Comics I've Read in 2010

Graphic Novel section [17 total]
[EDIT- added Angel: After the Fall and Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares]

• Angel: After the Fall by Joss Whedon, Brian Lynch, and Franco Urru. [Whedon was the co-plotter here, but the writing is mainly Lynch, as I understand it. For fans of the Angel TV series, which itself was a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this comic series continues the storyline, which ended with the beginning of a huge battle between all the demonic forces of Wolfram and Hart and Angel and his surviving buddies. I found it kind of disappointing, to be honest. It continues the trend seen in the Buffy comics of throwing in effects and scale at a level beyond what the TV budget would allow for, which is fine as far as it goes, but everything here is a bit too chaotic. They've made big changes to several of the main characters, completely altered the setting by dropping the city of Los Angeles into a Hell Dimension, and they start in media res and take a long time to explain just what's going on. Every chapter (representing an issue) seems to end on a different, shocking cliffhanger/revelation, and by the end of the graphic novel, which also ends in that fashion, I was a bit jaded. There's some snappy dialogue, but I felt as though a lot of stuff got changed just for the sake of changing it. To be honest, this was a problem with the television series as well in its last two seasons, where they made a LOT of weak character decisions and dubious transformations. So if you're a completist, pick this up, but be prepared to need the other volumes almost immediately to make any sense of what's happening.]
  
• The Boys, Vol. 1: The Name of the Game by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson [I'm not linking to any of these books as I wouldn't want to encourage anybody to read them. :-)]
  
• The Boys, Vol. 2: Get Some
• The Boys, Vol. 3: Good for the Soul
• The Boys, Vol. 4: We Gotta Go Now [I checked out all four of these volumes at once at the recommendation of a librarian who I talk to sometimes who has suggested some good reads in the past. These weren't among them. Short story: self-indulgent grossness for the sake of grossness, paper-thin commentary on celebrity, laughable pretense at serving the public, nothing worthwhile that hasn't been done better in other series with vastly more taste. I have a hard time believing that this series continues or that these have actually been popular enough to reissue in hardcover. Longer review here. Now I just have to figure out what to say to the librarian if he asks me what I thought of these, because he is a nice guy.]
• Brit by Robert Kirkman [meh, a lot of action, a couple unusual characters but everything feels really rushed, didn't excite me.]
• Checkmate/Outsiders: Checkout by Greg Rucka and Judd Winick. [Got this crossover for my birthday. A fun read, but a bit confusing because while I've read all the Checkmate titles that sandwiched around this story, I haven't seen the Outsiders stories that immediately preceded it, just the early Outsiders stuff, and the makeup and dynamic of the team had clearly changed a bit in the interim.]
• Crisis on Infinite Earths by Wolfman and Perez [Not good, the writing feels very, very dated and melodramatic, but the art by George Perez is great and I had fun reading this with Will.]
• Gotham Central Volume 1: In the Line of Duty, written by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, art by Michael Lark. [Really good stories about the police in Gotham who have to deal with cases related directly and obliquely to all the costumed criminals, as well as not knowing what the Batman is up to.]
• Gotham Central Volume 2: Half a Life. [The story in this graphic novel won an Eisner, I believe. It tells the story of detective Renee Montoya, her public outing as a lesbian, and her dealing with false charges of murder.]
• Gotham Central Volume 3: Unresolved Targets. [A great and chilling story involving the Joker terrorizing Gotham that I have to think influenced the plot of The Dark Knight movie, followed by a good story involving the Mad Hatter and disgraced cop Harvey Bullock.]
• Gotham Central Volume 4: The Quick and the Dead. [I liked the opening story about a corrupt forensic specialist selling supervillain related crime scene paraphenalia online a little better than the following story involving little used villain Dr. Alchemy, but the very Hannibal Lector-esque take on Alchemy was fun to read if not entirely original.]
• Gotham Central Volume 5: Dead Robin [The final collection of the series. The title story, which comes first, is very interesting and plays off an interesting fact--when dead teenagers dressed up as Robin start appearing, no one on the police force has any way of knowing if any of them are the real Robin. They don't even know if there are multiple Robins. The wrap-up story carries the character arc of detective Renee Montoya through to its sad but seemingly inevitable conclusion, and features a death that made me sad, as I'd come to like the lost character. The end to a good series.]
• Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larocca. [Wow. I was very impressed by this collection of the first six issues of the recent Iron series. The writing is sharp, the high-tech future intriguing, and the character of Tony Stark presented in a very interesting fashion. The storyline deals with the things that Stark fears most happening in the world, with the most significant being that a supertech terrorist has figured out how to modify his Iron Man technology and improve it in some ways. I don't quite buy the idea that young Ezekiel Stane is able to generate the power that he does just by converting his body's energy more efficiently, even as he's chugging thousands of calories. I could see him having extraordinary reflexes, getting smarter, and so forth, but powering energy bolts that can hurt Iron Man seems extreme given the rationale. But it's a sci-fi superhero, right? Salvador Larocca's art is fantastic, Fraction's pacing is wonderful, and he finds interesting new ways to torment one of comicdom's most tormented icons. Good stuff that had me searching my library for the next volume. Which, alas, they don't have!] 
• Low Moon by Jason. [A collection of brightly colored, largely silent cartoon panels that display odd twists on familiar themes and a very quirky sense of humor. Did not surprise me to find out that the creator is Norweigian. There's a very Scandanavian sense of melancholy and dry humor running throughout these stories. Very interesting and worth a look if only to see how much story and characterization can be packed into such a minimalist presentation.]
• Sleeper Vol. 1: Out in the Cold by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
  
• Sleeper Vol. 2: All False Moves
  
• Sleeper Vol. 3: A Crooked Line
• Sleeper Vol. 4: The Long Way Home [These somewhat disturbing graphic novels are the best combinations of noir, crime, and superhero storytelling out there. Double agent Holden Carver, whose unwanted superpower serves to alienate him from his own body and the world around him, gets stranded in a criminal organization when his handler is shot and left in a coma. These aren't your standard supervillains, though their leader, Tao, is a classic evil mastermind in many ways. Carver is constantly pushed into situations where he has to choose between duty, friendship, and survival, and every choice he makes seems to push him deeper into trouble. He has no good choices concerning who to trust. By the end, it's less a matter of wondering if he can get free and more a matter of wondering what the collateral damage to Carver and those around him is going to be. Riveting stuff, well illustrated by Phillips. There's some sex and violence that goes beyond what I typically consider tasteful or necessary, but it doesn't feel gratuitous in Brubaker's hands--there are moral and personal consequences for actions, and material that feels dark is presented as such. So superior to the Ennis crap above that the comparison between the two on one of the book covers made me want to puke. The books have been collected into two volumes, Sleeper Season 1 and Sleeper Season 2, which are the affordable ways to pick them up.]
• Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald [A classic that still holds up, filled with many plot twists and turns and a ton of difficult decisions for the characters that one didn't see in comics at the time.]

Review: The Boys Vol 1-4 by Garth Ennis

Grade: D
I read these on someone else's recommendation: a librarian who went so far as to put them in my hands. He's had some good suggestions for other reads, so I went with this one and felt obligated to finish them. But I didn't take long doing it.

There's an interesting concept underlying the series, which is that a group of supposedly normal guys goes around keeping the superhuman jerks in line through nefarious means. The idea is that pretty much all the superhumans, at least the ones with public personas, are scumbags celebrities who abuse the puny humans around them without a second thought.

But that concept is buried under the sheer grossness that author Garth Ennis (whose last name, if there is any comedic justice in the world, must rhyme with "penis") can't seem to help indulging in. Calling his writing crass and juvenile is an understatement. Faces ripped off, multiple graphic and gross sex jokes played out in panels, people wallowing in their own shit, being urinated on, vomiting, and so forth. It's all there, more than once.

I get the impression that Ennis wants to come off as though he's poking fun at all the sick, twisted stuff that he writes about with comic glee, as though this is some sort of satire of a world brimming with demented sickos. To me, he comes across as a mentally disturbed writer with an obsession with bodily fluids and violence. Or possibly someone who fantasizes about being a superhero so he can have sex with rogue meteors and treat everyone around him like crap. Let's keep the radioactive spiders and power rings well away from Mr. Ennis, please.

Some of the plotlines, like the story of how the corporation Vought American became so influential through it's creation of superhumans, are pretty cool. Some might have been interesting if they hadn't gone so over the top. For example, a planned Russian coup involves keeping 150 superhumans cooped up in a warehouse until the big day when they will be set loose upon the city--except they're all unknowingly programmed to have their heads blow up on command. This would have been interesting with a dozen superhumans. But Ennis is like that guy from Spinal Tap--he just wants to keep turning the knob up to 11. He is the OverKiller.

Occasionally Ennis seems to be trying to slip a message about the corrupting nature of power and celebrity into these storylines, but it falls flat for many reasons.

• His insights are not that original aside from the levels of depravity he associates with the supercharged Caligulas that he puts on the rosters of his thinly disguised mockeries of big name DC and Marvel group.
• Even his big "shocker" reveals are pretty damn predictable. His Professor X knockoff is a pedophile who has abused all the members of his teams when they were children. Believe me, by the fourth volume in the series, I saw this coming very quickly.
  
• We're supposed to empathize with the actions of a team of psychopaths going around blackmailing and killing superpowered sociopaths. Because their extreme violence and vigilantism is directed only at really awful people, it's okay. All publicly known superhumans (except ONE) are scum. It's not even a consistent premise, because the members of the Boys are all enhanced with the same formula that gives the superhumans their powers.
  

The underlying concept is interesting. It could have been handled much, much, much better, with better characters (there are exactly two likable characters in the whole series), more coherent plots, and without resorting to so much crude, endlessly repeated adolescent "humor."

Oh, and like a lot of Scottish comic book writers, Ennis seems to have a bug up his ass about the United States, though he also has characters claiming to love it in spite of its flaws. But just a suggestion: when you come from a small island that feels the need to draw extremely sharp distinctions between people of Scottish, English, and Welsh ancestry, it's a bit ridiculous to poke fun at Americans for celebrating their various hyphenated ancestries (Irish-American, Italian-Amerian, Mexican-American, etc) because "nobody wants to be like anybody else" or they're all searching for an identity because America has none.

Review: The Umbrella Academy

This graphic novel was written by Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, whose music I'm frankly unfamiliar with. (They make a big deal throughout the graphic novel of the author's rock star status.)

Nothing against Way using his apparent star status as a musician to get this gig, as well as an apparent sequel volume that I won't be reading. But it reads like a bunch of unrelated bits that he thought were cool and decided to string together with amateurish glee.

It's the story of a group of kids, born under unusual circumstances and gifted with extraordinary powers that they use to save the world, under the guidance of their adoptive billionaire father, who is apparently an alien.

The story jumps back and forth between the present day, when the adult members of the Umbrella Academy unwillingly reunite to face yet another threat to the world, and the past, when they began their journey toward familial dysfunction.

The story has some interesting ideas, a lot of weird ideas masquerading as interesting ideas, a cast of potentially intriguing but undeveloped characters, and only the vaguest semblance of a plot. It reminded me of Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol, with a slightly more coherent premise, equally weird but less interesting characters, and plotting that makes Morrison's early work look tightly scripted.

Bad guys appear and disappear with no clear motivation and no apparent relevance other than to provide a cool image and a loud bang. Even the main villains are the thinnest of sketches. Plot hooks are left dangling everywhere. It's not even clear just what kind of powers the various members of the Umbrella Academy possess. In some ways I applaud Way for trying to embrace the idea of showing rather than telling, but the scenes he devises are a jumbled mish-mash that end up telling us very, very little about anything. The big finale is a complete deus ex machina moment that relies upon one of the Academy members displaying a power nobody realized he had that single-handedly saves everyone from doom.

Ultimately, the Umbrella Academy is style turned up to 11 and masquerading as substance. The five star reviews on Amazon leave me scratching my head, frankly. The three-star reviews seem to hit the nail right on the head. If Way had exercised the storytelling discipline to flesh out anything that he dabbles in here, I'd have given him higher marks for the creativity of some of the ideas he tosses out.

But I feel that in the current comic book marketplace I can easily find much better told stories that are creatively satisfying.

Review: The Spirit, Vol. I by Darwyn Cooke

The Spirit is a classic comic book character created by the legendary Will Eisner. The Spirit has no super-powers or even much in the way of a costume, as you can see in this picture.

He's basically a cross between a hard-boiled private detective and a costumed street-level vigilante. Like the classic vigilante, he wears a mask, doesn't carry a gun, does his fighting with his fists, and has a rogue's gallery of very offbeat characters. Like a private eye, he gets smacked around a lot, has a wise-cracking sense of humor, uses his wits and contacts to follow up on cases, and deals with a lot of femme fatales. (This collection even has a story featuring the Batman and the Spirit, so you can see the contrasts between them.

Artist and writer Darwyn Cooke has brought the Spirit back in a recent series. I picked this up on a whim, and I was startled at how well done it is.

You might be familiar with Cooke's work on the DC Elseworlds mini-series Final Frontier, which reimagined the emergence of the Silver Age heroes of the DC universe in a 1950s that was truer to the politics of the time than contemporary comics were. The comics were also turned into a DC Animated-style movie. I found The New Frontier interesting but not particularly inspiring, to be honest. And I thought the ending was rather confusing and a bit cliched.

This new Spirit series just crackles with energy and style, however. Cooke's art is crisp and classic, evoking memories of old newspaper comic strips but with an updated sense of design. The coloring in particular is superb, really adding to the emotional nuances of the panels. And the title pages read as homages to Eisner's constant experimentation with design, introducing each story with a distinct visual style designed to tie into its theme.

It's the stories themselves that are a delight, however. Unlike the classic newspaper comics that it reminds me of, Cooke's Spirit moves through each storyline at a brisk, efficient clip, packing in little details of character and plot with great efficiency.

And the stories collected in this volume are self-contained within a single comic issue, which is remarkable in this age of decompressed storytelling. It would take Brian Michael Bendis at least three issues to tell most of the stories in this volume. Characters and subplots seem to carry over from one issue to the next, but you could simply drop in on any of these "chapters" with no prior knowledge of the Spirit and immediately pick up on the characters and plot. And be satisfied with the story arc and its conclusion. This is a completely different approach from that of Fables, which is also excellent, and it's one that is a real pleasure to encounter as a busy parent.

Cooke throws interesting characters out right and left. The pacing is fast and accentuates the sense of action conveyed by the art. Brief flashbacks deftly reveal key details about the main protagonists. There's humor mixed in with adventure. All in all, I give this collection an A+. I admit I was completely surprised by what it had to offer.

Review: Fables: War and Pieces

Unlike the Good Prince, which was volume 10 of Fables, the eleventh collection of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham's masterpiece, War and Pieces, pretty much demands that you've read the earlier volumes.

It's not that you can't understand what's taking place in this particular graphic novel without having read all that has come before, but you certainly won't appreciate it fully. The storyline has been building toward this huge conclusion for some 75 issues, so much so that Cory Doctorow mistakenly thought that this graphic novel concluded the Fables story.

In fact, there are at least two more collections on the way and I've read bits that suggest the story is perhaps only halfway completed. Willingham is not the sort of author to simply allow his characters a big victory without sifting through the consequences of their struggles.

In any case, in this volume the exiled Fables take the battle directly to the Adversary and his legions in the Homelands. I don't want to say more than that because I shouldn't spoil any surprises. And you can probably find a summary somewhere online if you really want.

I have to say that I've been reading Willingham's material for a while now. I have a nearly complete run of the troubled Elementals comic, which had some fits and starts. I've also got the script book for his Pantheon superhero comic, published in b/w by Lone Star comics. He's always had talent but I found a Elementals to be kind of scattershot in tone and conceptualization, ranging from really intriguing to weird and nearly incomprehensible. It also had a very, very strange collection of characters. Pantheon had some great concepts in it but was let down by poor execution in terms of the production and art. It also tried to cram a bit too much into twelve issues (or thirteen? I forget how many issues there ended up being, as I have the complete story in manuscript form), given all the implied backstory of the various characters and the comic universe that he was revealing. (I almost wish that Buckingham or some other talent like John Cassady could redraw the Pantheon story in color.)

For me, Fables is the real fulfillment of all the storytelling promise that Willingham displayed in those earlier comics. It's not something that I had any interest in reading based solely upon the high concept pitch. But the implementation is a treat. Willingham has found a vehicle whose dimensions are open enough to allow him to stretch even his more bizarre creative muscles, yet confined enough to stay coherent. With this series he really took a leap for me, moving from the ranks of promising journeymen to brilliant creator. And seeing that is as fun for me as reading the wonderful story itself.

Review: Fables: The Good Prince

If you haven't been keeping up with the comic book Fables, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham (pencils) and Steve Leialoha (inks), then you are missing out on one of the best comics being produced today. I'd rank this up there with titles like Ex Machina and Promethea (which has completed its run) for the richness of the setting, dialogue, artwork, and plot.

And it just so happens that this particular volume collects a story that you can enjoy and understand without being very familiar with what has come before. A lot of characters get introduced, but you are told most of what you need to know about them. I didn't read either of the two graphic novels in the series preceding this one and didn't have a problem keeping up.

The basic concept is that the Fables of western lore (and to a lesser degree Eastern--you do get to see them but the focus is mainly on the western fables living in America) were driven from the various faerie kingdoms by a mysterious Adversary and they ended up in New York living in disguise among the mundane population.

This particular storyline follows the adventures of a character who has played a pretty minor role up to this point in the series as far as I can tell, one Flycatcher (the Frog-Prince), who assumes his old role as Prince Ambrose and sets out on a noble quest with very interesting results. I can't say too much more without ruining some of the suspense, but suffice it to say that Willingham & Co. have developed a knack of making even conflicts that have foregone conclusions interesting to read, due to a combination of excellent visuals, some witty dialogue, and an ability to pull back now and then from the big picture view and zoom in on the specific casualties of any given struggle.

It's remarkable to me that Willingham can keep such a vast cast of characters straight and distinctive enough from each other to follow their exploits. He sketches out characters nicely with bits of dialogue, summing up small characters quickly while stretching out explorations of main characters at length. And one of the pleasures of Fables is that you never know when a seemingly minor character is going to be further developed in their own story. The Good Prince is a perfect example of that.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't credit Buckingham's excellent graphic design for helping distinguish the multitude of characters that dance across the page.

I'd only collected the first couple volumes of this series, as I have gotten out of the habit of collecting graphic novels in the past couple years, but I'm seriously reconsidering.

Review: BPRD The Warning

Most of the BPRD graphic novels to date have worked relatively well as stand-alone stories, with certain character revelations being introduced but the plots being decipherable (well, as much as they ever are) without a lot of familiarity with the earlier collections. Not so with this 10th collection in the series, which announces itself as the first book in the Scorched Earth trilogy.

The Warning tries to bring people up to speed, but I think it would be pretty confusing for those who haven't read several of the earlier graphic novels, such as Plague of Frogs or Garden of Souls. You've got legions of evil frog-beasts, strange devolved hominids building vast machines in the bowels of the Earth, visions of Cthuluesque monstrosities taking over the world, mysterious sorcerers appearing and disappearing in astral form, portents of a big destiny for Liz Sherman that belies her seemingly humble origins, and cryptic messages from the spirit of Lobster Johnston.

The city of Munich gets largely obliterated, the BPRD troops get some more serious gear, Liz gets kidnapped again by occult entities, and Abe Sapien starts acting exactly like Hellboy. Seriously, I don't know if the authors realize this, but in this storyline the personality transformation that began in Garden of Souls seems to be pretty much complete. Abe is talking and acting just as gung-ho, aggressive, and careless as Hellboy here. Still fun to read, but it just made me miss Hellboy actually taking part in these stories. I liked Abe more when they had more differences.

Overall, another good graphic novel, setting up a story arc that looks to deal out tremendous mayhem to Earth as ancient powers seek to reclaim their power and transform the planet into their playground. I'd be surprised if Hellboy himself doesn't make an appearance of sorts at some point in the process.

Review: BPRD The Garden of Souls

This graphic novel, written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and illustrated by Guy Davis, continues the story of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense that began in Mignola's Hellboy comics. Hellboy hasn't appeared in the BPRD comics for a while now. Instead we get Hellboy's former compatriots, the amphibious humanoid Abe Sapien, the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, and bodiless medium Johann Krauss.

By this point in the BPRD series (Garden of Souls is the 7th graphic novel), Captain Benjamin Daimo (a horribly scarred marine who returned from the dead in a mysterious fashion) and occult specialist Kate Corrigan are also on the team. For those keeping score, the homunculus Roger is dead at this point.

Anyway, this story involves Abe Sapien following mysterious messages about his past life as the occult dilettante Langdon Everett Caul. He brings Daimo with him to Indonesia, where he ultimately ends up at a strange little outpost of Victorian mad scientists who walk around inside these extremely cool looking robot suits (they look something like the helmet of an old diving suit, complete with portals, to which mechanical arms and legs in odd proportions are attached).

These fellows, who belong to something called the Oannes Society, are holding hostage a psychic Egyptian mummy named Panya who was apparently resurrected in the 1800s and has been walking the Earth since then. Of course the Oannes Society also has a crackpot scheme that involves triggering massive tsunamis that will kill many of the people in Southeast Asia, whose souls will then be absorbed by these artificial bodies the mad scientists have constructed for themselves, so that they will become godlike as a result.

I won't spoil the story in terms of how the bad guys get defeated or what Abe learns about his past. It's all rather confusing.

The things I liked:

• The robotic suits worn by the Victorians are really, really cool looking. Guy Davis does an amazing job of drawing in Mignola's style.
  
• The backstory of Panya the mummy is actually really interesting, at least the flashbacks to her life in the 1800s after she is brought back and becomes something of a celebrity in certain circles, only to be sequestered and then forgotten.
  
• There is some nicely creepy stuff involving a message being sent via a young girl.

The things that were less satisfying:

• I could not for the life of me figure out why a pseudo-scientific cult of Victorians whose interests seem to revolve around ancient sea gods would want to keep prisoner a mummy from a desert country who has no apparent link to the sea. At all.
  
• Supposedly this reveals how and why Abe got transformed from Caul into his fishy form. And it does. Sort of. But not in a very satisfying way. And there's a very clear disconnect between the personality of Caul and that of Abe and no real explanation as to why he's so different now.
  
• After a while all the weird occult societies and their various plots start to blur together.

Still, it's an entertaining story with some nice visual designs and solid storytelling.

Review: Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon

I read these 25 issues written by Joss Whedon and illustrated by John Cassaday in the form of graphic novels: one hardcover collecting the first 12 issues and two softcovers collecting issues 13-24 and Giant-Sized Astonishing X-Men 1.

Here are the things I liked about the series:

• The core cast is stripped down to a manageable number.
• The dialogue between characters is fantastic, especially the exchanges between Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost. Fans of either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel will see a lot of similar quips and snarkiness here.
• I think Whedon gets a good handle on characters like Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Beast. And he manages to make Wolverine interesting without having him steal every scene, which is nice.
  
• There is some much appreciated humor sprinkled in throughout that manages not to derail the action in the slightest.
  
• I love Cassaday's art in general, particularly how he shows emotion through body language blended with facial expressions and his ability to draw just about any crazy thing that Whedon can dream up side-by-side with perfectly normal looking stuff like teens, clothes, and a grassy lawn. It is immersive.
  
• Seriously, tons of great one-liners, most of which I just can't set up properly here because they have a visual element or require a few set-up lines to produce the proper payoff. And it might sound silly, but whoever placed the word balloons in the panels did a great job. You can see the timing that you would normally hear if actors were delivering these lines from a script.
  
• For the most part, the new characters that Whedon introduces, such as the young student who can create a cool-looking force field around herself, the villain Ord of the Breakworld, the artificial intelligence Danger, or the really bitchy Agent Brand of the interstellar/interdimensional variation of SHIELD known as SWORD (get it?), are well done. Whedon has this particular knack for making his key antagonists so interesting that you want to see them keep coming back even when they are doing bad things.
  
• The interpersonal drama is great and the personality issues/relationship subplots are woven deftly into the action scenes.
  
• There is a real sense of loss in the storyline.

The things I didn't like:

• I wasn't that excited about the old costumes coming back, particularly Wolverine's bumblebee look. The rationale given in the book is rather weak (superheroes wear costumes).
  
• Ord is a cool character given some of his lines and his trials and tribulations. But he looks downright goofy. The Breakworlders in general resemble a bunch of homicidal Dr. Seuss characters.
• The plausibility of some major plot elements make as much sense as the various prophecies tossed out in Angel or the cosmology of the 'Verse in Firefly (one solar system with a ton of terraformed habitable moons that all have Earthlike gravity and atmosphere and the one at the edge of the solar system still gets regular, normal sunshine--what?). Basically, as with most of Whedon's work in my opinion, you shouldn't look too closely at why these Big Events/Threats happen, or what the rules of the setting are, because they don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense (the vampires in Buffy and Angel are wildly inconsistent and the whole "a demon takes over the dead human body because some other half-demon bit them" is flaky and tosses out a lot of what makes vampires potentially interesting). What's important is how Whedon's characters react to these events and rules, which does tend to make sense and can be very engrossing.
  
• The Breakworld, an entirely new setting element, is really just a stand-in for yet another Demon Dimension where most everything and everyone is violent and dangerous. It felt a bit forced into the Marvel Universe.

Neutral:

• Those familiar with the casts of Angel and Buffy will probably find a fair number of similar characterizations in play here. Emma Frost and Brand as dueling bitches who somehow win our sympathy (Cordelia). Kitty Pryde as a kind of Willow/Fred amalgam. Cyclops has a bit of the forlorn hero vibe that Angel carried, Beast goes back and forth between cerebral and action hero in the vein of Wesley. Wolverine is a bit like a less talkative Spike. The thing is, all of these characterizations work, in my view. And it's probably more that certain relationships or bits of dialogue are reminiscient of some scenes in those series than anything else. So perhaps this is in the eye of the beholder.
  

Versus Grant Morrison's New X-Men or Marc Millar's Ultimate X-Men

• There aren't as many wild and daring ideas in this story as there were in either the Ultimate X-Men by Marc Millar or the New X-Men by Grant Morrison. There's one very interesting social concept in Astonishing X-Men, the idea of a cure for mutants, that got more or less blatantly stolen for the X-Men 3 movie. But it just falls by the wayside without any real sense of resolution after it gets tossed out there.
  
• On the other hand, the narrative of Whedon's story is much more coherent than Morrison's sequence. I also found the characters that Whedon introduced far more interesting and clearly presented than the majority of the ones that Morrison introduced, who are for the most part head-scratchers (still not sure what Xorn or Fantomex's abilities were or how they made any sense, and I could have done completely without Beak or Angel). Morrison tends to introduce new characters explicitly to upstage existing iconic characters, like a gamer who wants his new player character to prove he can beat up the existing high-level NPCs in a campaign. Thus they swiftly become annoying rather than integrating into an existing concept. And Whedon writes dialogue about a dozen times better than Morrison.
• As far as Millar goes, in Ultimate X-Men, as in most of his comics work (though to a lesser degree in Ultimates), he dials most everyone up a bit too far on the being a bastard or a self-interested ass personality meter for any of them to be likeable or even sympathetic. I couldn't care less about any of Millar's X-Men living or dying. I was genuinely upset when Whedon killed somebody major off at the end of his story arc.
• So if I had to look at relative strengths of the three series, I'd say Morrison is most gifted at exploring and introducing wild and original ideas in a setting, Millar is best at crafting a fairly coherent plot that drives forward very focused characters with great action and intensity, and Whedon is a master of creating characters that feel real and generate a range of strong emotional responses (humor, affection, dislike) in readers. Your reading preferences will probably influence your responses accordingly.
  

I definitely recommend the series, which is quite self-contained vis-a-vis the rest of the Marvel Universe. It doesn't even connect that strongly to the events of Grant Morrison's lengthy run on New X-Men that preceded it in the continuity.

Reviews: The Best American Comics 2008

I picked this up at the library over the weekend. It's an interesting collection with a very wide range of stories and artistic styles, none of which resemble contemporary superhero comics, which is refreshing. On the other hand, some the styles just didn't appeal to me. Another problem is that many of the stories here are excerpts, so just when they seem to be getting interesting, they end.

So it's best to think of this collection as a tasting sampler. That said, here are my favorite pieces:

• Burden by Graham Annable. Clean, simple b/w cartooning with a strong sense of line backed by a spare story of seeming redemption with a powerful finale. Excellent.
• The Salon, by Nick Bertozzi. A weird but strangely compelling story about a rather caricatured Picasso and an unnamed painter companion as they stumble across the principles of Cubism and perhaps track a string of murders committed by Gaugin. Be warned--more shots of Picasso's penis than is probably healthy to see.
• Seven Sacks by Eleanor Davis. An odd moral fable about a ferryman and an unusual assortment of monsters told almost entirely with pictures. Fascinating stuff.
• The Bloody Benders, by Nick Geary. Clean art style with a crispness and linearity reminiscent of some of David Macauley's work. An incomplete but interesting look into a real historical period.
  
• Life is Hell, by Matt Groening. Classic, bizarre, messy art and humor from the creator of the Simpsons.
  
• Gold Diggers of 1969 by Jaime Hernandez. Apparently this takes some his Love and Rockets characters back to an untold part of their childhood. I haven't read that work, but this was interesting and the art style is like an unusual take on Family Circus.
  
• Berlin by Jason Lutes. Really liked the art in this strange historical pastiche of people in 1930 Berlin, though the story, as noted, is a work in progress and the excerpt doesn't really pull it all together.
  
• George Sprott by Seth. I swear that when I first saw these panels I thought they had been drawn by Chris Ware, who actually did the next strip. A very odd story of a deceased host of a small television show about his exploits in the Far North as a younger man.
• American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang. Good storytelling and crisp art that conveys emotion very nicely. Wish the excerpt was longer.

Most of the remaining pieces either had art styles that I didn't care for or stories that were just too disjointed and difficult to follow (which might have been the result of excerpting in some cases). An example of the former is Trouble by T. Edward Bak, and of the latter is Thanksgiving by Chris Ware (whose art is lovely but whose storytelling style nearly always leaves me unable to follow his layouts or narrative).

As the above comments probably indicate, this was a very quixotic anthology and a nice reflection of the diversity in contemporary American comics.

Comic Book Influences, Redux

I realized this morning that I forgot some important influences on my comic book reading. When I was in the first and second grade, my family lived on White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Some new neighbors moved in across the street. They were a young couple. I can't remember the name of the wife, but the husband's name was Robbie, I believe.

Robbie had a huge collection of comic books, the first adult I'd ever met who owned any. He let me read them, but only in a certain room of his house at a specific table. Reading the older ones also required me to be under careful supervision, usually while he was working on something electronic at a bench in the corner.

As a result, I got to read Amazing Fantasy 15 as a kid, as well as the first 100 issues of Spider-Man straight through. I also got to read Iron Man from issue 2 up through at least the first 50. As I recall there were some Hulks in there as well. I don't recall much beyond that, aside from the fact that everything was Marvel. Aside from the Spider-Man issues, which had a big influence on me (being a tall, skinny kid with glasses who was regarded as a nerd by many of his classmates, Peter Parker was right in my wheelhouse), I don't really remember anything about the other issues. Even at that age I thought some of the stories were silly.

Later on, in junior high, I had a group of friends who were tremendously into the X-Men, Alpha Flight, and the New Mutants comics. These included several girls: Erica, Jennie, and Miriam. A couple of the girls were also into the New Teen Titans, my first real exposure to any DC comics. As well as my friend Jonathan and my sort-of friend and more-like-a-rival Scott, who was (and probably still is) a very gifted comic style artist even at that age. I would read some of these comics at Jonathan's house, watch Scott draw the characters at school, and occasionally play some super-hero games (we used Superworld by Chaosium) that were run by one of the teachers who founded the Games Club at our junior high. I always made my own characters for the games, as did some of the other kids, while the rest tried to emulate their favorites from the comics.

What these two formative experiences had in common was that I wasn't buying any comics for myself--I don't think I owned any comics aside from a couple giant-sized Avengers or Fantastic Four Xmas specials that I picked up around the holidays. I may have had a few issues of Alpha Flight that were my own, as they had a hero character named Puck who was a dwarf, as is my sister, so I felt an affinity for the comic even though it was about Canadians and I was about as far from Canada as you can get in the continental United States.

So on the whole, my reading material was dependent upon what my friends or neighbors decided to collect. In this sense it was a lot like visiting the library to check out graphic novels: your choices are limited to whatever they've decided to pick up.

What did I get out of these early comic reading experiences? Well, the art styles of George Perez and John Byrne influenced me for a long time, to be sure. I also recall that those Claremont/Byrne X-Men and the Perez/Wolfman Teen Titans had a fairly even mix of male and female superheroes, unlike classic groups such as the Justice League, Avengers, or Fantastic Four. That influenced me to this day: when I create superteams, I try to balance out the gender ratio as much as possible. It just feels more natural given that we aren't dealing with special ops forces here, but a bunch of people who typically gained their powers by accident or via legacy.

But when I look at the Marvel Essentials b/w reprints of those years or the DC Essentials, I typically don't feel a big surge of nostalgia. The 1980s have some good story lines, like Days of Future Past, but there's more soap opera than I remember. And the earlier stuff is just hokey.

I do wish they wrote more comics ilke that today for younger readers, though. The Justice League Adventures and Justice League Unlimited comics, based on the animated television shows, have been great fun for my kids.

Comic Book Influences

During my recent workshop experience, one of the other writers commented that several sections of my chapter read like they were intended to be a movie script. It was an interesting observation. To be honest, if there is a visual influence like that on my writing, it is probably due more to having read a lot of comic books over the years than to having watched a lot of movies.

You see, in addition to science fiction and fantasy, I also like superhero comic books. Among my favorites over the years have been specific incarnations of the Justice League, the X-Men, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Spider-Man, All-Star Superman, Invincible, The Authority, Planetary, Powers, Top Ten, Promethea, Starman, Shadowline, Hellboy, and the Suicide Squad.

As the above list will tell you if you're a comics fan, I don't consider myself a Marvel or a DC person. I've found that I'm also a little different from the typical fan in that I don't follow specific characters or teams so much as I follow teams of writers and artists. And even then I'm kind of picky. For example, I love Robert Kirkman's Invincible but I have no interest in his ongoing Walking Dead series. I've read two different incarnations of the Legion of Superheroes that couldn't be more different from each other--the Giffen Terra Mosaic sequence of the early 1990s and the more recent "DnA" (Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning) Legion, but never got into anything else. I have Marc Millar's whole run of Ultimate X-Men but didn't care for his work on the Authority. And Grant Morrison is totally hit or miss for me--I loved his All-Star Superman and his early JLA reboot, but didn't care for his Doom Patrol or his New X-Men that much. And I stopped collecting Ultimate Spider Man and Powers some time ago when I felt they were getting stale.

Also, I read comics when I was young, then had a long hiatus before picking them up again in college, then another hiatus after graduating. So although I'm familiar with the history of many iconic characters, I'm not overly wowed by a lot of the early writing or art. So a lot of my favorites are more recent.

My favorite comic book writers are:

• Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (Legion of Super-Heroes),
• Brian Michael Bendis (Alias, Daredevil, Powers, Ultimate Spider Man),
• Warren Ellis (Authority, Nextwave, Planetary),
• Neil Gaiman (Sandman),
• Keith Giffen* (Legion of Superheroes, Justice League International),
• Robert Kirkman (Invincible),
• Mike Mignola (Hellboy),
• Marc Millar (Ultimates Vol 1 and 2, Ultimate X-Men),
• Alan Moore (Watchmen, Promethea, Top Ten, pretty much every thing else he's written),
• Grant Morrison (JLA, All-Star Superman),
• John Ostrander (Suicide Squad),
• James Robinson (Starman),
• Brian Vaughn (Ex Machina, Runaways), and
• Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Astonishing X-Men).

My favorite comic book artists are:

• Carlo Barberi (Justice League Adventures, Justice League Unlimited),
• John Cassady (Astonishing X-Men, Planetary),
• Keith Giffen (Legion of Superheroes),
• Gene Ha (Top Ten),
• Tony Harris (Starman, Ex Machina),
• Bryan Hitch (The Authority, Ultimates Vol. I and II),
• Stuart Immomen (Nextwave, Ultimate X-Men),
• Kevin Maguire (Justice League International, Captain America),
• Alex Maleev (Daredevil, Alias),
• Mike Mignola (Hellboy),
• Michael Avon Oeming (Powers),
• Ryan Ottley (Invincible),
• Frank Quietly (on some titles, like All-Star Superman),
• J.H. Williams III (Promethea)

*I haven't read any recent work by Giffen that was particularly coherent, unfortunately.

RETCON!

As for the Mesa Grande universe, I had some inspiration while mowing the lawn and I'm going to be laying down a chronology and fitting the various groups into it. It will require some heavy retconning of DOA, which will affect some of the mission profiles and characters, but I like what's there so I want to keep as much intact as possible.

Here's the basics: what is now the DOA team will become a team called the Specials, formed in the 1990s by a secret cabal within various agencies of the Department of Justice (no NSA or CIA) in response to some major events (such as the spectacular exposure and collapse of the alien-backed conspiracy within Majestic-12 and the civil war between the Kremlin Thought Police, their next-generation of young psychics who want to create their own society of telepaths, and the high-tech Rocket Corps). Not so much emphasis on criminals or outright deaths, but lots of characters being put through the wringer. Most of the recruited characters are former law enforcement or vigilantes serving federal probation for their failures. This is an homage to The Outsiders and the television show Alias.

The real DOA now emerges in the 1980s as a black bag operation of the CIA. The government has a discredited process that will imbue ordinary people with superpowers. The downsides are various unpredictable mental and physical side effects and the fact that everyone who undergoes the process dies within 12 months because of their transformation as their bodies either (a) reject the powers or (b) the powers go out of control and kill them in some fashion. The CIA, banned from developing its own metahuman program after the disasters of MK-ULTRA in the 1970s, offers felons the chance to undergo the process without telling them that it's going to kill them. The idea is that there's no long-term downside to using these people, as they'll take themselves out of the picture. So truly, DOA. The series arc culminates when enough of the mission members realize what the hell is going on. This is an homage to the comics Strikeforce Morituri and the Suicide Squad.

Also want to introduce the 1960s group The Order of the Green Flame: survivors of the Philadelphia Experiment who lose their official Office of NAval Intelligence sanction and form a private association of crime fighters and defenders. Plus the original Minutemen and their downfall, the new Minutemen, the villainous mastermind plot that succeeds in preventing nuclearwar, and so forth.

Check out my Superhero Stuff

Okay, I haven't been posting much here recently because I have been putting a bunch of material on my web site, Dreaming Empires.

I had this inspiration, compulsion, what have you to take a bunch of actual superhero role playing game characters created and played by myself and my friends in junior high, high school, and early college, mix them with other concepts I'd had over the years, and blend everything together into a bright super-powered froth. Then I had the idea to make up missions for them AND write synopses of those missions as if I was describing an actual comic that was once published.

Still have a lot more work to go and need to get busy on other things, but I've put a lot of material in for the groups the Wild Hunt and Deniable Operations and Assets or DOA. The Wild Hunt, DPR, and Monster Squad are a bit of an homage to the X-Files, the recent incarnation of the DC comic book Outsiders, Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmission column in Pyramid magazine, and Hellboy's BPRD of comics and film. The DOA is a homage to the television show Alias, the DC comic book Suicide Squad, and one disastrous and another brilliant tabletop rpg campaign of my youth.

You can check out what I've been busy doing here:
The DOA main page (check out the missions and roster links at the bottom)
The Wild Hunt main page (check out the links to missions and specific characters)
The Justice Squad main page (there are pics of many of these characters on the DOA roster page)
The Monster Squad main page
The DPR main page

I created the pictures you see on some of the pages using a free online software flash program called Fabrica de Herois.

Please check them out and let me know what you think.

Updated My Web Site

So in my latest creativity phase, which I'm anticipating will last about a week, I've started adding more material to my web site, Dreaming Empires. Specifically, superhero setting and character material. There are even character pictures I created using a software program from a game called City of Heroes. Woo-hoo!

I've also decided to host a bunch of material for the Marvel SAGA rpg that I can no longer find online. Not sure why that is, but I had copied it from the original web site (I'm anal retentive that way--you never know when stuff will disappear from the web, so I copy and save a lot of web sites I like) so I posted it on mine. With my luck, someone will ask me to take it down soon. On the other hand, so few people read my stuff that perhaps it will be safe!

Anyway, I'm hoping to update stuff over the next few days, once I did up more character details and stuff on organizations. Then I'll be converting some of the characters to one or more rpg systems. And then I imagine I'll get distracted by another topic, maybe jumping back to the fantasy or science fiction.

Watchmen Parodies

Thanks to my sister and my buddy Aaron, I've recently come across two brilliant parodies of the Watchmen.

The first is a short animated clip portraying the Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon show.

The second is a webcomic Watchmen parody (the Ombudsmen) on PvPOnline.

Both are short but hilarious.

If you don't know what the Watchmen (one of the most lauded graphic novels of all time) is about or who the characters are, these aren't as funny. But trust me, both the parodies and the novel are very well done.

Vignette: Villain Wiretap

Wiretap transcript picks up after The Hammer returns from the diner’s restroom . . .

The Hammer: “So that’s the plan? Let me tell you, it sucks.”

Psycho-K: “No, it doesn’t. It’s gonna work.”

The Hammer: “Yeah, right up until the part where we get nailed at the docks.”

Psycho-K: “That ain’t gonna happen. You weren’t paying attention.”

The Hammer: “Well, I’m sure the rest of it was nice. I kind of focused on the part that was crap.”

Unknown Voice (possibly Gentleman Johnny? Cross-reference with clues below): “Will you two just—“

Psycho-K: “Oh, yeah, I forgot your incredible power of focus.”

The Hammer: Taps table. “Like a f***ing laser, baby.”

Unknown Voice: “Seriously, this constant bickering grows tiresome. I could be pursuing my own goals--”

The Hammer: Snorts. “Give me a break. Like that pays the bills.”

Unknown Voice: “What is that supposed to imply—“

Psycho-K: “Wait, I’m getting a mental impression here. A definite message. ‘I could be knocking off another museum and stealing a bunch of useless old shit nobody can fence.’”

The Hammer: Laughs. “’Oh, but first I have to pick the gayest possible thing to steal. Diamond-studded eggs?”

Psycho-K: “Statues of naked guys with no johnsons?”

Unknown Voice: “You can both pucker up and kiss my ass, you ignorant Neanderthals.”

Psycho-K: “Hey, I’m sorry if we interrupted your art collecting to offer you a chance to make actual money.”

The Hammer: “You mean to offer us a ticket back to prison.”

Jostling of silverware, rustling of clothing.

The Hammer: “What are you doing down there, man?”

Psycho-K: “I’m just looking for your balls, man.”

Unknown Voice: Voice muffled. “Wonderful. Here we go again.”

Psycho-K: “Just sayin’, you seem to be lacking in the cojones department all of a sudden.”

The Hammer: “Pointing out the huge gaping hole in your piece of shit plan is not—“

Psycho-K: Calls to the waitress. “Miss? Have you seen a pair of balls lying around anywhere? Big brass ones? My friend here seems to have lost his.”

The Hammer: “Fine, a**hole. You wanna go? Is that it? You wanna test the invulnerability again? Just say the word.”

Unknown Voice: “With great power comes great stupidity.”

Psycho-K: “Hey, don’t lose it with me because you’re afraid.”

The Hammer: “Afraid? I’ll leave the Gauntlets of Mars in the car, mother-f*****. How about that?”

Psycho-K: “You’re not afraid of getting hurt, amigo. That would be like me being worried about satisfying the ladies. You’re afraid of going back to stir.”

The Hammer: “And you want to go back? Hate to tell you, that doesn’t make me afraid, it makes you stupid.”

Psycho-K: Shakes his head. “Hell, no, I don’t want to go back. But I’m sure as s*** not going to live ducking my head and shuffling my feet hoping that the Man or the capes don’t notice me. Think about who you are, brother. You keep doing this small-time s***, people are going to think you up and died." Pause. "Back me up here, G.”

Unknown Voice: “He’s right about one thing. You can’t hide your light under a bushel.”

The Hammer: “How are you falling for this? You're the one with a college education.”

Unknown Voice: “I’m serious. Either you do these things, live this life we’ve chosen, or you don’t. You go straight. If you can, perhaps that’s the wisest course of action. But I can’t walk the path of the straight and narrow. I've tried. Leave aside the money and the material things I covet. I can’t give up the thrill, the edge, that sweet taste that comes when you get dealt a winning hand and actually beat one of those holier-than-thou spandex bastards. And you, you’ve sipped that nectar so many more times than have I. You can’t hope to replicate that sort of thrill unless you face true challenges to your ability.”

Psycho-K: "Time to step up to the big show again, my brother."

The Hammer: Sighs. "I don't know."

Psycho-K: "C'mon man, you know you want to say it." Pounds table. "It's Hammer Time, baby!"

Unknown Voice: "Could you possibly attract more attention, you amped up . . . ."

Coffee believed to have spilled on the surveillance device. Transcript ends.

Supercrew with the Kids

I recently purchased a .pdf of a very simple superhero roleplaying game called Supercrew. (You can read a review of it here.) The game rules are presented in the form of a 28 page color comic book, which is a nice touch.

A few days ago I read the game to my daughter and son, who are nine and six, respectively. Tonight mom was out at a work-related function and I asked the kids if they wanted to play a boardgame. My daughter suggested that since Mom isn't really into rpgs, we should try playing Supercrew.

Mutant Mayhem
I should preface this by saying that I tried playing Mutants and Masterminds with my kids about a month ago, with disastrous results. This was really my fault. My son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, reads at a high level and loves anything with numbers, so he's been reading my MnM books with joy. He's memorized a bunch of the rules as well. But I neglected the obvious point that being able to recite the rules doesn't mean comprehension, and that my lack of gaming experience with those rules would make me less effective as well. So that experience sucked, because the kids were confused, I was hesistant to make rulings, and my son got distracted by the Heroclix we were using as miniatures. Not my finest hour.

The Rules
This time was much better. With Supercrew you pick three powers for your character, each rated 1, 2, or 3, respectively. That determines how many dice you roll when using the power. A roll of 4, 5, or 6 on a die equals Effect 1--a 6 is re-rolled and any additional effect is added to the total. You also get to describe three tricks (which mechanically work the same for all characters--re-roll the dice, turn one die result into a 5, or automatically get Effect 2--but are described differently for each character's unique powers and style). You can use each trick once per gaming session.

You need to spend a hero point to use your level 3 power. How do you get a hero point? By using your wimpy Level 1 power and/or as a compensation for getting knocked out. Everyone has 3 toughness unless they've got a special ability that changes that (rules are kind of vague there). You define all your powers--there's a simple framework presented, but you can be pretty free-form.

The Set-Up
My son made a size-changing character with Shrinking 1, Growth 2, and SuperSizeShift 3 (which let him go back and forth in size in a single turn). He named the character SuperSizer.

My daughter made a character called Alien Z. Alien Z had Bulletproof Costume 1, Superspeed 2, and Trained Pet Monkey 3. Yes, my daughter's superfast character (who for some reason had heat vision as one of her tricks--I assumed it was based on her costume but let her make it her automatic Effect 2 trick) had as her most potentially powerful ability a trained monkey. She's very creative.

I basically copied the stats for two villains (even simpler than those for the characters) out of the book. One could control flocks of crows. I named her Blackbird. The other was called Miss Decibel and had sonic powers. And there were stats for a gang of ninjas, so I used those.

The Call to Action!
On the fly, I decided that the high-tech toy company where SuperSizer worked in his secret identity was being robbed by a gang of ninjas--he got a text message from a terrified co-worker. At the time he and Alien Z were working on her costume in his garage lab. He shrank to tiny size, hopped on Alien Z's shoulder, and held on as she raced at superspeed to the toy company's warehouse.

Back in Black--Ninja/Crow Throwdown
There they encountered a gang of ninjas robbing the warehouse. Alien Z decided to surprise attack the ninjas by racing toward them from a distance at high speed so they wouldn't see her coming, while SuperSizer snuck up in shrunken form once Alien Z left him by the side of the building. Alien Z rolled very well and took out half the ninjas on the first turn. SuperSizer cornered a ninja in the warehouse and grew to giant size. This, plus a series of bad attack rolls/good defenses on the part of the ninja, led to a comedic sequence where he put his head through the ceiling, then tried in vain to stomp the frantically dodging ninja. Alien Z knocked off another ninja, catching a shuriken in the back for her trouble, then noticed that a bunch of crows were flying off with the computer chips the ninja had previously been loading into the back of a truck.

(You may ask--if Blackbird could simply have had her minions fly off with the chips in the first place, why were the ninjas loading them into a truck? This is what happens when you take 5 minutes to set up a game and have a map handy that shows a loading dock with trucks on it. The kids never thought twice about it.)

Alien Z saw Blackbird guiding her flock of feathered fiends and tried to charge the villain. Blackbird used one of her trick powers to send a swarm of crows against Alien Z. Blackbird scored a higher Effect, so her attack went first. To make matters worse, Alien Z flubbed the defense roll, resulting in enough damage to knock her out after the shuriken hit. I ruled that the crows kept Alien Z from seeing where she was going, sending her careening into a truck at super speed and knocking her out. Blackbird then summoned a bunch of crows to lift her up into the air and fly her away.

SuperSizer sees all this because his head is sticking out of the top of the building. He uses his SuperBreath trick, rolls well, and blows away all the birds holding Blackbird, who tumbles to the ground and is knocked out.

SuperSizer and Blackbird engage in some rather awkward roleplaying banter with their captives before the police arrive. My daughter is good with the quips but just keeps asking the same questions and wants to use her heat vision to set Blackbird on fire. She says violence against prisoners is not against the law on her home planet. My friend Aaron might recall that my daughter gets her direct approach in these matters from my wife.

SuperSizer gets caught up in explaining to the villains just how they were defeated, possibly the first hero monologue I can recall. A little nudging gets him to threaten to shrink super small and crawl up the nose of one of his captives, which is sufficiently gross to get a little info out of a ninja--they were supposed to rendezvous with their employer at the docks. Then the other ninjas shut him up.

The police come for the prisoners and Blackbird uses another of her trick powers to turn into a bunch of birds and fly away to freedom.

Awkward Sleuthing
The next part did not go smoothly, as I eventually had to railroad the kids into trying to find clues to help them figure out what ship on the docks the bad guys were heading toward. I had this idea that a Japanese engineer had left from a military company because he didn't want to use his artificial intelligence breakthrough to control war robots, but to create lifelike robot pets for kids. The Japanese company wanted to steal the chips back and had hired ninjas and two supervillains to do it.

I don't think the kids got much of that. Eventually they figured out that ninjas were from Japan (a blatant, silly clue that my son actually grasped). Then they talked to the people in the warehouse and got enough info for my daughter to look up ships headed for Japan from the dock that evening. They found one and headed for it.

I probably should have just let the kids do whatever popped into their heads, but I really couldn't understand what they were trying to do. So my bad for not realizing they weren't getting the hints I was dropping.

Final Act
They got to the docks to see the ship ringed by crows keeping lookout. I can't really accurately relate what happened next, because I didn't quite understand it. But my daughter unleashed her pet monkey, which snuck on board the ship and rigged up a zipline that the two heroes used to swoop onto the deck at high speed past the startled crow lookouts. SuperSizer went giant-sized on the ship as Blackbird and Miss Decibel came to confront them.

At this point it was getting late and it was increasingly hard to keep my son even remotely focused on the game. So I wanted a quick ending with a bang. Thus I decided not to pull out any additional ninjas (they don't come cheap).

It was even faster than I expected. My son unleashed his SuperSizeShift ability, combined with his re-roll trick and a 6, to generate an Effect 4. Miss Decibel's defense roll of Effect 1 meant she would be knocked out. We described this as SuperSizer suddenly shrinking as Miss Decibel unleashed her sonic blast harmlessly overhead where his giant body had been a moment earlier, then leaping toward her like a flea, landing at her feet, and finally enlarging to full size with a punch that sent her skyward and into the water with a splash. Awesome.

My daughter engaged in some witty banter with Blackbird and then came up with a neat plan--to use the water nearby to soak the crows so they would be unable to fly, negating Blackbird's power. She got a 1 die anecdote bonus (another once-per-game-session deal) for an entertaining story about how she got the idea. Then she unleashed a staggering roll: 4, 6, 6, with the two re-rolled dice coming up 4 and 6, and the re-re-rolled 6 coming up 5, for an Effect of 6. Particularly considering that Blackbird had used up her power tricks for the session, she was toast even with an excellent full power defense roll.

Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me understand how the actions that my daughter described taking had anything to do with the plan she had laid out. It's like she forgot the water aspect entirely. Which was fine with me, I just can't remember it. The way I recall the conclusion is that she ran past a surprised Blackbird and leaped onto the water, creating a massive waterspout that shot up and drenched all of the crows, rendering them helpless as Alien Z rode the waterspout onto the deck of the ship, tapped a dazed Blackbird on the shoulder, and cold-cocked her when she turned around. Because that's more along the lines of what my daughter had said she was going to do, and that was beyond awesome.

There was no denouement, as it was time for pajamas and teeth brushing. But I was really happy with the visuals of the two final coup de grace moments, which would have looked great on a splash page or in one of the DC animated cartoons.

Afterthoughts
Much happier with this game session. If we started it earlier and perhaps took a break in the middle, we could get a could couple hours of fun. The rules are pretty simple and the tricks, particularly their limited resource nature, added some fun. My son seemed to have the best grasp of the rules, which I had to explain a couple of times to my daughter. She had the better focus on the game itself and contributed pretty much all of their clever dialogue.

My daughter tends to want to control the story more than the interactive format allows, especially as she's not the GM. The oddest aspect of this is that she keeps trying to hold the non-player-character's side of the conversation, talking back and forth with herself. On the other hand, she's getting better at thinking up stuff to do and tends to keep the action moving, which is a critical skill and much appreciated. My son has the attention span you'd expect of a six-year-old but also the associated enthusiasm when things go very well or very poorly. Basically great success or disaster got him equally thrilled and anything in the middle lost his interest fairly quickly. I also need to learn to hide the box of Heroclix when we are actually playing!

I think if I have just a little more fleshed out in terms of options (which wouldn't take long) so the kids could have more freeform choices (which I need to be willing to accept no matter how odd), and I figure out some ways to nudge them more gently into getting moving/doing, and they get more of the hang of how roleplaying games work (or narrative--you'd think that with all the animated adventures they watch, they'd recognize cliches and plot points more easily, but that just isn't natural connection for them), that they we will all continue to have fun.

I'm very happy that they gave me a second chance and that they did such a good job of being creative and fun, and I told them that.

Vignette: Veteran Superhero Shares Some Wisdom

“Here’s a tip. People are going to tell you their origin story. Sometimes they do it in a moment of weakness, sometimes it’s a bonding kind of thing in a time of crisis. And some people just get off on telling it over and over, like losers who can’t get over their greatest achievement in high school. Whatever. The point is, don’t believe them.”

"Why? Plenty of reasons why somebody would lie about it. What if your actual origin was getting anally probed by aliens who left some kind of radioactive suppository in your body that gave you powers?"

"Am I serious? Heh, sworn to secrecy, my friend. But that’s not the point. Even if you think you’ve got a wonderful origin that every mother dreams of for their spandex-clad son or daughter, it’s probably not real anyway."

"Look, people think they know their true origin. And they’re constantly being proved wrong. For years they think it was the radioactivity in the spider that bit them, then they eventually figure out it was the altered genetics of the spider, then someone comes along and tells them they were actually chosen as a champion by the emissary of some ancient spider god."

"Nobody knows for sure how they got their powers or why. You don’t. I don’t. We just have a best guess about it. And someday some creepy ex-government agent, eccentric scientist, or moody sorcerer is going to pop out of the shadows and turn your world upside down with an earth-shattering revelation."

"Your parents aren’t who you thought they were. Your arch-rival is really your half-brother or sister. Your mystical scepter is really a piece of sophisticated alien technology. You’re not a mutant, you’re the reincarnated spirit of some long-dead hero or the avatar of some mythological being. Your powers might even change. You’ll learn new stuff or forget old stuff. And you’ll have to roll with it. Whether you can or can’t, as much as being able to fly and shoot lasers out of your eyes, determines if you belong with the capes and cowls."

"That’s the world we live in, kid."