Wednesday Comics: DC, March 1982 (week 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! Today, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of December 3, 1981. 

Arak Son of Thunder #7: Thomas apparently wasn't up to writing chores this month as he's "plotter," and Conway and Barr are "scripters." Colon/Rodriquez still do the art. Arak and Valda end up in Rome seeking help from Pope Hadrian. He doesn't know much and suggests they go to Byzantium. They also meet the Wandering Jew and discover a subterranean people, the descendants of the followers of Pope Ursilus (presumably a standin for Antipope Ursinus give the years. Maybe just a typo?) who are followers of the mad, Black Pope. Arak is like someone's pseudohistorical D&D campaign.

DC Comics Presents #43: This is a fun issue by Levitz and Swan. Mongul takes Superman captive as he menaces Earth with the Sun-Eater, and Jimmy Olsen summons the Legion of Super-Heroes to help--the issue reminds us of Jimmy's history with the Legion. It also creates so tension in that the last time the Legion tangled with the Sun-Eater, Ferro Lad had to sacrifice himself to do it. Wildfire does here, but "sacrifice" is much less permanent for a guy made of energy, in fact it's turned into an end of the issue joke. Swan's stiff, more normally proportioned Mongul leaves a lot to be desired.

Ghosts #110: There isn't much worthwhile in this issue. There's a weird intro that promises "The Shattering Secret of Squire Shade" and then doesn't deliver. Unless the secret is that his carriage turns into a sleigh and his horses into reindeer at midnight on (presumably) Christmas? Anyway, Levitz and Gonzales present a vaguely Christmas story where toys commanded by an electronic device take revenge on a mean store owner. Then Kelly and Trinidad expect us to side with TV Network execs (I guess) as they plot and carry out the murders of every critic in the country after one of their fellows commits suicide following bad reviews. In Kelly's second attempt he's aided by a Paris Cullins who hasn't yet developed his distinct style for the story of a family plagued over the generations by the spirit of a cruel ancestor who is given a chance to walk the Earth again by replacing his doppelganger descendants.

Justice League #200: This is an issue fondly thought of by many, and I see why, but it's not my favorite of this Conway run. It does have an all-star cast of artists, though: Perez, Broderick, Kane, Infantino, Bolland, and Kubert. It riffs off the Appellaxian invasion from the origins of the JLA but adds the twist of a portion of the story where the newer League members must fight the original ones. It's got that hero vs. hero action, teams splitting up--all the classic superhero tropes.

Weird War Tales #109: This issue has a great cover to me. Kanigher replaces DeMatteis on the Creature Commandos and his characterization and dialogue is more consistent with the teams' origins, but at least this first part of the story has a bit less of the "war is hell" aspect of Dematteis' yarns, and he uses a lot more bombastic, Marvel style alliteration. Spiegle's art is probably more consistent with better visual storytelling than what we've got previously, but he doesn't really have a flair for monsters. Kashdan and Zamora follow-up the Commandos with the story of robots used as weapons in futuristic war, who wind up manipulating humans into staying in a continuous state of war to prolong their existence.

Kanigher and Hall/Celardo present an unusual War That Time Forgot tale by moving Circe to Dinosaur Island and having her turn hapless G.I.s into dinosaurs. Finally, Kanigher and Randall present a short, and obvious story about WWI soldiers fighting in a graveyard and dying in the same open grave.

Wonder Woman #289: True to form for Thomas, this issue re-introduces the Golden Age villain Dr. Psycho (though maybe we saw him briefly the issue before). This creates a bit of a continuity glitch, as Psycho had a few appearances in the 60s, starting in the nebulous period between the Golden Age and Silver Age continuity. These have been retroactively deemed appearances of this Dr. Psycho, but the original Who's Who lists this as his modern first appearance. Anyway, Psycho siphons ectoplasm from Steve Trevor and becomes Captain Wonder. The misogynist villain who is literally kind of a mental parasite is rife for modern use, and I think Grant Morrison made good use of him in this context in Wonder Woman Earth-One. Anyway, Silver Swan also makes an appearance at the end of this issue, promising an even bigger conflict next month.

The Huntress backup by Levitz and Staton sees her battling the Crime Lord, who's a crime boss really into the SCA--or at least wearing armor and carrying Medieval weapons.

Solar Wars: The Hutt Crime Family

The Hutt crime family was one of the most powerful criminal organizations of the Imperial era. Based on Mars, its reach extended throughout the system, owing to its connections to Nar Shadaa in the Jovian Trojans. It's most famous boss was Jaba, often called "Jaba the Hutt," who took control after a gang war in 3244. During Jaba's reign, the Hutt family was involved in smuggling, piracy, drug and weapons trafficking, and the slave trade, and well as various forms of cybercrime. 

Jaba's base of operations, his so-called Palace, was a former monastery of the Bomar sect, located in the Martian desert. Jaba's palace was in really a fortress, guarded by a compliment of his soldiers and any number of bounty hunters and contract killers vying for employment. Jaba was rumored to keep a unique, genetically engineered creature called "the Rancor" in a pit beneath the palace that he used to dispose of those that had displeased him.

This is a follow-up to this post.

Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 4)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around November 26, 1981. 

Action Comics #528: Wolfman and Swan bring back Brainiac (previously reformed by Superman's actions). He's arrived to get Superman's help to stop a Death Star-looking doomsday device he built in his villainous days, which is now headed for Earth. No disrespect to Swan, but as a kid reading comics in the 80s, the Buckler cover was more enticing than the Swan interiors.

Adventure Comics #490: With this issue, we say good-bye to Adventure Comics in this format and to Dial-H for Hero as its own series. While I can't say I'm super enamored of the concept, it wasn't really done any favors by the very episodic nature of its stories (even in an era of more "done in one.") While there was a sort of ongoing background plot with a shadowy Big Bad, that was never really given the attention it needed.

Anyway, this final issue has got some interesting designs but also some of the worst looking art in places. A villain called the Abyss transports our heroes to some weird worlds like something out of 70s Marvel but cycling through different super-identities is a winning strategy. At least in the story--not for comic sales.

All-Star Squadron #6: Thomas and Buckler continued travails of the All-Stars within days of the Attack on Pearl Harbor. They rescue Hawkgirl from sacrifice by the Feathered Serpent, but he still manages to gain supernatural power over people with "pure" Native American ancestry and decides to revive an empire. He even starts pushing around his Nazi Allies. Eventually, our heroes defeat him, and he's revealed to be a German in redface. His power is dissipated, and everyone goes back to normal. The JSAers who intended to give up their costumed identities and enlist are confident they are living the homefront in good hands with these new heroes.

Detective Comics #511: Bruce is convinced there's something more to Reeves' colossal political blunder that cost him the election, and he's right. Reeves finds out himself that the architect of his downfall was Rupert Thorne. Meanwhile, Dick decides to go back to college. Then, Batman tangles with another one-off Conway villain: the illusion producing Mirage.

New Adventures of Superboy #26: Inventor Phineas Potter wants to help Clark out, so he doses him without his knowledge with a spray that makes him irresistible to women, which complicates his activities as Superboy. There's also a gang convinced the inventor gave Clark some pills to make him bullet proof. It all works out in the end, of course. In the backup by Rozakis and Delbo, Superboy goes 4 years into the past (1962, specifically) to do research for a school paper on a space flight and sees his younger self thwarting saboteurs in an incident he no longer remembers. But why not?

Unexpected #219: This issue feels like left over Time Warp material or maybe a test run at a new sci-fi anthology. Helfer and Estrada have the cover story maybe inspired by the Outer Limits episode "The Invaders." Tiny aliens are pursued by very early animals including cockroaches and have the misfortune of trying to hide in a roach motel which gets tossed into a pile of garbage and burned. Mayer and Matucino follow it up with a convulted sci-fi yarn about a space traveler who hitches on to a ship that is unfortunately run by long-lived beings. He ages, imprisoned there, and the alien captain plans to use the human as a patsy for his crimes, but ultimately, he somehow gets the girl and immortality. 

Kashdan and von Eeden present the story of a feral human child raised by aliens who gets revenge on the man who killed her parents. Cohn and Giffen provide the only non-sci-fi story in the group about the devil trying to sell prosperity to a town for a price--it's the same deal he gives Nazi Germany.

Unknown Soldier #260: A crew mutinies and takes a Q-boat into a fjord to surrender to the Germans. The Soldier goes in disguised as a ruthless German commander to shock the crew into not turning traitor. Turns out those boys were just tired and want out of the war, so once the real Nazis are dispatched, Unknown Soldier is willing to say they were killed in action and let them go. Such is the war as portrayed by Haney and Ayers/Talaoc.

In the backup, we get Enemy Ace by Kanigher and Severin. A general decides von Hammer is too important to the German war effort to let him lead his squadron anymore, so they send in a ringer, but Hans ain't having it. He stills a plane to go and join his men.

World's Finest Comics #276: Barr pens the first two stories this issue. Dr. Double X breaks out of Gotham and tangles with both Superman and Batman, putting Batman in a death trap where Superman might inadvertently cause his death. Then, Oliver Queen is caught in a prison riot thanks to a loss of power. He has to improvise a bow and arrow to keep the assassin Slingshot from killing an ex-gang boss. 

In the Zatana story by Kupperberg and Speigle, a trick gone wrong leads to her manager being nabbed by demons. Zatanna must cross through the portal into the demonic realm and encounters and evil version of herself. Rozakis' and Infantino's Hawkman pines for his missing wife, feels guilty about flirtation with Mavis, then here's from birds that something is weird with the weather. Weather Wizard is the cause. The Captain Marvel (really Marvel Family) story by Bridwell and Newton has the Marvels trying to find off invaders from another dimension and needing help from some aging vets--who somehow get help from dead comrades in arms. 

Across the Solar System

This is a follow-up to this post about a hard(er) science fiction Star Wars confined to the Solar System.

Lando Calrissian reportedly became Baron-Administrator of Bespin, the largest cloud city and mining facility in the atmosphere of Saturn, after winning a high-stakes a card game. Largely Calrissian ignored the mining operation (except to collect his skim of corporate profits), instead focusing on running the entertainment facilities where the workers spent their credits.

The capital of the Solar Empire and largest city in the system was Coruscant, a Bishop Ring at Earth-Luna L4. 

The Kaminoans of Europa were known for their expertise in cloning and genetic engineering. Their techniques were disapproved of in the Republic and eventually outlawed under the Empire.

The Sand People of Mars represented a remnant of the first, genetically-engineered colonial population. They were hostile to later, post-complete terraforming colonists.

Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 3)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around November 19, 1981.

Brave & the Bold #182: Kraar and Infantino team-up Batman and the Riddler to follow the clues and find kidnapped mystery novelist Hugh Creighton. Well, Batman wants to find the novelist; the Riddler wants to take down the crook who's jacking his style. Turns out Creighton is behind it all, and wants revenge on Batman who he feels upstaged him. He would have gotten away with it, too, if the Riddler hadn't saved Batman from the deathtrap.

In the Nemesis backup, the hitman Greyfox manages track down Nemesis through his helicopter and lays a trap.

Legion of Super-Heroes #283: Levitz comes on board as writer with Broderick on art, and things immediately get a little better. The Legion must stop a band of organleggers from making off with organs from Medicus One, but doing that is easier than defeating the life-energy-sucking monster they leave behind. Luckily, Blok isn't organic life.

Green Lantern #149: Jordan returns to Oa and remains adamant he's going to quit the Corps after this business on Ungara, even though Katma Tui and Arisia try to talk him out of it. Meanwhile, Gold Face is beat up by his former flunkie who is revealed as the Qwardian St'nlli. The Qwardian then goes looking for Green Lantern.

On Ungara, the impending ice age proves beyond Jordan's ability to stop until Arisia arrives to lend a hand. Just as they seem to have accomplished the task with a giant mirror, St'nlli attacks.

House of Mystery #301: In the opener by Mishkin and Duursema, a sheriff rescues a woman from the surf who wears antiquated clothes and has the speech patterns to match. Is she a timelost survivor of the lost colony of Roanoke? Anyway, they eventually are going to get married, but strangers show up, reveal the story of her being from the lost colony to be a lie, and take her away. But then maybe that isn't true? My question is: Is this horror? Then there's a short by O'Flynn and Giffen/Smith about a woman deciding she must kill her vampire lover.

Cavalieri and von Eeden find mutant, thousand-legged cats to be the solution to (human) overpopulation, while Mishkin/Cohn and Rubeny suggest a deal with the Devil (who really does live inside the Earth) is the solution to the energy crisis--at least for a while. Finally, a man in need of money for his wife's cancer treatment agrees to help an alien reporter find a deadly lifeform on earth, which winds up being his wife's tumor cells.

Phantom Zone #2: Gerber and Colan/DeZuniga continue to add to the Phantom Zone mythology. The Kryptonian criminals are out, while Superman and Quex-Ul are stuck in the Zone. The criminals throw the JLA satellite out of orbit, steal Green Lantern's power battery, and almost start a nuclear war. Supergirl battles them and is defeated. Batman goes to the Fortress of Solitude, but Zod has already destroyed the Phantom Zone projector. Wonder Woman gets the full story of what happened from Nam-Ek.

Meanwhile, Mon-El tells Superman there are levels to the Zone and maybe a way out. Superman and Quex-El are going to try and find it.

Sgt. Rock #361: Kanigher and Redondo bring the feels (as the kids say) with Rock vowing to get a gravely injured lieutenant to the town of St. Antoine alive. He does it, but barely. The lieutenant lives long enough to tell the Italian war orphan he had been planning to meet that he and his wife are adopting her. He gives her a picture of her new mother and sends her on her way before dying.   

Tim Truman writes and illustrates the story of an old Apache renegade pitting himself against a young Apache working as a scout for the cavalry. Mandrake delivers a futuristic tale of a cyborg whose plans of conquest are foiled by the aging of his still-biologic organs. Randall finishes things off with a story of samurai in feudal Japan.

Superman Family #215: Pasko and Mortimer have Supergirl tangling with Toxus, a polluting villain from the future. She's aided by the Supergirl from 500,000 years in the future, who explains two villains have been released and switched in time. The Supergirls switch time periods themselves to tackle the misplaced villains but have trouble adjusting to the different eras. Mr. and Mrs. Superman finally resolve the Insect Queen storyline by getting the scarab away from Lana and thwarting the ultra-ant (Ultra-Humanite in an ant body). In the Private Life of Clark Kent, the ace reporter discovers that Frank, the doorman at his apartment house, is really Franklin Pierce Jackson, an old star from baseball's Negro Leagues, and he gets him to coach some kids. 

Lois Lane finds a billionaire who has been missing for almost seven years and wants stay missing. She winds up helping thwart a relative who stands to inherit his money and wants the ex-billionaire dead. Finally, Jimmy Olsen investigates a charity with mob ties--and grows some self-respect and breaks up with Lucy Lane once and for all.

Warlord #54: I detailed the main story in this issue here. The Levitz/Yeates Dragonsword story concludes with Thiron appearing to be near defeat by the Emperor Quisel, but then the sword, man, and dragon become one and he transforms into a dragon man. He burns Quisel to ash, rebuffs the offers made to him by the two calculating mages that wouldn't help. Bidding goodbye to Dsyillus whose descendants he claims will inherit the land, he flies off into comic book limbo.

The Ruined Temple [Broken Compass]

We continued our Broken Compass game last night, "The Quest for the Serpent Throne" with the adventurers facing a number of jungle pulp adventure perils. First, their path was blocked by rapids on a tributary of the Hooghly. Sam Stone managed to make it across but hardly unscathed, (he took a spill and acquired the Bleeding Feeling.) so the rest of the party decided to find a way around. While they were separated, Sam was taken captive by a jungle tribe. There others were too once they were reunited.

After the Professor spoke to the tribe's chief, the chief sent them to a ruined Naga Temple. There they read ancient inscriptions that revealed the very items they sought could be used to fulfill a ritual brining the return of the Naga's from the Underworld.

Then they had a run in with a giant cobra. The managed to hide in the temple and block the door until the snake went away.

TO BE CONTINUED

Still getting to know the system, so I made a couple of missteps in running this session. The giant cobra was either an Enemy if you fought it or a Danger if you tried to run away. In either case, the difficulty level was such that the character was likely to fail. But a fail in Broken Compass doesn't mean you don't succeed in what you were trying to do, it just means you had to rely on Luck (and use some Luck Points) to do it. The player's were sort of treating Luck like Hit Points and wanting to be too granular with their actions (trying to do one thing to set up something else), when mostly, the scene seemed to be constructed to be an obstacle that made player's use up some Luck to get by. I presented the situation as one they had to succeed at to get through, but really the players were always likely to get through, it was just a question of how much Luck they lost.

The Space War

Here's the idea inspired by Andor: It's the 33rd Century and the solar system is a powder keg ready to blow. Twenty years ago, a fascist regime toppled the ailing Solar Republic to establish the Empire. But on the colony worlds and orbital habitats resistance to the new government was never completely crushed. If these groups can get organized, there will be a full-scale rebellion.

Take the grittier turn on the Star Wars universe of Andor and Rogue One, filter it through The Expanse (with a bit more advance technology like terraforming, cloning, and AI) and set it all in the 33rd Century (just like Lucas did his original treatment for The Star Wars) and you've got a less pulp and perhaps more cyberpunk version of my Pulp Star Wars setting.

There would be no nonhumans (well, no alien species, perhaps robots or droids are still common--and clones), no jedi, and fewer worlds. But drawing on the dark shadows of the Star Wars universe, I think would translate pretty well.

Weird Revisited: Aliens to Know...and Fear

I keep thinking I'm going to stat these guys, but I haven't got around to it yet, so I figured it was time to share. I don't know the original artist or source, but this should prove a handy reference for "real world" close encounters. You can't tell the players without a scorecard.

1. Roswell, 1947. As described by Beverly Bean, who reportedly had the bodies described to her by her father who had guarded them: "He said they were smaller than a normal man--about four feet--and had much larger heads than us, with slanted eyes, and that the bodies looked yellowish, a bit Asian-looking."
2. Valensole, 1965. Maurice Masse a French "agriculturalist" saw a spaceship and these guys
3. Villa Santina, 1947. An Italian artist was able to sketch his close encounter.
4. Salzburg, 1957. A soldier in the U.S. Army supposedly described these guys to a Canadian newspaper.
5. California, 1952. Orthon of Venus gave a message to George Adamski about nuclear energy.
6. São Francisco de Sales, 1957. Antonio Vilas Boas was abducted by these smartly uniformed guys who took him to have sex with an alien woman.
7. Voronezh, 1989. Robotic alien shows up in Russia to hassle teenagers as witnesses look on.
8. Aveley, 1974. Weird aliens abduct a whole family.
9. Pascagoula, 1973. Carrot alien. Only in Mississippi.
10. Caracas, 1954. He had a sphere motif going on.
11. Greensburg, 1973. Bigfoot-UFO team-up.
12. Kelly, 1955. Better known as the Hopkinsville Goblin Case--which I have statted.
13. And the Chupacabra needs no introduction.

Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around November 12, 1981.

Batman #344: Conway, Colan and Janson bring the Poison Ivy and Arthur Reeves, mayoral candidate, subplots to a conclusion, plus reintroduce Vicki Vale (who hadn't appeared in a canonical appearance since 1963 but had shown up in a 1977 appearance that was retconned by this issue). Ivy gets control of Wayne Enterprises, but Batman starts waging psychological warfare by essentially stalking her with a plan to get her to break and make a confession, but instead she turns her assistant into a plant monster and has him attack. Robin shows up to help Batman and Ivy is apprehended. The assistant spills the plot to the cops. Meanwhile, Reeves reveals his evidence Batman is really a mobster, but a reporter quickly shows the evidence to be fake. Notably, this issue seems to directly follow last month's Detective Comics. While events in the other title have been mentioned before, this seems to be setting up a tighter continuity.

Flash #305: Mishkin and Cohn manage to give the Mirror Master a bit of tragedy. He's fallen in love with an Atlantean scientist who has been trapped in a mirror for thousands of years. Using his knowledge of the Flash, he launches an elaborate plan that will end up with the Flash liberating her by taking her place. It works well until the very end, where Flash destroys the mirror, thwarting the plan and trapping the woman presumably forever.

We get a new Dr. Fate backup from Pasko and Giffen and Mahlstedt. At the Boston Museum of Natural History, cultists have released the Lord of Chaos, Totec. When Fate and Totec fight they are pretty evenly matched, but then Inza shows up just in time to be taken hostage. Totec captures Fate too then starts the final summoning that will cause the fifth massive extinction event on Earth.

G.I. Combat #238: In Kanigher's and Glanzman's first Haunted Tank story, the crew is supposed to be part of a group opening up another front to take the pressure off the Soviets, but they wind up having to go in solo. They meet kids being trained to fight Nazis and ride a log down a flume to stop the kids' parents from getting executed. Why don't any World War II films show us the real war like these Haunted Tank comics. In their second outing, they are riding a raft down river (tank and all) picking up allied soldiers scattered in the drop near Eindoven. They wind up being carried out to sea and having a tank on a raft versus U-boat battle.

The other stories include one of the usual O.S.S peices. Then there's a short about a guy who intends to run in the next Olympics but makes his last run on a Pacific Island dropping a grenade in a Japanese pillbox. Finally (and really, it's been enough), there's a story of an American POW secretly kept captive by a Japanese officer following the war who feeds squirrels then makes his escape when the squirrels attack the Japanese officer looking for food.

Jonah Hex #57: Fleisher takes another dive into Hex's past. Hiding into a town, Hex saves an older woman from some thugs in a saloon, and it is revealed that she is his mother. She let's Jonah spend the night at her nearly bare, rat-infested apartment, and he recalls when she left him when he was a boy, running off with a traveling salesman and leaving Jonah with his abusive, alcoholic father. Near dawn, he gets up and goes to find the gambler his mother owes money to and guns down the man and his henchmen. Hex rides out of town echoing to his mother her last broken promise to him as a boy: "be back again real soon."

The El Diablo backup is a good one. El Diablo relentless pursues a group robbers and murderers into the desert, refusing to let them leave or even turn back. They turn on each other, then on him and in the end, they are all dead. El Diablo explains to the last one that the desert has become their Hell where they will stay for all eternity.

New Teen Titans #16: Wolfman and Perez give Kory a boyfriend, Frank Crandall, but he's really an agent working for a rogue HIVE leader who's looking to discover the Titans' secrets. The rest of the team discovers the truth, but before they can tell Starfire, Frank is killed by his boss. Starfire goes on a rampage but is stopped by her teammates from murdering the HIVE guy. He's later killed by his peers for taking insanctioned action.

Also, this issue we get a preview of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew by Thomas/Conway and Shaw/Andru. Superman is stopping a meteor and winds up being transported to the furry animal comics universe of Earth-C. The meteor winds up giving a number of the inhabitants super-powers, including Captain Carrot. Superman and Captain Carrot team-up to stop a plot to use a de-evolution ray on the United Nature Building in Gnu York. Yes, we are in for a lot of those sorts of puns.

Secrets of Haunted House #46: Enjoy this title while you can because this is the penultimate issue.  Harris and Sutton start us off with what might be a superhero origin. I man is summoned by his father who reveals he's a wizard and passes his power to his sun via a sweet magical bandolier and talisman. He manages to defeat some bad guys and save his girlfriend. Next up, Sciacca and Bernard have a guy getting rich after he buys a newspaper from the future from a strange curio shop. He should have read beyond the final section, though, because the paper also contained his obituary! Kanigher and Vicatan have a woman on a trip to Egypt manipulated by an ancient cult who believes her to be the reincarnation of a queen. Her spirit gets a bit of revenge though, as she causes the cult leader who killed her to be killed to serve her in all eternity.

Then there's "Star-Trakker" by Timmons and Ditko where an android sent to collect samples of alien life crashes on Earth in a swamp instead and starts capturing and killing humans fulfill its function. A government operative named Stone is sent out to disable the creature and eliminate any witnesses. In the end, he's revealed to be yet another android.

Superman #368: Vlaatu (really Superman in deep disguise) leaves the Revengers to head out on his mission, reverting to his true form and Superman thought process as he nears Earth. But the Revengers suspecting Vlaatu's identity have planted a hypnotic suggestion making him believe he is actually a Super-droid sent destroy Superman. He plans a violent gesture to draw is quarry out and settles on killing Lois Lane! Lois, playing a hunch, throws herself off a cliff and sees her in peril breaks the Revengers' hold on Supes' mind. He flies back to the Revenger planetary base and puts mist around it, so if they leave, they will get amnesia and forget their hatred of Superman. Convenient!

We also get another Superman 2020 story. It's New Year's Eve and the flying, domed city of New Metropolis is going to drop like the Time Square ball. When it lands, everyone appears dead! It turns out terrorists unleashed a deadly plague, but Superman managed to introduce a counteragent that put everyone into suspended animation temporarily. He's got to race against time to stop the terrorists and find a cure.

Ascending to Yai

 Our Land of Azurth 5e campaign continued last night with the party perhaps entering into Yai from a cave and finding themselves in a storage room. A higher tech storage room of on par with some other strange places they've been in the past, but essentially a storage room. 

The cantrip Thaumaturgy came in handy this adventure as it allowed them to open doors they didn't possess the color-coded key card to open, and to inadvertent free two grateful shedu. The shedu, in return warned them of a brain-eating monster lurking about and suggested this structure had once moved through higher dimensions in some fashion. The shedu also revealed they had been subsisting on a store of twinkies.

They road a lift between levels and found mostly storage, but did encounter a robotic watchman who they were able to successfully talk with via magic. He didn't tell them anything they found useful, however. Leaving a storage area, they found themselves in an atrium on a walkway overlooking an expansive garden, gone wild with neglect below. On the walkway, they also ran into an old man.

He said his name was now "the Archivist," and he had once lived in Yai of which this was a sublayer. He took the party for hallucinations, at first. He did note they looked vaguely familiar. He was a foundling, taken in by the people of Yai and so had always been something apart from them. He took this job to catalog their history, but the people of Yai were now only concerned with their entertainments, not their past. He seldom had any contact with them now.

Waylon asked the old man if he had seen any of the Azurth books. The old man thought that rang a bell and said he would go look. He asked the party to wait in the lounge for his return and pointed them the way.

Not Available in Any Galaxy

 In the G+ days of 2016, I imagined what some Osprey Books Star Wars entries would look like. Here they are, rescued from the depths of tumblr:

Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! Today, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of November 5, 1981. 

Arak Son of Thunder #6: Thomas and Colon/Rodriquez have Arak presenting his accusations against Angelique and her brother to Charlemagne, but the emperor and his paladins are skeptical. Ultimately, Charlemagne orders Arak seized so the joust can continue, but the warrior defeats the French guards and unhorses Angelique's brother, by flipping him off his horse by his lance! The White Cathayan is killed by his horse's hooves, so Angelique summons up a demon and makes good her escape. Everybody feels bad about not believing Arak then, and the Emperor send him off to try to rescue Maligigi. Valda chooses to go with him.

Crossing the Alps, they encounter a frozen elephant and troops which Valda thinks is a lost remnant of Hannibal's army, then they seek shelter in a handy hut. Too handy as it turns out, as it's a trap set by vampires to waylay travelers. Our heroes win the day, with Arak impaling a vampiress on the elephant's tusk!

DC Comics Presents #42: Levitz and Norvick bring in the Unknown Soldier for an unusual team-up. After dispelling a cloud of radioactive gas from about a nuclear test site, Superman starting musing about war. In his Clark Kent identity, he pitches a story about the causes of war to Perry White, but White thinks he sounds more philosophical than journalistic. A mysterious soldier enters the office and gives Clark a message for Superman but leaves quickly before they can ask any questions. The message sends Superman following a trail of clues to a rogue military base in the Arctic that is planning to cause nuclear armageddon, he's helped along the way by mysterious military officers of various sorts. He comes to suspect they are the Unknown Soldier, but he never finds out for certain. With the plot foiled, he visits the Unknown Soldiers supposed tomb to thank him, unaware that the Unknown Soldier watches from the shadows.

Ghosts #109: The first story here is a fantasy tale by Cohn/Mishkin and Zamora where a warrior continues his fathers' quest to slay an avatar of death. He succeeds but finds death far more capricious and prevalent in a post-personification world like our own. Next, Kashdan and Bender have an escaped convict being offered a way out of the country by taking an elixir to place in in near suspended animation, so he appears dead. In the end he's the hapless patsy of a vampire. Kashdan has another one (with Ayers this time) that harkens back to the sort of story this title used to have a lot of where a scuba-diving graduate assistant causes his boss' death at in the jaws of an orca so he can take credit for an archeological find. The professor's spirit gets revenge later by causing the skeletal jaws of the orca, on display at a museum, to fall and kill the guy. Finally, Jones and Carillo present an EC-style story of a nebbish creep who falls for woman he sees in a bar, but when he discovers she's with another guy plots to frame his rival for the murder of his nagging wife. Instead, he accidentally frames to woman he's pining for. No ghost in that one at all!

Justice League #199: The Lord of Time's needlessly complicated plan to acquire antimatter from the past is well underway. The partial amnesiac JLAers are making their way to the Grand Canyon with their DC Western character escorts. The Lord of Time has also sent a group of robots dressed as cowboys into the past to hedge his bets. 

As they approach the Grand Canyon, the League members start remembering more and more. GL's ring warns him the approaching antimatter is dangerous. The robots try to keep them on track, but to no avail. The Old West heroes take out the robot while the League members use their powers in a pretty implausible way to make the antimatter explode before it enters the atmosphere. They return to their own time (1981, specifically) to find Superman survived the Lord's krypton trap and has defeated the bad guy.

Weird War Tales #108: The Creature Commandos (whose logo is now bigger than the comic's title on the cover) and G.I. Robot! Sandwiched in between is this odd story "Jasper Pepperdyne: Defender of Space and Time" that reads like a "back door pilot" maybe and isn't really a war story, weird or otherwise. Instead, it's about a Victorian gentleman in his Victorian rocket than rescues the crew of a space shuttle in distress and regales them with tales of his adventures. It's by Barr and has great art by Garcia-Lopez.

G.I. Robot by Kanigher and Broderick has JAKE and Coker in the Pacific trying to help some local resistance fighters against the Japanese. The robot seems to develop a cross on the attractive woman leading the rebels, but Coker constantly dismisses the evidence because "robots don't have hearts." DeMatteis and Hall/Celardo present the best Creature Commando story to date with Lucky in the hospital after a suicide attempt. The reason (as we find out in a flashback) is that the Commandos had allowed themselves to get captured so they infiltrate a camp and get close to a French scientist being held by the Germans who want her to synthesize a new nerve agent. When the Commandos make their escape, Lucky is forced to kill the scientist who had been kind of him with his bare hands. As he recuperates, the other "monsters" in his unit are uncharacteristically compassionate, showing new or perhaps developing characterization for them.

Wonder Woman #288: The new creative team of Thomas and Colan/Tanghal takes over. Steve Trevor is still in the hospital in bad shape after getting a brain injury in last month's preview. (Thomas makes sure we know this is the second Trevor Diana has known and is actually from an alternate universe, defiantly refusing to let readers quietly forget those shenanigans, which I suspect Conway had intended.) A new superhuman appears on the scene, the beautiful Silver Swan, who is taken for a hero, but Wonder Woman suspects she is shady, and Wonder Woman's instincts are correct. In fact, Silver Swan has been stalking Wonder Woman at the behest of Mars, even moving into an apartment with Diana Prince and Etta Candy in her secret ID of Helen Alexandros. Silver Swan tries to kill Wonder Woman as she goes to return a brief case with secrets to General Darnell but holds off when there are witnesses and pretends to be a hero.

Meanwhile, Dr. Psycho comes to visit Steve Trevor. I'm sure that will fine.

In the digest format, Best of DC #21 is one that I have a lot of nostalgia for as a kid. My brother and I read it and re-read it until it got dog-eared. It reprints "The Untold Origin of the Justice Society" from the DC Special #29 (1977).