Rawr.

So,  I hope y'all are already dialed into The Doubleclicks. This geekcore sister act has been pulling some buzz lately for the wonderful Nothing to Prove video, the in-your-face response to the "fake geek girl" issue. But as the hipsters say, I was into them way before they were popular. Their latest album, Laser and Feelings, was on my get-list as soon as it was announced - and it did not disappoint. As well as continuing to wave the geek flag high with clever and enjoyable songs, Angela and Aubrey are both demonstrating growth and development as musicians.

I bought the super-fun-size album package (or something), so in addition to the digital download, I got a physical CD -- and the cool Special Prize. Here it is in action:



Yay!

(Oh, and if you're wondering about the velociraptor - check this out and all will be made clear.)

Holy synthesis, Batman!

So, I saw this thing today, from Mashable via Geeks are Sexy:

It was coincidental, in that I had been thinking of a few things recently and this pulled them all together.

There's been all this buzz about the next Superman movie being a Superman & Batman movie and that its vibe is going to be the Superman vs Batman deal from Dark Knight Returns.

There's been buzz and gossip about the Wonder Woman movie, which I guess has been put on "pause" once again, because nobody in Hollywood can figure out how to make a movie about such a "tricky" character. (Lots of good chatter about this on Twitter.)

This stuff got me to thinking about Matt Wagner's Trinity, and how much I liked it, and how cool it would be to see a movie version of it. (Oh, and if anyone needs to know how to make the invisible jet awesome, just read this.)

And Trinity always puts me in mind of Calamity Jon's model for these three Ur-superheroes: that the characters are as iconic as they are because each one represents a different tradition of adventure that fed into the superhero genre: Wonder Woman from myth and fantasy, Superman from science fiction, and Batman from swashbucklers and the pulps.

What Jon's model makes obvious is that while myth and sci-fi both routinely present heroes and/or villains with (innate or manufactured) powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, pulp heroes were exciting precisely because of their vulnerability and more realistic power levels. Which meant that Batman's idiom, while as strong of pedigree as the other two, did not give him the raw power to stand next to Superman or Wonder Woman in most adventures or conflicts. So while he captured the same level of popularity, combining the narrative streams was problematical.

This didn't stop World's Finest from pairing Superman and Batman for many years, or Justice League of America showing all three heroes together. But in these stories, Batman was more detective and escape artist than powerhouse, and his contribution in most stories came from his wits and his will. It was his savvy, his cleverness, and his resolute badassery that gave him the right to stand alongside aliens and demigods.

But somewhere along the line, the current that gave us that awesome curbside beatdown in DKR starting building strength. It was no longer enough for Batman just to be smart and tough; he had to be the master strategist and perfect warrior, with a plan for every contingency and a device for every situation. He had to be unbeatable, not just by thugs and gangsters and deranged clowns, but by anyone, super-powered or not. And this current swept us along as we watched bat-gear, which had already proliferated in numerous goofy ways, become more and more militarized and weaponized and science-fictional, and saw Bruce Wayne transform from the orphaned son of a moderately wealthy physician into the heir to a vast industrial empire and a fortune that made him one of the world's richest men, in order to explain how he can afford all of that gear.

At some point, Batman left his domain as the avatar of the pulp adventurer in the prime superhero trinity and edged over into same sci-fi circle as Superman. An article I read recently[wish I had the citation] asserted that contrary to popular belief, Batman does indeed have a superpower: that superpower is money. Money for vehicles, money for exoskeletons, money for bodysuits, money for less-than-lethal firearms, money for all the stuff that can make him the guy who can take down anyone.

Until we get to where we are now, when half the time Batman seems like a stealth Iron Man rather than a caped crusader. Don't think so? Just look at the 2013 half of the image above and tell me it ain't the truth.

As all of this was swirling in my head, the classic yellow-oval Batman on the "1939" side of the image put me in mind of an exchange I had with Marc Burkhardt some time back, as we were marveling at a story in which Batman improvised his way out of a combat situation by throwing a car battery at the bad guy. We both expressed a desire to see a stripped-down Batman, a smart detective and tenacious fighter, a shadowy street-level hero.

I dunno. I imagine I'm going to have to wait quite a while.

Didn't make the cut

So, as I was pawing through my comics looking for JLA #200, which I never found, I decided to take the opportunity to organize a bit and weed out some stuff that I didn't want. Here's what's headed for the half-price bookstore (and you'll see some of them came form there):

I love me some Paul Chadwick but this was a little too weird for me.

I liked the concept of this but thought the execution was pretty pedestrian.

This never grabbed me at all, and I gave it three tries.

Extremely disappointing.

Okay, but I can;t imagine re-reading it.

This came on a good recommendation, and there is much to love about it. In the end, it was a little too self-conscious, and I quickly grew tired of the OMG-he-is-so-cool Shade.

Still holding on to Lady Cop.

Dude, the obscure

So, the search that generated that pile of pre-internet artifacts that comprised yesterday's post also turned up another document. Here it is in all its cryptic glory, a list scrawled on the back of a rejected print run of a real estate flyer I had created for a client:

What the heck is this? It took me a while to remember, and Googling didn't help much. I got one clue from a discussion board and it came back to me.

These are all characters listed in the "Minor Superheroes" section of The Encyclopedia of Superheroes by Jeff Rovin, published in 1985 by Facts on File. (I still have my first edition copy.) More specifically, they are all characters listed as appearing in Doctor Peculiar #1, a one-issue-wonder published by Madison Comics in 1984. (That issue must have been among the last additions to the book!) Talk about obscure.

Once I had pieced this together, I recalled how the list came to be: While browsing the encyclopedia, I noticed that a few entries referred back to this comic, and then I read through each of the more than 300 two- or three-line entries in the chapter, in order, and made a manual record of all of the ones that listed DP1 as their first appearance. Must have been a  slow day. I have no idea why I did this, other than idle curiosity and mild obsessive-compulsive behavior. I guess if there had been an internet, I would have looked them all up, but as it was, I just wrote the list and kept it for 28 years.

But now there is an internet! But bloody hell- there's still precious little information! My Google searches are mostly dead ends, and even the Grand Comics Database does not have the issue listed. Fortunately, Mile High Comics has actually a copy for sale, and they even have a cover shot:

It's a bit disappointing, actually. Dr. P looks like a typical generic eighties superhero. (You can tell it's not the nineties yet since he doesn't have any pouches and/or spikes and/or a leather jacket.) I was hoping for a group shot of all the heroes together, or at least one of those old 80 pg. Giant multi-panel covers highlighting a few of them.

Still, I think I'll fork over a few bucks for a crappy copy. maybe there's a group shot inside, or a party scene of something, and I can finally see what The Sow - heroine of southern Maryland looks like. Heck, these guys might even be in the public domain...

Objets anciens

So, while conducting a search through the actual paper files that still take up some space in my home office for a thing that I didn't find, I selected a few other ancient artifacts that I came across from the pre-internet era to present to you now. These document how we did things Back in the Day.

Memes

Back in the pre-internet days, ideas still spread from person to person within a culture through units (memes) that carried cultural ideas, symbols, or practices. We just had to photocopy them and pass them along in person. You knew something had gone viral if the person you handed it to had seen it already.

Quotations, inspirational and/or clever

If you came across a quote you liked, you didn't share it on Facebook or cut-and-paste it into your email signature. You cut-and-taped it to an index card. And then you looked at it once in a while, when you came across it in a desk drawer.

Movie images

If you liked a movie and wanted an image from it, you tracked down a store that sold old lobby cards or promotional stills and you bought one of them. You didn't install it as your desktop wallpaper, but you might put it in a plastic sleeve for protection and thumbtack it to a wall.

Comics Archives

There were none, unless you cut them out of the newspaper and kept them in a folder or envelopes.

Celebrity Pictures

If you were a young man in 1973 who watched Diana, the one-season sitcom staring Diana Rigg, even though it was incredibly derivative of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, down to the opening credits and the side-by-side desks in the office set and Richard B. Shull taking the Gavin McLeod role, just because it was Diana Rigg and you had been crushing on her since reruns of The Avengers -- anyway, if you were that young man and you wanted some photos of Ms. Rigg for keepsakes, you couldn't just download them, no. You had to cut them out of the Sunday magazine section and stick them onto self-adhesive polaroid photo backing sheets, that's what you had to do.

Scripts and dialogue

And if you wanted the some script pages, perhaps Abbot & Costello's entire "Who's on First" routine, you wouldn't just fire up a search engine with some well-chosen keywords. You would wait until The Naughty Nineties came on television again, and then tape the routine with a cassette recorder, and then painstakingly transcribe it onto Eaton's Corrasable Bond paper using a manual typewriter that you got with S&H green stamps. And you might even decorate that transcript with a little doodle of the comedians.

Yep, that's how it was, boys and girls. How did we ever survive into the information age?

Now get off my lawn and go play where you live.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades

So, anyone who plays D&D with me will confirm that I am all about the minis. Not in the I-have-talent, I-like-to-paint-tiny-things, doesn't-this-look-awesome sense, heaven knows, but in the if-the-party-is-being-attacked-by-bears-I'd-like-some-bears-on-the-board-please way. In the I've-got-like-400-pre-painted-minis way. Yeah, it's a little crazy.

one box of many

I guess my theory goes like this: the minis have two purposes: to arbitrate combat and to add to the texture of the game. It is in the second purpose that that an extensive collection of minis comes in handy. Any sort of tokens can be laid on a grid to establish how far apart or close together two characters are; helping to establish the mood and atmosphere is where a large collection of minis comes in. When the DM reaches behind the screen and lays out the monster that has surprised the party, that the players can immediately see that it is an owlbear or a cyclops or an ettin actually adds to the flow of the story-telling, which is the most important part of the game.

Since it is impossible to have every mini for every situation, it becomes more important to not be wrong than to be right. That is, you might not have the exact mini, but have one that's close enough that it doesn't actually pull players out of the moment. For example, using a giant snake in place of a giant bear makes it hard to keep the scene straight in a player's mind; using a badger instead of a boar is less jarring. It may not be perfect, but close can be pretty good. Look at how this works.

Here's a scene that would be pretty typical of a game I run. Let's say a party of three, a male half-orc rogue, a female human cleric, and a female dwarf fighter are entering a confrontation with three gnolls and a wolf.  It might look something like this:

It's not perfect, but it's close. Some details are off, and the gnolls may actually have falchions instead of spears, but nothing is going to take a player out of the instance.

But, obviously, it is only possible to get this right most of the time if you have a large collection of minis (or if you buy new specific minis for every campaign, ultimately winding up with a large collection). Compare that to this, an all too common situation:

Well, maybe I've never actually seen someone use railroad workers for gnolls, but you get the point. You would keep wanting the cleric to talk like Wesley Snipes, or getting confused and thinking the gnolls are attacking with shovels. The minis just aren't close enough to the characters to keep from distracting from the storytelling rather than adding to it. Way too easy to happen - unless you have a crazy supply of minis.

And if you have no minis at all, you wind up with this:

And nobody wants that.

But it's a Sisyphean task: no matter how many minis a DM collects, there's always going to be a scenario for which there is nothing close in the collection. Which leads me to my alternate plan:

This approach certainly meets the objective of clarifying spatial relationships to administer combat, and while it may not add to the texture of the game it will not detract from it either. The minis here are presentational, not representational. With just a few variables - perhaps color, size, and height - you could establish a collection of generic minis to stage any encounter with clarity and without distraction. In fact, the argument could be made that this technique would actually aid the storytelling element of the game, since the only representation of the different characters would remain in the players' imaginations, without any outside influences at all.

Hmmm.

Don't be surprised if you see a big lot of minis for sale on eBay sometime soon.

Martian Meshugenah

So, today I was paid a surprise visit by that raconteur, bon vivant, and all-around man-around-town, Jim Wilson, proprietor of Let's Not Talk About Movies, that premiere movie review blog. He was on his way to the twentieth anniversary reunion for Bill Nye the Science Guy, for which he was the sound designer back in the day (not incidentally winning an Emmy for his efforts). A chance to see Yojimbo is always a Good Thing, and in this particular instance, I came away with material gain as well: once again, in what is becoming somewhat of a tradition, my great and good friend gifted me with a Martian Manhunter action figure. To wit, The New 52 version.

Here it is, all nice and pristine in the box:

And here it is a few minutes after Jim left, reduced from M/NM to CR/AP:

So let's see: The blue color scheme is now kinda purple, and he's a little more olive green; I can live with that. He's got pants; I liked the faux-Barsoomian near-nakedness, but okay. His cape melds into a tunic-collared shoulder-pad/pectoral-shawl thingie; I'm not really sure how that would work. I love the breechclout, although he really doesn't need it now that he has pants. The symbol is still there, and half of the classic cape harness, so we'll call that good. But here's the rub:

Is everyone in the DCnU this cranky all the time? To quote the comics reporter: "sometimes I look at silver age superheroes and wonder why they look so different and then I realize it’s just that they don’t look like assholes." In any case, the new figure will grace the Martian Men's Room with the rest of them.

In other Martian news, Yojimbo's visit was such a surprise that I completely forgot that I had a Martian for him:

Yojimbo is something of a Chuck Jones expert as well as a big fan, so when I came across this Marvin the Martian a few weeks back I couldn't help but pick it up for him, planning to give it to him the next time we met up. I wish I had remembered that today.

So, Jim, I leave you with this snippet of dialogue for which I am sure you need no citation:

[Presenting a gift-wrapped dynamite stick to Martian Commander X-2]
Porky Pig: Happy b-b-birthday, you thing from another world, you.
Marvin Martian: Ooh, thank you!