An earnest dedication

I’ve been thinking of the best way to sum up what Betty Page’s death meant to me and had just settled on a theme when I found a notice from the Rodenberry family that Majel Barrett Passed away today. This is getting to be too much for me to process. So many people I’ve met are passing away this year.
Betty Page just reinforced the loss of Dave Stevens, two beautiful people who gave so much of them selves and asked so little in return. Forry Ackerman and Majel Barrett where larger than life icon that shaped the world in ways we will never know. Steve Gerber an ‘irascible’ gadfly who shook up comic not only with his writing but with his activism. Frank Thomas, last of Disney’s nine old men, became a metaphor of the state of the medium he helped create as well as Bill Melendez who breath life into the Charles Shultz’ Peanuts Gang and gave snoopy a voice.
There are so many more but it all just becomes words, the words become noise, and the noise is drowned out by the next rolling billboard. Life is for the Living. We have more important things to worry about; jobs, families, health. Who am I kidding; the next reality show will erase your memories like so many whiteboards. Did you catch that? “Catch what?” many of you will think but the old fogies got it right way. How many of you remember blackboards. Out with the old in with the new is the mantra in our fast paced lives. White boards are more sanitary than there dusty predecessors. Oh but you can’t produce the same variety or art on that slick laminated surface as you could on the deceptively smooth slate surface. You can streak, smudge and scrawl on that dark canvas with vibrant pastels that would never show on the pail young upstart. Many master pieces was lost to the teacher’s eraser to reside the recesses of the mind.
That is were all these people live now; in the “Remember when’s” and “Did you knows” of late night gad fests. I’ve decide that this is not a fitting tribute to people who shaped us as much as any parent or teacher ever did. I’ve this moment resolved to gather the works of the people who have passed. Not to preserve, there are groups much better equipped than I am. but to share. A few minutes here and there, with family and friends to rededicate them to our memories, reflecting on why they were more than just names in the credits. It’s the least I can do after all they’ve done for me.

Doing it for the kids: an RPG Tale

Prior entries on this site have established the staff of the AV Room as avid fans of role playing games.  RPGs are an excellent means of developing the imagination.  My current endeavor is an ambitious effort to introduce the nuances of role playing to a group of youngsters under the age of twelve.

In the past I would spend about two weeks of review before starting the latest installment of our 26 year old campaign. Having experience players gives the game master a solid foundation on which to build and also the flexibility to change things as needed. For the newest campaign I must plot as much in advance as possible.

When I finish I’ll have spent about 6 months planning out every detail.  I’ve developed a system were they start as 0-level characters who haven’t fully developed their attributes or skills and through game play they will develop both to first level and character age 15. I want to cover several weeks a session so I plan on having them plot how juggle apprenticeships with studies and practice will be covered in minimal rolls based on time management charts, i.e. did they get there chores done in time to go to class.  On their days off work they can do what they want.

To keep them occupied I’ve created detailed city maps and their surrounding terrain. There are hundreds of NPCs with complex social groups governments, secret societies and new character classes.  The ruins of the old city or liberally sprinkled with oodles of hidden goodies.  And I’m plotting encounters galore.  This will be my best thought out storyline for a campaign ever!

While there are lots of antagonist to keep the young players engaged I have to face my own enemy; boredom.  I have to compete with RPG progeny: the video game.  I will have to paint the most vivid pictures in their minds.  So I’m enlisting Herbie’s art skills to help flesh out their characters as well as the parents to guide them though the mechanics and maximize their fun.

The ultimate goal is fun.  For me fun will be the satisfaction of the player recounting game moments fondly.  Now I just have to convince a group of tweens that sitting around a table rolling dice is fun.

-CJ

What I’m Doing; Too Much

I am so tired.

I threw a birthday party for the wife Saturday.  Went from 2 pm to 2 am.  Woke up Sunday to find a burst pipe under my water heater.

My son begins testing next week so no television till the end of tests and reviews every night.

Most of the last week I’ve been trying to pin down Herbie to do more pod casts but LEX is giving him grief.

What’s really been eating up my time is the new Dungeons and Dragons campaign.  I’ve scrapped everything form the last campaign; maps, characters, villains, organizations and most of the magic.  I’m using elements of the previous 26 years as a foundation for the new campaign.  Character classes no seen in almost 20 years are back but none of the players from then would recognize them.   A new and larger city, the third one in the history of the campaign so far, has been built next to the flooded ruins of the old.  New magics that are not as benign as they seem. Races have been wiped from the map and others that were never been prevalent before will come to the fore front in roles never imagined.

This is just mechanics; the hard part is this time most of the player will be ‘tweens.  I’ve never played with anyone under 16, including myself, and I’m very concerned with holding the attention of a generation that grew up with Play Station and Wii.  I’m planning dozens of scenarios for each game session knowing how easily my own son gets bored.  So I’ve set myself the challenge of keeping it intelligent and exciting while trying to instill a desire to actually role-play and not have the player just react.  I’ve always strive to do so but the age of the players means I can not rely on natural curiosity to keep things going.

So pity the poor DM vying to win his sons heart from the silicone game monster.

I wonder if there is a saving trough versus media over load.

-cj

Allen Drinkwater’s Victory Tour

We chose Allen Drinkwater author of “Victory” as our first interview and he was a natural fit with the AVRoom’s brand of podcast.

Intelligent and knowledgeable he tells us in no uncertain terms the reasons for writing his novella.  Herbie and I have found a kinder spirit in this young man from Boston and will be speaking to him again in the future.

We hope you enjoy our conversation with Allen Drinkwater as much as we did.

-CJ

Fallen Heroes

It seems like all we do here on The AV-Room is count down the lives of our heroes who we have passed. I’d like to think that life after 40 is more than that, that we can look at the culture we live in and think that our lives are ongoing, but it just isn’t so. In the past six months since my friend CJ and I started the AV-Room we lost Steve Gerber, Gary Gygax, and also recently a personal idol, I won’t call him a friend even though I met him 15 years ago and bonded with him while he was still drawing his strip for Eclipse Comics: Dave Stevens.

Dave Stevens was the finest illustrator I have ever met personally. He adored the early American illustrators, as much as Steve “The Dude” Rude, or Adam Hughes or even Frank Cho do today, but he was the first. His strip “The Rocketeer” was a fetishistic rite into early airplane culture, a return to the time of the pulps and the serials that it was clearly based on, but also an adaptation and a modern distillation to whatever is modern and nostalgic about the culture that our parents or our grandparents were obsessed with. It was a yesterday filtered, filled with the adolescent yearning of planes, adventure and pretty women.

Oh, and the specter of Betty Page. Dave and Betty, Betty and Dave. Tied together, his pictures captured her and translated her essence to a kid too young to have ever seen her at her best. I talked to one and yearned for the other through my teens. I yearned to draw like Dave though, and in the end that is what we can all aspire to. To have touched someone enough to have driven them to follow in our path. I’m sure the Adam Hughes’s, and Steve Rude’s will cite him as a primogeniture, but me I’ll look at his splash pages and his pinups and wonder what might have been if he had lived.

He was born 10 blocks from where I was raised. Him and Weird-Al Yankovick, just ask me who I’d rather have around right now,  He assisted Russ Manning on Tarzan, helped Doug Wildey in Saturday-morning animation, and kept alive the image and likeness of every pinup model who ever lived, or he had ever loved.

He was an inspiration, as much for him as Jack Kirby was even though I didn’t have half the talent he did. I am thankful for his art and for The Rocketeer, and for Jennifer Connelly as Bettie Page, even if they couldn’t get her likeness for the movie, although we all pictured her in fishnets and chains, and all that we have Dave Stevens to thank for.

I know he had given up on his greatest creation, embittered by his Disney vacation, but I’d like to say that he was an inspiration. Rest in peace Dave. Thanks for the memories. It was a pleasure to have met a true gentleman.

-Herbie P.

Playing those Existential Blues

Do you remember that movie by Steve Martin “The Lonely Guy“?  Didn’t think so.  It’s a little know Martin vehicle that tells the tale of a suddenly single man struggling to find love and purpose and in his life.

I saw it when I was eighteen, my soon to be ex-girlfriend had left for college I was months away from active duty and I was killing time till then.  A bunch of us were kicking it at Herbie’s house ’cause he had cable.  We were all big Martin fans and so we started watching “The Lonely Guy“.  We were laughing through the first half of the movie ragging on each other that this or that scene was taken from their life.  It soon dawned on us that we were the character in the movie and the laughter ended.

It is a good movie but it made us think long and hard about our lives; sometimes I think that this is the reason Herbie Married LEX.  We were all single and direction less contemplating college or career.  Mine is the only generation I know that had midlife crisis in our twenties.  In the go go eighties and nineties if you weren’t making piles of cash or starting a family you were pretty much a dead beat or a slacker.

In a similar vain as “The Lonely Guy“ is an on-line comic strip Garfield minus Garfield. Like many people my age I enjoyed the early years of this comic and proudly placed a stuffed replica of the pasta loving feline in my car window. But alas all good things must come to an end and so did Garfield.

What’s that you say; “But Garfield is still running.”, “I read it every day in my paper.”, “They’re working on a third movie.”.  My point is there hasn’t been a good ‘Garfield‘ comic in decades.  The strip has become derivative of it’s self, repeating fat jokes and pasta quips repeatedly, a sure sign it’s past it’s prime. The antithesis would be ‘Get Fuzzy‘ with it’s sharp word play and layered secondary characters that give the even deeper leads plenty to play with.

Into this figurative and literal two dimensional world stumbled a genius able to see past the one note name sake and see the story behind the fluff.  The site says it best:

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured  mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”

When you think about it in real terms; only the mentally disturbed or terminally lonely converse with their pets.  Anthropomorphizing your cat into a person you talk to and answers you back is not the sign of a healthy mind.  In psychobabble terms Jon Arbucle is projecting his need for aformation onto his pets but his subconscious, feeding on his depression, reflects his self loathing off his pets back to himself.  So his cat is just a cat and the snide remarks are Jon’s ego manifesting and berating himself for his lack of initiative.  Yeah he’s that screwed up.

The absolute brilliance of G-G is the removal of the surrogate i.e., the cat, leaving Jon trapped in his own mind.  We see a man stripped of his defenses naked to the world suffering though bouts manic depression, paranoia, worthlessness and some things to disturbing to contemplate.  This is the lonely guy taken the nth degree.  Yes I do see people I know as well as my self reflected in the eerily existential story within this strip.

Jim Davis would do well to consider branching out into edgier fare.  He obviously has a lot of angst buried within himself as the edits on G-G shows.  The problem is that the ironic artistry would probably be lost once it passed though marketing.

-CJ

What I’m Reading: Freak Angels

Wizard Con LA had a number of interesting panels featuring the publishers and distributors in attendance.  Unfortunately I could only break away from the friends I was escorting to see one I’ve already written about.

Though I missed the AVATAR Press panel I did manage the next best thing.  I had a pleasant conversation with Marketing Director  David Marks about the heavy weight talent the represent like Allen Moore, Frank Miller and Jamie Delano just to name a few.  I have read a number of their titles with Warren Ellis’ Crecy being the one  I’d most recently read.  David let me know that Warren Ellis had a special project under way for AVATAR; FREAKANGELS

FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield there are five installments which chronicle the lives of young hip psychics who live in the Whitechapel district of London after the end of the world.  Seemingly indefferant to the state of the world they’ve carved out fiefdom for themselves.

This group of tragically beautiful pettygods who can’t help but bicker among themselves wake one day to find their bohemian psyocracy is being threatened by a shotgun toting Manc slag out to avenge her brothers.  The problem isn’t the girl, it’s what she represents.  Some time ago one of the group of twelve left on poor terms and has hatched a plot to send brainwashed drones to eliminate his former compatriots.

The story is just starting to take form.  We’ve been introduced to five of the twelve, one an installment so far.  Each has their own quirks so it will be interesting how Ellis will develop twelve individual characters that are similar in looks but different in personality.

What I must give kudos to is the practical use of a tinfoil hat in a comic.  Read it and you’ll see what I mean.

http://www.freakangels.com/

-CJ

And how was your holiday?

This was one of those weekends that if your not an observant Christian you were wondering why all the stores were closed.  The bowling alleys were open though; got in three games before going home to make Easter Dinner.  I’m not a big fan of holidays especially when you don’t get a day off.  Things are about to get real busy now.  I have to get final prep done for the costumes I have to make.  Should be getting to our interview next week.  I still have a lot to say about Wizard World LA ‘08.

Additionally there are a slew fandom related films coming up; Hell Boy 2, Batman 2, Hulk 2, Iron Man, Punisher: WarZone and WANTED.  There are even more sci-fi/fantasy movies; Speed Racer, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I have to sleep now evil supervisor make me work Over Time.

-CJ

What I’m Reading: ‘Victory’

Rabid Star Wars fans from Boston

Once I was so upset with my wife that I said to my friends we should just get away for a while.  We started making plans for a road trip to Vegas getting more excited by the moment contemplating what we’d do.  But as we got closer to the county line reality came crashing down on us.  We all had work the next day and we’d spent the day helping a friend get his house ready for his new born child.  So we didn’t take the trip and since one member has past and another has moved away.

Most people have similar stories of risks not taken desires unfulfilled.  The novella ‘Victory’ by Allen Drinkwater of grabbing desire by the balls and ridding it over the edge.  The narrator, a verbose slacker nerd who over analyzes every situation, convinces his friend Willams, an ego maniacal philosophy professor (what other kind is there) to slip the leash of convention after a night of literally taking life by the balls.

Two more unlikely heroes you’d be hard pressed to find.  The narrator mind is obviously set on hyper drive causing him to continuously pprocess the data around him.  Williams on the  other hand  has fits of brilliance that he must keep track of in a journal to organize his convoluted thoughts.  Thou seemingly unsympathetic it becomes apparent they are archetypes of the overly intelligent and under stimulated masses the pervade fandom.

As an editor there were times I would have said to cut down the dialog and tighten up the story but When I focus on just reading I can see that this is the narrators personality coming through.  He only has the one friend because He uses big words and over analyzes everything just like many fan boys and sudo intellectuals.  Williams speaks in a more concise manner because he arrives at conclusions before he speaks and thinks himself in charge of any situation, which is not always the case.  Further more their life affirming missions are to embarrass and old flame and get a movie icon to admit hes a money grubbing hack.  The third member of this expedition introduced about 2/3rds into the story Jamie, an Afro-American Vietnam Vet. who found salvation in sci-fi, is much more plane spoken and is a enjoyable contras to the more intellectual members of the trio translating much of the other pompous bullshit into layman terms.

This is not the fluffy piece of escapism found on the shelves of your local mega book dealer.  This is a story written by a fan about a fan for fans.  Breaking with convention each character we meet speaks with his own voice without regard of commercial norms.    Though well rooted in fantasy we are always reminded that everything has a consequence though sometimes far fetched are always satisfying.

If your not scared by words you should go to www.victoryisyours.net and enter a fantasy world were if your answer to who’s Nietzsche is “He’s de guy who said God’s Dead” will earn you a well deserved nut shot.

-CJ

What I’m Doing: Getting Organized

Wow I’ve made a lot of work for my self.  I have stacks of notes from Wizard Con to go though.  I’m following up with the contacts I made and reading the materials I gathered from them. I’ll be posting reviews, observations and interview as quickly as I digest the data.

I’m currently reading Allen Drinkwater’s novella ‘Victory’.  I’ve read the fist 3 chapters and must say I’ve laughed out load so many times my wife is wondering if my tenuios grip on sanity had finally been lost. I’ll post a review of the novella tomorrow.
So stay tuned as I regurgitate what I pass off as knowledge and observation.

-CJ