Into Darkness

Pretty cool news to round out a month of wobbles, shakes, tumbles and quakes: Push Push are reforming! No, hang on, that's not it. And it's certainly not the way to announce an article that otherwise ought to get my attention, because courtesy of Twitter I discovered The Darkness are coming to NZ next April. Yah-roo!

And then courtesy of chum Tim I discovered they're coming to Wellington. Get in.

Opportunities are now open for all and sundry to apply for the unofficial position of Jet's Plus One on 21st April 2017. No application will be refused.

And now, to mark this momentous news here's a celebration of calligraphy, geography, Cadbury Flake, casual/alarming cross-dressing and the institution of marriage:

Brought (back) to Book

Ma, I fixed a book!

This book I have enjoyed since I first found it in a bookshop in Roslyn, Dunedin some time in 1984.

It's not the actual book, actually. Who knows where that went? Loaned to a RPG-curious nephew, lost to the ages. Probably sent to a school fair or assisting in filling land. It happens, and because it happens, I looked for a replacement nearly ten years ago, and in that time (mainly sitting in my bedside cabinet), the secondhand copy I bought in a Newtown shop turned into this:

Now, the thing about having been a librarian for nearly 25 years is, I've never ever mended a book. At all. So when faced with detatched covers, dangling spines, and dried up glue like this:

...I had to resort to the librarian's friend, Google!

Long story short, during a week at home after Wellington's last office-closing earthquake, I discovered the book lying in pieces at the bottom of a box and decided then was the time to take action.

Covers were trimmed, glue was scraped off, and while the inner pages were separated into two or three 'blocks', luckily the interior was in pretty good shape despite some slight foxing. Hey, it's a paperback book - it's hardly top quality material from the get-go.

But hey, it worked! Mod Podge was the glue, a nondescript laminate (Coverseal, basically) stiffened up and waterproofed the cover, and I was even fussy enough to paint out the white creases and tears which couldn't be glued back together.

I fluffed the front cover, it turning out skew and the patched card replacement won't fool anyone; but my beloved old book is back in one piece and readable again. Hooray!

So proud I was in showing it off to Mrs Simian. Of course, it was only then that I realised I'd re-glued the insides upside down.

1966 And All That

The true strength of a pop cultural icon lies in their resilience. Heroes and villains come and go, but the greatest of them endure through generations and interpretations. Yes, there may be periods when they are considered out of vogue, but being strong figures they are bound to return - perhaps as a farce, or a revisionist retelling, or as a mirror to contemporary society's travails.

I speak of the big ones: Robin Hood. King Arthur. Sherlock Holmes. Batman. The Sixties version.

No, come back, I'm not mad. I wasn't even mad in 1989 when I sniffed at this rare product of high camp and sixties psychedelia and walked away. Tim Burton's reinvention of the character was just around the corner and the big bad Nineties introduced a less colourful, more serious take on the character. The Dark Knight was the order of the day, and the Caped Crusader had quickly become For Selected Audiences Only. I eschewed the series' self-knowing silliness and cheap later episodes, and those misspent afternoons screwing my youthful freckled schoolboy nose at the hyper kinetic hi-jinks our neighbours' colour TV provided every same Bat-time same Bat-channel.

So what changed for me to rediscover the West and Ward Batman? Well it wasn't the TV show, though I do want to 'reconnect' with it in some form - the Blu Rays look mighty tempting. Of course the car I rediscovered to my surprise in the Dark Knight Rises extras. It was also the Bat-history, dutifully documented, directed and delivered by that doyen of the Detective Comics dynamo, Mr Jim Moon that got my attention. And it was the comic strip.

Yes, again, the Wellington City Library has done itself proud and has a pretty decent collection of the recent Batman '66 anthology series, being a set of new Batman tales told with the energy, the enthusiasm and the tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1966 series. When they're good they're very very good- not since Lego's Batman '66 set have I been so relieved to see Caesar Romero's painted moustache so faithfully rendered beneath his Joker makeup. And Burgess Meredith's Penguin, Frank Gorshin's Riddler (who owes his reputation purely to the TV series and Gorshin's talents), the triumvirate of Catwomen in Kitt, Merriwether and Newmar plus other TV-only villains, like Egghead, Bookworm, Louie the Lilac, Ma Parker, Shame, King Tut and Marsha Queen of Diamonds. The captions recall the exclamations of the show's cliffhanger closers, the title fonts are perfect, and over all there's a spirit of fun in the series, even in recent years with its canon-bending introduction of anachronistic characters like Harley Quin and Bane.

For the most part the series sticks close to its roots, even with occasional crossovers to contemporary TV series (Green Hornet, Man From Uncle, The Avengers) and shout outs to the future (including a seemingly irresistable nod to a certain Seal song during a Poison Ivy outing). In case you're wondering, Batgirl gets as good as she gave, and there are some intriguing stylistic ventures also - notably a meta trip to Japan for the Bat trio where an encounter with Sixties comic villain Lord Death man. Trippy.

And trippy is as it should be. The '66 series is something to be celebrated, particularly amidst the sturm und drang of the Snyder films and Arkham video games. There was a time when Batman was fun, and was in on the joke, and those days did more for the survival of the Bat brand than anything in its comics. At The Warehouse in Whanganui recently I picked up a copy of the West and Ward Batman movie - until recently all you could get of the original series. Jet Jr and I watched it when it came home with me and we had a blast.

All of this presumably comes from a relaxing by Fox on its grip on the old TV series, leading to a minor snowstorm of retro products. The final release of the full series is the obvious jewel in the crown (those extras!), and the comic follows  of course. Batman 66 Lego is utterly adorable:

But no Batgirl minifigure? For shame!

And after the success of West, Ward and Newmar's animated reunion in Return of the Caped Crusaders there's now a follow-up in the works, featuring Two-Face voiced by - who else? William Shatner. Holy Dream Casting!

Daddy's Little Heartbreaker

RPG Dreamer

Over the years as a roleplayer when I've not been dreaming about actually playing RPGs, I've dreamed about creating one. I had a few on the go as a teen; there was Exorcist and Nosferatu! The Game of the Undead, both pretty much the same game, aimed at emphasising specialty character classes like the titular ghost-botherer as well as Grave Robber (this was years before Tomb Raider arrived as a media-friendly title). After that came Mystic Woods, which was literally a dream RPG, being the product of an early-morning waking idea in my head of Eighties-type slashers in remote locations combined with magical artefacts and portals to other worlds. memories of playing the rather gruesome Splatterhouse arcade game may have infiltrated my subconscious, there.  Finally, there was Gloriana, set in an alternative Elizabethan Age inspired by the works of Spencer, Pope, Marlowe and Shakespeare, where the Virgin Queen's reign was both aided and beset by powers foreign and supernatural, and the players were adventurers in this world of fairies, witches, demons, ghosts, alchemists, warlocks, astrologers and Spaniards. I still think that one has legs, but the trouble with all of these game ideas was the same one that beset a lot of early D&D adaptations: they never strove too far from the source mechanics of Gygax and Arneson's Dungeons and Dragons. In my defence, this was understandable, as I don't have the head for game design. I don't feel bad that all of these ideas faltered before I seriously put pen to paper - why reinvent the wheel?

Heartbreakers

I'm told that I'm hardly alone, and that there's a long tradition of what's been termed the 'heartbreaker' game, where a devotee of RPGs goes out to create their own system, investing time, passion and probably funds only to see it plummet to the remainder bins or merely wither on the vine. Kickstarters can be a useful filter for those keen to take the plunge, but for myself I would say that at least half of the ideas above, any game system I could devise could just as well have been reshaped as a D&D campaign and left it as that. Even Gloriana wouldn't need a lot of changing, the idea itself being based around character types, creatures, politics and skill sets - all surface detail rather than mechanics.

The House Wins

So, then, to the present day, where I've recently found loose pages of ideas from playing over the years. There's a mix of material here - ideas for character templates, variant races, honing character classes and creatures to 'fit' literary archetypes from Chaucer to Tolkien, and module ideas in which to plonk them. Plus of course there's Gnomes - of course there are Gnomes. One of my bigger self-made modules Barbigazl had Gnomes and not Dwarves as its  central race, so they've never been far away. I've decided then to attempt to put these ideas together with traits and playing styles discovered and adopted by me and my fellow players since we began, under a set of House Rules (for want of a better term.) I might call it Redcastle, after the home we first played D&D in, and see where it goes.

This may end up as yet another occasional series on Jetsam and go no further - common sense suggests that it does, but if you're interested at all, I'd love to hear what you think!