Wednesday Comics: Multiversal Spotlight: Earth-37

The Multiversity Guidebook came out a couple of weeks ago, giving new information on the 52 Earths of the current DC Multiverse as envisioned by Grant Morrison. If you're reading Multiversity and inclined to skip this because it's just a guide book, you should reconsider as there is a bit of story there. Even if you haven't been reading Multiversity, but you're a fan of the DC multiverse you should check it out. Many of them were the old standbys we've seen since the earliest days of the Pre-Crisis Multiverse. Some are of much more recent vintage:

Earth-37
Apparent Concept: Earth Chaykin
Pictured: (left to right) Robin (Rickart Graustark), Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), Joker (Bianca Steeplechase), Star Hawkins, Tommy Tomorrow, Iron-Wolf.
Sources: Weird Worlds (1972) #8-10; Twilight #1-3 (1990) and presumably Ironwolf: Fires of Revolution (1999); Thrillkiller #1-3 (1997) and Thrillkiller '62 (1998), collected here.
Analogs: The world of Thrillkiller was designated as Pre-Crisis Earth-61 in Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths (2006); Post-52, Thrillkiller characters were shown as being on Earth-37 in Countdown: Arena #1 (February 2008).

Comments: Twilight was a re-imagining or Watchmen-izing of a number of DC's future nonsupers characters. It's unclear if the non-Twilight versions exist anywhere in the current Multiverse. Chaykin created Ironwolf in Weird Worlds and he gets referenced in Twilight, though never seen. We can assume he would be a different version.Then, years later, John Francis Moore and Chaykin wrote an Ironwolf graphic novel that altered his world a bit and represented some of the events of the Weird Worlds stories. The graphic novel is clearly intended to be in the world of Twilight, but it doesn't seem to jibe with the off-hand references to Ironwolf in that story! Ironwolf as pictured above looks like he did in his original 70s appearances, for what its worth.

Strange Stars: Galactic Adventuring

While any sort of adventure can probably be run in any of the regions of Strange Stars (on sale now!), each one is particularly suited to certain types of adventures:

Outer Rim
Precis: A wildnerness with dangers lurking on often inhospitable worlds.
Good for: survivable stuff, encounters with monsters in desolate places.
Inspiration: Alien, Planet of Vampires, ST:TOS "Obsession" and "The Galileo Seven," The Gold Rush (1925), Flight of the Phoenix (1964, 2004).
Comments: Ksaa territory in the Outer Rim opens up additional possibilities. They make a good standin for the scheming Romulans or Farscape's Scarrans.

The Alliance
Precis: A civilized, polyethnic region with dangers on every border.
Good For: espionage, special ops missions, border patrol, law enforcement, crime & detective stories.
Inspiration: James Bond, the Dominic Flandry novels by Poul Anderson, Ocean's Eleven, E.W. Hornung's Raffles stories, the Trigger Argee stories of James M. Schmitz, the Luff Imbry stories of Matthew Hughes.

The Instrumentality
Precis: A theocratic, expansionistic empire to be fought against or served, surrounding smaller independent states.
Good For: freedom fighters or self-interested rogues fighting the system; space pirates or privateers operating out of an anarchic port, spy stories or law enforcement (pulpy or shades of gray)
Inspiration: Firefly, Howard Chaykin's Cody Starbuck, James Bond, Ice Station Zebra (1968), Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982), Zapata Westerns.

Coreward Reach
Precis: A "points of light" wilderness with hidden civilizations and ruins of the past.
Good For: Exploration; lost worlds; comedies of manners with quirky cultures.
Inspiration: Gulliver's Travels, Forbidden Planet, the Alastor Cluster and the "Planet of Adventure" series by Jack Vance, ST:TOS "Shore Leave" and "A Taste of Armageddon," among many others.
Comments: The incursion of the Locusts also gives room for military action and an impending danger to add a ticking clock to other sorts of adventures.

Zuran Expanse
Precis: A lawless frontier where different cultures meet and ancient secrets are buried.
Good For: rogues and crminals; pirates, civilization vs. savagery, artifact looting and tomb-raiding.
Inspiration: Tatooine in Star Wars, the Uncharted Territories in Farscape, particularly the episodes "The Flax," "Home on the Remains," and "Liars, Guns, and Money," A Fist Full of Dollars, Deadwood, Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), King Solomon's Mines, The Professionals (1966).

Planets of Adventure

"Sword & Planet"/Planetary Romance is not exactly an under-presented genre in gaming (allowing for its relative lack of presence in current media). I can think of two recent games that tackle the genre directly (Warriors of the Red Planet and Planets of Peril) with things like Carcosa perhaps touching on it. And there are others. Most of these seem to borrow directly from the Burroughs style, perhaps learning a thing or two from his imitators. One element of Burroughs's later Mars and Venus books that is sometimes lacking or minimized is that Barsoom and Amtor aren't just fantasy worlds. They--a lot like Oz--are collections of "lost worlds."

Burroughs made a career of borrowing from the H.R. Haggard tradition of hidden, exotic societies/cultures in out-of-the-way places. Except for the "baseline" culture also being exotic or alien, Barsoom and Amtor really aren't that different from Tarzan's Africa; it had thorn-girt lands full of dinosaurs and monkey men, and lost Roman colonies, and intelligent apes who thought they were living in London, etc.

The hordes of sword and planet novels of the 60s don't really do any more with this than Burroughs, mainly content to have swashbuckling derring-do with airships and half-naked princesses--and to be fair, that is probably enough for anybody--but elsewhere the whole "planet of exotic adventure" thing got pushed to patchwork, crazy-quilt levels of exotic sub-worlds: Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.

Mongo had the Orientalist city of Ming the Merciless (with a beautiful princess), but also the ice kingdom of Frigia (with a beautiful queen), and underground kingdom with Magic Men and death dwarfs (beautiful queen there, too), plus Shark Men, Lion Men, and Hawk Men. There is a uniformity to most Barsoomian city-states with their jeddaks and metal harnesses that is thrown out the window in Flash Gordon.

This sort of thing didn't end with Mongo. Jack Vance sort of does it in his Planet of Adventure novels. Lin Carter (of course) got into the act and combined it with the dying earth in his Gondwane novels. Though seeing the Vadim/Fonda film of 1968 might not convey this, the first Barbarella saga in the comic strip has her crashing on the planet Lythion and encountering undersea people ruled by a Medusa and a society modeled on 19th Century Earth, among other adventures.

This sort of thing would be easy in gaming, though it would make sessions somewhat unpredictable from the players' standpoint. The map would just be a lot of questions marks where almost anything might go.

Strange Stars in Print!

Now the future can be in your hands. Print copies of Strange Stars are available now on rpgnow and drivethrurpg.

Cover not enough for you? Okay, here's an interior shot:

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The Fae Moon

The sphere of the Moon is a threshold, the place where travelers from the Earth pass into the more rarified aether of the heavens. Despite its proximity to the Tellurian sphere, the Moon is untainted by Man's fall. It's inhabitants are the faerie of old who have built their strange mansions and gardens in the luminous, silvery wastes, on the banks of viscous seas like liquid obsidian.

The fair folk rule over an insectile people they either found there or fashioned with their arts after their arrival. These are the Selenites. They do not speak to humans so far as is known, but they do have a language of mental emanations they use to speak with their masters.

The Moon faerie trade with the Earth. They sell oneiric wine, rumored to be made from the scintillant, diaphonous gray petals of the night-flowers they cultivate amid the geometric, coral-like, alabaster growths of their gardens. It was also the faerie who provided the King of Albion with his heir, Gloriana, gestated in a great egg in an underground grotto. The egg—round, quivering, and iridescent as a soap bubble and filled with a milky fluid stirred by opalescent swirls and eddies—was brought down to Earth and delivered to the King by a company of fae, their gangling limbs and moths' wings only slightly less luminous than moon itself.

Wednesday Comics: My Favorites of the 00s

Ben of Mazirian's Garden asked on Gplus the other day about good superhero comics of the mid-90s through the 2000s. They got me thinking about what my favorite comics were in the first decade of the 2000s, leaving out series/runs that began or ended in another decade. In no particular order, here's what I came up with:

ALL-STAR SUPERMAN by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitley
In a decade where Grant Morrison was a dominate creator, All-Star Superman may well be his best: a clever and at times touching love letter to the Silver Age Superman. A multi-award winner.

DC:THE NEW FRONTIER by Darwyn Cooke
Darwyn Cooke imagines the history of superheroes from the end of World War II, through dark days in the 1950s, to a new age dawning in the early 1960s. Winner of just about every award comics has got to give and well-deservedly so.

THE ULTIMATES 1 & 2 by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch
Millar and Hitch re-imagine the Avengers for the celebrity-obsessed 21st Century and provide a blueprint and visual inspiration for the Avengers film. There run was followed by Jeph Loeb--and the less said about that, the better. Millar returns for a another run well worth checking out with Ultimate Avengers.

GRANT MORRISON'S BATMAN
With several different artists, Morrison delivers almost everything one could want in a Batman run, while mixing in elements from a lot of older stories--including his son with Talia and the return of the Batmen of All Nations. He continues it in 2009 in Batman and Robin and then into the twenty teens with Batman, Incoporated. The collections are confusing but this one begins it and this one takes it up to Final Crisis.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR: GOD WAR by Mike Carey and Pasqual Ferry
Ultimate Fantastic Four was always kind of the alsoran of the Ultimate line. It had a string of good creators, but none of them really seemed to click with it and left after competent, but uninspired runs. Mike Carey game in and gave us a superhero sci-fish take on the Eternals and Thanos that played out their obvious similarity to the New Gods. Carey's whole run is pretty good, but this is the high mark.

JLA/AVENGERS by Kurt Busiek and George Perez
The most "conventional superhero" title on this list, but a damn competent and entertaining one. This crossover is a thing of fanboyish fantasy and the sort of yarn that made us all fall in love with comics as kids.

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY (1 and 2) by Grant Morrison and various artists
Morrison's most ambitious project to date, about a team of lesser known or new DC heroes who save the world, but never meet each other. The story unfolds over seven limited series and book ends. It's all collected in two volumes.

The Shifting Setting

Changing elements of continuity or setting through retcon or revision are common in comic books. When we include alternate universes like the Ultimate Universe or DC's multi-Earths, the number of variant characters, organizations, and situations gets even greater.

Reading Viriconium by John M. Harrison was the first time I had seen this sort of thing in a fantasy world. Characters often retain the same name and vaguely similar characteristics, but their histories are different, and so is the history of the city they inhabit. Viriconium always seems to have the same streets, the same neighborhoods, even the same shops, but it doesn't always seem to be same place.

I imagine Harrison feels like he does this for different reasons than comic book writers, but ultimately I think what they have in common is a desire not to straitjacketed by the past in the stories they want to tell.

It got me thinking about how rpg settings don't have to be set in stone. Maybe instead of growing into Tekumel with a lot of detail, each campaign can be sort of variations of the same basic setting sketch. It seems like this could have a few advantages: the style of the setting could change--new elements (new rules, new races) could be easily introduced that might have been uneasy fit before. At the same time, a familiarity with basic things like locations and cultures could be maintained.

This would also be away to participative setting development to players that might be a be hesitant. They get a "first pass" where the GM does most of the work, then a "redo" where they reconfigure things as they go.