Stray Bullets

Matt Liebowicz aka Matt Hawk was a Boston lawyer who, inspired by a dime novel character, took on the identity of a masked gunfighter for justice, the Two-Gun Kid. Matt Hawk was killed by the Two-Gun Kid on April 28, 1885 and the Kid died in July of that year. Except that they were one in the same man, and he did not died in 1885, but rather in 1887 in Wonderment, Wyoming, fighting alongside a number of colorful crimefighters of the Old West.

Unless he didn’t. In 1938, Dr. Thomas Holloway was tending a dying, elderly man who claimed to be the Two-Gun Kid. He seemed to know the future. He bequeathed Holloway a mask and a pair of six guns. Holloway would use these to become the vigilante called the Angel.

Two-Gun Kid visited the future at least twice, becoming an Avenger. Perhaps his timeline is as branched as Kangs? Here he went out in the blaze of gunfire, there he died in bed, there he visited his own grave, seventy years after his death.

Jonah Hex’s fate is more certain. Maybe. He was shot and killed by the coward George Barrow while playing cards in Cheyenne in 1904. Barrow opened fire with a shotgun while Hex fumbled with his glasses. His body was stolen by an unscrupulous wild west show promoter who had it stuffed and put on display.

Jonah Hex visited the future, too. Stolen from the year 1875 (or more likely 1878), he spent years in a nuclear war ravaged future. He also met the Justice League as a member of a group picked by the Lord of Time. Is it possible then, that the Jonah Hex whose stuff body was displayed in the Frontier City Amusement Park in Laramie, Wyoming, as late as 1987 (Hex had seen it himself in storage in the 2050s), was not Jonah Hex but an imposter? Hex knew the future needed a body, but did it need to be his body? Just who was George Barrow, really?

Wednesday Comics: Daredevil

Since about 1983, seems like everybody's Daredevil run has include angst, Catholicism, and probably ninjas and the Kingpin. There was a time before Frank Miller's seminal run where Daredevil wasn't like that. Where he smiled and fought guys like Stilt-Man. (Yes, Stilt-Man appeared in the Miller run, too. No need to tell me.)

Enter Mark Waid, who brings that more standard superhero sensibility back to Daredevil without jettisoning the character's history. The idea is that the reveal of Daredevil's secret identity (in a previous run) has not be completely refuted, leaving Matt Murdock too infamous to try cases in court. Instead, he coaches people no one else will represent to represent themselves, while solving the problem that makes it so hard for them to get a lawyer as Daredevil (because it always seems to involve super-villainy!).

In addition to restoring more of a early Bronze Age Daredevil, Waid also avoids the serious decompression that is too common in modern comics. Most of these cases take two issues. "B Plot" runs through the background, but it's along the lines of a network TV drama in terms of complication.

The art by Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin is great, too. They really try to find visual ways to represent his super-senses, which is not completely new to Daredevil, but appreciated.

Volume 1 contains issues 1-6. There's also an omnibus of the Waid run if you feel like going all in.

Whom Gods Destroy

Later she would claim to be named for a "cosmos-slithering dragon of interstellar legend" the hyper-Jormungandr of the time before the Old Gods died, but at first she called herself "Madame MacEvil." It had the ring of the menaces born in the fires of Apokolips: just ask Granny Goodness, Doctor Bedlam, or the Deep Six. Cosmic evil advertises and cares not if you think it banal. Madame McEvil, Moondragon, was not on the side of Apokolips, though. She mimed the madness of its minions as a sort of sympathetic magic, a way to bring down the dread Darkseid himself.

Or maybe she had just gone crazy. Being a mortal raised in a austere monastic tradition of the gods can do that. You cannot gaze upon the glory of Supertown and remain unchanged. Ask the boy who sampled the Forever Peoples' cosmic capsules.

"She Could Be You!"

That was the tagline on the later issues of the comic book based loosely on her adolescence and young adulthood that ran from when the actual Patsy Walker was barely in her teens until she was in her 30s. Her real life was far stranger than the fiction with time as a superhero, a second marriage to the literal son of the Devil (or a devil), mental illness, and then suicide (and then resurrection).

Viewed through the lens of the comics, Walker (who first appeared on the teen scene in the 40s) was a twenty-something when she and her best friend were at the front of the crowd to see Reed Richards and Susan Storm emerge as a married couple. In reality, she was in her early thirties, married, and dealing with an abusive husband. Buzz changed in Vietnam the comics said, but Vietnam was yet to come. Buzz's first war was Korea, and the truth is he didn't change much.

Buzz Baxter was mostly a nonentity in the Patsy Walker comics, but never one to let is girlfriend get the limelight ahead of him, Buzz had inked a deal for a comic based on him, too. Buzzy was even less truthful and only lasted half as long.

A chance meeting with the Beast would turn the abused housewife into a superhero, divorce Buzz Baxter, and expose corruption within the military contractor Brand Corporation. The early sixties were a different time.

Weird Revisted: Release the Hounds

This post from 2011 was one of a series on planar related stuff for the Weird Adventures setting. None of it saw publication other than on the blog..

Chronos hounds, or temporal hounds, are extradimensional beings who sometimes hunt the Prime Material Plane. Some ancient tomes hold that these creatures are benevolent, and defend causality and stability against horrors form outside spacetime. Observed behavior of chronos hounds is ambiguous at best, and those who may encounter them are urged to caution.

From a distance, a chronos hound has the silhouette of a large, lean dog. A closer look reveals that the body of the creature is actual more like a human's, perhaps specifically an androgynous youth's, twist and stretched to conform to a canine’s basic arrangement. It's front paws, for example, are slender, human-like hands. The heads of the hound is always blurred and indistinct, as if in constant motion, but there is the suggestion of toothy, canine jaws, and glowing eyes. Hounds appear to be able to speak by telepathy, but also make a garbled sound like the cough and growls of a pack of dogs, as if heard at the other end of long and empty hallway. Their skin is hairless, and the faintly luminescent blue-white of moonlight.

Only in the past decade, has metaphysics developed the proper theoretical framework to understand the chronos hounds--and even now those theories remain controversial. The most brilliant minds in the City hold the hounds to be a wave function which only observation causes to collapse into the form of the creatures described above. Thaumaturgic investigation suggests they serve an eikone called Father Time, or are perhaps extensions of his will. They act to prune "streams" of time and possibility--making reality from probability--toward some inscrutable purpose.

# Enc.: 1d6 (1d6)
Movement: 120’ (40’)
Armor Class: 4
Hit Dice: 4
Attacks: 1 (bite),
Damage: 1d6
Save: F4
Chronos hounds are only visible if they choose to be, prior to acting. Only some rare circumstance keeps a first attack from being by surprise. Their actions in this plane have a stuttering appearance, as if they are teleporting short distances rather than moving normally. Chronos hounds reduced to 0 hit points disappear entirely. Chronos hounds are able to pass through (or around) any physical barrier--or indeed temporal barrier. A combat with them may begin one day, only to have them break off the attack, and re-appear months or even years later.  A first encounter with a chronos hound, maybe not be the true first encounter, from the perspective of the creature's timeline. Whatever subjective amount of time appears to pass in combat with them, 1d100 minutes have based for the world external to the combatants.

The greatest enemies of the chronos hounds are the achronal hyperbeasts, which they will fight to the death when they encounter them. Thankfully, these higher order dimensional monstrosities are seldom encountered on this plane.

When The (Star) Man Comes Around

Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.
Except that the planet of Daxam (or Dakkam in some dialects) wasn’t doomed, and the desperate scientist was wrong. He and his wife launched his last hope anyway, their son, just before government agents killed then. The tiny ship would carry this lost son of Daxam to earth where it crashed in the everglades. No kindly couple rescued the child, but he was safe there in the ship’s technological womb as he grew to physical adulthood over the next almost 20 years. When he emerged, he still had the mind of a child.

An encounter with the Man-Thing sent this strange visitor from another planet fleeing from the swamp. As fate would have it, he first encountered Superboy, Kal Kent, son of the original Superman. The alien clearly had abilities at a near Kryptonian level (in fact, the Daxamites maybe an offshoot of the Kryptonians), and Superboy assumed the newcomer was a refugee from that world. Remembering stories of his father’s encounter with the amnestic Halk Kar, Superboy called the alien “Mon-El” as his father had the last near-Kryptonian arrival.

Superboy lost track of “Mon-El” who eventually ended up in New York, just in time to encounter Ben Grimm leaving a showing of Five Fingers of Death. Grimm saved him from an attempted assassination by Daxamite agents. Ultimately, Grimm got the alien to Reed Richards who determined that Mon-El was sound of mind (though it was undeveloped) and that exposure to cosmic rays had altered his physiology in unforeseen ways, making him an energy dampener. He also noted lead levels building up within the alien’s system.

At Project PEGASUS (a military/industry partnership with the involvement of STAR Labs) for further testing, Mon-El encountered the Cosmic Cube, which sent him into a coma. When he emerged, he was no longer child-like. He was aware of who he was and his true name, Lar Gand. What’s more, he was spiritually transformed. He took the name Aquarian. He set out to wander the earth, bringing peace and enlightenment to the world. He gained something of a following, and more than one “spiritual program” arose in his name.

His ministry was cut short when lead poisoning began to kill him. Rather than some other form of suspended animation, he voluntarily chose exile in the Phantom Zone, hoping to bring some measure of peace to the criminals imprisoned there. He is said to have emerged again, after a millennium, a changed man, ready to embark on a new stage of his existence.

A Supers Campaign Idea from the Vaults

Re-organizing some old gaming stuff (i.e. moving from one closet to another). I came across a campaign intro document for a Mutants & Masterminds game I ran maybe 10 years ago. The idea was a universe where characters from virtually every comic book publisher existed in the same world and there was no "sliding timescale," so characters than first appeared in the 60s for example were in that era.

I don't have it in digital form anymore, but here's a scan of it: