Knowing your Unnhh from your Arrghh

I do like it when creative comics talk and role-playing design talk can use the same words. Let’s narrow it down to one of my three current supers design projects, Champions Now, and talk about the fights. There are three interrelated points: what happens and knowing why; the damage, pain, hurtin’, including the two famous gutturals in the post title; and why the characters are even there and fighting at all.

Dynamic mechanics

I said I’d be getting to actual comics during all this role-playing talk, didn’t I? Here we go.

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.

Spider-Schlep

In one of the letter columns in the late-80s Question, Denny O’Neil refers to Peter Parker as a schlep, and always having been one. That’s Yiddish, and a little confusing because that precise word is a verb meaning to lug something inconvenient, but here, and as I’ve often heard or used it, it’s short for schlepper, meaning an inept, stupid person.

Sense, coincidence, nonsense, and consequence

We’re all grown-ups here, right? Not gonna freak out when I say, all plot is contrivance.

70s and 80s, ladies

So, me & women. For better or worse, lots of them, and a lotta cultural blast-furnace for much of it.

Irish rage, Catholic guilt

How do you discuss a legend?

A pretty butterfly

The vigil continues with this post from Steven S. Long, regarding that comics paragon of sanity and restraint – not that we want to go diving headfirst into anything, as many would agree.

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.

Eat hot lead, comics reader

This is first in a series on comic book vigilantes, focusing mainly on but not limited to the 1980s. It’s a tag-team thing: each post is written either by me or the estimable Steven S. Long, and ended with the other’s response

Second-best villainy

H’m, let’s see that one again.

BONUS POST: Thanks to Larry Lade and his May pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! Let’s have some fun today. I got to thinking about how much I liked some of the secondary villains when I was a kid, especially those poor orphans who showed up in Marvel Team-Up or for a half-issue beatdown in the Avengers.

Superhuman endurance

No glamor.

It’s 1966, in The Amazing Spider-Man #33, co-plotted by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, drawn by Ditko. it’s the third of a three-issue story called “If This Be My Destiny …!” which is so iconic as to have its own detailed Wikipedia page.