An Evening With the Nocturnals

Nocturnals is a series of comic book limiteds and one-shots written and drawn by Dan Brereton. Its main characters are a vigilante team of--well, monsters--who tangle with gangsters, supernatural menaces, and an evil corporation that serves as a front for Lovecraftian invaders. If it sounds like role-playing game fodder, Green Ronin beat you to it with a 2004 sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. I also count the Nocturnals among the inspirations for my Strange New World of the City setting.

It all started with an eponymous limited series published by Malibu Comics’ Bravura imprint in 1995. It’s since been collected under the subtitle, Black Planet. It introduces the mythical Northern California town of Pacific City, and its resident extra-legal heroes, Doc Horror (a two-fisted scientist from an alternate dimension with a dark secret), and his gang. The group includes: Polychrome, a ghost; Firelion, an artificial, pyrokinetic samurai; babe from the Black Lagoon, Starfish; reptilian genetic chimera, Komodo; and undead gunslinger, Gunwitch. Also tagging along is Doc’s daughter, Evening, who likes to be called Halloween Girl, and carries creepy toys inhabited by spirits.

Their foes are the forces of the corporation Narn K and their mob allies. Narn K manufactures artificial humans and human-animal hybrids in its Monster Shop, but, more sinisterly, is a front for an invasion force. The alien Crim overran Doc Horror’s homeworld, the Black Planet, and only the Nocturnals stand in the way of them doing the same to Earth.

The adventures continue in another limited, The Dark Forever, in 2002. Halloween Girl gets her own stories in Witching Hour (1998), and the Troll Bridge one-shot in 2000. Gunwitch takes center stage in Outskirts of Doom, also in 2002. After a hiatus, the gang was back in Carnival of Beasts in 2008. Green Ronin’s Nocturnals: A Midnight Companion, isn’t just a gaming supplement, but a “bible” to the series’ characters and their world with material written by Brereton, himself.

Anyone who’s a fan of psychotronica, or just good comics, should probably spend an evening or two with getting to know the Nocturnals and the mean (and weird) streets of Pacific City.

Dungeon, American Style: The L.A. Lizard Underground

On January 29, 1934, The Los Angeles Times published a stunning report on an ancient, underground city beneath the streets of L.A. That’s enough for an American dungeon, but it gets even better. The city wasn’t alleged to have been built by Native Americans, pre-Columbian explorers, or even Atlantean survivors, but rather by Lizard People.

Cue Sleestak hissing here...

“Busy Los Angeles, although little realizing it in the hustle and bustle of modern existence, stands above a lost city of catacombs filled with incalculable treasure and imperishable records of a race of humans further advanced intellectually than the highest type of present day peoples, in the belief of G. Warren Shufelt, geophysicist mining engineer now engaged in an attempt to wrest from the lost city deep in the earth below Fort Moore Hill the secrets of the Lizard People of legendary fame in the medicine lodges of the American Indian.”
- Jean Bosquet, L.A. Times, 1934

It must be said, that Shufelt was a man with some unusual ideas even before the whole lost lizard city thing. He had designed and built an apparatus which he claimed could detect any substance by honing in on its vibrational character.. The device--which was a pendulum in a glass box, attached to a black box affixed with compasses--could not only be used to detect gold and valuable minerals, but could even track down a person using a hair sample.

Using this miraculous device, Shufelt was able to discover a subterranean complex beneath Los Angeles and running under Santa Monica Bay. When he mapped it out, the system of tunnels looked (to him) like a lizard.

In researching the mystery of the complex’s creation, Shufelt was told about a race of “Lizard People” by a Hopi Indian, Chief Little Green Leaf. Indian legends (according to Little Green Leaf) held that a “great catastrophe” had sent the Lizard folk underground 5000 years ago.

Like any good dungeon, this one’s got treasure. First off, the Lizard People kept all their knowledge on gold tablets 4 ft. long and 14 in. wide. On one of these was supposed to the “record of the origin of the human race.” They also had imperishable food supplies “of the herb variety” and a chemical solution which could cut through rock, that they had used to build the tunnels in the first place.

By the time the story broke in the L.A. Times, Shufelt and crew had been digging shafts to get into the city. Updates on the project appeared in newspapers. Then, abruptedly, the project was cancelled. By March 5, 1934, the shafts had been filled in and the contract cancelled.

Maybe, it came to an end because Shufelt was a nut, and his story a fantasy. Or maybe that’s what Enik and his boys want us think.

Roadside Distractions

When travelling beyond the City, across the roads and highways of the Strange New World, you never know what you might find...

Bring Me The Head...

A down-on-his-luck adventurer with a broke-down car is stranded at an abandoned roadside diner. He carries a strange bag, that turns out to hold the head of a Zingaran bandit hero stolen from his grave--a head that's still very much alive due to a spell cast by a bruja.  He plans to sell the head to a cabal of wealthy cultists for a substantial sum. The only problem is, he’s pursued by Zingaran revolutionaries who want it back, and Hell Syndicate thugs playing to collect on the soul-debt the bandit chief welched on.

Nightmare Town

Strange doings, in a small, isolated, desert town with a secretive sort of excavation--guarded by out of town thugs--on its outskirts. The locals are tight-lipped and scared, but what they do say is interesting.  They tell how the town has been taken over by the urbane, but menacing, Llewellyn Wail--the enormous, hairless, and almost-albino overseer of the dig--and his hired guns. They're looking for the meteor that crashed near the town about a hundred years back--in a place animals avoid, and old-timers call haunted. Townsfolk have seen weird burns on injured diggers, and heard them discuss the need for welding torches--maybe even magic ones.  Then there's the odd glow, and unnerving hum, coming from the excavation site that makes folks want to close their shutters and cover their windows at night.

A Burial Is Arranged

In a roadside oddities museum, the mummy of a Native medicine man puts out a psychic plea: "Return me to my ancestral grounds for burial and I'll show you the hidden riches of my people."  What the mummy doesn't know--and neither does anyone else--is that the road back now cuts through a stretch of badlands swallowed by a black dust elemental and crawling with zombies.

The Blood-Spattered Bride

A late-night sighting of a woman in a white dress on the side of the highway leads to the discovery of a ghost-town where a macabre wedding is in the offing.  The vampiric bride, and the rest of her undead wedding party, are waiting for the groom--and they're not too picky, as long as he's living.