Big Game Wednesday - The Wider World

As I was starting to explore the wider world of role-playing games beyond Dungeons and Dragons, the industry itself was undergoing explosive expansion. There were dozens of companies putting out products compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, and just as many, it seemed, putting out products to try and unseat it. And among those products were some future big names.


For instance, there was a little company called Midkemia Press that put out a series of campaign books--a book describing a city named Carse, for example, complete with maps and NPCs, encounter tables and price lists--that would fit together to form a larger campaign world. Within a couple of years, that series of Dungeons and Dragons campaign supplements would be fleshed out further in a massive novel, titled Magician, that would turn out to be the start of a hugely successful series making its author, Raymond Feist, one of the most successful writers in the field. And of course, thanks to the Internet and a resurgence of interest in retro RPG products, Midkemia Press is still around, still offering some of the same supplemental materials they sold thirty years ago.

Similarly, there was a company called Flying Buffalo that put out a game titled Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes designed by one Michael Stackpole, who would later rise to prominence as a novelist for the Battletech and Star Wars X-Wing: Rogue Squadron series of books. And after Stackpole left the X-Wing series, another previous RPG designer, Aaron Allston, would take his place on that series.

Which is not to mention the direct media spin-offs of D&D itself--the Dragonlance novels, the animated TV series, the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

For my own personal journey though, stepping into the wider world consisted of two stages. Stage two I'll talk about in a couple of weeks. Stage one was Multicon, the first time I gamed outside of my usual group.

While I was home for summer vacation in the summer of 1981, I attended a science fiction convention in Oklahoma City called Multicon, and for some reason, ended up spending almost the entire convention in the gaming room. I entered a Villains and Vigilantes tournament game which ended up being a fascinating experience.

The game was crazy. First, instead of rolling up characters at random, we were tasked with building ourselves under game rules. The gamemaster had a few simple tests of dexterity and strength to force people to justify giving themselves high attribute scores. Then he assigned powers secretly to each of us. And then the game started, at the convention, with an attack by aliens (I think) which involved some sort of dimensional portal which gave us superpowers. I ended up with a force field that I couldn't control--it came up automatically whenever someone attacked me--but as long as I was in physical contact with someone else, we were pretty much invulnerable, so I tried to play that aspect as well as I could.

We were whisked through another dimensional portal to a space station in the far future, where we battled more aliens in a quest to stop... something, I don't remember what. I do remember the bad guy took off through another portal, so we chased after him and were transported to a grassy field on a farm somewhere...

Where we discovered that we were bunnies fighting for our lives, only instead of battling aliens with blasters, we were trying to escape a dog and a nasty barbed wire fence. We fought our way through the bunny adventure only to be whisked through another portal where we were now medieval knights of the Round Table...

On a very silly quest for the Holy Grail (adapted from a D&D scenario published in the July 1981 issue of The Space Gamer). I didn't win the ultimate prize for the tournament--a signed novelization of Escape From New York by Mike McQuay (who would years later become one of my best friends and inspire me to try writing fiction for real)--but I had fun.

Quick McQuay story: I remember hearing a rumor, or perhaps it was McQuay who told me, that John Carpenter wouldn't speak to him anymore after the novel came out. You see, Carpenter's movie is a straight-ahead action film. It's got a satirical sense of humor, but the action is played pretty straight. But McQuay apparently couldn't bring himself to write the action with a straight face, so he added an element that is never mentioned in the film--namely, that all the characters in the film have suffered brain damage from nerve toxins used in a big war with the Soviets. In other words, the reason everyone acts the way they do in the film is because they are all, from the President to the warden to the bad guys to Snake Plissken himself, bugfuck crazy.

So anyway, after the big tournament game was over, I played some other stuff as well. There was a game of Steve Jackson's Undead, and there was my introduction to Dean's World.

Dean was a local gamemaster who I ran into at a few conventions. Older, gray-haired, diabetic and frail, yet the guy ran an incredible game. I was never exactly sure what system he was using. There was some sort of system, I'm guessing because we did use character sheets and dice, but the rules were all in Dean's head. His games took place in a multiverse with different planes at war with each other, and where you could have modern-day mercenaries battling aliens battling ninja battling superheroes battling wizards battling vampires, and it all made sense and flowed effortlessly from Dean's seemingly limitless imagination. I played with him at two or three different conventions, and I don't think I ever saw him flip open a single rulebook, nor use so much as a single written note to jog his memory.

That weekend had a huge effect on me. A couple of years later, I ended up stealing the dimension-hopping V&V scenario for an adventure I ran during a Halloween party at my apartment (including an episode where the players turned to bunnies), and I'm pretty sure my plans for a multi-planar war in V&V were at least partly inspired by Dean's World.

The entire weekend was an exhilarating blur, topped off by my introduction to another game I'd never heard of, The Morrow Project. That game was memorable in its own way, namely as the biggest clusterfuck I had ever encountered around a gaming table. And yet, it was fun enough that I later bought the rules and orchestrated an equally huge cluster of my own as a GM a couple of years later.

But that's next week.

Movie Monday:Breather

So the long slog through all the live-action Batman films is over. I had thought to end with one massive cross-comparison of all the different elements--the Batmobiles, the Manors Wayne, etc.

But I ended up being pressed for time, so here instead is the 67 Year Cavalcade of Batmen.


Next week: Comedy

Out of the Vault - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Pt. 1

So okay, it's been a long time coming, but I have finally gotten up the nerve to talk about Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. And because it is so big and there's so much to say about it, I'll probably be doing each of the four issues in their own post.

It's hard to overstate the influence this comic had, on the character of the Batman and on the comics industry as a whole. Without this comic to mine ideas from, Tim Burton's "Batman" would not have been made, nor would it have been as successful. Without the success of Burton's "Batman," the subsequent Batman films would not have been made, nor would the market have been proven for subsequent superhero films like "Spider-Man" and "Iron Man." But I'll talk more about that at the end. Where to start?

Let's start before the beginning, with the state of the character before Miller redefined him. Here are some sample panels from Batman #366, written by Doug Moench and drawn by Don Newton and Alfredo Alcala, cover-dated December 1983, a little over two years before the graphic novel debuted. The storyline: Batman has headed down to Guatemala with Vicki Vale, to stop the Joker from exploiting the civil war raging in the country. Joker plans to take over the country and remake it into a criminal paradise, known as Joker-Land.

This issue, by the way, was the first one to show Jason Todd in costume as Robin. It's not just the silliness of the story I want to point out here. Moench was at least trying to open up the book's horizons a little and not have the same tired plots in the same tired city.

But everything about the character had just become static and stale; the costume was really the only thing distinctive about him anymore. Otherwise, he was just another do-gooder in tights (tights that he's been wearing for who-knows-how-long in the Guatemalan jungle without a single sweat stain or tear, not even a snag of the cape), throwing the same Batarang on a rope that TV viewers saw him use on TV 20 years ago. And the people around him barely even notice that there's anything unusual about a dude in a bat costume anymore. He's not striking fear into anybody.

That was what Frank Miller confronted when he did his take on the Batman in 1986: a character with a unique concept who had stopped being unique and interesting years ago. So let's see what Miller did to bring life into the old boy.

The first thing he did was to shift it into an "imaginary" reality, outside the canon DC universe and years into the future, so he could take chances with the character. Bruce Wayne is now in his 50's and has retired from Bat-adventuring. He now risks his life doing things like racing cars to replace the adrenaline rush of crimefighting. And he seems to have lost all purpose in life; while trapped in a crashing car on page one, he speculates that "this would be a good death," and returns to that line throughout, giving us one of the central themes of the story: an old man whose life has lost its meaning, now searching for a meaningful death.

Yeah, that's right, I said "theme." This story had actual themes, which was not something you encountered often in mainstream superhero comics and which was one of the things that lifted it above the rest of the pack.

We find out that Bruce has not been Batman for 10 years, though we never find out exactly what made him quit. The story implies that it had something to do with the government making superheroes illegal (a trope it shared with that other 80's comics mega-event, Alan Moore's Watchmen), but it also implies that it may have had something to do with the death of Jason Todd. (Let me apologize right up front for the blurriness of many of the scans; all I have is the square-bound trade paperback, so I can't get a clean scan all the way to the edges without taking the entire book apart)

Keep in mind that this was a couple of years before the 1-900-Kill-Robin storyline, "A Death in the Family," in which fans voted to kill Jason Todd off. In fact, you could say that entire storyline came about because it was inspired by this peek into a possible future.

One other thing to notice here: the colors. The book was drawn by Frank Miller and inked by Klaus Janson, with beautiful painted colors by Lynn Varley. And as you see here, the colors echo the themes. The scenes of normal people, including Bruce Wayne out of costume, feature muted colors, almost monochromatic. It's not until Batman bursts forth again on a stormy night that the color palette returns to something approaching normal.


Those lightning panels are gorgeous. Varley's colors brought a depth to the sometimes-crude artwork that gave it much of its impact.

But let's take a quick step back. This all comes to pass as Bruce, ever more frustrated with his meaningless life and the way the city is deteriorating all around him, one evening watches "The Mark of Zorro" on television. It just happens to be the movie he saw with his parents the night they were killed, which triggers a particularly vivid flashback of the event, which I mentioned before in its influence on Tim Burton's "Batman" movie.


Next thing you know, Batman is once more on the streets, terrorizing the criminals of Gotham, only this is not the Batman we thought we knew.


That's no tired old Batarang-on-a-rope. This is not the boring old establishment Batman, the jolly old uncle from the 40's comics, or the good citizen in a mask who delivers safety lectures to an adoring press as in the 60's TV series, or a guy who just shows up in costume in the middle of the jungle and nobody cares, as in the comic above. This is a Batman who breaks the law in the quest for justice and isn't above breaking a few bones as well.


I love the contrasts of that moment, the professional, mathematical detachment of analyzing all possible ways out of the situation, then picking the one that hurts the other guy the most. As soon as we saw that moment, we fans, we realized this was the Batman we had been missing all these years, the Batman we'd wished for, but didn't realize we were wishing for until we saw it presented to us. And from that moment, Batman would never be the same.

Batman learns that Two-Face might be involved in some of what went down that night. This hurts Bruce, because Harvey Dent has just been pronounced cured and released from Arkham, and Bruce wanted to believe that he could be redeemed (as much for himself as for Harvey). So Batman goes on a hunt for the truth, ignoring any niceties along the way.

This was Batman as Charles Bronson in "Death Wish," or Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry." Which is to say, what Miller was doing with the story here may have been old hat in movies or books, but it was virtually unprecedented in comics at the time.

Of course, Batman's return doesn't go unnoticed, by the media or by his old friends and enemies, including a Joker who is still being held in Arkham Asylum and has said nary a word since Batman disappeared ten years ago.


Which brings us to another of the questions the series asks, which is if the mere presence of a figure like Batman brings out the evil in folks like the Joker. The entire story features a satirical counterpoint to the action in the form of TV news broadcasts featuring clueless anchors and windy pontificators and self-help gurus posing as mental health professionals. And though I have taken Miller to task before about his unfunny satire, it works better here, if only because it's a counterpoint to the serious themes, rather than the main point of the story.

Everything in this first of four oversized issues leads to a final confrontation between Batman and the man who might be Two-Face, including this almost-throwaway moment that would inspire a big-budget movie and ultimately, some really sad rubber nipples.

Two things going on here that would provide inspiration to the Tim Burton "Batman" and all subsequent Batman films: number one, Batman's wearing body armor, and number two, Batman's using a gun to fire a special cable harpoon rather than swinging on a Batarang-rope. His character didn't change in the comics so much after this, but all movie versions of Batman since then have included those two elements.

Batman finally confronts Two-Face and learns that Harvey Dent is truly irredeemable. And in Harvey, Bruce sees a reflection of himself. But that doesn't mean Batman is giving up the cape and cowl again. No, the Dark Knight has returned, and there's no going back.

At least, not in this lifetime.

Big Game Wednesday - You Can't Run Before You Crawl

So after the aborted Starships and Spacemen idea, I ran across another game from FGU, this one titled Villains and Vigilantes, (a game I've mentioned before). It was a game of superhero adventure by a couple of guys named Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. I've mentioned Jack Herman in Out of the Vault before, because of his scripting work on Eagle; he also did lot of scripting on Elementals. Jeff Dee was an artist who did some work for TSR and even took a shot at some comics work.

As soon as I saw the game, I knew this was the one I wanted to run. It was such a natural fit for me. I loved comics and superheroes, and I knew a lot of the history and background of both of the major comics universes. I had shied away from trying to run Dungeons and Dragons because I didn't have the encyclopedic knowledge of the genre that some of my fellow gamers had, but I would measure my comic-book chops against any of them.

So I bought the game and started reading through. Like Starships and Spacemen, Villains and Vigilantes followed the standard D&D pattern of rolling stats on 3d6. Instead of choosing a character class as in D&D, you would roll your origin type, which would determine what types of powers you could have. Then you would roll how many powers you would get, then consult another set of tables to roll the powers themselves.

If that sounds like a prime recipe for getting dice-raped, you're right. D&D's random stat rolls could leave you in the hole right at the start, but at least their character classes gave your character some balance. In Villains and Vigilantes, one guy could roll up a character with awesome stats who rolls a 6 for Mutant Powers and ends up with Form Change, Heightened Attack, Heightened Defense, Flame Powers, Regeneration and Force Field (so he can turn into a fire-breathing dragon or flaming demon or something cool), and another guy with crappy stats who rolls a 1 for Sponsored Powers and ends up with Radio Reception.

But at that point, I didn't know of any other way to do it. And really, though I've derided the Blank & Blank games as being simple copycats, at that time, the similarity to D&D was not a bug for me, it was a feature. If the stats and hit points fell in similar ranges, then I could easily adapt any number of things from Dungeons and Dragons for use in my V&V campaign, since there was precious little support material out there, as in none, apart from one sad scenario from Judges Guild titled "Break-In at Three Kilometer Island," published on cheap pulp paper with stats that seemed to reflect a rather... unconventional interpretation of the game rules, if I remember correctly.

Didn't matter anyway. I didn't want to run a pedestrian game of costumed crime-fighters. I didn't want to run Batman fighting crooks in Gotham. I wanted to run the X-Men versus the Brood in outer space. I wanted to run the Kree-Skrull War, or the battle against Thanos of Titan. I wanted Cosmic, man. With a touch of gritty Stephen King-style Firestarter thrown in.

I had a vague notion of a cosmic battle for all the planes of existence, Moorcock crossed with Kirby's New Gods crossed with King's The Stand. But of course, I had no idea how to get there. I had several ideas that I thought would make cool scenarios. I put down some notes for a secret government conspiracy the characters would run afoul of, and I had a list of neato gadgets and item loot that I wanted to show off to my players. But I had no idea how to structure actual adventures, which became obvious when we started playing.

The complex combat rules didn't help. Although the stats were generated fairly similarly to Dungeons and Dragons, the combat ran on a completely different system. To attack someone with super-powers, you had to consult this freaking huge matrix table with every single attack and defense type listed, and you would basically cross-reference the power against up to five defenses.

So say I've got a Human Torch-type character who's attacking an Elongated Man type, with Stretching Powers, Heightened Dexterity and Heightened Senses. The base chance to hit with Flame Powers is 15*5, or 75%. But consulting the table, I see that Stretching converts one of those 15's to a 14, and Heightened Dexterity converts one to a 10. Heightened Senses has no effect on the chance to hit. So my base chance to hit, not counting Dex or level or range bonuses, is 15+15+15+14+10, or 69%.

Dude.

The entire experience was painful, for the players and for me. I was lame, man. If you want to know the name of the worst GM I ever played with, it was me during those first painful attempts at running V&V.

I gave up on that first campaign pretty quickly. It was going nowhere I wanted it to go.

But I didn't give up for long.

Figures

I spent the entire winter with hardly a sniffle, and NOW, now in March, I catch a cold. Minor, mostly just a runny nose, but still, no fun to talk for 10 hours on the phone with it.

Movie Monday - The Dark Knight, 2008, Part 2

So last week, I discussed how 2008's "The Dark Knight," despite being a very flawed film, was nevertheless the best screen adaptation of Batman ever.

One of the reasons was the film's depiction of the Joker. And what's fascinating to me about that depiction is that it takes exactly the opposite tack from the previous film's depiction of Batman.

In "Batman Begins," Nolan keeps the basic elements of Batman's origin and legend more or less intact from the comics. Sure, some things are invented and some things are spun; the comics never depicted Bruce Wayne being trained by Ra's al Ghul in a Tibetan temple, for instance. But the shooting of his parents, the shooter's identity, a host of minor characters and details, Batman's code against killing his enemies: all of those are preserved in a way the previous films had not.

In "The Dark Knight," though, they throw out virtually every bit of old Joker baggage. The chemically-stained flesh, the smiling toxin, the comedy-themed crimes: all are gone. In fact, the film goes to great pains to tell us that the Joker is man without an identity. He's a creature, a force--preternaturally smart, vicious, ruthless, a prince of lies.

See, the thing about the Joker is, you can't be certain of anything he tells you. For instance, Richard Corliss, reviewing the film in Time magazine, wrote...

The Joker observes no rules, pursues no grand scheme; he's the terrorist as improv artist.

But this is wrong. Yes, the Joker says in one scene that he doesn't plan, he just does things. But it's pretty obvious from watching the film that the Joker's schemes are actually carefully planned. It's obvious from the first scene of the movie, where the Joker's scheme is so meticulously timed that one of the thugs just happens to be standing in exactly the right place the moment the school bus comes crashing through the wall.

If you watch carefully, you see that the Joker, though he seems wild and out of control, actually keeps himself very tightly controlled. In the scene where Bruce throws a fundraiser for Harvey Dent, we see Bruce grab a glass of champagne and pretend to drink, only to go outside and pour it off the balcony. A few minutes later, the Joker and his thugs burst into the party, and the Joker grabs a glass of champagne, pours it out, then pretends to drink it. And in fact, the Joker apparently does have a grand scheme in mind at every moment of the film.

So what is the Joker's grand scheme? Well, here's a theory. It appears that his entire goal is to destroy the Batman by making a killer out of him. More specifically, the Joker wants to corrupt the Batman by dying at the Batman's hands. Let's look at a few key moments to see what I'm talking about.

The Joker's entire thrust at the beginning seems to be all about killing the Batman or forcing him to reveal his true identity. And to that end, he drive the city into chaos with random killings. But about halfway through, when the Joker and Batman have their first confrontation, the Joker stumbles out of his wrecked semi and walks toward Batman, firing his machine gun off to the side while muttering, "C'mon, c'mon. I want you to do it. I want you to do it." What does he want? He wants Batman to hit him with his speeding supercycle.

Later, in the interrogation room, Batman mentions that he has only one rule, and we know what that rule is: Batman refuses to kill. And the Joker replies, "Then that's the one rule you'll have to break."

And in the final scene, as the Joker is plummeting to certain doom after the Batman has thrown him off the tower where they had their final battle, the Joker laughs maniacally, laughter that is muted when the Batman saves his life with his grapple gun. That moment, when the Batman saves the Joker's life, is the moment when the Joker really loses, and you can see it on his face.

But in a sense, you could call it a draw. Because while the Joker doesn't turn Batman into a killer, he does drive Harvey Dent to it, and through Dent, the Batman's reputation is destroyed.

Oh, and speaking of Dent, every fanboy who felt betrayed by this:

had to have gotten a big thrill out of this:

Hell yeah! Now that's Two-Face.

And of course, no review in the series would be complete without a glance at the changes in vehicles, costume and sets. In "Batman Begins," stately Wayne Manor was burned down, so Bruce is now living in a penthouse apartment (as the comics' Bruce Wayne did for a time in the 70's). So that also means that for the first time ever, we have a Batman film without a Batcave. Instead, Bruce has a huge subterranean lair near the waterfront (I think--the entrance is via a shipping container, anyway).

It's striking and stark, but like the rest of the film, it begs a lot of questions. How did Wayne build it without anybody noticing? Does he really need a solid ceiling of light? Doesn't the power consumption draw attention to it, if nothing else does?

During the course of the film, the Tumbler is destroyed, but it just happens to have a sort of emergency escape mechanism in the form of the Bat-pod, basically the Tumbler's front two tires and suspension converted into a self-powered motorcycle.


It's one of those movie-moments where by the time you've totally registered your disbelief--"Oh, come on!"--you get overwhelmed by the coolness. I do like the fact that Batman has to spend the rest of the movie riding the Bat-pod, because he doesn't have another Tumbler just lying around.

Batman's costume evolves in this one, too. The big one: the headpiece is made separate from the neck so Batman can turn his head. And the armor is made lighter by having more separation between the plates, for more freedom of movement and more of a real-world feel.

A few more random observations: I do like the subtly humorous details that show us the Joker's sense of humor. Like the way he silently mouths the word "six" in disbelief after the detective has told him that the Joker killed six of his friends. Or the fact that one of the knives the cops confiscate from him is a vegetable peeler. Or the way he deadpans the answer, "yeah," when mobster Gambol asks if the Joker thinks he can get away with stealing from them. Or the visual pun he uses to force the police convoy transporting Dent into a trap.

That's class, made even better by the fact that the filmmakers don't dub in a line to state the obvious for the slower members of the audience.

At one point in the movie, there's a big police parade for the funeral of Police Commissioner Loeb. And for some reason, this...

ends up reminding me of this:

There's no Andy Kaufman in this one, but there is a psycho with a gun masquerading as a cop.

And finally, finally, we come to the strangest little detail of all. There is actually one piece of continuity between Schumacher's Batman films and Nolan's, one character in common played by the same actor. He has no name, and he only speaks one line in one of the films, but it is definitely the same guy.

If you remember, in "Batman and Robin," one of the Gotham socialites at Bruce Wayne's fundraiser for the Gotham Botanical Gardens (the one which is crashed by supervillains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy) is this guy.

In "The Dark Knight," at the fundraiser for Harvey Dent which is crashed by the Joker, the same guy shows up again. He tells the Joker, "We're not intimidated by thugs," which results in this:

He actually does look a little intimidated. U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy must be the biggest Batman fan in the Senate to show up in not one, but two Batman movies under two different directors.

Suspense

I'm working on the new Out of the Vault and trying to get it ready to post sometime late this evening (I work till 8 p.m. on my new schedule, so it won't be up until 10 p.m. or so, if I get it done at all). I really don't want to miss another one, but changes in my work schedule are playing hob with my time management right now.

ETA: I'm not going to make it tonight. It's just too big. There are too many things I want to say, and they aren't coming out right yet. So look for this one next week and I'm sorry for the delay. I'll try to make it worth the wait.

Big Game Wednesday - Bloody Mad Dougal

I had originally planned to continue my odyssey through my early days of gaming, but I figure it might be a nice change of pace to have an update on the game I'm currently playing, just because I'm having so much fun with it. I've mentioned Mr. Smeaton before, but didn't actually speak much about the game itself.

So, a very brief background: the game takes place in Atlantis during the late 1800's (we think; Atlantis can only be reached through some sort of dimensional portal that may be an entrance to an alternate universe, or perhaps a gateway to the distant past). Britain has established a colony in Atlantis and jealously guards the secret of the Rift. Because in Atlantis, magic and alchemy actually work, producing wonders that can transform modern civilization, and Britain wants to make sure that the resulting power and wealth are hers alone.

Enter Dougal Smeaton, a gigantic Scotsman, son of a whisky maker, former artilleryman, and now an engineer designing steamships powered by Atlantean alchemy. Smeaton has fallen in with a rather bloodthirsty noblewoman named Victoria Sterling-Drake, who is on a mission from the Crown to find a close family friend, Sir Walter Graves. Graves was an archaeologist on the trail of a legendary treasure. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

So Smeaton has suddenly found himself being dragged along on a series of adventures with Miss Sterling-Drake, along with her mysterious manservant, a sorceress, and a doctor. They've battled cultists and assassins and sorcerers and monsters on the trail of a mysterious statue which holds the secret of a legendary island under the sea. Along the way, they lost the doctor and gained a native hunter/tracker. And quite recently, Smeaton went rather mad.

Here's why that last bit's important:

At one time, I apparently told the members of my gaming group that all my previous player-characters had seemed to go crazy at some point or another. I don't remember saying that, but they assure me I did. But it isn't really true. Not every character has gone mad, just... several. And you know, there were mitigating circumstances and shit.

There was Matrix, but she was crazy by design and got to die a really heroic death. And there was that chaplain in that Morrow Project game, who just snapped and began preaching to a forest fire. But really, it was a one-shot game, and everybody else in the party had already killed each other or themselves, so in a sense, my character was the sanest one in the game. And, yes, Stim the thief in Chuck's D&D game had gotten really paranoid and went totally round the bend. And then there was that ninja in Bushido who concocted an elaborate scheme to kill the young samurai he was assigned to protect, but that wasn't so much crazy as evil.

And so, my character in our recent futuristic superhero campaign, Cole "Metalord" Chen, got an unjust reputation for being "insane." He wasn't, really. Or not entirely. The Joker has a great line in "The Dark Knight" where he says...

"I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just... do things."

I'll be talking more on Monday about how you can't take the Joker at his word on things like that, but it's a perfect description of Cole.

Part of it may have just been frustration with a new game world and a different gaming style; I would try to figure out a plan--gather evidence, establish a headquarters, whatever--but it didn't seem to make much difference to the overall plot. Whatever I tried to do, it would a) not work, and b) be made totally irrelevant by some new plot development. Nothing I did mattered.

So at some point, I just started... doing things, random things, which had consequences, and that was Step One. And then, when I got mind-controlled by the evil Red Queen, I had to play Cole as evil for a while, and had entirely too much fun doing it, and that was Step Two and game over. The verdict was in: Cole is random and unstable and enjoys the dark side way too much, ergo crazy.

So okay, I accept that, and yeah, I even played into it quite a bit once the rep was established. And I had fun doing it (my favorite "crazy Chen" moment came when I pretended to lose my powers for a while, prompting another member of our group to try to get them for himself, which didn't turn out quite the way he wanted). But now the campaign's over and we're starting the Atlantis story, and I was determined not to do the same things with Smeaton that I did with Cole. Smeaton was going to be stalwart and heroic, a dependable rock, an island of calm unmoved by the storms whirling around him.

And for a while, it worked. Turns out, the doctor took the role of the crazy one there for a while, and Smeaton could be the dependable rock I wanted him to be. Yeah, he did have a really bizarre ambition to sell whisky which he would brew in the belly of a giant steam automaton, and he did deny the existence of magic even when it was performed right in front of him. But bad business plans don't equal insanity, necessarily, and as an engineer, it makes sense that he would only believe in what's measurable, repeatable, buildable with your own two hands (plus there was another reason that he still hasn't discussed with anyone--I wrote a speech, but I've never had a good opportunity to give it).

But once Lady Sterling-Drake entered his life, Smeaton had a run of bad luck. He has been stabbed and shot. He had his throat slit by an assassin, and on another occasion had his guts slashed open by the same fellow. And more recently, he was nearly burned to death by a fire-breathing chimera. And in every instance, he was healed, completely and instantly, by Lady Sterling-Drake's extraordinary empathic powers.

So what is a rational-minded engineer--who believes firmly in mundane explanations for seemingly miraculous events--to conclude when confronted with fire-breathing monsters of legend and multiple instances of being brought back from the brink of what seemed like certain death, with not even a scar to show for it?

The only thing he can conclude, really. Mr. Smeaton has decided that he is in Hell, and that Lady Sterling-Drake is the demon assigned to torment him. He is obviously doomed to an eternity of being pushed by her into situations where he will be grievously wounded unto death, only to have her put him back together good as new so that he can do it all over again, forever.

Or to put it another way, Mr. Smeaton has gone quite barking mad. Which is a shame, really, because I don't want this reputation to become some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I can play a character who stays sane. I can. I'm almost totally certain of it.

Pretty much.

Next week: Villains and Vigilantes, 1st Edition, and the worst GM ever.

Earning Out

Fourteen years ago, I headed back to Korea for my second tour and my last year in the Army. And during that final year, I researched and read, gathered materials and articles here and there and assembled notes for a novel about a modern-day war in Korea.

A year later, I got out of the Army, came home, went through the piles of research I had assembled, and began writing said book, titled Blue Falcon. Three years later, the book was finished and I began searching for an agent.

I had some nibbles, including a full manuscript requested by a pretty prominent New York agency. But in the end, I got nowhere with it. I spent about three years trying to sell it, and every time I tried to work on something else, my mind kept getting seized back to Blue Falcon and Korea.

Finally, I decided enough was enough. In late 2003, I scraped together some money from various sources, including selling plasma, and published the book through iUniverse.

In some ways, it was a stupid decision, and in other ways, it was the best thing I could have done. The stupid: iUniverse is a vanity press, and despite its best efforts has never been able to shake that reputation. So I ended up with several copies of a book no one wanted to buy, other than my mother and a few friends.

The best: deciding to publish forced me to think like an editor and pare the manuscript of tons of fat. And the comments I got when I submitted it to the iUniverse Editor's Choice program were more specific and insightful than the comments I had gotten from either the big New York agent or the Penguin Putnam editor who read it. By the time I finished revising the manuscript for publication, the book was miles better than it had been before.

Even better: getting the book published, and holding it in my hands between two covers, allowed me to finally put the book to rest in my mind and move on. Without iUniverse to help me get Blue Falcon out of my system, there would have been no Digger, no Death Wave and no Whatever Comes Next.

But I have to say that putting Blue Falcon between two covers also allowed me to get the distance to see its many flaws, to the point where I'm more embarrassed every time I think about it. Nowadays, I mainly try not to think about it at all.

So it was a weird surprise tonight to go over to my wife's house to see my daughter and find a letter from iUniverse. Even stranger to open it up and realize it was a ROYALTY CHECK!

For, uh, $3.78.

But still, that's $3.78 more than I ever expected to get out of it.

Movie Monday - The Dark Knight, 2008, Part 1

We're finally reaching the end of our months-long recap of the Batman movies, from the serials of the 40's to 2008's "The Dark Knight." Like all my other recaps, this one is pure spoilers from start to finish, so if you're one of the three people on Earth who hasn't seen this movie, go watch it before you read this.

I have to say right up front that I was not looking forward to this movie before it came out. "Batman Begins" had been a very good film, but there had been something... forgettable about it. Maybe just the fact that it lacked a really powerful, memorable villain.

And I didn't have much hope that "The Dark Knight" would fix that. There was a ton of hype about Heath Ledger's Joker, but I wasn't buying into it. Number one, I'd never seen Ledger in anything before. All I knew about him was that he was the pretty boy star of that medieval movie where they sang Queen or something. I couldn't imagine that guy ever being riveting.

And number two, what I could see of his performance in the trailers kinda' sucked. He was just some dude in a grubby suit with greasy hair and smeared make-up--make-up!--with his face set in a Nixonian scowl and speaking in this buzzy voice like Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor. The Batcycle looked cool, but from what I could see of the Joker in the trailers, I was going to hate it.

And then I saw it, and it was not at all what I expected. It was not a perfect film, by any means. It was simplistic and eminently parodiable. The symbolism and moral dilemmas were as subtly honed as sledgehammers, several scenes rang false for me, and Christian Bale's growly Bat-voice--so effective in the small doses of "Batman Begins" ("SWEAR TO ME!!!")--proved wholly inadequate for the long-winded speechifying that dominates the final fifteen minutes or so of this movie.

There's so much wrong with this movie. Where do I start?

"The Dark Knight" starts about a year after "Batman Begins." Batman is cracking down on the gangs, cutting off the supply of drugs to the streets. Unfortunately, he has also inspired some wack-job wanna-be vigilantes who dress up like him and attack criminals with shotguns (a detail inspired by, what else, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

But there are other forces at work in Gotham. A mysterious mastermind known as the Joker has been robbing mob-owned banks, leaving a trail of bodies.

And there's a new district attorney in Gotham, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhardt), replacing the D.A. who got shot in "Batman Begins." Dent has gained a reputation as a brave and incorruptible defender of justice.


And just like the last time, Bruce's childhood friend, Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes (played this time by Maggie Gyllenhaal), is sleeping with her boss. Such a slut, that Rachel.

Speaking of which, Rachel is one of the things I have trouble buying in this movie. Gyllenhaal is no Katie Holmes, which is to say that her Rachel comes across as smarter, but also less pretty and fun (and let's face it, Holmes's Rachel was no barrel of laughs herself). Rachel spends much of her screen time looking tired and judgmental, with lank hair and deep lines cutting across her face.

Which isn't bad in and of itself, but both Bruce and Harvey are supposed to be head-over-heels in love with her, and the Joker calls her beautiful not once, but three times in his one scene with her. It's one of those things where we're supposed to believe the script and not our lying eyes, and it just doesn't work for me (except for one big scene, which I'll talk about later).

So as Batman is travelling to Hong Kong to grab a Chinese gangster with vital evidence for Dent's prosecution, the gangs are hiring the Joker to kill Batman once and for all. Only the Joker doesn't so much want to kill Batman as kill, say, everybody else, while causing as much chaos and terror as he can along the way.

And throughout the movie, almost every scene has some nagging detail that just doesn't make sense. How did the Joker know the other thug would be standing in exactly the right place to get hit by the bus? How did Lau manage to get all the money out of the mob banks without any of the mob bosses being alerted to it? Did Batman and Dent plan to let Gordon get shot, so they could fake his death and lure the Joker into the open, and if so, how did they make that happen? How did the Joker get all those explosives into the hospital without anybody getting wise, especially given that the other times we see his bomb set-ups, they involve dozens of barrels of fuel? How did Batman manage to loop the ropes on the floor ahead of time in just such a way that they'd catch the feet of every SWAT guy surrounding him? The entire movie is a festival of nonsense.

And yet, in the end, none of it matters.

Because the entire thing is done with such style and such grandiose ambition, that it goes beyond being a "really good comic book movie" and becomes a "really good movie," regardless of genre. And Ledger's performance really is as good as the hype made out. Credit a good deal of that to the writing and direction, also, because co-screenwriters Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan do some fascinating things with the character that I might talk about in more depth next week. And Bale is good, as are Michael Caine as Alfred and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon. Aaron Eckhardt brings some real depth and intensity to his portrayal of Harvey Dent as well; too bad his villainous turn was so completely overshadowed by Ledger's.

And even though I bagged on Maggie Gyllenhaal, she has a brilliant moment in her final scene, when she realizes that Harvey is the one being saved and that she is going to die. We see that realization on her face, yet she still tries to comfort Harvey. In that moment, she really is beautiful, and we can finally understand why both men would be so deeply in love with her.

But still, after this...

I was a little disappointed to end up with this.

More random observations about the film next week.

Out of the Vault - Hard Boiled

Part of me feels as if I should really be covering Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. But I foolishly sold off my first editions of that comic years ago, so all I have is the square-bound trade paperback, and it's really hard to scan. So I'm going to put that off a while longer and talk about another Frank Miller joint, Hard Boiled.

By the late 80's, Frank Miller could do anything he wanted in comics. His run on Daredevil had made it one of Marvel's best-selling and most-imitated comics, and his Wolverine mini-series with Chris Claremont had been a huge success. His Ronin mini-series had wandered a bit, but was solid and exciting. His Batman: The Dark Knight Returns had not only redefined the character for an entire generation of fans, but also (along with Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing) changed literally the entire business of comics in America.

Frank Miller was the man. Everything he did was golden. There could never be enough Frank.

Or so he must have thought in 1986 when he decided to stop drawing comics and concentrate solely on writing them for other artists. It was a mistake.

It started out well enough. His Daredevil graphic novel, Love and War, was a quality piece of work with brilliant, quirky art by Bill Sienkeiwicz. And the Batman: Year One storyline with art by David Mazzuchelli was an excellent companion piece to his previous graphic novel, providing plenty of material for future filmmakers to steal use for inspiration.

But then things took a wrong turn. One problem was that Miller had never really been that great a writer; he did some action tropes very well, and he was good at finding an interesting angle on a character. His work was a level above some of the old guard of the 70's, the Roy Thomases and Elliot S! Magginses and Bill Mantlos. But it lacked the subtlety of the best of his peers.

What had made his previous comics great was that he had also drawn them. Which is not to say he was a great artist, either. His figures were clunky, and his work lacked grace and detail. But what Miller did in the early to mid-80's, better than any other comics artist of his day, was to take the influences of manga and movies and translate them to the page for a visceral impact that no one else could match. While most everybody else was busy imitating Kirby's abstract bombast or Neal Adams's sketchy realism, Frank Miller was drawing movie storyboards that were blowing the older styles out of the water.

Miller's work was daring and fresh. Sometimes he would skillfully layer in dialogue and captions as a counterpoint to the action. Sometimes he would just forego words altogether and spend pages in silent action, which was such a relief after years of Spidey's lame wisecracks. There were better artists and better writers, but there were damn few other comics that competed with Miller's as a complete package. So it was really ironic that when Miller teamed up with better artists, the quality of the overall work went downhill.

Another part of the problem was that around 1989 or so, Miller somehow decided he wanted to write comedy. It seems to have started with the "Robocop 2" screenplay that he wrote (later rewritten by Walon Green). The problem is that Miller's just not funny. His sense of humor (at least judging from his comics) is very black and satirical, and it just doesn't come across very well. You can watch "Robocop 2" or read Hard Boiled and recognize that, "yes, this was meant to be funny, I see that," but it's never executed well enough to actually make you, you know, laugh.

Which leads me (finally) to Hard Boiled, written by Miller and drawn by Geof Darrow, first published in 1990 by Dark Horse Comics. The story: A psychotic android named Nixon (at least, that's what he sometimes thinks his name is--his owners, Willeford Home Appliances, just call him Unit Four) goes on a rampage, killing hundreds of people. The Willeford corporation whisks him back to headquarters, fixes him up, and sends him to his home in the suburbs as Harry Seltz (or maybe Burns), all fixed up. Until the next day, when everything blows up again and Nixon-Seltz-Burns-Four learns that he may be fated to save all androidkind. After killing a very large percentage of humankind.

Or something.

It's a little hard to follow, just because the entire story is so hallunicatory. Not only can Nixon not keep his identity straight, but the entire world has this ugly, dreamlike weirdness that keeps the plot from ever actually registering in the brain.

Guards with pistols strapped to every available inch of their bodies. A hugely fat blob of a man who lounges like Baron Harkonnen in a huge vat while his body is scrubbed and massaged by a legion of nude robot fairies. Talking dogs who shoot lasers out of their eyes. Nixon's creepy children, who cuss like adults and watch their dad-bot having sex with their mom, and may be robots themselves. Enormous public orgies and a supermarket full of oddly oversized products. And of course, surgical equipment powered by candy bars and fetuses.


(I'm sorry for the blurry scans, but I'm too lazy to redo them) If you look closely at the surgical robot apparatus here, you can see some resemblance to Darrow's later work on the Matrix movies. Like his later work on The Big Guy and Rusty, the Boy Robot, Darrow's obsessive attention to detail is both a plus and a minus. On the positive side, his work is unique and arresting, and a lot of the tiny details are truly funny and creative. On the other hand, the wealth of detail can cause pages to blur into a mush of tiny precise scribbles, like this double-page spread of Nixon facing off against a car armed with some wicked miniguns (click the images for larger versions--I normally scale the pics way down, but with Darrow's work, I've left them pretty big so you can appreciate the level of detail).


The level of detail is amazing, but it's so busy that it lacks dramatic impact. And it's not helped by Claude Legris's airbrushed colors, which just make everything even more muddy and indistinct.

Oh, and speaking of double-page spreads, one other really unusual thing about Hard Boiled is just how much it relies on full-page and double-page splash pages. Fully half the first issue is made up of full-page and double-page images, and the other issues feature almost as much. Sometimes it works really well, such as this dramatic moment when we see just how much damage Nixon has taken from his latest mishap (a devastating head-on collision).

Yes, the page is still full of detail, with some nicely goofy touches like the car keys embedded in Nixon's head. But the detail doesn't detract from the composition, unlike the spread above.

It's hard to tell how much of the goofiness is Miller's and how much is just a matter of Darrow going wild. But some parts, like the talking dogs and the creepy kids (echoing the creepy drug dealer kid from "Robocop 2"), are definitely Miller's doing. And then there's this:

What's funny about this is that it's Miller parodying his own work, having his nutball character narrate himself in terse first-person present just like Batman's inner dialogue in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, only Nixon's actually speaking out loud. What's funnier is that Miller then went back to playing it straight in Sin City. What's not so funny is that Miller tried to go back to the self-parody well again in "The Spirit," having Denny Colt narrate himself to different characters (and a cat). It didn't work any better there than it does here.

And of course, there was the final indignity, which was that the first and second issues were published in September and December of 1990, after which we had to wait over a year for the third and final issue in March 1992 (American/Canadian exchange rates apparently changed drastically in the intervening time - the U.S. prices for issues 2 and 3 are the same, but the Canadian price for issue 3 was two dollars higher than issue 2). It helped that the (incredibly gory) cover did apologize for the delay, but not much. Especially given the weirdly anti-climactic and depressing ending. The whole thing just felt like a misfire from start to finish. A competently written, very well-drawn misfire, but still...