2000AD...all at once

Feel the burn...

2000AD...all at once

Feel the burn...

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.

Tin Tin in Innsmouth

(As you can see, version 2-B has effectively won...unless a lot more votes suddenly appear...)

Tin Tin is a much-beloved Belgian comics character who has been all around the world on various adventures for decades now.  Peter Jackson is working on a Tin Tin movie.  Everyone in the world knows about Tin Tin except maybe most of the population of the United States, which is weird.  Tin Tin is cool.  If you don't know Tin Tin, take a few minutes to check it out.

Here are a few quick Tin Tin links:

• The Official Tin Tin site
• Wikipedia on the various flavors of Tin Tin and on the Character of Tin Tin
• Wikipedia on The Adventures of Tin Tin
• The Tintinologist Fan-site
• Lambiek on Tin Tin
• Some thoughts on the Tin Tin movie from a dedicated fan (includes pictures from Empire magazine)
• A blog devoted to the Trailer of the Tin Tin movie--markerters & publicists have funny jobs
• A site that is better at presenting information on the Tin Tin movie than the above graphical pile of Tin Tin-esque vomit

You can also look up Tin Tin or Search Amazon.com for tintin, or consult Google Books, and the usual sites.  And that's cool, but it's not this:

Grim Reviewer shows off a few more of these wonderful Tin Tin/H. P. Lovecraft mash-ups at their blog.  You can also cut to the chase and go right straight tothe artist Murray Groat's site and see what else he's up to...besides paininting some of the most awesome Comics/Graphic Novel covers for stories taht we may well never see...Tin Tin in Rlyeh is very cool and Tin Tin At The Mountains of Madness really cracks me up.  You can see some of the covers here at ComicsAlliance.  My personal favorite has to be:

Now if only someone would actually write these stories to go along with these great covers...

Bela Lugosi is Dead, and Monsterverse Has Him...



Bela Lugosi's Tales From The Grave

You can hear Peter Murphy crooning sinisterly in the background, or at least you could if you clicked here or hit the play button down below to the left a bit.  Ah Bauhaus.  The good old days.




Monsterverse is a fresh new alternative comics publisher that is reviving and resurrecting the genre of old school Horror Comics like EC, Warren and a lot of other Pre-Comics Code publishers used to crank out long ago and far away.  You can find out a bit more about them here, Read their blog, or watch a Preview or a teaser-clip for the recently released Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave, which is available here.  Issue one features a beautiful portrait of Lugosi as Dracula by Basil Gogos himself.  They also feature Reprints of Famous Monsters of Filmland on the Monsterverse Store-page, which is very cool.

Bela Lugosi died August 16, 1956 after a memorable career in the movies that hit its peak with Tod Browning's Dracula in 1931...and arguably hit its nadir with his involvement in Ed Wood's gloriously terrible Plan Nine From Outer Space, though that point could be argued by hardcore Lugosi-fans, depending how they feel about some of the other less than awesome roleshe had to take on in order to make a living. It is Lugosi's performance in Dracula for which most people remember him, and this is for good reason.  Just watch the classic trailer:



Some Suitably Macabre Bela Lugosi Links
Bela's page at Findagrave
Bela at Findadeath
Bela Lugosi Bio at the NY Times site -- Full Biography is here, a filmography is here
A nice Fan Site for Lugosi, including another filmography, just in case
Lugosi at the International Movie Database site
The obligatory Bela Lugosi Wikipedia entry
Lugosi at AllMovie
Lugosi at the Internet Broadway Database
Info on the Stage Production of Dracula at the IBD site
More info on Lugosi at a site that is mostly in Hungarian
Biofile page on Bela Lugosi
Lugosi at Rather Grim Tales
Lugosi at Netflix
Some Bela Lugosi Quotes
Lugosi at The Pit
Lugosi Bio at the Who2 site
Bela at NNDB

"I have never met a vampire personally, but I don't know what might happen tomorrow."

Bela Lugosi

Thank You Mr. Hite: The Black Terror Goes Eldritch

Okay. I'm late to the party, again, but this time I've spent a few weeks side-lined with a nasty shoulder injury and the combination of muscle relaxants and pain-killers were almost worse than the persistent, never-subsiding pain itself. Almost. But I'm reasonably better now. Now it's time to get caught-up on a bunch of long-overdue stuff. Like this one.  Please excuse the sub-par illo above--I only had ten minutes to cobble something vaguely relevant togther.  Better stuff is in the works now that I'm back at least part-time.

Ken Hite's Adventures Into Darkness

For M&M Superlink

Written by Kenneth Hite

Published by Ronin Arts

48-page PDF (16.6 MB)

Stock Number HITE003, $9.95

Available all over the Internet or from your local supplier of RPG-madness.

What If H. P. Lovecraft Wrote Comic Books?  Sure it's as unlikely as R. E. Howard writing soap opera scripts, but then if you keep in mind that Hank Williams derived a great deal of song-writing inspiration from Romance Comic Books...well...maybe it's not quite so far fetched as it might sound at first blush.  Besides, HPL really needed the money...and much respected and revered Sci-Fi Great Alfred Bester (amongst quite a few others) did a bit of time writing for the Comics (as in Green Lantern--Bester invented GL's Oath, for example), so why not HPL writing for Nedor comics?

The One and Only Kenneth Hite reveals the long-lost account of H.P. Lovecraft's long suppressed and entirely too obscure comics writing with all the versimilitude of a hoax, just the way the old gent said that such a thing ought to be done.  It's one of those dream-projects where it really ought to have happened, but at least now, thanks to Mr. H, we get to see what it might have been like, kind of...

Adventures Into Darkness includes:

• A complete historical overview of H.P. Lovecraft's comics career, including a wonderful section on just How It Came To Be...
• Full Mutants & Masterminds (Second Edition) statistics for 17 of Nedor Comics superheroes and 'super-ified' HPL-derived protagonists, from the Fighting Yank and The Black Terror to Nodens,  "Doc" Strange and on to Randolph Carter, Dream Master...super trippy, yet with a ring of esoteric authenticity few other authors could have pulled off...
• Eleven supernaturally sinister villains, including that dreamy-witch herself Asenath the Body-Snatcher, the fiendish Nazi sorcerer Baron von Junzt, the eldritch Yellow Lama, and the demi-god Dagon, amongst other favorites...
• Monster stats for grotesque ghouls, fiendishly ferocious Frog-Men, outrageously ostentatious Outer Ones, tainted tribal Tcho-Tchos, naughty nightgaunts, and the ultra-creeptacular Dark Haunter, all lovingly detailed and ready to rumble right off the bat...
• An up-to-date Price Guide that details just how much your rare Lovecraft comics will bring today, should you consider parting with such terrifying treasures...
• A complete section detailing how-to mix together the Golden Age of Comics with the madness of H.P. Lovecraft, and either dragging things kicking and screaming into full-out supernatural terror, or just wild and wooly flights of madness-tinged imagination and oneiric phantasy...
• Super Sanity rules .. and what HPL-inspired supplement can be complete without talking about SaNiTy in some capacity?  Insane superheroes grappling with soul-shattering Elder Horrors from beyond...it's not just for contemporary comics any more, even the Golden Age can be subverted and retroactively polluted by the toxic genius from Providence...and thank Cthulhu the Stars are Right for this to happen now!

Ken Hite delivers -- really delivers -- a timeless, eldritch mutation of unholy dread and delight as he combines the horrific cosmic-nihilism of H.P. Lovecraft and the daring, dashing and determined Nedor superheroes in Adventures Into Darkness, one of the maddest, most deranged and wonderful mash-ups ever imagined.

The Black Terror is a superhero from the old Nedor Publishing comics line that is in the Public Domain, and he's one of a group of vintage characters that have been revived and re-imagined by Alan Moore (Mr. Moore at Wikipedia) via ABC/America's Best Comics (Terra Obscura), Dynamite Entertainment's Project Super Powers (Highly Recommended), AC/Americomics FemForce, and others.  Ken Hite has expertly and deftly re-imagined the Black Terror, Fighting Yank and other Nedor heroes as if they had been written by H. P. Lovecraft himself and made it all available as a supplement for Mutants & Masterminds.  This is truly Fun stuff!  What Mr. Hite doesn't know about HPL isn't worth knowing, generally, and he displays here a fairly lucid and well-researched grasp of the old Nedor superheroes that does an obscure comics geek's heart proud.  With some effort this stuff could be ported or adapted to quite a few other superhero RPGs, and with some inventive sneakery, one could likewise draw a great deal of inspiration from this supplement for bringing the Golden Age of Comics into HPL-vania via whichever set of rules you prefer for demented Noir-ish romps into spectral weirdness and occult horror.  (I'm still waiting for the official retro-style Hammer Horror RPG...)

Not every tome, folio or book discovered in an investigation need be some moldy old grimoire...and just as was mentioned towards the bottom of the previous post regarding madness-inducing/insanity-inspired works of comics-genius and some obscure, long defunct but possibly reviving comic book publisher specializing in putting out grimoirically-derived four-color fantasies for the kiddies...the mixture of HPL and Comics is a heady cocktail that is just dripping with bizarre gobs of inspiration and untapped, here-to-fore mostly unexplored potential.

Superheroes are the contemporary embodiment and pop culture expression of mythological figures.  Co-mingling them with a manufactured/synthetic mythology such as Lovecraft's opens the door to a host of other methods of re-imaging these trope-heavy characters as long forgotten or often suppressed/censored aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos or even more interestingly, it gets the imaginal ball rolling a bit and gets one to wonder how such characters might fit into other milieus and time periods.  Roll back the faux-contemporary veneer, scrape off the 30s-40s Noir fashions or the Roaring Twenties bombast and take things back a few more decades, past the War to End All wars, past the Civil War, past the Whisky Rebellion and the American Revolution, down the dusty corridors of history, and these characters can easily be made to fit, more or less just about as they are, especially the Black Terror, who makes a great Dread Pirate archetype despite being a nominal good guy.  Of course once you step past the founding of the United States, someone like Fighting Yank needs to be revised, possibly as a loyal-royal British patriot, or French, German or Algonquin.  That's when things like this get truly fascinating.  What would a patriotic superhero who served Imperial Rome have been like?  Or Carthage?  Was Vercingetorix a superhero?  If not, what would he have been like as one? A lot of this territory has been superficially explored in various What-If stories, Elseworlds, alternate time-line tales, and all that, and of course quite a few historical figures have been incorporated into various superheroes' back-stories, lineages, or even family trees (as with the Wold Newton stuff).

The notion of mythic superheroes goes back, way back to Beowulf and Gilgamesh--very likely even before them.  Back when Mr. Gygax was penning the first of the Little Brown Books, he plugged-in the title Superhero for any Fighting Man who reached a total of 120,000 experience points (Men and Magic, p.16).  Implicit in the suggestions outlined by the great and mighty Big G himself in that particular root/core tome of RPG-goodness is the notion that one was not to just take inspiration from John Carter Warlord of Mars, Conan the Barbarian or the other mentioned heroes, superheroes really, but one's characters were to aspire to become like unto those models and templates, those archetypes and mythic forebears. Your Fighting Man (Magic User, Cleric, etc. ) was supposed to evolve into something wonderful, special, unique and intriguing in their own way, through the steady accumulation of merit, minions, material, and magic as codified by the experience point system.

So, aside from Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Arthur, Bran Mak Morn, Achilles, and the rest, sometimes it is fun, and occasionally illuminating to de-volve popular characters to what they might have been way back when, to figure out what it would be like to have a Travis Morgan-type character develop in the midst of your Pseudo-Medieval setting, or to develop your own take on the time-wornhonored trope of a Robin Hood-style figure, like R. A. Salvatore's Highwayman, for instance.  It's not exactly rocket science, unless you're re-inventing Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, but even then, it can be quite fun and rewarding to mix-and-match various obvious superheroes with the expectations of other genres and to develop analogous versions of Zorro, Sinbad, Sherlock Holmes, etc. that are more than just a knock-off or cheap imitation.  Reed Richards may be the smartest man in the Marvel universe, but who is the smartest guy in your setting?  Hercules is the strongest hero, according to some, but who epitomizes power in your setting?  Are there different kinds of strength that are exemplified besides raw, brute force?  Even Tolkien played this game--look at Aragorn, really look at the guy; he's one of the last descendents of a prehistoric culture destroyed in a great Atlantis-style cataclysm, raised with responsibility and honor ground into his head at every turn, burdened from birth with a sense of destiny, I mean Destiny, and the heir of a forgotten lineage of mythic beings who were orders of magnitude beyond piddly, normal humanity.  He's over seventy years old when the War for the Ring begins.  He's closer to Superman or Doc Savage than he is to any piss-ant faux-medieval groundskeeper. 

In summary, what I'm suggesting is that instead of ripping off and plunking down established characters in your setting ala the old Giants In The Earth feature from the way back days of Dragon magazine, take a look at those characters that you find interesting and spend some time developing your own version of how someone like that might have developed in your world.  Instead of borrowing Tarzan, you might invent your own Zembla, or perhaps you'd prefer to try your hand at a fresh take on Lee Falk's Phantom.  (Here's a hint: the first Ghost Who Walks didn't have matching .45's, so yours wouldn't necessarily require them either...perhaps matching cutlasses, crossbows, or a matched set of tribal throwing irons would be a better fit...that's up to you, after all...)  Who says that Jungle Lords all need to live in Africa, let alone be only 'Jungle' Lords; why not vengeful Tundra Lords (reindeer-riding Schwarz-Peter-style badasses) or Ladies of the Fertile River Valleys (Think Babylon)?  Don't even get me started on why most of them seem to always be magic mighty white guys...but then the world is probably not ready for a female kobold superhero...though yours might be...

Atlas Update 1.5

While we were up along the North Shore of Lake Superior for our five-year anniversary, we spent a few pleasant hours in Duluth.  We took a walk along Superior and discovered a nice antique/rock shop called Fragments of History, split a yummy lake trout appetizer with some local beer at the Dubh Linn Irish Pub, and spent a couple of hours digging through the comics-bins at two of the local comic shops.  Dragon Port Games was having a twenty-five-cent sale in their backroom and we were able to scrounge-up a few issues of Magnus (mostly the Valiant version) and some other things that we seemed to have missed the first-time around like the Warren Ellis-scripted and very subversively odd Doktor Sleepless.  Dragon Port Games was advertising their upcoming RPG Auction, which might be fun.  We have a bunch of older RPG-stuff we're interested in unloading, like a first-edition boxed-set of Striker miniatures rules for Traveler, as well as a few other tid-bits.  It was a nice shop, very roomy and spacious and well set-up for running miniatures games, which they do regularly and often.  The other Comics Shop was called Collector's Connection, and it was also very nice, clean and well-lit...not at all like some such establishments.  The staff were friendly, helpful, and very knowledgeable...and able to handle obnoxious kids better than most school bus drivers.  We were able to find a nice copy of Wulf: The Barbarian (Atlas Comics), and some back issues of Dynamite's Buck Rogers and Project Superpowers which looks fantastic, but then how do you go wrong with Alex Ross doing the covers and re-design of these older, obscure public domain super heroes?

Speaking of Wulf The Barbarian of old Atlas Comics fame, apparently Wulf is going to be the third Atlas character to get re-imagined/revised/re-booted from Ardden Entertainment.  CBR has an updated article on Atlas at the New York Comic Con, and their plans for Phoenix from which I quote:

"We're rebooting it," Deneen said of the series inspired by the original Atlas title. "It's the same central premise where this guy is abducted by aliens, experimented on and then finds out their plot. The story is what happens from there. We're not changing that premise, but we take it to the next level. 35 years later we've seen a lot of these movies and comics – 'Independence Day' and 'War of the Worlds' and any number of alien comics since the original 'Phoenix.' So how do we take the original concept and twist it? We've added things we feel have never been done before. It's a new twist on the abducted by aliens and on the run story that Jim and I are really excited about."

Nicely done.  In 75 words or less Mr. Deneen manages to put most reservations about how they're approaching this character to rest and sparks a bit of much-needed interest at the same time.  As I said previously, the older version of Phoenix is a real train-wreck of a title that was in dire need of a re-boot before it appeared the first-time.  We're looking forward to finally seeing the 12-page Zero-Issue, perhaps sometime this coming weekend.  I still think that Jack Hawksmoor of Stormwatch / The Authority was/is about as great a re-boot of the core premise of the Phoenix, that of the alien abduction and cyber/nano-modification of their bodies, but of course, Phoenix wasn't ever made into The God of Cities.  He was more like an astronaut suffering PTSD with issues surrounding the source of his powers...and some nasty benefactors who wanted to destroy humanity.  That part could be really played around with quite a bit, and it is encouraging that they're sticking to that aspect of the character.  What he needs is a sidekick like R. Lee Ermery: a drill sargeant type to cut down the emo-detours into mamby-pamby land.

It is interesting that when I first heard about the re-launch of Phoenix and Grim Ghost, that it was emphatically stated that this was not a re-launch of Atlas, just a testing of the waters to see if these two characters would still have any traction in the marketplace.  Well, now it's a full-fledged relaunch, of sorts.  Again, CBR has an article on the Relaunch of Atlas, which they're characterizing as a Come Back.  Newsarama also has a rather nice in-depth interview with Brendan Deneen and Jason Goodman of Ardden Entertainment that clears the air and sets things straight fairly clearly. 

Like Mr. Goodman says:

“We have 28 titles and hundreds of characters imagined by some of the greatest minds in the industry," Goodman said in the release. "They will now find a new life in comics, television, and movies. We are thrilled to finally bring these great characters back for the world to enjoy."

Scoop, a free newsletter for collectors, offers a whole bunch of Atlas material that is well worth checking out.

It's a nice blend of nostalgia and marketability, untapped commercial potential and a bucket-load of fun, weird and vaguely familiar characters that could migrate into other media, say video/console games or movies.  Having worked with J. M. DeMatteis to revive and re-imagine Phoenix, Grim Ghost and Wulf, the new and improved Atlas (in partnership with Ardden Entertainment) is in a fairly interesting position regarding the legacy IP of the former Atlas Comics.  They did a wonderful job with Flash Gordon, they brought back Casper and the Spectrals, and it sounds like they have a real plan for how best to revive the Atlas universe.  Too bad DeMatteis has left Ardden Entertainment.  Hopefully this won't kill the momentum, but one has to wonder about 'different visions of how to proceed.'  Maybe they argued over doing Planet of the Vampires versus the Destructor next.  Whatever.  That's between them.  I'm curious how Wulf will do, and what, if anything, will be coming next.  I know that I don't get a vote, but I'm also not the only one who is clammering for a Planet of the Vampires re-boot, even if I don't get to write it.

Once we pick-up our copies of the Phoenix and Grim Ghost Zero-Issues from our local comics shop (we're not planning on going back to Duluth for a while), we'll post a review.

If you are at all interested in the older, deader Atlas Comics, then you really ought to download the Atlas/Seaboard Downunder pdf by Daniel Best.  Very interesting reading, for someone who is into old, obscure, once-defunct comicsbook publishing companies and all that sort of thing.

There is also a Message Board/Forum over at the Atlas Archives site if you want to dig into the facts, rumors or weirdness surrounding either the old or the new version of Atlas Comics.

Hmmm...old obscure comicbooks.  Characters relegated to the dustbin of pop culture, remaindered and buried amongst the dross and debris of the cheap-bins and known only to a few stalwart aficionados of the strange, the unusual, the mostly forgotten...

The stories and history surrounding the older, deader Atlas Comics is perfect fodder for a Lovecraftian occult conspiracy horror tale in their own right, either in fiction or in a game sceanrio.  The opportunity to blur the edges and bring the versimilitude up a few notches is also very appealing, so using the old Atlas as a springboard of inspiration, it's not hard to see how to develop some fun and unique plots, hooks or a whole campaign based off of a fictional doppleganger of the defunct Atlas.  Imagine, if you will, a comic book company started as an act of vengeance, one that makes a big splash and burns out in less than two years.  Then the whispering begins.  Strange tales of bizarre rites, secret wisdom encoded or encrypted into some of the issues of certain titles, possibly a set of macabre clues to some mystery, weird prophecies, even whole missing issues written entirely in constructed languages similar to Shaver's Mantong or Stanislaw Szukalski's Protong...but such things as these are for another post, when the stars are right and we have time to go down the ConLang Rabbithole a bit more in-depth.  For the moment, consider the implications of Cthulhoid Comics, not in terms of content, but in terms of the production of such things, the creation of comic book representations of cultic images and grimoiric passages to corrupt the youth of the world in ways that even Ed Gein's comic-hating lawyer couldn't have imagined...

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.