Light the Sky: A Comic Book in Progress /// Version 5.0: Fatally Yours

Another particularly twisted little webcomic (and I mean that in a good way) discovered via comicscene. Both Light the Sky and Self Inflicted have some things worth looking at.

Light the Sky: A Comic Book in Progress

Martin Nodell -- RIP

I saw him a few years back when I visited WizardWorld Chicago to meet the Big Bang Comics guys (too bad that didn't work out better) and he didn't look very good back then. It was sad, in a way, because he had been reduced to having to sell drawings of Green Lantern with his shaking hand just to pull in a little bit of money.

It's a shame how the comic industry ends up treating its own in the end. Siegel and Shuster. Dave Cockrum. William Messner-Loeb. Jack Kirby. Martin Nodell.

He will be missed, but somewhere there is an engineer lighting his way with an emerald lantern that brings life, then death, and the power.

Martin Nodell -- RIP

Martin Nodell, the artist co-creator of Green Lantern, died this morning less than a month after his 91st birthday. I'm afraid I have no further details other than that Marty had been in poor health lately.

Marty was born 11/15/15 in Philadelphia. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and later, Pratt Institute in New York. It was in New York that he began working as a freelance artist, in or around 1938. He soon started freelancing for several comic book companies that either didn't pay or didn't pay well. As he later told the story, he got tired of being stiffed by the smaller firms and decided to make an all-out effort to break into the majors. He called at the offices of the biggest publisher, DC Comics, and was told they were full up but that there might be work at an affiliated company, All American. The editor there was Sheldon Mayer.

Mayer gave him a little work. When Nodell asked what it would take to get steady assignments, Mayer, who was looking for a new feature for the company's signature title, All-American Comics, told him to come up with a character. Nodell returned a few days later with sketches and the germ cell of a strip called Green Lantern. He said the idea had come to him on the subway when he saw a man waving — you guessed it — a green lantern. Nodell also said he wrote and drew the first few pages of the first story...but he wasn't a writer so Mayer brought in one of comics' top writers, Bill Finger, to rewrite and finish the first tale. The result was that Green Lantern, by Bill Finger and 'Mart Dellon,' debuted in All-American Comics #16, cover dated July of 1940. The character, which drew inspiration from the legend of Aladdin, was an immediate hit on the magnitude of the firm's other new superstars, The Flash and Wonder Woman, and soon received his own comic. (The All-American company was later absorbed by DC Comics. A new version of Green Lantern was created in 1959 and that version remains popular today, though the original Nodell incarnation has also been known to reappear.)

The Graphic Work of Lien-Cooper, Greenlee and Howe

Here's a webcomic site that I found through the comicspace website. There's some really good stuff in here, particularly Gun Street Girl and Red Dahlia. Really good art and stories. If you like comics, web or print, you should check these guys out.

Panel2Panel.com

I will probably be posting more webcomics as I come across them through this site.

Edit: Be sure to check out No Stereotypes too. Pretty good stuff.

Georgia Erases 519 Places Off the Map

So, what happens when the place where you live disappears from the map? This can be an intriguing start to a senario for your modern horror games. What if someone was trying to actively hide a town from the rest of the world? Somewhere, off of the official maps, are places with names like Arkham, Innsmouth, Gotham are out there waiting to be discovered again. But why have they been hidden so thoroughly, and who benefits from their hiding?

Georgia Erases 519 Places Off the Map

Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Between and Climax. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.

A total of 519 communities have been erased from the newest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere 'placeholders,' generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.

Someone Owes Science An Apology

Like a great man once said: 'Nuff said!

Your Mom's Basement: GALACTUS IS COMING!

From the Your Mom's Basement website:

Your Mom's Basement: GALACTUS IS COMING!

YMB's crack investigative team has unearthed the long rumored, but never confirmed, collaboration from 1983 between Marvel's Chairman Emeritus Stan Lee and religious comic tract creator Jack Chick.

Long out of print and now only infrequently stumbled upon in the odd truck stop bathroom (as all good religious witnessing tracts should be) YMB is now able to present to you 'Galactus is Coming!'

Jack Kerouac on Steve Allen

Just a few square questions...

Sausages affected by draconian trade laws

Warning: This sausage contains no actual dragon. WTF?

Sausages affected by draconian trade laws

A SPICY sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.

R.I.P. Jack Williamson

This is a great loss to science fiction.

Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson has been in the forefront of science fiction since his first published story in 1928. Williamson is the acclaimed author of such trailblazing science fiction as The Humanoids and The Legion of Time. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Williamson with inventing the terms 'genetic engineering' (in Dragon's Island) and 'terraforming' (in Seetee Ship). His seminal novel Darker Than You Think was a landmark speculation on the nature of shape-changing.

Jack Williamson died Friday 10th November at his home in Portales, New Mexico.

Williams was 98 at the time of his death.

No Magic Fantasy and Keeping The Fantastic

This is a thread that I started on RPGnet, and also on the RQ3 mailing list. Because of my buying up some RQ3 stuff, I am interested in giving a try at running a fantasy game again (for the first time in a very long time). Obviously, because of the fact that I don't actually like a lot of the stuff that passes for fantasy literature out there I am looking for a campaign that goes a bit further afield.

These conversations represent my thoughts coming together on the matter. It seems that some can't grasp the concept of fantasy without magic.

And, since I've mentioned it in both discussions, this Wikipedia entry sums up some of what I am interested in within this genre of the fantastic.

No Magic Fantasy and Keeping The Fantastic

I'm going to start this out by saying something that won't come as a big surprise to some: I'm not a big fan of fantasy literature. Sure, I've made my attempts at reading Tolkien, Jordan, and so many others that are out there but most of them have just not sparked my interest. There have been a few fantasy writers that I've liked over the years, but they tend to be sword and sorcery writers like Moorcock, Leiber and Howard. I guess that I just liked their energy a lot better. Because of this disinterest I got out of fantasy gaming round about 87 or, except for a couple of one shots back in college and a rather long run as a player in a D&D 3.0 game a couple of years back. The stuff just doesn't really get me going in a way that makes me want to run or play in a fantasy game for any long period of time.

I'm stating that so that we all have a baseline for the conversation here. This isn't going to be a 'let's talk Chris into liking fantasy literature' discussion.

However, recently (do to my buying up some old RQ3 stuff online...most of which I am still waiting to arrive) I've been eyeing putting together a fantasy game to run. Obviously I want something that will interest me as a gamer and a GM, which means that the heroic fantasy stuff is straight out. What I am interested in is something that has a very strong fantastic element to it, but without being the 'stereotypical' fantasy stuff that I am really not as interested in going into. Obviously, from the title of this thread, I am looking to run something with no magic in it. Period. No spell casters, no clerics with healing magic...none of that. I do want there to be elements of the fantastic in there, however. I want bizarre non-humans who are different from elves and dwarves, and who are more than just the familiar tropes and conventions dressed up in new clothing.

I want a world that is dangerous, strange and more than a little dark around the edges *but* at the same time I want the the heroes (the PCs) to be grand and larger than life. They are heroes who kick ass and take names, but at the same time there are grander threats to them out there in the larger world. But I don't want those threats to be so overwhelming that there is no chance of the PCs being able to achieve victory over these threads. I want mythic and fantastic, but without the usual trappings of magic that populate most fantasy games and books.

Please, comment and let me know what you think.

Edit: Here's an interesting blog post that was mentioned in the RPGnet thread.