Weird Revisited: The Anthology Crawl

This post was originally published on May 2, 2013, shortly after the death of Andrew J. Offutt.

News of Andrew J. Offutt's passing on April 30 got me to thinking about the Sword & Sorcery anthology series he edited (Swords Against Darkness) and fantasy anthologies in general. It seems to me you could use such an anthology (or anthology series) for inspiration and nonrandom "random placement" of encounters/things of interests in a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl.

Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.

The Grind of Acheron

There is a realm where the obdurate, crystalline structure of a Mechanus shatters and fragments, floating free into the void of half-formed concept. This is a border, though not any physical border because the clockwork nirvana is infinite and redundant in its mechanism, but a conceptual border where the Prime Mover's certainty no longer holds, where the grand program fails. This was the place where, after the fall from Unity (as Law sees it), rebellious Archons sundered themselves from Mechanus. This is the ideaspace separating Pure Law from Hell. This is Acheron.

It's a hell of sorts in its own right. Its acolytes know it as the Crucible. Here, they contend, new truths of Law are formed. Perhaps one day there will be one stronger and surer than either Hell or Mechanus? Adepts of Pure Law view it as gall on the purity of Order, the place where Hell's error abrades it. The Lords of Hell see it as an opportunity.

Pieces of supernal machinery break off at the edges of Mechanus, twisting and reforming, to store failing Order within, into planet-size Platonic solids which continue to degrade, erode and crumble. These have been colonized by numerous beings: malcontents from Hell, reformed things of Chaos, and authoritarian souls with iron dreams of their own version of Order. All the would-be dictators and tyrants begin to gather their followers among the lost and the beaten and forge their own armies of conquest. And then they go to war.

The struggle is as senseless as it is endless. None of the despots or authorities are ever able to overwhelm the others and seldom do they convert them. The strength of Law is shattered, after all. Also, none of them have clear vision of Unity, for they were only born after it. They merely ape what they know of Hell, crudely. 

One might be tempted to view Acheron as a place of Chaos, but philosophers point out that when taken as a whole, the plane is as predictable as Mechanus. Its war machines grind forever on at the behest of devils who will never achieve the godhood they crave.

Wednesday Comics: DC, July 1982 (week 4)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, we review the comics hitting the newsstand on April 29, 1982.

Action Comics #533: Wolfman and Swan resolve the H.I.V.E. story. The organization threaten the world with a cloud of nuclear waste to distract Superman so they can kill Jimmy and Lois. Our heroes stay one step ahead. 

In the Atom backup, Air Wave and his father D.A. Larry Jordan help the tiny titan foil a Dallas oilman's plot to blow up the nuclear physicists' convention.

All-Star Squadron #11: Thomas and Gonzales/Ordway have Akhet and his Flying Eye are preparing the annex in the Earth in the name of his Brotherhood. After an encounter with the All-Stars, the alien abducts Hawkgirl, Steel, Robotman, and Atom. While the Flying Eye patrols the globe, the world leaders weigh their options. A group of All-Stars investigating the disappearance of a group of missing scientists and the captured All-Stars in the Eye both discover the same thing: Anton Hastor, the supposedly dead enemy of Hawkman and Hawkgirl.

Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew #5: The Zoo Crew help museum curator Oklahoma Bones (son of the famous archeologist) with the issue of alien easter eggs uncovered before World War II on Easter Bunny Island. Pig-Iron accidentally activates an egg and releases an alien yolk monster. The Crew ultimately scrambles the egg monster, but at the annual White House Easter Egg hunt a visiting ambassador turns out to be the Ratzi Baron von Vermin and the eggs he donated eggs are duplicates of the one which nearly destroyed the Zoo Crew.

Detective Comics #516: Conway and Newton bring the School of Crime storyline to a close. The criminals catch on to Batman's disguise as Matches Malone. The Headmaster asks him to be the next guy to dress up as Batman for a demonstration. Batman realizes what they are up to and escapes the trap, then starts taking the thugs down one by one. The Headmaster has a total breakdown seeing all his plotting and planning brought to an end. Meanwhile in Gotham, Vicki Vale is pushed to deliver her photos with evidence of Batman's identity--which will go into the hands of Rupert Thorne, and Gordon becomes partners with Jason Bard, determined to find the truth behind Hamilton Hill.

In the Batgirl backup by Burkett and Delbo, Barbara is in a bad way after the bite of Lady Viper. While she remains unconscious for about a week, Lady Viper continues her criminal spree. But when Barbara finally wakes up, she finds out things have gotten even worse: She's now a snake woman like Viper!

New Adventures of Superboy #31: An obsessed scientist gives his son super-powers. As Pulsar, he's pitted against the Boy of Steel. Dear old Dad continues to sap Superboy's strength with a red sun ray just to make sure of his kid's victory. In the end, though, tips from Pa Kent on the "sweet science" of boxing help Superboy win the day, and Pulsar turns against his father's "win at all costs" methods.

Dial H for Hero continues to be a thing. They fight a villain named Whitefire and their are two characters created by one fan this issue, which is notable, but honestly that's all I recall and I only read it two days ago.

Tales of the New Teen Titans #2: Wolfman and Perez reveal the origin of Raven, most of which we knew already, but now we get more of her time in Azarath and the reveal (at least I think it was a reveal) that Trigon was actually born of the evil of the people Azarath they cast out into the space between dimensions. One nice touch is how questions the Titans ask Raven as she's telling the story kind of lampshade questions the reader might have like: "How did these people leave Earth and go to this place between all dimensions to begin with?" Anyway, given that most of this was known, I don't feel like the extended origin justifies its page count.

Unknown Soldier #265: Haney and Ayers/Talaoc send the Soldier to North Africa where he must solve the murder of the tyrannical Brigadier General "Bull" Bannon. He has full authority to act as judge, jury, and executioner, but Bannon was hated by his men and the Colonel that seems likely to have killed him is beloved and by all appearances a fine leader. This one is continued to next issue.

The Losers encounter some kids really gungho to go to war and the Losers are sort of forced to let them in a story by Kanigher and Evans, which is disappointing in that it barely uses the Losers at all. Kanigher/Severin bring the Enemy Ace back to the killer skies where takes out some French planes trying to ambush him then tangles with crazy ol' Steve Savage briefly.

World's Finest Comics #281: Burkett and Novick bring Superman's and Batman's class with the military name-themed b-listers to a close. While Batman prepares to thwart their plans from the inside, Superman escapes the timeless dimension they sent him to by focusing on his heartbeat and thus bringing time to the timeless place. With the team back together, the bad guys go down. 

Next up, Green Arrow tracks down a homeless woman to was witness to an arson for insurance money scam, but not before the arsonists kill her. Ollie figures out the real estate mogul responsible and blackmails him into building a homeless shelter to avoid jail. Rozakis and Saviuk still have Hawkman out in space fighting aliens. This incident has gone on too long for me. We end on the Bridwell/Newton Marvel Family, which has the Family (plus Kid Eternity) having to contend with a giant Mr. Mind.

Weird Revisited: Comic Book Swordswomen of the Seventies

The original version of this post appeared in 2010...

 

"Sword-swinging fantasy protagonist" has generally been a male gig. The pulps gave us a number of Sword & Sorcery heroes of renown, but Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore's "gal Conan," is the only heroine of note from the era--Howard's Dark Agnes being a "historical" adventuress. It wasn't until the Sword & Sorcery revival of the late seventies-early eighties that more women joined the fray.

Despite the smaller number of Swords and Sorcery heroes in comics, there's a much larger percentage of swordswomen. This can probably be attributed to the visual nature of comics--and the inherent appeal of scantily-clad warrior ladies to a predominantly male audience. Despite that, the beauteous women warriors of comics are for the most part more obscure than their male counterparts. It's time they got their due, starting with the trailblazers of the 1970s.

The first swordswoman of the seventies didn't have to deal with sorcery, but she did exist in a post-apocalyptic-fantasy setting, so I'm going to give her a nod. Lyra of the Femizons is from the pages of Savage Tales (vol. 1) #1 (1971) in a story called "Fury of the Femizons." This might be Stan Lee's update on William Moulton Marston's psychosexually underpinned Wonder Woman concept, or an alarmist "cautionary tale" of women's lib gone wild--or, you know, an idea he scrawled on a napkin at a local deli to fill pages.

Lyra's 23rd Century is essentially a reverse Gor, or The Planet of the Apes if you replace "apes" with "Amazons." Lyra is the toughest gladiatrix around, defeating (and killing) the weak for the "vicious voluptuaries" of Queen Vega's court. That's until she meets hunky slave Mogon and agrees to help him with his revolutionary aims for the sake of love. It all ends tragically, of course--well, mostly for Mogon. Lyra is forced to kill him to "prove" her loyalty to Vega. But she feels really bad about it and realizes, "when a man is but a slave--it is the women who live in bondage." Not sure what Lee meant there, but let's move on.

Our next swordsman is a little less obscure. Red Sonja, the so-called She-Devil with a Sword, debuted in 1973 in Conan the Barbarian #23. Sonja was Roy Thomas' Hyborian Age adaption of Sonya of Rogatino in his Conan-ified interpretation of Robert E. Howard's historical actioner "The Shadow of the Vulture." Thomas' Sonja got magical puissance with a blade from a goddess, along with geas that she would never know (in the Biblical sense) a man until he had defeated her in fair combat. After her Conan appearances, she got a famous chain-mail bikini from artist Esteban Maroto and a lot of further appearances, including a succession of three self-titled series.

Marvel's loss of the Howard licenses couldn't sheathe Sonja's sword. She came back, and so did her chain-mail outfit so beloved by artists and fans. After a couple of one shots at other companies, Dynamite Entertainment picked up the character in 1999, and she's still going strong in an ongoing series and a succession of limiteds.

Just as Red Sonja was beginning to climb in popularity, DC unleashed their own swordswoman. Raven-haired Starfire got her own title from the start, debuting in 1976. The creation of David Micheline and Mike Vosburg, Starfire swung her sword for her world’s freedom from the alien Mygorg and Yorg for only 8 issues. Like Lyra, she had a dead love for motivation, and like Red Sonja, she was always spurning the advances of men.

The next two heroines chronologically have a connection to Red Sonja. The first, and the one to appear in the seventies, was Ghita of Alizarr. Frank Thorne took over the pencilling chores for Red Sonja in Marvel Feature #2 (Jan. 1976) and continued through the eleventh issue of her first self-titled series. Thorne spent most of the seventies getting photographed with attractive women--mostly by dressing up like a wizard and judging Red Sonja lookalike contests at conventions:

It's fair to say that ending his tour on Red Sonja didn't end his interest in buxom warrior women, so he created his own. In Warren's futuristic 1984 #7 (1978), the Red Sonja-reminiscent but blonde-tressed, Ghita of Alizarr debuted. Freedom from Comics Code restrictions freed Ghita from her clothes--frequently--and she proved not at all encumbered by any Sonja-esque restrictions on whom she might have sex with or how often.

Ghita appears in three issues of 1984 and also in several collections where Thorne gets to play Thenef the Wizard in the cover photographs.

And here our heroines ride forth out of the seventies. 

Go Ape

 

Over on the Flashback Universe Blog, Jason Sholtis and I have started an episode by episode review and commentary on The Planet of the Apes 1974 TV show.

Head over there are check it out if that short of thing interests you.

Wednesday Comics: DC, July 1982 (week 3)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around April 22, 1982.

Brave & the Bold #188: Kanigher and Aparo team Batman with Thorn (as in Rose & Thorn). After taking a group of any city kids to do some environmental clan up, Batman investigates the murder of a former Nazi spy and the theft of a canister of a deadly, biological warfare gas. Batman meets Rose Forrest as she's weirdly being attacked by birds, then investigates the theft of her father's corpse from its grave. At the cemetery, Batman tangles with a group of Neo-Nazis and he is assisted by Thorn, Rose's alter. Together, Batman and Thorn defeat the Nazis, but Batman decides to continue his investigation alone.

Legion of Super-Heroes #289: The Legion searches for its five members who are lost on an icy asteroid. Lightning Lad and Chameleon Boy both engage in some self-flagellation on how their leadership got the group here. Saturn Girl and Timber Wolf, trapped on the asteroid get close, which is easily misunderstood by Light Lass when she arrives with the rescue party. Meanwhile, the darkness teased a couple of issues back is about to make itself known. Levitz and Giffen/Patterson are handling both the character stuff and foreshadowing their epic well.

Green Lantern #154: Barr and Staton/Smith have a distress signal taking Hal to planet where he saves some natives and takes them to their tribe, whose chief thanks him for protecting them "again." Only problem is Hal's never been here. After he helps them out again they offer him a throne and jewels. It turns out they mistaken him for a Green Lantern, named Dalor, who shows up and tells Hal that he is in Sector 2813 instead of 2814. Dalor explains that the tribe's offerings are merely his payments for his services. Hal's not happy about that and demands Dalor to accompany him to his spatial base.

Dalor's a new Green Lantern, but he explains all the planets have been paying him for his services, so he thought was the way it went for Green Lanterns. Hal wants to tell the Guardians, but there's another distress signal from the planet. Dalor tries to beat Hal to attend to the emergency, but he falls unconscious, just like the rest of the tribe, due to a sulfur cloud. Hal fans out the gas and saves everybody but the chief, who died by intoxication. Hal lays into Dalor for his behavior, but the projection of a Guardian appears in front of them, saying that they'll judge the one responsible.

House of Mystery #306: Jones and Sutton bring Andrew Bennett and Mary to Victorian London. Bennett is immediately mistaken for Jack the Ripper, and Mary is murdering woman in the name of the ripper to try to kill the ancestor of Dr. Barr who made the cancer cure that's killing vampires, so he'll never be born. Turns out the doctor who helps Bennett is actually Jack the Ripper, and his housekeeper (the sister of a prostitute Mary kills is Barr's ancestor.

The next story by Cavalieri and Patricio is better and certainly less convoluted. Government agents are interrogating a Private who stole a file on the secret Project: Ultra. They give him an experimental truth serum, which allows him to see all truth. The final story by Gwyon and Curry has a young boy told all his life by his vain and neurotic mother only to find it it's true--as he bleeds to death from hemophilia. As someone with hemophilia, I don't particularly find the story offensive, but it is dumb and terribly inaccurate in its portrayal of the condition.

Sgt. Rock #365: Kanigher and Redondo have Easy in a tough spot in the desert, but they're saved by a gungho kid from Appalachia who loved the arm so much he wants to stay in 30 years. He doesn't get to, but breaking the usual formula, he isn't KIA, but gets a ticket home due to injuries. He guips he got 30 minutes of action instead of 30 years. Mandrake is on art duties for the next story, a sci-fi yarn where a woman fleeing invading aliens is helped out by the geyser, Old Faithful. Between this and Brave & the Bold this month, I suspect Kanigher has an environmentalist streak.

In "Destruction from Below" a violent leader of a Stone Age human tribe leads them underground, but then he falls into some weird mushroom patch and sleeps for a looong time. When he awakens, he attempts to lead the degenerate descendants of his band, but the modern world is too much for them to handle when they emerge in a city park. In the final story with art by DeMulder, an F-4 Phantom pilot's dream of a dogfight with a dragon is symbolically prophetic of the way he escapes an enemy in a dogfight the following day. 

Superman Family #220: Supergirl is still trapped in a ghostly state thanks to Master Jailer. She goes to Ivy University and seeks help from Ray Palmer, the Atom, who is able to figure out a solution. Returned to normal, Supergirl goes back to New York. She manages locate the Master Jailer's hideout in the Brooklyn Bridge--but he turns out to be a robot, and the real Master Jailer is still at large.

In the Kupperberg/Delbo Jimmy Olsen, the accumulated inconsistencies lead Jimmy to begin to realize that he is under someone's influence. But he goes to the Planet and accuses Clark of being Superman, as Brain Storm observes from his secret lair. The O'Flynn/Oksner has a reformed criminal Lane helped stay out of jail tipping her off to a job his old gang is pulling. She helps fake his death so they can catch the gang. Finally, in the Mr. and Mrs. Superman story by Bridwell/Schaffenberger, introduce (briefly) a Supergirl stand-in--Liandly from the planet Rolez. She returns to her homeworld at the end of the story, but not before helping Superman against the Earth-2 Colonel Future.

Warlord #58: I detailed the main story in this issue here. In the Kupperberg and Duursema Arion backup, Arion continues on his journey more troubled than before, after learning he was born from cosmic matter. Meanwhile, Garn Daanuth, sorcerer and ruler of the dead city Mu, plots Arion's downfall. While Arion sleeps the sorcerer sends an astral projection to kill him. Arion awakes up but is struck down by Garn. Gemimn and Chaon observe the battle an argue over who they think will prevail.

Four-Color Swords & Sorcery: Monsters!

Earl Norem

Big monsters are a hallmark of Bronze Age Four-Color fantasy of the Swords & Sorcery mode. These creatures are often are the antagonist of the "big battle" of the issue, the full manifestation of the menace posed by the main villain--and occasionally the main villain themselves. Less formidable big monsters may be an obstacle to the final confrontation with the villain.

The monsters come in a variety of forms from merely giant to gargantuan natural animals to animate statues/automata of humanoids or animal shape. Tentacled, tendriled, or pseudopod-waving creatures seem to particularly common. I suspect so their threat is made clear in a way that doesn't immediately injure the heroes or result in a Comics Code Approval imperiling amount of blood.

So are multiple heads. Both of these have the added benefit particularly in games of allowing one creature to engage multiple heroic opponents more easily.

These creatures, at least the bigger ones, are seldom defeated by hacking them until they die. In game terms, the simplest to defeat require a "critical hit" or called shot of some sort, often an injury to their eye. Others are dispatched by a trick of some sort: using the environment or their own abilities or natural weaponry against them. Finally, some can only be killed using a special item or weapon, typically obtained earlier in the adventure.

What does this meaning for emulating the genre in gaming? These are my take aways:

• Unique, big monsters need to show up regularly. Maybe not every adventure, but most of them.
• The best way to defeat the creatures should seldom be the most obvious brute force method.
• This means the GM needs to reward creative thinking by the players to handle these encounters.
• If the ways of defeating the monster are particularly limited, the means must be telegraphed to the players and be available to them.