Apropos of Nothing

I've consolidated my various blogging efforts and can now be found at doctorcomics.blogspot.com

See you there.

So you see a National Geographic headline that reads Eight Armed Girl and you think to yourself, "No way. That cannot be true."

But it is.

or ... Why I Love the WGA

So I got the keys to my study carrel (#2) today; it is sort of the academic version of a cubicle, with a wooden desk built in and a separate, rolling bookcase (called, for some inexplicable reason having nothing to do with whiteness, a Moby) which I pull in and out of a big lockable dockable ... thing. Seven or eight of these academicubes are open for any grad student to use at any time, but the rest (about a dozen) are assigned to specific people.

Now you may be asking, why DO I love the WGA? I shall tell you.

Monday: "Hey, let's watch Chuck and Heroes." "It's in reruns." "Oh. Well, I guess I'll go work on my dissertation."
Wednesday: "Hey, let's watch Bionic Woman." "Reruns." "Oh. Well, I guess I'll go work on my ..."
Thursday: "Smallville?" "Reruns." "Dissertation."

This strike is going to triple my productivity.

Another welcome bit of news last night. I have gotten a graduate student study carrel in the library on campus. At the moment, I share an office with 4, count'em, other people, and it's not a big office. There are fewer desks than there are instructors. Even this perk will be denied me come December, since I will be officially on leave until June when I graduate.

I don't get much work done at home; for years my work habit has been to write in public places with a lot of busy people (none of whom are paying attention to me). Now I will have a space to work in the library on campus, all the way through graduation. It's got a lockable book-case just for me and my stuff, which I look forward to loading up, and will be just a floor down from the comics collection. My laptop will plug in, etc.

And the new policy in the library will allow me to bring in some snacks and drinks. So I can work the hours away, type-type-typing my medieval comic goodness.

Got my Spenser chapter back from Stewart today with only minor corrections. This is a great relief, since the rest of the diss is pretty much going to be more of the same. This means I can relax about the overall direction, style, and composition of the thing and focus on just writing it.

( More thoughts on the Knights of Pendragon )

This morning I got to read the first 8 issues of a series called Knights of Pendragon, published in 1990 as part of Marvel UK. It had British writers, artists, and editors, and was -- despite the appearance of an occasional superhero -- really more of an ecological thriller/horror story.

The first 6 issues tell a fairly unified origin story, quoting liberally from the Penguin Classics edition of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. In this tale, the Green Knight is no less a figure than the Earth itself, who taught Gawaine that no one should take more from the world than they're willing to give back. Centuries later, mankind has strayed from the path of righteousness, the environment is being plundered, and the Green Knight is pissed. He demonstrates his ire by going medieval on an evil corporation before our heroes -- including a reincarnation of Gawaine -- track him down at the Green Chapel in the middle of the South American rain forest. Gawaine's modern surrogate, a Welsh detective named Dai, forges a new pact and, for the moment at least, the Green Knight stops murdering poachers.

It's an interesting tale and Arthurian scholars have known about it for years, but no one has really given it any time. It's never been explicated beyond a few brief summaries in places like Alan Stewart's wonderful Camelot in Four Colors site. I look forward to giving it at least a few pages. I wanted to read all 18 issues, but it is time to meet with Stewart and talk about the job hunt.

You know, it didn't really take me that long to write a chapter of that damned thing once I sat down and did it. It was very easy to put off. Very easy indeed. Today was a good day, as I passed it off to Stewart and we talked about the job search process.

Tonight I ordered the six volumes of The Invisibles that I did not already have. Years ago, when I was writing the comics chapter of King Arthur in Popular Culture, I wrote to Grant Morisson and asked him if he was consciously using the Arthurian Round Table as a motif when he was writing Justice League. He wrote back (posted on his blog really) yes, but not only that, he had been consciously trying to re-imagine Arthurian archetypes in the second volume of the Invisibles. At the time, I had no space to pursue that lead.

Now I do.

So I'll be starting with Camelot in Comics, that chapter I wrote so long ago, and adding to it some long examinations of Arthurian play done in books since that chapter was written. Rick Veitch's Aquaman will get the long nod, and Grant's Invisibles, and maybe even something of Captain Britain, if I can figure out what books need to be read to do it. Due date: Dec 1.

Tonight I finished the first chapter of my dissertation. Well, it will actually be one the chapters in the middle, but you know what I mean. I'm on a chapter-a-month plan now, if I want to finish by May, and I must finish by May because I have already told my mother I am graduating in June.

No force is more compelling than disappointing your mother. I encourage the use of this tactic, but only as an absolute last resort.

The endnotes and bib stuff still need to get fleshed out, but it's the 34 pages of text that I am worried about. I'll turn it in to Stewart tomorrow. Oh, and it's got 16 pages of comic art illustrations. Hopefully this will make the diss a bit more fun to read.

I cannot wait to put Spenser behind me and move on to Malory.

Friday night I was pressed into emergency GM service when the scheduled Saturday entertainment proved untenable. Inspired by the date, I took the opportunity to do a story I have wanted to run for a very long time.

It was seven centuries ago, on Friday the 13th of October, 1307 that secret orders sent out by King Phillip V of France were opened, leading to the arrest of nearly all the Knights Templar in that country. The arrests were made under cover of tax-inspections, and most Templars went peacefully, but at least a dozen were said to escape. I used the rules for Pendragon to set up a story in which agents of the King and Pope meet up with a Templar informer to root those last dozen heretics out of the chapel where they have dug in.

The story was intended to be Medieval Horror, but it really turned out more like moody action-adventure fare. About six hours of writing went into it, about half that time making the five player characters and the other half sketching out scenes of moral depravity which tested the heroes' virtues at the same time as their stalwart sword arms. Pendragon proved a perfect match for the game; I used rules from the "Tournament Period" of the game to simulate early 14th century arms and armour, and gave everyone at least one special ability written out on a note card which they could use a few times during the session. Daniel played King Phillip's man, a Chivalrous Knight; Mark was his Religious counterpart, the Knight Hospitaller. Nicole took the Templar Informer, rounding out the plated contingent. Two people came in about halfway through the story: Michael got stuck with the Dominican Inquisitor when his young son picked the Squire -- who turned out to be a Satan worshipping inside man.

The reason Pendragon is such a great system is because it doesn't try to do everything. It's a game of knightly adventure and because it focuses on those stories the system is brief and elegant. There was plenty of differentiation between characters and everyone quickly grasped the way Passions buffed up their combat ability while Traits served as roleplaying aids and occasional moral challenges. Because this is not D&D, hit point damage slowly accumulated through the night, until at the climactic fight with Sir Gerard, the Preceptor of France, Mark's Hospitaller took enough punishment to fall to the ground unconscious. We had just gotten him back on his feet for the final encounter (with a Wyrm whose combat abilities were boosted by every spiritual trial the heroes had failed) when his ride showed up and off he went. Pity, as the story ended pretty well and everyone seemed to have a good time.

I ran Pendragon several times in college and afterward, and it's easy to remember why I loved it. It's a game that is seemingly blockhead simple, but like any simple intruction, actually empowers you to say things of surprising depth and complexity.

I have at last, years after vrylakos told me to do so, sat down to read Kim Newman's Anno Dracula. This is a horror novel set in an alternate Victorian London. The tangent point is the twenty-somethingth chapter of Dracula, when Van Helsing, Seward, et al fail to defeat Dracula and are instead sent running for the hills, terrified or dead. Dracula, triumphant, goes on to "turn" Queen Victoria and eventually marry her, becoming the Prince Consort of the British Empire. Vampires come out of the shadows and become not just accepted, but all but expected in the government and other places of power. But all is not well: as England begins a fast slide backwards into medievalism, with dissidents impaled in the cobblestone streets, Republican discontent over the vampire queen and her Carpathain Consort grows, and in the back alleys of Whitechapel a bloody killer of vampire prostitutes has become the folk hero for a revolution...

The book is extremely well researched, and readers of From Hell will recognize all the usual Ripper supporting cast, from Abberline and Netley to Thicke. This is an especially good counterpoint to Moore's work, actually, because although many characters occur in both books, the characterizations are entirely different. Anno Dracula is fifteen years old now, and was written before Moore's gloomy masterpiece.

In addition to the cast from Jack the Ripper, and virtually everyone from Dracula, the novel also uses Victorian fiction as the source for virtually every named or speaking character. The author's notes have some additional cues, but I recognized: Fu Manchu and daughter, Moriarty, Holmes, Mycroft, Col. Moran and LeStrade, Drs. Moreau and Hyde, the Invisible Man, Dr. Nikola, Quatermain, the Lone Ranger, Raffles, Rupert of Hentzau, Camilla, Orlock, Varney, Ruthven, and the Rue Morgue orangutan. To these (and my list is woefully incomplete) couple appearances by historical characters of the period like Oscar Wilde, the Elephant Man, and many, many, many more.

But is it any good? Name-dropping is pretty, but it doesn't tell a tale. In this case, image is matched with substance. Newman really gets into his groove when describing the physical manifestations of his particular brand of vampire horror: he has picked up on all the metaphors of disease in Stoker's novel (Oh yeah, Stoker. He's been put in a concentration camp with Sherlock Holmes.) and so we learn that Dracula's bloodline is diseased, foul. It allows the new vampire to change shape, which naturally everyone wants to try, but its also notoriously tricky to learn, which ends up with a lot of deformed vampires stuck in part-bat or part-wolf form before they expire in the 19th century version of a Transporter Accident. Newman does really good splatter horror.

The turns of the plot are well placed, and if we have a certain knowledge of how things will turn out in the end, it is flavored by macabre fascination and Gothic foreshadowing. Ultimately the book rejects the human/vampire dichotomy in favor of the notion that some people are just pricks no matter if they're alive or dead, and I have to say I found this rather agreeable. Conversely, Newman does not stint on the tragic so-called "immortality" of the vampire, noting rather dryly in one passage that, in fact, most vampires died earlier than they would have if they had remained "warm," whether due to insanity, self-destruction, or the savage violence of their own kind.

I read the book in two days, and parts made me laugh aloud. Those sharing the couch were kind enough not to be offended.

So I have been talking this week with a few old friends -- R and K and the delightful occamsnailfile -- about the sort of games we like to play and don't like to play. Such discussions make you wonder "what makes a game popular?" Or, in this case, unpopular, because I am talking about roleplaying Star Wars.

On the surface, Star Wars should be an amazingly popular genre to play in. It has virtually everything a diverse player group would want: supernatural powers, fantastic locations, high-flying martial arts action, dramatic storylines, cool antagonists, wierd monsters and cultures, and the gold bikini (tm). So why don't people want to play in it? What is it about the Star Wars universe that leaves potential players shrugging their shoulders and going, "En."

Common Wisdom on this question would be, "Because the prequels sucked." Indeed, you might even be able to trace this solely to Phantom Menace, because once you jump the shark on a project it is, by definition, jumped, and no amount of lipstick on the pig will unjump it. This line of argument goes that once you have recast the genre's coolest villain as a plucky youngster, reduced the mystical supernatural wisdom of the cosmos to midichlorians, alienated everyone who considers continuity important, and introduced two really interesting new characters only to kill one off and make the other inexplicably in love with said plucky youngster, you have pretty much soiled the dove beyond redemption. And this argument is hard to argue with because all those things are, in fact, true.

There's no question that Lucas' second set of films is very informed by his new status as a father; he's publicly stated he made the films for his son. And, perhaps, this is where the problem lies, since the setting has become something which is intended to appeal to adolescents or pre-adolescents. The protagonists of the classic films were grown adults; Luke may have been a whiner in the first film but his issue with not that he was too young to get involved in matters of great pitch and moment, but that he felt he was too old and had missed his shot. He wanted to grow up like his imaginary father, and dreaded growing up to be like his all-too-real uncle. Meanwhile, Han is a scoundrel who shoots first and he gets into a romantic triangle with his best (non-hairy) friend over a woman who, at first, he doesn't even like much. These are not little-kid problems. The prequels only flirt with this sort of thing, such as when Anakin slaughters first a village of sandpeople (off-camera!) and then murders an entire class of aspiring Jedi elementary school students. (Okay, that had to happen off camera. I grant you.) So maybe it is simply the childishness, the simplicity of the new Star Wars universe, that makes it unappealing to seasoned gamers.

One argument I will not swallow, however, is that Star Wars "has been done." So have plenty of other RPG settings, yet we continue to play them. How many awful systems must Lord of the Rings go through before it gets a good one? I don't know, but one day that game will exist, and when it does, there will be thousands of people playing it. D&D's Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance settings are doing just fine, thank you, after decades. There's no question many, perhaps even most, players find Star Wars dull and unworthy of time, but the reason has to be deeper than simple traffic flow on the street. After all, for all the bleach that three decades of gaming can apply to the brilliant colors of Star Wars, you have also gotten plenty of elaborations that have made the setting into one of the largest and detailed RPG settings imaginable. There are worlds, cultures, aliens, traditions, hardware, antagonists for every possible story out there, tools waiting for us to reach out and take them.

Ah, but most of those tools are from Walmart. Star Wars has expanded in a way that, to keep with our other previous example, Lord of the Rings has not. Tolkien Enterprises kept everyone else from writing anything set in Middle-earth. Even the Professor's unpublished notes edited by his son Christopher are considered "non-canon," so that games that come out based on LotR can use only that novel and the Hobbit. Everything else, including the Silmarillion, was in an unfinished state by Tolkien's death. But Lucas, perhaps out of a desire to have a ranch worthy of the Emperor, opened up the floodgates and hundreds of books are the result, not to mention comics, video games, and -- the ultimate menace -- RPG supplements. In all of this material, there are a few gems. Most of it is mind-numbingly banal. Star Wars has lost its artistic vision, and its not all because of Anakin Skywalker. It could be argued that long before Lucas dressed up as Fonzarelli and lept his Phantom Menace motorcycle over the Sarlacc, he had already fallen to the Dark Side. Lured by the wealth and fame, he closed his eyes and took his hands off the bars. The power of unchecked capitalism, of publishers eager to make a dollar and authors eager to get their hands on characters the whole world recognized, took over and drove his baby -- a universe which had entertained millions in a way unique to its generation -- right into the tank.

He, and Star Wars, may never recover. Star Wars fans believe in redemption and we try hard to show that the game is still vibrant with exciting stories. But no matter how many cool and frightening villains we craft, how many epic space battles we breathlessly guide the players through, no matter if we find thousand year gaps in the Galactic History and set our game there, right then, when none of the awful crap can get to us, we always hear the words of a little green master, who taught us so much:

Once you step upon the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

In the gaming arena, the news is that I spent about a month playing at Crucible Element, or C2 as it was known to some. I decided I didn't like it. My review of the game, posted on the now-with-less-cleansing-agent WORA (registration required), was just one of many discontented voices. I didn't let on that I was one of the founders of Crucible City (C1), mostly because I didn't want to have to defend every action I had ever made on that game or my short-lived effort at building a sequel, Worlds of Wonder. Only pomr knew, and I asked him to stay quiet. Once I had decided to leave, I outed myself, mostly because I was sitting in the lounge and people started talking about Clark as if he was not around, and I felt dirty. Anyhow, I'm not at the game anymore, and I caused pomr some flak because suddenly everyone wants to know why he didn't say something when he knew I was playing. But what can he do when some schlub decides to use the anonymous Internet to be, you know, anonymous for a change.

One nice side effect of the review was that the day it was posted, while I stood in the corner listening to players talk about how to fix the game, two old friends showed up. R & K have always been hoopy froods and, like me, they were there at the dawn of Crucible City. Naturally, we immediately started talking about what sort of game we would like to play. This is what happens when you get enthusiastic people together who are all smarter than I. In fact, CC itself was an outgrowth of Pulp Fusion MUX, which pomr and I hatched on one of his gone-but-fondly-remembered visits to sunny SoCal for burgers, a flick. and girlwatching.

In other news, I just built myself a bench for my back yard. It's pretty.

Well, it took IDW two weeks to finally tell me that I am overqualified for their editor position. This was a great disappointment to me, but since I have been on pins and needles for two weeks and a slave to my cellphone and email waiting for word, there is a certain amount of liberation involved. I have my life back.

I also ended up doing a couple of essays on the history of Beowulf in Film and in Comics for them, to be printed in their upcoming 4 issue adaptation of the Gaiman Beowulf, so it was not a total loss. Perhaps some more writing work will come out of it all. Chris Ryall and Ted were both very nice about everything, and they clearly admired my abilities, but felt that the amount of tedium in the job would be a waste of what, clearly, they decided were mad skillz.

Feh.

On the plus side, while the unwashed masses were crowding in at GenCon for the right to learn that yes, they too can shell out money in both lump sums and monthly fees for the right to play D&D again, the select few were enjoying DarrenCon 2007 in Vegas. Comics, video games, fanboy chat, good food and a happy dog. It was especially good to get to know ideaspace better, and meet new mutual friend Jack. vrylakos makes an excellent host, and it is wonderful to see him setting off for his great new job and home with his inamorata, Lauren.

check the Metahuman Activity Map

The Veil

SoonIWillBeInvincible.com

Not that I have the time to write a comic book about a liberal superhero -- because I don't -- but if I did I would blog it on Daily Kos.

I just got home. The interview seemed to go well. They were impressed with my academic cred, and the question may be not whether or not I can do the job, but whether or not they got a different resume from someone who can do it even better.

Interestingly, I found out this is a Senior Editor position which would be responsible for all IDW's monthly books, pretty much everything except the trades.

No pressure.

Should know by Monday.

I just wanted to thank everyone who chipped in with well wishes for the Big Interview tomorrow. I should hit the road around 9 to reach San Diego in plenty of time for an 11am appointment. I will bring a carload of good luck with me.

More on this story as it develops.

I've been to Comicon many times, and I remember when it was a comic convention instead of a popular culture convention. I also remember when Preview Night was for exhibitors, pros, and a very few diehard fans -- not toy collectors who had to attend Wednesday just so they could get all the exclusive toys which companies duly provide for them. I suppose this makes me sound like a crotchety old guy, but you know what they say: stick with what you're good at.

This year I went down for just one day, Thursday, playing hookie from one hour of work to do so. (I'm sleeping fine.) My reason for braving the crowds? I wasn't there to present a paper. No, this time I was there applying for a job. IDW Publishing, which specialized in film and media tie-ins and puts out the comics for Transformers, Angel, Spike, and now Doctor Who, is hiring an Editor. But they are not just a film-comic company; any firm which does collections of Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates has to have a love of the comic medium, because those things are sure not going to be making a lot of money. They also do a lot of projects written by their editorial staff; I guess one of those, "Thirty Days of Night", got picked up and is being made into a film in a sort of reverse-version of the company's normal modus operandi.

I ended up speaking with Dan Taylor, one of their editors, who recognized me from an initial email I sent about the post a couple of weeks ago. I have one thing going for me in this job: education. I figure I must be the only PhD applying, though you never know these days. Teaching freshmen how to write essays is 95% editorial work, so it's not like I don't know that side of the job. And I certainly have the comics knowledge.

Today I got a call from Editor in Chief Chris Ryall, and I have an interview Friday. I'm going to be nervous as hell until then, but maybe it will burn through me over the next couple of days and I will be able to show up calm, cool, and collected.

Because working on comics for a living would be pretty much the coolest job ever. So if any of you know these guys, write to them and tell them what a frickin genius I am.

JT

Not saying I have the time to write a Harry Potter RPG -- because I don't -- but if I had spent a couple of days working on it to the exclusion of my diss, it might look something like this.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.