Wednesday Comics: DC, April 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 January 14, 1982.

Batman #346: Two-Face escapes from Arkham by hypnotizing the guards with a special coin. While Batman searches for him, Gordon worries about Mayor Hills promise to get rid of him, Dick frets over his mysterious new girlfriend, Dala, and Vicki Vale becomes ever-more suspicious that Bruce Wayne is Batman. Conway is juggling a lot here! In the end, Batman tracks Two-Face down and overcomes numerous traps but is captured anyway.

In the Catwoman backup by Jones and von Eeden/Marcos, Catwoman discovers that the detective who hired her is really an ex-Nazi searching for an h-bomb formula hidden on the train. H wants revenge on her because her father killed his father. He ties Catwoman to the railroad tracks and he explains how he made the trains disappear with an underground tunnel and made everyone believe in ghosts with holographic images. Catwoman gets free and uses his own holograms against him.

Flash #308: Bates and Infantino/Smith have actress Daphne Dean seeking out the help of her childhood friend Barry Allen. It seems she's been getting increasingly more creepy letters of love from Lance Basilla, their childhood bully. Lance has been participating in some sort of sleep study and while he has dreamed his fancies are given physical form. A mummy monster from his mind challenges the Flash in an attempt to get Daphne. In the end, lightning thwarts the monster, and Lance seems to give up his obsession.

In the Dr. Fate backup, The Lord of Chaos Malferrazae (who has masqueraded as the god Totec) has sent a creature to destroy Fate. Only after the combat has gone on for sometime, does Fate discover the creature is borne of Inza's jealousy. If Fate manages to destroy the monster, Inza will die, devastating Kent Nelson's and destroying his will to serve as Doctor Fate, allowing Malferrazae to cause the fifth massive extinction on Earth! But if he doesn't destroy the monster, Malferrazae still wins.

G.I. Combat #240: There's a note in the letter column of this issue that they've had to cut back on pages. In Kanigher's and Glanzman's first Haunted Tank tale is more fantastic than most, with our heroes going up against a robot tank crew. When they are defeated by quicksand, Hitler executes the inventor in a fit of pique in true super-villain fashion. Kashdan and Matucenio deliver an ode to a hardworking truck. In the O.S.S. story, the metal plate on an agent's head gives a signal for the bombers to follow to destroy a German radar installation. Kashdan and Redondo present a story about a really by the book sargeant--who ultimately uses that manual to leave a paper trail for rescues to follow when he and his men are captured. 

The issue is rounded out as always by the Haunted Tank. With his tank busted and his men injured, Jeb has to go for help, but runs into a German death squad. His crew comes to the rescue at the last minute in a captured German armored car.

Jonah Hex #59: DeZuniga's cover for this issue is completely misleading because it just depicts the events of a nightmare Jonah has. Meanwhile, Wu Gong Phat, who claims to be a merchant from Nanking, sets a trap for Hex. Mei Ling receives a mysterious letter and rides off. The issue ends with Hex apparently being loaded on a boat in the San Francisco harbor.

The El Diablo backup by Cohn and Ayers has a traveling hypnotist arrive in town. After a seemingly innocuous show of his abilities, he gets the subjects he demonstrated on to rob a bank. All except Lazarus Long who becomes El Diablo and brings the wrongdoers to justice. Something El Diablo does leaves the hypnotist a jibbering madman.

New Teen Titans #18: Wolfman and Perez bring back the original Starfire. When his son is killed by Americans in El Salvador, a Soviet official seeks revenge by sending his secretary, Maladi Malanova, to America ostensibly as a courier--but she's also carrying a deadly disease. Learning of the plot, the Soviet government dispatches Starfire (the Russian one) to the U.S. to stop her. This being a superhero comic, the Titans mistake Starfire for the plague-carrier, and they fight. Then, they fight some more when they find out he intends to kill Maladi who is incurable. The Titans fight Starfire to a stalemate and Maladi is finally taken to a hospital to die in peace. Kid Flash condemns Starfire for his callousness, but the hero ultimately reveals that Maladi was his fiancée, and he had only volunteered for the mission to spare her the pain of a tortuous death.

Superman #370: Wein and Swan present "Better Living Through Chemo-stry!" Chemo returns to Earth and somehow merges with a laid-off factory-worker whose animus for his old employers drives Chemo to attack their factories. Superman succeeds in separating the two.

In the retro-topical "Superman: The In-Between Years" backup by Rozakis and Schaffenberger, Clark Kent learns that his roommate Tommy Lee's parents in South Viet Nam are endangered by the Communists and goes to help them as Superboy.

D&D Icons

Thinking about the 13th Age Icons this weekend, I think it would be fun to replace them with these guys. Really, it wouldn't take much modification of the official 13th Age crew. 

Caruso the Bard probably wouldn't make the cut, though.

Games I Liked in 2022

The pandemic led to more gaming, and that continued in 2022. In addition to running my long-standing 5e Land of Azurth game, I ran a few other systems:

Broken Compass: I really like this rules lite pulp game, and so do both the groups I've run it for. It makes for a great palate cleanser when you might get tired of a longrunning campaign in something else. I hope to run it more in 2023.

Marvel Heroic: I ignored this game at the time it was released, but I really shouldn't have. After running it for a short-time, I think it will become my go-to supers game in the future. There are somethings I don't like about it, but it runs quick and has a comic book feel. I might "update" a game to Cortex Prime (the latest iteration of the basic engine) if I was to run it again.

Rocket Age 5e: I only ran one session of this. I don't think it's a bad system, but 5e just doesn't seem the best to me for pulpy, retro-sci-fi. I think if I tried to run this setting again, I'd likely do it in Broken Compass. I would still recommend Rocket Age (both 5e and otherwise) for the setting material, though.

Wednesday Comics: DC, April 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 January 7, 1982. 

Arak Son of Thunder #8: Continuing the story from last issue, Valda and the Pope are captives of the subterranean Black Pope and his people and Arak is forced to fight in the arena to try to save their lives. He succeeds, of course, but a kidnapped woman from Rome above saves the day by knifing the Black Pope from behind. There's a Viking Prince backup by Kanigher and Duursema, but I feel like this is a bit of recap from what's gone on before with that character.

DC Comics Presents #44: Rozakis and Irving/McLaughlin resurrect Dial H from Adventure Comics. Superman goes to Fairfax to investigate why the town has become a hotbed of new heroes, just as Chris King pulls a boneheaded move. He turns himself into a monster called Beast-Maniac by dialing H-O-R-R-O-R instead of H-E-R-O. In the course of solving this problem, our heroes discover the mysterious Master is behind all the super-villains.

Ghosts #111: In the first story, Mishkin and Texiera present a doctor who has figured out a way to both analogize and present psychological pathology and sort of a virtual reality game--except when he's confronted by his colleagues over his methods it doesn't stay virtual, and his own deathwish does him in. In "The Last Kung-Fu Movie" by Kelley and Giffen, Bruce Lee appears to have been the inspiration for an Asian film who gets his revenge from beyond the grave on unscrupulous Hollywood types. 

Mayer and Ditko present "Shrieeeeek!" a mildly (perhaps intentionally) humorous tale of a man brought to ruin by th ghost of a mouse he had killed. It's really kind of an Atlas Horror sort of story, actually.

Justice League #201: Conway is joined by Heck for one of his lesser outings in this run. A down-and-out, one shot super-villain, Joe Parry (not Perry!), encounters Ultraa living as a normal guy in Atlantic City. He befriends the superhuman lug and manipulates him into turning to crime. When the Atom alerts the Justice League to a bank robbery perpetrated by the duo, Flash deliberately brings Hawkman in on the case, hoping to get his friend back in the game post-separation from his wife. Ultraa battles Superman, Flash, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Atom, and Hawkman to a standstill in a board-walk casino, until Hawkman convinces him give up the fight. Parry is taken into custody, and Ultraa goes to live with a tribe of aborigines like those who raised him back on Earth-Prime.

Weird War Tales #110: When surgeon Myrra Rhodes is able to restore Shrieve's damaged face after an accident, the Commandos are hopeful she can make them human again. When she tries to explain to them why that won't work, they throw a tantrum and break stuff. Rhodes gets exposed to a random combination of experimental gasses and is rather improbably transformed into a snake-haired freak. She joins the team, because being a creature is apparently the main requirement for being a Creature Commando.

Allikas and Zamora follow that up with a story of Germans being psychically lead to a new British supr-weapon, only to discover they had come to ground zero of the test of that weapon. Kanigher and Trinidad have a sailor adrift aided by mermaids against Japanese frogmen. Finally, there's a story of flag-bearer during the Crusades which I guess is "war" but nothing in it is particularly "weird."

Wonder Woman #290: The fight with Silver Swan continues. Just as the tide seems to be turning in Wonder Woman's favor, Dr. Psycho, smitten with Silver Swan, enters the battle as Captain Wonder using ectoplasm from Steve Trevor. With Wonder Woman defeated, they plan to take her and kill her in front of President Reagan. Trevor awakens, though having realized he isn't a native of this Earth. With him conscious, Captain Wonder is no more, and Psycho crashes the plane. Mars has had about enough, and takes Swan's powers away in disappointment, turning her back into regular old Helena. When Psycho and Helen see each other as they truly are, they are mutually repelled and run away from each other. Trevor and Wonder are reunited, though.

In the Huntress backup by Levitz and Staton she finally defeats the Crime Lord, though after this thing being dragged out for three months, I've sort of forgotten what the point was.

Transportation Acquired

 Our Land of Azurth 5e game continued last night with the party intending to go to the Country of Sang and meet up with the Clockwork Princess now that they had secured the Elders of Yai as an ally against the Wizard. Waylon asked the Elders if they could provide transportation. They could, not directly, as the folk of Yai don't leave the city, but they did at one time have a suitable craft. It had been stolen by an impetuous member of their community, Gill-24, but it was currently located not far from the city in the mountains.

The Elders agree to sleep-train the party's biggest fanboy, Irwin-37, to fly it and send hm to accompany the group. With that accomplished, they set out down a precarious set of hidden stairs on the outside of the city's dome. They trek through the mountains, avoiding conflict with a creature like a cross between a porcupine and a grizzly, before reaching the ship's crash site. Of course it was guarded by robots.

The party has bcome pretty good at destroying robots by now. Shade even made constructs her favored enemy!

Inside the ship, they discovered a group of imprisoned creations. Two telepathic, floating things clued them into the fact that the ship was now under the control of a pirate named Garbulex. Garbulex threatened the party over the intercom and tried to turn a giant monster loose on them, but Irwin-37 saved the day by putting the creature back in stasis. 

The party decided Garbulex was going down. They made their way to the control room where Garbulex did a share swivel with tented fingers and gloating thing.

Then the fight started.

Garbulex has some sort of energy sword and a cloak that seems to have a life of its own like Dr. Strange's in the movies. He looks to be a formidable opponent.

Then Kairon polymorphs him into a chicken.

His unpolymorphed cloak manages to fly the chicken out of the ship, despite the best efforts of the party to kill them both. Despite their foes' escape, the party are the easy victors and now have a ship.

[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 2)

This continues my discussion with Anne of DIY & Dragons on the dungeoncrawling implications of Peter Watts' Blindsight. You can read part one here.

Trey: Going back to the alien a minute, it strikes Rorschach's innards are perhaps less a dungeon and more a haunted house. A number of the dangers are really psychological (or neurological) but not less real for that. In that respect it resembles other sci-fi haunted houses like in Planet of Vampires or Event Horizon.

Anne: That's a good way of describing it and gets at one of the things I found most fascinating (and frustrating) about Blindsight as a book. Because on the one hand, it's really interesting to see someone take the various real-world quirks of the way human consciousness works and try to turn them into dungeon hazards. On the other hand, there were points where one character is explaining something to another where I felt like, "ah yes, Peter, I too read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I may be off on a tangent, though!

I think both the Rorschach and the Borg illustrate the difficulty of trying to represent an intelligent but non-conscious entity trying to communicate with humans. Presumably that's something that dungeon masters would find challenging to represent too. I wonder if the rise of chat-bots will make us more accustomed to the way that computers talk and make it easier to fake, though?

Trey: That's a good point. We're becoming more aware all the time of what non-self-aware AI is capable of! For dungeon purposes I think the easiest way to handle this is to have the creatures not communicate really. 

Anne: Or maybe be really obviously like old video game NPCs? They have a line or two of dialogue, and if you try to keep talking to them, all they can do is repeat it.

Trey: I like that. I've toyed with something like that with some monsters in my games, but I don't know if I pulled the effect off.

Anne: It might also be worth noting that killer dungeons of this or any sort seem to work best with either the tournament or zero-level funnel format. To experience them as intended, you need a good supply of characters to get killed, without slowing down the overall momentum of the game too much.

Trey: That's a good point. They are dying dungeons, for sure. 

A Blindsight like or inspired dungeon potentially allows for a different sort of exploration, though. Rather than only the physical exploration of a space, it allows the unraveling of a mystery, though not of the whodunit sort.

Anne: Yes! The payoff for flinging all these imaginary lives into an imaginary meatgrinder can't just be imaginary money. It needs to be knowledge. Ideally, some kind of understanding of the rules for how the killer dungeon operates, so you can learn to avoid its dangers.

[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 1)

This is the second in a series of chats between Anne of DIY & Dragons and me about dungeoncrawling (or dungeoncrawling inspiring) science fiction. This installment's topic: Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Trey: So, obviously (like Roadside Picnic) Blindsight isn't strictly a "dungeoncrawl" novel--but I think it has some interesting things that might inform dungeoncrawls.

Anne: It certainly has a section of dungeon-like exploration. And one that's kind of consistent with a scifi mini-tradition of people using clones or backups to explore an alien space so deadly that it requires multiple "lives" to traverse.

Trey: Yes. It's a "killer dungeon" as many sci-fi ones are.

Anne: I'm thinking of Aldis Budrys's Rogue Moon and Robert Silverburg's The Man in the Maze as the earliest examples I'm aware of. But Alistair Reynolds's "Diamond Dogs" novella would be another more recent example. I think I've jumped the gun a bit here though. We should probably say a little more about Blindsight generally before getting into the details.

Trey: Good point! Blindsight concerns what happens after Earth receives an alien visitation (not unlike Roadside Picnic in that regard!), but technology is advanced enough that humans can pinpoint where the visit came from in the edge of our solar system and sends first probes and then a (trans)human team to intercept. What they find isn't some more and fuzzy first contact, but a vast and alien intellect with which no communication is really possible. An intellect that wants humanity dead. It takes a while for the team to piece this together though, but all the while the alien is trying to kill them.

Anne: It's been a few years since I read it, so forgive me if I'm remembering wrong, but the near-lethal dungeon is a kind of trap, isn't it? The alien made something that was almost too dangerous, but just safe enough that the team would give in to the temptation to explore it. And while they're focused on the threat of the environment, the alien intellect is up stuff in the background.

Trey: The alien lives in a high radiation environment so some things are hostile because they just are, but it is effectively experimenting on the explorers. This is killer dungeon where the dungeon and the monsters are inseparable.

Anne: "Inseparable" is a good way of putting it! The amount of connection between the intelligence (which calls itself "Rorschach"), the space the human team is exploring, and the monsters that live inside that space is one of the few things the team successfully learns.

Trey: Yes, it's an interesting concept we haven't quite gotten in dungeon ecology (I don't think). The living dungeon where the monsters aren't just local fauna/flora but essentially cells in a great body. I'm sure someone has suggested that, but I've never seen it actually carried through.

Anne: The dungeon as body of giant monster is more of a scifi concept than a fantasy one, and it does lend itself to drawing on real-world biology as a starting point. The film Fantastic Voyage (with the shrink ray and submarine going inside a human body) is one approach, but it focuses on the sense of wonder, and maybe the didactic opportunity, more than the unsettling or horrific feeling you could get from realizing that the dungeon itself is alive.

Trey: I think it's perhaps rpgs have tended to be rather conservative in their approach to fantasy. From a practical standpoint that presents a low bar to entry, perhaps. There are rpgs with living dungeons though, 13th Age, for instance. Mostly nonbiological but I think there have been a couple of those.

Anne: The Borg Cubes in Star Trek are kind of like living dungeons. I mean, the ships themselves are entirely mechanical, although they function more like bodies than like starships. The Borg themselves are cyborgs, but their bodies seem to be mostly robotic, with only a vestige of biology remaining. In that case, the individual Borg are kind of like cells within the body. 

Trey: Very true! It strikes me that the Rorschach and its cells introduce a way to deal with the problem of the typical, distasteful narrative of dungeoneer in D&D. If dungeons arrive unbidden and spew forth creatures that you can't communicate with and want to kill you, well clearing them out is a bit easier to justify.

It's kind of the premise of my "Apocalypse Underground" series of posts from years back.

Anne: I wonder if that's something that living dungeons often have in common? They represent a threat that almost has to be explored because of the danger it poses. Roadside Picnic's like that too - the Zone appears one night, and everything inside it is contaminated and ruined by its appearance. At least some of the people going in are the ones who were displaced by it showing up.

Trey: That's a good thought. People who are displaced and lose their homes and livelihoods may need what valuables can be wrested from the dungeons.

to be continued