Captain America Throws His Mighty Shield

I managed to pull myself away from SDCC to see Captain America: The First Avenger while I was out there.  My verdict: Best superhero film of the year.  It doesn't really do anything surprising, but it does what you expect it to do very well.

The film follows familiar lines, as telegraphed by the trailer.  "The formula that made a man out of Steve Rogers!'  with bits from the Ultimate Universe and the 1991 limited series The Adventures of Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty.  A few new twists have Bucky being the senior partner in their duo (at first) and Cap as a war bonds sales performer before becoming a real soldier.

The World War II period is pretty well evoked (at least for a film like this)--it was certainly more convincing that X-Men: First Class' 1960s.  True, its Hydra seemed less Nazi and more Cobra at times (in fact, Nazis seemed to have been oddly verboten in this WWII film), but by the time they're playing a major role, the story was moving along too fast for me to care.

This film had to carry the weight of all Marvel references from the previous films to get them to the upcoming Avengers movie.  It could have easily collapsed under their weight, but the script handles the cosmic cube, the Howling Mad Commandos (if not in name), and Howard (father of Tony) Stark as if they were all there naturally and not as fan service.  As always, stay through the credits for the inevitable link to the next film.

After the (slight) dissappointment (or maybe just weariness of the genre) with Thor, The First Avenger has renewed my excitement to see the team get together.

SDCC 2011: The Curtain Falls

This is my buddy Brandon in the shot he orchestrated to commemorate his Comic Con experience.  It wasn't easy to get--mainly because the ladies got a lot of attention and were difficult to get to.

I managed to make it over to the few gaming related booths (Chessex and Steve Jackson Games for rpgs).  There was also a "Cthulhu Library" booth right next to SJG which had Lovecraftian merchandise of all sorts, including games.  I picked up Kenneth Hite's Bookhounds of London, and let myself get talked into a purchase of Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity on the grounds that the hardcover limited edition is hard to come by.  This delving into Yog-Sothothery led to the stunning revelation that Brandon had never heard of Cthulhu or HPL!

Needing to patch this gap in his geek education, I encouraged Brandon to buy one of Penguin's Lovecraft collections.  Later this afforded me the opportunity to mock him, by dramatizing his discovering HPL for the first time.  He took a picture of it:

Our luck with panels wasn't very good (all the ones we wanted to attend were had too long lines), but we did get into the Immortal panel by inadvertently breaking in line.  After hearing Tarsem Singh talk about his artistic goals, and seeing more footage from the film.  I'm a bit more interested in this than I was before.

That's the Con highlights.  It was interesting comparing this year to last.  The crowds seemed less on Thursday and Friday than the previous year, and the convention floor seemed less busy, whereas the panels seemed moreso. One thing that doesn't change is that it remains quite a spectacle.  Where else can you see four slave-girl Leias crossing the street in a loose approximation of the Beatles on Abbey Road?  Alas, I was too slow to photograph that bit of quintessential con, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

Comic Con-fidential

I'm in San Deigo for Comic Con International, and again this year, the first bit of excitement centers around getting my pass.  This time, I get a text from a man who identifies himself as "Aric" who wants me to meet him in the lobby of a hotel in the gaslamp district.  After I final locate the hotel in question (which was much harder than it should have been owing to hotels and streets with almost identical names) Aric passes on the badges for myself and my friend Brandon (who always arranges these exchanges that somehow get left to me to carry out) marking us as "Professional Guests" (which amuses me to think we've somehow elevated the art of "guesting" to a degree as to actually be professional at it) and our oversized and gaudy souvenir bags that are the mark of SDCC attendance.

I thank Aric and make my way over to the covention through the crowds--and in the shadow of a giant inflatable Smurf.  Beyond that, the overwhelming message of the San Deigo streets is that I shoud play this Arkham City game because billboards are everywhere, including on the backs of moving vehicles.

Anyway, inside the convention center its the usual mixture of fairies, steampunks, and cardboard Daleks--though my impression so far is that there are fewer costumes than last year.  Ignoring the cosplay, I buy myself an $8 personal pizza and $4 bottled water and set out to do some shopping.  Several major genre book publishers are there, but they mostly disappoint me by serving up a plate of Star Wars or video game tie-in novels or fantasy with smoldering covers hinting at romance undertones.

I do see that The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is out, though I resist buying one at that momemt.  Also Grant Morrison's history of/meditation on comics Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human is out, so that I quickly download it to my Kindle.  I've only read a couple of chapters, but its great. Morrison's insights into the iconic comic characters are at once exactly what everybody says, but at the same time delivered in such a way as to seem fresh and insightful.  Maybe I'll do a fuller review at some point.

Back at the Con, Heavy Metal tempts me with the latest of Jodorowsky's and Mannara's Borgia and 2000AD woos me with a Nemesis the Warlock collection, but both lose me to the wonder of an almost 3 foot long shark swimming stately through the air above our heads, its tail moving sinuously as it goes.

I'm told these are called "Air Swimmers" amd will soon be available at a toy store near you.

After that I try to go to a Batman panel.  Too long a line.  I don't even try A Game of Thrones as its line already stretches into infinite.

Maybe I'll have more patience for standing in line on Day 2...

A Map of Reality I Drew While I was Waiting...

...for my car to get repaired.

It's a bit incomplete--and not up to the standards of the illustration my posts usually have--but it summarizes what I've discovered so far about the multiverse of the Strange New World.

For instance, the Positive Energy Plane is just the beginning of the Prime Material--or the etheric echo of that beginning.  The Negative Energy Plane is the other bookend.

The highest Heaven is the domain of the Creator(s).  Most dead don't make it to the highest Heaven but maybe some lesser "heavenly" realm--like maybe the Elysian Fields (also called Summerland or the Fiddler's Green).  It's the counter-plane to the Wasteland, embodying "hope."  There are more of these heavenly realms.

At the "bottom" of reality is the Pit, the Abyss.  It's the place that fell the farthest in the Fall.  The place of beings with no place in creation who want nothing more than to tear it all down--the demons.  "Circling the drain" of the Pit, falling into it at different velocities, are hellish realms of various sorts.  Hell (appropriately) where the fallen angels hope to stage a coup in creation and then forestall its slide into the Pit.  Closer to the ultimate nullity are the Wasteland and the grim Black Iron Prison (which I left off the my map!) where the odious Deodands (named, interestingly, for an archaic legal term for a thing "forfeit onto God for causing a death") imprison, punish, and re-educate souls caged in their Escher maze prison hell.

Between Heaven and the Pit are planes more neutral to "good" and "evil"--or more accurately, they're places where the struggle between angels and demons is seen as beside the point.  The denizens of Machina (polyhedral nanomachines, forming the distributive conscious of their Singular god(dess), and other worshippers like the Mantid Warrior-Nuns) believe that only absolute order can restore creation to an unfallen state.  In constrast the formless, fluid intelligences of the Gyre (who often send technicolor clowns as their emissaries) believe that endless change is the only hope to recreate the conditions of the original Singularity of All and lead to the multiverse's reunion with the Godhead--or at least that's one of their myriad ideas.

Warlord Wednesday: The Path Branches Ahead

Though we’re not quite at that point yet, there are some branches ahead in the trail, Warlord fans. Issue #71 is the last that bears the name of the series’ creator Mike Grell--though as I’ve noted before, since issue #53 it was actually written in part or in whole by Grell’s then wife Sharon Wright. Given that Grell returns to the character in a 1992 mini-series and then in a 16 issue on-going in 2009 (which brings an end of sorts to the saga), it would be reasonable to jump to reviewing those series after #71 on Warlord Wednesdays and view the remainder of the first series as apocrypha.

On the other hand, Dan Jurgens starts as regular penciller when the Grell’s are still writing it (#63) and continues through #93. If Grell is the Warlord’s father, Jurgens is at least an uncle. He’s responsible for a number of Morgan’s appearances in other DC Comics after the end of the series, and he drew the Grell written appearances of Morgan in Green Arrow (and apparently was instrumental in them occurring in the first place). Also, Cary Burketts stories in the near post-Grell period deal with important plot threads like the secret of Tinder’s origins and Tara’s relationship with Graemore, and introduce some cool new characters like Scarheart and Krystovar that seem to “fit.” Plus, I just think the "Time Paradox" and "New Atlantis War" storylines are cool.  Finishing all that would take us to issue #100.

The third option is to follow the series until its actual end. The last writer Michael Fleischer does have a Sword & Sorcery bent (giving a nod to the Clark Ashton Smith story “Isle of the Torturers”), but overall, the issues after 100 and until its end feel different that what came before. Part of it is more crossovers with the mainstream DCU, but also it just seems more like "generic fantasy comic" than Warlord. It’s not bad (mostly) and some of its pretty good, but its a new direction and less “of a part” with what went before.  But it is a part of the "official" series.

So it’s time for the mostly reticent Warlord Wednesday readership to make itself heard--if it exists, which the number hits I get on Wednesday’s suggest it does. I’ll probably put up a poll at some point, but I wanted to go ahead and throw the question out for comment. After #71, where does Warlord Wednesday go next?

Wonders from the Planes

Besides the gray dust, other outer planar artifacts sometimes turn up in the more thaumaturgically-oriented private markets of the City, or end up in some structure of the Ancients to be found be adventurers. Here are a few of them:

Skeletal key: A minor artifact of the demonic gaolers from the plane called the Black Iron Prison. It’s a six inch long key that does indeed appear to be made out of bone. It can open any non-magical earthly lock, and a specific cell block within the plane of confinement, though it will be impossible to find out which one without magical or extraplanar aide.

Madness record: Condensed from the substance of their realm by the polychromatic clowns of the Plane of Chaos, these appear to be mundane 78rpm phonograph records. If the record is played, all those who are able to hear the strange and indescribable sounds on it will be affected as per the confusion spell.

Fabrication fog: A swarm of minuscule, polyhedral automatons from the Tesseract of Machina, the Plane of Order. These beings are packed into a small square box of some light, but extremely durable alien metal with cautionary text in several different scripts (but no earthly ones) engraved on it.  When the box is open the automata appear as a glittering swarm of fly-sized bronze shapes. They will be bound to the one who opens the box and serve him for one year (their power runs out then without recharge), until he is dead, or he gives them to someone else. They act like the fabricate spell, making whatever the owner desires within the restrictions of the spell (other than the need for the craft skill--the automata can manufacture anything non-magical item with a model or reference image). There are rumored to be versions of these which perform healing functions.

Strange Encounters

Fiction isn't the only place to get inspiration for events tinged with the supernatural, horror, or just the weird.  Peruse any book or website on unexplained phenomena and you ought to able to turn up quite a bit of usable material, depending on the genre you're gaming in.  Here are a few choice proportedly true vignettes I found on this UFO-oriented website.  There are hundreds more where these came from:

Location. Spike Island, Cork Harbor, Ireland
Date: June 1914
Time: afternoon
The 6-year old witness was walking along a path next to the sea with her eyes mostly on the ground. She happened to look up when she was about five yards away from the wall of local doctor's house and saw something bizarre. A strange figure was looking over the wall across the harbor to Cobh. She walked a few more steps nearer before she realized that what it was--and then she became rooted to the ground with fear. It was not ten paces away and she could see it only too clearly. It must have been a very tall creature, because she could almost see it to its waist---and the wall was at least five feet high. It was in the rough shape of a human being---that is, it had a head and shoulders and arms---though she didn't see its hands, which were behind the wall. Except for two dark caverns where its eyes should be, the whole thing was of one color, a sort of glistening yellow. As the wall was parallel to the road and on her left, the thing was looking past her---across the little road and straight across to Cobh. As the witness stood petrified, the thing began to turn its head very slowly toward her. At this point the young witness heard a voice in her ear: "If it looks straight at you, Eileen, you will die." Her feet seemed to be anchored to the ground by heavy weights, but somehow she managed to turn and run. She ran into a nearby cottage about 15 yards away. Her next memory was of Mrs. Reilly (the owner of the cottage) sponging her face with water, as she shook all over with shock and terror. She told Mrs. Reilly that she had seen something dreadful in the Doctor's garden. Mrs. Reilly told the young witness that she was not the first to see it and would not be the last.

Location. Linaalv Lappland Sweden
Date: 1919
Time: daytime
9-year old Ragnar Byrlind and his brothers & sisters were inside the family's house playing games when their mother called for them to come to the window and look. About 400 meters away some sort of object was coming along the road. It was a dark gray object, longer than the timber lorries of the present day. On what appeared to be a coach box at the middle sat a figure and two others were running in front of it carrying flashlight like implements in their hands. The entities looked like human beings and wore some kind of headgear but it was impossible to discern any details at the distance. When the object was at some distance from the observers it suddenly released a light smoke and disappeared on the spot. The family investigated the area but found no traces.

Location. Camperville, Manitoba, Canada
Date: winter 1930
Time: late night
On a cold winter night as the whole family slept they were suddenly awakened by the keen howling and frenzied barking of their dogs. Several family members quickly rushed out after getting quickly dressed. The dogs acted as if they were rabid but never approached the figure of a strange man that was standing by the fence next to the road. He was not wearing proper clothing. In the dead of winter with temperatures below 30, this figure wore a black tailed tuxedo and a white shirt. He stood there watching the dogs, and then he looked at the family. They walked towards him to see what he wanted but he backed up to the dirt road. Two of the men walked towards him. He watched them approach him and then walked backwards down the road. No matter how fast the men walked they could not get close to him. He seemed to be walking backward one step at the time but no matter how fast they ran they could not reach him. The men gave up and returned home. They never saw the stranger again.

Location. Northwest of Stewart, British Columbia, Canada
Date: 1938
Time: unknown
While searching for a missing trapper in a remote glacial area near the Alaskan border, constable Larry Requa entered a cave and discovered 5 “alien skeletons” which had extended craniums. One of the entities had a metal medallion on, imprinted with star symbols. All 5 entities were facing a stone altar and it was Requa’s impression that these beings had been “stranded” as they could not leave the earth. The cave had unusual characteristics as it appears to wind in a vertical configuration and the walls were extremely smooth as if these beings had used a “boring device” to make the tunnels within the cave. Apparently as of July 2000 the skeletons were still in the cave. It is not known what the present status is.

Location. Sonoma County, California
Date: 1950
Time: afternoon
Two men and one 17-year old boy were exploring some old mine shafts when they started hearing clicking noises. They could smell a fire so they were curious as to what was on fire all the way down in a mineshaft. They went further down and they started to see a weird substance on the walls of the mine. Then they saw the fire farther down and they noticed that there was something near it, but they could not make out what it was. Upon closer inspection they realized that it was some sort of hideous beast that resembled a boar with human features. It had hands and patches of red hair on its body. It appeared to be bashing an animal skull of some sort against a rock to be cracked open. As soon as the creature saw the witnesses it charged after them. One of them suffered a deep gash on his back as he crawled out of the shaft.

Location. Oracle Arizona
Date: 1950
Time: daytime
Juan Urrea was playing in the yard when suddenly the door of the outhouse creaked open. There, to his surprise, lurked a tall, kangaroo-like creature with blazing red eyes. It peered out around the edge of the door, and then beckoned him to come forward. Urrea believed the creature meant to do him harm. He ran and never saw it again.