Nowhere Men and The Fantastic Four

The first issue of Nowhere Men, written by Image publisher Erik Stephenson and with Nate Bellegarde and Jordie Bellaire on art, was something different to come out at the end of a year of different comics released by Image. At least the first issue was.

The first issue is one of the most information rich comics I've read in a long time. It has article excerpts to introduce us to the 4 heads of World Corp. It has an interview with the most erratic of the founders. In the 4 pages that they cover you get a full breakdown of the four most important cast members and you get to see exactly why three of them couldn't keep the fourth on. And that's without getting into the coal gorilla or the space virus.

The second issue does just as much. In fact it does too much. In it we find out that this is all set up for yet another independent take on The Fantastic Four. Let me run this by you and see if any of it sounds familiar  A group of scientists are in space and no one knows that they've left the earth. While there they're exposed to something that makes radical changes in their physical make up. On turns to vapor. One grows thick callouses all over his skin but keeps his good disposition  One begins shooting a ray from himself with destructive powers. We got three of the four in the second issue. And they're all super geniuses which is Reed Richards real power anyway.

And its all so disappointing. The first issue had so much more potential than just being a Fantastic Four clone. And it could still be. Stephenson might have plans beyond Marvel's First Family and its just me reading too much into the powers shown in the second issue. After all there's more than 4 people with the transformative virus. Here's hoping issue 3 brings something else to the table. Because I want this one to be something different.

Da

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Interesting...

GenCon

For the first time in... well, ever I have a vacation. I real, honest to god, work is paying me even though I'm not there vacation. Of course I'm going to use it to go embarrass myself at some games.

Wednesday night at about 11pm myself and 4 of my friends are piling into the van and driving the six hours to Indianapolis for GenCon. I'm playing in the Thursday Late Night Commander tournament again, and hopefully I'll do better than my 4th from last year. Thankfully I don't have to worry about Erayo locks as much this year thanks to the monk being banned for use as a general. I'm not sure who I'll be playing yet. Right now I'm leaning towards Azusa, same as last year, but I've been working on a Mono Black list that might be there.

I'm also playing in the Ascension World Championships on Saturday. I'm more optimistic about the EDH.

Otherwise I don't have a lot scheduled. I'd really like to see something cool from the test/demo room. Unfortunately you can't get anything specific on the website so I'm going to wait till I'm there to see what they've got.

So if anyone is there hit me up on Twitter @eFridayPfender. If nothing else I'd love to play some pickup Commander.

Critical Miss

I want to roll some dice.

I want to keep track of more stats than a Baseball fanatic.

I want to get into arguments over minutia.

Theres no two ways about it.

I want to play a tabletop RPG again.

Its been a few years since I've had a regular game. The GM that was running it was awful. He'd always run modules that he'd find online but he'd never run them correctly. He wouldn't read them ahead of time, a light skimming over is all he'd do. Then he'd make mistakes on details that mattered. And combat...

Every dungeon we'd end up in, and it was ALWAYS a fantasy campaign, every time he'd end up lining the enemies up in a row and marching them straight at us. He'd guess as to how long it'd take them to get to us from wherever they are in the building and they'd attack us in wave after wave. We'd never explore the place, the sweet encounters that were written up for specific room never happened, just a two hour long fight then we get all the loot. Game over.

If you can imagine he was even harder to deal with as a player. The last game we played where he was a PC devolved into an hour long debate on committing genocide on a tribe of Goblins.

I don't play with him anymore.

So I want to get a new game going soon. Something horror or Sci Fi. Something where characters can be built to do something other than cleave enemies in half and still be worth playing.

I do have a Call of Cthulhu core book around here somewhere...

The Best Decade

I'm watching Vampire movies from the 70s today. So far I've seen

A woman put into stocks for dancing on a Sunday

Two women dressed as clowns in a car chase firing on the pursuer.

Christoper Lee is everywhere.

Subtitles drop off the bottom of the screen so you can't read them.

A motorcycle stored in a lighthouse.

Dracula releasing the Bubonic Plague to kill everyone. They even called it out in the movie as not making sense.

Dracula's fur vest wearing biker gang.

Let's sleep in a cemetery tonight! Someones coming, quick, hide in this grave!

Are they vampires or ghosts or... ghost vampires? Didn't they die in the opening scene?

I love the 70s.

First Issue Blues

What makes a good first issue? I've been reading a lot of them lately and the question has been on my mind. There’s a lot of different ways to take the opening of your story. Recently I've read the openers to The Manhattan Projects, Saga, Prophet (a relaunch and issue 21 technically but I’ve never read any before and don't feel the need to now.) The Secret History of D.B. Cooper, Thief of Thieves, Hell Yeah, Saucer Country... I've been branching out a bit.

I'd say most of them are failures for first issues.

I've only got one criteria for a successful first issue of a comic book. Its got to make me want to buy the second issue. That’s it. And most of them are failures. Out of the books I listed above I'm only going to be sticking with The Manhattan Projects, Saga, and Prophet.

So why don't I want to buy the second issue of the others? Well, it depends. The Secret History of D.B. Cooper was an odd book. Its premise is based in a hijacking from the 70s but it quickly turns into Samurai action with a Teddy Bear sidekick against a monster/Russian government Official. To say it was odd would do the word odd a disservice. But most of the book was tied up in the fight and the conversation between Cooper and the Teddy Bear. At the end there's a bit with some CIA agents but I really didn't feel like there was enough to keep me around other than the Odd. Odd is not enough for me.

Thief of Thieves spent half its issue in a flashback about stealing a car. This is supposed to be about the greatest thief alive and he spends most of his time jacking a sedan. The heist at the beginning was cool but the book ends on him quitting. Reluctant worlds best thief isn't a pitch its a party member in Final Fantasy 6. We're going to have to spend a good bit of the next issue on how to get him to steal shit again. Pass.

Hell Yeah was especially off because for a book called Hell Yeah it was pretty dull. Kid goes to school, kid gets in fights outside of school, kid gets threatened with expulsion, kid goes to see a band, kid goes to bed. Kid goes to school and people from another dimension show up. So until that last one we had an episode of a generic teen drama on ABC Family. And I called him kid because I have no idea what his name was. There was some other bits with the first Superheros to emerge in this world but none of it was anything we hadn't seen before. Don't engage me and I won't pick up number 2.

Saucer Country was the one I'm most disappointed in. Paul Cornell wasn't a name I was familiar with a year ago but now I look forward to his DC Comics work and have really enjoy his credited Doctor Who episodes. The first issue of Saucer Country falls into what I like to think of as the first issue folly. To get us to buy the comic you have to tell us what its about. In this case its about a Divorced Hispanic Woman running for President after being Abducted by Aliens. Your standard Grays. The problem with knowing that going in is that it kills our big reveal on the last page. I was abducted by aliens has ZERO punch when I knew that 3 months ago from the solicits. Otherwise we got some Divorcees feeling lonely and a crazy guy talking to tiny imaged of naked people. Once again, Odd isn't going to get me to buy your comic and neither is lonely.

So what worked? We did have three successes out of seven books.

The Manhattan Projects didn't let me know anything about it from the solicits. All it had was a tag line of “Infinite Oppenheimers” and the knowledge that it was about the secret projects behind the scenes of the development of the Atomic Bomb. So what made this comic work when the others didn't? Well, first we're in a familiar area with scientists that most people have heard of. Even if you don't know Oppenheimer when Einstein shows up you'll know him. But the familiarity is undercut by the intrigue of what they might be doing. The Odd moment in the middle of the book is explained as its happening and is pretty high on the crazy concept scale. But its pretty sweet too. And the last page cliffhanger, which I'm not going to spoil, wasn't something that I knew of months ago nor was it something I saw coming. This book grabbed me with its super science and its crazy potential and made me want to buy issue 2. I'm actually more excited for 2 than I was for 1 and I'd say this was easily the most anticipated book on this list for me. I can't wait to see where it goes.

Saga is a bit of a cheat because I'm fairly certain that Brian K Vaughn regularly sacrifices children to appease his dark lord and gain boons. Possibly in the same Ceremony that the Pixar guys do. He did go all Hollywood on us. What makes Saga work isn't its mash-up of sci fi and fantasy but the strong character work done in a small bit of time. By the end of the first issue you know the protagonists, you know how cheated the Robot Prince feels at having to hunt them, and you know exactly what the bounty hunter is going to do later when he catches them. It might just be an effective use of archetypes and tropes but it works wonderfully. And Fiona Staples art is just beautiful. Especially the giant turtle with laser eyes. Yeah, this one is full of Odd too but its held together by things you care about.

The last one is Prophet. Prophet is a really strange book. Its heavy on narration which it uses to take us through the strange and terrifying world that the Earth has turned into. Its like a travelog of the future after it went to hell. Its got more ideas in one issue than most series pack into a year and it has them all seamlessly tied together to give us a picture of life and what John Prophet is dealing with. There’s nothing to spoil here, no huge final page revelation or twist in the story, just an extremely well done comic that deserves attention. Instead of trying to hook me by the end it hooked me from the first few pages. I really don't feel like I'm doing it justice here.

So what makes a good first issue? Well, it looks like doing something different helps, but don't rely on that like a crutch. Have interesting characters and don't spoil everything in the solicits? Sounds easy doesn't it?

I best the next few I read are going to suck