As of December 2016, I hadn’t maintained or updated my Amazon wishlist in… I don’t know… years? But my folks, who have ever endeavored to surprise me with Christmas gifts that they knew (or assumed) I wanted, and had newly discovered the ease of shopping online, found Fantasy Flight’s box set for the third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay deep within a list of graphic novels I had already since purchased (or forgotten about) and now out-of-print vinyl.
So my Christmas present that year was indeed a surprise.
Don’t get me wrong — I was excited to receive it. It was just that, the last time I had played WFRP was probably the summer of 1991 and, except for a brief attempt at Trinity in the early 00’s, that was the last time I had played a tabletop rpg of any kind.
My love affair with gaming during those intervening decades was as tumultuous as my human romantic relationships, and no less complicated. That’s a blog post for another time. Suffice to say while I satisfied a passion for games with a host of different collectible card games and an ever-increasing library of boardgames, I had neither the time nor the support to dive back in to ttrpg’s.
That all changed when I moved back home to San Francisco in 2012. I had reunited with a group of friends and family that loved late nights at a dining room table covered with dice, tokens, and map tiles almost as much as me. Around this same time, my brother, who had never himself played a ttrpg, but had been listening to a number of newly popular gaming podcasts, expressed a desire to start a D&D campaign. My Dungeons & Dragons experience was buried even further back in the past (last time had been… ’87?), but I do know something about this Warhammer universe and it just so happens that we’ve got this massive box of third edition WFRP goodies to explore.
Continue reading A Brief, Unspectacular Attempt at 3rd Edition WFRP
You know what? Absolute Carnage #1 by Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman is, actually, really pretty good. Why the qualifiers? Because I’ve never been a big fan of the character, and what little interest I did have in Spider-Man’s stable of symbiotic super-villains dropped off considerably as the ultra-violent aesthetic swallowed up the 80’s anti-hero boom and suddenly, painfully, took precedence over any kind of decent comic book storytelling or artistry. Subconsciously I think I’ve somehow equated the Punisher/Deadpool/Venom-Carnage fanbase with the same people who can’t stand seeing a Black Captain America or a Jane Foster swinging Mjolnir. I don’t have time to waste on that nonsense. So, coupled with my disinterest in the characters, I also assume any new books featuring those guys would therefore target that audience. Pass.
I’m not lazy by any means. I’m swamped. “Idle time” isn’t what it once was and finding shit to write about every week has its challenges. That said, my experimental effort at a blog entry title that, much like a spontaneous tweet accompanied by an image or two, can communicate everything I need should, also, force me to blather on introspectively in the most blog-like of fashions. Which is what I just did.
For some time now I’d been trying to transition from straightforward weekly new release bulletins to something a little more bloggy (read: pathetically self-indulgent), but related to comics all the same. That War of the Realms rundown really burned me out. Not just with writing brief four-color reviews either — I was worried that I needed a real break from superhero books. I’ve been reading and collecting comics pretty much nonstop for over thirty years and, for whatever reason, these last few months had seen my unread stacks pile up to unprecedented heights (save for the stupid WotR tie-ins, given my stubborn insistence that I read every damn page in order and on time) and my enthusiasm for reading the latest installments of some of my favorite capes n’ tights books had stalled considerably.
Avengers #21 – Mondo Variant (Marvel)
Blade Runner 2019 #1 – Artgerm Exclusive Virgin Variant (Titan Entertainment)
This book shouldn’t be this good. It also shouldn’t only be three issues. Every year Marvel does one of these anthology tie-ins for its summer event and they’re usually a hodgepodge of tangential short stories by aspiring writers and artists that add very little to the overall storyline… and are largely forgettable to boot.
What I probably should be doing is talking about the incredible Silver Surfer: Black by Donny Cates and Tradd Moore. Or at the very least, my initial impressions of DC’s Event Leviathan by Bendis and Maleev. But instead I’m rolling ahead with more quick hits on everything remotely related to Marvel’s War of the Realms. After perusing this list of crossovers and tie-ins, however, my hope is that the casual fan will forego all this tangential crap and read one of the two aforementioned books instead. I’m getting ready to bury the hammer, Marvel. Let’s wrap this shit up, yeah?
When I started this earnest effort at charting Marvel’s big summer event, my goal was to tackle, first and foremost, the readability of War of the Realms and all of its associated crossovers, tie-ins, and supplements. The idea was to see whether or not I could recapture the wonderful anticipation I used to feel with these types of stories (Civil War comes to mind most immediately), or if disjointed and confusing narratives were going to be the new norm. I haven’t always read all the tangential crap, but I’ve felt like, in most cases, I’ve consumed the majority. Despite that, gaps in storytelling from forced compression or publishing delays have really affected that experience (Civil War II, by contrast, stands out in this regard).
