Tintin through the lens of Mickey Mouse

 Thanks to Humble Bundle, I have been reading Fantagraphics Disney Masters series, which are reprints of old Disney comic books, many of which are from Europe.

Honestly, other than Carl Barks and Don Rosa, I don’t have much interest in Disney comic books, although I do find it fascinating how that medium has been much more successful in countries that aren’t the U.S. If the world wasn’t on fire, I wouldn’t be reaching for this level of escapism. I look forward to a time when I don’t feel the need to read ancient Mickey Mouse comic books.

With that said, almost all of these stories are decades old. When I think about about other reprinted comic books I’ve read from the 1950s, these hold up surprisingly well. Particularly when you consider that they were aimed at a younger audience than horror or superhero comics.

I’m actually enjoying the Mickey Mouse work more than the duck works. I think that is because Barks and Rosa have spoiled me for quality stories about Donald and Uncle Scrooge. 

I kept thinking, though, that the Mickey as a detective stories reminded me of something. Particularly the ones drawn by Paul Murray. And then I realized that they reminded me of Tintin!

Oh, I’m not saying that they were as good as Tintin. After Herge really got rolling, the quality of the art and stories was something else. And they definitely can’t compare to extensive research Herge famously did. 

However, Mickey as an adventurer definitely has the same feel as Tintin. They tap into the same archetype. A moral paragon who is hyper competent but still supposed to be an Everyman. Which also means everyone else around them has to provide the conflict and interest lol

In the adventure stories, Mickey is always paired up with Goofy. Which makes Goofy take on the jobs of both Snowy and Captain Haddock. Which makes sense because Goofy is both a dog and the big guy.

And, yes, I definitely consider Captain Haddock a richer and deeper character than this vision of Goofy and one with much more interesting family friendly profanity. (Heck, I forget he’s a relative latecomer to the stories since I view him as so intrinsic to Tintin) However, I read the notes and the editors discussed on how Goofy was necessary to make the stories funny because this version of Mickey isn’t funny.

Which then made me appreciate both Captain Haddock and Snowy more because that explanation helped me understand their roles in the Adventures of Tintin. Tintin is too bland and competent. We need a klutzy terrier and a recovering alcoholic of a sea captain to keep us on our toes.

The Disney Masters series hasn’t made me discover hidden masterpieces. It actually made me appreciate other works like Tintin or Carl Barks duck work more. However, they are a pleasant distraction.

Not all lines drawn in a dungeon are equal

 I knew what I getting when I backed Trial By Fire (a name that has been used for a wide variety of media a whole bunch of times) When I see a PnP Dungeon Crawl that just requires a pencil, I know we’re talking about a puzzle where you draw a line on a grid and combat is a simple math equation.

Alexander Shen has designed a bunch of games/puzzles that follow this formula. Paper App:Dungeon adds a die but is still basically the same idea. Solo Tower Hack also used the idea in 2007 (also with dice) 

and I’m sure it wasn’t the first.

And Trial By Fire is indeed drawing a line on a grid, just like I thought. It does make some design choices that will make it see some play for me.

First of all, it has a slightly more in depth character system. Four different stats and an inventory system. And it is organized in an easy to use checkbox system.

Far more importantly than that, you pick one of four different classes that give you different stats and starting inventory. That adds variety, which is good when you don’t have any dice or cards to change things up.

Most important for me as far as actually seeing play, one of the printing options is as a pocket-sized booklet. Trial By Fire is _far_ from unique in that. Gladden Games Paper App series is built around the idea. However, Paper App: Dungeon is my least favorite game in the series and Trial By Fire gives me a dungeon crawl alternative I enjoy more.

Trial By Fire does have some drawbacks. It is an abstract puzzle and there is going to be an optimal solution. It doesn’t have a campaign mode, which is the best part Paper App: Dungeon in my opinion. And there are plenty of alternatives to it that do the same basic thing.

However, I do like the class system and the inventory system. I think it does a good job at what it does. It’s not the first little dungeon crawl I’ve backed but it’s the one that’s made it into my travel bag. 

Trial By Fire isn’t for everyone. Or even most everyone. I got into Dungeon Crawls by way of Dungeons and Dragons and it does not scratch that itch. However, it works well as a minimal space/material travel distraction.

Around the World in 15 minutes goes to South America

 Around South America in 15 Minutes is the fourth map in the Around the World in 15 Minutes series. And it breaks the mold just enough to make me want to see what else they can do with the system.

No Box Games, now a part of Shiny Pigeon Games is not my favorite PnP publisher. That would be Button Shy or, particularly if we’re just talking Roll and Writes, Postmark Games or Hammerdice. However, their small catalog has a couple of games that I really think hit it out of the park.

Beards and Booty manages to capture the essence of Beer and Pretzels in an easy to print game. Around the World in 10-15 Minutes makes me feel like I’m playing Ticket to Rise as a R&W, even it has completely different mechanics.

I do think that Around et al is a little to easy too well at, particularly if you are playing it solitaire. However, I keep on enjoying enough to regularly play it. And I honestly think it would really work for a family audience. Which is not the easiest sell for a PnP.

Around et al is built around getting points from three different paths. Visiting every city in an area, collecting souvenirs and exploration. The twist in South America is that visitation has been completely removed and exploration has been expanded.

All of the exploration is now about trying to photograph animals and the animals have varying degrees of scarcity. The rarest animals can only been seen in one city with with one per region.

I had a general strategy that worked for the world, USA and Europe map of trying to hit every single city and adjusting exploration and souvenirs as the dice dictate. That doesn’t work with South America. Hitting every city isn’t as important as hitting specific cities. And when you get fewer exploration rolls, it really hurts. 

South America now competes with the USA map for what map I think works best for solitaire play. More than that, it makes me think about how you can tweak the overall system. How the maps can be more than just different geography.

The Space Merchants still feels timely

 I’ve been aware of The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth pretty much since I started looking seriously at science fiction. I remember seeing copies of it at used bookstores when I was in high school and I knew it was supposed to be one of the great classics of the genre. 

But I only got around to reading it last month.

It’s one part thriller, two parts social commentary and three parts satire with a hefty focus on character development.

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Spoilers 

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

In this world of the future, industry rules the world to the point where governments are not even figureheads. And advertising firms runs industry. The world is on the edge of ecologic ruin but advertising campaigns mask and hide that fact.

Michael Courtenay is a high level advertising executive in one of the leading firms. To give an idea of the scope, the company incorporated the entire subcontinent of India. They are now in the process of colonizing and owning the planet Venus.

So, of course, Mitch ends up getting shanghaied into a position at the bottom of the barrel, skimming algae and locked into a contract designed to bury him in forever debt so he gets to see life on the other side.

Mitch is a really well designed character. He starts off an an anti-hero. And not a Wolverine anti-hero but a Willy Loman anti-hero. More than that, he isn’t a Bertie Wooster child of privilege. He is fiercely intelligent and aggressive. When he hits rock bottom, he immediately starts digging up.

And it takes most of the book for Mitch to hit his redemption point. I remember hearing DiMartino and Konietzko, the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender, say that Zuko had to regain his privilege to give him to sacrifice for his heel face turn to mean anything. Mitch has taken over the company that owns India before he become a conservationist and a good guy.

While the thriller aspect of the book is the least important one, at least in my opinion, Pohl and Kornbluth do deliver on it. The plot keeps on making unexpected swerves and they keep on ratcheting up the tension.

I found the satire to be milder compared to works by, say, Kurt Vonnegut. However, I also wonder if it would have felt more extreme in 1952 compared to a far more social media saturated world.

The Space Merchants felt like a piece of classical literature disguised as pulp science fiction. I’m glad that I read it but I’m also glad I waited to read it.

I don’t know how big a legacy Warpspawn Games has

 It had been a number of years since I had last tried looking at Warp Spawn Games. Even then, it had been a bit dodgy. Unfortunately, it looks like it is gone for good.

This is because, even more unfortunately, the designer behind Warp Spawn Games, Lloyd Krassner, passed away in 2020. He was younger than I had always pictured him. And, eventually, the no-longer-maintained site faded away.

I am not the right person to write about Krassner or Warp Spawn. They weren’t my kind of games and I’ve only played very few of them. However, as someone who loves PnP, they are a major historical landmark in that part of the hobby.

Warp Spawn got started in 1997, still the early years of regular people using the internet. For more than twenty years, it offered free print-and-play rule sets.

Almost all of the games were designed by Krassner. Who designed literally hundreds of games. Mostly war games, which are outside of my wheelhouse but I believe he was well regarded as a designer, not just for being prolific. 

I may be mistaken but I believe it was just rule sets and you had to come up with the components yourself, although online users created resources for a number of the games. 

Mind you, we are talking about dial-up modems that _allegedly_ could get up to 56 kilobytes per second. By modern standards, that is non-existent bandwidth. Getting enough to be able to make anything was amazing.

While the site is gone, the games are not. The files have been saved. I personally found them at https://www.rockini.name/warpspawn/ and I am sure that’s not the only place. 

Lloyd Kissner created resources, free games and a gaming space in the Internet when folks were figuring out just what kind of environment the Internet would become. I honestly wonder what the hobby alone, let alone PnP, would look like without him.

Rome Must Fall explores the logistics of war in one page

 I have really been meaning to look at Martin Melbardis and their company Solo Wargame. Specifically the Roll and Write war games. I’ve actually backed a few on Kickstarter and just needed to find the time/headspace to try them. Looking through the ones I have, Rome Must Fall seemed like the most newbie friendly so that’s what I started with.

I have to say that Print and Play war games have been around for a while. I think they might have been one of the earliest genres to get adopted. You can find Chit-and-Hex PnP games that are decades old. Heck, Malta Convoy is a roll and write war game from 2001. 

However, Solo Wargame’s mission statement seems to be to create PnP games that have the convenience of Roll and Write but have some heavier meat to them. I like Postmark Game’s Battle Card series but they are very light exercises.

Despite the name, you are actually trying to hold the Roman empire together in Rome Must Fall. The game is set in 425 AD and you are dealing with threats on… well, just about every side. 

You are dealing with six different fronts in the game, four barbarian forces and two raiders. Every loss to the barbarians makes you lose territory while losing to the raiders will cost you some form of resources.

The core mechanic is dice allocation. You roll six dice. You assigned them to each front. Then, the invading forces get to roll against you. 

You have a limited number of reserve tokens that you can use to increase your die, as well as limited access to some special abilities. Not only do you have to roll sixes to be able to use the special abilities each one is tied to a city on the map. If that city gets sacked, you lose that ability.

And, just to make sure it hurts, your six sided dice can get reduced to three-sided dice by certain losses.

If you lose too many key cities, you lose the game. If you can survive 12 turns, you win the game.

Simply put, you can’t win every fight. You have to pick your battles carefully and figure out what you can afford to lose. Your resources are going to get more and more scarce as the game goes on. Years ago, a friend told me that Advanced Civilization was about managing calamities over six hours. Rome Must Fall gives you that experience on one page in fifteen minutes.

To be honest, I haven’t played enough to figure out how much luck determines if you’re going to survive. I haven’t survived yet.

That being said, and I mean this as a compliment, Rome Must Fall feels like an older brother to the Battle Card series. It serves as both a small war game and a history lesson. However, while I feel that there is an optimal path in those games, there is too much going on in Rome Must Fall to have a single, scripted strategy. 

Rome Must Fall is a budget friendly, accessible experience. It is fraught with tension as you do your best to slow down the death spiral that is baked into the game. I’m glad I looked into Solo Wargame.

Rock Candy Mountain - tale of mythic hobos

 Rock Candy Mountain is a mythic hobo tale. I can only assume it’s not named The Big Rock Candy Mountain due to copywrite reasons. It is the story of how far a man will go to be with his family. (Oh, it’s also a two volume graphic novel. Did I mention it’s a comic?)

I don’t know if mythic hobo is actually a real term but you know what I mean. The story of men (it almost always seems to be men) who may be homeless but still have pride and integrity and independence. It’s not exclusive to the United States but it does seem to click here.

While Brother Where Art Thou is one of the quintessential mythic hobo movies (despite not actually being about hobos) and uses the song The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the work that immediately sprang to my mind was Emperor of the North Pole. A movie that it sometimes feels like only three other people have seen lol

In it, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine play a hobo and a conductor who basically try to murder the Hell out of each other. It’s not perfect but it left an impression on me.

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers 

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Spoilers

Rock Candy Mountain is the story of a hobo named Jackson who sold his soul to the devil to make sure he would make it back to his family when he gets drafted into WWII. A family that dies on their way to meet him when he gets back to the states. 

Now, he is searching for Rock Candy Mountain, a heaven for sinners, hoping there he can be reunited with his wife and daughter.

The gift that the devil gave him was the power to defeat any man in combat. A power with a lot of loopholes (more than one man or a woman negates it, for instance) but one that the book has a lot of fun playing with. (He was able to use it to kill Hitler and take the spear of destiny. Which is why the book isn’t set in the 1930s and isn’t very hobo but is pretty mythic)

By the time the story starts, Jackson has the FBI and the Hobo Mafia after him but they pale compared to the devil. The devil looks like a pantomime devil with horns and goatee but literally rips people apart. The book is a comedy horror and the devil is the horror part.

And our point of view character is the perpetually unlucky Pomona Slim, who wasn’t looking to be a hobo or caught up in a fight with the devil. However, he turns out to be one of the most decent characters in the book, to the point that the devil tells him he has no claim on his soul. (He is willing to make a deal with Pomona though)

Rock Candy Mountain is a fun story with undertones of tragedy and redemption. I didn’t know I needed a mythic hobo but I guess I did.