Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Living Planet

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues with his adventures in the world of Pandarve. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Living Planet (1986) 
(Dutch: De Levende Planeet)
Art by Don Lawrence; script by Martin Lodewijk

Storm and friends have been flying above the clouds in the aircraft they commandeered last adventure for over a day. Storm has been reticent to descend through the cloud cover and attempt a landing as he isn't really familiar with the aircraft or how to read its instruments.

Nomad suggests the blinking light on the console might be a low fuel indicator. He's right. They are forced to descend rapidly through the clouds:

The thermal updraft from the lava provides a little extra lift, enabling Storm to pull out of the nosedive. Still, they have to find a place to land, and the air is difficult to breath. Storm manages to put the plane into a gentle climb to cooler altitudes before passing out.

They awaken to a surprise:

Gnomish men are disassembling their aircraft as salvage! Their foreman makes comments about "making quota" and "tight schedules." Storm protests and tries to stop them:

The little men keep dismantling the plane, unconcerned when Storm points out it will drop his friends and him into the lava below. "What do you expect me to do about it?" the foreman asks nonchalantly.

TO BE CONTINUED

Superhero Logos

I've been working on a supers project with a couple of collaborators that will hopefully be a comic and rpg thing. It's necessitated (or at least allowed) me making logos for the various characters in a Bronze Age/early Modern Age style. I thought I would share a few of the ones I have made for the heroes, the Super-Sentinels. Unlike the villians, these needed to look like they might have been on the cover of a comic.

Ray Logan would have burned alive on re-entry when his spacecraft malfunctioned, if he hadn’t been saved by the COSMIC ARCHONS. Their power healed him and bonded him to a suit of armor, making him one of their paladins for intergalactic justice, the COSMIC KNIGHT!

This one uses a font by Iconian fonts (one of my go-tos) as a pass, but then I gave it a perspective reminiscent of one of the Legion of Super-Heroes logos or Neal Adams' iconic X-Men design. It seemed fitting it should have Starlin-esque cosmic telescoping.

Kelli Cross was a college student, but what she was really into was roller derby. When she discovered her grandfather had been a costumed crime-fighter during World War II with a set of magical roller-skates that supposedly came from an extradimensional imp—well, it all sounded pretty hard to believe, but skating and fighting crime just seemed like the thing to do!

This one was inspired, obviously, on the classic Ira Schapp logo for the Flash. I am not completely happy with the speed-lines. Schapp made it look so easy!

Son of a spelunker and an exiled princess of the underground city of Sub-Atlan, Roy King uses the technomagical harness and gauntlets to swim through rock like it was water. He protects the underground from the surface world—and the surface world from the dangers of the underground—as the SUB-TERRAN!

This one was inspired by the logo of a DC Hercules series, but with roughened, rocky letters as seen on a number of Marvel 70s logos. There are a lot of rocky or stone fonts out there, but none worked well with the extreme perspective, so I had to use a plainer font (by Blambot, I think) and roughen it myself. It had to be done in stages to get the final thing. 

This character was originally going to be called the Subterranean, but that was too long to fit on anything but the plainest "book style" logos, so I had to shorten it.

Return to Wermspittle

If you like early modern/modern fantasy cities like Jack Shear's Scarabae or Umberwell or the City of my Weird Adventures (if you recall back to 2012 and before), then you will want to check out Hereticwerk's Wermspittle. I did an introduction to that setting once upon a time. Go read it. We'll wait.

After a several year hiatus, new Wermspittle posts have begun to appear, including some actual play reports. Slowly, admittedly, but proof of life. Check it out.

Again, Random Ultra-Warriors!

Interested in generating the sort of visually distinct science fantasy characters of the sort found in Masters of the Universe? I've got a set of random generators for you, just in case you missed it the first time I posted about it a few years ago. Pair the Random Ultra-Warriors Creator with your favorite science fantasy/post-apocalyptic rpg and your ready to create characters so distinctive they ought to be sold separately in their own blister pack.

Wednesday Comics: More Metabarons

I heard there was a Metabarons comic on Free Comic Book Day, which precedes a new Metabarons series. I've mentioned Metabarons on this blog before, but for those unfamiliar with it, it's the Greek Tragedy by way of Space Opera generational saga by  Alejandro Jodorowsky that he came up with riffing off ideas from his aborted attempt to get a Dune movie made.

The original "Saga of the Metabarons" was published, complete, in English in the early 2000s. In 2014, there was a sort of prequel Metabarons Genesis: Castaka published in 2014.

Hearing about this new series, I went looking to see if I had missed something, and what do you know? I had. There are already two volumes in a series called The Metabaron. Now, I haven't read these yet myself, so I can't comment on them (though I'll have them in hand this week), but I wanted you guys to know they were out there:

The Metabaron Book 1: The Techno-Admiral and the Anti-Baron

The Metabaron Book2: The Techno-Cardinal and the Transhuman

Misty Isle of the Meanies

Our Land of Azurth 5e campaign continued last night, with the party and friends still lost at sea after displeasing the Sea King. Their submarine had wondered into strange, dense fog. Kory Keenstep recalls legends of the mist-enshrouded paradise of Cucana and is sure they have found it. When Captain Cog sights a green and pleasant isle in his optics, it seems that Keenstep may becorrect.

When Waylon, Dagmar, and Erekose go ashore, they find the pleasantness to be an illusion. The island is gray and mostly barren and cloaked in gray skies and a sulfurous stench. Going ashore, they find paths strewn with the pulverized bits of broken toys, and occasional gray statues that look more like petrified people.

They made their way past the giant, sessile worms with lolling stripped tongues to the Blue Pagoda City. There they encountered the disagreeable blue meanies--and ended up slaughtering them in fairly large numbers. The party wandered through the bunker encountering and defeating a number of odd and violent people before apparently reaching the inner sanctum of "His Blueness."

This adventure began a loose adaptation of Chris Kutalik's Misty Isles of the Eld, liberally mashed together with the film Yellow Submarine.

Mecha & Cavemen

The physical copies of the the English translation of the French prehistoric rpg Würm finally arrived last week. I got the main rulebook and the Voice of Our Ancestors  magazine with rules and adventures. I taked about the main rulebook pdf before. On of the Voice of Ancestors issues has rules for the benefits conferred by ritual cannibalism, which is an interesting edition. I don't know if I can convince my group to play it, but I'm not sorry I backed the Kickstarter.

Tom Parkinson-Morgan, the author of Kill 6 Billion Demons, released the latest iteration of his mecha rpg Lancer for free. I confess I have not read through it yet, but hey, it's free.