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.

More women

I take no part in ostentatiously excluding Dave Sim and Cerebus the Aardvark from modern comics discussion, and I dislike the stink of piety that rises from it. “Are you now or have you ever been” regarding liking or valuing Sim’s work was instituted about twenty years ago and unfortunately seems to have stuck around.

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.

Inking is sexy

India ink. How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Better, let me roll about and smear you freely. Swoop you with a brush, boldly line you where no [whoever] has gone before, feather you gently, let you spatter me all over, and spatter you back with white-out or just cake it on solid.

Irish rage, Catholic guilt

How do you discuss a legend?

Against the Establishment

You may not know my Captain America at all.

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

How did I get these mutton chops?

Quick! Count the Wolverine things he doesn’t have.

Wolverine, sheathe your claws! In fact, go away. (Denial … crumbling …) All right, I admit it, that would be covering up for my 80s self who dribbled all over the hairy bastard like everyone else.

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.