Batpulp

I encountered Batman oddly.

Kill, kill, kill

Art by John Hotchkiss

I jumped back into role-playing with gusto in late 1985, armed with Champions 3rd edition and a handful of enthusiastic friends. Before too long I was meeting lots of others playing the game, in person and through The Clobberin’ Times, and I got a good look at how plenty of people expected to play their heroes. How was it? Easy. In a word, they were killing all over the place.

Is your hate pure?

Hollow Girl / Luke Cooper

Some game design thoughts percolated recently. Can it be there yet breathes life in the superhero vigilante? Last year’s blog series with Steve Long, and my recent revival of thought about it, suggests to me there is – or at least, that I want to design a role-playing game about such things. And produce some more comics.

The smoking guns

Just about a year ago, Steve Long and I concluded a series of posts about comics vigilante heroes, and I’ve realized what we left out: the Shadow and the Spider. I plead two things: the usual blindness of comics readers regarding anything but what passed directly under their noses as customers, and conversely, the overwhelming prevalence of the characters such that we regarded them more as the surrounding air than as something you see or talk about.

Super money

Rich people, right?

The not so secret cabal

Denny O’Neil, once upon a time

In the course of scribbling our vigilante posts and rejoinders therein, Steve and I realized something.

In Darkest Knight

Vigilantism is ever vigilant! Steven S. Long leads in this one.

Wicked good

More vigilante posting? Yes!

RON CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP

In the 90s, you were able to do good stuff only when no one was looking. And for “good stuff,” you can’t do much better than Batman: The Animated Series, 1992-1994. 

Kim Yale

Kim

I’d returned to reading comics in the summer of 1985. By the summer of 1986, I blush to confess, I had become an ardent letter-writer to multiple titles, a letterhack as the term went then, as well as pen-pal with several other people with the same behavioral disorder (remember: no email, no internet, no personal computers, nothin’ but paper letters and the phone, people).