[A sketch I'd done at work circa 1996, when I was hugely into The Far Side.]
An Adventure Outline for the Chilling Season
4 days ago
Friday, May 7, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Collecting Comics
[The rest of my Free Comic Book Day script.]
Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming. The flier says I’m going to talk about comic book collecting and I had planned on doing a comic book Q&A – but that’s okay, I can give a short talk to you about collecting comic books to kick things off and then get to questions. If you didn’t come with a question to ask, that’s okay too! I prepared some questions for you – all you have to do is pick one and ask it when the time comes.
Tony Isabella wrote, “the golden age of comic books is when you’re 12.” So, let me tell you briefly what collecting was like when I was 12. It was 1983 when I was 12 and this comic book came out when I was just entering Tefft Middle School. It’s from Marvel Comics. Marvel and DC Comics were the two big companies back then and that’s still basically true today. Back then, there was a lot of company loyalty among fans. Marvel’s loyal readers didn’t read DC’s books. We were called Marvel zombies. The companies even played up this rivalry and every year the two companies would have a baseball game against each other. Marvel was producing around 40 or just over 40 comic books a month back then. This comic book cost 60 cents. If I had $25 a month back then, I could have bought every comic book that came out every month. Nowadays, $25 would get me six comic books. Only six.
Back in the ‘80s is when collectors started being told to bag their comic books in plastic sleeves to protect them. If I recall correctly, we were told to double bag them, but I’ve never seen comic book stores doing that and I certainly could never afford to do so. Between the sleeve and the comic would be a cardboard sheet that would keep your comic book from bending. And you were supposed to stand up your comic book collection instead of laying them down flat, as there was less risk of them bending if standing up. We were also told to change the plastic sleeves over time, though that could get pretty expensive if you had a lot of comic books and I never did it. I had to throw out a lot of comic books because of that. The plastic sleeves are supposed to keep mildew away from your comics, but if mildew does get in, or you put a mildewy comic book in plastic, the plastic sleeve is no good. And, eventually, the mildew will spread even inside the other plastic sleeves around them.
If you wanted to buy this same comic book today, there’s three ways you could do it. You can go to a comic book store, check for this in their back issue bins, and pay maybe $3 for it. You could go online and try to win it in an ebay auction. You might get it for only $1.50 that way. Or you can go to Marvel’s web site and subscribe to their digital comic book collection. For $10 a month, you can access thousands of comic books from Marvel’s history online. You can buy digital comics from almost every company except DC Comics, which has refused to jump on this bandwagon.
Now, you might wonder why a comic book from almost 27 years ago now costs $3 when it used to cost 60 cents. That’s simple economics – if something is harder to find and people still want it, you can charge more for it. Now, back in the ‘90s, this principle fooled a lot of people into thinking that they could invest in a comic book that would become hard enough to find that it would be worth hundreds of dollars. Only comic books from the 1960s or earlier are that hard to find and that rare and valuable, but the whole speculator craze of the ‘90s turned a lot of people off of comic books when they found out their collections were worth almost nothing. So, if you do collect comic books, learn the lessons of the past and ONLY buy them if you like them, not to try to make money off of them.
Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming. The flier says I’m going to talk about comic book collecting and I had planned on doing a comic book Q&A – but that’s okay, I can give a short talk to you about collecting comic books to kick things off and then get to questions. If you didn’t come with a question to ask, that’s okay too! I prepared some questions for you – all you have to do is pick one and ask it when the time comes.
Tony Isabella wrote, “the golden age of comic books is when you’re 12.” So, let me tell you briefly what collecting was like when I was 12. It was 1983 when I was 12 and this comic book came out when I was just entering Tefft Middle School. It’s from Marvel Comics. Marvel and DC Comics were the two big companies back then and that’s still basically true today. Back then, there was a lot of company loyalty among fans. Marvel’s loyal readers didn’t read DC’s books. We were called Marvel zombies. The companies even played up this rivalry and every year the two companies would have a baseball game against each other. Marvel was producing around 40 or just over 40 comic books a month back then. This comic book cost 60 cents. If I had $25 a month back then, I could have bought every comic book that came out every month. Nowadays, $25 would get me six comic books. Only six.
Back in the ‘80s is when collectors started being told to bag their comic books in plastic sleeves to protect them. If I recall correctly, we were told to double bag them, but I’ve never seen comic book stores doing that and I certainly could never afford to do so. Between the sleeve and the comic would be a cardboard sheet that would keep your comic book from bending. And you were supposed to stand up your comic book collection instead of laying them down flat, as there was less risk of them bending if standing up. We were also told to change the plastic sleeves over time, though that could get pretty expensive if you had a lot of comic books and I never did it. I had to throw out a lot of comic books because of that. The plastic sleeves are supposed to keep mildew away from your comics, but if mildew does get in, or you put a mildewy comic book in plastic, the plastic sleeve is no good. And, eventually, the mildew will spread even inside the other plastic sleeves around them.
If you wanted to buy this same comic book today, there’s three ways you could do it. You can go to a comic book store, check for this in their back issue bins, and pay maybe $3 for it. You could go online and try to win it in an ebay auction. You might get it for only $1.50 that way. Or you can go to Marvel’s web site and subscribe to their digital comic book collection. For $10 a month, you can access thousands of comic books from Marvel’s history online. You can buy digital comics from almost every company except DC Comics, which has refused to jump on this bandwagon.
Now, you might wonder why a comic book from almost 27 years ago now costs $3 when it used to cost 60 cents. That’s simple economics – if something is harder to find and people still want it, you can charge more for it. Now, back in the ‘90s, this principle fooled a lot of people into thinking that they could invest in a comic book that would become hard enough to find that it would be worth hundreds of dollars. Only comic books from the 1960s or earlier are that hard to find and that rare and valuable, but the whole speculator craze of the ‘90s turned a lot of people off of comic books when they found out their collections were worth almost nothing. So, if you do collect comic books, learn the lessons of the past and ONLY buy them if you like them, not to try to make money off of them.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Comic Book Q&A - pt. 2
Q: What’s the interest in publishing comics with characters not seen in 60-70 years these days?
A: As you know, you can’t make your own comic books featuring Superman or Spider-Man and sell them, because those characters are the property of DC Comics and Marvel Comics respectively. But there were many comic book companies that published comics in the 1940s and 1950s –Better, Centaur, Fawcett, Fox, Hillman, Lev Gleason, and Quality are just some of the better-known ones – that went out of business. For the most part, no one ever bought the properties of those companies so, over time, they became public domain characters. Anyone can take a public domain character, like Amazing-Man or Black Terror, and write and sell new stories for those characters. The only catch is that you have to base your character off the original stories – you can’t borrow from anything another publisher using Black Terror is doing nowadays. The benefit of using a public domain character is that you aren’t trying to introduce a brand new character into a crowded marketplace. These characters have history to them – often just a few issues’ worth published decades ago -- but at least some history. There aren’t any public domain characters featured in our Free Comic Book Day giveaways, unfortunately, but the big company cashing in on public domain characters right now is Dynamite Comics, but DC, Marvel, and Image have been using more public domain characters too.
Q: Why do you only hear about superheroes when it comes to American comic books?
A: Because the superhero genre is a creation unique to comic books. There were some precedents for it – some clues that this was coming, but no one noticed them at the time until Superman seemed to come out of nowhere back in 1938. Before that, most comic book stories were adventure stories with ordinary detectives, explorers, or pilots, or they were funny animal stories.
Interest in superhero comic books dried up after WWII and then the only comic books that were selling well, except for Superman and Batman, were cowboys and funny animal comics. Now, cowboy comics, or westerns, disappeared back in the 1970s, but funny animal comics have never gone away. Disney comics have been around almost since the very beginning and are still published today – though not always by the same company.
After superheroes, the comic book industry tried other genres and some – gangster, horror, supernatural, comedy, romance – did sell very well for a time, but none of them have had the staying power of superheroes. Remember, Superman has never had poor sales in his 72 years of existence. And, ever since the genre as a whole made its comeback in the late 1950s/early 1960s, superhero comics have stayed the best-selling comic books.
The benchmark for a best-selling comic book always used to be 1 million copies sold in a month. Back in the 1940’s, lots of comic books sold over a million copies a month. Most comic books don’t get even close to that anymore. The last comic book to pass that amount was an X-Men comic book and that was almost 20 years ago – but it was a superhero comic book that last passed that amount and the industry is betting that it’ll be a superhero comic book that passes that mark next time, if it ever even happens again.
Q: What is the significance of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman?
A: DC Comics sometimes refers to them as their “trinity”. These are the only three superhero comic book characters ever that have always been in continuous publication from the very earliest years of the history of comic books. Think about how many comic books that is. These characters have been published in thousands of comic books, since 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively. Now, in Superman’s case, that’s because he’s always been a popular character. Believe it or not, there was a time in the mid-1960s when Batman was not a popular character. His titles were almost canceled. Then the live action TV show with Adam West came out and gave the Batman comic books the shot in the arm for sales that they needed. Wonder Woman is a much more unusual case. Wonder Woman has never been as popular as other superheroes, but DC Comics started publishing Wonder Woman under a special contract with the man who created the character. If DC ever stopped publishing Wonder Woman comics, ownership of the character would revert back to the creator or his family. So, in order to keep the character for its licensing value, DC has never stopped publishing Wonder Woman.
Now, that feat is remarkable for superheroes, but there is one other character that has stayed in print just as long without stopping – Archie Andrews, who first appeared as a teenager in a humor comic book back in 1941 and has stayed a teenager ever since.
Q: What is the meaning of “The Golden Age of Comics” and the “Silver Age of Comics”?
A: The 1940s is known as the Golden Age of Comic Books because comic books have never sold better than they did in the 1940s. But it wasn’t known as the Golden Age of Comics at the time. When the kids who grew up in the 1940s came of age in the late 1950s, the nerdiest guys who still loved their comic books from the 1940s would write to comic book editors saying that they needed more comic books like they had back in the “golden age” of comic books. You remember what I said about the golden age being whenever you’re 12 – well, that was the golden age for them. Only, when they said it back then, the name stuck and we’ve been calling it the “Golden Age” ever since. And they were successful too – comic book editors brought out new versions of old favorite characters – the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and so on – and those characters ushered in what was then called the Silver Age of Comics.
The Silver Age of Comics was a new boom, or surge, in comic book popularity that lasted until the end of the 1960s. During the Golden Age and the Silver Age, most of the comic book characters still around today were introduced.
Now, comic book collectors like being able to categorize things and it long bothered people that the Golden Age ended in the late 1940s and the Silver Age began in the late 1950s – what to call the years in between? So they made up the name “the atomic age”, that few people other than old comic book collectors use. Likewise, the decade before the Golden Age became known as the platinum age, and the decade after the Silver Age, the 1970s, that was called the bronze age. Things get a little trickier after that because all these newer names started coming about in the 1980s and, then, they called the 1980s the modern age. But, of course, the 1980s isn’t modern anymore and it seems silly to call the last 30 years the modern age when every other age was only 10 years long. Some people have suggested names for these decades – my favorite was calling the 1990s the zirconium age – but for the most part not enough people have been able to agree on any new names for ages. Nothing has really stuck. Maybe someone in this room will come up with the name that will wind up getting used for the comic books made after 2000.
A: As you know, you can’t make your own comic books featuring Superman or Spider-Man and sell them, because those characters are the property of DC Comics and Marvel Comics respectively. But there were many comic book companies that published comics in the 1940s and 1950s –Better, Centaur, Fawcett, Fox, Hillman, Lev Gleason, and Quality are just some of the better-known ones – that went out of business. For the most part, no one ever bought the properties of those companies so, over time, they became public domain characters. Anyone can take a public domain character, like Amazing-Man or Black Terror, and write and sell new stories for those characters. The only catch is that you have to base your character off the original stories – you can’t borrow from anything another publisher using Black Terror is doing nowadays. The benefit of using a public domain character is that you aren’t trying to introduce a brand new character into a crowded marketplace. These characters have history to them – often just a few issues’ worth published decades ago -- but at least some history. There aren’t any public domain characters featured in our Free Comic Book Day giveaways, unfortunately, but the big company cashing in on public domain characters right now is Dynamite Comics, but DC, Marvel, and Image have been using more public domain characters too.
Q: Why do you only hear about superheroes when it comes to American comic books?
A: Because the superhero genre is a creation unique to comic books. There were some precedents for it – some clues that this was coming, but no one noticed them at the time until Superman seemed to come out of nowhere back in 1938. Before that, most comic book stories were adventure stories with ordinary detectives, explorers, or pilots, or they were funny animal stories.
Interest in superhero comic books dried up after WWII and then the only comic books that were selling well, except for Superman and Batman, were cowboys and funny animal comics. Now, cowboy comics, or westerns, disappeared back in the 1970s, but funny animal comics have never gone away. Disney comics have been around almost since the very beginning and are still published today – though not always by the same company.
After superheroes, the comic book industry tried other genres and some – gangster, horror, supernatural, comedy, romance – did sell very well for a time, but none of them have had the staying power of superheroes. Remember, Superman has never had poor sales in his 72 years of existence. And, ever since the genre as a whole made its comeback in the late 1950s/early 1960s, superhero comics have stayed the best-selling comic books.
The benchmark for a best-selling comic book always used to be 1 million copies sold in a month. Back in the 1940’s, lots of comic books sold over a million copies a month. Most comic books don’t get even close to that anymore. The last comic book to pass that amount was an X-Men comic book and that was almost 20 years ago – but it was a superhero comic book that last passed that amount and the industry is betting that it’ll be a superhero comic book that passes that mark next time, if it ever even happens again.
Q: What is the significance of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman?
A: DC Comics sometimes refers to them as their “trinity”. These are the only three superhero comic book characters ever that have always been in continuous publication from the very earliest years of the history of comic books. Think about how many comic books that is. These characters have been published in thousands of comic books, since 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively. Now, in Superman’s case, that’s because he’s always been a popular character. Believe it or not, there was a time in the mid-1960s when Batman was not a popular character. His titles were almost canceled. Then the live action TV show with Adam West came out and gave the Batman comic books the shot in the arm for sales that they needed. Wonder Woman is a much more unusual case. Wonder Woman has never been as popular as other superheroes, but DC Comics started publishing Wonder Woman under a special contract with the man who created the character. If DC ever stopped publishing Wonder Woman comics, ownership of the character would revert back to the creator or his family. So, in order to keep the character for its licensing value, DC has never stopped publishing Wonder Woman.
Now, that feat is remarkable for superheroes, but there is one other character that has stayed in print just as long without stopping – Archie Andrews, who first appeared as a teenager in a humor comic book back in 1941 and has stayed a teenager ever since.
Q: What is the meaning of “The Golden Age of Comics” and the “Silver Age of Comics”?
A: The 1940s is known as the Golden Age of Comic Books because comic books have never sold better than they did in the 1940s. But it wasn’t known as the Golden Age of Comics at the time. When the kids who grew up in the 1940s came of age in the late 1950s, the nerdiest guys who still loved their comic books from the 1940s would write to comic book editors saying that they needed more comic books like they had back in the “golden age” of comic books. You remember what I said about the golden age being whenever you’re 12 – well, that was the golden age for them. Only, when they said it back then, the name stuck and we’ve been calling it the “Golden Age” ever since. And they were successful too – comic book editors brought out new versions of old favorite characters – the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and so on – and those characters ushered in what was then called the Silver Age of Comics.
The Silver Age of Comics was a new boom, or surge, in comic book popularity that lasted until the end of the 1960s. During the Golden Age and the Silver Age, most of the comic book characters still around today were introduced.
Now, comic book collectors like being able to categorize things and it long bothered people that the Golden Age ended in the late 1940s and the Silver Age began in the late 1950s – what to call the years in between? So they made up the name “the atomic age”, that few people other than old comic book collectors use. Likewise, the decade before the Golden Age became known as the platinum age, and the decade after the Silver Age, the 1970s, that was called the bronze age. Things get a little trickier after that because all these newer names started coming about in the 1980s and, then, they called the 1980s the modern age. But, of course, the 1980s isn’t modern anymore and it seems silly to call the last 30 years the modern age when every other age was only 10 years long. Some people have suggested names for these decades – my favorite was calling the 1990s the zirconium age – but for the most part not enough people have been able to agree on any new names for ages. Nothing has really stuck. Maybe someone in this room will come up with the name that will wind up getting used for the comic books made after 2000.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Comic Book Q&A - pt. 1
[These are notes for the Comic Book Q&A I'll be giving at my library on Free Comic Book Day tomorrow.]
Q: How long have comic books been around?
A: The idea of a comic strip, or a series of drawings that follow each other sequentially to tell a story, has been around for centuries. The idea of taking the conventions of the comic strip and converting them into book form – and filling a whole book with nothing but these modified, longer comic strips – did not come about until 1897. The idea of making a comic book series and publishing it once a month did not come around until 1922 and that was the first comic book published in the form we recognize it today – before that, comic books were always hard-covered books. The idea of publishing all-new material in a comic book and not just reprinting modified material from the newspaper comic strips – the real birth of the comic book you might say – was not until 1933.
Q: What was the first character published in a comic book?
A: The Yellow Kid, Polly and Her Pals, or Detective Dan, depending on which you consider to be the earliest comic book. If those don’t sound familiar, it’s because none of them have been published in many, many years.
Q: Why is Superman such a boy scout?
A: You could say success ruined Superman. In 1938, when Superman first appeared in comics, he was a tough-talking, head-bashing vigilante who didn’t care if bad guys died and had a socially progressive agenda he was actively working towards. And, almost immediately, Superman became very popular. Now, the people who wrote comic books in the late ‘30s could get away with an awful lot – the Arrow was a good guy who shot bad guys with arrows and killed them – because not that many people were reading it. But when Superman started selling a million-plus copies a month, suddenly it became very important what Superman was doing, as there were a lot of kids and a lot of kids’ concerned parents now paying attention. So Superman began to act in a more conservative, law-abiding fashion.
You could also say World War II ruined Superman. As the U.S. began to embrace the idea of going to war, the worldview of its people changed. To rationalize war, people see it in black and white terms of good vs. evil. To fit into this worldview, Superman had to become all-good. So a lot of elements that could be seen as objectionable to some people were dropped. Not that Superman had much to do with the war effort – in the comic books he was barely involved – but by modifying the character to fit the worldview of the times, the publishers ensured the character would remain popular – and publishers have been using this technique ever since, reinventing old characters every time they seem to feel outdated.
Q: Who would win if they fought, Superman or Batman?
A: This has actually been fought out many times over the last 20-odd years, but what makes the answer so contentious is that Batman usually wins. Now, that should seem to anyone to be impossible. Superman is at least a thousand – if not a million times stronger and faster, depending on your interpretation of Superman and how powerful he is in that interpretation. There was even a time when Superman was acknowledged as being smarter than Batman too, so there doesn’t seem to be any way in which Batman could have an advantage over Superman. And that, basically, is why Superman always loses. If he wins, then he looks like a bully picking on Batman. If Batman wins, he gets to look cool -- he’s not a bully because he was the underdog to start with.
Usually, Batman has kryptonite with him to even the odds against Superman, but he has been shown using Judo to hold his own against Superman on at least two occasions – the animated Batman/Superman movie and the New Frontier comic book miniseries.
Q: What was the first team-up of superheroes?
A: Until late 1940, the superheroes that were appearing on the scene never interacted with each other – maybe sometimes on the covers of their comic books, but never in the stories themselves. That changed with the debut of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics #3. Though Batman and Superman were, theoretically, reserve members (who almost never appeared in the series), the main purpose of the Justice Society was to push eight of DC Comics’ second-tier heroes until they were popular enough to have their own series. It wouldn’t be until 1964 when Batman and Superman – always DC Comics’ most popular stars -- started regularly appearing in the Justice League of America.
Q: Why didn’t superheroes ever win wars?
A: Actually, there were quite a few stories around 1940 and 1941 when superheroes beat up or stopped Hitler or Hitler-like characters. Even a 4-page story in Look magazine by Superman’s creators back in 1940 showing how Superman would end the war by capturing Hitler and Stalin and turning them both over to the League of Nations to stand trial. You could only do that so many times, though, before it looked ridiculous since the real war just kept going on and on. Although there were many patriotic-themed comic books that came out during WWII, the publishers decided that, for the most part, comic books should remain escapist fantasy and not get too involved in real world events. War comics is itself a genre of comic books different from the superhero genre. The war comics character, Sgt. Rock, fought WWII over 30 years of comic books, so the ability of comic book characters to keep fighting and fighting the war and not make a difference on it, historically, was well-established.
The first comic book series to question this assumption was All-Star Squadron, a comic book from the 1980’s that documented untold tales from the 1940s. Here for the first time, an explanation was given as to why the superheroes never won WWII – Germany and Japan were protected by magic artifacts from direct superhuman intervention.
As for wars after WWII, comic book companies have generally been afraid to get their superheroes involved in wars because public opinion on whether the American people should be involved in those wars has been so divided. Comic books have been made about the Korean War and the Vietnam War, but never with the popularity that WWII comics had. After 9/11, some comic books had a “War on Terror” slant to them, but that was abandoned after being unpopular too.
Q: How long have comic books been around?
A: The idea of a comic strip, or a series of drawings that follow each other sequentially to tell a story, has been around for centuries. The idea of taking the conventions of the comic strip and converting them into book form – and filling a whole book with nothing but these modified, longer comic strips – did not come about until 1897. The idea of making a comic book series and publishing it once a month did not come around until 1922 and that was the first comic book published in the form we recognize it today – before that, comic books were always hard-covered books. The idea of publishing all-new material in a comic book and not just reprinting modified material from the newspaper comic strips – the real birth of the comic book you might say – was not until 1933.
Q: What was the first character published in a comic book?
A: The Yellow Kid, Polly and Her Pals, or Detective Dan, depending on which you consider to be the earliest comic book. If those don’t sound familiar, it’s because none of them have been published in many, many years.
Q: Why is Superman such a boy scout?
A: You could say success ruined Superman. In 1938, when Superman first appeared in comics, he was a tough-talking, head-bashing vigilante who didn’t care if bad guys died and had a socially progressive agenda he was actively working towards. And, almost immediately, Superman became very popular. Now, the people who wrote comic books in the late ‘30s could get away with an awful lot – the Arrow was a good guy who shot bad guys with arrows and killed them – because not that many people were reading it. But when Superman started selling a million-plus copies a month, suddenly it became very important what Superman was doing, as there were a lot of kids and a lot of kids’ concerned parents now paying attention. So Superman began to act in a more conservative, law-abiding fashion.
You could also say World War II ruined Superman. As the U.S. began to embrace the idea of going to war, the worldview of its people changed. To rationalize war, people see it in black and white terms of good vs. evil. To fit into this worldview, Superman had to become all-good. So a lot of elements that could be seen as objectionable to some people were dropped. Not that Superman had much to do with the war effort – in the comic books he was barely involved – but by modifying the character to fit the worldview of the times, the publishers ensured the character would remain popular – and publishers have been using this technique ever since, reinventing old characters every time they seem to feel outdated.
Q: Who would win if they fought, Superman or Batman?
A: This has actually been fought out many times over the last 20-odd years, but what makes the answer so contentious is that Batman usually wins. Now, that should seem to anyone to be impossible. Superman is at least a thousand – if not a million times stronger and faster, depending on your interpretation of Superman and how powerful he is in that interpretation. There was even a time when Superman was acknowledged as being smarter than Batman too, so there doesn’t seem to be any way in which Batman could have an advantage over Superman. And that, basically, is why Superman always loses. If he wins, then he looks like a bully picking on Batman. If Batman wins, he gets to look cool -- he’s not a bully because he was the underdog to start with.
Usually, Batman has kryptonite with him to even the odds against Superman, but he has been shown using Judo to hold his own against Superman on at least two occasions – the animated Batman/Superman movie and the New Frontier comic book miniseries.
Q: What was the first team-up of superheroes?
A: Until late 1940, the superheroes that were appearing on the scene never interacted with each other – maybe sometimes on the covers of their comic books, but never in the stories themselves. That changed with the debut of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics #3. Though Batman and Superman were, theoretically, reserve members (who almost never appeared in the series), the main purpose of the Justice Society was to push eight of DC Comics’ second-tier heroes until they were popular enough to have their own series. It wouldn’t be until 1964 when Batman and Superman – always DC Comics’ most popular stars -- started regularly appearing in the Justice League of America.
Q: Why didn’t superheroes ever win wars?
A: Actually, there were quite a few stories around 1940 and 1941 when superheroes beat up or stopped Hitler or Hitler-like characters. Even a 4-page story in Look magazine by Superman’s creators back in 1940 showing how Superman would end the war by capturing Hitler and Stalin and turning them both over to the League of Nations to stand trial. You could only do that so many times, though, before it looked ridiculous since the real war just kept going on and on. Although there were many patriotic-themed comic books that came out during WWII, the publishers decided that, for the most part, comic books should remain escapist fantasy and not get too involved in real world events. War comics is itself a genre of comic books different from the superhero genre. The war comics character, Sgt. Rock, fought WWII over 30 years of comic books, so the ability of comic book characters to keep fighting and fighting the war and not make a difference on it, historically, was well-established.
The first comic book series to question this assumption was All-Star Squadron, a comic book from the 1980’s that documented untold tales from the 1940s. Here for the first time, an explanation was given as to why the superheroes never won WWII – Germany and Japan were protected by magic artifacts from direct superhuman intervention.
As for wars after WWII, comic book companies have generally been afraid to get their superheroes involved in wars because public opinion on whether the American people should be involved in those wars has been so divided. Comic books have been made about the Korean War and the Vietnam War, but never with the popularity that WWII comics had. After 9/11, some comic books had a “War on Terror” slant to them, but that was abandoned after being unpopular too.
New art - Hawkman
[Megan and I were particularly fond of this one too, possibly my first time ever drawing Hawkman and based loosely on a Mike Parobeck drawing of him.]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
New art - Captain Marvel
[In preparation for this Saturday's Free Comic Book Day draw-off at the library, this is one of the practice drawings I did. It's based off the cover of Shazam Archives vol. 2 and Megan liked it so much she painted it for me.]
Monday, April 26, 2010
Garham to Greyhawk Campaign: Session Two (pt. 2)
While most of the friends were busy with these errands, Kevlamin went to the two richest men in town – the mine owners Baladeva Smets and Kellert Tilki – and tried to warn them about the threat to their mines. Baladeva's guards did not like Kevlamin's attitude and threatened to kill him if he did not leave. Kellert's doorkeeper let him into to meet Kellert. The old man offered to pay Kevlamin 10 gp if this information turned out to be true and said he would double his guards on his mines, but refused to spare any guards to help Kevlamin and accused him of being a spy for Smets when Kevlamin pressed him on it.
Finally with a full company of 21, the friends sent word via Dilber to Zimik that they were ready to raid the caves that very night. Kevlamin was intent on luring the goblins out and ambushing them in the ravine. Ruben went along with his plan and volunteered to go into the caves and get the goblins to chase him out, though Manga and Seth wound up going along as well. They made it as far as the first cave, but after finding netting concealed in the mud on the cave floor, they were fearful of a trap and ran back out. When no one followed, the entire company (minus Archippos and Nodwick) went into the cave and started illuminating it with lanterns and candles. While Kevlamin and Seth searched the side walls, Manga went over a short wall of wooden stakes at the rear of the cave with a borrowed candle and found a low tunnel exiting deeper into the complex. Instead of telling everyone, Manga went to explore it alone.
When everyone else found the concealed tunnel, they followed Manga to where the tunnel split off into two directions. Fortunately, they were able to spot Manga's muddy tracks and followed him to the left. They caught up to him at a four-way intersection of tunnels up ahead, where Manga had paused before entering a cave off to the right. That cave turned out to be a mostly empty storeroom for barrels. Down the opposite tunnel was a now-empty animal pen, but down the tunnel exiting the opposite end of that cave was a cave with five goblins in it. The goblins were wrestling and play-fighting with their weapons on the floor. The friends, at the fore of the company, charged in and engaged the goblins in melee. Four of the give goblins went down in about 20 seconds of fighting, while the fifth escaped past the front ranks of the company only to be overwhelmed by the halflings at the rear. The goblin offered them its measly treasure – 5 sp and 4 pieces of copper junk jewelry -- to let it live. After interrogating the goblin and learning Kraglut's lair was on the opposite end of the cave complex, Kevlamin killed their prisoner.
Heading south from there down another tunnel, the heroes came to a guard room with wooden planks crossing a moat to a short, crude wall. Over the top of the wall could be seen the heads of four bugbears. The halflings came from the rear up to the moat and launched their sling bullets, but the bugbears were quick to respond with thrown rocks and spears. After three volleys apiece, four halflings were dead and one of the bugbears was down, with the other three injured. Then the friends decided to brave charging across the moat. They rushed through an opening in the wall and were met with spears. Seth was impaled on a spear and killed. The others fought on... ((Which is where we had to stop for the day!))
Kevlamin – 577 xp
Ruben – 307 xp
Manga – 649 xp
Clair – 467 xp
Daphne – 471 xp
Seth's player will get to start over with a new character next time with 153 xp
Finally with a full company of 21, the friends sent word via Dilber to Zimik that they were ready to raid the caves that very night. Kevlamin was intent on luring the goblins out and ambushing them in the ravine. Ruben went along with his plan and volunteered to go into the caves and get the goblins to chase him out, though Manga and Seth wound up going along as well. They made it as far as the first cave, but after finding netting concealed in the mud on the cave floor, they were fearful of a trap and ran back out. When no one followed, the entire company (minus Archippos and Nodwick) went into the cave and started illuminating it with lanterns and candles. While Kevlamin and Seth searched the side walls, Manga went over a short wall of wooden stakes at the rear of the cave with a borrowed candle and found a low tunnel exiting deeper into the complex. Instead of telling everyone, Manga went to explore it alone.
When everyone else found the concealed tunnel, they followed Manga to where the tunnel split off into two directions. Fortunately, they were able to spot Manga's muddy tracks and followed him to the left. They caught up to him at a four-way intersection of tunnels up ahead, where Manga had paused before entering a cave off to the right. That cave turned out to be a mostly empty storeroom for barrels. Down the opposite tunnel was a now-empty animal pen, but down the tunnel exiting the opposite end of that cave was a cave with five goblins in it. The goblins were wrestling and play-fighting with their weapons on the floor. The friends, at the fore of the company, charged in and engaged the goblins in melee. Four of the give goblins went down in about 20 seconds of fighting, while the fifth escaped past the front ranks of the company only to be overwhelmed by the halflings at the rear. The goblin offered them its measly treasure – 5 sp and 4 pieces of copper junk jewelry -- to let it live. After interrogating the goblin and learning Kraglut's lair was on the opposite end of the cave complex, Kevlamin killed their prisoner.
Heading south from there down another tunnel, the heroes came to a guard room with wooden planks crossing a moat to a short, crude wall. Over the top of the wall could be seen the heads of four bugbears. The halflings came from the rear up to the moat and launched their sling bullets, but the bugbears were quick to respond with thrown rocks and spears. After three volleys apiece, four halflings were dead and one of the bugbears was down, with the other three injured. Then the friends decided to brave charging across the moat. They rushed through an opening in the wall and were met with spears. Seth was impaled on a spear and killed. The others fought on... ((Which is where we had to stop for the day!))
Kevlamin – 577 xp
Ruben – 307 xp
Manga – 649 xp
Clair – 467 xp
Daphne – 471 xp
Seth's player will get to start over with a new character next time with 153 xp
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