Natholeon
eldannardoFiled under: Comics
About 20 years ago Dan and I strted inventing our own comic characters. We spent untold hours in the back of his Mum’s garden shop coming up with our universe of Marvel and DC rip offs (mostly Marvel). The gem of this time was Delta Wave, a team of mutants that went through several transformations. I was obssessed with the early Marvel writing of Stan Lee, and for this reason the comics basically sucked. They were 20 years out of date in terms of writing. I also felt that I was a better artist than Dan, and I guess in conventional John Buscema terms I was – but Dan had style, which I didn’t recognise for quite a while.
When I got to Uni I invented a team called Boogie Groove, with the basic plot that some aliens (the Disc’oers) gave 4 teenage surf bums powers in order to fight some other aliens (the Gysk). Why didn’t the Disco’ers do it all themselves with their superior technology and superhuman abilities? Because they weren’t groovy enough! Sound like the thinnest plot ever – it was miles ahead of Delta Wave! Anyway, I did a rough draft (you could call it pencils, but I wouldn’t go that far…), which Dan took away and added to. He was geeting influenced by artists that really appealed to his style, and in 1996 created the first few pages of Boogie Groove. For the sake of nostalgia, I thought I’d post them here:
Never did finish it, but maybe one day…
Nate
In my initial post on the site I mentioned that Dan and I really became friends through a mutual love of comics. Mostly the X-titles of the late 1980s, but also the Avengers and Fantastic Four. I even read a few DC titles, although they were never Dan’s cup of tea. Well, we would have given anything to be able to collect figures to game our heroes in those days, but there just wasn’t anything around. Dan remained an avid comics buyer, but myself, well I just picked up the odd thing here and there, and tried to keep up with what Claremont and others were doing to the X-men (which was pretty much wrecking them…). I have to say that my interest was rekindled when Joss Whedon started Astonishing X-men. It was so good to see the team well written for the first time since Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor.
Anyway, the point of this post is not to provide an in-depth critique of comic books, but to show how they link to wargaming. This came about when I stumbled across Battleground Weird War in my surfing, and was pleasantly surprised to see figures of the Invaders (Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Human Torch) fighting the Nazis. After some research I found that these figures were from the Heroclix range. This is one of those collectible games with booster packs i.e. you have to buy heaps to get the figures that you’re after. So I sourced a company, Strikezone, who provided the figures individually. I worked out how much the Invaders would be, and added the X-men in just for old times sake, and contacted Dan to let him know. Well, he wanted them all! So in nio time flat he had ordered 76 assorted goodies and baddies. Unfortunately the postage from the US is a killer – it makes up a third of the total cost of anything you buy, and the initial plan was for about 100 figs, but that made the postage even worse – about 1/2 the total! The good thing was that the figures had arrived within a week – very speedy.
On Saturday we pulled them all off their Heroclix bases and remounted them. The painting is often very basic and quite shabby in places, so we’re going to touch them up. Alongside the Pagenses this weekend, I touched up the Fantastic Four. The figure that I painted least was the Thing, as I felt he looked OK. The other three members got the full treatment, particularly the Human Torch.
So what to do with them. Well, Dan and I are looking at adapting WAB for superheroes. Certainly it will take a lot of role play, and we think that a lot of the Pulp atmosphere needs to be added – eg. scenario driven games where players are awarded points for clever traps, boasting, using cliched lines (‘I’ll be back’, ‘you haven’t heard the last of me’ etc). But in the meantime- my Arthurian Combrogi are awaiting!
Nate
