Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 2 pt 1)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 19, 1981.

Action Comics #520: Conway and Swan don't bring in yet another alien menace, at least. Eric Burton, some superstar tech-entrepreneur, has his sights on Lois Lane, and he's using his money and technology to make sure Superman is distracted by every event on Earth that might need his intervention. Burton isn't causing the events, he's just making sure Superman knows about them, and the Man of Steel can't resist helping. In the end, Lois needs help and Burton shows his cowardice while Superman saves the day. Not a great story, but I think there's a kernel of something interesting here regarding Superman's sense of duty.

The Aquaman backup by DeMatteis/Heck comes to an end (that's even the title). Aquaman and the robot Poseidon with his dad's mind go to confront his crazy mom. She throws a bunch of robots at him in the form of his foes, highlighting how obscure most of Aquaman's rogue's gallery are. In the end, her sister shows up and reveals Aquaman isn't the prophesized one. Atlanna sees the error of her ways and says she's sorry, then destroys herself and the robots. Aquaman opines that as far as he's concerned, this parents were gone a long time ago, practically stating outright that this storyline will be ignored in the future.

Adventure Comics #482: The villains come and go pretty quick in whatever town Vicky and Chris live in! Well, I guess the first one, Interchange, is attacking Washington, D.C., but that still puts 2 super-villians in their at-best medium-sized city. There's Silversmith (with the power to coat things in silver), and the H.I.V.E. assassin Blademaster. Various rookie mistakes bring Chris's cop dad ever closer to figuring out the two are someone related to the superheroes that all show up only once.

Brave & the Bold #175: Batman teams up with Lois Lane to fight Metallo with Jim Aparo on art. Lois might not be the perfect partner to take on a villain with a Kryptonite heart, but they get the job done in the end. Not a bad issue, but far from standout.

In the Nemesis backup by Burkett and Spiegle, Nemesis teams up with the Scotland Yard guy as they figure out the bad guy is playing a chess game with all his kidnappings, and his ultimate target is the Queen.

Green Lantern #141: Wolfman and Staton introduce the Omega Men. Jordan and Carol Ferris go for a campout since they've both lost their jobs at Ferris with her father's return to a more active role. In the woods, they run across the Omega Men. These guys are played more antagonistically in this first encounter than I'm used to seeing them. Also, I never really thought about it, but most of this initial group have an animal-based schtick: tiger, reptile, and bird.  

House of Mystery #293: I..Vampire is back by DeMatteis and Sutton. Bennett and his sidekicks are still on the trail of the Blood Red Moon and attend a rally by racist politician Q.B. Stonewall. He's denounced by a Black Senator, Olive, whose house is later set on fire by the KKK. Bennett is sure Stonewall is a vampire (though he doesn't see the red crescent mark on Olive), but Stonewall is dead. It turns out his assistant is the vampire, but before Bennett can strike, his friend Dmtri stops him. The assistant is his mother!

In the opening story by Conway and Tuska/Celardo, a dead man's dog pesters a gravedigger until the man follow's the dog. He hear the deceased's son confess to the dog's master's murder. The dog was guided in these actions by his master's ghost. "The Senior Sin!" by Ms. Charlie Seegar and Tenny Henson has two young hoodlums who like to prey on the elderly getting cursed by the people whose deaths they've cause to age prematurely, then they are murdered by other young punks.

Legion of Super-Heroes #276: I'm embarrassed today say, I didn't catch the hint regarding the villain of this issue in the title "Lord Romdur's Castle." Conway has the team on of those Medieval worlds the 30th Century seems to have, and they go to check out this villainous Lord Romdur who turns out to be Mordru! (See, Romdur is an anagram for Mordru.) The art by Ditko and Chiaramonte seems mostly phoned in. The cover by Buckler and Giordano is the best part of the issue.

Marvel Super-Heroes with Step Dice

I got a set of those unusual DCC polyhedrals this weekend just for the hell of it, and I was musing on Discord how you could replicate the MSHRPG rankings (Feeble to Unearthly) with a complete set of those dice, like this: Fe (d4), Pr (d5), Ty (d6), Gd (d7), Ex (d8), Rm (d10), In (d12), Am (d14), Mn (d16), Un (d20).

I suppose switching to that sort of mechanic would allow you to ditch the action table, but but keeping something even loosely approximate to the success percentages of the actual game would probably be complicated enough to require one, as shown here:

If you didn't care about sticking as closely as possible to Marvel's percentages (and admittedly, even with this, you've had to give up on the chance of a red success for lower scores) then you could give flat roll thresholds: 4 for green, 7 for yellow, and 10 for red.

I don't actually think there is any reason to do this, but it was amusing to think about.

Pulp Sci-Fi Technology

Star Wars (and to a lesser extent Star Trek) are products of their respective eras in regard to the futuristic technology then portray (or don't feature), but both are also probably beholden to their pulp antecedents and the imagine (and failures of imagination) of the authors that wrote them.

While I won't claim to have made an exhaustive study, here are some things I've noticed about the technology of the retro-future, supplemented by things noticed by Marcus L. Rowland in his excellent Forgotten Futures rpg Planets of Peril based on the works of Stanley Weinbaum, and by GURPS Ultratech 2.

• Radium: Radium seems almost sort of unobtanium in a lot of old stories, an is imbued with uses and properties it doesn't really possess in real life. This goes along with...
• Radiation: Various sorts of radiation (or even sometimes a vaguer property called "vibration" of matter or energy) can do almost magical things. This continues in science fiction, of course, but by the Atomic Age the language used to describe it much less mystical.
• Mechanical not Electronic: One can hardly fault writers of the 20s-40s for not including many (or often any) computers in their works, beyond the occasional mechanical brain, but it's interesting how even the electrical devices appear sparingly, outside of things like visiplates/visiphones (visual communication devices). Some more planetary romance leaning authors like Leigh Brackett, tend to describe virtually none of this sort of technology. This has implications we might not think of: Edmond Hamilton's stories for instance have no jail cells with coded keypads or even simply push button keypads like Star Trek. All his futuristic locks seem to require a hand held "vibratory key."
• Planet and ship based: Artificial satellites and space stations are very rare. In fact, I don't think I've read a story written before the 50s that had them.
• Acquired not Synthesized: Many more breakthrough materials or pharmaceuticals are harvested from alien worlds that made in the laboratory. Even breakthrough laboratory discovers often require some exotic "natural" material.
• Solitary Inventor: Great scientific leaps from space travel to super-weapons are typically the province of single geniuses or experimenters, not teams of government or industry-funded scientists. First space travel is almost always mentioned as a work of a sort of Wright Brothers instead of a NASA.
• Atomic Energy: Everything is atomic powered it seems like.
• No TV: I'm sure there are stories that make reference to something like television as an entertainment medium, but it appears in very few stories. 

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 5, 1981.

Justice League of America #191: As established in previous issues, Zatanna is losing her powers, so she calls on the Atom or help. Why he was the guy to call, I don't know, but let's just go with it. Suddenly though, all the members of the JLA begin to experience the loss of power. The culprit is Amazo, reactivated against his will by the Key, who's stealing the Leagues energies for his own use and to cure the Key of his freakish dwarf body state. In the end, Zatanna shows compassion and cures the Key with some of her magic. She reveals to the Atom her power loss wasn't caused by the Key and is apparently permanent. 

Not a bad issue, but it leaves me with the impression the whole "Zatanna is losing her powers" bit was all just a means by which Conway could reduce her powers, perhaps because he buys into the whole "magic is too powerful because it can do anything" idea that shows up in comics fandom and writers from time to time.

New Teen Titans #8: This is a Claremontian :each character does their own thing and deals with their own stuff" slice of life sort of issue. Starfire starts modeling jeans with Donna Troy as her photographer, and we meet Donna's beau, Terry. Cyborg meets some kids with prosthetics at the park and plays ball them. It's all pretty well-paced and well-done. With this sort of story, I can see how New Teen Titans developed the reputation it did for being different and better than a lot of comics in its era. This sort of thing is common place now, and it devolved into soap opera at best and treading water at worst in X-men from late era Claremont on. But this is 1981 not '91, and it feels fairly fresh. 

Secrets of Haunted House #37: The cover story by Wessler, von Eeden and Smith has a tipi-dwelling (in the modern day) Native American shaman using magic to turn the tables on an unscrupulous developer bent on murder. A bit better is the story by Charlie Seegar and Barretto/Colletta where a conman charms an old widow but not her adopted daughter. In the end, he discovers his bride is really a pet canary transformed into the semblance of the demonic young girl's deceased caregiver. The girl transforms the conman into a bird, too, so he can be with his new wife forever. In a "weird western" tale by Kashdan and Estrada, a frontier doctor removes a bullet from the arm of a young man, only to find it's silver, and he's saved the life of a werewolf.  

In the Mister E story by Rozakis and Spiegle, Kelly returns to the Old Country to help out her aunt who has been thrown in a psychiatric hospital. Mister E mysteriously shows up there, too. It's a good thing, because Kelly's aunt isn't mentally ill, she's being menaced by a leprechaun. Mister E threatens the little guy into leaving her alone.

Superman #360: Yet another story with another group of aliens that we will never see again making an attack on Superman in some indirect way. In this case, making Clark Kent forget he and Superman are the same person. How long has it been since we've have a bona fide super-villain in this title? Either the writers or editorial think Supes' rogues gallery is played, which may be a defensible point, but they seldom replace it with anything worthwhile. I feel like Action is the better of the Superman titles at this time, though neither are spectacular.

The backup is by Rozakis and Saviuk/Colletta is a World of Krypton story. WoK stories have a sort of charm because they tend to accentuate what a crazy place Krypton was. In this story a boy and his father find an odd stone in a river that gives off energy. Unfortunately, it's getting this energy from the sun, absorbing all the sunlight in the day and releasing energy at night. It's destroying Krypton's ecosystem and the Kryptonians don't know how to stop it, until the kid that found it just feeds it to a metal-eater beast in the forest.

Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #2: "Defeat" is an apt title for this Empire Strikes Back installment of the limited series that sees the Guardians defeated by Nekron and the Corps, despite doing well against Krona's troops, defeated by the Maltusian himself. Hal Jordan is the last to fall, but it all seems pretty hopeless. The Barr plot and Wein script seems much more modern than a lot of stuff from this era. The realm of Nekron is reached through a fleshy hole or necrotic lesion in the universe. Staton's design or Nekron is kind of modern, too.

Weird War Tales #100: The main event of this issue is the Creature Commandos getting a little War That Time Forgot action, courtesy of Barr and Hall/Ordway. It's an action-packed tale that reveals the some total of Hall's knowledge of dinosaurs likely comes from King Kong (1933). Their orange and magenta hides probably don't help verisimilitude either. Anyway, in the end, the Creature Commandos act to stop the U.S. military from exploiting the dinos like they've been exploited. 

There's a silly one-pager by Snyder and von Eeden/Breeding where a solider cracks under pressure, only to be revealed to be an actor on a set. The last story is a pretty good one by John David Warner and Vic Catan Jr. In feudal Japan, two scavengers are robbing the dead on battlefields which earns them the ire of Death and a samurai army of living dead. They are pressed into service, but manage to make it out alive. No sooner do they promise not to meddle in the affairs of the Spirit Realms again than they are planning to hock stolen demon masks. 

Wonder Woman #280: I was wondering where Conway was going with the cult storyline, but apparently he was going to appearances by Klarion, Witch-Boy and the Demon, so I'm satisfied with that. Klarion is behind the cult, to what purpose we don't yet know, but clearly he wasn't giving the head of the Delphi Group use of his legs again out of a sense of altruism. Wonder Woman, who realizes she's out of her depth after fighting a demon, gets help from Mother Juju. She refers the Amazon Princess to Jason Blood, but it's the Demon who's eager to take on the forces of darkness. 

In the backup, Huntress has her showdown with Lionmane. The Huntress triumphs in the end, and we learn she had a score to settle since Lionmane had given her mother, Catwoman, a severe beating years ago. While all this is going on, the Huntress's love interest falls victim to the Joker.

World's Finest Comics #269: This issue is pretty good. Conway and Buckler/McLaughlin have Batman buried alive by a crook, and Superman and Robin must race against time to save him--or to show up after he saved himself, because he's Batman. Batman's escape is well done, but Superman's power gets a bit diminished to make the story work. Haney and von Eeden/Breeding have Oliver Queen chasing down a lead about drug smugglers on a fictional Caribbean island, and Green Arrow becomes involved after saving an attractive woman (obviously very attractive, Arrow keeps talking and thinking about it for several pages) from a crook. It turns out the woman's ploy to save her brother is a con, but GA was never fooled. Rozakis, Saviuk and Rodriguez deliver the best segment so far in this Hawkman/Hawkgirl arc, as the winged wonders return to Thanagar so Shayera can save Katar from the bite of a mutant insect in the not very good early parts of this story. The Shazam! family segment by Bridwell and Newton/Adkins has Captain Marvel Jr. defeating Sabbac. 

The Red Tornado story is probably the issue's low point, but even that isn't so low. RT is looking for a tool he needs to repair himself so he doesn't fall apart and winds up saving the owner of an electronic store who is being held captive by Marxist terrorists led by Madame Redclaw (who must have inspired the DCAU villain Red Claw). Conway has this goofy thing of having the terrorists make Communist revolutionary sort of statements, only to have them immediately shown to be wrong. 

A Game I Would Like to Have Seen

Logan's Run may have come out a bit too early for an rpg tie-in, but it seems like the sort of thing FASA would have got a hold of if anybody did.

I think the setting has a lot of rpg potential, particularly as developed in the TV series.

Weird Revisited: The Life Aquatic

This post first appeared in 2011...

A merman and his landwoman bride.  Grand Lludd, 5825.

In the waters west of Ibernia, ship passengers occasionally glimpse and wonder at light in the depths. These are the lights Undersea, municipality of the mer-folk. Part of the empire of Grand Lludd, the citizens of Undersea have never been Her Preserved Majesty’s most loyal servants. Only the threat of submarine bombardment has stifled open rebellion at times. Still, in these hard years following the Great War, land and sea need each other too much for such squabbles.

The mer-folk are not to be confused with mermaids, despite similarity in names. Those half-fish creatures (and wholly nonhuman, whatever their appearance) are more akin to faerie. Mer-folk look, for the most part, like surface humans except for a slight bluish tint to their skin, eyes a little larger than usual, webbed hands, and a slight tendency to barrel-chestedness--though its common for portrayals of them in art to exaggerate their inhumanness. So little apparent difference for beings naturally inhabiting great depths and pressures hint at the subtle magics that have been used to adapt them to a submarine life. Scientists suggest this points to them being an engineered race, perhaps derived from Meropian stock. Mer-folk find this whole line of speculation dull, and are largely unconcerned with their own origins.

Perhaps its this lack of curiosity, among other traits, that has led to the common Lluddish stereotype of Mer-folk as thickwitted. They're also held to quick-tempered and lascivious (a judgement perhaps derived from their indifferent attitude toward clothing--at least in the seas). Mer-folk don’t drink (at least not in their usual habitat) but their men tend to enjoy licking certain sea slugs for an intoxicant effect, and singing (it can be called that) gurgling, warbling shanties, while their women perform suggestive, water ballet-like dances.

Though they are limited in the areas of metallurgy, chemcal, and alchemical sciences, the mer-folk are not utter primitives.  They use magic to shape stone for buildings, and have either used animal husbandry or magic to enhance the abilities of sea creatures for their use.  The lantern jellyfish sometimes seen in aquariums are best known example. 

On land, mer-folk must wear something like reverse diving suits--pressurized suits filled with water--unless they have access to magic aid. They're able to breath air, but the exertion quickly tires them and it's uncomfortable for more than a half-hour or so. Their skin quickly dries out in air, as well.  The use of heavy suits isn't as cumbersome as it might seem as mer-folk are stronger than a surface human of comparable size.

There are some mer-folk enclaves in the New World. The largest of these are in New Lludd, there mer-folk are involved in fishing, and the Southron coast where they engage in sponge harvesting, as well.

Constraints & Creativity

Occasionally, after I do a post on science fiction limited only to the Solar System or single country settings or the like, I get somebody commenting that seems too small or too limiting a space for them. In a similar vein, I feel like settings or games that provide a lot of options for PCs are lauded whereas limiting options for characters is viewed in a negative light.

People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules. 

There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.

I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.

But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.

Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.