. To that end, you approach most screens in a place of safety so you can look over the obstacles and come up with a strategy. Take for instance, this scenario here. This enemy shoots right at you. You should have the Shield Barrier charged immediately, so the instant you land you can have it charged, then shoot behind the barrier in total safety.

When it comes to control, Krion Conquest is something of an improvement over Mega Man in one crucial respect: you can shoot up. This isn't a little thing. Enemies that are impossible in the Mega Man games, like the diving helicopter-guys in the Cut Man stage, are easily dispatched here because you can shoot up.

In fairness, there are some powers that just don't come up at all. The Freeze ability requires you to charge the weapon up, and only freezes the enemy in place. There is literally no scenario in the game where this comes in handy. Likewise, the Fire power is a "kill everything on screen" ability, which has the terrible side effect of stealing a third of your life. In a grueling Mega Man style game where every level is an endurance test, this is never a smart idea.

I hear Krion Conquest had an even more unique and un-Mega Man-esque trait that was ultimately taken out of the American version of the game, a series of cutscenes in between levels. I would have loved to see this and I'm sorry it was removed! For one thing, while cutscenes are common today, this was absolutely unheard of in the 8-Bit era outside of the Ninja Gaiden games, where the cut scenes between levels turned the game into a big story. I understand the foreign versions of the game have cutscenes and I would very much like to see them restored to the game at some future date.

From what little we see, the game is set in the astounding futuristic year 1999. Whoa! Those were heady days, back in 1999, what with the the Euro, Woodstock '99, Spongebob Squarepants...though with the boy bands, Pokemon craze, and Star Wars: Episode I, weren't things on earth bad enough without robot invaders?

All in all, Krion Conquest and Mega Man are similar in the sense that all human beings are similar…what is important and what ultimately truly matters are the unique, distinctive differences.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars Reviews: A Princess of Mars

2011-07-21T21:48:00.008-04:00

With the movie coming out and interest in the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books at an all-time high, it's my hope to review all 15 of the Barsoom series. Lots of people call them the John Carter of Mars series, but that's a little misleading since unlike the Tarzan books, Burroughs's Barsoom novels were about an "ensemble cast," and John Carter is only the hero of a few.

A Princess of Mars

Though I enjoyed this one a lot, it's a good start point but it all just gets better from here. It's got everything: a man's friendship with giant monsters who are secretly capable of love and affection despite the fangy exterior. The most memorable character is Woola, a lizard the size of a grizzly with a mouth like a frog who turns out to be a loving, loyal and devoted as a brave dog despite the ugly looks. Mention the name "Woola" to an ERB fan and it's an icebreaker that instantly delights, like mentioning R2-D2 to a Star Wars fan.

If MacGuyver is a hero because of his ability to improvise, John Carter is a hero because everything he does is something nobody's ever done before.

Barsoom must be a dream-world for entrepeneurs: in the book John Carter arrives naked and unarmed, becomes a chieftain of Apache-like Green Men, something no normal human's ever done before. He arrives in a Red Martian city and instantly is allowed to become a pilot without even a background check or any evidence he'd been behind a stick before, a fast track for aviators even John McCain would envy. At the end, he sacks an unsackable city (something never done before) with an army of Green Men (who like the red men as much as gangbangers like a honkey in the projects, so it's something never done before - see a trend here?).

A lot of ERB-fans like Lupoff rank this as one of the best of ERB's books, which I simply can't believe. It was a dynamic first-time novel by a first time writer (Burroughs would write Outlaw of Torn and Tarzan of the Apes later the next year) but Burroughs had obvious gifts as a storyteller but needed to get some practice and polish in. In particular, the first half of the book had a style so baroque, so overwritten that at first I wondered if it was parody...but it was just a first-time writer getting into the swing of things and finding their feet. The high point of the Mars series was yet to come with Gods of Mars.

The Green Men are pretty cool

The story of Princess of Mars is the story of how John Carter fell in with the Green Men of Mars, the first people he encountered, and how he lived with them and got their help to save a red-skinned princess he liked.

What's impressive to me is that Burroughs obviously started out using the Green Men as a metaphor for how he didn't like Communism, a science fiction moral lesson that could have been cloying and obvious, much like the "evil feminist" race from Pellucidar who were giant brutes with beards, or how in ERB's books all religions usually end up being some kind of scam.

But somewhere between idea and execution something extraordinary happened: ERB obviously started to like the Green Men, and they became extremely cool and likable. After all, how can you possibly hate a race that has no lawyers? And the proof is at the end, the hordes of Green Men help John Carter save the day.

At first Burroughs starts off talking about how the Green Men are the victims of having no loving parents, but the more we discover about the Green Men the cooler they are. They're brave, fierce fighters and have tremendous loyalty. If a Green Man or woman hates you, you know it because they pull their gun out on you...and there's something admirable about that, especially if you have zero patience for indirectness and passive-aggressiveness.

And the Green Men laugh when horrible things happen to other people, which is an extremely dark but extremely endearing character trait. John Carter tries to pretend it's some perverse alien characteristic, but the truth is, there is nothing more human than schadenfreude.

In the words of Mel Brooks: "tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when I fall down an open manhole cover and die."

And while the Green Men don't have many feelings of intimacy or family, that also means sociopaths, perverts and criminals are a lot rarer with them than with us. Tal Hajus, that evil fat toad ogre, for instance, is extraordinary because he's a rare atavism.

True, the Green Men have a Spartan culture where unfit children die, but all of the obvious flaws in their society made them feel like an imperfect but real world society - in short, they're worthy enemies that eventually Burroughs gives up condemning moralistically because they make for good bad guys and allies.

Burroughs was born with a horrible disability: he was a reactionary. However, unlike other reactionaries, Burroughs was likeable because he had a sense of humor and wit that made him catch himself before he fully gave in to puritan moralizing. He reminds me of Archie Bunker, who was so funny even liberals liked him, and who was like an old dog always learning new tricks.

The book had some moments that were unintentionally hilarious. My all time favorite was when John Carter kills a Green Martian by launching his flier at them full-speed and then decapitating them.

Tars Tarkas - the real hero of the book

Is it just me, or is Tars Tarkas the real hero of A Princess of Mars?

Think about the last act. It was Tars Tarkas, not John Carter, who kills the villainous Tal Hajus, and for the best reason of all: Hajus was responsible for the death of TT's wife and it's time for revenge. It was Tars Tarkas's gift for statesmanship, not anything John Carter did, which united the green hordes together and made the fall of the city of Zodanga possible at all. In short, Tars Tarkas played a bigger role in the rescue of Dejah Thoris than John Carter did.

In literature, it's trendy now to make books that are basically retelling an entire story from the perspective of a minor character or even the villain. Grendel, Wicked, and The Wind Done Gone. Somehow I think Tars Tarkas would lend himself to this treatment better than most. It would be possible to rewrite Princess of Mars so that it's basically Tars Tarkas's story and he only occasionally interacts with the side-character of John Carter. There was a lot going on when John Carter arrived (Tars Tarkas hiding his disgust with Green Martian societ with a perfect poker face while he climbed the ladder hoping for revenge), a lot going on we didn't see (how did Tars get the hordes together, anyway?), and presumably a lot going on afterward (as we saw in Gods of Mars, where Tars Tarkas experienced as yet undocumented adventures trying to find his friend).

John Carter of Mars

As someone that's primarily a Tarzan-fan, I always looked on John Carter as being a less interesting guy compared to someone with such a unique personality and worldview as Tarzan. John Carter was an "11th-level Fighter," to use a D&D term.

Reading Princess of Mars again forced me to re-evaluate that statement. John Carter was introduced to us by a nephew as a fighting man, but a guy with good humor. He's a solid, honest gallant sort of guy, and not terribly intellectual; it's his son, Carthoris who's the mechanical genius. John Carter's also kind to animals, which marks him as a fundamentally decent person, but which also shows he's far from totally serious and straight-laced. He's a gentleman capable of gallantry and sentiment. He says he's not a true romantic, but I don't believe him...

The "incomparable" Dejah Thoris

Thus far, I've had nothing but good things to say about this book. Here's where that changes.

When I wanted to review Edgar Rice Burroughs books, I thought it might be interesting to give an award for the most annoying character in the book. I nixed that idea because I quickly realized it would be the main love interest every single time.

In the history of adventure fiction, was there any female as shrill and awful as that living, breathing McGuffin, Dejah Thoris? John Carter wants her because she is the first woman John Carter sees on Mars that isn't a giant monster.

We're told over and over she's superbeautiful (her only virtue) but honestly? After being surrounded by tusked grotesques all the time any near-human woman would look pretty darn good.

Actually, I take that back. I would actually choose a Green Woman like Sola over Dejah Thoris. I am being serious, here. Sure, Sola is a giant monster, but looks aren't everything. For one thing, Sola actually has positive personal character traits: her motherliness, personal protectiveness and loyalty, a great contrast to Dejah Thoris's haughty snottiness. She was cruel to John Carter for no real reason other than he was an earthly stranger that didn't get her vibes.

Dejah Thoris goes from unsympathetic and needlessly cruel to downright crazy-person bipolar in one final conflict in Zodanga, a scene that is frankly unbelievable, where Dejah wins the coveted "Lois Lane Award" for arbitrary out of character behavior done in order to squeeze conflict out of a story. She refuses to marry John Carter because she promised herself earlier - not even a marriage, just a promise - to some horrible jerk.

What gets me is, there's no need for Dejah Thoris to do the "if you had come just an hour before, when I promised myself to Than Kosis" bit. No need! While Dejah was absent, the navy of Zodanga took advantage and all-but conquered Helium. If Zodanga, wanted, it could have totally crushed Dejah's home country. Dejah Thoris would have looked actually heroic and self-sacrificing if she said she would marry a man she didn't love in order to save her entire people.

That's not what Dejah does, though. She pettily insists she would have gone away with John Carter even if that would have destroyed her entire race, if he just accepted her vow of love and marriage, a ritual he didn't even recognize as he was an earthman stranger to Mars - an ugly "gotcha" game. Rather, the reason she went with Than Kosis is because a little earlier (and bear in mind there had been no actual marriage) she said she would.

It's frequently a part of the belief system of moral midgets that giving one's word and keeping it no matter what awful things you're forced to do, no matter what horrors result, is the height of personal integrity. There was a really great indictment of how Oath-giving can be evil and destructive in the Fritz Lang silent movie Kriemhild's Revenge, where the Nibelungen were forced to close-ranks and protect the murderer of Siegfried from his justifiably angry widow's deserved revenge. The Nibelungs died pointlessly for no reason at all in a burning building, protecting a murderer and killer from Kriemhild's just revenge, simply because Siegfried's killer was one of them and they promised to circle the wagons. Kriemhild's Revenge is a tragedy about how keeping an oath no matter what can be tragic and self-destructive and anything but heroic.

Dejah Thoris is a beautiful woman, but that's about it. Like Jane, she's a pre-feminist liability to these books. In every single media version of Dejah Thoris, she becomes a sword wielding Valkyrie. Many people suspect that's due to feminism and political correctness, but I don't think so...many other pre-feminist characters have remained noncombatants, like Jane Porter, Dale Arden and Lois Lane. Rather, I suspect the reason Dejah becomes a warrior woman is because if she became courageous, she'd have a single positive character trait.

News of the Weird

2011-07-21T00:04:00.006-04:00

I really enjoyed this story about the execution of a Texas racist killer who targeted Middle-Easterners in revenge for September 11th, mostly because everyone involved came out looking good.

The Texas racist killer was evil, but he died brave, like a man.

At his execution, these were his last words:

"Even though I lay on this gurney, seconds away from my death, I am at total peace," he said. He later called himself "still a proud American, Texas loud, Texas proud."

"God bless America. God bless everyone," he added, then turned to the warden and said: "Let's do this damn thing."

Don't misunderstand me: I hate murder and racism, yes...but I also despise cowardice. Actual bravery is so shockingly rare.

Besides, he shot Middle-Eastern looking people as revenge for 9/11. There was a lot of anger and revenge momentum after that. In fact, the attack on Iraq was basically just misplaced anger and vengeance. Lots of people, even a lot of liberals, wanted to attack Iraq despite the fact it didn't have anything to do with 9/11.

Hear that, America? You're just like this guy: misplaced bloodthirstiness over 9/11 made you support violence on a bystander, and the only difference is he actually got a gun while the rest of you settled for being craven, jeering little war-cheerleaders. Are you all really such angels of mercy you can tsk-tsk this man with a straight face, especially someone who did what the lot of you jackals secretly wish you could?

Better yet, it sounds like Nark Stroman learned his lesson. Imagine that, actual redemption, something you never see because most people are proud and willfully ignorant, cruel and incapable of remorse. A case might be he was trying to do it to save himself from death row, and that's certainly possible. Prison has a way of breaking you. The thing is, Mark Stroman's been to prison before, for armed robbery no less (at age 12 - damn!). He wasn't broken there, and his death wasn't the death of a guy who was begging for mercy because he realizes he's going to die. He most sincerely came around to actual remorse.

The story gets better, though, in terms of displays of real human virtue and sincerity.

The killer's convenience store clerk victim, Rais Bhuiyan, so sincerely believed in real forgiveness and mercy he fought at the last minute to save his own attacker from the death penalty. He believed his attacker had reformed and didn't deserve to be executed and his Muslim faith urged him to forgive his own shooter.

Now, if anyone in the world would be understandably excused from showing mercy, it would be an innocent convenience store clerk who had an eye taken out by a racist on a shooter rampage who shot him in the face, especially if that shooter is responsible for other murders. If Rais wanted to see a little Texas-style justice done, who could possibly blame him or hold it against him?

I guess there goes to show there are as many good, forgiving Muslims as there are good, forgiving and sincere Christians. Which is to say, they're an insignificant fraction of the population.

Again, other virtues on display that's seldom seen: mercy, and actually practicing what you preach. It's obvious enough why not being a hypocrite is virtuous, but mercy is not seen as a virtue anymore because people forget it is actually difficult to have mercy, and very easy, in fact it's the most natural thing in the world, to want revenge.

Keep on winning, Charlie!

2011-07-03T21:45:00.005-04:00

Mr. Charlie Sheen, I want you to know you have one supporter in the person of a Mr. Julian Perez.

A lot of people have gone about you saying a whole lot of weird and eccentric things about tiger blood, but that's because this nutty Oliver Cromwell puritan country doesn't know panache when they hear it...I mean, "tiger blood?" That's a cool turn of phrase.

As nearly as I can determine, your so-called "crazy" public statements can be reduced to the following bullet points:

Being rich and famous is actually a lot of fun.
It is possible to periodically enjoy, indeed, even overindulge at times, in illegal drugs without being a self-destructive "addict."
Two-and-a-Half Men was actually a badly made, unfunny show.

Well, shoot, Chuck! I'd agree with all of those bullet points, and I can personally vouch for #3 being absolutely and inarguably true.

Your problem is twofold: telling it like it is in a notoriously truth-averse culture, and being utterly unrepentant about it.

If I had any piece of advice to give you, it's this: remain utterly unrepentant. Sure, it's easy to create a second career after a tremendous meltdown by suckering the rubes and pretending to give up drugs and wild women and find Jesus. Protestants have a built-in narrative about the drug addict criminal who goes too far and then needs to be "saved." As Mark Twain once said, "churchgoers love a rapscallion." This is so built into their mental hardware as true, such a soft spot, that they'll accept absolutely ludicrous claims that conform to that, especially James Frey's book where as a rich upper class white kid, he seriously claimed to be a drug kingpin and stone cold criminal.

When I read James Frey, I was amazed not that he was ultimately exposed as a monumental liar, but that anyone was ever gullible enough to believe he was anything else. His lies are not only ridiculous, but pure schmaltzy pap and melodrama. There's one part in Frey's book where he becomes bunkmates with a huge but ulimately goodhearted and illiterate black prisoner. Frey then teaches him how to read, obviously. But then the pair read War and Peace together, and weep at the powerful moments. Now this I have to call shenanigans on, since I can read anything and I've tried on a number of occasions to start War and Peace but I never get more than a few pages in.

This can be you, Charlie: pimping the great Protestant addiction novel. A fate worse than death, if you ask me.

Despite that, an even more glorious fate can await you: that of the living counter-argument to the claim drugs and hard living will kill you eventually. Growing old is inevitable, but growing boring and cowardly is optional. Take Hunter S. Thompson, smart and tough - the one honest man of his generation. The entire craven, cowardly generation of the 1970s, on rewriting their history, tried to shift their experiments with drugs into "addiction." Every so often there were rumors that Thompson OD'd on this or that, but it never happened. Thompson remained unpenitent at great cost to himself, but the ultimate payoff was he didn't end up an aging sell-out.

I don't get why everyone laughs about you claiming you cured your addiction with sheer force of will and the power of your mind. That's the only thing that can truly fix anything about human behavior, including addiction.

In short, Charlie: keep on winning.

Video Games, the single greatest subterranean source of pop culture

2011-06-22T12:25:00.006-04:00

Try to imagine for just one minute that you didn't watch movies at all.

All your friends would drop weird quotes and references you didn't get. Trends would come and go in popular culture, and you don't know where they come from.

Fractured fairy tales with modern references and winking jokes to parents would be the norm in the book publishing world and you wouldn't understand why (thanks to the popularity of Shrek, among others).

One day, everyone would suddenly be into science fiction and aliens out of nowhere and talk about how "science fiction is back" (thanks to Independence Day).

You'd wonder why, one summer, the big panic, all everybody seems to talk about are asteroids smashing into the earth (thanks to several movies with that topic back in 1990-whenever it was).

In short, you would not be aware of a lot of what's going on around you. You'd be dimly aware there's a subterranean force of great influence but you wouldn't know what it is.

Well, don't imagine any more. That's how I – and a lot of other people - feel about video games.

Until I got a friend that played video games extensively, a lot of things were going on around me that I just didn't understand. The comparison between movies and video games is totally apt because the video game industry reached a tipping point a decade ago where more Americans spent more money on video games than on movies. That statistic shocked me, but all the gamers that heard about it weren't surprised.

For example, it struck me as strange that starting a few years ago, every nerd friend I had started to be a Russophile, admiring Russian culture and the USSR. At first I thought it was because Russians were the last bunch of white people to be really scary and tough, and the USSR was their heyday and high point. And while that speculation may be true, the answer is because a lot of video games were made with Commie and Russian bad guys.

Also, when did zombie apocalypses get so popular, anyway? Suddenly every friend I had started quoting zombie survival manuals. Obviously they were inspired by the anti-consumerist Romero movies and the supercool cult films like Army of Darkness…but those have been around for decades. Why were zombies and end of the world zombie scenarios suddenly the hot property now?

I never understood zombies. They were mindless, dumb and made from boring assholes: former accountants and travel agents. Vampires are also very trendy now, but Vampires I get: Vampire stories are full of cool crumbling castles, fog, and gaslight, Victorian atmosphere. Vampires are aristocratic, sociopathic megalomaniacs with a hefty dose of scary sexuality. The good Vampire baddies have so much personality they totally dominate the stories they're in, compelling and repellant at the same time like good baddies should be.

By contrast, zombies are mindless so they're more a force of nature or inanimate object. The single thing you never want in a story is one where characters are opposed by inanimate objects without personality, like a door lock or a security system, for instance. Conflict is only interesting between people and personalities that want opposing things.

Remember all the sequels to the Mummy back during the Universal days, when the Mummy was basically a mindless, speechless corpse driven like a robot by anyone wearing a certain ring? Wasn't that much less interesting and scary than the original film where Boris Karloff was an evil sorcerer creep who could barely pass for human, but who was driven by lost love?

I don't understand zombies, but I did understand why a zombie apocalypse would be appealing, at least to others. It's for the same reason people love disaster movies. Freud said nobody ever thought about disasters unless they long for them to happen at some level.

It reminds me of the Reagan administration's attitude to nuclear war, Jesus, and the environment. Everyone remembers James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, and how, when asked what his office's strategy was to preserve national parks for future generations, said that as the Rapture and end of the world would come soon there was no need to try to preserve national parks long-term. Thankfully, Reagan's enormous cowardice was greater than his hatred for living things and no war happened, but nonetheless, there is a personality type that looks forward to the end of the world because it means an absolving of adult responsibility.

On the other hand, the very things that bore me about Zombies – the fact they have no personalities and are totally mindless – are the most appealing thing about them to video game designers. One of the greatest problems with video games is how the enemies never act intelligently, never take cover, and just run into gunfire and keep on attacking even when wounded. That may not make sense with human enemies, but with mindless hordes of neverending zombies, it's what makes them scary!

Not just that, but like with movies, if one video game does really well and is a surprise hit, everyone tries to imitate it. So before you know it, there were a billon zombie shooting games and all everybody was talking about were zombies.

As I try not to close an article without a few book reviews, it's interesting to note that the notion of the apocalypse goes before the 20th Century and back into the 19th. The idea that end of the world scenarios were a common theme in the literature of the 19th Century is very surprising to a lot of people, but it just goes to show how nihilistic Western culture actually is.

The Death of the Earth. J.H. Rosny (1910). The Rosny brothers were the single greatest geniuses of science fiction Belgium ever produced, and they dealt with mankind's beginnings (as in Quest for Fire and the Xipehuz) and mankind's end, as with the Death of the Earth, a future billions of years from now without living things where mankind is aware of their end and resigned to it - it's scary to find a world where the entire "fire" has gone out from mankind. In the moving final pages, the untold billions of generations that passed on the earth end with a single pair of eyes that shut closed. One of Rosny's preoccupations (that of evil living minerals) is on display here, just like his greatest inhuman creations, the Xipehuz.

Beyond Thirty. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1915). See how far you can hear this shlocky premise before you crack a smile: World War I so totally destroyed Europe that hundreds of years later it was a totally unknown bombed out no-man's-land that reverted to stone age savagery filled with escaped zoo animals like lions. An American captain becomes the first to explore unknown Europe and saves a hot cave girl, the last queen of England. The idea World War I would have continued forever is laughable enough (as is the idea America would never get involved), but it's almost shocking to imagine the same ERB who wrote the gung-ho beat-back-the-devil Hun-basher Tarzan the Invincible would also write a story that tsk-tsks Europe for going to war and praises isolationism.

The Last Man. Mary Shelley (1826). When Napoleon was defeated, the bad guys won. The attempts to "franchise out" the French revolution and create a Republican united Europe failed, and the reactionary and aristocratic elements of Europe prospered. This was a lost generation of young geniuses like Byron crushed underfoot by snotty, dull and untalented moralists, and it doesn't surprise me the reaction to this novel about the end of the world would be horror by the Mrs. Lovejoy-types that ruled Europe. Basically, the Last Man ended Mary Shelley's career and remained forgotten until it was rediscovered a couple decades ago. Unlike Frankenstein, which was moody and atmospheric from the get-go, it wasn't immediately obvious the Last Man is about an end of the world scenario (my personal favorite failed prediction is the idea that Greece would still be fighting for independence against the Turks in the 21st Century), which made this story all the more shocking when the premise is revealed.

The Last American. J.A. Mitchell (1889). Some Persian explorers discover the lost city of Noo-Yok in America. Amazing to me how the cheesy conventions of the end of the world story are already here at this early stage: we even get a look at the crumbled Statue of Liberty. America and Western civilization is wrecked and mangled. What happened? The answer is something that would never occur to a 21st Century person: a weakening of the immune system that left us vulnerable to punishing winters. I guess the 19th Century was more rural than we thought. Thankfully, this book is short and its prejudices are innocent unlike the ultra-vile racist fascist Jean Respail's "Camp of the Saints," which has neither of those two virtues.

Are you a nerd poseur?

2011-06-20T02:00:00.003-04:00

At what point is someone so non-participatory and unknowledgeable in nerd culture that no matter how they describe themselves they cannot be considered to be a true nerd? I mean, what's the threshold, the minimum passing requirement for nerd know-how? At what point does someone stop being a nerd and just becomes a poseur?

A nerd poseur! Until recently the very idea was laughably unthinkable. Who the hell ever heard of that? Until recently, nobody ever intentionally set out to be a nerd, the way people set out to be punk rockers or gangstas. Being a nerd was an accident, something that just happened because you were an outcast and outsider, and fantasy worlds, or math and science, became fixations to mentally escape a world that was unpleasant.

How things have changed! Nerd culture has taken over the world. Even attractive and wealthy people who never got an asthma attack in their lives try to be nerds. And comic book movies are Hollywood's biggest tent-pole genre now, the summer's bread and butter with two or three superhero movies a month. If you told me that would happen eight years ago, I would have burned you as a witch.

Let me describe to you something that happened to me when going to see Green Lantern with four or five supposed nerds.

Of the lot, I was the only one that read or knew anything about Green Lantern comics. Now that in and of itself doesn't mean anything since there are many different kinds of nerds into different things, and anyway, I'm more of a True Believer myself. Alright, no problem.

Then later on, there were promos for remakes of two old-school cult movies: a new Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (which many consider to be the best one of the lot) and Fright Night.

I was the only one that knew either of these were remakes. Now, Green Lantern is one thing but that's the point at which I started to wonder if something was up.

If I could go on a digression here for a minute, I don't see the point of remaking Fright Night, because as enjoyable a movie as the original Fright Night was, it was all the more interesting and original in the context it was released. The year Fright Night came out, slasher movies dominated horror films and it had been over two decades since Hammer made any of their gothic horror films. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time in pop culture where the classic horror monsters like Vampires were so passé and old fashioned, that a vampire-themed monster horror film was incredibly refreshing and a change of pace.

That's the entire movie: a guy thinks his neighbor is a Vampire and because supernatural-type horror and Vampires are so laughably off the pop culture radar, nobody believes him – not even the pathetic has-been host of an old-timey horror show. It was like the Kingdom Come of gothic horror, with old school guys, wrinkles and all, come back to show the punks how it's done. Don't you get it? In a world of True Blood where Vampires are popular and everywhere, the entire idea behind Fright Night makes no sense.

The worst was yet to come, however. In conversation I brought up Lord of the Rings, and I realized that in a group of five nerds, I was the only one that read the entire series. It reminded me of that Twilight Zone episode where the ending was a guy realizes everyone in a bar is a werewolf but him. My God, even science fiction and Heinlein fans that hate fairies and dragons, who have never thrown dice with more than six sides in their lives…even they have read Lord of the Rings.

I mentioned before there is an absolute bare minimum needed to qualify as a nerd. Would anyone disagree that Lord of the Rings would be on there?

I doubt anything will come of this observation, though. When gangsta rap went mainstream, a lot of people became gangstas who didn't have the credibility to pull it off. In short, their sincerity was in question. The reason nothing like that will ever happen to nerds is nerds, as outcasts ourselves, we understand what it's like to be excluded from things and nerd cultures have an anxiety about ever excluding anybody.

Say you're a nerd and that's enough to be one – whether it's true or not.

Hero System Review Tuesday: "The Ultimate Vehicle"

2011-06-03T09:00:00.009-04:00

This book was written by Bob Greenwade (who the hell is that?) and Steve Long. This is both an accusation and assignment of blame.

I saved this one for last because this one is quite possibly the worst book put out for the entire 5th Edition, which is irritating because it's one of the most necessary. It is the only truly unplayable book ever released for 5th Edition, and possibly the worst thing ever put out under the Champions/Hero System title.

The book is full of baffling headscratchers that make it practically unusable. My favorite is how practically every single jet vehicle has an enormous -1¾ limit to represent they have a damaging effect when their movement power is in use (jet planes burn things behind them).

Something having a damaging effect has a limitation on it? It's like a "limitation" one of the deviously sadistic minmaxing "Knights of the Dinner Table" crew would come up with, simultaneously saving points and doing damage. Heck, I have no idea where they coughed up the outrageous -1¾ figure because in the superhero genre book, doing property damage under you when you use your earth-movement powers is a miniscule -¼ if it's a limit at all, and I don't think it is. I've always been of the opinion that if someone else has to pay the cost of something, it's not a limitation. Call it a limitation version of the "tragedy of the commons."

By the way, destroyers and submarines only have a "mere" -¾ limitation for their damage-dealing screws and propellers. While manatee-killing is a very real problem facing our oceans, I somehow doubt your player characters will be inconvenienced at the -¾ level by the occasional contact with "Nature's Speedbumps." By the way, in a perfect example of how limitations in this supplement were assigned by throwing darts at a wall, airplanes with the very serious problem of stall velocity only have that as a -¼ limitation (which affects turn mode, requires constant movement, and can be a disaster in the event of Drains) and requiring a takeoff and landing is a -1.

It's also insane what they choose to give a limitation. I can't literally think of any occasion damaging exhaust is a problem, but I can think of one big limitation on planes: someone smashes or gums up a wing the whole thing goes out of control and flies like a filing cabinet. No Restrainable-esque limitation for that, though! Restrainable is, incidentally, a -½ limit, so stall velocity is a lot more damaging and gives you back a lot less. Good going, Bob Greenwade.

This reminds me of an old aviation joke. The job of a propeller is to keep the pilot cool. Turn it off, and watch him sweat.

It gets worse. The character sheet for the M1A1 Abrams tank has a DEF of 20. Now, stop and think about that. That means that on the balance, a 100 Active Point Energy Blast, or STR 100 character, will not do any damage at all. Hell, even Grond, the Champions Universe's Brand X answer to the ultrastrong Incredible Hulk, has STR 90. Considering the point value for above average, powerful superheroes is 70-90 Active Points in a power, that means a single M1A1 tank can easily shrug off an entire party of higher power player characters. Considering RPG-7 rounds, which do 4d6 Killing damage, can mangle a tank on a straight-shot, this is a little amazing.

To quote Jason Sartin: "saying this book should be burned is an insult to fire."

Oh yeah: elevators, missiles and torpedoes are built as vehicles. What?

Personally, I always thought having to pay points to have headlights and an FM radio was really pushing it, so you can imagine how delighted I was to see that an Anchor (an anchor!) actually is something boats have to pay points for! Really!

You need to charge players to have elevators and anchors? I'm actually surprised the book doesn't make you pay for bathrooms. Things necessary to the normal functioning of a vehicle aren't worth points.

I expect better from published materials than this amateur hour stuff. This book is typical of where new players go insane with the Hero System, and I mean literally insane because it is nothing short of a mental illness: they figure they have to pay points for everything, and I mean everything.

I remember once a player wanted to play a fish themed aquatic hero that tasted bad. You know how there are some fishes that taste bad and predators automatically spit them back out? He went crazy with how to represent something so trivial, including Mind Control with Persistent.

I was like…"For the love of God, Brian…Mind Control? Really? If we really, really, really want to make this something other than a zero-point feature, like red hair, we can buy it is as a low level perk, like the Fuzion did. Sure, it was a bad game and an unworthy heir to Champions, but at least it handled stupid stuff like this pretty well."

One player of mine wondered if he had to pay points for another player character as a Follower or Contact.

Another thought he might have to pay points to be a dark-skinned character because he was then pretty much immune to sunburn.

This is where you can go literally insane with a system like Champions – if you're wondering if being a lightskinned redhead is a disadvantage or advantage or start paying points for boat anchors, you have literally lost perspective and gone totally mad, a full-on mental disorder. The Vehicles guide totally embraces that madness. It's like the Necronomicon for the simultaneously clueless and anal-retentive.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, no other book used the rules in the Vehicle Guide (someone correct me if I'm wrong and the fantasy books did – I didn't read them and really, neither did anybody else). Nobody else gave an insane (-1¾) power break to every single jet vehicle. Nobody else treated elevators and anchors as things you have to pay points for. The Vehicle Guide is isolated from the rest of the entire system in a way that makes me think of the court orders on registered sex offenders.

There's a howler on practically every page. The "flying carpet as a vehicle" idea was, um, interesting, especially for something that is pretty much a textbook example of an OAF at most. Let me know when you can roll up and carry with you your Volkswagen beetle, though.

On that note, the book also broke the 11th Commandment of the Hero System: thou shalt not build suits of power armor as vehicles! I could see powergamers the world over lick their chops hungrily at this ugly, broken, heretofore nonexistent precedent. That's the part that baffles me...despite it being a book on Vehicles, it's a little unclear on what counts as an actual vehicle at all.

I feel a little guilty going after elevators, flying carpets and suits of power armor built as vehicles because though it was a misfire of an idea, and one that might have been responsible for the big change in 6th Edition where it's impossible for a vehicle to have a vehicle, nonetheless it had the guts to think outside the box. It was a misfire, but a spectacular misfire. When you go off the beaten path, sometimes you find new things never seen before. On the other hand, what happened here was this book went so far off the beaten path it got so lost that Jimmy Hoffa couldn't find it.

Another one of my favorite bits was how every modern fighter plane had both electronic countermeasures (bought as a Suppress) and electronic counter-countermeasures, which is bought as a Suppress for Suppress. When I explained this to my game table, there was an awkward moment because my players assumed I was joking and then realized I wasn't. One of the most pursued and pointless chimeras of the Hero System is figuring out the "correct" way to build something, but if everyone you explain how you built something responds with a "wait, seriously?" you're probably not doing it right.

Anyway, as even a casual Tom Clancy war porn reader would tell you, the pace of avionics development is so extreme countermeasures useful in one decade are out of date and nearly useless the next, though the book treats countermeasures as an absolute set number for every vehicle. They mumble something in the back about how this is probably not a good idea, but no guidelines are presented.

There are moments where I seriously wonder if the guy that wrote this ever actually played any tabletop games ever in their lives. The "missile lock is bought as a Detect" gave me that feeling in that it makes characters aware of something incredibly obvious, especially if you're playing on a map, which by the way, 5th Edition Champions assumes you are.

Imagine this at your game table.

GM: (moves enemy planes onto the game map) "Captain Rick, just when you think you're in the clear, your radar screen flashes with the red of hostile MiG fighter planes. You can see them screaming through the air at you and their muzzles flash."
GM: "Roll your Missile Lock Detect."
PLAYER: (rolls dice) "7."
GM: "You get missile lock from the enemy planes."
PLAYER: "…Really? Gee whiz, I never would have guessed, almighty GM. That was 5 points well-spent. Can I roll Combat Piloting or do I need a Detect (Ground) so I don't hit it?"
GM: "Yeah, yuck it up, smartass. They're heading right for you."
PLAYER: "Hey, you know missiles are vehicles now, right? You *DID* put them on the initiative chart…right?"
GM: (grumbles, as he rifles through his papers and places missile tokens on the map)
PLAYER: (watching) "Well, I'm sure glad I rolled that all-important Detect. By the way, I'm using my electronic countermeasures."
GM: "They use their electronic counter-countermeasures."
PLAYER: "I use my electronic counter-countermeasures."
GM: "Alright, I got a 36 on one and a 42 on the second and…damn it, what subtracts from what again?"
PLAYER: "I'm not sure. By the way, I spend my next phase doing a flyby so I hit a MiG with my Killing Attack exhaust."
GM: "Good thing for you no manatees can fly, or that limitation would *really* sting right about now...."

See what I mean when I say this is unplayable?

In conclusion, authors of the Ultimate Vehicle, Bob "Who?" Greenwade and Steven "I should know better" Long, I hate your product more than any other book ever released for any system ever, and that includes that World of Darkness splatbook "Gypsies" that gave a real-world ethnic group superpowers.

By the way, I was just as confused by the name Bob Greenwade (who the hell is that?), until I did a google search and discovered this book is his only published RPG work except for some Haymaker! fanzine articles. On his personal page on Haymaker! he's humbly self described as having a "genius-level IQ," which considering "The Ultimate Vehicle," I *really* doubt. The worse a game designer, the greater and more insane tendency to make extravagant claims about themselves. Remember when the creator of SenZar said he could punch ten times in a second and had a nothing short of superhuman weightlifting bench?

(Note: Pardon the lateness of this review, which didn't come on a Tuesday.)

Leigh Brackett's original 1978 "Empire Strikes Back" script

2011-05-30T03:05:00.007-04:00

Leigh Brackett's original script for "The Empire Strikes Back" is something I've sought after in a lifetime of being a Star Wars fan. This wasn't just another movie, it was the high point of the entire franchise. What secrets did the script contain?

Recently, I read it and I got a chance to find out. It was not what I was expecting at all.

Who is Leigh Brackett?

Leigh Brackett was all of seventy years old when she wrote the original script for the Star Wars Sequel (the name hadn't even been picked up), and one of the many people from Hollywood's Golden Age who was tapped in the 1970s when blockbuster, mass market pictures came back into vogue, just like "Exorcist" director William Friedkin was a student of Howard Hawks.

Brackett wrote the scripts for arguably the greatest Western and film noirs of all time: Rio Bravo and the Big Sleep.

Brackett is one of those authors, like Hemingway, that's bigger than the stories they wrote. She always "power-dressed," long before that expression came into vogue, loved driving her red sportscar way too fast on California curves. There was a famous story were Leigh played volleyball with the boys in Muscle Beach, California and held her own.

Saying you're a fan of pulp science fiction of the Golden Age is tantamount to admitting you're a fan of Leigh Brackett, just like saying you like Silver Age Marvel Comics means you like Jack Kirby. People forget that the vaguely denigrating term "space opera" started out as praise, a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, a way of telling apart the usual hokey "Adventure" sex-and-shooting romps from the Leigh Brackett-type moody, atmospheric adventure science fiction thrillers.

It was especially shocking to read Leigh Brackett and discover she wrote (anti-) heroes in a voice shockingly similar to Star Wars's scene-stealing, coolest character, Han Solo. One particular antihero character, Rick in "Nemesis from Terra," had a moment so "Han Solo" it was a little chilling, especially when you imagine it was written in 1944.

While on the run in a cave network under Mars with his lady friend, he reached in the darkness and grabbed her.

"Which wrist did I grab?"

"Left."

"We go left. And baby, we'd better hope you're lucky!"

Since the prequels came out, I had another reason to want to read the Leigh Brackett script for "Empire Strikes Back." With the prequels, it was absolutely inarguable that George Lucas had absolute creative control. And those lousy movies were the result? A lot of fans started to wonder if maybe George's role in the success of the original movies was a little overrated. If Star Wars wasn't great because of his contributions, then who else was it? Laurence Kasdan? "Empire Strikes Back" director Irving Kirschner? Producer Gary Kurtz?

It's become a common argument among fans that Leigh Brackett, not George Lucas or screenwriter Laurence Kasdan, was responsible for the strong story of "The Empire Strikes Back." In an interview in Starlog around 1980, George Lucas claimed that it was Leigh Brackett's idea that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. Ever since Brackett's death in 1978, Lucas has given her a gradually smaller and smaller role in the history of Star Wars; currently Lucasfilm claims that Brackett's script was rejected in its entirety as unsuitable, and George Lucas only kept her name on the script credit as a favor to her widower husband, "Planet Smasher" Ed Hamilton. That's a pretty interesting claim considering that the screen writers' guild rules determines when a writer gets credit!

The Structure

First things first: the basic structure of the Brackett script is ultimately identical to the finished film. The differences are in the details.

All the beats of the final film are there: Luke is captured on an ice planet, the Rebels have to evacuate because of upcoming Imperial attack (although in this script the Rebels can't buy a break and get a double-whammy of Imperial troops and unstoppable, unfriendly ice monsters as well), and there's an escape into asteroids, Han and the Princess fall in love, and Luke goes to train as a Jedi Knight under some mysterious weirdo. All roads lead to Cloud City, where Darth Vader has captured Han and Leia due to Lando selling them out, and ultimately the climax is a lightsaber duel between Luke and Darth Vader where Luke is tempted by evil.

Yoda is there (named "Minch," a froglike old bog planet dweller that trained Obi-Wan), as is the Emperor…here he's his usual self as a hood wearing old sorcerer. Apparently this was the point where the idea the Emperor was a powerless figurehead pawn of a powerful military junta, present in the original Star Wars novelization among other pre "Empire Strikes Back" places, was ditched.

One of my favorite scenes shows something I was always curious about: Darth Vader's castle. Darth Vader has some gargoyle-like pets that he feeds, delighting in their greed and cruelty.

Lando

The most surprising element of the script had to do with Lando, here called Lando Kadar. As opposed to a charming but untrustworthy rake who tried to go legit and became successful, Lando in Leigh Brackett's script is a man who "went native," like Jake Sully in "Avatar," accepted by and becoming a leader of a tribe of primitives who live on the Cloud world and fly aerial manta rays.

A lot of people believe Lando was created for a very cynical reason: a big criticism of the original Star Wars was there weren't any black people in it. But there's not a single word about Lando's race in the script. The description of Lando Kadar is that he was so good looking, like Rudolph Valentino, he seems almost a little unreal.

Originally we hear that Lando Kadar was some kind of refugee from the Clone Wars. That's when the bombshell is dropped: Lando Kadar was a clone, from a planet of clones.

Han Solo, Dialed Back

One of the more disappointing things about the script is that Han Solo in this movie is a seriously subdued, "big brother" figure that seems very bland, without his trademark pride, gambler's arrogance, coolness and desire for independence. Han Solo is strongly on the Rebels' side, and isn't conflicted about it at all. Some of his character defining moments, like running the blockade of Imperial ships, leading them into an asteroid field and so on, are absent. This was one of the biggest surprises because practically every single hero Leigh Brackett ever wrote was basically Han Solo. Obviously I wouldn't expect a first draft to be perfect, and a few more rewrites were needed.

Han got a really interesting piece of business: we learn his estranged stepfather was a wealthy interstellar shipping magnate that might be the most powerful person in the galaxy after the Emperor and Darth Vader, and the Rebels need his help. This mission is set up at the end, where Han leaves in the Falcon. I always thought this was interesting because what little we've heard about Han's stepfather reminds me of the Fu Manchu-esque Prince Xizor in "Shadows of the Empire," who was also a shipping magnate and was also the third most powerful and influential guy in the galaxy.

There is one important character that isn't mentioned at all: Boba Fett, and there was no dark cliffhanger with Han Solo trapped in chocolate. Considering the original version of the Star Wars script had Darth Vader as an evil, quiet and menacing bounty hunter, I'm inclined to think this might have been Lucas's idea.

Luke Skywalker is "Rocky"

It's hard to imagine how a boy pilot who blew up the Death Star could possibly be an underdog again after proving himself in such an amazing way, but the Brackett story knocks Luke down a peg in the beginning to build him up. By the end of the story he's humbled, more aware of his shortcomings, but also more adult and wise.

The story starts with Luke getting his ass kicked by ice monsters, just like in the final film. And it goes downhill from there – he tells Leia he loves her and she rejects him, because of her duties (leaving him to think "she's a princess and I'm a farm boy from Tattooine"). And then, in a very subtle way, she leaves Luke to "help out" (ha, ha) Han Solo…

One of my favorite parts of the original Brackett script was how Luke drew his lightsaber to fight an ice monster and got his ass kicked.

Han Solo then tells Luke that Ben Kenobi was a good guy but he filled Luke's head with nonsense, and even for the Jedi Knights, lightsabers were entirely ceremonial weapons and are not the most practical in real fights. This is really funny to me, because I always found the idea that someone with a sword was invincible against people with guns was just a little unbelievable, and come the prequels, the lightsaber was so overused and overpowered it became boring. To have someone at this early stage flat out say they're romantic and sentimental but not a very practical weapon, well, it rings absolutely true.

Therefore, when Luke starts training on the unnamed bog planet, when the ghost of Ben Kenobi tells him he has potential and greatness, Luke was a little suspicious of him. "I'm nobody," he says.

Leigh Brackett's Star Wars sequel script had an infinitely more complex and intriguing view of the Force than the later films. When Luke asks what the Dark Side of the Force is, Yoda tells them the Dark Side isn't something external, but your own personal Dark Side and worst characteristics, insecurities, wrath, hatred and vices. Giving in to these traits is destroying yourself.

Was Darth Vader Luke Skywalker's Father?

Short answer: no, not in this script.

If Luke being Darth Vader's son was Brackett's idea, it wasn't here. And it isn't just a question of that line not being there. In one scene on the bog planet, Obi-Wan introduces Luke to the ghost of his real dead father. The moment is as earth-shattering for Luke as it is for us.

Amazingly of all, Luke's Father tells him he has a sister, who in the script was given the name "Nellith."

During the final confrontation, hoping to unleash Luke's evil side, Vader taunts him with the knowledge that he killed his father.

"You don't stand a chance against me. …No more than your Father did, anyway."

Vader plays to Luke's vanity as well as his rage and wrath, hoping to get Luke to use the Dark Side so Luke could say he killed the great Darth Vader. In the end Luke gives in to wrath and rage, and as a result, he betrays his Jedi oath, a crushing moment where Luke believes he ought to die.

All in all, Darth Vader's temptation of Luke was much better done in this script because he had something to tempt Luke with.

Hero System Review Tuesday: "Conquerors, Killers and Crooks"

2011-05-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

Maybe you're one of those that doesn't like the Champions Universe. You'd rather create your own, or say, set the game in your favorite comics world like the Marvel Universe.

I said the same thing myself. Don't worry, you'll set a game in the Champions Universe eventually. You will!

Either you'll realize it's insanely labor intensive to write out six or seven character sheets every single game and you find yourself wishing for support so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, or you'll get deep into the game world the more books you buy and realize you're left out of the fun with bad guys like Ankylosaur, Shrinker and Foxbat.

It's literally impossible for anyone that calls themselves a GM to read Champions, Killers and Crooks and not come up with five million ideas for your own group.

That brings me to the single most sterling recommendation for Conquerors, Killers and Crooks: because a roleplaying game is all about player characters, a Champions superhero setting is pretty much defined by who the villains are. Which leads to a very unusual situation in RPGs, where the villain book is the only really "required" sourcebook for an entire setting! If you want to set a game in the Champions Universe, this is the only one you really truly need for that Champions feel – the Champions Universe book itself and the Champions setting book are more or less optional, just for the completist. If you're on a budget, this is the book you need.

I love this book. I can't recommend it enough. It's useful for developing something a GM should have, which is an intuition about what makes someone dangerous and lethal and what makes for a cakewalk fight, something you may not have if you make your own bad guys from the beginning. For that reason it's good to peruse even if you don't intend to use the Champions Universe. One of the single most difficult and unpredictable things about a superhero game is the ability to determine challenge.

In general, this is a book you can "trust." If it says a villain is super-deadly and requires a team to fight, he probably does. A bad guy's DEX and CON ratings usually "feel" right. I've seen some dumb-ass, useless and unusable bad guy character sheets by energetic, prolific amateurs like Sam Bell where nobody's PD or ED was ever above 3 and if a DEX was 20, they must be a Dexmonkey King of the Ninja or something.

Best of all, Conquerors Killers and Crooks seems to be the one place that avoids the magic fetish everyone else writing in this cosmos seems to have. Magic villains are no more or less represented than any other kind of bad guy, like mutants or aliens. Color me surprised to see there was an American Indian character, Warbow, that (shocking for this edition) didn't have Shaman Ancestor Powers! It may be the case that a lot of these baddies were created before Champions was all-magic in the 5th Edition, so they're grandfathered in, in something close to their original forms. I'd hate to imagine what they'd be like if created just for this edition. Danish politician Fiacho would probably get his powers from the EPCOT version of Viking magic like every other asshole.

Come to think of it, the 5th Edition Dr. Destroyer does look a little like Sauron, doesn't he?

The strange case of Elizabeth Brady Cabot Winslow

2011-05-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

She's got one of these over-the-top Boston Brahmin names, "Elizabeth Brady Cabot Winslow," which ranks up there with Thurston Howell III, and on her own blog on Friendster, she is self-described as "one of the 50-100 most intelligent people in the world."

Despite all that, she claims a giant conspiracy is against her - one that caused her to be electrocuted at a public telephone, among other things.

She gives a rapid-fire account of all the things she's done in the world: an editor for World Book Encyclopedia, she was a former Vegas showgirl and once stopped an entire sporting event when she entered because she was that gorgeous. She was a super-genius and member of MENSA besides, a polymath in many fields, and was the heir of a family that became the basis for the movie. A member of a rich and politically connected family, she has an alphabetically listed "enemies list." One of them, her cousin Ted Knappen, I was able to find. Just like she said, he was a vice-president of Greyhound Bus.

I have to admit, I was intrigued by this person's story - mostly because she used the term "impecunious" correctly. I can man-up and admit when I don't know something, and I had to get a dictionary and look that one up (it means "poor"). That's not exactly a word that rolls off the tongue of your usual bum.

Ms. Winslow's names and contacts were so specific that I found it unlikely her stories of being connected and from a good family were entirely false.

What I suspect happened to Ms. Elizabeth Winslow is, she was a genius, attractive and successful young woman who, around her mid-forties, was the victim of a very real medical condition: paranoid schizophrenia.

This condition alienated others and left her impoverished. Being poor, she lived in areas where there was a lot of crime and she was often the victim of crimes and robbery. In short, she isn't someone to make fun of, but a victim of mental illness that wrecked her promising life. I feel a great swell of pity for Elizabeth Winslow and I hope she finds the help she deserves.

There was one part of her story that I could check out personally. She claimed to have gone to Coral Gables High School for one year in 1959. I'm not a teacher anymore, but I knew the area and I substitute-taught there once and did observation hours as an undergraduate education student. For those that don't know, Coral Gables High School has the reputation of being a "rich kid" school in a "rich kid" area. Anyone that lives in the Coral Gables neighborhood, a district of Miami that is pretty wealthy, would in fact probably be well-off.

I managed to find two references to an Elizabeth Winslow in the 1959 Coral Gables Yearbook. She was indeed on the swim team, just like she said she was on her website. And it certainly is possible she was a Vegas showgirl.

Eizabeth Winslow is the second from the left on the bottom row.

More research may be needed; a wealthy, attractive and intelligent girl that fell into poverty due to mental problems would make for a good story.

Hero System Review Tuesday: "Champions Universe"

2011-05-10T09:00:00.006-04:00

Do you like magic?

Well, apparently, so do Steven S. Long and Darren Watts, the people that brought the Champions Universe into the 21st Century.

Magic is (seriously!) responsible for all superpowers, even mutants and accidental origin types (say what?).

Atlantis is full of magic, and so are the Champions Universe's Mole Men equivalent race, who also use magic. The main martial artist NPC uses magic swords (possibly +3 Shocking Burst Vorpal, but let me check the DMG tables again). The other dimensions are filled with magic and the book even points out only mages are suited for interdimensional travel – which is weird because the most famous other dimensions in "real" comics are "alternate universes" and the Negative Zone. Depending on the sourcebook, there are more magic bad guys than any other origin. There's even a city full of magic, Vibora Bay – especially irritating in that it broke the Champions Universe's long-time prohibition against fictional, DC style American cities.

Almost every single hero outside of America gets their magic powers from the region's local magic folktale, representing the EPCOT version of that world culture. If you think this means the continent of Africa is packed with soul brothers with tribal lion-command powers, you'd be right.

Magic, magic, magic. I think Julius Schwartz is getting chafed from all the 360's he's doing in his grave.

This blew my mind. This was where I realized things were out of control. Just in case you think I was exaggerating above.

To summarize: "magic makes mutants and power armor work because of the Nazis."

Say what? By the way, this insane page is contradicted by the fact that later on they talk about how technology is relatively higher in the Champions Universe earth because of superheroic inventors. It's like even the book realizes how Medichlorians-level terrible an idea this is and rejects the idea like a viral infection mere pages later.

By the way, if the idea was to bring Champions in with the meta-setting, it choked there, too. There must have been at least as much magic during their Brand-X Conan or Middle Earth age in the meta-setting, and yet I'm betting there were no mutant powers and powered armor then. Maybe it's because there were no Nazis.

I know comics have wizardry involved from time to time but…how many super-mages are there in "real" superhero comics? I mean, can we do a head count here? Guys, this is disproportionate representation.

I play superhero roleplaying games because I've had about a bellyful of fairy-and-dragon fantasy games. I have great memories of running D&D games for my friends in middle school, but if I never run another D&D game again as long as I live it'd be too soon.

Despite the obvious raging boner the creators have for magic, the book is a pretty useful introductory guide to the Champions Universe, and explains what "Hunted: PSI, 8-" on character sheets actually means. It provides an introduction for newbies, and is a great place to start. I'd recommend it, but if you can get it by borrowing it once from your GM for a weekend so you know who ARGENT is, that'd be the best course of action. A lot of it is filler, naturally: a lot of the world setting is about characters that aren't important. Who the heck was Beowulf or MicroMax? The only character from the Justice Sentinels that stands out to me was Diamond, and that's because he was obviously inspired by the Thing.

One thing this book has going for it, though: that may be the awesomest cover of any roleplaying game product ever. They did George Perez in all the right ways!

Julian Perez At the Movies: Thor

2011-05-08T09:00:00.008-04:00

It's weird to say, but Thor is a smaller personal story than you'd expect. Compared to how "big" Iron Man 2 was, for instance, it had relatively fewer battles and special effects scenes and worked at a smaller scale than one would expect for someone like Mighty Thor. I was surprised at how short and tight the movie was.

The Thor movie is a lot like the first Iron Man in that it is about a guy who changes from the start of the movie to the end because he gets put through the wringer and realizes he made mistakes. Thor starts off as a hero with a lot of flaws: he's a bolsterous guy with a big personality but he likes to fight way too much, which is a problem for a guy who might be King, because a wise king shouldn't look for trouble.

He's proud and easily offended and haughty, and like a lot of proud people he gets revenge for insults a wise person might just ignore. At the end of the movie, Thor shows how he's changed because he actually fights to save some former enemies because he figures over the top retaliation isn't right!

The Science Fiction Elements

One dirty little secret about Mighty Thor that even comic book fans don't get at times is that Mighty Thor was never, ever entirely Tolkien or Gaiman esque mythic fantasy, but was kept off-balance and interesting because it had unusual and incongruous science fiction and a cosmic element to it that felt more science fiction than fantasy. Thor was never "Lord of the Rings," it was something weirder and cooler than that because it had alien invasions, giant unstoppable robots, and science fiction villains like Ego the Living Planet, Zarrko the Tomorrow Man, and the High Evolutionary and his Dr. Moreau beastman city.

It was almost Joseph Campbell mindblowing, with moments like a guy on a horse galloping through space. Jack Kirby always drew shining Asgard less as a giant Viking town than as yet another secret society future city, just like the Inhumans' Attilan.

Though Thor started out as based on Ancient Pagan stories, it was always something altogether different and it says something that the most interesting characters even in Thor's world of Asgard were totally without precedent in folklore: Beta Ray Bill – an alien with the power of Thor, the Enchantress and the Executioner, the Warriors Three, and so on. Even when something was taken from folklore, it was juxstaposed with either modern New York (like that Walt Simonson story where Thor chased the indestructible dragon Fafnir through the subway system and then fought him on the Empire State Building) or outer space (like that one where Thor, the Lady Sif and Beta Ray Bill fought Surtur the Fire-Giant, but he was leading an invasion of an alien planet).

After Stan Lee and Jolly Jack left Might Thor, super-literate English lit major Roy Thomas tried slipping in some classic references to pagan stories, like how Mighty Thor actually had a chariot pulled by goats – a detail most other writers "forgot" about mostly because it looked pretty stupid. The more folkloric a character is in Thor, the more likely they are to be dull in the comics. Balder the Brave, who in Pagan belief was a sort of Jesus-figure who died and came back to life, had no real personality in the comics apart from being a loyal friend.

All that brings me to this movie. They went in exactly the right direction with Thor, which astounded me: I figured they'd "play it safe" and do Thor like "Lord of the Rings" or "Narnia." Here, they made Thor even more science fiction than before: the other dimensions are now planets (apparently the Frost Giants now have their own planet), and the Rainbow Bridge of Bifrost is now a wormhole gadget that looks like the Asgardians borrowed it from Doctor Who.

Loki is described as a "wizard," but that must mean something different to Asgardians than to us because his "magic" is mostly tricks like the hologram gadget from "Total Recall."

In the comics, though Thor often battled science fiction menaces, Thor was unambiguously exactly what he said he was: an immortal deity. Fighting him was more like taking on a force of nature than a person. Here, he's more like a superpowerful alien mistaken for a god by primitive humans.

Make no mistake: the science fiction elements were a theme of Mighty Thor that this movie just made more explicit than usual, a case of a movie "getting it." They pushed that angle front and center in the trailers, which is weird. I think it might have been to say, "I know he's based on paganism, but look! It's really science fiction! So, please, please, please don't skip out on our movie, people from the South!"

The Bad Guys: Loki and the Destroyer

The villain of the movie – Loki - is fascinating because he's so totally different from any other bad guy in superhero movies.

All the major twists and turns of the movie are due to him, which is why, despite the fact he's so great it's hard to talk about him without spoilers. Just when you think you've figured out his motivation, there's another level to his scheme in operation; you don't even really "get" the character until one last line he gives that explains everything.

In the end Loki comes off as strangely tragic because he wasn't evil so much as someone that went wrong somewhere. Loki is sympathetic because his motive is he has something to prove to everyone, despite the fact people accept and like him; he's insecure and sees distrust and hate where there just isn't any.

The costume was great, too: there was one shot that was just a shadow of Loki on a wall; with that curved horn helmet of his, Loki was immediately recognizable just by silhouette.

Loki must be Norwegian for liar, because that's exactly what he does, and everyone believes him. In fact, he's so good at lying and pulling strings, so subtle, that the first scene he manipulates other people it's possible to not even realize he did it. Loki wins fights by sneaking and cheating and playing on other people's emotions. In one scene he looks like he's about to fall to his death and asks his brother Thor to save his life. Surprise! It was a hologram trick that lets Loki stab Thor.

Loki lying can be more crushing and destroying than any proton beam: one of the worst, crushing scenes in the movie was one where Loki goes to Thor and tells him their mother doesn't want Thor to ever come back to Asgard.

The Destroyer was just about perfect in this movie. He was huge and unstoppable and totally silent and intimidating and reminded me of Gort, the robot from "The Day the Earth Stood Still." I saw someone at the premiere with a 7-11 Destroyer cup, which makes perfect sense: opening night of Thor is the only place in the world you can possibly be comfortable drinking out of a plastic robot in public. I totally expect that in the future, statues of the Destroyer will be sold at science fiction conventions next to busts of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Comedy

One thing the trailers probably didn't tell you about Mighty Thor: it's funny. Just as funny as Iron Man, in fact, which is really a relief because if it didn't have a sense of humor it'd be insufferable. Thor bonds with a scientist because the pair of them drink heavily (and competitively!), and the pair come back stumbling drunk. The human characters help Thor become a decent person because he sincerely wants to help Jane Foster, as Thor knows she's right.

I was super-nervous about Kenneth Brannaugh because I thought it might be the Ang Lee "Hulk" all over again: another case of a "highbrow" director who makes a bad movie because he looks down on the material. This didn't happen here at all, and I'm delighted. Still, Brannaugh is a classy guy and he brought a lot of polish: notice that in all of his scenes all the actors are doing something instead of just staring blankly, and because of his direction he made some jokes work that should be unfunny on paper.

Nobody that really appreciates or understands Shakespeare could possibly be a snob. As genius as the guy was, Shakespeare wrote his plays like the better Hollywood blockbusters; there was plenty of stuff for the literate but his target audience was the lowest common denominator so there was always plenty of attention-getting sex, violence and functions comedy (farts and midgets). If Shakespeare lived today he'd be perfectly at home doing surprisingly high-quality stuff in the studio system.

The Casting

Kenneth Brannaugh is a color-blind casting guy; in "As You Like It" he made Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington brothers.

A lot of people wondered about the Asian Hogun the Grim, which bugs me because that critique is actually downright comics-illiterate; even in the comics he was not from Asgard but was a bitter outcast from a country to the South, a sort of Mongol type pan-Asian place with genies and flying carpets. Hogun was the first of the Warriors Three to get a solo story because he was so popular: he had a lot of cool mystique as a quiet, antisocial guy who thought his life was cheap.

If I have a critique of that movie it's that the minor characters went underdeveloped. Surely some cute character bit, even if it was one line, could have been given to Volstagg (who seemed curiously thin in this movie), Fandral the Dashing was just there, as was someone as cool as Hogun.

Idris Elba did just fine. He got the best costume in the entire movie, bronze-gold space armor that looks like something Darth Vader would wear if he was a good guy. He has a great growly voice and accent, and together with oddball hazel-gold contacts, he let his voice and the costume do all the work. He doesn't look Asgardian but he sounds like it. I guess if you want an explanation for his un-Asgardian looks, Heimdall might have been a "naturalized citizen" to Asgard, originally from someplace else, like Hogun the Grim.

Polybius - the world's spookiest video game

2011-05-06T09:00:00.007-04:00

One of my all-time favorite, spookiest urban legends involves a mysterious arcade game whose existence was never substantiated, Polybius. It's a great window into the early days of video games, a horror story that developed around the anxiety people have around a new, unfamiliar technology seen as scary, youth-corrupting and addictive.

It's easy to imagine the Polybius story as a schoolyard telephone game that got bigger and bigger, a pearl that formed around the sand grain of a real life scientific phenomenon that was poorly understood at the time: some people go into epileptic fits when certain lights flash in sequence.

These days we all know about how flashing lights and intense concentration lead to epileptic seizures, but imagine how terrifying it must have been to see something like that happen in the early days of video games. You're at an arcade with a friend and in front of dozens of witnesses he foams at the mouth and collapses to the ground in a fit after constantly playing a video game.

Imagine seeing all this and not understanding why it happened.

Because the game, Polybius, if it existed at all, was put out by a manufacturer that can't be traced and no machines exist, it's very possible there's no basis for it at all. Nonetheless, the fears the game played on were very real, and the story tells us a lot about what people were afraid of at the time.

The usual versions of the urban legend goes something like this: in 1981, seven arcades in rural Portland, Oregon received a mysterious black with green joystick, undecorated arcade game named "Polybius" after the Ancient Greek founder of modern cryptography. The company that produced it was the previously unknown Sinneslöschen Publishing (a German term meaning "sensory-extinguishing").

Introducing a game in limited quantities isn't suspicious in and of itself since it was normal to test market arcade games before a wider release, and because the gaming industry was very new at the time, it wasn't uncommon for unknown publishers to get into the action either. The game itself was innovative by all accounts: most people (supposedly) remember the game being a Tempest-like tunnel-shooter.

According to the urban legend, the trouble started immediately after the game arrived, those that played it suffered from feelings of dread, terrifying nightmares, night sweats, an inability to sleep due to constant screaming, and amnesia or memory loss. Different stories say that many people just stopped playing video games, and one became an anti-video game activist. One teenager first became moody and violent after playing Polybius constantly and even committed suicide.

Many people reported seeing men in black suits around the Polybius machines, not collecting quarters but removing data of some kind. A few reported the screen flashed with subliminal messages - "Obey," or "Work Eight Hours, Play Eight Hours, Sleep Eight Hours."

And mere weeks after it first appeared, Polybius machines were taken away and never heard from again. No arcade collector owns a Polybius machine, and the general consensus is that either Polybius never existed or the evidence is inconclusive about it ever existing.

What was Polybius, if it even existed? What's the truth behind the legends?

One of the more interesting theories is that Polybius might be a confused memory of the vector-graphics tube-shooter Tempest (interesting that the gameplay should be described as a lot like Tempest!), which had to be revamped because it gave vulnerable people seizures.

It is entirely possible that instead of some scheme by an X-Files agency, Polybius was just an ordinary game. According to this interview with a guy that claims to be the designer of Polybius, the game was test-released in Portland, Oregon, and as a result of a boy that got an epileptic seizure from the game, a panicky company, not used to selling something like video games that was a lightning rod for parents' groups, overreacted and pulled the plug on the Polybius's wider release and scrapped all the arcade machines that exist. The "men in black suits" were people from corporate that examined the machines for safety purposes.

Without a single working copy of the game it's difficult to take the story seriously, but nothing in it was all that outrageous or unbelievable: just a game a lot of people took time and effort to create that was the victim of a rumor mill because of a poorly understood real-world medical reaction, the litigation for which made the parent company overreact and yank all the machines out. The story of a kid who got sick from a game was passed around by a local rumor mill and became bigger and bigger, and the removal of the machines was seen as confirmation of all the scary stories.

Everything about this story, from the power the threat of litigation has on cowardly companies, to the tragic way creative people get trampled, to the lack of paranoia or conspiracy...it all has the unpleasant stink of believability. Without proof, it's all hard to believe especially with the way people try to attach themselves to a famous story like that of Polybius, but reading the interview, my bullshit detector never went off once. I sincerely hope Steven Roach's story will put an end to this over the top urban legend once and for all.

Champions (Hero System 5th Edition) Product Review Tuesday: Aaron Allston's "Champions: Superpowered Roleplaying"

2011-05-03T10:12:00.009-04:00

Better late than never, right?

I'm proud to introduce a regular feature – Champions Review Tuesdays, which focus on the old 5th Edition, which is overrepresented in my collection. Every Tuesday I'll get another one up like clockwork of another Champions (Hero System) product.

Seriously, the necessity for reviews of this type dawned on me when I realized the quality of Hero System productions swung around so wildly that some books were must-haves and others were terrible to the point of absolute uselessness. I also realized that most of the webrpg reviews were done by sycophantic fanboys incapable of providing useful or thoughtful information.

Champions: Superpowered Roleplaying (By Aaron Allston)

When I first got this book I thought it was pretty friggin' useless, and a rip-off for the dough I forked over.

For heaven's sake, I already know how superheroes work, what a "brick" and an "energy projector" character are. I had a basic sense of how the genre worked, like the difference between a Master Villain (say, Doctor Doom) and a Henchman Villain (say, Whirlwind, Tigershark or the Wrecking Crew), defining characteristics of the Silver Age and Bronze Age, and things like skintight costumes and what a superteam government liason does. All of which, by the way, are explained in the book. I'm not joking – there's a whole page on how superhero costumes work. Take a look so you don't think I'm lying:

It felt like they were trying to explain superheroes to people on another planet where there were no superheroes. The book also suffers from things like an attempt to explain romance and comedy in superhero comics, which feels like word-count padding and filler, probably because it is.

Since then, though, I've played with enough people that don't "get" superheroes…and I've been on Champions Online, a game theoretically about superheroes ruined by a playerbase that instead creates furry weirdness like rainbow winged wolf-women and vampire faggotry for the no-longer-cool-or-relevant World of Darkness.

It was then that it dawned on me. The Champions Sourcebook is actually necessary because some people actually don't get superheroes and all this has to be spelled out for them.

It sounds weird, I know, but it reminds me of an anecdote told about Joe Orlando, a guy that was principally a horror and EC comics guy who transitioned into superheroes with great difficulty.

Joe Orlando once wrote a memo where he asked a plotter, "why does the Thing have to smash through a wall? Can't he use a door?"

To which the exhausted writer responded, "look, Joe, you either get this stuff or you don't."

It gets even more interesting when you consider that because Champions has been around for such a long time, there are people that play Champions and don't read superhero comics at all, just like there are people that play D&D and don't read fantasy novels. The Champions Universe started off as a store-brand version of Marvel Comics but acquired a life of its own. To an old school comics fan like me, it's inconceivable, and a perverse reversal of the natural order, that someone could be more familiar with Mechanon than Ultron or Doctor Destroyer over Doctor Doom. It reminds me of people that think Drow are really in world myth, instead of being a creation of Gary Gygax.

Suddenly I understood why, for example, the superteam in this book, the Champions, had powers, vehicles and bases that were so very generic: they're supposed to be that way, to work as "examples" of how you build, say, a Batman type hero, a brick-type invulnerable hero, a power armor hero, an energy projector, and so on. This is especially important and meaningful because the purpose of examples is to show what the system can do.

In an unusually prescient move that shows these people actually play their own game, there was even a Worf-type alien hero. I have almost never been in a group and not had at least one person not want to be a "today is a good day to die" Worf guy. They even give him a Phys Lim to represent unfamiliarity with earth culture. It's like the characters were created with a "how to do this" list in hand. If you're a newbie and aren't sure how to do something, this can be very, very helpful.

If you're an overworked dog of a man like I am, you can do what I do: steal the Champions' V-Jet and use it for whatever superhero team jet's in your own game (all superheroes need a jet, right?), borrow the stats for their wisecracking HAL 9000 AI computer and use it for the one in your superhero base (all superheroes have one of those, too). I hate to interpret designer intent, but I believe that's literally what they're there for, people!

That reminds me. Where the book really shines are the crunchy game bits, and there are a lot of them. The templates are huge packets that make superhero comics easier. They include game bits that are absolutely indispensable: team communicators. Comic book technology like blaster pistols, rocket packs, and character sheets for generic evil minions. Speaking from experience as a GM in a labor-intensive system who believes in working smarter, not harder, that evil minion sheet in back has literally been the henchman sheet for dozens of very different baddies.

The templates are a lifesaver because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel with basic character concepts like the Earth Control Hero, Growing Hero, Scientist, or Martial Artist. When you become a GM, these will be your best friend. Many of them even have things you didn't think of. My favorite was the Multipower for telekinesis heroes, which had Darkness (representing whirling local dust and debris to make a blinding smokescreen). I hadn't thought of that, but that's just cool.

There is also a no-frills Batmobile type supercar, and at least five types of bases: urban base, space base, and an underwater base complete with computers, all with pretty common options. If you think this will save you work, you'd be right. File off the serial numbers and you can pretty much Xerox this and hand them out to characters "right out of the box."

My advice? If you know superheroes, skip the flavor text in front and then go right to the crunchy bits, which you can then file the serial numbers off. I really hate to do "time is money" comparisons, but let's get cold and logical about this: how much would you pay to save yourself hours of unnecessary work? Seriously, let's attach a dollar amount to GM labor. If you say you'd pay anything from from $5-$20 an hour to save you the equivalent amount of work, this book will still pay itself off eventually if you run a campaign longer than a few weeks.

The optional rules are interesting, although they conform with intuition. For instance, the rules on the "Fastball Special" are basically what you'd expect: a character does a Move-Through maneuver based on the velocity of the inches of throwing. You can probably guess that's how it would work if you've ever been a GM for Champions for any length of time, but it's nice to have that in writing. The Directed Knockback rules measure what happens when knockback is used to hit one character into another: namely a second attack roll against a target in the path of the knockback, which gives damage based on inches of Knockback on a 1" = 1d6 basis. This is such an intuitive way to handle it that I'm not entirely sure this even counts as a new rule.

When building characters I always turn to the Vulnerability Frequency tables. How often do cold attacks come up in your average superhero world, anyway? Mental powers? Again, good to have it in writing. Though I notice there is a slight Marvel emphasis on a lot of these tables. For instance, Cold/Ice powers are judged as uncommon, and fire and heat powers as very common. That's one big difference between the Marvel and DC Universes: Marvel has tons of fire people and relatively few ice characters, while DC has tons of ice people and relatively few fire people.

Finally, in back there are some great classic villains for a variety of campaigns, in addition to the famous Utr – er, I mean, Mechanon. Green Dragon, a villainous kung fu expert, is a great character because he can with very few alterations be retweaked into the character sheet for literally dozens of "costumed athlete" martial arts types with very little effort.

It's at this point I ought to admit a prejudice I have that colors my appreciation of the book. I don't like "genre toolbox" supplements that give you an overview of a genre or milieu so you can create your own setting with them. Universal systems, or games like Champions that play-act at being universal systems, are pretty much plagued with books of this type. The non-crunchy parts of these kinds of books are irritating to read because as I said, they waste your time telling you things you already know.

The worst part is when toolbox books of this type take a view that genre simulation is the absolute top priority, and if simulation is the priority, things end up becoming parodies of themselves because they never break new ground.

The best and most interesting things ever done with superheroes, and with anything else for that matter, are the ones that "break the rules." The FF didn't have secret identities, for example, which was a pretty ironclad comics rule until then.

Because genre simulation is paramount, the books give frankly horrible and embarrassing advice I can't see any real GM taking. Typical of this is a section on fads and creating fad-themed superheroes with disco and skateboarding themed powers. Does it occur to anyone else that maybe accurately simulating the genre is ultimately not as important as not being retarded? Because having disco and skateboard themed characters sounds pretty retarded to me.

This gets even worse with other Hero System products. My favorite is another toolkit book, Pulp Hero which gave the most dysfunctional advice imaginable on handling race and sex. When it came to women, it said that "because pulps like Adventure made an effort to portray females as smart, strong and sensible, there are many examples to fall back on when creating as many heroines and capable female NPCs as you like."

Okay, fine, but later on, they discuss racism, and give three possible options for a game master and group, all of which are equally insane: the first is setting a game in the 1920s and ignoring racism and sexism as existing in society entirely (!); the second is making all characters white and male to "accurately simulate the pulps," (!) and the third is a "compromise" (their words) possibility where "Oriental" is used instead of "Asian" and "if there is a nonwhite player character, there should be only one."

What blows my mind about this is not how horrible the advice is (pretending racism and sexism didn't exist in the 1920s, or requiring players to make all-white male heroes?) but it never even occurs to them that maybe it's possible to create smart and capable racial minority heroes, or even an all-minority party, even if there is no precedent for that in the pulps themselves? In other words, the reason women heroes can be smart and not useless is only because Adventure magazine did it!

Another reason I don't like books of this type is that they take a backwards approach to how, in practice, the creation of settings work. They start with making someone ask big questions that in practice most people creating a setting, roleplaying game masters or otherwise, don't answer immediately, like what the status of superhumans and the law is, or the history of superheroes.

In a homebrew game, it's a very rare game master that has everything fleshed out from day one. Thinking about the history of superhumans isn't the first thing you should be thinking about when starting a game or a setting. I understand different GMs work in different ways, but is starting with a chapter like "Timeline" about the history of the entire world really the way most GMs do things? Is that even the most helpful way to think?

Heroes that worked for the bad guys

2011-05-02T08:15:00.011-04:00

Mr. Moto

Talk about a supporting cast member that steals the show. Mr. Moto is a weird, funny looking little Asian man with bad taste in clothes and a tendency to wear golf suits. He never raises his voice or is impolite.

And he's Imperial Japan's greatest secret agent. He desperately tries to win and defeat huge swaths of territory for his masters, those friendly folks that brought us World War II and Pearl Harbor. He wants to help conquer China for Japan.

Despite his obvious affiliation with the forces of darkness (one book makes him a personal friend of Emperor Hirohito) Mr. Moto is interesting because you wouldn't expect a guy in a bad golf suit and glasses to have such a casually matter of fact, practical attitude to killing, execution and assassination. He's a supercompetent secret agent with a dozen skills, but he doesn't look it or act like it.

Once you figure out the real character of the unassuming Mr. Moto, you're always a little nervous about him because he's got his own agenda and sometimes that involves him helping you and sometimes it doesn't. If you have a conversation with Mr. Moto, he'll smile and be polite, but you'll come away thinking you just told him everything and he didn't tell you anything at all. He's patient, outwardly polite, and even tempered. He's a cryptic guy that never shows his real feelings; it's obvious "Mr. Moto" is a pseudonym; what his real name is, we just never learn. Even though he works for the baddies, it's impossible not to like a guy this cool.

By the way, it's worth pointing out for Martial Arts buffs that Mr. Moto knew and used Judo, which was given by name and its general properties accurately given (grabs, throws and joint-locks). The only earlier appearance of Asian martial arts in fiction I can think of might be Sherlock Holmes's use of Bartitsu, which barely counts because Bartitsu was created by a Brit.

Mr. Moto is obviously a take on Charlie Chan, but one who went far enough in his own direction to be interesting, in much the same way the start point for Conan the Barbarian was obviously Tarzan.

The Mr. Moto books have a great sense of humor, which is another thing to recommend them. In terms of unpredictability, there were some that a mystery buff like me can figure out all the twists well ahead of the author ("Your Turn, Mr. Moto") and others where I was genuinely surprised ("Think Fast, Mr. Moto").

If you've read one Mr. Moto book, you've pretty much read them all. Some down on his luck American/Western main character living in the Far East bumbles his way into international espionage and must be saved by secret agent Mr. Moto. There's usually the beautiful evil spy lady, of course, a vague MacGuffin, and some (usually) evil Chinese secret agent.

The books are filled with the usual claptrap "inscrutable east" Fu Manchu stuff that macho post-pulpsters will desperately try to tell you isn't racist. The phenomenon at work here is an attraction to the most sensational elements of a culture to the point a real place becomes a cartoon version of itself. I for one would love to read at least one detective mystery set in New Orleans that doesn't somehow involve voodoo magic, for instance.

There's an argument that lots of adventure stories rely on luridness and sensationalism. That's fine, luridness and sensationalism I don't have any gripe with. The problem with things like "inscrutable east" is that it shows a real laziness of intellect. Anyone that ever threw their hands up and said we can never understand the primitive mind in jungle adventure stories is being intellectually lazy - same thing with inscrutable "who can ever figure out these Orientals" stories.

The truth is, there's a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. If you want to make a good impression on some Chinese clients, for instance, buy a book of Chinese culture, manners and etiquette. Figuring out other cultures isn't hard if you decide to take the effort.

Before Pearl Harbor, the allegiance of a huge part of the mainstream American public, not just German American Bundist types, was with the Fascists. Sure, they were efficient and Anticommunist, but never underestimate the American public's ability to sympathize with winners and hate on losers. The Chinese, though conquered and horribly exploited by the Japanese, in the Mr. Moto stories, were overwhelmingly represented by backward and lawless Warlords.

By the way, the Mr. Moto books are a perfect example of what I think is one of the most insufferable characteristics of modern libraries: the insistence on good books over popular ones. John P. Marquand was an established Pulitzer prize-winner who dabbled in mystery, espionage and thriller novels, yet despite his credentials his most famous creation was Mr. Moto. I could never find any Mr. Moto novels growing up, but all of his dense Pulitzer-winning stuff nobody read today was everywhere in every library I knew. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

It reminds me of a story about one inner city girl that wanted to find Nancy Drew stories, but they weren't available in her own library. Librarians: I understand the library profession has a special obligation to make available the great works that make up our Western culture. But if some inner city kid wants to read some Nancy Drew books, for the love of God, let her have them!

SUN KOH - The Son of Atlantis, the Man of Destiny

"Hey Jules...did you ever hear there was a pulp hero, published in Germany in the 1930s, that was like sort of a version of Doc Savage, except he was a Nazi that wanted to take over the world for Germany?"

I remember a fellow pulp-loving friend of mine told me that and I thought he was crazy because it sounded too weird to be true. But I looked into it and apparently Sun Koh actually did exist.

Even though the stories want us to think he's a noble heroic type, everything about Sun Koh is unintentionally sinister in the extreme. A Doc Savage type hero called "The Perfect Aryan" (creepy!) with blonde hair and big muscles, what sets Sun Koh as different, other than his allegiance to Nazi Germany, is that his backstory is filled with Nazi crackpot alternate history and mysticism.

Sun Koh fell from the sky, a legendary prince of the Kingdom of Atlantis (a land filled with blonde haired whites related to modern Germanic people, naturally - it's laughably mentioned he's related to "Mayan Kings"), sent to warn our time about a coming ice age like the kind that destroyed Atlantis, a cataclysm only the Aryan race can survive and therefore he is sent to ensure its dominance over the planet. He has a tattoo on his back of hidden kingdoms and mysterious places, and a lot of his stories involve going into weird lands in India and using Indian mysticism and yogic techniques. He performed acts like removing ice from Greenland (in accordance with Nazi myths about "Ultima Thule"), going into the Hollow Earth via a hidden ancient tunnel and also bringing sunken Atlantis up from the Hollow Earth so Aryan peoples have more living space.

By the way, I'm pretty sure reading that previous sentence gives you schizophrenia. Sun Koh's stories are so full of discredited racist pseudohistory that if he lived today he'd spend all his time fighting vaccination and looking for Obama's birth certificate. That kind of bothers me because Doc Savage's world was interesting but purely rational.

Incidentally, I've always found it an interesting trait of German science fiction that despite how the technology got incredibly over the top, there was very little space travel at all. After all, when you've got both that AND the Hollow Earth you're just getting greedy.

Sun Koh is a shockingly casual killer. He often rips off artifacts from ancient cultures and takes them without apology. He operates according to "protagonist centered morality," in the sense that what's right and wrong is determined by the main character; opponents are bad guys because they stand against him. In one story, he actually advocated enslavement of a native people at the Hollow Earth. In short, he was an absolute monster. What's creepy about these stories is not how different he is from pulp heroes, but how similar.

Sun Koh has a few allies: two sidekicks including a servile bellboy, as well as a big Negro prizefighter. Later on the pulp introduced Jen Mayen, a fellow inventor and mad scientist that is more his mental equal (and even got a spin-off dedicated to him and his vehicles), and Joan Martini, a sexy woman daughter of an archeologist who was thought to be a crackpot because of his belief in Atlantis and other hidden kingdoms.

By the way, the black American prizefighter sidekick died off a year after the strip started at the request of Nazi officials. The guy got a heck of a sendoff: Sun Koh gave Nimba great wealth which he used to support the Ethiopians against Italy, and he was eventually killed in battle. His last words? "Say hello to Atlantis for me." Not a bad fate for an ethnic sidekick with a lot more dignity than usual - but horrible that it had to happen at all. It's interesting to note this sidekick died the same year Jessie Owens embarrassed the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics.

Sun Koh was obviously a rip-off of the Doc Savage type technology and science hero. Both series lasted over 150 books long, and both started with him going to the Yucatan peninsula, finding a lost civilization of Mayans, and ends with our hero taking back enormous treasure that means he doesn't have to work a 9 to 5 and can just fight evil all the time. Except Doc Savage's Mayan friends gladly gave him the treasure in gratitude, whereas Sun Koh just took it.

What's exasperating about Sun Koh is that unlike Doc Savage, Conan, Tarzan and other far superior American adventure characters that fizzled out without the Gotterdammerung they deserved (damn - there's that Wagner imagery, I've got to stop reading these), Sun Koh actually got a "final story," an "ending" where he conquered the Hollow Earth and Atlantis, long since prophesized, rose from the sea. I want to never stop kicking this guy in the nuts with my all-kosher feet for this: this racist douche got something my favorite hero Tarzan never did.

The Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu - 2007's TMNT Movie

2011-04-08T23:14:00.009-04:00

One thing about my viewing of the 2007 TMNT movie kept me from enjoying it fully. I used to think I'm not the type to get misty-eyed over dead famous people I never knew personally, but it was extremely difficult to hear the voice of powerful veteran character-actor Mako.

I had to turn the movie off and come back to it after a while because it was difficult to watch. The movie must have been his final performance, since it came out in 2007 and he died in 2006 (after a quick look at IMDB, apparently it was).

Anyone who pretends they aren't moved when actors they love die are lying. Through art you feel a connection to others.

In any case, I was surprised and delighted to see the new movie "got it." They knew what made the Ninja Turtles tick. Lots of teams like the Fantastic Four are described as a family, but with the Turtles that's literally true: all four of them are brothers, and they have the same camaraderie and competitiveness of brothers with strong personalities. Splinter, the wise old rat that trained them in Martial Arts, is even called Father by the turtles. When he isn't called Master or Sensei because he's that, too. Mako even used different tones of voice when Splinter was their Sensei and when he was their parent.

If the Ninja Turtles are a family like the Fantastic Four, like the Avengers, all the emotional stories and conflict is based around an axis of two characters: one is a leader-type that is responsible and principled, and the other is a wild, brash, proud and ferociously independent guy that bucks at being led. With the Avengers it's Hawkeye and Captain America and with the Turtles it's Leonardo and the angry, tempermental Rafael. Just like Boba Fett was based on Clint Eastwood, Rafael was based on the screen persona of James Cagney. Amazing how much screen time Rafael gets in the Turtles movies: he's not everyone's favorite but he's obviously the writers' favorite, just like Hawkeye was consistently every Avengers writers' pet character.

The movie feels like an actual Ninja Turtles movie, as opposed to what I was afraid it would be: a movie that shamelessly uses the fondness people my age have for the Ninja Turtles to knock off a cheap and fast flick. Yeah, sure, it's animated, but now that I think about it, I'm surprised none of the original Ninja Turtle movies were animated. Like Tarzan, the Ninja Turtles have an athleticism and physicality that only animation can actually bring to screen.

Animation was the best decision ever for this movie because it was filled with monsters and black magic like animated rock golems. Though the movie is a direct sequel to the original live action movies, it combines their New York street-toughness with the Ray Harryhausen weirdness that defined the lighter and softer animated TV incarnation, which had traditional superhero stuff like Dimension X and a scientist that turned himself into a fly monster.

Like Batman, there are several different tones the Turtles take over the years (and like Batman, the sillier things got the more science fiction there was), but this version the Turtles' goofier elements are more subdued and subtle. For instance, there is some pizza-eating, but it's in the background and the Turtles don't go too crazy, and some of their catch-phrases are alluded to but never outright said, like the Turtles have a license plate that says "DUDE-1." Michaelangelo in particular was like his late eighties/early nineties contemporary, Bart Simpson, in that he was pretty much a catch-phrase machine. Michaelangelo still likes to skateboard, which dates the Turtles a lot - but I'm not complaining because it made for some neat stunt scenes and is character-appropriate for a fun-loving, keep it hangin' dude like him.

There was no Turtle Van, Turtle Blimp or Turtle Communicators. The movie borrowed a lot of things from the 90s cartoon (which was to the Turtles what Adam West is to Batman), but apparently the idea of the cash-strapped turtles that live in a sewer having their own friggin' blimp was too over the top to believe. The height of Ninja Turtle high tech in this movie is smoke bombs, plastique and hang gliders. They don't even use that most comic book of all pieces of technology, the grappling hook gun! I guess they're too old school for even that.

The turtles are guys that love what they do: they like adventure and beating up evil Ninjas and it's hard not to like them back when you see them wiseass their way through fights. Why couldn't the relatively humorless Spider-Man movies be more like that?

Thank God (aka Frank Miller, in this universe) this movie wasn't a reboot or origin story. It's a straight up sequel, and it's great to see a movie that doesn't go through the motions and tries to legitimately continue the story. It reminds me of Superman Returns, in that TMNT straight up ignores the bad movies. Unlike Superman Returns we get an honestly new story.

For one thing, Shredder isn't the bad guy again, the way you'd expect of a cheap and easy movie that uses the familiar elements. Shredder is to the Turtles what Lex Luthor is to Superman: he's great but we're all sick of him. Get another villain, already!

Thank goodness they didn't use the villains from the animated cartoon, two borderline-retarded Dr. Moreau animal men named Bebop and Rocksteady with Brooklyn accents that were about as legitimately menacing as Bulk and Skull were.

The main villain is basically a straight lift of the DC Comics baddie, Vandal Savage. An immortal ancient Chinese warlord who uses his immortality to become a super-rich, influential tycoon. Did I mention he was played by Patrick Stewart?

They also did the single most obvious villain to do, but it's such a cool idea it deserves to be mentioned. The Foot Clan are now led by some evil Asian Dragon Lady mastermind, basically a lady Shredder.

This should come as no surprise. Every single Asian mastermind supervillain has a hot, evil daughter that knows karate and wears a catsuit, ever since Dr. Fu Manchu had his evil daughter Fa Lo Suee. Remember Ra's al-Ghul's daughter, Talia? It was downright criminal that the Batman movie with Ra's in it left Talia out since she was the single most memorable element about Ra's other than the Lazarus Pit. First Christopher Nolan mispronounced Ra's's name (it's said Raysh, damn it!), mangled his origin...and now this!

Other than their catsuit-wearing leader, the Foot clan follow the Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu: the more Ninjas there are, the less awesome they are, until a good guy can cut through a crowd of bad guy Ninja henchmen like butter.

The setting is New York. Where else would it be, right? The turtles are street-tough vigilantes, illegitimate children of Batman and Daredevil. The turtles even leave in the middle of conversations, just like Batman does, and they leave criminals tied up to lamp posts like Spider-Man. The comic started off as a parody of Frank Miller, who was so big he created a subgenre unto himself, full of bat-wielding vigilantes, street punks on every corner with colored spike hair, narration box overuse, Sais, Nunchaku, and ninjas, ninjas, ninjas.

By the way, what ever happened to ninja, anyway? Remember when every Martial Arts school switched to black uniforms for a little while because ninjas were so cool? They were a huge craze in America back in the eighties for a while thanks to two guys: Frank Miller and Orientalist novelist Eric van Lustbader. Van Lustbader wrote Ninja and Jian and other airplane thriller novels that were basically the P.F. Chang's version of Asian culture combined with adventure and espionage porno for men, sort of like a combination of Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Grisham and Memoirs of a Geisha, basically a male version of romance novels.

You know, I've actually thought about Lustbader a lot the past few weeks because the tone of all those BBC articles about the destruction in Japan reminded me of Lustbader: "experts" talking about Orientals and their culture in ways that emphasize their solemnity and stoicism in ways that make them stop seeming like real people and make their suffering no longer real, either.

Believe it or not I'm actually a big fan of Lustbader's thrillers because at least they were different; find a stack of thrillers published in the 1980s aimed at male readers and I guarantee two-thirds will be Tom Clancy imitators. Anyway, Ninja had one of the greatest opening "first victim" scenes ever, instantaneously killed by ninja.

Eventually the ninja craze was supplanted by the kickboxing craze, just like the ninja craze supplanted the first wave Kung Fu craze with Bruce Lee. That's a shame because ninja are incredibly supercool and near-superhuman. They have mystique as stealthy assassins from an exotic culture. I love watching old Samurai movies from the 1950s and 1960s where a typical meeting with a Ninja would go with a Warlord in an empty room, except for a shadow that suddenly appears next to him. The warlord would give his instructions to the shadow...the real person never shown and his voice never heard, ever...and then the shadow would vanish from the wall.

Don't get me wrong, the TMNT movie wasn't perfect. For one thing, there wasn't much of a central villain. The main Vandal Savage bad guy wanted penance for his actions and was ultimately a decent person. The Turtles could have walked away at any time; the story felt like it didn't concern them directly. Towards the end it becomes a "call the cops" movie, a film where the entire premise can be undone if someone just called the cops. Overall, it was tightly plotted and everyone got something to do, even Casey Jones and April, and the Foot Clan received one very interesting character-defining bit that showed they weren't just bad guy hirelings but had something to them.

Splinter in particular was very well used in this movie. He even joined the fighting at the end, which was a surprise. He didn't die at the end or disappear like all mentors and he didn't just show up to deliver expository dialogue.

A few things about the Turtle movie that surprised me:

The movie was a short and tightly plotted 80 minutes long. Compared to bloated, overlong comic book movies, that's practically a blessing and no scene feels useless. There are advantages and disadvantages to skewing your audience young and apparently a short length is one of the benefits.

Why is April O'Neil suddenly an expert in ancient cultures? Wasn't she like, a reporter? Like Chakotay from Voyager, a dull character that never got anything to do, Chakotay got skills as required by the plot so he'd have something to do. Also, in a surprise that left me laughing kept out of the trailers for obvious reasons, she joins the turtles in battle in a banana-yellow Ninja catsuit. Oooh, what a toughie! I don't know any TMNT fans...was this something people really demanded to see?

The opening of the film was identical to an obscure, years too late TMNT knockoff called Warriors of Virtue. In Warriors of Virtue, the leader of the Karate Kangaroo heroes, the guy that had his shit together the most, had to spend years in retirement in the jungle hounded by guilt, and the story was about him returning from retirement. No joke, the guy's color was even blue. Like in TMNT, he's even introduced as a shadowy "guardian angel" presence saving some kid in a jungle.

You can tell this movie company, Imagi, is a far Eastern studio (Korean) because when they have Asian characters, they don't look obviously Asian or different from the Caucasian characters. To Asian people's eyes, they don't look any different from us. Though I'm not sure what I was expecting, something that surprised me about Japanese cartoons was how the Japanese drew themselves looking identical to Americans.

Samantha Briggs - the "lost" companion

2011-03-30T09:47:00.008-04:00

She helped the Doctor crack the mystery of an airport where people were disappearing and replaced by pod people, and she became fast friends with Jamie.

Yet, no list of companions I've ever seen ever counts her among their number at all! But for a while (one six-part episode, The Faceless Ones) Samantha Briggs was a companion of Doctor Who during the Troughton era.

(This one's for you, Eddie, the biggest Doctor Who fan ever.)

It's not surprising she's not better remembered because her debut episode, The Faceless Ones, is totally lost as a result of a mixup at the BBC. After Ben and Polly, the two most "swinging sixties" of all the Doctor Who companions, chose to leave together, there was a mad scramble for several episodes to find a companion to be "the girl."

Samantha Briggs was immediately chosen to be that girl, but unfortunately, despite a personal plea from man-candy Frazer Hines, she turned down a regular part on the series.

The character the show creators eventually chose as the new companion the very next serial was va-va-voom Victoria in the Evil of the Daleks, but not after some deliberation: the character they originally wanted was the Waterfield's maid, Mollie!

Samantha Briggs was groomed to be "the girl" in the very episode Ben and Polly leave, something that the actress's departure put a major crimp in. She was a tough, gutsy, ornery Liverpool girl from the 1960s. More than any other companion, she and Jamie had real chemistry right from their debut episode.

She couldn't have been more different from the sidekick they eventually went with. Victoria was a proper Victorian girl whose most distinctive attribute...other than the obvious, of course...was her Fay Wray scream. Samantha on the other hand was very "mod," a tough London bird and honestly, was a bit of a schnauzer-face. Victoria though, was quite possibly the foxiest companion, at least until that cave girl.

(The irony of Victoria being the prim and proper Victorian lady never ceases to amaze me since apparently in real life she was the Goodbye Girl for the Falkland Islands invasion.)

For the life of me I don't understand why Samantha Briggs isn't considered an official companion. She played a huge role in the resolution of the story, became friends with everyone, and was a scrappy engine for the events of the story. She was clearly groomed to be the big new companion. And even the fact she was only in one six-part serial isn't enough to disqualify her since Sara Kingdom was considered an official companion despite being an ally for only one episode as well! One that is also, by the way, lost.

I for one, would like to see Samantha Briggs restored as an officially numbered companion! That means, when numbering the companions, bumping everyone above her up one spot.

By the way, the actress that played Samantha Briggs, Pauline Collins, was far from done with Doctor Who when she turned down a part as a companion. She later on showed up in the new series playing, of all things, Queen Victoria! I believe she has the record for the longest absence of time between appearances on the series.

Everything you know about these figures is wrong!

2011-03-28T20:31:00.009-04:00

There are some figures in pop culture that are no longer characters but are symbols, their names used as verbs. Here’s the problem, though: often everything we know about those characters is wrong, as the characters have been almost totally misrepresented.

The Perils of Pauline

The Perception:

Pauline, according to pop culture, was a silent film heroine who was usually captured and tied to train tracks or a saw mill. She was symbolic of the virginal damsel in distress (and light bondage).

The Reality:

Here’s the thing, though: Pauline often was placed into dangerous situations, but she usually got herself out of them.

It would be crazy to say she was a feminist character or even a really strong woman, but for the time she was a little naïve but smart, scrappy and competent and typically solved her own problems. There were some occasions that she needed a rescue but these were occasional, not constanty.

Pauline was an adventurous female that wanted to be a writer, independently wealthy, and when she got married, she wanted to see the entire world from China to Paris and everywhere in between. Her evil accountant wanted to rob her blind, so he ensured she always faced some mishap.

And while we’re at it, Perils of Pauline is often described as the first of the cliffhanger serials. Only it didn’t have cliffhanger endings! Pauline experienced a problem or life-threatening in an episode and at the end typically solved it. There were no episode cliffhangers.

Incidentally, check out this serial from 1919, featuring both Pauline actress Pearl White as an antiquities thief that duels with Werner Oland as a Chinese gangster. It’s interesting in that both characters are thieves unlike other serials, and also that it features Pauline and Charlie Chan matching wits.

Horatio Alger

The Perception:

Horatio Alger was an archconservative who wrote hoary “rags to riches” stories where scrappy urchin shoe shine boys pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become wealthy by the end. His stories are fantasies that gloss over real inequality and create a very damaging American mythology.

The Reality:

Horatio Alger’s most famous works like “Ragged Dick” (ha, ha) were all about shoe shine boys and other scrappy underdog kids, but they were not rags to riches stories but have realistic endings where the kids get into middle class respectability in professions like clerk or accountant. He did not write any stories where a kid became Dale Carnegie!

And far from writing stories where a character achieves their status exclusively “by their own bootstraps,” the majority of Horatio Alger stories featured a mysterious wealthy stranger who takes notice, secretly, of some good deed the hero does and works to benefit him in secret.

Let me repeat that: even in Horatio Alger novels, getting ahead is all about who you know!

Seriously, guys! Sure, I am tired of privileged nepotism beneficiaries like Bill Kristol saying poverty and lack of education aren’t real problems because anybody can be a millionaire, so it’s basically the poor’s own fault and they don’t deserve pity. But don’t use imagery of Horatio Alger, who didn’t write the kinds of stories people think he did and if he was guilty of anything, it was being formulaic and a little lazy. Michael Moore wrote a chapter in his slacker-aimed political book “Dude, Where’s My Country?” called “Horatio Alger Must Die.” This was, by the way, also where Moore published his deeply unimpressive Saudi/Bush family connections, which he honestly expected to shock everyone in Fahrenheit 9-11, but instead got a big, fat “why is this important?” from everyone.

What’s more, Horatio Alger was far from an archconservative. He was a Unitarian Minister, which means if he lived today he’d drive a VW van. His later books were often Westerns that were often banned by Church groups because of their extreme and surprising violence. And finally, it’s very likely Horatio Alger was homosexual. Yeah, I know, that’s often said about a lot of figures, but with Alger it’s better substantiated than most: he had to leave the church because of allegations of sex with teenaged boys, not to mention many friends that he confirmed his sexuality with.

Rambo

Pop Culture’s Perception:

Rambo’s name is a byword for macho, testosterone fueled and brainless soldiery, and in foreign policy is often a symbol for right-wing aggression. In pop culture, Rambo is the ultimate pro-violence kill-crazy warhawk.

The Reality:

The actual character of Rambo, however, is nothing like that. In his first film, First Blood, John Rambo was a flashback-fueled veteran that went on a rampage as he was forgotten by society and unable to reintegrate into it. The final scene in the film was a vulnerable and somewhat pathetic Rambo breaking down crying about how he was a broken person that was the inevitable byproduct of war. It’s a mistake to say that the Rambo movies are anti-war, but Rambo was extremely cynical about it, even when he became a bow-wielding superman in the later films. Even in the violence-intensive later films, Rambo was still a tragic, pessimistic, doomed figure who had nothing in his life.

Rambo is the flip-side of Rocky Balboa. Whereas Rocky movies believed in America and the underdog, Rambo movies are always cynical and bleak, with Rambo as an expendable, Samurai-like, Zen figure that became war itself.

In the later films there was a lot of violence and mayhem and it’s easy to misinterpret that. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie, because all war movies glorify war somehow.

Tarzan

The Perception:

In the movies and television shows, Tarzan is typically a monosyllabic caveman that lives in a crummy treehouse, a wild man that’s a little on the slow side.

The Reality:

Two things about reading the original Tarzan novels take everyone by surprise: Tarzan is intelligent, and Tarzan is violent.

Tarzan taught himself to read with books left by his castaway parents when he had no spoken language, and in the book series later learned to speak perfectly a dozen languages including French and German. He could pass for a distinguished gentleman (at least on the surface, anyway), which made his savage nature all the more dichotomous and surprising when he ripped his nobleman’s clothes off to rush into the primitive. Return of Tarzan had some shocking images of a heartbroken Tarzan spending time in Paris smoking cigarettes, drinking absinthe and going to art galleries.

And for that matter, Tarzan didn’t have a treehouse. He lived with Jane in a sizable and wealthy plantation house in Africa, a compromise Tarzan was extremely unhappy with, but which he did to keep Jane happy.

Finally, Tarzan was a superwarrior of tremendous strength with a surprising bloodthirstiness that was animalistic – nature red in claw and fang. In Beasts of Tarzan, he actually killed a deer by sinking his teeth in until he drew blood. Tarzan was explosive and strong and a little scary and intense. To my knowledge, these two attributes give Tarzan his mystique and make him intriguing, but I’ve yet to see ‘em in any TV or movie version of Tarzan.

By the way, what do Tarzan and Horatio Alger have in common? Both were published in the first pulp magazine in existence. The Argosy got its start publishing Alger's serials. By the 1910s it changed its name to "All-Story Weekly" where Burroughs printed, in serial form, the Tarzan novels.

RPGs made under license

2011-03-20T14:14:00.007-04:00

RPGs produced under license have incredibly stringent rules about faithfulness to content and that can result in odd and hilarious situations where RPG writers try to passive-aggressively undercut elements of the world they don’t like.

Screw Medichlorians!

I’ve yet to see anyone in a Star Wars RPG product (or, for that matter, any other bit of Star Wars lore like novels and comics) ever mention or utilize the terminally retarded Medichlorians concept.

This is especially strange because in Star Wars RPGs, I’ve seen detailed treatments of something as throwaway as the Kessel Run used as the basis of an entire product, complete with gameboard, map and tokens, not to mention elaborate and detailed RPG treatments of Cantina-scene background races like the Hammerheads and walrus-men.

Medichlorians were explicitly described in the Phantom Menace as part of a huge exposition scene, yet much more detail and energy was spent in the roleplaying game devoted to what the monsters in Chewbacca’s holographic chess game actually are! You can’t tell me that’s not passive-aggressiveness in action.

Here’s another case of Star Wars RPG writer passive-aggressiveness: the adventure module “Tatooine Manhunt” by Bill Slavicek and Daniel Greenberg.

Have a look at that cover. Doesn’t it sound like the coolest thing you can do at your gaming table…have your buddies fight against the awesome, ruthless bounty hunter enemies in Star Wars, like Boba Fett, the Terminator-esque unstoppable assassin robot IG-88, and the lizard guy Bossk?

But wait! Look on the inside.

That’s right – for some reason, the module couldn’t use Boba Fett, Bossk, IG-88 or the rest. But that sure didn’t stop them from doing what the writer wanted to do! He made characters that are so identical to the iconic Star Wars baddies that to call them knockoffs would be misleading, because at least a “knockoff” would imply distance, that in some way these are different people. What happened was, most likely someone told them the characters were unavailable so they went and wrote this.

Star Wars is an interesting case because in many ways, the RPG created the entire expanded universe as we know it. You see, the RPG was the first place to consolidate information about the setting and revealed information previously unknown…so therefore RPGs were for a long time, only Star Wars “reference books.” Because the RPG materials were Lucasfilm-licensed, everything in them was first vetted and therefore totally canon! People writing the novels and comics had to read the RPG books because they were actually the most complete sources of information available on the Star Wars galaxy.

She-Hulk in Fantastic Four

If you replace a member of the Fantastic Four, no matter how good of a character you are, people will hate you because these guys are so beloved. Remember that loathesome motherfucker HERBIE, who replaced the Human Torch in the cartoon?

That goes double for any character that replaces someone as awesome and universally liked as Ben Grimm, who is quite possibly the Morgan Freeman of the Marvel Universe: the guy everybody likes. Take the TSR Marvel Super-Heroes game module, which features the FF vs. Arcade.

The adventure module “Murderworld!” by Jeff Grubb had to use She-Hulk because the TSR game was set in modern continuity, and someone working under license can’t pick and choose. It’s not “cafeteria canon.” But it was obvious the writer wasn’t a big Shulkie fan. For instance, Ben Grimm’s statistics were prominently given in the back “for game masters that want to use him.” Uh, okay.

Notice his sheet is as big and prominent as She-Hulk’s despite the fact the character’s not even in the adventure module!

What’s more, when the FF arrives at the killer amusement park Murderworld, the She-Hulk’s ironic deathtrap was being on a simulator plane targeted by a gauntlet of traps and missiles and so on. The other heroes’ encounters were perfectly tailored for them in a traditional Arcade way. Placed in a plane? That’s something one would subject Ben Grimm to, since Ben used to be a pilot and war hero.

They mention briefly in the module that Arcade assumed the Thing was still in the FF. What does this mean? Two things:

1) The story as written makes no sense if used with She-Hulk but plenty of sense with Ben Grimm. Ben Grimm could fill in for Greenie and it would not require anything about the module to be changed!

2) Even in the story itself, the module writer made sure people are going, “hey, where’s the Thing?”

Women and the Lens

In the Lensman novels, Smith went out of his way to explain that women can’t use the Lens and have minds totally incompatible with the Lens in terms that are hilariously patronizing. There was one scene in First Lensman where it was deliberately stated that one female character went to Arisia and was outright refused to be granted status as a Lensman as she didn't have the mentality for it. This is canon, inarguable as gravity.

To say this creates a problem for gaming is an understatement. To REQUIRE a female player to play a male character against their will is pretty awful, and for the worst possible reason imaginable: because it’s impossible to enjoy being a woman in the setting that’s not a noncombatant nurse.

The Lensman RPG manual desperately tried to work around this limit in a way that could best be described as subdued panic. In fact the guy that wrote the guide once said in an interview that he was nervous about taking on the project because it would piss off his wife! The book contained a few sly, subtle hints slipped under the radar about how something like a female Lensman could be possible. One of them expressed a compromise possibility that perhaps Clarissa MacDougall needed to be the first female to use a Lens and after her, others were possible. That doesn’t make any sense, but it was something.

Things about the X-Men people forget

2011-03-02T05:14:00.014-05:00

These things are not just cute little factoids but elements of the characters that ought to really be important, things that ought to influence characterization and propel stories.

Toad had access to the power and technology of the Stranger

The Toad and Magneto were captured by the powerful, superadvanced cosmic being known as the Stranger. The Toad was left behind in the Stranger’s captivity coldly by Magneto when Mags escaped. There the Toad remained, studying the Stranger’s technology. In Avengers #137, the Toad was actually able to use the Stranger’s science well enough to impersonate him and pretty much whoop on the entire Avengers, including powerhouses like Thor and Iron Man.

Consider the implications of that story. The Toad studied for long, long periods of time the science and technology of an advanced being that is either on par with the Watchers or at the very least the Overmind. The Toad was always an underrated genius with a surprising intellect for someone so underconfident and sycophantic, which is an interesting idea in and of itself...but mastery and use of the Stranger’s technology puts him in a very scary category of Marvel Universe high-level tech users. And who’s to say Toad doesn’t have a Stranger gadget or two stowed away? Even if Toad barely understood what he was working with (which Avengers 137 seemed to contradict - every indication was the Toad knew what he was doing and working with), the slightest application of the Stranger’s science can result in superweapons that can put Toad in one of the top tiers of X-Menaces...or at the absolute least, make him a believable villain.

The Angel had an adventuring career long before he joined the X-Men

To the best of my knowledge, no one has mentioned this since the J.M. de Matteis “New Defenders,” but Warren Worthington III was the only one of the X-Men that had an adventuring career and costumed identity prior to joining the original group as the Avenging Angel. We get this element of his origin in Uncanny X-Men #54, where not only did he have a career as a hero, he also fought crime on his own, acquired some moderate fame independently, and even had a classic superheroic secret identity. Back when the Angel left the X-Men and joined the Defenders, he was much more comfortable without the X-Men and in a superheroic occupation because they said he’d gone it alone before. Heck, the Avenging Angel costume is so important it became Warren’s regular outfit when the X-Men acquired real costumes as opposed to training uniforms.

The Avenging Angel period can’t help but arouse curiosity and we only saw the barest hint of it. What villains did he fight? What adventures did he have?

Rogue started off as a supervillain

I can see why writers just let this one drop. After all, doesn’t that poor kid have enough angst and problems in her life, they have to add one more source of internal drama? What with her cruel total inability to have anything like intimacy and the way her powers provoke an identity crisis, and her ultimately heartbreaking attraction to men that are all wrong for her like Magneto and Gambit.

But lest we forget, Rogue was not only a supervillain, she was the nastiest, cruelest member of Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which was the nastiest, cruelest incarnation of the Brotherhood ever. Just check out Uncanny X-Men 158.

In that story, Rogue shot to kill and was capable of murder. She delighted in mayhem. Rogue was, in short, not a crook that was just in it for the cash or because they were framed or tricked, the way Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were.

Rogue was scum that could melt acid, but redemption came when she realized she was losing her mind, going mad, and forgetting who she really was and couldn’t control her power. When she showed up at the X-Mansion wanting help, she was so pathetic and humbled that it was possible to forgive her past cruelty out of sheer pity. This is surprising, because her draining Carol Danvers’s powers and memories (to the point Carol couldn’t recognize her own father) was such a nasty crime that, like the murder of Gwen Stacy by the Green Goblin, it would be very, very easy to consider Rogue totally unredeemable afterward.

To be fair, from Avengers Annual #10 to about Uncanny #158, Rogue was scarred by the power and identity transfer with Carol Danvers and a case can be made she wasn’t 'herself' in these stories. But that doesn’t explain how conflicted Rogue was in her early appearances in X-Men and in Secret Wars, where she was totally uncomfortable being a superhero in light of her past, a person with divided loyalties that could jump ship and turn bad again if the occasion presented itself or the going just got too rough. There was even an intriguing but dark possibility she might become a villain again if it meant being on the winning side in the Secret Wars.

To the best of my knowledge, this inner conflict fell away as Rogue felt more and more like an X-Man, which is to be expected, but it's surprising how few people have brought up that Rogue started off evil. Contrast that to how Hawkeye and the Black Widow’s criminal origins have been a regular part of their characters.

Come to think of it, this whole list could actually be made up of things about Rogue writers forget. One of Ms. Marvel’s powers they just ignored and allowed to disappear was Carol Danvers’ Spider-Man like “Seventh Sense,” although there was one occasion it was stated in dialogue that Rogue lost the Seventh Sense at some point. This makes sense. Considering Rogue’s genetic instability, it would be logical if the power transfer from Danvers was far from perfect.

Alright, so they explained that one…but if Rogue has Ms. Marvel’s powers and physiology, she therefore has Carol’s Humanikree genetics. Did you get that? Rogue is part-Kree.

Eulogy for Dwayne MacDuffie

2011-02-25T16:38:00.006-05:00

Dwayne McDuffie, a guy best known for writing for the DC Animated toons and then actually getting to write Justice League, died recently, which is an ugly shock because he was energetic, relatively young, and wasn't obese or anything. He's the kind of guy you figure can go the distance, and his death (due as I understand it, to accident) is the kind that makes you angry.

In his capacity at working at animated DC, particularly Justice League, he created some of the slickest, coolest cartoons ever made, the single best expression of DC superheroes in any medium ever. Dark, smart and old-school cool, Justice League was the first animated DC cartoon to use long-term arcs and is generally considered, along with the early seasons of Batman and Mask of the Phantasm as the high point of superhero animation.

Let me tell you the exact moment I realized Dwayne McDuffie was my kind of guy.

During the DVD of the Justice League episode 3-parter, Dwayne said he was absolutely shocked by the buzzkill, disappointing revelation that Hawkman's wings were some kind of strap on to his cosume and not actually a part of him. So, if you look closely at his Justice League show, at no point do any Thanagarians take their wings off, ever - even when by themselves...and if someone unfamiliar with DC were to, say, draw a conclusion from that...well, that wouldn't be his fault, would it? They don't say the wings are a part of them, they just heavily imply it!

This is such a clever way around outright contradicting canon that I have to give him props for sheer sneakiness.

Also, note that Nth Metal is onl mentioned as an engineering concept totally unrelated to flight.

I thought I was the only one this drove up the wall and it's nice to know I wasn't alone. People that are totally entrenched might wonder what the big deal is, but I started off a Marvel fan, reading Marvel-only as a point of pride. Naturally I got curious about DC because I liked superheroes, and one of the first I wanted to read was Hawkman because he looked so darn cool: he had wings and fought with ancient weapons. He looked like a DC version of one of Frank Miller's Ninja heroes.

Instead, we have a character that is an alien (huh - why is that necessary?), who uses ancient weapons for no reason except an insane whim, whose motive for coming to earth and remaining there is murky at best, and worst of all, his wings aren't a part of him. This final bit removes the element of fantasy and adventure. It makes him a phony, a sham, a lie...like a pimply faced, Doritos-smelling teenager pretending to be Santa Claus at a mall. The real Hawkman is a lame character like Wonder Woman, in that he makes absolutely no sense so it's impossible to like him.

Regardless, here's another thing that Dwayne MacDuffie have in common: we're both Englehart fans.

Here's the pudding...the very first story arc after the three-part introductory movie was actually based on Englehart's dramatic splash story in JLA 140-142 featuring the origin of the Manhunters and their attempt to steal the power of the Guardians, the inciting incident of which is framing Green Lantern for murder.

What's more, the two characters that were the best developed in the entire comics run were Hawkgirl and Jon Stewart. It was Englehart's idea to bring Hawkwoman into the JLA with the impressive logic that if Hawkman was a member, why wasn't Hawkwoman, anyway? Though it should be noted that it was Gerry Conway a few years later that had Hawkwoman as a member without her husband.

Finally, it was Englehart who established the character of Jon Stewart as a leading man. When Englehart took over Green Lantern, the expectation was he was going to bring Hal Jordan back. Which he didn't do for at least an entire year, doing to the one thing nobody expects: writing Jon Stewart as such an interesting and competent guy, when he finally got around to Hal Jordan, I didn't want Hal back.

Even one of Englehart's minor stories was adapted by the animated series, including a Batman/Aquaman team up in Legends of the DC Universe.

Thus, Dwayne MacDuffie was a guy on my wavelength. I know he will be missed, and in an era when people who just don't care or know anything about comics characters except campy water cooler jokes (ahem - Brave and the Bold) he was someone that loved the characters and took them seriously. He was a rarity and his enthusiasm will be missed.

The Fifty State Quarters

2011-02-22T16:43:00.008-05:00

The Florida 50-State Quarter is so dull that I think I dozed off when looking at it. A collage of mostly empty space with the space shuttle and what I can only guess is Ponce de Leon's galleon. What, they couldn't do like the ugly Wisconsin quarter and cram in images of our principal products? (I'd love to see a state that's praised as "First in Bauxite!")

All this becomes all the more shocking when one considers all the great imagery that could have been used for the Florida quarter, like an image of the dead rising from the grave to vote in elections. Amelia Earhart leaving Hialeah and then crashing to her doom. Perhaps images of a few of Florida's real natural treasures, humorists like Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry, or maybe one of those ultra-tacky Daytona mermaids.

The trouble with the state quarters was they were predictable. Try to guess what was on the Maine quarter. Go on...guess.

The single two best quarters were those with unexpected themes. For instance, New Jersey's quarter was dedicated to the state's military history as the site of many Revolutionary War battles. It's easy to forget that Jersey, all spray tanner jokes aside, was the site of many turning-point battles during that conflict.

When you think of New Jersey, do you think of military history and the Revolutionary War? No, but it's great to see Jersey get a shout-out.

And my all-time favorite was Alabama.

When you think of Alabama, do you think of Helen Keller? Not really, and that's why there's something genius about it. It shows there's a lot more to that state than college football and Martin Luther King.

It's worth noting that recently a dollar coin was unveiled to celebrate 200 years of the birth of Louis Braille, a coin that actually features Braille on the front!