Dark Matter: inspiration and fun

More comics, creativity, and role-playing intersection – it’s a fine day. This is about Abby Baldwin’s own graphic novel Dark Matter, serving as the conceptual jumping-off point for role-playing my alpha version of Champions Now with her dad Robert. Here’s my conversation with Robert about all sorts of concepts and angles on it.

For quick reference on the project, I’ve done my own playtesting with the alpha version, as shown in my videos about the Defiants, and several other groups are giving my feedback (e.g. this post) about doing that too. I’m now moving into Beta testing with several groups at once, and receiving feedback from others too.

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.

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.

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.

Context!

I love me a timeline. This one’s built mostly from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, mainly because I couldn’t help but scribble it out as I went along. In the year since I did that, so many of my posts presume knowledge of the content that it’s simply good sense to get the thing on-line for reference.

Irish rage, Catholic guilt

How do you discuss a legend?

Jet and silver

You might have missed Moon Knight along the way, vigilante-wise. Let’s make sure that doesn’t continue – and if necessary, Steve Long will make sure I will face midnight justice later in the post.

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.

And the horse you rode in on

Ask any comics fan: over thataway is Marvel and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns], and over thisaway is DC and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns]. You choose your flag and you wave it. The rest are fringe. As my Brit Lit informed me, it’s “RCs to the right, Prods to the left, and fancy buggers in the middle.”

What was the question again?

This is the second in a series of dialogue-posts by me and Steve Long about vigilante characters in comics, mainly during but not completely restricted to the 1980s. More 80s TMI about me too!