Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 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 November 12, 1981.

Batman #344: Conway, Colan and Janson bring the Poison Ivy and Arthur Reeves, mayoral candidate, subplots to a conclusion, plus reintroduce Vicki Vale (who hadn't appeared in a canonical appearance since 1963 but had shown up in a 1977 appearance that was retconned by this issue). Ivy gets control of Wayne Enterprises, but Batman starts waging psychological warfare by essentially stalking her with a plan to get her to break and make a confession, but instead she turns her assistant into a plant monster and has him attack. Robin shows up to help Batman and Ivy is apprehended. The assistant spills the plot to the cops. Meanwhile, Reeves reveals his evidence Batman is really a mobster, but a reporter quickly shows the evidence to be fake. Notably, this issue seems to directly follow last month's Detective Comics. While events in the other title have been mentioned before, this seems to be setting up a tighter continuity.

Flash #305: Mishkin and Cohn manage to give the Mirror Master a bit of tragedy. He's fallen in love with an Atlantean scientist who has been trapped in a mirror for thousands of years. Using his knowledge of the Flash, he launches an elaborate plan that will end up with the Flash liberating her by taking her place. It works well until the very end, where Flash destroys the mirror, thwarting the plan and trapping the woman presumably forever.

We get a new Dr. Fate backup from Pasko and Giffen and Mahlstedt. At the Boston Museum of Natural History, cultists have released the Lord of Chaos, Totec. When Fate and Totec fight they are pretty evenly matched, but then Inza shows up just in time to be taken hostage. Totec captures Fate too then starts the final summoning that will cause the fifth massive extinction event on Earth.

G.I. Combat #238: In Kanigher's and Glanzman's first Haunted Tank story, the crew is supposed to be part of a group opening up another front to take the pressure off the Soviets, but they wind up having to go in solo. They meet kids being trained to fight Nazis and ride a log down a flume to stop the kids' parents from getting executed. Why don't any World War II films show us the real war like these Haunted Tank comics. In their second outing, they are riding a raft down river (tank and all) picking up allied soldiers scattered in the drop near Eindoven. They wind up being carried out to sea and having a tank on a raft versus U-boat battle.

The other stories include one of the usual O.S.S peices. Then there's a short about a guy who intends to run in the next Olympics but makes his last run on a Pacific Island dropping a grenade in a Japanese pillbox. Finally (and really, it's been enough), there's a story of an American POW secretly kept captive by a Japanese officer following the war who feeds squirrels then makes his escape when the squirrels attack the Japanese officer looking for food.

Jonah Hex #57: Fleisher takes another dive into Hex's past. Hiding into a town, Hex saves an older woman from some thugs in a saloon, and it is revealed that she is his mother. She let's Jonah spend the night at her nearly bare, rat-infested apartment, and he recalls when she left him when he was a boy, running off with a traveling salesman and leaving Jonah with his abusive, alcoholic father. Near dawn, he gets up and goes to find the gambler his mother owes money to and guns down the man and his henchmen. Hex rides out of town echoing to his mother her last broken promise to him as a boy: "be back again real soon."

The El Diablo backup is a good one. El Diablo relentless pursues a group robbers and murderers into the desert, refusing to let them leave or even turn back. They turn on each other, then on him and in the end, they are all dead. El Diablo explains to the last one that the desert has become their Hell where they will stay for all eternity.

New Teen Titans #16: Wolfman and Perez give Kory a boyfriend, Frank Crandall, but he's really an agent working for a rogue HIVE leader who's looking to discover the Titans' secrets. The rest of the team discovers the truth, but before they can tell Starfire, Frank is killed by his boss. Starfire goes on a rampage but is stopped by her teammates from murdering the HIVE guy. He's later killed by his peers for taking insanctioned action.

Also, this issue we get a preview of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew by Thomas/Conway and Shaw/Andru. Superman is stopping a meteor and winds up being transported to the furry animal comics universe of Earth-C. The meteor winds up giving a number of the inhabitants super-powers, including Captain Carrot. Superman and Captain Carrot team-up to stop a plot to use a de-evolution ray on the United Nature Building in Gnu York. Yes, we are in for a lot of those sorts of puns.

Secrets of Haunted House #46: Enjoy this title while you can because this is the penultimate issue.  Harris and Sutton start us off with what might be a superhero origin. I man is summoned by his father who reveals he's a wizard and passes his power to his sun via a sweet magical bandolier and talisman. He manages to defeat some bad guys and save his girlfriend. Next up, Sciacca and Bernard have a guy getting rich after he buys a newspaper from the future from a strange curio shop. He should have read beyond the final section, though, because the paper also contained his obituary! Kanigher and Vicatan have a woman on a trip to Egypt manipulated by an ancient cult who believes her to be the reincarnation of a queen. Her spirit gets a bit of revenge though, as she causes the cult leader who killed her to be killed to serve her in all eternity.

Then there's "Star-Trakker" by Timmons and Ditko where an android sent to collect samples of alien life crashes on Earth in a swamp instead and starts capturing and killing humans fulfill its function. A government operative named Stone is sent out to disable the creature and eliminate any witnesses. In the end, he's revealed to be yet another android.

Superman #368: Vlaatu (really Superman in deep disguise) leaves the Revengers to head out on his mission, reverting to his true form and Superman thought process as he nears Earth. But the Revengers suspecting Vlaatu's identity have planted a hypnotic suggestion making him believe he is actually a Super-droid sent destroy Superman. He plans a violent gesture to draw is quarry out and settles on killing Lois Lane! Lois, playing a hunch, throws herself off a cliff and sees her in peril breaks the Revengers' hold on Supes' mind. He flies back to the Revenger planetary base and puts mist around it, so if they leave, they will get amnesia and forget their hatred of Superman. Convenient!

We also get another Superman 2020 story. It's New Year's Eve and the flying, domed city of New Metropolis is going to drop like the Time Square ball. When it lands, everyone appears dead! It turns out terrorists unleashed a deadly plague, but Superman managed to introduce a counteragent that put everyone into suspended animation temporarily. He's got to race against time to stop the terrorists and find a cure.

Ascending to Yai

 Our Land of Azurth 5e campaign continued last night with the party perhaps entering into Yai from a cave and finding themselves in a storage room. A higher tech storage room of on par with some other strange places they've been in the past, but essentially a storage room. 

The cantrip Thaumaturgy came in handy this adventure as it allowed them to open doors they didn't possess the color-coded key card to open, and to inadvertent free two grateful shedu. The shedu, in return warned them of a brain-eating monster lurking about and suggested this structure had once moved through higher dimensions in some fashion. The shedu also revealed they had been subsisting on a store of twinkies.

They road a lift between levels and found mostly storage, but did encounter a robotic watchman who they were able to successfully talk with via magic. He didn't tell them anything they found useful, however. Leaving a storage area, they found themselves in an atrium on a walkway overlooking an expansive garden, gone wild with neglect below. On the walkway, they also ran into an old man.

He said his name was now "the Archivist," and he had once lived in Yai of which this was a sublayer. He took the party for hallucinations, at first. He did note they looked vaguely familiar. He was a foundling, taken in by the people of Yai and so had always been something apart from them. He took this job to catalog their history, but the people of Yai were now only concerned with their entertainments, not their past. He seldom had any contact with them now.

Waylon asked the old man if he had seen any of the Azurth books. The old man thought that rang a bell and said he would go look. He asked the party to wait in the lounge for his return and pointed them the way.

Not Available in Any Galaxy

 In the G+ days of 2016, I imagined what some Osprey Books Star Wars entries would look like. Here they are, rescued from the depths of tumblr:

Wednesday Comics: DC, February 1982 (week 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! Today, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of November 5, 1981. 

Arak Son of Thunder #6: Thomas and Colon/Rodriquez have Arak presenting his accusations against Angelique and her brother to Charlemagne, but the emperor and his paladins are skeptical. Ultimately, Charlemagne orders Arak seized so the joust can continue, but the warrior defeats the French guards and unhorses Angelique's brother, by flipping him off his horse by his lance! The White Cathayan is killed by his horse's hooves, so Angelique summons up a demon and makes good her escape. Everybody feels bad about not believing Arak then, and the Emperor send him off to try to rescue Maligigi. Valda chooses to go with him.

Crossing the Alps, they encounter a frozen elephant and troops which Valda thinks is a lost remnant of Hannibal's army, then they seek shelter in a handy hut. Too handy as it turns out, as it's a trap set by vampires to waylay travelers. Our heroes win the day, with Arak impaling a vampiress on the elephant's tusk!

DC Comics Presents #42: Levitz and Norvick bring in the Unknown Soldier for an unusual team-up. After dispelling a cloud of radioactive gas from about a nuclear test site, Superman starting musing about war. In his Clark Kent identity, he pitches a story about the causes of war to Perry White, but White thinks he sounds more philosophical than journalistic. A mysterious soldier enters the office and gives Clark a message for Superman but leaves quickly before they can ask any questions. The message sends Superman following a trail of clues to a rogue military base in the Arctic that is planning to cause nuclear armageddon, he's helped along the way by mysterious military officers of various sorts. He comes to suspect they are the Unknown Soldier, but he never finds out for certain. With the plot foiled, he visits the Unknown Soldiers supposed tomb to thank him, unaware that the Unknown Soldier watches from the shadows.

Ghosts #109: The first story here is a fantasy tale by Cohn/Mishkin and Zamora where a warrior continues his fathers' quest to slay an avatar of death. He succeeds but finds death far more capricious and prevalent in a post-personification world like our own. Next, Kashdan and Bender have an escaped convict being offered a way out of the country by taking an elixir to place in in near suspended animation, so he appears dead. In the end he's the hapless patsy of a vampire. Kashdan has another one (with Ayers this time) that harkens back to the sort of story this title used to have a lot of where a scuba-diving graduate assistant causes his boss' death at in the jaws of an orca so he can take credit for an archeological find. The professor's spirit gets revenge later by causing the skeletal jaws of the orca, on display at a museum, to fall and kill the guy. Finally, Jones and Carillo present an EC-style story of a nebbish creep who falls for woman he sees in a bar, but when he discovers she's with another guy plots to frame his rival for the murder of his nagging wife. Instead, he accidentally frames to woman he's pining for. No ghost in that one at all!

Justice League #199: The Lord of Time's needlessly complicated plan to acquire antimatter from the past is well underway. The partial amnesiac JLAers are making their way to the Grand Canyon with their DC Western character escorts. The Lord of Time has also sent a group of robots dressed as cowboys into the past to hedge his bets. 

As they approach the Grand Canyon, the League members start remembering more and more. GL's ring warns him the approaching antimatter is dangerous. The robots try to keep them on track, but to no avail. The Old West heroes take out the robot while the League members use their powers in a pretty implausible way to make the antimatter explode before it enters the atmosphere. They return to their own time (1981, specifically) to find Superman survived the Lord's krypton trap and has defeated the bad guy.

Weird War Tales #108: The Creature Commandos (whose logo is now bigger than the comic's title on the cover) and G.I. Robot! Sandwiched in between is this odd story "Jasper Pepperdyne: Defender of Space and Time" that reads like a "back door pilot" maybe and isn't really a war story, weird or otherwise. Instead, it's about a Victorian gentleman in his Victorian rocket than rescues the crew of a space shuttle in distress and regales them with tales of his adventures. It's by Barr and has great art by Garcia-Lopez.

G.I. Robot by Kanigher and Broderick has JAKE and Coker in the Pacific trying to help some local resistance fighters against the Japanese. The robot seems to develop a cross on the attractive woman leading the rebels, but Coker constantly dismisses the evidence because "robots don't have hearts." DeMatteis and Hall/Celardo present the best Creature Commando story to date with Lucky in the hospital after a suicide attempt. The reason (as we find out in a flashback) is that the Commandos had allowed themselves to get captured so they infiltrate a camp and get close to a French scientist being held by the Germans who want her to synthesize a new nerve agent. When the Commandos make their escape, Lucky is forced to kill the scientist who had been kind of him with his bare hands. As he recuperates, the other "monsters" in his unit are uncharacteristically compassionate, showing new or perhaps developing characterization for them.

Wonder Woman #288: The new creative team of Thomas and Colan/Tanghal takes over. Steve Trevor is still in the hospital in bad shape after getting a brain injury in last month's preview. (Thomas makes sure we know this is the second Trevor Diana has known and is actually from an alternate universe, defiantly refusing to let readers quietly forget those shenanigans, which I suspect Conway had intended.) A new superhuman appears on the scene, the beautiful Silver Swan, who is taken for a hero, but Wonder Woman suspects she is shady, and Wonder Woman's instincts are correct. In fact, Silver Swan has been stalking Wonder Woman at the behest of Mars, even moving into an apartment with Diana Prince and Etta Candy in her secret ID of Helen Alexandros. Silver Swan tries to kill Wonder Woman as she goes to return a brief case with secrets to General Darnell but holds off when there are witnesses and pretends to be a hero.

Meanwhile, Dr. Psycho comes to visit Steve Trevor. I'm sure that will fine.

In the digest format, Best of DC #21 is one that I have a lot of nostalgia for as a kid. My brother and I read it and re-read it until it got dog-eared. It reprints "The Untold Origin of the Justice Society" from the DC Special #29 (1977).

Broken Compass: Incident on the Hooghly

My alternate Sundays gaming group played its third session of Broken Compass continuing the "Quest for the Serpent Throne" adventure in the Golden Age sourcebook. Paul joined the group playing the Dwayne Johnson-esque pregen Sam Stone I had created for an adventure with my other gaming group.

His strength and brawling skill was much appreciated when the Sumar Nagarani's goons attacked them in the night, trying to get the naga shell. O'Sullivan, Stilton, Stone managed to escape the boat, bringing Professor Ram with them. O'Sullivan commandeered the shuttle boat and guided them to the shore to make camp as he figured it would be impossible to navigate the rapids in the dark. 

O'Sullivan took first watch and his keen hunter instincts allowed him to kill one menacing tiger with a literal shot in the dark and scare off the other. Once everyone got to sleep after being startled awake by the rifle shot, the rest of the night based uneventfully.

We are still getting used to the Broken Compass system but I continue to like it. It moves pretty quick in play. Some aspects (only players rolling and enemies only having one stat) lead to it requiring some thought about how to accomplish certain types of action, particularly things done to require some sort of advantage or give the enemy a disadvantage (the terms used here in the general sense, not in the game mechanics sense). Also the lack of a rules summary, I still continue to feel keenly.

Weird Revisited: The Dungeon Mad God Machine

This post originally appeared in 2017...

 

Seeing Alien: Covenant yesterday, which (no real spoilers) carries a theme from Prometheus (and from Frankenstein, ultimately) of lesser beings meddling in creation of life, gave me an idea. I've written before (and it's sort of baked into the rules in any case, most explicitly in BECMI) about dungeons in D&D being an engine of apotheosis.

What if dungeons didn't just create gods or god-like being? What if they tended to create mad ones? All those weird D&D monsters are waved off as the products of crazy wizards, but maybe they're more specifically the product of crazy, god-level wizards?

In fact, it's possible dungeons weren't originally a tool of apotheosis at all. One mad race, the Engineers (or Dungeoneers) did came upon that accidentally. The first dungeons were their laboratories, their three dimensional journals of magical experimentation. A delve into one charts (and recapitulates) their ascension to post-mortaldom--and their descent in madness. A dungeon then, is a living blasphemous tome, recording secrets man was not meant to know.

It goes without saying that probably all life in the campaign world began their. Everything crawled up from the depths, evolving away from its original purpose to its current form. Unless of course, that evolution was the point. The Dungeoneers might have felt they would only have arrived at godhood when they could create beings that could follow in their footsteps--or maybe even challenge their supremacy. Perhaps there's another, higher level game and they need soldiers, or experimental subjects, to win it?

Wednesday Comics: DC, January 1982 (week 4)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around October 29, 1981. 

Action Comics #527: Superman is a pawn in the struggle between two sorcerers from 1 million years in the future: Syrene and her husband, the villainous Lord Satanis. They seek Merlin's Runestone, but in the end Satanis is banished to Hell--at least until issue 539 when he's going to return to trouble Supes again. All this is courtesy of Wolfman and Swan.

Adventure Comics #489: Two Dial H stories again, with more one shot heroes created by readers against more one shot villains created by readers. The first story by Rozakis and Infantino/McLaughlin has the concept of the superheroes Chris and Vicki turned into having to appear in court to testify against the villain--which is difficult because they can't become the same heroes twice. They instead dial up other heroes and have to disguise themselves to keep their court date. The second story by Bridwell and von Eeden/Mahlstedt has the kids dialing in now identities to take on an alien menace who is a literal marionette with strings going to an x-shaped spacecraft. It's kind of a weird but interesting character than could have been used in a better story.

All-Star Squadron #5: As usual Thomas packs a lot of story in 28 pages. Most of the members of the Justice Society intend to resign and join the military in their civilian identities, but first they need to go to the Yucatan to find out what happened to Shiera Sanders (Hawkgirl) who was down there on an archeological expedition. Meanwhile, Johnny Quick and Robotman thwart terrorists at the statue of liberty, then arrive in time to see the new Firebrand's debut. The Buckler/Ordway art continues to be great for this sort of standard superhero material.

Detective Comics #510: Conway's mayoral contest subplot continues but seems to be drawing toward its conclusion as Reeves threatens to unleash photos revealing Batman's secret identity. Meanwhile, Lucius Fox is kidnapped, and Batman has to tangle with a foe he has dealt with in a long time--the original Mad Hatter. Now, up until this issue, there was just one DC Comics Mad Hatter, but here Conway retcons Alice in Wonderland-obsessed, Tennell character resembling Mad Hatter of his first 1948 appearance to be the original, and the hat-themed crime committing, mustachioed Mad Hatter that was in the tv show and the comics from the 50s-70s as "an imposter." Tetch says he was in a mental institution and that since getting out he has killed the imposter, but that guy shows up again in the late 80s.

In the Batgirl backup, the Annihilator is still trying to make Batgirl is bride, but the dynamic duo of Supergirl and Batgirl keep foiling his plans. Batgirl frets about being useless with all Supergirl's might, but in a twist, you can see coming a mile away, it's her clever thinking that wins the day.

New Adventures of Superboy #25: When Prof. Lewis Lang and his hippie-ish assistant Burt Belker bring back the Chaos Helmet from the Valley of Ur, Belker puts it on and is possessed by a Lord of Chaos. He becomes Dr. Chaos who looks like a costume color switched Dr. Fate. I wonder why Dr. Chaos never got picked up as a Dr. Fate foe? 

Unexpected #218: In the first story by Snyder and Ayers, the Mexican General is defeated in 1836 because the Texans attack during his siesta time. Okay, that may be "unexpected," but c'mon, DC! Next, Kashdan and Ayers have a story about a guy traveling to the future and discovering aliens have taken over Earth. His fellow researchers don't believe him, but he manages to track down the aliens in his present and wipe them out. He's killed in the process, and his fellow time travels never realize he saved the future for humankind. 

In the cover story, Native American survivors of a nuclear holocaust venture forth from their home into the deep swamps of southern Florida only to discover horrors including gator people eager to transform others into their kind. The final, meandering story by Kanigher and Vicatan, a woman finds the mask of Medusa in a scuba-diving scavenger hunt and lives only long enough to regret it.

Unknown Soldier #259: Haney and Ayers/Talaoc give us another one of their high concept yarns. The Soldier is in Italy and forced to fight a crazy Italian strongman who has sided with the Germans in a gladiatorial arena for the amusement of Goering who's decked out like a Roman emperor. In the gallery of war feature, a pair of young soldiers on guard duty on opposite sides of the Civil War bond over there commonalities, including their harmonica playing. That doesn't keep them from accidentally killing each other in the next day's battle. In the Captain Storm story, he finally manages to get John F. Kennedy out of harm's way and take out the commander of the Japanese sub he's been after, but only at the cost of his own PT boat.

World's Finest Comics #275: Metropolis is having a heatwave when Gotham unseasonable snows. it turns out to be Mr. Freeze in an abandoned Soviet space station, but I like that Kupperberg sticks with the Bronze Age idea that Metropolis and Gotham are not very far apart. Barr and von Eeden have prison leading Oliver Queen to develop even more of a social conscience as he befriends a fellow inmate Green Arrow nabbed and gets Black Canary to help his undocumented immigrant family deal with an exploitive landlord forcing them into crime.

Zatanna is still fighting that guy with a sonic scream on a cruise ship courtesy of Conway and Speigle. He's crazy powerful, being able to freeze a large area of water with a scream, but he gets an accidental electric shock and loses consciousness. His powers are gone but their source is still a mystery to our heroine. After some new bachelor bonding with Flash, Hawkman nabs the Matter Master who has been robbing the museum by changing the material of items so that the museum thinks they have been stolen and replace--and then stealing the items and changing them back. Bridwell and Newton have Captain Marvel have to come to the rescue of a kidnapped Billy Batson, which involves a stand in and the help of Captain Marvel, Jr.