18 July 2022

Ground Zero (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 24)

Ground Zero: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Alan Barnes, Gareth Roberts, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 1995-96
Acquired: December 2020
Read: April 2022

This volume continues the "past Doctor" focus of Land of the Blind, but with a more unified approach otherwise. Bar two fill-ins, every story in the volume is illustrated by Martin Geraghty; the strip hasn't had a unified artistic vision since John Ridgway went from primary artist to one of many back in 1988, so around seven years prior! I like the unity of approach, but even better that it's Geraghty, who is great both with likenesses and storytelling, the combo you need—but don't always find—in a tie-in artist. There's also a new unity of vision behind the scenes; the commentary in this volume by strip editor Gary Gillatt is great stuff, showing how he decided to totally change the approach of the strip.

Curse of the Scarab / Operation Proteus / Target Practice, from Doctor Who Magazine #228-34 (Aug. 1995–Jan. 1996)
stories by Alan Barnes and Gareth Roberts, art by Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell

We open with a three-part fifth Doctor and Peri story, a three-part first Doctor and Susan story, and a one-part third Doctor and Jo story. They are all pretty competent. Curse of the Scarab is a decent adventure runaround, with some fun ideas and some more implausible ones; like a lot of Alan Barnes's Big Finish work, this involves plunging the Doctor into a certain moment in historical pop culture, and Barnes is a good pop culture historian, so it works. Some lush artwork from Geraghty helps. Operation Proteus is okay; again, there's some good stuff and some other stuff I found harder to buy, such as the way the cure is deployed. Target Practice is the DWM main strip debut of Adrian Salmon (I guess he was already doing the Cybermen strip, but I won't get to that for some time), and he is one of my favorites. His style is well suited to the subject matter.

from Doctor Who Magazine #235

Black Destiny, from Doctor Who Magazine #235-37 (Feb.-Apr. 1996)
story by Gary Russell, art by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

Martin Geraghty may be a good artist, but he's not a good enough artist (yet, anyway) to save us from Gary Russell's confusing transitions; there were several moments in this story where I didn't know what was going on or who was who. The resolution is total nonsense, introducing a whole idea never before mentioned in the story.

from Doctor Who Magazine #238

Ground Zero, from Doctor Who Magazine #238-42 (Apr.-Aug. 1996)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

It feels different this time...

This story does a lot of things to change it up, to signal that the comic strip as you knew it is at an end. There's an ongoing story in DWM for the first time since, I think, The Mark of Mandragora way back in #169-72... five years prior! Ground Zero picks up on hints dropped in three of the previous four stories in this volume, paying off why a mysterious a voice accosted Peri, Susan, and Sarah Jane.

It's also our first story with more than three installments since Final Genesis in 1993. It uses its five parts to good advantage, twisting and turning through a complicated plot; it has powerful cliffhangers. Obviously the death of Ace, but the reappearance of the old companions and the TARDIS plunging into the human collective unconsciousness are also great moments, well executed. The story uses its space to good advantage.

It also feels very now for the first time in a long time. This is the Doctor of the tv movie, not the show, not just in costume, but in attitude, and in an indication that both he and Susan are part human. The death of Ace adds to this: the strip is an ongoing concern, able to change its own narrative in a way that hasn't been true since the introduction of Bernice Summerfield. But it's not just the death of Ace. The story builds off what has come before and sets up what is to come.

On top of all that, it's a dang good story. I will say it runs a bit intense for my tastes—Peri is put through the wringer in a way I don't quite like—but it's engaging, it's interesting, the identity of the narrator is a good reveal, it has great concepts, it has great visuals. The empty streets, the Threshold, the TARDIS straining itself, the console room exploding, and of course Ace's death. Tremendous stuff, and I devoured it. Though I have enjoyed the strip more than I have not since A Cold Day in Hell!, it really does feel like something special is back.

from Doctor Who Magazine #243

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #243 (Sept. 1996)
story + art by Sean Longcroft, lettering by Elitta Fell

This is a neat little semiautobiographical story about writer and artist Sean Longcroft's on-again off-again love affair with the show, peronified by him interacting with Tom Baker as the Doctor. Well done, I found it amusing and heartwarming in equal measure. "[Y]ou can't be four years old forever, you know. But part of you always will be."

Stray Observations:

Gary Gillatt says in the commentary that around this time, strips by Colin Baker, Barry Letts, and Andrew Cartmel all fell through. We've seen good stuff from Cartmel, but the other two leave me a little more apprehensive. Did we dodge a bullet or miss works of artistic genius? We'll never know, I guess.
It took a few posts of explanation from friendly GallifreyBase posters for me to get the last-panel joke in Curse of the Scarab that Barnes is so proud of in the notes. A bit belabored.
Gary Russell admits he can't actually write comics in the notes, but he only realized this after being punted off IDW's Doctor Who comic after six issues of its eighteen-issue run. I agree, to be frank (his IDW story was terrible), and I admire his honesty. Despite this self-realization, he's evidently writing an upcoming comic for Cutaway...
I understand the reasoning behind jettisoning the Bernice Summerfield era from the strip's history (#193-208), maybe even all the way back to the first VNA allusion (The Grief in #185). But by showing the classic tv console room being exploded, the strip lops off a bit of its own history, as the new console room was its invention, in The Chameleon Factor (#174).
It's particularly a shame, as the strip had made this "yes our own history does matter" move before, with the sequence leading up to The Mark of Mandragora. As the new-era strip will do in its next installment in End Game, that storyline even referenced the very first ever DWM story to make it clear that yes, the ongoing story you have read since The Iron Legion is back! But that is gone, along with the VNAs, even though I don't think it had to go with them.
When logging this collection in LibraryThing, I realized that my children already own a book by Sean Longcroft... he is the illustrator of Usborne's First Book about the Orchestra, a "noisy" book I read them many times until the circuitry shorted. Now that I know, I can actually see it in the style.

This post is the twenty-fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers End Game. Previous installments are listed below:

15 July 2022

Reading The Lost Princess of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the one-two punch of The Scarecrow of Oz and Rinkitink, I felt like I was missing the Oz characters. Sure, they showed up in those massive celebrations at the end of each book (by now a traditional way for Baum to squeeze in all your favorite characters) but I missed all those folks, you know? Baum must have felt the same way (or, rather, known his readers would) because Lost Princess of Oz contrives to include a large number of familiar characters.

Originally published: 1917
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

The premise here is that overnight, a number of things vanish: Glinda's Great Book of Records, the magical tools of both Glinda and the Wizard, Ozma's Magic Picture, (in the far-off Yip Country) a Magic Dishpan... and Ozma herself! Our characters must search the country without any of their customary powers at their disposal. They divide into four search parties, one for each of the four quadrants of Oz. Without any actual leads, their plans are apparently to just wander around looking for stuff; it seems to me that had Ozma been in the Gillikin Country, being searched by the Shaggy Man, his brother, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead, she might be lost still. Thankfully, she turns out to be in the Winkie Country, which is (wow what a coincidence) being search by the largest group, consisting of Dorothy, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Button-Bright, the Wizard, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, the Cowardly Lion, the Woozy, the Sawhorse, and Toto. As they go, even more join the group: the Frogman, Cayke the Cookie Cook, and the Lavender Bear.

For the most part, Baum does an okay job by this large cast of characters. The Wizard gets some good problem-solving moments, and Scraps's sideways logic also comes in handy at times. Button-Bright's ability to get lost actually turns out to be a key plot point. The animal characters don't contribute much to the plot, but there are a couple scenes where they talk to each other a lot; in fact, Toto talks an unprecedented amount here, a marked contrast to his reticence to speak in Tik-Tok. The Woozy never really does anything, though; I have a feeling that Baum included him just because Neill like drawing him. (In many of the books, Neill includes the Woozy in crowd scenes where he is not mentioned in the text; this book has an illustration of the Woozy wearing an apron and doing dishes in the Magic Dishpan! Not a thing that actually happens but a delight to look at.)

The main issue is that having all three girls in the group is pretty pointless: narratively Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy are the same, and thus Trot and Betsy end up largely not doing anything. I think if Baum wanted to flesh out the relationship between the three girls (which would be a fun thing to do), he would have had to do something like make it be just the three of them. Or if he wanted to give Trot and Betsy something to do, he should have sent them out with other search parties (and given those search parties something to do). The working title was Three Girls in Oz, but reading the finished book, you can see why he dropped it.

Anyway, the whole thing is good fun. It does sort of beggar belief that Dorothy's search party finds Ozma in the third place they look after setting out in a totally random direction, and some of the rules Baum imposes on this "mystery" don't really make any sense (the characters conclude that Ozma must be in Oz because no one can cross the Deadly Desert... two books ago, Trot herself flew into Oz over the Deadly Desert!), and Baum seems to forget how the Magic Belt works (but if it did work here as it had in Ozma of Oz, the book would end around chapter five).

But it does the thing I like an Oz book to do: interesting places to visit, weird problems for the characters to reason their ways out of, good interactions between the characters. The misdirection of the clues about where Ozma is according to the truth-speaking Little White Bear are pretty cleverly done. I like any Oz book with Button-Bright comedy. I don't know what's up with the "Toto loses his growl subplot" but it is entertaining. The Frogman is an interesting character... though my favorite new character was Corporal Waddle, the little toy brown bear soldier who takes himself and his useless popgun very seriously. Stay tuned for Corporal Waddle in Oz?

My son seemed to enjoy it: lots of characters doing fun things. When I asked, he said, "I liked it the same as Rinkitink. I liked the good parts but didn't like the bad parts." The "bad parts" turned out to be the passage detailing how Ugu the Shoemaker traveled around Oz stealing all the magical implements and kidnapping Ozma. He also began telling me about his own oz book, [His Name] in Oz, which is exactly the same as The Lost Princess of Oz, except that he presses a button that defeats Ugu the Shoemaker so no one gets kidnapped! But more on that book in future installments...

One other thing to note: this is the first set-in-Oz novel Baum wrote after the publication of Tik-Tok, which included for the first time detailed maps of Oz. You can tell, because the descriptions of Oz geography suddenly become much more detailed and consistent here; Baum talks about rivers in the Winkie Country are, and what characterizes different regions of it. He continues to pay attention to geography in this way over the remaining three of his Oz novels, unlike the somewhat ad hoc way he had described things previously.

13 July 2022

The James Bond Daily Express Newspaper Strips, Volume 2

The James Bond Omnibus, Volume 002

Collection published: 2011
Contents published: 1964-68
Acquired: January 2022
Read: April 2022

Adapted by Henry Gammidge & Jim Lawrence

Art by John McLusky & Yaroslav Horak

Beginning in 1958, the Daily Express ran a daily comic strip adapting the James Bond novels, which has been collected into a series of omnibuses by Titan. I reviewed the first volume a few years ago, and now that I've read all the novels adapted in the second, I've read that one, too. This collects adaptations of the last few James Bond books—On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Octopussy & The Living Daylights—and then it circles back to adapt some stuff skipped over before—"The Hildebrand Rarity" from For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me.

The first two stories here are written by Henry Gammidge and illustrated by John McLusky; McLusky illustrated every story in volume 001 and Gammidge wrote most of them, and as there, they are perfectly serviceable adaptations. Gammidge doesn't make a lot of tweaks to the stories, usually just streamlining them a bit, e.g., long passages about Bond learning about Japanese culture in You Only Live Twice just don't make the cut. He does make the biggest change I can recollect from him in YOLT; in the novel, Bond infiltrates Blofeld's Japanese base alone, but here, Kissy Suzuki sneaks in with him. The story also has a weird discontinuity; at its beginning, Mary Goodnight is introduced as Bond's new secretary, but at its end, when Bond is thought dead, we're told she's so sad because she had been Bond's secretary for years. He does also massage the way one story leads into the next; we see Mary get reassigned to Station J after Bond dies, setting up her role in The Man with the Golden Gun.

from The Man with the Golden Gun (ser. 3, no. 194)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

With The Man with the Golden Gun, Jim Lawrence takes over the writing and Yaroslav Horak the art. Horak's art is more exaggerated and even sometimes grotesque than McLusky's more realist style; the women are more apt to pose suggestively. I did sometimes find it harder to follow, but I also found it more immersive.

from The Living Daylights (ser. 3, no. 255)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

Lawrence is much more likely to take liberties in his adaptations. He adds a whole subplot in The Man with the Golden Gun before Bond goes to Jamaica; Bond is recuperating from his brainwashing at the same clinic where one of Scaramanga's victims is recovering, and is turns out the victim's nurse is a Russian spy who tries to seduce Bond, and then whom he foils. The Living Daylights is a pretty straight adaptation, but Octopussy adds a lot. The short story is told from the perspective of the villain; Bond comes to see him, tells him he's been caught, and the villain ends his own life. But here, we see Bond's investigation play out in Austria, aided by (of course) a young woman, and then in Jamaica, aided by both her and Mary Goodnight, picking up from TMWTGG. Chinese gangsters try to kill Bond; the whole thing is much more elaborate.

from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 271)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

This, then, becomes the go-to method for the last two adaptations. There's no spy plot in the original of "The Hildebrand Rarity"; Bond just bumps into some rich American jerk collecting wildlife specimens while on vacation. Here, the rich American jerk is also working with the Soviets to steal an experimental NATO unmanned submarine. Many people seem to praise these strips for capturing the feel of the novels, but in this one, I felt the influence of the movies a bit; the strips began before the films did, but by the time of this strip, the first four or five films were out, and it feels a bit Thunderball to me in particular. The Spy Who Loved Me is also quite different; the first two thirds of that novel don't feature Bond at all, but tell the life story of Vivienne Michel, whose life Bond saves in the final third. The novel replaces all this with a completely unrelated story about Bond trying to stop a recently revived SPECTRE from stealing technical data on a new stealth airplane. This expands massively on a very brief story Bond tells Vivienne in the novel. Again, it feels more film Bond than novel Bond.

from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 428)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

But it also works. I like adaptations best when they bring something new to the table; Gammidge and McLusky did solid work, but it often didn't add much. Lawrence and Horak's work is at its best when they are adding their own stuff, and I look forward to seeing where they go in future volumes, when the strip's adventures became (with one exception) wholly original, because based on this, they know how to spin an entertaining Bond tale even without Fleming as a basis.

I became curious: On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the longest Bond comic story so far, clocking in at 274 strips. On the other hand, The Living Daylights is the shortest, at just 54. But volume 001's Thunderball was 64, and adapted an entire novel, while this volume's The Hildebrand Rarity is 174 strips but is adapting a short story. So which strips were the most expanded/condensed? To work this out, I counted out how many strip installments each comic story took up, and counted how many pages each corresponding story ran in my 2006 Penguin editions of the Bond books.

Blue indicates stories by original artist McLusky and his various collaborators, yellow stories by Horak and Lawrence, and red is for averages.

The average compression is that one page of prose becomes 0.65 strips; if you remove the short stories from that, it drops to 0.53, because the average page of a short story becomes 2.24 strips! It's quite a difference, but even the two Horak/Lawrence novel adaptations are the only novel adaptations to have more than one strip per page of prose. The later McLusky/Gammidge ones were trending longer, though, with You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service the only two of their novel adaptations to be above the average compression. Were they expanding the stories as the grew closer to running out of Fleming stories to adapt?

Astoundingly, the 48 pages of "Octopussy" can become 167 strips (3.48 strips per page), while the 336 pages of Thunderball become just 64 strips (0.19 strips per page).

11 July 2022

The Furies by Mike Carey and John Bolton

The Sandman Presents: The Furies

Originally published: 2002
Acquired: February 2022
Read: March 2022

Writer: Mike Carey

Artist: John Bolton
Letterer: Todd Klein

I read this over a decade ago in its context as a Sandman story. Now, I return to it with a new context: a JSA-adjacent story. Specifically, a story of Lyta Hall, who had been a main character in Roy Thomas's Earth-Two comic Infinity, Inc. before she got picked up by Neil Gaiman as a Sandman character. When we last saw Lyta in Infinc, she was married and pregnant, and then her husband Hector died, but it turned out he kind of lived anyway, as the new Sandman of the Dream Dimension. When Gaiman picked up with Hector and Lyta in The Sandman, he killed off Hector again and made Lyta the instrument of the death of The Sandman's Dream, and then made their son Daniel the new Dream. So when this comic starts, Lyta is trying to return to her life in Los Angeles, attempting to cope with the seeming death of her child. (From a chronology standpoint, it does read a little strangely. Lyta's apartment still has a baby room? This comic was published in 2002, and Lyta got pregnant way back in 1987 or so, but such is comic-book time.)

So how does it work as an Infinity, Inc. story? The answer is that it's okay, not as good as it does a Sandman story. There is an Infinity, Inc. group shot on one page, but overall this does the Sandman thing of being very oblique in its references to the superhero world it was all derived from. I did have to wonder at some of the continuity of it all. Lyta is of Greek descent, and knows the Greek language and Greek mythology... this would have made sense in her pre-Crisis backstory, when she was the daughter of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman, but post-Crisis, though her mother was Greek, she didn't know that until she was an adult; she was adopted and raised by Admiral Derek Trevor and the former superhero Miss America, Joan Dale-Trevor. But maybe I am overthinking all this!

Whose work has John Bolton pasted these real people heads over, anyway?

The Furies works as a story of a strong woman whose strength fails her. Lyta was an immensely powerful person, but she became a victim and a pawn—how can she get her agency back? I really like Lyta, and I remember liking the story, so I was looking forward to the reread... but I struggled with actually being emotionally connected to this story, since as I last read the relevant issues of The Sandman back in 2010, I was a bit fuzzy on what had actually happened to Lyta! So overall, fine but not great.

When I read panels like this, I kind of wonder what Roy Thomas thinks about Lyta's post-Infinc life. Did he ever imagine a comic where Lyta gets out her frustrations by having sex with and then beating up random men she meets in bars?

I am curious to see how it ends up playing into Geoff Johns's JSA run, if it does at all. As of this writing, I've read the first volume of that, where we're told Hector (resurrected again, of course) can't find Lyta. But according to this, she's living in their old apartment in LA, and the police have her on a register of ex-superheroes, so how is he so bad at looking!?

This post is twenty-eighth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One. Previous installments are listed below:

All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)

The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)

All-Star Squadron (1981-87)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)

Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)

America vs. the Justice Society (1985)

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)

Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)

Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]

Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)

Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)

Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)

Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)

The Young All-Stars (1987-89)

Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]

The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)

The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)

Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)

Armageddon: Inferno (1992)

Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)

Damage (1994-96)

The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)

Chase (1998-2002)

Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)

08 July 2022

Star Trek Adventures: Playing "A World with a Bluer Sun"

After "Biological Clock," I knew I wanted my Star Trek Adventures game to have a few more standalone episodes, but I didn't have a strong opinion as to what those actually would be. So I made a list of all the ones accessible to me and literally picked one with RANDOM.ORG! (Well, kind of. When I do this, I do "reroll" if it means we'll have back-to-back missions that are somewhat similar. Like, I wouldn't want two Prime Directive–focused episodes in a row.) Doing this brought me to a mission from the These Are the Voyages compilation...

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 48276.1. After our harrowing ordeal in the microverse, we’ve put in at a neutral Haradin space facility so that both ship and crew can recover. In the interim, I’ve recused myself from command, and the ship is being run in rotation by the lower deck shift supervisors. It will be good experience for them before we resume our journey… beyond the Rim of the Starlight!”

Episode 7: "Never Again to See a Blue Sunrise"

(based on "A World with a Bluer Sun" by Marco Rafalá)

Planning the Mission

the unnamed planet orbiting the wormhole
(stock art, I think)

The premise of this one is that the players find a crashed Starfleet shuttle on an alien planet; they then discover the shuttle came from a century-old Starfleet vessel trapped in a wormhole, though thanks to time dilation, the shuttle crashed just six years ago and the ship has only been in the wormhole for two. Because of the death of the captain, the crew has divided into three paranoid, warring factions, mostly around departmental lines. This was easy to fit into my campaign setting: I made the wormhole responsible for carrying the USS Atlantis beyond the Rim of the Starlight.

That said, the scenario as written is set in the original series era, and the Atlantis is an NX-class ship from the Enterprise era, specifically from the time of the Earth-Romulan war. I decided to move the Atlantis's era up in parallel with my campaign's era. Specifically, I made the Atlantis a Walker-class starship (like the Shenzhou from Discovery), and the time period it had come from became the Klingon war seen in Discovery season one. I had a couple different reasons; one was that I am pretty sure no one in my group has seen Enterprise, but a few have seen Disco (season one at least). Another was that things on the Atlantis are very paranoid and dark, and that seemed a good fit for Starfleet in Disco season one. Enhancing that, in the scenario as written, the Atlantis crew is concerned about Romulan infiltration, but in Disco season one, the Klingons infiltrate Starfleet with a surgically disguised agent, so fear of infiltrators would be justified. On top of all this, I have a nice Eaglemoss model of the Shenzhou!

I also tweaked the time dilation some: two years seemed an awful long time given how bloodthirsty everyone was. So I had the shuttle crash be three years ago, and the Atlantis's time in the wormhole six months.

USS Atlantis in the wormhole
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

This one worried me a bit going in. Every mission we'd done thus far had just a couple NPCs. This one has three factions on the Atlantis, each of which is represented by two named NPCs. I put a bunch of work into reorganizing what each faction believed about what was happening on the Atlantis, partially to streamline it, and partially to make it something I believed in more, and thus felt I could play. I wanted every faction to be kind of right and kind of wrong. In the scenario as written, some of it is very beyond the pale, with things like the science officer kidnapping people to perform lethal experiments on them! I wasn't convinced. What I ended up coming up with:

The Engineering faction thinks there's a Klingon infiltrator on the ship, and that it is almost certainly the head of the Command faction. If Atlantis returns to Earth without purging the Klingon, it could run rampant in Starfleet Headquarters. This faction wants to find and kill the “Klingon” — and if half the Atlantis crew must be sacrificed in the process, then so be it. This is war.
The Command faction thinks there is an alien, not of Klingon origin, but some kind of malevolent force brought by the wormhole, and they can’t let it go free. It is their duty to destroy the alien before it destroys them. Should it reach an Earth colony or other populated area, millions could die. They think the chief engineer is probably the alien, hence (they think) the reason the engineers mutinied against the first officer's authority after the captain died.
The Sciences faction thinks there is no infiltrator on the Atlantis, seeing this belief as an extension of the militarist mindset that had infected Starfleet during the Federation-Klingon War; they resent the co-opting of their research by the war programme, and see what is happening on the Atlantis as an extension of that. The chief science officer thinks, though, that the object that created the wormhole is a Klingon weapon; the chief medical officer thinks it's not Klingons but unknown aliens, and that these aliens are broadcasting radiation to make the Atlantis crew paranoid. (The science officer does murder someone still, a subordinate who is going to prove she's wrong about the wormhole object being Klingon.)

To help the players track who was who, I actually used screenshots of Disco background characters to represent each named NPC, so they would have a visual reference. I also almost always do some gender-tweaking to the characters. On top of that, the whole Atlantis senior staff in the scenario as written was human, because the ship comes from before the Federation; I initially made the first officer Mallory into a Zaranite named Camalov, but then I realized I should make her into an Osnullus, since that species appears on Disco, and thus I could depict her in the right uniform.

If it's helpful to you, here are my Atlantis crew mock-ups:

Other than that, my main change (thanks to a post on Reddit) was to streamline the mission a bit by removing a tribunal scene that would have scene a lot of NPCs arguing with one another. I changed it to the head of the Command faction just using a bogus test to "prove" the chief engineer was the infiltrator, no calling of witnesses or anything.

USS Atlantis transporter room
(art from These Are the Voyages)

Lastly, I did change the title. I doubt my players would have noticed or cared, but the "A World with..." construction felt too similar to our opening story arc's "A World Beyond the Starlight." After toying around with various ideas ("To Seek a Bluer Sun" was one, which I ended up using as the title of Act III), I ultimately used a sidebar title from the mission description, one that seemed pretentious enough to fit into my preferred style for Star Trek episode titles! (To make it work, though, one needs to make sure they read that sidebar aloud, especially its final line: "...I am never again to see the blue sunrise of home." If you don't do that, blue suns are never actually mentioned in the story!)

Playing the Mission

For this mission, I had six players. Five were continuing on from "Biological Clock":

Hayley as Liana Carver, human science officer
Cari as Jor Lena, Bajoran security officer
Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, Tellarite medical officer
Céline as Seleya, Vulcan engineer
Keith as Vivik, Arkarian pilot

We were also rejoined by one who had been in episodes 3 and 4, but then taken a hiatus from the group:

Claire as Mooria Loonin, Trill command officer

Claire had never gotten to command an away mission in her two episodes, and Céline and Keith were too recent to have commanded, either. The episode actually has two away missions, so I put Keith in charge of the first (a quick excursion to the planet's surface) and Claire the second (the trip to the Atlantis in Acts II-III). Loonin has a couple different Values about command being co-operative, so putting her in charge of a situation that had deteriorated so badly seemed apt.

USS Atlantis deck plans
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

It took us two-and-a-half sessions of three hours each to play through the whole thing. The first session, the half one, covered the first two scenes of Act I, plus the teaser I had written, which is where the players first investigate the planet and its crashed shuttle. Some of the Reddit reports I read noted that some early parts of the mission seem like red herrings, and thankfully my players didn't spend too much time on those.

The second session covered Act I, Scene 3 and then most of Act II. This has the crew taking stock of the wormhole, and then beaming over to the Atlantis. At one point, Hayley had to step out of the room just before she needed to do something, which gave the other players extra time to brainstorm what she could do. The mission-as-written suggests that the player ship could attempt to destroy the object they find in the wormhole. This didn't even occur to my players, but they progressed from wondering if they could use a tractor beam to pull the Atlantis out to coming up with a plan involving using a probe as a relay to create communications with the Atlantis. Great plan... unfortunately, they rolled badly and the probe was destroyed by the gravity in the wormhole! I always like it when they do some good Star Trek–style brainstorming. They also had the good idea to bring an advanced communications device, more powerful than a comm badge, along, and there was definitely a point where I let them talk to their own ship that I wouldn't have, if they didn't have it.

(One of the conceits of the mission-as-written is that the player ship is on low Power... but if there's a spot in the Core Rulebook that lays out how much Power different ship functions cost, I couldn't find it!)

bottom view of the Atlantis, focusing on bridge
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

Once they were on the Atlantis, it became tricky: unlike any other STA episode I have run so far, the players have a lot of flexibility in terms of where they go and how they do things and what they do. The mission-as-written is filled with a lot of notes about what might happen where, so I was constantly flipping back and forth trying to keep track of everything. It was all doable, and I enjoyed it, but it was a far cry from very linear starter set! Giving them pictures of the NPCs really seemed to help, and I also used my play mat to write down some high-level notes about the various factions on the Atlantis.

The players did not intervene in the battle between the Command and Engineering factions that is going on when they beam in; they then fell in with the Engineering faction at first, before spending their time moving around the ship trying to persuade the factions to agree to a cease-fire so that they could work together to free the crew. In doing this, they try to piece together the mystery: Is there really an intruder on board? Is it Klingon or alien? I let them take their time at first, but when we started the third session, I spent some Threat to establish that the ship's structure was decaying rapidly. They decided to split up and pursue different avenues (something I usually encourage by giving the players extra Momentum): two went to fix the Atlantis's transporters, two to investigate the strange pod in the launch bay, and two to talk to the Command faction.

I found that the episode really kicked into gear in this last session. The players investigating the pod (Vivik and Gurg) did a good job; Gurg's player in particular followed one of his Values ("Pursuit and Sharing of Knowledge") and didn't attend the tribunal so that he could do extra scans for evidence of what life-form might have been on the pod.

Loonin and Jor had a good showdown with Commander Camalov. The tribunal scene was strong; Loonin and Jor had the idea to persuade Parish to let them say something to the assembled crew before Camalov could do her bogus test on Phillips, and Claire gave a truly excellent speech about Starfleet values and won everyone over. The players were flabbergasted when Camalov shot Phillips, and Phillips did nearly die, but things turned out okay there in the end. The mission-as-written has a lot of suggested Threat spends for this section, which was very helpful to me. It felt pretty tense to me throughout the last act, especially when Camalov returned to try to kill the real intruder.


Commander Camalov's office (former mess hall) (Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

I did find one thing I read on Reddit is true; bringing Kearney, the crash survivor, along to the Atlantis, does feel kind of pointless. She mostly just followed the players around. But I did make some use of her, in that her presence made it easier for the players to convince Parish, Kearney's old subordinate, to help them at one point. But, I hadn't encouraged the players to take her or anything; it had been entirely their own idea.

When the players first rescued Kearney, she noted that their uniforms were different, causing Jor to respond, "We're trying something different... do you like it?" As the characters moved around the Atlantis, I made every new group note this same thing, so a running gag soon developed... one Gurg undercut eventually by just blurting out, "It's the year 2371 now. Deal with it." From then on the two each said their version simultaneously. It all climaxed well when Jor, without Gurg, found herself having to begrudgingly lead with what had been his line. (I had this Reddit post in the back of my head, but my players made it work without any prodding.)

The players reported enjoying it. They like the mystery angle, and they liked flexibility they had in their approach, and they liked the sense of not really knowing what was going on and having to piece it together. So, I was a little worried about this one going it, but it ended up being a strong episode, and the final session in particular is probably my favorite single session thus far.

Beyond the Rim of the Starlight:

Opening Arc: A World Beyond the Starlight

Part I: "The Alcubierre"
Part II: "The Rescue at Xerxes IV"
Part III: "We Are Not Ourselves"
Part IV: "The Pierced Veil"
Epilogue: "Signals"

Season One

"Biological Clock"
"Never Again to See a Blue Sunrise"
"Stare Decisis"

06 July 2022

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Blindsight by Peter Watts

For a while, it was de rigeur on Reddit's "printSF" sub to basically recommend Blindsight in response to anything. Then the sub realized it was verging on self-parody, and it backed off, and I don't see it mentioned so much anymore. But I was intrigued enough that when I got an Amazon gift card, I used it to pick up a nice "Tor Essentials" edition of the book.

Originally published: 2006
Acquired: January 2021
Read: July 2021

It seems to me that it somewhat follows in the tradition of Solaris, it being interested in a group of scientists investigating an alien life-form beyond our comprehension that ultimately lose themselves. It's an interesting book with a big concept, asking "what is intelligence?" and positing that you might be able to have intelligence without self-awareness. This is followed in two ways: there are the aliens, but there's also our main character, who is hyper-aware of others but not so much himself.

I liked a lot of what was happening, and found myself frustrated by other parts of it. The interpersonal dynamics on the spaceship crew didn't always ring true; I feel like things the book asserted were true about the characters were not often demonstrated in practice. The concepts were interesting, but at a certain point—around the two-thirds mark—I started getting a bit lost, and I never really recovered my footing. The whole thing ended up feeling a bit... sterile? Which I think is partially by design, but still... It's the sort of book I appreciated more than I enjoyed, though it's also the sort of book I feel like I might get more out of on a reread. But when does one ever have the time to reread books!

04 July 2022

Stargirl by Geoff Johns, Lee Moder, Scott Kolins, Dan Davis, et al.

Stargirl by Geoff Johns

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1999-2003
Read: March 2022

Writers: Geoff Johns, James Robinson, David S. Goyer

Artists: Lee Moder, Scott Kolins, Dan Davis, Chris Weston, John Stokes, Mike McKone, Wayne Faucher
Colorists: Tom McCraw, Carla Feeny, John Kalisz
Letterers: Bill Oakley, Kurt Hathaway

This volume collects the entirety of Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., a modernized take on the Star-Spangled Kid that began slightly before and ran alongside the Robinson/Goyer/John JSA revival of 1999. Our main character is Courtney Whitmore, a teenager who has recently relocated to Blue Valley, Nebraska because her mother has remarried, to Pat Dugan, who back during World War II was Stripesy, sidekick to the Star-Spangled Kid. She ends up becoming the new Star-Spangled Kid, eventually dubbing herself "Stars" and then "Stargirl," while Pat operates as her sidekick in a robotic suit called S.T.R.I.P.E. (As the cover of my edition indicates, it eventually became the basis for the CW tv series Stargirl starring Brec Bassinger.)

As a concept, it's great. Definitely a good storytelling engine: you have high school stuff, secret identity stuff, interpersonal stuff, legacy stuff. Courtney is ultimately the inheritor of the Star-Spangled Kid mantle and the Starman mantle. But I ended up feeling like Geoff Johns might not have been the writer to successfully pull off his own idea. The idea here is that Courtney becomes a superhero to annoy her stepfather, and then sort of grows into it... but I felt like this is an idea that we were told more than we actually saw on the page. The interpersonal dynamics were often crowded out by the superhero plots and the crossover storylines; some of Courtney's development as a hero was seemingly happening over in JSA, not here. I never really got a feel for her and Pat's relationship in a meaningful way.... but of course this is Geoff Johns. Great idea, but hand the execution over to, say, a John Rogers or a G. Willow Wilson, and I think this would have soared.

Heck of a kick for a brand-new superhero.
from Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. #1 (script by Geoff Johns, art by Lee Moder & Dan Davis)

Still, it's entertaining stuff. Johns picks up on the kind of "legacy" work Roy Thomas was doing in Infinity, Inc., and the result is strong. I liked the story about Courtney interacting with Starman, for example, paralleled with a flashback adventure about how the original Star-Spangled Kid became Skyman, and also tying in how Star-Spangled Kid got the cosmic converter belt way back in the very first story I reviewed for this project, Only Legends Live Forever. I don't know if this kind of storytelling is meaningful to people who haven't been reading JSA comics nonstop for over two years now, but I dug it.

Of course I am always up for an Infinc flashback!
from Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. #4 (script by Geoff Johns, art by Lee Moder & Dan Davis)

The Teen Titan appearances were fun. The story delving into the post-Crisis version of the JLA/JSA/Seven Soldiers of Victory crossover that brought the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy into the present day was fun... almost certainly better than the original story, actually! (Although, since when was the Crimson Avenger's sidekick, Wing, a kid? In the Roy Thomas version, he was the chauffeur!) I liked the occasional conversations between Pat and the original Starman, Ted. The villain being an evil cheerleader was good. The only "legacy" element I disliked was learning that Danette Reilly, Firebrand in All-Star Squadron, was fridged off-panel sometime in the decades since WWII in order to give the Shining Knight some angst. She is too good a character to deserve that, but apparently has made no post-A-SS appearances except in the All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant.

Poor Danette.
from Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. #13 (script by Geoff Johns, art by Lee Moder & Dan Davis)

Overall, this is fun, and I look forward to seeing Courtney shine in JSA. But I can't help feel that somewhere in the multiverse there's a version of this comic that rivals G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel!

This post is twenty-seventh in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers The Sandman Presents: The Furies. Previous installments are listed below:

All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)

The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)

All-Star Squadron (1981-87)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)

Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)

America vs. the Justice Society (1985)

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)

Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)

Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]

Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)

Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)

Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)

Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)

The Young All-Stars (1987-89)

Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]

The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)

The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)

Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)

Armageddon: Inferno (1992)

Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)

Damage (1994-96)

The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)

Chase (1998-2002)

01 July 2022

Reading Rinkitink in Oz Aloud to My Son

Rinkitink in Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

Rinkitink in Oz, like The Scarecrow of Oz opens outside of Oz and mostly takes place there, too. The protagonist is Prince Inga of Pingaree; his peaceful island nation is sacked by raiders from the islands of Regos and Coregos, and his parents kidnapped. Along with King Rinkitink of Rinkitink and the king's talking goat Bilbil, Inga has to travel to Regos and Coregos to liberate his people, and then go to the Nome Kingdom to find his parents. Near the end, though, Dorothy and the Wizard come to help him, and the character briefly visit Oz.

Originally published: 1916
Acquired and read aloud: April 2022

I didn't know the circumstances of this book's creation when I was a child. Baum wrote what was initially called King Rinkitink around 1905, after he had written just two Oz books, and a few non-Oz fantasies, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. He never published King Rinkitink, though, and thus when he didn't have time to write a new Oz book in 1916, he pulled King Rinkitink out of a drawer, edited some of the continuity to make it fit what had happened in the Oz books (particularly the deposition of the Nome King in Tik-Tok of Oz), and totally replaced the ending so that Dorothy showed up to save the day. (He must have been thinking of somehow incorporating Rinkitink into the Oz mythos for some time, though, since the countries from it all appear on the map in the Tik-Tok endpapers, published in 1914.)

Something I never noticed until reading it aloud to a three-year-old is that it's very different tonally from most other Oz books. The dangers in Oz books are often very abstract, things that it's hard to be scared of. But in Rinkitink, the raiders from Regos and Coregos go around destroying buildings and whole societies; Inga's parents are constantly being threatened with destruction. It's more of a boy's adventure story than the gentle fantasies of most Oz novels. My son reacted very strongly to this, often crying out "no!" and hiding under the sheets as I read and telling me it was very scary. Though when I asked if I should stop reading it, he said, "No, I like being scared." But still he continued to react strongly, and it was enough that my wife suggested that maybe I shouldn't be reading him the Oz books until he is older. But my memory is that Rinkitink is very much an outlier in this way, and if we got through it, things ought to return to normal.

I asked my son what he thought of it when we were done, and he said, "I liked the good parts and didn't like the bad parts." Well, fair enough. The "bad parts," on probing, were any time anything was destroyed, or anyone was threatened with destruction. The good parts were all the rest of it.

I don't really remember what I thought of the book as a kid, but I enjoyed it as an adult. Baum has a tendency to undercut his protagonists, but here, even though Inga is aided by some Magic Pearls (given to his ancestors by a mermaid queen, presumably the same one we met in The Sea Fairies), he shows himself to be brave, resourceful, and clever, reasoning his own way out of many of the tricky situations he ends up in. Dorothy saving him in the ending is a little frustrating, but before that, Inga has managed to escape death at the hands of the Nome King many times, and I didn't find it too bad. What did bother me is that the King of Regos and Queen of Coregos die off-page through the total happenstance of their boat hitting a storm! No comeuppance for Inga there.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript to King Rinkitink no longer exists, so we don't know how Inga would have saved his parents without Dorothy's intervention. The International Wizard of Oz Club ran a competition in 2017 for fans to come up with an alternative ending without Oz elements, and published the winner as a new edition called King Rinkitink; I'll have to check it out at some point.

If King Rinkitink had been published when originally intended, it would have been the first appearance of the Nome King (aside from a minor cameo in Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), but by the time Rinkitink in Oz came out, the Nomes had been the antagonists in three Oz novels: Ozma, Emerald City, and Tik-Tok. In Tik-Tok, the original Nome King, Ruggedo né Roquat, is deposed, and he is replaced by his own chief steward, Kaliko. As a result, Baum seemingly just went through the Rinkitink manuscript and replaced the name. Some people argue that this results in a discontinuity: Kaliko is a nicer ruler in Tik-Tok than Ruggedo had been, but in Rinkitink, he enchants Inga's parents and will not let them go. I think people who argue this, though, are overlooking that Kaliko is not "nicer" in the sense that he is a "good person" overall. Rather, Kaliko is "nicer" in two ways: one, he is less cruel toward the Nomes themselves and thus a more popular ruler, and two, he is more deferential to people from Oz because they have more power than the Nomes and have defeated them on many occasions. Kaliko has no reason to be nice to Inga, and indeed, being nice to Inga would require him to break his word to Regos and Coregos, and we know from Ozma of Oz the extent to which Nomes will go to keep their deals. But as soon as Dorothy and the Wizard show up, Kaliko is highly deferential. It's all politics! As always, I enjoyed getting to use my very snobby-but-deferential Kaliko voice, especially with Kaliko being king. I had him always saying quite terrible things to Inga and Rinkitink, but sounding very apologetic in doing so.

Note that the Wizard considers Bilbil very unusual because he's a talking animal even though he's never been to Oz... but he meets Bilbil in the Nome Kingdom, which lies underneath the Land of Ev, and in Ozma of Oz the ordinary American chicken Billina becomes capable of speech when she arrives in Ev.

The other thing that occurred to me on this read is that people from Pingaree age normally. This would be quite sad if you think about it: Inga may be good friends with Dorothy now because they are seemingly the same age, but in another couple decades, Dorothy will still be about ten while Inga will be an adult, and by the present day, Dorothy will still be about ten... but Inga will be dead! Dorothy may live forever, but she can never be friends with someone from outside Oz. I am given to understand, though, that Inga does return in Sherwood Smith's Trouble under Oz (2006), so I am curious to see how she handles this issue. Only forty-two more books until we find out!