brianrogers

So I haven't even run a session of either Gaslamp Melodrama or Mech & Matrimony yet this year and I'm already gnawing on ideas for the 2013 prospectus. Specifically

He Escapes Who Is Not Pursued (Gumshoe)
A cross between Heroes and Cold Case, the PCs are part of the FBIs metahuman cold case squad, tasked with closing out kidnappings and murders that predate the early 21st century arrival of super villains. The intent is that the powers take the place of the high tech gadgety and super-forensics of shows like CSI rather than being flashy ways to beat people up. 

Pundits - Map of the Great Game
The PCs are British and Raj-era cartographers doing the first surveys of India and its surrounding countries, a wonderful excuse to go from place to place across all sorts of politics and environments. I suspect the setting will have just a touch of the sub-continents magic and mythology in it to make it a little gamer-friendly, but I haven't settled on a system yet. Indian myth and colonial history are just ripe with gaming opportunities so I'd like the excuse to research a bit. In case you're wondering, the term Pundit is Hindi for "Learned One" and the British applied it to their local cartographers and guides. 

I expect more will come to me.

71) Incredible Hulk 441-453 by Peter David, Angel Medina and Mike Deidato: The collapse of the once proud series continues, through a combination of unforced errors and definitely forced ones.  On the unforced error side, David is doggedly pursuing a plot arc about Hulk suffering brain damage from a grenade that Banner took right before he transformed into the hulk, leaving shrapnel in his brain. This is a revisiting of a classic Hulk plot and might well have gone somewhere but it comes across as very creaky, removes the Hulk from the supporting cast and returns the book to an "on the run from the army" plot, which I personally always found dull. Add into this the strange decision to revisit the Future Imperfect time travel plotline - which David might have been trying to link to the Troygan War plotline, which again had potential - and things get very muddled. These pale before the forced errors, which is the Marvel Editorial decision to give control of their key books to Rob Liefeld in the Heroes Reborn plot arc, yanking Hulk out of his regular plots into the stupid Onslaught crossover, then pulling out the Bruce Banner psyche, then a forced crossover with Thunderbolts. I doubt David really wanted to explore what the current Hulk is like without Banner, and the book just feels like it's a floundering mess, perhaps with some passive aggression in the writing under chafing editorial control. The inconsistency of the art team over the last two years hasn't helped either.

72) Incredible Hulk 454-460 by Peter David and Adam Kubert: the last of the artists David worked with on Hulk, Kubert is vastly more proficient than his predecessors, but stylistically the book, with an emphasis on four panel pages or three panels over two pages, doesn't quite jell. Story wise we get a moment of clarity in the Hulk chased by the Army plot that's going on, where David looks like he's setting things up for a a whole new paradigm, but it's totally thrown off by a forced crossover to the X-Men Apocalypse plotline, followed by the end of the heroes reborn plot and a return to something like normalcy. The psychological thread of this, that Banner actually killed his abusive father while working on the gamma bomb, thus giving vent to his internal anger (a pathetic back-justification as to why Banner would have been working on a bomb project given his later anti-military stance - how about "it was the freakin' Cold War, and Banner is an Oppenheimer analogue?")  and is now being haunted by his father's ghost/memory, isn't strong enough to carry it, but might have worked as a year long arc if David hadn't had to do crossover after crossover. 

73) Incredible Hulk 461-467 by Peter David and Adam Kubert: David's final 6 issues on the book show either where he might have been going with it or his graciousness in giving the new author a clean enough slate to work from - psychologically reunited, Hulk/Banner make peace with Betty, Rick (who was severely injured by the Apocalypsed out Hulk last book) and even Thunderbolt Ross, who has been restored by the Troyjans. David makes it look like he's setting up a new plot arc with Banner being employed by the government as a weapon of lat resort under Ross' direction. Then David kills Betty in a really unnecessary way that shatters the agreement and leaves the new creative team with a Bruce Banner on the run from the army with an anger-generated Hulk, basically the Hulk Status Quo Ante. He then does one last issue of Rick Jones being interviewed by Peter Parker a decade int he future that is both a psycological conclusion and a big F-You to the Marvel editorial team. It's clear that David is not leaving under good circumstances, and reading the last 27 issues it's pretty clear where the problem lies. It's a shame that the book so devolved during its last 3 years, but again, I'm not sure how much of this can be leveled at David, who had things he clearly wanted to do but was stymied in making use of the time to do them. These are perils that only exist in serial fiction. 

74) Home Fires by Gene Wolfe: New Gene Wolfe! Yea! he revisits some old themes of identity in this one, where many of the characters not only aren't who they appear to be but they're being pursued by outside forces for who they no longer are. It's well put together, not as strong as the Sorcerer's House but better than Pirate Freedom. Plus, a third person viewpoint means less unreliable narrators. 

75) The Green Hornet vol 1 by Kevin Smith, Phil Hester and Jonathan Lau: A comic series based on an unproduced screenplay of Smiths, I have to admit that Smith does a fine job of making the original Hornet/Kato team really impressive. The contemporary ones - of course Britt Reid Jr. is a wastrel and the new Kato is a hot chick - need some work, but all told it impressed me enough to start looking for the later issues. the art team is really heavily inspired by Mike Grell in his later John Sable/Longbow Hunters phase, but need some work on differentiating characters, and a lot more work on comprehensible fight layouts. 

76) Atomic Robo vol 5 - the Deadly Art of Science by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegner: It's new Atomic Robo! Buy it! Read it! Love it! This one is set in 1930, showing the growth of Robo into the, er, man he would become in his maturing relationship with his dad, Nikola Tesla, his somewhat apprenticeship with a masked vigilante Jack Tarot and his first love affair with Tarot's techie daughter. It's a fun read as always. Remember how I praised Kevin Smith's work in Green Hornet on making the elder Hornet and Kato cool? Let me say that his work pales in comparison to how Clevenger and Wegener make Nikola Tesla cool - by the endgame you realize that Tesla was both insanely cool and a total badass. Much fun.

64) Incredible Hulk 401-411 by Peter David and Gary Frank with Jan Duursema: Back to my pontificating on this. David manages to shift things back to the central metaphors (control of power; the double edged sword of the atomic bomb) by making the now intelligent stable Hulk in charge of the Pantheon, an inherently unstable organization that uses tons of covert military force, often against the wishes of the US Government. This run of the book continues the feel of the last one while giving Banner something powerful that he can barely control that isn't himself. Plus, a chance for David to give is a look at a Nick Fury who is nicely human and nicely badass. 

65) Incredible Hulk 412-419 plus Future Imperfect by Peter David, Gary Frank and George Perez: Aaaand we get to watch control slip away from him. Good solid story arcs with an outer space battle time travel adventures and possible the best "hero fighting an evil future version of himself" story I've seen. There are also some genuinely funny bits in this, mostly focusing on Rick Jones' romance with Marlo, the Grey Hulk's girlfriend from Las Vegas (following the law of conservation of cast). 

66) Incredible Hulk 420-426 by Peter David and Gary Frank, with Liam Sharp on the last issue: It all falls apart, both the Pantheon and Hulk's control of his psyche, continuing that pretty deft parallel. The endgame of this is a little weak, for reasons that will become clear. A nice change in the Hulk power set where at this point if he gets too angry his brain's fail safes change him back into Banner but with the rampaging Hulk's personality. 

67) Incredible Hulk 427-441 by Peter David, Liam Sharp and Angel Medina: I hate to say it, but right about here is where the book starts to fumble, and it's pretty clear that it's not entirely David's fault. Marvel's editorial staff decided in 1995 to start chasing the Vertigo horse and designated a bunch of its books had to become 'Edgy', and Hulk was deemed one of those books. Suddenly it was put on new shiny paper (which makes the art look lousy) and shifted to dealing with child abducting murderers, anti-abortion shootings and getting yanked out of its current setting  - Hulk and Betty are hiding out near the Everglades - back to New York to involve Hulk in a pointless crossover of Edgy Urban Crime/Biblical Fantasy  that culminated with the incredibly stupid killing of Nick Fury at the hands of the Punisher. It's all pointless to the actual Hulk plotlines, and it's followed by a 5 issue arc involving the Leader's long term plans and the return of the Army Hulkbusters and Glenn Talbot that would have been pretty good if it too hadn't felt incredibly rushed, likely because David and the Hulk were now popular enough to get stuck on the thrice annual crossover circuit. The mid 90's really were a crummy time for comics. 

68-70) PS 238 Volumes 3-6 by Aaron Williams: the book continues to be fun, but it's starting to suffer from subplot kudzu with too many new characters and some plot threads that were B plots, then C plots and then forgotten becoming A plots for a few issues, producing plot whiplash. The best part of this 3 volumes are the issues with a small chunk of the cast in Las Vegas because it let Williams focus on them and their development. The rest feels oddly muddled, which is strange since it's not like Williams doesn't have time to flesh things out a bit. 

52) Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: another of his investigations into social statistics, this was excellent. I do wonder why Canada _doesn't_ implement the 6 month split children's hockey league. Maybe if they had they'd have won the cup this year....

53-54) City of Glass and Ghosts by Paul Auster:  Purchased in an airport bookstore months and months ago I finally got to it. Now I wonder why I bothered. Self-consciously 'literary' blather about the nature of identity. Blah blah blah. There's not anything in here that I haven't seen done before; plus it twigged my irritation of people writing literary fiction following all the same genre tropes of 'literature' in the format of "reinventing" some existing genre with insights so banal that any genre reader makes them almost immediately. This was purchased in a volume of "The New York Trilogy" and the third book will, in all likelyhood, remain unread. 

50) Boardwalk Empire - the Birth high times and corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson: some more historical non-fiction, this was wonderfully engaging. Again, good readers help, as the book was read by Joe Mantenga, who carried just the right tone for the book.  The history of the city itself - a place so uniquely grounded in the tourist industry and so wedded to organized crime - is fascinating and very much somewhere someone might want to set a game. I keep wondering what a super hero set in 1930's Atlantic City would feel like...the idea of a Batman type mired in a massively corrupt city doesn't quite work, because it's not like the locals felt terribly oppressed by the tourist-friendly crime that made the place tick. More likely a tarnished angel who looks into the crimes that everyone knows are crimes working hand in glove with the corrupt establishment. The presence of accepted crimes that _are_ truly vile, such as Mann Act violations and enforced prostitution, that are sanctioned by the government make that problematic as well. Thinking on it, however, if I wanted to run a Trail of Cthulhu game in the back half of the year 1920's-30's Atlantic City might be a good starting place. 

51) Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III: The last of the Americas Best Comics reread, it's still beautiful and very strange. The character has the same pared down powerful simplicity as Tom Strong serving as the foundation of a much more complicated story. OK, yes, it's didactic as points, but I also found it consistently engaging. If you're not interested in Kabbalah or the Tarot or other mysticism then yes, much of this is going to be a loss. But if you are, whew, what a ride. 

45) Terra Obscura vol 1 & 2 by Alan Moore, Peter Hogan and Yanick Paquette: More of the America Best Comics reread, these are two volumes of adventures based on obscure and now out of copyright heroes from the late 30s and early 40s. While not high art they are both fun and a wonderful snapshot of many of the lesser known golden age characters. 

46) The Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes by Jeff Rovin: Pulled off the shelf to see if it had all of the Terra Obscura characters (answer: pretty damn near all) I got sucked into reading through this with the thought of raiding it to provide backstory heroes for a new supers universe. Some of the characters are perfectly servicable, and some are downright strange: Captain Midnight, who has the power to stop clocks (not time, just clocks, meaning that someone actually had the power Timepiece Control from Heroes Unlimited); the Echo, who uses his skills as the worlds foremost ventriloquist to fight crime (apparently the 'surprise them with a noise behind them' gimmick worked for 9 issues!) and the delightfully named Microface, whose mask contained nightvision and telescopic vision lenses, vocal amplification, a min-camera and other useful gadgets but, well, Microface?!? Rovin's work claims to be pretty exhaustive but it's easy enough to spot connections between characters that he missed or omitted. Still, the book is fun in a geeky sort of way. 

47-ish) Tomorrow Stories by Alan Moore and others: Moore's first anthology book for ABC, it's got 5 components each aiming for a specific type of comic. I tried to reread the whole thing but much of the Cobweb stuff (more pseudo porn with Melinda Gibbe) and almost all of First American (Mad Magazine style social satire) left me cold. I can't really claim to have reread the whole thing. 

48) Greyshirt - Indigo Sunset by Rick Veitch and others: Greyshirt was, to my mind, the strongest of the Tomorrow Stories characters - a Spirit homage with more darkness than the original but the same style of storytelling and the same two fisted style of hero whose main power is surviving getting the crap beaten out of him to eke out a victory. Plus, much like many characters in the encyclopedia, the character has a single gimmick - his chainmail suit under the dandy clothes makes him highly resistant to gunfire - backed up by a particular style. This 6 issue series gives us a 30 year look at the character, from his youth to the present, with a longer story arc weaving in and out through the various tales. Recommended. 

49) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: After having three different people recommend this in a two month period I succumbed and borrowed my parents copy. Read about a quarter of it over the weekend and then tore through the remainder last night, finishing up at a 'dear god tomorrow is going to suck' hour of 2 AM. Which means it was very engaging in the best genre page-turner sense. Of course, I could be the last person on the continental shelf who hasn't read it yet, but I'm glad it was worth the hype. 

41) A Downhill Lie: a Hacker's return to a ruinous sport by Carl Hiaasen: I heard the author on Wait Wait a couple months back and noted to myself that the book sounded interesting, hence my picking it up when it appeared on the library's audiobook list. It was interesting and fun, but I expect that it would have meant a lot more if I actually, ya'know, played golf. 

42) Tom Strong by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse and others: my reread of Top Ten has of course triggered a reread of the America's Best Comics line, and I remain amazed by how good a book Tom Strong is. On one level it's nice, straightforward comic book super hero, but it's also thoughtful, endlessly inventive, respectful of comics history and a great example of super-exploration, something I wish we saw more of in both comics and gaming. Plus, the titular hero is such a great example of the strong, ethical scientist that Lester Dent mastered with Doc Savage. It's a good, solid heroic core, and I think people under-value the storytelling versatility of super-strength and modest damage resistance in supers gaming. This might be why I keep coming back to Jim Cambias' Doc Toltec as a game hook. as he's another great version of the iconic structure. I will warn people that there's a chunk of the book - much of the last quarter - which is fill in stories top get the book to 36 issues so that the final issue could coincide with the end of Promethia, and the failures of execution visible there show how the character type is much harder to get then you'd think.

43) Tom Strong's Terrific Tales by Alan Moore, Steve Moore and others: I immediately picked this 12 issue series up for a reread, and part of me wishes that the Tom Strong and Young Tom Story stores from here had been folded into the regular Tom Strong book to avoid the aforementioned filler spot in the main book, as they're all solidly done. The other component of TSTT is Jonni Future, which is Steve Moore and Art Adams doing to Adam Strange what Alan Moore had done to various other DC characters in his image days - reinventing them just enough to show you how cool they were. However, Jonni Future is mired in cheesecake wink nudge stuff which diminishes the idea (I don't mind seeing Art Adams draw hlaf naked women, but that really shouldn't be the focus of the stories). 

44) Alan Moore's run on Awesome Comics: Alan Moore also did some work for Rob Leifeld's Awesome Comics, specifically a run on Supreme, Leifield's pathetic Superman rip-off, which produced one of the best runs of Superman ever, and Judgement Day, which performed the alchemy in turning the dross of the Awesome Comics universe into gold. I'm not sure how much Leifield realized that Moore was deconstructing and, well, shredding, every story that Lefield had produced in the script of Judgement Day, which writes off the needless dark violence of the 90's comic market with some ideas about the nature of comic book stories that he explores in much greater depth in Promethia. Plus, going from Chris Sprouse's work on Tom Strong and Supreme to Leifield's work on Judgement Day and we learn the important fact that Leifield can't draw for crap.

38) The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett: recommended by Joshua Kronengold in A&E I'm happy to have picked this one up, even though at times the Austinian pastiche of the background was just a little too twee. It improved once the central character changed from being Eleanor to Jane Eyre midway through the book, while the final third of the book was in many ways a more conventional fantasy novel. Still and all quite good, and I look forward to the sequel. 

39) The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock: My Moorcock reading has been woefully deficient (just the Elric stories some 20 years ago) and therefore I was pleased to find the White Wolf edition of the Hawkmoon Eternal Champion stories at the library book sale. The first of them was as compulsivly readable as the Elric stories, if not more so as the hero is less of a brooding menace to everyone around him. It's fascinating to see how Moorcock was able to take the pulp fantasy traditions of Howard from 30-40 years earlier and recast them; of course, I'm now reading them 40 years past that. 

40) I Am America (and so can you!) by Stephen Colbert: picked up at the book sale to kill time (they didn't allow strollers in, so Rachel and I had to trade off with the baby outside the tent) this was cute, but the central joke of Colbert's character works much better in short televised doses than it does in longer print. Of course, that's true of almost any TV comic trying to write a book - it's damnably hard to carry off stylistic delivery humor for a couple hundred pages. Glad I only dropped the $1.50 on it.

36) Freakonomics  by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner: more in my commute audiobooks, it was interesting to listen to this one so soon after The Tipping Point as the pair give different explanations for the falling crime rate in the 1990s in NYC - Gladwell argues that the changes in police tactics were what tipped the scales in New York, where rates fell more and faster than other places, while Levitt argues that the legalization of abortion decades earlier removed a large enough percentage of the population whose socio-economic standing would have pre-disposed it to crime. As with all competing theories I'm not sure how much weight to put on either theory - chaotic systems tend to have lots of inputs after all - but Levitt doesn't do himself any favors by stressing the poor life performance of, among other factors, single parent children in the section on crime rates and then stating unequivocally that being in a single parent household has no effect on school performance. I know the two are not identical, but they'd seem to have enough points of commonality that it makes it feel like Levitt is changing which metrics to stress in his book based on which support his theory de jure. 

37) The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: How in the high heavens had I not read this prior to now?!?! This was freakin' wonderful - pure Falkenstein bait! Much as I like using the Captain Fasaad framing decide to do exploration stories I really would like to do a soup to nuts expedition to somewhere strange game.