Wednesday Comics: X-Men Grand Design

X-Men: Grand Design is a mini-series, planned to last 6 issues, that is intended to weave the over 40 years of X-men publication history into a single, epic narrative. This bold perhaps even foolhardy task is undertaken by Ed Piskor, alternative comic artist, who has already authored another sprawling epic, the Hip Hop Family Tree.

Piskor's version begins with Namor's flooding of New York in the 1940s (setting the stage for mutant hysteria) and moves through the formative years of both Magneto and Xavier, before getting to the formative years of the X-men--and that's just issue one. This is no summary like Marvel Saga, but something more like comic book adaptations of the Bible. It's pretty condensed, but it's a genuine narrative. Piskor makes up very little. Instead he emphasizes certain elements and streamlines or omits others in the name of giving these stories by numerous creators with different visions a throughline. The incarnation of a new Phoenix Force host is a big thing that obviously didn't appear quite some early in the original comics.

The style of the comic is a fusion of an alternative comics sensibility with the decidedly retro that works. There are no glorious splash pages to drool over, though. This is all about the story.

Issues 1 and 2 are currently available.

Cult of the Cobra

On May 25, 1953, one of a pair of twins was stolen from a New Delhi hospital by the shadowy Cobra Cult. Twenty-three years later, Jeffrey Burr ruled the cult as Kobra, and had transformed it into an international subversive organization.

In the next few years, his organization would see even greater expansion in Western hemisphere and pose a sufficiently serious threat to American interests that a special task force would be created to deal with them. The unlikely architect of this success was a recent convert to the cause: A former car salesman turned con man and anti-government agitator who would become known as Cobra Commander.

The key to the future Cobra Commander’s success seems to have lain in his ability credibly speak to the desires of angry political fringe of whatever persuasion. He could recruit from the United Freedom Front, Black Spectre, Posse Comitatus or the Sons of the Serpent, or keep things ideologically light and bring in disaffected members of strictly criminal groups. Cobra Commander’s only certain belief personally seems to have been in brokenness of the current system, and in the power of fascist symbols and pageantry. He tossed the snake-scale costumes and robes for a more imposing, paramilitary vision. Given the Commander’s success, Kobra allowed it.
It was quite a rise, but in the end too high and too quick. Kobra would not share the throne. In the mid-eighties, barely a decade into his meteoric rise, Cobra Commander was assassinated at Kobra’s command.

Silver Metal Lovers

There is no doubt that Henry Pym is a scientific genius, but advanced robotics and artificial intelligence is far afield from biochemistry and biophysics. The achievements in those areas credited to him (for contractual reasons) in Marvel Comics are actually the work of his friend, William Magnus.
Magnus was of old Dutch New York stock and his family knew the van Dynes socially (perhaps even dating Janet) before he became a student of Janet’s father, Vernon. Magnus surpassed his mentor at young age, had developed intelligent robots, the Metal Men, had an impressive list of patents and government contracts, and an advanced laboratory complex while Hank Pym was still falling into anthills.
There had been robots before, certainly, but Magnus was interested in his creations doing more than passing Turing’s test. He wanted emotive machines, something truly animate. Magnus was an esotericist as well as a man of science, and his theories on emotion were an odd mixture of alchemy and psychodynamics. He brought forth the traits than were already in the metal, he said. His nuclear-powered Philosopher’s Stones, the responsometers, were an attempt to model the mind or soul more than the brain. One of his Metal Men, Tina, made with platinum responses, fell hopelessly in love with him. For reasons conscious or unconscious, Magnus always told her this meant her responsometers were faulty.
For his second series of robots, he tried encoding the psyche of a human as a substrate. Ultron would be birthed from Hank Pym’s brow. This robot was self-evolving, and he transformed himself into an Oedipal monster who wished to kill Pym so it could have Janet van Dyne. Ultron’s reproduction has become almost viral. So many iterations have existed and become separate lines of evolution, he has proved impossible to eradicate.
When Ultron decided to build his own wife, he had Magnus aid him (perhaps with brainwashing, perhaps not). He wanted Janet van Dyne’s soul in a robot body. He named that new being “Jocasta.” His psychocircuits had surpassed any human concern with irony. Jocasta was as unlucky in love as any of her predecessors, dying at the hands of Ultron just when she found her feelings requited by Machine Man.

Unfathomable Variations

The digital version of Operation Unfathomable is now in the hands of Kickstarter backers, inching us closer to the time when anybody will be able to buy it. Having played OU in a game run by its creators, I can attest to it being a solid adventure, and one I could see using in more contexts than just old school D&D. Jason's vision seems to be informed by pulp fiction (when the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy where not so clearly delineated), B science fiction movies, and comic books. While some traditionally-minded epic fantasy campaigns might need to do some tweaking to content and tone, their are other genres where it would work with about the same amount of effort.

Here's what I've come up with with just a little bit of thought:

Post-apocalyptic: Put the Underworld beneath a Gamma World or Mutant Future. The monsters become weird mutants or alien incursions. The Chaos becomes literal radiation, or some reality warping residue of the biggest super-weapon the ancients had. Or the malfunctioning drive of an immense alien saucer. Whatever.

Call of Cthulhu or similar Pulp Horror: Tweak the tone a bit, and Jason's Underworld is every bit as much a lurid place of weird menace as K'n-Yan or red-litten Yoth. It already Great Old Ones and their cults lurking around, too, though it would be easiest enough to substitute known mythos horrors like Eihort or Tsathaggua. Turning lurid up to ultraviolet, I invite you to contemplate the potential parallels with the Shaver Mysteries.

Superhero: This will seem the most unlikely of these suggestions, and it certainly won't be for all campaigns, but I would point to the Silver Age strangeness of Cave Carson (recently rebutted for modern psychedelic strangeness) and even the Mole Man and the various subterranean cultures of the Marvel Universe. Obviously, the parameters of the mission might be different, and the previous force that cleared the path the PCs followed, might will be the campaigns next major villain. (Or the original X-men to your team's New X-Men, if you get my Giant-Sized X-Men #1 drift). You might also want to Kirby up the monsters a bit, too.

Boys of War

In 2007, the U.S. Veterans of Underage Military Service reported that most of their members had first served between the ages of 14 and 16, with twenty-nine active members entering service at 13. No report exists as to how many were in the so-called Young Allies, or as they were later and unofficially named, the Boy Commandos.

In 1941, after a few dedicated members of the Sentinels of Liberty (a patriotic youth organization and Captain America fan club) aided Bucky and Toro in defeating a group of would-be saboteurs in a Brooklyn shipyard, the United States government commissioned the formation of the “Young Allies,” a group of older youths that would help protect America’s shores against spies and saboteurs with there vigilance and prepare for military service should the need arise. A comic book was also commissioned that presented the boys in a more active role than they actually had (at least initially) and portrayed them as younger than they actually were for twofold propaganda purposes: to build support for war among young people and to ridicule the Axis powers by showing them defeated by children.

Not long after America’s entry into the war, members of the Young Allies were fighting overseas alongside Bucky and others, though their activities were directed more for publicity and propaganda purposes than military effectiveness. This “Boy Commando” unit (as it came to be called) was officially made up of boys of minimum legal military age. In fact, most were between 14 and 16, and conspicuously, all were orphans. This group allowed members from allied countries, including two from nations under German occupation.

Beyond the fictionalized incidents presented in comic books, a full accounting of the activities of these brave boy commandos has ever been given.

Weird Revisited: In the Belly of the Beast

This 2012 post on the hunting and uses of the leviathan didn't make it into Weird Adventures.

Leviathans are perhaps the largest and most mysterious denizens of the ocean depths. These gigantic creatures dwarf both whales and reptilian sea serpents. Their name in the gurgling language of the sea devils translates roughly as “monster-thing stronger than even the gods.” Despite their great size, the creatures are seldom seen, and carcasses are rarer still.

Some have suggested that the size of leviathans is impossible and therefore indicative of a magical nature. It has been theorized that the creatures' rarity is a by-product of the fact that they actually swim through the etheric substructure of reality, only passing through the physical world’s oceans incidentally.

The discovery of a leviathan carcass always instigates a mini-”gold rush.” The flesh and bone of the beast are of interest to alchemists (synthetic insulating blubber was an outgrowth of study of the leviathan) and thaumaturgists who use various leviathan parts for spell materials. Leviathan ambergris can be used to make perfumes and colognes easily infused with charm or suggestion properties. It’s also a psychoactive and can be smoked to produce a euphoric effect and intense sexual desire that in some individuals manifests a a mania lasting 10 x 1d4 minutes.

Less scientifically minded individuals hope to salvage treasure swallowed by the leviathan in its journeys. Whole ships laden with cargo are sometimes found (this is facilitated by the fact that internally leviathans are cavern-like, evidencing a strange paucity of organs). The loot-minded must be wary, however. Strange miasmas are sometimes produced inside a dead leviathan that can cause death or mutagenic effects on the unprotected.

The Day It All (Didn't) Happen

We do not live in one of those universes where a teenage president was elected and set everything right, at least for a time. No youthful wave managed to get the Constitution amended so that eighteen year-olds could run for the highest office in the land. There was no teen President, but there was a Prez Rickard.

The young man from Steadfast who made the clocks run on time did spark a national movement. A protest, a bit of political theater, aimed at what he viewed as the corrupt system. Prez went through all the motions of running for president on a campaign of truth and love, just without officially being able to run.

He had been a legal candidate for a local office, hand picked by Boss Smiley who may have been a literal avatar of the political machine. At the very least, Boss Smiley represented it. Youth was the wave of the future, and he had the foresight to want to catch that wave for his own purposes.

Prez went around him and ran straight for the presidency. He named his mother his running mate (she had named him Prez, after all), and said he would appoint that shaman and amateur naturalist, Eagle Free as head of the FBI. He would not be shackled by the forces of Old and Evil.

They tried to stop him, of course. Years before they resorted to the madbomb to sweep the vestiges of democracy away, the Elite went after the Prez. Supergirl saved him from an assassin employing high technology and black magic. The Establishment meant business.

Everything came to a head in August of 1968. The Prez and his followers were in Chicago along with other youth activists. They held their own nominating convention where the Prez beat out Pigasus the Pig, who gave a gracious concession speech through his spokesman. Many historians cite the refusal of the Democratic Party to allow Prez to speak at the national convention as pivotal cause in the escalation of the protests and a factor in the violence that followed.