I Wanna Play Batman!

Yes, there are quite a few people who play role-playing games as adults (and no I don't mean strapping on a plastic stethoscope and playing "doctor").

As witness the boys (and several girls) who get together for these sorts of games in the comic book Knights of the Dinner Table. Mostly they play a modification of Dungeons and Dragons known as Hackmaster (a real game based on D&D with a license to do so!), but occasionally they take a break and use other game systems. The central group that lends its name to the comic book usually play a Wild West version of the game called Cattlepunk, while the players you see here from the Black Hands group play a superhero game. In this game, you can either make up your own superhero or play an established character from a comic book or movie.

Naturally this leads to people thinking, "Hey, I'll play the coolest one with the unbeatable powers!" But as anyone who plays these games knows, the GM (GameMaster) is always right, and if he chooses to modify things, he can. You want to play Batman? Fine. But I'm going to take away all the stuff that makes his crime fighting so effective, like his money to start...:) But as Kick-Ass's alter ego Dave discusses with his friends in the movie of the same name, what is Batman without his money? A brawler with a gas-guzzling car.

I love how the artist, who reminds me of Matt Groening in so many ways, draws "the boys" gathered around the table, most of them in costume. The only one who doesn't is Stevil Van Hostile, who as you can tell from his name, is a bastard who always plays a bastard. The art itself doesn't change much (like Groening's, at least in the early days). It's the story that really gets you laughing.

Good Girls Wear Chain Mail Bikinis

Ah, Red Sonja. A character that has fueled the dreams of more than one fanboy since her inception. Many were the cries of disappointment when the deal fell through to make Rose McGowan into the flame-haired she-devil.

Considering her origins (Goddess grants her extraordinary fighting ability after she is gang raped and loses her entire family to a band of barbarians), her choice of clothing (if you can call it that) was always a bit odd, to say the least. This excerpt, from the more recent incarnation by Dynamite Comics in 2003, puts the rationale for this decision in a nutshell. Rather like the couple that join the Hotzone Club in ARMY@LOVE and have sex in the middle of a firefight, then get surprised by an insurgent soldier who can only stand and stare at the girl.

If you look closely at the costume of Red Sonja as she has traveled through the years, you will notice odd changes. Her very first appearances were much more modest, with at least some nod to covering herself against at least some blows. Then they stuck her in the bikini and all hell broke loose - her popularity rose dramatically. She had a return to some semblance of modesty in the '80's, although her outfit still looked like something she'd wear to bed rather than to a battle. In the new millenium she has discarded her previous trappings and wanders the lands in her bikini once again.

Ah, but look closely even then! Different artists have the job of rendering her adventures, and all of them have their own way of dressing her. Some will give her the chain mail she is always famous for wearing. Some will give her scale mail, interlinked scales over some kind of mesh underneath. Some will give her linked mail, small disks sewn together with lots of space in between. Some artists will even switch up in the middle of the same story, making the attentive person say "Hang on a minute, how many of these bikinis does she have?"

But if that same person looks closer still, he will notice that some artists draw her with something obvious underneath the metal, while others will try to make it appear that she's naked and that a strong breeze will knock her bikini flap aside and, as the saying goes, "Let them see Christmas." Needless to say, the famous "gratuitous booty shot" is VERY common.

She has been described as the original bad girl, the female who every man lusts after but no one can get close to without getting seriously hurt or even killed. The dream of the pasty-faced fanboys, naturally, is to be the ultimate alpha male who does manage to win her love by defeating her in single combat.

Love her or hate her, Red Sonja still draws the eye and the heart. Me personally, I want Robert Rodriguez to get off his butt and get the ball rolling again on that movie he promised two years ago.

All Engulfing Sonic Sponge

Courtesy of Giant-Sized Fantastic Four #6. The team, minus the female part, goes toe to toe with the ideal, monologuing villain called Annihilus. Testing their superpowers while they go after the doo-dad on his belt (which will save the life of Sue Storm who's having a baby...blahblahblah), Annihilus starts throwing random stuff at them, which as you see here, includes that lovely Sonic Sponge. Apart from the continued insistence on the characters narrating everything that happens to them in the pictures, which again I find TOTALLY annoying, you see bucket loads of completely silly stuff like this, invented purely to give a man who flies while on fire a specific challenge.

Ought to be in jail for taking so many liberties

Weird War Tales #74, from April of 1979. So many liberties are taken here with science and history that it's almost impossible to keep up with them. Tanks running around in the snowy mountains of Scandinavia, tank crews dressed up in nice warm clothes like they just came out of a Macy's Annual Sale, woolly mammoths suddenly coming to life after years in the ice, and instant domestication of the animal by a crew that uses their destroyed tank parts (after the mammoth stomped it to bits) to build an Indian-style canopy on top so they can ride the beast in comfort. The artists and writer responsible for this goofiness I'm sure had plenty of time for research, but they obviously didn't take it. They couldn't even get the time frame right for when the woolly mammoth was alive. Mind you, cryogenics was a very big fad around that time, and like cold fusion, we all thought it would usher in a new era of human possibilities. A lot of wild imaginings get pulled into the general stream of popular culture and used without regard to realism.

Remember folks, peeps in the fifties thought that nuclear power was going to mean practically instantaneous flight between cities on opposite sides of the globe.

The Incredible Plastic Faces of Richard Corben

My own humble attempts at art are fed by influences from many sources. Most of these sources are graphic artists such as Wendy Pini, Milo Manara, Moebius, and, as we see here, Richard Corben. One of the major contributors to the movie Heavy Metal back in 1981 with his "Den", he has the most wonderful facility with faces that morph and change from one emotional expression to another with fantastic fluidity. This is coupled with a finely honed appreciation of anatomy that a lot of artists today would do well to study.

You've come a long way, baby

Published four months before I was born, this is what a teenaged girl might have been reading back in 1968. From Teen Love Stories #3.

And yes, the title of this post is meant to be ironic, although only those who remember Virginia Slims ads from women's magazines back i the seventies will know why. They even popped up in my mother's favorite magazine Family Circle.

Blinded by the light, the 3D, etc.

From September, 1985, folks. I have this one stored to read later. Thoughts on it to follow, but in the meantime, a picture speaks a thousand words, doesn't it?