Jess Nevins is a Superhero

Jess Nevins is a Scholar. He's the type of Bibliophile & Pop-Cultural Scholar that would be right at home in Riskail, and I mean that in the best possible way. His work in Annotating various comic book series such as Kingdom Come led into his compiling a series of in-depth Annotations for Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which in turn led to the publication of his annotations (plus some essays, a great introduction and an interview with Alan Moore as well) as Heroes & Monsters . A second volume, A Blazing World, was likewise compiled from Nevin's erudite annotations and informed ruminations concerning the League's Second Series. He has also gone on to annotate The Black Dossier in his Impossible Territories, and Century: 1910, which is an on-going project that you can find here.

If you want a quick idea of just how formidable a task it is that Nevins took on in annotating the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, take a look at this list of the literary characters appearing in these 'funny-books.'

But that's just one example/project. Jess Nevin has also compiled a very thorough and eminently readable & enjoyable essay on Timely Comics, the shop that became Atlas and then Marvel. He has also expanded upon that essay with a number of follow-up essays on many of the classic and criminally neglected Timely Comics Characters such as The Blue Blaze, The American Avenger, Dakor The Magician, The Invisible Man, Hercules, The Thin Man, The Black Widow, Merzah The Mystic, The Black Marvel, and even Sub-Earth Man. Whew. And there's more. Like the 3Xs, but that's enough for now. Fascinating stuff. The Thin Man isn't Nick Charles, he's a super-scientist from a happy valley in the Himalayas who can turn himself super thin to get into places ordinary guys can't. Oh and he has a beautiful assistant named Oalla who helps him out. Likewise the Timely Comics' Black Widow isn't a Russian spy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Scarlett Johanssen, but rather is the "...strangest, most terrifying character in action picture magazines - the Black Widow. You've heard of the black widow spider - that evil creature whose bite spells doom. Now start the adventures of another black widow - a human tool of Satan whose very touch means death." Yeah. You read it. They wrote it. This is a character that I definitely want to learn more about, and probably would never have learned about at all if it hadn't been for Jess Nevins--Superhero Scholar and Librarian of the Lost Antiquities of Pop Literature. Ah the Golden Age of Comics, the more I learn about it, the more I come to realize just how short-changed we've been thanks to corporate myopia and greed...but that's a topic for another day, another post.

But there's much, much more. Jess Nevins has also done a great deal of research and annotation involving the Golden Age Superheroes and the Pre-Fantastic Four #1 Superheroes of Marvel Comics (The comics Giant that grew out of Timely above...).  He offers you a glimpse into the forgotten and buried secret history of the Blazing Skull, Dynamic Man, The Eternal Brain, KaZar (before he became a hippy), and Vagabond & the Fighting Hobo (Both of whom sound like off-beat heroes that you might meet in The City), amongst many, many others. (Some of whom overlap with the aforementioned Timely characters, being in fact direct continuations or revisions of those earlier superheroes--comics, especially older comics, are more than a little cannibalistic as well as incestuous.) There is even a page devoted to the Lost Generation of Marvel heroes active prior to the Fantastic Four's fateful (and all-too-often-and-Badly-RetConned) rocket-trip. You can find more details on the Lost generation characters here.

He has also has contributed some rather intriguing things to the Wold Newton Universe community such as the priceless You Weren't Nuthin' But A Hound Dog essay that really throws the WNU to the dogs by speculating on the canine descendants of a bitch irradiated by the meteor that set all of the WNU into motion in 1795. You can find a set of links to Nevin's WNU essays here. The essays on The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy and Reach For Yuh Genealogical Charts, Stranger are really well-done. It is especially weird and wonderful to consider the implications of John Carter (Warlord of Mars) being related to Randolph Carter (the Silver Key wielding Dream-master from HPL's tales).  It certainly is one way to make a Statement. Nevins is also a contributor to the Win Scott Eckert edited anthology of P. J. Farmer WNU-focused parascholarship Myths for a Modern Age.

Have you ever heard of Captain Mors aka der Luftpirat? You can find out about this forgotten hero of the German Dime-Novels of the Early Twentieth-Century. In some respects he gives a German spin on Verne's Robur the Conquerer (with some Robin Hood style quasi-socialism) and might even be considered a distinct predecessor to Perry Rhodan. His adventures were far-ranging to say the least, extending out unto the rest of our solar system and possibly beyond in at least 165 installments, most of which remain in German. The dime-novel series featuring Captian Mors was very possibly the first Science Fiction magazine, but that's an argument for Scholars to settle with their swords. In the meantime, you can check out one of the two E-Text versions of Captain Mor's adventures here, thanks to Jess Nevins (and Justin Gilbert who translated it over from the German). Like Perry Rhodan and Dray Prescott, there is a great deal of this stuff that is trapped in German language just begging to be translated and unleashed upon an otherwise unsuspecting English-reading audience...

If you are at all interested in doing research into Literature, Art, Books, Comics, Maps, Medieval Stuff, History, or Role Playing (amongst many other things), Jess Nevins provides pages upon pages of links and references for you to make use of including his exceptional list of Reference Texts. And yes, I realize that his page of Role-Playing links is a bit out of date, but with all the stuff this guy has going on, that's perfectly understandable, and besides, it's still a very extensive list that is worth investigating. The Anarchy & Espionage page is perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but that's because it is the most appropriate to the next few Riskail posts. You can find a directory-list of Jess Nevins assorted Bookmarks here. It's quite a lot of resources, so you'll definitely want to bookmark it yourself.

Nevins has also built an Online Directory to Golden Age Heroes that offers a listing of just about every known Golden Age Hero from 1935-1949, all arranged from A to Z and navigated via the little box on the upper left. This is an incredible treasure-trove of obscure, esoteric and mostly forgotten information sure to help others in their research efforts. It's a handy reference for digging back through the accumulated data-debris in order to look up or locate obscure old characters that might have fallen not only into obscurity, but the Public Domain. Alternative sites in this area include The Mystery Men & Mystery Women Encyclopedia, Hero Goggles' Golden Age Superhero and Villain Encyclopedia, Cash Gorman's Golden Age Encyclopedia, Mikel Midnight's Golden Age Directory, and others whom I hope to get to in the near future. And of course there is Jeff Rovin's amazing Encyclopedia of Super Heroes. You might also want to check out Lev Gleasons' Comics Page for a bunch more Golden Age links.

If you're a fan of the classic superhero Lee Falk's Phantom then you might want to check out these posts over at Nevins' No Fear of the Future blog: Painted by Pygmies, and The Color Purple (as rendered in black newspaper ink).  He also maintains a Livejournal that is simply fascinating, if you are interested in the market shares of the old Pulps from back in their hey day, which I actually am. All those numbers came out of the process of assembling The Pulp Magazine Holding Directory, which is about as rampant a bit of nerdistry as you can shake a stick at, but it's damn cool...to anyone really, really interested in the Pulps.

You can also find a wonderful article at io9 by Jess Nevins that details the development of Science Fiction from out of the Pulps.

And if you are interested in the Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years then you need to go here. Right now. No fooling. Jess Nevins has compiled another incredible collection of Heroes dragged from the cold wreckage of the earliest days of the Pulp and Adventure magazine days, all of it alphabetized, annotated and presented as a wonderful jumping-off point for really diving into this are of the Pop Cultural Underworld/Wasteland for days on end.

Then there's the vast amount of Fantastic Victoriana stuff that Jess Nevins has likewise compiled, annotated and converted into an Encyclopedia of the Fantastic Victoriana. The site offers you a wealth of incredible, well-researched and fun essays that range from A to Z.  He has also included at this site a detailed list of links for researching the Fantastic Victoriana all for yourself--a true gift to every would-be steampunk and Victoriaphile out there.

Is this the end for Jess Nevins? Not by a long shot. But it is the end of this post.

Happy Wold Newton Day!

Picture from The Offical P.J.Farmer Homepage: http://www.pjfarmer.com/

Today is Wold Newton Day. To celebrate it in style, be sure to visit the All Pulp site where they are featuring tons of Wold Newton features, articles, and more in commemoration of the meteor that re-shaped literary history forever.

The Wold Newton Universe is a crazy, mixed-up place full of all the classic heroes and villains of popular literature and more. Originated by Philip Jose Farmer in his recently reissued classic of literary pseudo-scholarship and faux-biographies Tarzan Lives, and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, the Wold Newton Family set forth by P.J.Farmer soon morphed and mutated into the Wold Newton Universe (WNU) thanks in large part to Win Scott Eckert who is credited with sparking the hyper-creative expansion and on-going evolution of Farmer's original concept into the thriving field of parascholarship and literary crossover-ification that it has become today. The librarian-superhero Jess Nevins, the Warrenverse's Chris Nigro (Who also contributed to this post by the way), and several other stalwart and scholarly adventurers have likewise set sail upon the high seas of Post-Farmerian Wold Newtonry and our own universe is far better for it.

Those two books from the 1970s began what we today call the field of creative mythography (coined by Win Scott Eckert) or parascholarship.  Farmer introduced the concept of many the world's most famous, infamous and even in some cases overlooked or obscure fictional characters sharing a common ancestral lineage (based upon the meteorite crash in the town of Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13,1795) and co-inhabiting the same reality. Farmer established a means by which all the literary characters of the past that he cared to meddle with or make use of were now fair game to his schemes and machinations--though in some cases Copyrights and Trademarks did present something of an obstacle.  But not for long as can be witnessed by Farmer's reinvention of both Tarzan and Doc Savage in his Lord Grandith and Doc Caliban novels A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin.

Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, (an official crossover between Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes), and The Other Log of Phineas Fogg further explored and developed the Wold Newton concept, as did his excellent A Barnstormer in Oz.

Farmer also produced a very good and very official Doc Savage novel Escape From Loki, which is well worth tracking down if you're at all a fan of the Man of Bronze.

Philip Jose Farmer is probably best known and remembered for his Riverworld, World of Tiers and Dungeon series as well as such books as A Barnstormer in Oz, Hadon of Ancient Opar and many, many others. His intense scholarship and mind-wrenchingly brilliant and exhaustive work in developing faux autobiographies of both Tarzan and Doc Savage is what set the whole Wold Newton ball of wax into motion. The Official PJF website has a page dedicated to Farmer's Wold Newton works that is very much worth taking a look at, if only to get some idea of the depth and bredth of this particular literary Rabbit Hole.  (Just the Tarzan or the Doc Savage Chronologies that Win Scott Eckert has contributed to the Farmer website can keep you busy for weeks, months, years...may the Gods ahve mercy on your soul if you click here.)

Alan Moore, an extraodinary gentleman and another very accomplished adept of the literary crossover, speaks frankly about P. J. Farmer in this interview. Win Scott Eckert has edited a truly memorable anthology of Farmer's original essays and a wealth of other Wold Newton information titled Myths For The Modern Age, which is available from Monkeybrain Books.  There is also a recent anthology of Wold Newton/Farmerian goodness that has been published by Meteor House titled The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer, an excerpt of the first 200 words from Eckert's tale Is He In Hell? is now available here.  Black Coat Press and their Tales of the Shadowmen series as well as the 2-volume Crossovers books are also very fun WNU resources.  The PulpNet site also offers a nice overview of the Wold Newton Universe concept.

One of the best first places to go in order to learn about the Wold Newton Universe would be Farmer's Tarzan Alive and/or Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and Win Scott Eckart's incredible treasure house of a web pages hosted by the PJFarmer site. After that, there are so many links, so many authors, so much material and so little time that you're pretty much on your own. It's an incredible literary labyrinth and imaginative play-ground...and it is highly addictive. Consider yourself forewarned. There is no known cure, should you succumb to the dubious wiles and insidious plots & counterplots of the WNU.

Two other Wold Newton sites to consider are The Secret History of the Wold Newton Universe by Dennis Power, and The French Wold Newton Universe by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier.  Chris Nigredo's very detailed articles on Horror Hosts and the Brady Bunch can both to be found on The Secret History of the Wold Newton Universe site as examples of the diverse array of characters and concepts that various creative mythographers have worked on incorporating into the WNU.


The WNU is a huge macro-topic, and with Chris Nigro's and others expert help, this is just the beginning of our explorations of the Wold Newton Universe via this blog.

Read The Rook

http://timecastlebooks.com/the_master_of_time

The first volume of The Rook's adventures are available for free online, and the creator of The Rook, Will DuBay himself is the mastermind behind Timecastle Books...and they are putting out archives of all The Rook's adventures.  There's an interview with DuBay from a while back here at the Mania site. If you haven't ever read the tales of Reston Dane, his grandfather Bishop, Manners the long suffering robot, etc.--click the link and get familiar with the best time traveling comic-book super-scientist/chess-master cowboy ever to pull a six-gun on a robot.  (Here's a bonus link to Rook movie rumors...)

The Warrenverse

Warren Publishing started out in the late Fifties with an 'adult' zine called After Hours.  It made it to four issues before dying, but in the course of its last issue they ran an interview with the one and only Forrest J. Ackerman.  From the ignominious ashes of After Hours arose Famous Monsters of Filmland, without a doubt the quintessential monster-movie magazine aimed at kids and anyone else who liked a good scare or monsters in general.  (Forry Ackerman also was responsible for importing/translating the German SciFi Pulp Perry Rhodan into English and distributing it in North America, but that's another story for another day).

Forry Ackerman, working through Warren Publishing, established both Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World which introduced what he called 'Monster Comics.'  Monster World eventually gave rise to Creepy and Eerie and in time Vampirella as well as other magazines including a reprinting of Eisner's The Spirit.

Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella introduced a completely new universe of characters, a Warrenverse, if you will.  The combination of horror, monsters, science fiction, fantasy and pulpish heroics combined with a bit more adult perspective and frank language/sexual situations proved a fairly potent and memorable influence on quite a few readers, writers and artists exposed to this stuff at an early and vulnerable age.  Exterminator One (pictured above) still beats the so-called Terminator hands-down.  The first story alone packs more of an emotional wallop than anything Ahnuld's walking, talking bullet-catching miscreants have managed.  Or what about The Rook, a wild west tinged time-traveller whose time machine is shaped like a chess piece and who packs six shooters, not a screwdriver, sonic or otherwise.  The Rook is still cool after all these years, and though the stories were uneven on any given instance, the character is still very, very fun and would benefit greatly from being revived by an author with some imagination and a firm grasp of Zane Gray or Louis L'Amour more than Doctor Who.  Then there is the infamous Night of the Jackass...a series that dealt with the proliferation of a drug --Hyde25-- in Victorian London and its horrific effects on the downtrodden masses as they suddenly gain superhuman strength at the cost of losing their minds, going hyper-violent and dying within 24 hours.  It's a peculiar blend of Jack the Ripper and 28 Days Later, but with horribly mutated and cracked-out bat-shit-crazy street people, not zombies.  Again, the series as presented is a bit uneven, but the core concept is intriguing and horrific in a way that From Hell simply isn't, despite being far and away much better written and layered with tons of cleverness, allusions and versimilitude.  I, for one, would dearly love to see Alan Moore re-vamp the Night of the Jackass series...but it'll probably never happen.  I doubt that he's ever even heard of it, for one thing.

Mac Tavish, while appearing a great deal like a poor man's Magnus Robot Fighter in space, did manage to scrape together some fun moments.  Darklon the Mystic (an early Starlin creation) was a strange mash-up of sorcery and super-science featuring a galaxy-hopping sorcerer anti-hero that still reads as good today as it did decades ago; and I mean that in a good way.  Darklon the Mystic would easily be right at home on Planet Algol, Fomalhaut or right in the middle of a Sorcery & Super-Science session.

Hunter and Hunter 2 were actually kind of fun as well.  Hunter was about the post-apocalyptic retro-dystopian adventures of Demian Hunter who fought against the horrific 'demons,' saurian-like mutants who had branched-off from humanity after a cataclysmic war long ago.  In the usual gambit of such tales, Hunter was not only the foremost killer of 'demons,' but his father was actually the king of the demons who had ravaged Hunter's mother.  It was a real Empire Strikes Back kind of thing, and Hunter spent most of his time hunting down daddy un-dearest in order to lay the righteous smack down on his scaly butt.  The Big Bad Guy really was Demian Hunter's daddy...and he, himself was a half-mutant, which gave him some measure of improved abilities, but nothing too outrageous or useful beyond the usual large muscles and diminished brains that comes standard for most such heroes.  Demian Hunter was an emotionally distant, amoral killer who was reminiscent of a Captain America style super soldier gone really bad, barbaric and after the fall of civilization.  In some ways it is as if a half-breed Conan drank the Super Soldier Serum and then went about kicking ass in a world that wouldn't let Thundarr come out to play.  It was a fairly popular series and the character of Demian Hunter has been resurrected several times now, mostly for cross-over stories with The Rook, Vampirella and Darklon the Mystic.

Hunter 2 involved the inheritor of the Hunter franchise, a full-blooded human warrior named Karas who took up the mantle, title and helmet and got to work killing off artificial mutants being mass-produced by evil wizards.  This series was more like Thongor or one of those second-string Conan-types facing off against wizards and mutants in a post-apocalyptic Shannara-like setting...and he gets a very special side-kick/ally--the Exterminator Cyborg!  Very Cool.

This series was far less dystopian, and more fantastical, more Tolkein-esque, but in a thoroughly Warren way.  Instead of being a superhero from the start, Karas has to learn the ropes and live up to the legend of his fore-runner...and that makes the whole series take on a very different feel right from the start.  You watch Karas become a great hero, which is admittedly a stock plot, but it works very well.  This series was superior to its predecessor in many respects but it hasn't gotten the same level of support, recognition or plain old respect that Demian Hunter has. Maybe that'll change eventually.  It's a shame that this really good series was lost amidst the horror-stuff that surrounded it in Eerie at the time.  People looking for Science Fiction or Fantasy were not going to necessarily look at Eerie and that, if nothing else, really cramped this series' popularity pretty severely.

Vampirella was one of Forry Ackerman's best ideas ever.  A vampiric answer to Barbarella, this character became an icon for Warren Publishing and one of the single most stared-at characters in all of comic-dom.  Vampi is not just any old jiggly cheesecake vampiress in a skimpy red swimsuit, she's a 'good' vampire from the planet Drakulon where blood flows in rivers...and...yeah...it does get kind of silly...but her first issue had a cover painted by Frank Frazetta, and did I mention the skimpy red swimsuit?

The Jose Gonzalez wall poster of Vampirella is still a classic and it's available for sale once again at the Vampirella website, which is very cool.

So, why dredge-up all this Warren-stuff?

Simple.  It's not all that well-known outside of those of us who grew up with this stuff or those old collector-dudes who smell like cats and grumble about insanely inconsequential minutiae only three other people in the universe know or care about.  And that sucks.  Period.

Warren Publishing produced some abysmal dreck in its time, sure, but so has any and every other publisher in any genre or media.  Sturgeon's Law applies.  But amidst all the hype and titillation, crudity and silliness (rivers of blood for crying out loud?!?), there were shining moments of inspired imagination at work, stories that didn't fit the cookie-cutter mold of Marvel or DC who would never have allowed Starlin to produce Darklon the Mystic until after it came out via Warren (they let him write Thanos, but only after Darklon proved viable).  Stories like the first Hunter series or Exterminator One's origin, let alone Night of the Jackass could never have been done through DC or Marvel  or anyone else who was peddling 'respectable' and code-approved stuff.

Warren was putting out stories that were different, demented and dangerous.  There was a grim and gritty Noirish sensibility in a Warren story that you wouldn't normally find in comics. The sorts of things that you'd find in the Pulps and Men's Adventure Novels, yes, but not in comics.  Not prior to Warren. Not in the US.  Sure some of the stories fail miserably, as do many stories written more than thirty years ago, but others stand the test of time quite well, aside from matters of taste (or lack thereof).

The grittiness and Noirish-ness became something one expected from Warren.  It made their characters such as The Rook or Hunter 2 seem more coherent, cohesive, even more literary than just the usual costumed 4-color oafs they were competing with--and that added to the overall versimilitude of the Warrenverse.  When you discovered the Exterminator Cyborg within the Hunter 2 series, that automatically lent a lot more gravitas to the mix because it just welded the whole Exterminator back-story onto Hunter 2.  And yes, the other guys did their own bit of intra-title crossovers, but there was something special about how Warren handled it--little things like the Exterminator Cyborgs, and Darklon the Mystic being a distant descendant of Demian Hunter really gave it a feel and a flavor unique unto itself.

So what does any of this mean from an RPG-type perspective?  Glad you asked.  When developing a setting, it is not enough to just go down the checklist and develop a set of archetypal characters as opponents, obstacles or potential allies.  You need to look at how these various characters that you're developing as NPCs interact with the world, with each other, and look for ways to develop their inter-personal relationships wherever it feels appropriate or useful to do so.  Relationships make more of a difference than powers, stats or weapons.  The Rook, Restin Dane, has various ancestors and descendants who are out there, crossing his path at inconvenient moments or sometimes working at cross-purposes to one another, while others are his supporting cast and the like.  That's before we get to his competitors, rivals, opponents, obstacles and former lovers.  It was the almost soap opera-esque emphasis upon the various characters' relationships to one another that really made The Rook work.  You could forgive a lot of hookum and balonium if it was broken-up by the stories that dealt more with the mischief-making of Bishop Dane and the robot gentleman Manners, the complications in Restin's relationship(s) with January Boone, Katie McCall (who also had a relationship with Bishop for a while...), and so on.  It was the richness of the character interaction that made it all work, not the gimmicks or gadgets, though those didn't hurt any--especially the Time Castle shaped like a rook from off of a chessboard.

If your NPCs arise from a vacuum and return to the void in-between encounters, they're too flat and static to be any good for anything beyond crowd-scenes and filler.  You're going to need a few decent NPCs that have more meat on their bones, more heft, more to them than just a few random quirks and a moustache or blue hair.  A good NPC is more than a bunch of stats with a name.  They're your chance to flesh-out aspects of the universe that could open doors for the players that they never knew existed.  The bad guy Gat Hawkins for The Rook is responsible for introducing Bishop and Restin Dane to both January Boone and Katie McCall, a very significant development.  This kind of NPC can become a catalyst for adventurers, like trying to live up to the legend of Demian Hunter or some similar hero that the PC may be descended from--and that could likewise lead to a betrayal of that heritage for the sake of power and revenge, becoming a dire bogeyman that others hear about in hushed whispers of dread such as in the case of a Darklon type of sorcerer.

The Warren characters occupy a strange twilight niche in-between the Pulps and the more tame and bland comics most people are used to, and that makes them a veritable treasure trove of potential inspiration and ideas to draw upon that most of your players won't automatically recognize or be able to peg off the bat.  The sheer inspired lunacy of some of the Warren stories have yet to be repeated, let alone topped...and that makes them a very good resource for your fiction, your game, or your reading pleasure.

This, of course, opens the door to the Wold-Newton Universe parascholarship efforts set into motion by P. J. Farmer...which we'll get to in another post.  Shortly.