Books 79-82

[subplotkudzu]

79) Swamp Thing, volumes 6-11 (reread): Why yes, I am missing volume 5, with the first John Constantine story. I've read it before, but don't own it. This set of volumes covers through American Gothic and the Outer Space arc, and is very, very good stuff. Got me thinking about the prevlanace of space opera/SF sequences in ongoing comic books - almost everyone has their voyage into space arc, given a long enough run from single writer.

80) The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: Pulled this off the shelf because Mylescorcoran and his group just ran a Judge Dee game. I'm wondering how the hell Chinese detective stories setting has not been made into a professional game system! The characters have a high degree of authroity and autonomy, the genere has reliable small groups (Jidge Dee is the judge, his sherrif/watson type, along with two martial artists and a con man for his deputies), and it's an interesting social setting. I will almost certainly pitch something on this soon.

81) The Ballad of Halo Jones: one of Alan Moore's unfinished works, this 2000 AD series with Ian Gibson is a fascinating, if depressing, analysis on the need to break out of decaying soceital niches. Moore fortunately completed enough to feel like the series has a resolution, but there's clear that there's more story for Halo.

82) The Complete DR and Quinch: I'm clearly on a Moore kick here, since his books just got shelved to the front. This violent, juvenile farce done with Alan Davis was one of my first exposures to his work, and it's quite a bit of mental whiplash between this and Halo Jones, which he was writing concurrently. Not quite as funny to me as it was 22 years ago, but still funny.

Comments

[40yearsagotoday.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm talking about. OA, Kara-Tur, they didn't sell too well. Even mushed up as they were, folks avoided them for some reason. I think it was that subconsciously, they were uncomfortable because they didn't know quite what to do, and all the cool stuff you mention couldn't balance that out.

Obviously, there are exceptions. We (and most of the people we know) are among them. But we're still exceptions.

-D*

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Then how do you explain the gangbusters sales of "Legends of the Five Rings"? I know the card game had something to do with it, but it was a damn popular game.

To clarify however, I was more questioning the absence amongst the Indie games movement rather than why Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf haven't done a Chinese Detective Game. There's plenty of small press stuff getting wide circulation these days that has no problem with odd or complex cultures. In the age of niche gaming (which we are in now, and likely for a very long while to come) there are easily rules for exceptions.