Critical fail

 Gone for the nonce.

So, I want to stay in touch with all my peeps, but I am getting weary of the whole social media scene and blogs are apparently just too 2008. In light of this, I am suspending operations on Instagram and on this blog - no new posts will be forthcoming.

But fear not- if you really want to continue to hear from me, just click the link below and subscribe to the Walaka Tribune!

Once a week (or so) you'll get a fun little email newsletter from me with cartoons, book reviews, news, photos, and random thoughts. And you can just hit the reply button to say hi back and let me know what's up with you - it's a win-win!

Here's that link:

SUBSCRIBE TO THE WALAKA TRIBUNE

I hope to hear from you soon!

Mini Museum

 The Museum of D&D Miniatures has a new upgrade.

Dall'Italia con amore

So, recently my two sisters went on a trip to Italy. I guess there were some postings on Bookface (whoch I am not on), but I did get one text, from Norma Jean, and it was goodie.

They visited a Murano glass workshop in Venice, and apparently that particular artisan was a comics fan. Norma Jean didn't tell me which specific place it was they went to, but she did send these pictures:

 Crazy, innit?

Then, today I got a flat in the mail from my sister Linda - it was an autographed print of this:

I was confused at first, becasue I thought it was something from the Murano glass place, but no -- it is from Galleria La Nuova Forma in Lanciano, yet another bed of superhero amore in Italy.

The catalog that accompanied it says this is Serigrafia a 37 passaggi di colore interventi in glitter, foglia oro, foglia argento, floccaggi e passaggio calcografico a secco which Google awkwardly translates to "Screen printing with 37 color passages interventions in glitter, gold leaf, silver leaf, flocking and dry chalcographic passage".

So, to sum up: there are fine art superheroes in Italy and I have great sisters.

 

Your moon asplodes!

A quiet moment of intense drama...

In the grand tradition of Exploding Sun and Ring of Fire and CAT. 8, the other night Wonder Wife and I dipped into the well of truly awful disaster movies, this time a big-budget version from a master of big, dumb movies, Roland Emmerich: Moonfall. And I gotta tell ya, it was big, and it was dumb. Mind-numbingly stupid. So bad I have returned to bad-movie reviewing, which I generally try to avoid.

So, the premise is that the moon is actually a mega-structure, a fact which the government has at least suspected, if not known, since 1969. It is also the site of an ongoing battle between an evil AI entity (that looks like a swarm of metal shavings) and and a good AI that is a the last remaining artifact of the alien race that actually created Earth and seeded it with what became human life. (It's a long story and not very interesting.) And for some reason it's falling out of orbit, too.

Anyhow, an intrepid disgraced ex-astronaut (who had a close encounter with the metal shavings on a mission years before), a plucky NASA ex-astronaut administrator (who was on the same mission but missed the encounter), and a wacky conspiracy theorist who seems to know more than all government scientists combined must team up to intervene in the AI battle and keep the moon from crashing into the earth as its orbit decays, although it causes a lot of trouble on the way down anyway.

There all are sorts of hijinks, including gravity doing things it doesn't do, the atmosphere doing things it doesn't do, NASA getting a space shuttle out of a museum and somehow making it spaceworthy in hours, and panicky people running and hiding and shooting at each other as things explode and crash and burn. Apparently the real astronaut serving as technical advisor would occasionally tell them "that's not really possible" but they would roll with it anyway because Movies. It's a total mess.

There was only one bright spot: Halle Berry actually tries her best to breathe life into a cardboard character speaking insipid dialog, She is working so hard I actually felt sorry for her, but she's really the only in the whole film who is acting.

Actually talking about D&D...

So,I am not going to repeat my recent lament about blogging, but I will note that although Epicurus and Talent have been pretty healthy of late, this little geeky blog has been pretty neglected. I don't know if that's because my comics/cartooning pursuits have become a bigger part of my normie life (I have an Instagram, for cryin' out loud), or because D&D and similar geeky pursuits have become more mainstream (viz: this), or what, but let's correct it with something that made my little nerdy heart sing:

So maybe you have to have had more exposure to D&D than just watching Stranger Things, but seeing an owlbear, a  treasure-chest mimic, and a gelatinous cube in a big-budget production (it's even got a Chris!) - well, I am not sure if have been this nerdily excited since the Michael Keaton Batman movie.

Unfortunately, we won't see it for another 14 months, so let's stave off creeping fascism and environmental doom at least until then, okay?

More stupid money

So, a few months back I mentioned on Epicurus that I had spent entirely too much money to acquire a musical instrument that I cannot play and that in all likelihood I will never learn to play. This tale is about spending some more stupid money, but at least this time it was on something that I am certainly well equipped to appreciate. 

This is a DC Comics house ad by the great Ira Schnapp announcing the launch of the Justice League of America in their very own comic. After three successful outings in The Brave and The Bold (numbers 28-30) in early 1960, the seminal silver age super-group got its eponymous magazine later that year.

The B&B adventures of the JLA and the earliest issues of their own comic predate the start of my reading days; I was a 12-cent silver ager and missed the "all in color for dime" era by just few years. In fact, I read most of these early stories for the first time as reprints collected in "80 pg. Giant" specials.

Nonetheless, the Justice League itself, and this ad as well, loom large in my memory of those early, heady days of discovering comics. The sensibility of the great Schnapp lettering on display here, which abounded in DC house ads and logos for many years, forms the background fabric for my visual recreation of that era. Schnapp also designed the title of the Justice League of America comic itself, something I liked so much I had it reproduced for my arm tattoos.

The cool action-figure chess game in the ad caught my fancy and the Just Imagine! headline resonated with me and has stayed with me over the years - so much so that I have even used this ad as the conceit for a speech to honors students when I was a dean. (I must not have been the only one to love it - DC used the phrase as the name of a line of early 2000s comics in which Stan Lee re-envisioned DC heroes.)

In any case, this ad, and the Justice League, have always meant a lot to me. And a couple months ago, having a little extra folding green, I did something for the first time ever: I bought a comic as a collectible artifact and not as reading material.

Through the good offices of Heritage Online Auctions, I successfully obtained a copy of  Justice League of America #1. It's in pretty poor shape - you can see the corner wear, water spot, and creases even in the picture above - but frankly, that's the shape most of my comics were in most of the time. (As a friend of mine observed after having some comics slabbed, the highest-graded comics are those that were loved the least.) Because it was in such sorry condition, I got for just relatively stupid money - chump change, really - and not the $10,000 or more that a near-mint copy would go for. (That would be totally nuts.) But I am really happy for it, and it holds pride of place in the living room.

I don't think this purchase will send me down the road of acquisition - I like my life a lighter than that - but having this one item gives me a great deal of pleasure.

Favorite characters

It was pretty clear that Katoichi from an earlier post is a Kobold ripoff of  hommage to the long-time Japanese movie character Zatoichi., the blind masseuse-gambler-swordsman. Wonder Wife and I are great fans of Beat Takeshi's 2004 version of Zatoichi, and that film directly inspired these two characters as well. This backstory is from an email to the DM.

Elsa & Adrien

Karmin and Walter will be playing Elsa and Adrien, twin sisters. Elsa is the butch one (older by a minute), a nimble rogue, and Adrien is the femme one, a charming bard. They hail from a middle-class family in the hinterlands (you tell us where), a merchant clan with the roots of its small fortune in piracy and smuggling. Dad wants the family to be more legit, so he insisted his children go to university and he had the resources to pay their way in. Adrien is truly interested in learning more about these magic powers she has been experiencing; she has been up to now attempting to be a model student even though her own moral standards can be fairly elastic. Elsa really just came along (a) to protect Adrien and (b) to con/steal from the townies to line her own pockets (she takes after her mother's side of the family). As such, while Elsa attends classes and sometimes even enjoys them, much of her time is spent off-campus in various taverns around town, drinking and gambling with the townies.

Now here are the deets only the DM needs to know:

First of all, Adrien is actually a boy. He is a cross-dresser, living as a woman to avoid a longstanding feud involving the first-born sons of rival families in [whatever hinterland we're from] as part of dad's plan to go legit and leave the clan past behind. Adrien has Disguise and Bluff at 9 and Act at 8 and has been doing this almost his whole life, so I imagine she passes very well. Other than that, the backstory is accurate.

Adrien has focused exclusively on Enchantment spells and carries a small ornate masterwork light crossbow (a going-away gift from daddy) in her pack and no other weapons. She wears only padded armor, which has very intricate and ornate embroidery. Some paper and pen in her backpack and that's about it. I have attached a picture that gets the flavor: she is practicing Perform (Dance). Since this is a one-shot, if you think the Enchantment focus is a little off for the flavor of the adventure (or if I just change my mind) I might go Conjuration.

Elsa almost always has numerous daggers secreted about her body, which she draws -- and sheathes -- with sleight-of-hand. Since many people in town go armed, however, she often openly carries one very plain-looking dagger, lest anyone mistakenly suspect she's an easy, defenseless mark. One of the hidden daggers is a masterwork dagger that she recently was given after finally -- and just barely -- proving herself by managing to nick her mother during one of their many combat lessons. While she cannot use magic herself, due to her sister's coming into some ability with it, she's been interested in learning more about magic -- specifically, say, methods for how those without magical talents can try to use magical artifacts. Otherwise, she focuses on her own, personal lessons: making local connections with smugglers, thieves, and others with dubious morals so that she may someday, despite father's wishes, keep up the family tradition; learning the local gossip; and trying to make just enough money gambling each week to cover her bar tabs and incidentals -- by cheating, if need be. Since town-gown relations are strained, however, she doesn't advertise that she's a student, instead preferring to leave her affiliations and profession nebulously undefined -- and leaving her books and school supplies on campus.

Karmin is my best gaming buddy and we did have a swell time playing these siblings for a campaign that was all too short...