Aaron Bitman's page

Ah yes, those darned dangling plot threads.

I remember when the Superboy series was about Superman when he was a boy in Smallville. Jonathan Kent (Superboy's foster father) decided to run for the city council to help fight a scheme to build a shopping mall outside of town... and he started getting death threats. At first, Jonathan kept this a secret from Clark. Then someone blew up Kent's General Store. Jonathan still tried to keep the threats a secret from Clark, who knew that Jonathan was hiding something from him, but Superboy was too busy with cosmic threats to have much time to think about it. Later, hired assassins presumably tried to kill Jonathan.

The predictable conclusion to this subplot was that Clark would find out what's going on, track the problem down to the president of the city council, get the dirt on him, and put him in prison. Yet the series kept implying that Jonathan would solve the problem himself - as he seemed determined to do - which would have been so cool!

I found the idea so intriguing that I ordered the last Superboy issue (number 54 from 1984), although at the time it was a tad pricey by my standards, because I thought it would resolve that subplot. And in that final issue, the president - having failed to scare Jonathan - tried to bribe him, obviously unsuccessfully.

And that was it! The subplot obviously wasn't over, but the series got cancelled. The letters page said that Superboy and Supergirl would soon share a series, tentatively titled DC Double Comics, but I'm not aware that any such series materialized. I must leave it to my imagination. And maybe it's just as well, because maybe that subplot would have disappointed me with the predictable Superboy-saves-the-day resolution. Now I can imagine that instead, Jonathan got that city council seat, dug up some dirt on the president, and worked with the police to put him behind bars. Hey, all that experience he had helping Superboy must have taught him a few things about crime and law enforcement to help him fix the problem on his own. At least, I'd like to think so.

Introduced as a gun-toting criminal in a tuxedo, top hat, and domino mask, Deadshot was only intended to be a one-off villain for the superhero Batman, but writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers revived, redesigned, and popularized the character in Detective Comics #474 (1977), which featured the debut of his wrist-mounted guns, reticle emblem, and mask with a built-in targeting sight that have since become Deadshot's visual motif.

And DC Comics included that issue in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. (I've mentioned that fact before but it bears repeating.)

I remember, 20 years or so ago, after I got married and could no longer hang out at my friend's house to read his comics, I asked to borrow from his Green Lantern collection. He loaned me a HUGE number of issues, far more than I expected to read. But I started on it.

I particularly remember issue #3, where Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner get into a fistfight and get arrested. Some other guys use the rings to make trouble, Hal takes care of it, and Guy admits that Hal was the best damn Green Lantern he'd ever seen.

So I was still READING it at that point. But as I proceeded through the series, I gradually lost interest, reading less and less thoroughly, until I was only skimming through it...

...but then came Emerald Twilight! Damn! That story forced me out of "skim" mode and made me start actually READING again! And I continued actually reading for dozens of issues, from that point.

I suppose I might focus more on specific issues if I knew which 7 issues you were talking about.

First up was a new printing of the classic Iron Man story Demon in a Bottle. I’ve been waiting for a copy of that for what seems like eternity.

If you read Demon in a Bottle, ending with issue 128, I would urge you to read 129, which satisfactorily wraps up a major subplot in that story arc.

Also, for the first time ever I bought what they call a slabbed book. This was X-Men #142.

More seriously, I keep feeling like I ought to comment on the issue itself. I didn't earlier, because I expect you'll never read THAT copy. But still, that two-part "Days of Future Past" story was one of the most defining moments of X-Men history.

I remember, back in the 1990s, going to my friend's house, reading his "X-Men" comics, and hearing him tell me that as time went on, the "X-Men" story implied more and more strongly that the future portrayed in "Days of Future Past" was the actual future toward which the world was heading.

I argued: "But that CAN'T be the future! The 'Days of Future Past' story established right away that in that other timeline, the Brotherhood assassinated Senator Kelly. The X-Men changed history by preventing it."

My friend amended "Well then, the future will be SIMILAR to the 'Days of Future Past' timeline."

You know, I was thinking about this thread. It was - whoa! - SEVENTEEN YEARS ago that I started reading this thread, wishing to write in it. I particularly wanted to end a post here with "Long live the Legion thread!" It wasn't until 2009 that I did the former (in this post), and 2010 when I did the latter (in this post).

But... in 2017 EileenProphetofIstus seemed - to me, anyway - discontent with these boards. At least, she didn't seem happy with MY responses to her questions, like this one or this one.

And later that year, she bailed out of these boards altogether, and I feel poorer for it. I don't know what happened with her, but I'd like to think that she met with success writing her Legion game, her campaign world book, and whatever other projects she worked on since then.

What can I say? Jim Shooter's death left me thinking of other kinds of losses too.

This came as a shock to me.

I won't waste time writing about the facts of Shooter's remarkable life. You could get that information from many, many sources, far more reliable than anything I could write here. I expect that even people who hated Jim Shooter couldn't deny what a huge impact he had on the American comic book industry, so hard facts are easy to research.

No, I just want to throw in a personal note. In the 2000s, when I was at the height of my Legion of Super-Heroes fandom, I got and read all that material from its beginning in 1958 until mid-1968. I had heard that Jim Shooter - whom DC Comics had hired to write for that series when he was 14 - did a particularly good job, revolutionizing the series. But I read his Legion material published from mid-1966 to mid-1968 and said "Meh. I don't see that it's any greater than the earliest Legion stories." I felt much more impressed with Paul Levitz' contribution to the series.

Only two days ago, I happened to write about the subject on these forums. (Here's a link to that post.) At the time, I had no idea that Shooter's death was only one day away. Anyway, I was speaking highly of Paul Levitz' Legion issues from the 1970s and 80s, saying that they "beat the heck" out of the earlier stories. And to indicate that I knew what I was talking about, I explained how I had read Shooter's stuff from the 1960s.

And as I wrote that, I looked at my own writing and frowned. (I've been doing that a lot lately with my own writing.) Was it fair for me to compare material from the 1960s to the late 1970s? In the 60s, DC was still gearing comics toward children. It wasn't until the 70s that DC began to consider the more mature demographic (although I must comment that I feel DC didn't quite figure out how to make that work for them until around 1980). I found myself finishing that paragraph with the confession that perhaps I was being unfair to Shooter. Instead of making my point - that I knew what I was talking about - I found that I was defeating the... POINT of making a point. Maybe I DON'T know what I'm talking about.

Later in that post, I went on to say that I wanted to get more of Levitz' Legion material from the 1970s. After I submitted my post, I found myself thinking "And when I do that, I ought to try some of SHOOTER's Legion stuff from the 1970s as well. Until I do, what right do I have to trash-talk his writing?"

Of course, Shooter's work since then was tremendous. His work for Marvel in the 1970s and 80s changed the whole course of comic book history. But again, sources are plentiful, so you don't need me to tell you that.

Back in March, in this thread, Aberzombie brought up Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga. That led me to rave about Paul Levitz, whose Legion stories from the 1980s I contrasted favorably with those of Jim Shooter from the 1960s. (Here's a link to that post.)

In writing that post, I referred to Paul Levitz' first Legion run. Then I proofread my post and frowned. It wasn't his FIRST run. What about all those Legion stories he wrote in the 1970s? So I edited my post to say "Paul Levitz's SECOND run". Later I re-read my post and frowned again. In the 2000s, when I got all Legion-crazy and collected over 50 of those Paul Levitz issues, why did I never look into Levitz's FIRST run, from the 1970s? I don't recall ever even considering it. I'm not such a Legion fan anymore, and can no longer seem to read more than a few issues at a time, but still, I wondered what I might have missed out on. Maybe Paul Levitz - still a young and immature writer - had some room for improvement in the 1970s, but hey, I got and enjoyed reading his stories about Aquaman and The Huntress from that decade, even if his dialog wasn't quite up to snuff.

So the next time I ordered old comics from Mile High, I threw three of Levitz' Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes issues into my order. I chose issues 228 through 230, simply because they were cheap. With hindsight, I should have chosen some later issues which were twice the length, thus getting more bang for my buck, but I didn't think to check the page counts. Ah well; live and learn. But the issues I DID get proved worthy additions to my collection. Yeah, some of Levitz' dialog could have used some minor revision, but he had good IDEAS for stories, and the plots and action beat the heck out of the Legion stories of the 1960s.

Maybe I should justify what qualifies me to make that comparison. I bought and read the first three DC Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes volumes, thus covering every Legion story until mid-1968. Possibly Jim Shooter's Legion stories improved during the next ten years, in which case my dismissing Shooter may be unfair, but I'm judging by what I've seen.

Anyway, I got to start my reading with a bang. The rest of this post is spoiler-heavy, but hey, there were ALREADY spoilers; in Adventure Comics issue 354, Jim Shooter had foretold that Chemical King - whom we had never even SEEN and would not see until 17 issues later - "sacrificed his life to prevent World War VII". (I was fortunate enough to see that bit of foreshadowing in the third Showcase volume, which also showed me the first appearance of the Dark Circle in Adventure Comics issue 367.)

So I thrilled to see those very events - related previously in only one brief phrase in Adventure 354 - unfold in Legion issue 228. I've often ranted that I prefer LINEAR time travel stories - in which the future cannot be changed - over stories it which it can. Not only do I regard the business of changing history to be inherently illogical, but every story about changing history - with no major exceptions that I can think of - seems unable to stay true even to its own - already absurd - rules of logic. Before the Crisis on Infinite Earths, characters like Superboy simply could not change history in the DC comic-book universe, and that's the way it should be, in my not-so-humble opinion. The letters page, speaking of issue 223, mentioned a "billion possible futures". I don't know what that's about, and I don't want to know. Issue 228 showed us history happening the way it was meant to happen.

Issue 229 made a perfect follow-up to that story, as the Legion went after the Dark Circle in retaliation. Even issue 230 mentions Chemical King's funeral, if only briefly to set the stage for Bouncing Boy's solo story (as I've seen done in so many other team books). And it's nice to see an alien that isn't just a human in a funny suit.

Last year, I got so thoroughly hooked on Denny O'Neill's Iron Man run that I frequently had to order many issues of that stuff from Mile High Comics. This time, I'm not nearly so hooked on Levitz' Legion stories, so it will probably be some time before I order comics again. But I look forward to that day - whenever it is - so I can get a little more of that Legion material.

My latest order from Mile High also included other comic books that I wanted as a result of stuff Aberzombie brought up in this thread. I'll probably post about some of those other issues another day.

Get the bikes!

In the 1990s, thanks to my friend and his huge comic book collection, I was able to read Peter David's issues of The Incredible Hulk, X-Factor and Aquaman. But it's thanks to Peter David and his great storytelling talent that I read so MANY issues of those series'.

In 2023, in this thread, I was talking about comics related to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. (Here's a link to that post.) To recap, for many years, I wanted to read Buffy comics, but didn't, because I figured that to appreciate them, I would need familiarity with the show.

If I could now advise my past self - or anyone else in a similar position - I would recommend the eight-issue series Fray, by Joss Whedon. It's set in the Buffyverse, but it doesn't assume knowledge of the show. It takes place centuries into the future, in a time when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and there are flying cars. I mean... how often have I wished to see action scenes with flying cars, like I mentioned in this thread and in this thread, among others? And that's the type of background Whedon gives us in this epic story about a Vampire Slayer and her demon mentor. The story is funny, it's tragic, it's suspenseful, it's action-packed, it has Joss Whedon-style plot twists and surprises, and in short, it rocks.

In 2023, when I finally finished the Buffy show, I went on to get a lot of trade paperbacks reprinting Buffy-related comics. I got the first four volumes of "Season 8". I got the first two volumes of the Buffy Omnibus. I got Tales of the Vampires and Tales of the Slayers. Some of that material was good, some of it less so. But recently, to my surprise, I felt a desire to read Fray a third time. I've long rated stories based on the number of times I voluntarily read them (or, in the case of videos, viewed them). I never thought of a better objective criterion. So yesterday, when I finished my third reading of Fray, that officially made it my single favorite story of the Buffyverse.

My all-time favorite module series is the "Coin" trilogy by Kenzer & Company: The Root of All Evil, Forging Darkness, and Coin's End. It was written for the "Kingdoms of Kalamar" setting and D&D 3.0 but I converted the first two modules to Pathfinder RPG 1e and ran them in Golarion, starting in Nex and seeing the party travel to the Mwangi Expanse and Katapesh over the course of the campaign. I described my experiences with that campaign in the following thread:

My 6-year-old played Pathfinder

I could swear someone else on these boards related running the "Coin" trilogy in Golarion, starting it in... the Shackles? The Sodden Lands? Something like that. But I can't seem to find those posts now.

I have X-Factor issues 1, 2, 3 and 7, all drawn by Guice. I remember talking about that stuff here.

Yes, it's been 10 years since I created the thread...

Happy 80th birthday, Herb Alpert

...to pay tribute to my favorite musician alive. In that thread, I wrote a 1300-word biography of him. Since then, I expanded that biography to 15,000 words, adding a bibliography and footnotes and dividing it into chapters. Every now and then I update it or add material. Obviously, I don't expect anyone on these boards to read a post that long.

So I'll just say this: when I call Alpert "my favorite musician alive", what I have in mind is his "Tijuana Brass" records from the 1960s. By the time he finished making those, he got sick of that kind of music and changed to other styles, some of which were popular and some of which I like. But they weren't the Tijuana Brass.

This year, at the age of 89, Alpert - still making records and going on concert tours, amazingly - began a tour titled “Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass & Other Delights” in which he plays mostly Tijuana Brass songs in a manner reminiscent of his old style. Yes, even now, as he turns 90, he's still going strong, doing what he loves to do.

Here's wishing his health and happiness for the next 10 years.

Presenting a Swing-Styled, Big Band Rendition of Portal's 'Still Alive' with a masterful Sinatra Sound-Alike... courtesy of The 8-Bit Big Band. :)

Back in the late 1990s, when Nintendo ceased production of the 16-bit Super NES, I no longer felt any interest in new computer games. I would dig out old games and play them, but new games just didn't call to me... with one major exception. Portal came out in 2007, but it would be many years before I heard of it. Actually, I heard a few mentions of GLaDOS. I read a direct reference or two to the character on these very messageboards, but the name meant nothing to me at the time.

One day - in 2023, I think? 2022, maybe? - I happened to hear that cover of "Still Alive" by 8-Bit Big Band. I didn't like the song enough to want to download it to add it to my playlist, but I liked to stream it on occasion. And something about that song intrigued me. What was the song about? I read up on Portal and it fascinated me! It's the only computer game that I bought since the 1990s. I spent months working on setting my record for the shortest amount of time to complete it. And I never even liked that kind of game!

Gotta catch 'em all.

So... James Jacobs' favorite adventure writer of the 2nd edition era is Bruce Cordell. I find that very interesting.

I myself cannot name a favorite adventure writer of any category. There are simply too many great ones. But I'll never forget my experiences with The Shattered Circle. I was just starting to wake up to the realization that 3.X was the edition for me, despite my desire to run a lot of AD&D adventures. I had converted "Clarshh's Sepulchre" (from Dungeon magazine, issue 53) to D&D 3.0, run it, and judged that I had done a good job (despite a few mistakes on my part, which I resolved to correct by learning from those mistakes). But what about a REALLY big conversion project? Would I have the patience to convert The Shattered Circle to 3.0, despite the awkward issues I had doing so? Well, I did, in a long and painstaking process. I could have taken shortcuts to make the conversion faster and easier, but I feel that a great adventure like that deserves to be run in a way that's true to the original. And I ran it in 3.0 twice.

And I regard The Sunless Citadel to be my favorite introductory adventure for 3.x. I ran it in 3.0 more than once. And many years later, I converted it to Pathfinder RPG 1st edition and ran it in a campaign. Again, I painstakingly wrote stats true to the original but compliant with PFRPG, without taking shortcuts... except one: for one of the NPCs, I grabbed the equipment from a statblock in the NPC Codex. But that's all.

And although The Gates of Firestorm Peak was too big for me to run, I used PARTS of it, at least.

So Bruce Cordell definitely holds a significant place in my heart and in the history of my role-playing life.

And I now feel compelled to mention something else, in case you feel that my own personal opinions might not be convincing enough. I'm now looking at the 116th issue of Dungeon magazine, which came out in 2004. That issue includes a list of the 10 most highly recommended Dungeon magazine adventures. I was on the verge of copying that list into this post, but then I got nervous. That list is published in copyrighted material, after all. The moderator might delete my post for that reason. But suffice it to say, that list proves that even the Paizo staff liked many Dungeon magazine adventures from the 1990s. And as for the 1980s, they chose an adventure from the very FIRST issue of Dungeon! (I don't have that issue, so I can't speak to that.)

Whew! I just wrote a lot about something which - I admitted in the very beginning - is off the intended topic of this thread. I should stop now.

Whoa! I mean... whoa!

You know, when I wrote that post above, I just carelessly threw those links in there. I hadn't actually read that seven-year-old post in many years. I just re-read that long post about how I led up to "Chadranther's Bane" and how it began. That post included many details that I had long forgotten. Some of those experiences I had described in that post surprised me when I re-read them today. I'm now remembering some more of my experiences with that adventure... but that would be getting REALLY off-topic.

I'll admit that my post here misses the point of the thread. But I feel compelled to comment, nevertheless.

I never liked the stuff in Dungeon in the ‘80s. Their adventures seemed amateurish to me and a waste of 3 dollars or whatever. Never spent a dollar on that magazine and put all my money in books and boxed sets instead.

Well... I can't exactly argue. Yeah, most of those adventures indeed seemed amateurish... with a few exceptions, most notably "Chadranther's Bane", from issue 18 (which came out in the year 1989). That adventure excited me so much, I ACHED to run it. I spent a great deal of time converting it to Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and drawing some of the maps in great detail. Actually running the adventure was so incredible, I described the experience at great length in this post. If that post is too long and detailed for you, here's a post with a shorter version of the story.

But OK, for the most part, Dungeon in the 1980s had room for improvement. Here's the thing, though: the next thing you say is...

But with 3E it looks like Paizo took the magazine to heights that even the books couldn’t match.

As soon as I read that, I said "Huh? You just skipped over a whole decade!"

Maybe you've never seen Dungeon in the 1990s. And if you didn't, boy did you miss out! In 1992-1997, that magazine gave us over a dozen adventures so wonderful that even after I switched to Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and later to Pathfinder RPG 1st Edition, and later still back to D&D 3.0, I felt compelled to convert many of those adventures to whatever engine I was running, usually in great detail and with a great deal of time and effort. Here's a description of some of my favorite adventures from that period.

I remember getting over a dozen issues of Batman and Detective Comics back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Batman #483 was the last issue I got.

Actually, that issue may have been a large part of the reason I didn't buy any more after that.

Oh, Crash and Burn/Byrne were interesting characters. Maybe my problem with the story was that they overshadowed Batman and Robin too much; the heroes seemed like they were thrown into the story, almost as if they were an afterthought on the writer's part.

And maybe, from a financial point of view, that was a good time for me to stop. After I lost interest in Batman for a few years, the Knightfall story intrigued me enough to make me read my friend's issues, beginning shortly before Knightfall. I remember Bane breaking the inmates of Arkham Asylum free, setting the stage for the war of attrition that would eventually break Batman. Since I got to read every issue of the story, it was just as well that I didn't get an issue or two here and there, as I had done earlier.

And yeah, Tim Drake's role at the time was kind of cool.

...that Gygax quote at 37:22 of the video...

I meant 37:32.

Okay, I Googled it. It's from the August-September 1975 issue of Europa magazine.

But... I still feel skeptical. Didn't Gygax play D&D with all three of his daughters?

EDIT: Or were those some of the games that he felt were "spoiled"? Okay, that might be a good answer.

Okay, I watched the vast majority of that video. (I skipped some parts in the middle because they got too detailed about the rules and their implications.) Most of the comments I could make about it are so obvious, I won't bother. (Also, I'm afraid some of my comments might look bad out of context and might get my post deleted.)

But I will say one thing about that Gygax quote at 37:22 of the video. I think it's unbelievable that he would write such a thing. In fact, I think it's so unbelievable that I feel skeptical. What's the source of that quote?

You know what? I think I'll write a comment in that YouTube page asking that question. If no one gives me a source, I will remain skeptical.

Okay, it's been over a month since episodes 6 through 10 of Season 6 came out, but for a long time I put off watching them, because I was watching other stuff. Today, I just finished off the latest batch of episodes, and I greatly enjoyed it. Without spoiling the story - TOO badly - I can say that the many plot twists really threw me, and in a GOOD way this time. I say that as a contrast to Season 2, which left me feeling sick (as I've related in a previous post). In fact, the latest episode looked like a deliberate resemblance - yet a contrast - to the Season 2 finale. This time...

And once again, I don't feel I'm spoiling the story too badly when I mention the brief glimpses we get of Miyagi himself, albeit in a dream. In the movies, Miyagi briefly mentioned having to fight for his life. I've reflected that might make for a fascinating movie, although I doubted that any actor other than Pat Morita could do the character justice. When I saw that dream sequence, I immediately thought: Now THAT actor looks GREAT for the part!

Really the whole sixth season - or the ten episodes of it that came out so far - are chock full of great, fun moments. I even enjoyed the fight sequences, and I usually find such scenes to be too long and drawn out. Those scenes were long, yet I still thrilled to watch them. I often had to rewind and re-watch certain parts to answer questions like "Wait... how did that that character manage to win? I missed that part." In fact, I often went back to remind myself of how things went down with other kinds of scenes, like dialog.

In short, this is fascinating stuff!

I read "The Laughing Fish" in The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told. In fact, the cover of that trade paperback shows the Joker with a grinning fish, clearly referring to that story.

I saw that episode of the animated series, too.

Also, in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, I read "The Deadly Ricochet", a story originally printed in the preceding issue (that is, Detective Comics #474), which shows Silver St. Cloud finding out Batman's secret identity, which sets the stage for the next issue.

I remember getting Detective Comics #583 and 584 - which formed the first "Ventriloquist / Scarface" story - from a local drug store when they first came out. I don't believe I had ever bought any issue of Batman nor Detective Comics before. I was deeply impressed with how dark both Gotham City and Batman himself were portrayed. I found that stuff dramatic (although my friends didn't seem to find it so). "When you are the Batman -- when you hate crime with a passion that drives you to fight it every waking moment of your life -- where do you START?" I mean... wow! And the Ventriloquist / Scarface made a fascinating character (or two). I read that two-parter again and again, and ran it as a DC Heroes Role Playing Game adventure, sometimes reading excerpts directly out of those comics to the players in the process.

I went on to get over a dozen new issues of Batman and Detective Comics over the next few years. And I vaguely remember the Ventriloquist's part in Knightfall.

I'm not familiar with any of the replacement versions, though. And although I watched dozens of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, I never saw the Ventriloquist in it.

Now I'm curious to know what you meant about making a death stick. At first, I assumed you meant that Wesker was permanently killed in the comics. I wondered about that, so I just looked up Ventriloquist in the Wikipedia, which says that the "One Year Later" storyline retconned his death. Later Wesker got killed again, but then got reanimated into a Black Lantern in the "Blackest Night" crossover. And then in the "New 52" continuity he was never killed. I suppose you could argue that these three events don't disqualify Wesker's death from "sticking", but it seems to me that his death was ESSENTIALLY undone. Or did I misunderstand your last remark?

Maybe some of this stuff could go in your Did You Know...? thread, but I just feel like posting into this one.

Red Sonja - as we know her - owes her origin to Allan Howard. No, he's not related to Robert E Howard, but he wrote an article - titled "Conan on Crusade" - for the fanzine Amra. That article (reprinted in The Conan Swordbook, edited by L Sprague de Camp) talked about Robert E Howard's fiction set during and a little after the Crusades. "Conan on Crusade" had just one paragraph about REH's short story "The Shadow of the Vulture" whose hero was a German knight named Gottfried von Kalmbach. That paragraph described the original Red Sonya - with a Y in her name - like this:

"Von Kalmbach alternately and sometimes simultaneously roisters and fights magnificently throughout in company with a red-headed Russian she-cat who would have made a fit companion for Conan. In fact, she might have been a bit too much for him."

Roy Thomas read that excerpt in that book and instantly felt intrigued. He got in touch with REH's estate to get photocopies of the original short story "The Shadow of the Vulture". And the rest is history.

I've seen this in several popular internet forums and perhaps some of you have seen it too. On multiple occasions I've Googled a question and, when browsing the websites that discuss the question, I find that the best source of answers is a page from one popular internet forum or another. The page begins with somebody asking the same question I did, and then goes on to provide good answers from many users... but it also shows that a lot of people answered "Just Google it." And I'm ranting because some people say that in ways that are... um... not nice.

When I see this, I check the dates and see that no one posted in that discussion in years and years, so I don't see much point in posting there myself. But I just want to shout at some of these people: "Hey, leave the original poster alone! The way I see it, he did me - and almost certainly other web-surfers as well - a great service! Now we have a page chock full of good answers! People CAN Google the question... and consequently find this very page!" I mean... does no one see the irony in this?

You know, I frequent a certain other website with forums. (It's not the same as any of the other internet forums I was alluding to above.) On multiple occasions, I saw that someone on those forums asked a question that intrigued me, so I Googled the question, composed an answer based on my findings, and posted the result. I would often begin such a post by saying "I'm no expert on the subject, but I can run a Google search as well as the next guy". I hope I didn't sound condescending when I said that. I should really THANK those people whose questions motivated me to learn about those matters. Maybe I should post a message on that website to that effect.

I'd like to conclude by saying: I salute those brave users who dare to ask questions despite the risk of ridicule.

Back in the days of Dungeons & Dragons versions 3.0 and 3.5, the official, default method for ability score generation was 4d6-and-take-the-best-3... but with one additional bonus. If the ability score array you roll is too low (before racial adjustments), you may scrap it and roll a new array. Your ability scores are considered "too low" if your total modifiers are 0 or less, or if your highest score is 13 or lower.

This, incidentally, will raise the average roll from about 12.2 to about 12.5. I wrote about how I determined that fact in the following thread:

Share your Code Snippets

Then the ones they saved for me to have first crack at were all Uncanny X-Men: #'s 131, 135, 240, & 241.

I'm glad you brought up the Dark Phoenix saga again. I felt like speaking badly about it last time, but really, I greatly enjoyed that story when I first read it, back in the 20th century. It WAS the high point of X-Men of that era.

And it's a funny coincidence - or was it deliberate? - that you're collecting Inferno from the beginning at the same time, because that story...

Also picked up Detective 544, just because.

Then, just because I loved the Wrightson cover, I picked up Swamp Thing #2.

Back in the 20th century, when I became a fan of Alan Moore, I felt the need to read his Swamp Thing stories...but before I did that I had to grab as much Swamp Thing material before Moore's run in order to understand the background. My first step was to get a trade paperback reprinting the 10 Len Wein / Bernie Wrightson issues. And the second issue was particularly memorable. When the Swamp Thing said "I... CARE!!" that simple ellipsis gave me the impression that it hurt him to talk. It was the first time the "Swamp Thing" story hinted at that.

And of course, that story first introduced Arcane. If my goal was to appreciate what Moore did with the story when I read his material, I reaped the rewards all right. "Just say UNCLE!" Classic!

Then in one box I found a 68 page special from ‘86 - Last Days of the Justice Society of America. It looked cool, so I picked it up.

I have that... and I have mixed feelings about it. I mentioned earlier in this thread that my all-time favorite comic book is the 1999-2006 run of JSA. That stuff made me pursue older Justice Society material, including that "Last Days" special. I've mentioned how much I like Roy Thomas many times before, including in this thread. I consider him to be the greatest "Conan" writer, for instance. So you would think that I should REALLY love his work on Justice Society.

But... I don't know. It seems to me that he did with the JSA what he wanted to do... and then threw the team into the trash. Why?

Because, as Thomas wrote, the Crisis had made them "virtually redundant"? Ridiculous! After the traditional yearly JLA/JSA team-ups, this was all the more reason to keep the JSA around! Now the story didn't have to contrive the crossing-over of Earths anymore; those team-ups should be easier than ever to arrange!

Because they're "aging"? So what? Thomas had already contrived an excuse how the JSA stayed alive for as long as they did. It should be easy enough to come up with more such excuses, indefinitely!

Because they "had served their purpose"? He didn't think that many current and future fans would want to read - and write - about the JSA just like he did?

And Thomas admitted - at the end of that two-page essay - "DC could bring them back anytime it wished." I should think it obvious that DC inevitably WOULD do so, sooner or later. So why contrive such a bogus end for them?

I like SOME of Thomas' work, but his treatment of the JSA? Not so much.

And I don't know if the readers were supposed to "care for" Azrael. I think he was supposed to be the loose cannon that would threaten the whole Batman legacy. I think that the tension that the readers were supposed to feel was whether the real Batman could - or would - stop him before Valley did something really terrible.

Yeah if I had just read Detective Comics #666, I would feel compelled to read Batman #500 afterwards, and not "just for the hell of it". That issue was more than just "solid"; I'd say it was the pivotal issue that would make or break "Az-Bat", as you call him, thereby determining the whole direction of the Batman story for the next year. Those two issues, put together, formed the climactic chapter of "Knightfall".

Once again, I feel like beginning a post with "Wow!"

Back in April, on this thread, I mentioned starting collecting, and by now I HAVE collected Iron Man issues 160 through 201, Denny O'Neil's longest uninterrupted run on the series. I just finished reading that run yesterday. There are so many fascinating aspects of that epic saga, I don't know which ones to choose. (I don't have time to talk about ALL of them.)

For those who don't care about who writes the issues, I could call that collection "the Stane saga", as it covers the beginning of Stark's problems with Obadiah Stane, right up until their final battle. And I mean FINAL; Stane never came back in that continuity. Actually, since I had already read Demon in the Bottle, I knew about Stark's alcohol problem, so I could have read just issues 162 through 200, but even that makes 39 issues. I'm not aware that any comic book had ever run a story arc for that many issues before. I mean, this was back in 1982-1986! (Well, maybe those of you better versed in comics than I am would know of some comparably long story that pre-dates the Stane saga. Any thoughts?)

It's funny that Aberzombie's been collecting issues from the Batman: Knightfall story arc. O'Neil edited - and led the creative teams for - Knightfall, and he clearly re-used many of his ideas from Iron Man in planning his Batman stories.

I mean, just consider O'Neil's work on Batman. He wrote a story where Batman had a drug addiction. Later, he wrote a story that introduced Jean-Paul Valley (Azrael) and Batman worked with him. Knightfall introduced a new villain, Bane, who used the aforementioned drug as a weapon, and who - as far as I know - came closer to breaking (literally!) the Batman than anyone else ever did. (Well, I should say he broke THAT Batman worse than anyone else did. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Earth-2 Batman kind of broke when Selina died, and then someone killed Batman... permanently! But I digress.) With Bruce Wayne out of action, Jean-Paul Valley took over as Batman for a long time - with Bruce's own endorsement - but soon Valley went psycho, and the two Batmen had to duke it out for Bruce to become Batman again. Even after that, it took Batman a while to pick up the pieces of his life. But he emerged stronger for it, with a new, more powerful Batman suit.

Now consider the earlier Iron Man material. Even before O'Neil started writing, there was a famous story about Stark's alcohol problem, but O'Neil brought that subplot back, when Stane used alcohol as a weapon against Stark. (Oh yeah, the name "Bane" even rhymes with "Stane"; I wonder if O'Neil - or someone - named the character Bane as a smug hint.) Also, James Rhodes had been established as a friend and able ally of Tony Stark, even before the Stane saga. Stane came closer to breaking Iron Man than anyone else ever did, as far as I know. And with Stark out of action, Rhodes had to take over as Iron Man, eventually getting Stark's own endorsement to do so. But then Rhodes went psycho, and the two Iron Men had to duke it out. Even after that, it took Iron Man a while to pick up the pieces of his life, but he emerged stronger for it, with a new, more powerful Iron Man suit.

I trust you see the similarity now, if you hadn't already seen it.

It's evident how much this story fascinated me, because I'm not much of a collector. If I want to read many consecutive issues of a comic book, I would get trade paperbacks (or hardbacks) with reprints. But I'm not aware that the Stane saga - or any part of it - got reprinted, so I kept collecting. I mean... for me to get 42 consecutive issues is crazy! Only once before in my life did I get that many consecutive issues of a comic book, and that was during the years of my Teen Titans fandom, back in the 1980s!

Of course, one major highlight of the Stane saga was James Rhodes becoming Iron Man in issue #170. If I weren't so determined to collect this complete saga, I might not have been willing to shell out $8.40 for just one issue. Okay, I can just imagine Aberzombie reading this and laughing "Ah, you cheapskate! I shelled out $125 for Conan the Barbarian #1 and $80 for Uncanny X-Men #126." Well, I don't recall ever spending more than $8.40 for a single issue of a comic book before.

Another major highlight was the story's treatment of alcoholism itself... but I've rambled on long enough. I should get started on my day in the real world already.

All these years later, what is it you love about PF1 and/or 3.5/3.0 that you keeps you running what is arguably the most burdensome system to run as far as prep time and weight at high level play.

One point I didn't address in my earlier post here was the "weight at high level play" part. High level play isn't an issue for me when I choose a gaming engine, because I HATE high level play! During my BECMI years (the 1980s) when I got a copy of the D&D Companion Set, I practiced with it by using it with my own PCs, solo. I had been using those PCs, slowly running all of them through adventures from 1st level, so it was quite an achievement, actually, to advance some of them as high as 18th level. However, that experience taught me that high-level play is too overwhelming, due to the power level and the options. Other than that one practice solo campaign, I never advanced any character past 15th level, nor statted out any NPC with more than 15 class levels, in any tabletop RPG.

I started with BECMI and AD&D 2e. One of the things that got me hooked on 3.X was balance. No longer did we have these different - ARBITRARY! - XP charts for each class. No longer did wizards start off pathetic and wind up too powerful; just hearing a character's level gave you at least SOME idea of how powerful that character was. No longer were demi-humans' levels limited. More generally, BECMI and AD&D had arbitrary rules; 3.X was more complicated, but those complications existed for a REASON, giving us a more balanced and generally more fun game. And although I sometimes rant about inaccurate CRs, 3.X beats the heck out of BECMI / AD&D in that area. Also, 3.X gave us a wealth-by-level table. And 3.0 and 3.5 gave us rules for monsters as PCs, using Level Adjustment; that filled a void that I felt REALLY needed filling. And Pathfinder gave us great pawns.

Detective Comics #'s 627, 638, 640, 641, 643-646, 652, 666-675, 677 & 678. Most of these were from a time I had stopped buying most Batman (for reasons I don't recall).

Batman: Shadow of the Bat #'s 19-23. These after I realized I didn't own #'s 1-31, probably from around the time I had stopped collecting Bat titles.

What a time to stop buying! I should think the whole Knightfall / Knightquest / KnightsEnd story must have been the biggest Batman-related event of the 1990s!

The had a copy of the original Marvel Savage Sword of Conan #1. Price and condition weren’t too bad, so I picked it up.

I felt fortunate a few years ago to get Savage Sword of Conan #3 in a condition that WASN'T so good, because in good condition it probably would have been out of my price range. I wanted that issue in particular because it bridged the gap between "Black Colossus" and the issues of Conan the Barbarian that Roy Thomas wrote in the early 1990s.

This month, I sprang $70.90 to buy 27 issues from Mile High Comics. It's kind of weird - because for the last 40 years I've regarded myself as a bigger fan of DC than of Marvel - that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 27 issues I ordered was a Marvel comic. But they were of the four titles I wanted.

I mentioned each of those four titles in this thread lately. I told you earlier that I had 2 issues of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. Now I have two more. I mentioned six months ago learning about the Magik limited series. Now I have all four issues.

And for years - ever since I first read Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle - I've been curious to read about Tony Stark's alcoholism relapse which led to him handing the reins to James Rhodes. I got 9 issues of Iron Man from that era.

And most of all, I got Alpha Flight. I mentioned earlier in this thread that I have - and recently re-read - the first issue and wanted to contine reading from there. But how many issues should I get? In July I was thinking of ordering and getting only 4 issues of Alpha Flight (and only 4 issues of Iron Man). Then I said "I won't feel content with so few issues!" So I put off ordering until this month, when I went nuts, daring to go all out and buy TWELVE consecutive issues of Alpha Flight! I felt nervous doing so. There's a strong possibility that after I read just a few issues I'll get bored of the series and regret buying so many. I guess that's the problem with ordering online: it's not feasible to buy one issue at a time, so I wind up committing. At least I qualified for free shipping this way. And now I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

Back in 2016, I first drafted the Top Ten list of my favorite novel series' of all time. Since then, I revised that list many times. I added two series' to the list, disqualified another one, and merged two items on the list into one. I promoted some series' to higher spots on the list, which obviously pushed other entries further down. But in the 7 years since I first wrote the list, I've never promoted anything all the way up to the #1 spot... until 2024. The new reigning champion is Dragonlance.

Oh, there will always be a place in my heart - and several places on my bookshelves - for the former #1 listing, L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and its 13 major sequels (The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, et al). I first finished that series back in my childhood - around 1981 - and it gave me a fascination for fantasy fiction that hasn't left me since, and it led me to so many other things, including, predictably, Dungeons & Dragons in 1983.

Yet oddly, I never read any D&D novels (apart from Endless Quest books) until 1996 when I got started with Dragonlance (or DL for short). I loved the Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlance Legends trilogies so much, I went on to buy and read dozens more DL novels over the next four years. And when Dragons of Summer Flame broke my addiction, that freed me to re-read the Chronicles and Legends and even some second-tier Dragonlance books, including Weasel's Luck, Flint the King, The Kinslayer Wars, and others.

And when I started the Chronicles a THIRD time, my timing happened to be perfect. I finished the first novel (Dragons of Autumn Twilight) and sought to move on from there in 2006, just my local public library made Dragons of the Dwarven Depths available, so I could fit it into its proper place in continuity between the first and second Chronicles books. This was no second-tier book; it was a rare gem, worthy of the original novels! I went on to insert Dwarven Depths between books 1 and 2 in my every subsequent reading.

Of course, not everyone liked it. This conversation in 2016, in which SmiloDan disrespected that novel, made me realize something two days later. (Here's a link to those two posts in which I realized it.) When I like some early novels in a series but not later ones, it's best to pretend that those later ones simply don't exist, particularly when I judge and rate the series.

And as I wrote those posts, I started thinking seriously about writing the list of my 10 favorite novel series' of all time.

And in case you read those posts and that business with the "biscuits" makes you wonder, I should mention that I refuted that point in this post.

But getting back on track, when I had difficulty deciding how to rate the series' in my Top Ten list, I felt the need for concrete criteria, so decided: the more times I voluntarily read a series, the higher it should rank on the list. That made sense... but what about when I read two series' the same number of times? To break the tie I needed a secondary criterion. After some thought, I came up with the tiebreaking rule: when comparing two series' that I read the same number of times, the higher-ranking one should be the one I first read more recently. The theory is that the longer ago I first discovered a series, the more time I had to re-read it, so the more chance it got.

Now I'll admit that last criterion can split hairs sometimes. For instance, I first read my #9 favorite series in 1984-1985. After finishing that, I first read my #8 favorite in 1985-1986. Should that measly one year - an accident of history - really make a difference? Or for another example, my #6 listing is a great, famous classic of science fiction. My #5 favorite is science fiction, but not a classic. Does it really deserve a higher ranking? But whenever I consider such examples, I wind up deciding that the results aren't so outrageous, so I stand by them.

And there could be no question of which entry reigned supreme. In 2018, when I finished my fifth reading of the Oz series and began my SIXTH (!), even though I didn't get very far into my sixth reading (because by that time, I just knew the story too well) Oz seemed untouchable.

Or did it? I kept getting the urge to read Dragonlance, and I just couldn't get through those second- and third-rate DL novels anymore, so I kept going back to the best ones. In 2022, I finished my fifth reading of the Dragonlance Chronicles / Dragonlance Legends sextet, and thought: but Dragons of the Dwarven Depths deserves a place in that series! So then when I kept getting that craving for DL again and again, I read Dwarven Depths for a fourth and fifth time. (I mentioned that in this post last year.)

And this year, I started my SIXTH reading of Autumn Twilight! I'm not very far into it, but still, I've officially read that series six-and-a-fraction times, just as with Oz. And this isn't even splitting hairs; I've been acquainted with Oz for well over a decade longer than my Dragonlance reading!

(In my system, when comparing the number of readings, I don't compute the exact fraction; a fraction is a fraction, whether it's one thousands, or 999 thousands, or anything in between.)

Whew! I congratulate anyone who got through that long ramble about numbers. It may seem weird that I went on for so long about that without mentioning any reasons WHY I like Dragonlance. But hey, what can I say about it that I haven't said already? For instance, there's this post, this post, this post,, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, this post, and... well, many others.

You know, it's a funny thing about X-Men. Sometimes I try to emphasize the positive. Like... you mention #136, the cover picture of which is very famous, and was imitated so many times.

But... maybe it's the mood I'm in, but I feel like mentioning some rather less positive things about X-Men. Yes, it had many great ideas, but those ideas were mired in stories full of... less-great ideas. That famous cover of issue 136 we both mentioned advertised the death of Phoenix, yet she didn't really die until the NEXT issue. It made her actual death seem almost anti-climactic. And that was supposed to be the high point of the series!

Like I said, X-Men was chock full of good ideas. Consequently, other media were able to adapt that series well by distilling its best ideas into a more concentrated form. For instance, there were those seven wonderful X-Men movies, running from 2000 to 2019. Oh yes, I even liked that third movie X-Men: The Last Stand which so many people trash-talked. I defended it in conversations, such as this thread and this thread.

And the Dark Phoenix movie came up with some interesting twists on that story.

So yeah, the X-Men comic had some wonderful ideas. But readers have to wade through a lot of unconvincing and poorly explained stories to mine those ideas. In recent months - probably due in large part to this thread - I kept feeling a desire to read those stories, so I would read an issue, or a few, before getting bored and giving up until the next time I had such a whim. In that way, in recent months, I read issues 145-154. Sure, Chris Claremont could write with AUTHORITY. That is, when he wrote about the X-Men, he convinced me that X-Men history happened the way he wrote it. Many later X-Men comic book writers lacked that ability. But Claremont failed to explain so many of his ideas, which he sometimes could have done very easily!

I'm fortunate enough to have X-Men Visionaries 2: The Neal Adams Collection which reprints X-Men 56-63 and 65. There's a cliche about making computers fail with logical paradoxes and like that. But convincing those computers to fly into the sun? I can't think of any other examples of THAT.

Why can't you just make up stats if you want to use a creature in your game?

Heh. I was tempted to ask the same question, but then I realized something. I generally run low-level games, so my conversions were relatively easy, such as Tasloi.

I remember shortly after PFRPG 1e came out, I spent some time converting The Root of All Evil to it. By the time I ran that module a second time, two years later, most of those monsters I had converted had PFRPG stats posted on the internet, making my work worthless. But even before those stats were posted, most of those were low-level monsters. The biggest exception by far was the Guardian Familiar which was CR 9.

The same goes for Night's Dark Terror. By the time I ran it in PFRPG 1e, most of that stuff was on the net. What I did have to convert, such as Hutaakans and Traldar, had low CRs. Again, the biggest exception by far was CR 9 (the Kartoeba).

But on this thread people are discussing Kaiju, oni, and demigods. That's high-level stuff that I feel no desire even to attempt.

But with the smaller CR range... well, yeah, I do wonder why some people can't write up stats themselves. I must have converted dozens of monsters to D&D 3.0 to get stat blocks with low CRs.

Yeah, a few months ago, on this thread, I mentioned reading my friend's comics back in the 1990s, including many of his old Batman issues. I neglected to mention that what drove me at that time to read Batman was Knightfall, Knightquest, and KnightsEnd. I started with earlier issues than that, in case it gave me a feel for the background, but reading that Bane / Jean-Paul Valley story was my goal. And I surpassed that goal; I must have kept reading for a while after KnightsEnd because I remember reading the story where Bruce persuades Alfred to come back.

I'm finally reading a book which I first wanted - badly - to read over 30 years ago.

Back in the twentieth century, I was a big Doctor Who fan. To this day, I've never been crazier about any other TV show. And I wasn't content only to watch; for those times when I couldn't watch TV or video, I collected over 100 novelizations of the original Doctor Who television serials and read all of those that I got. I read the vast majority of them many, many times, in fact. Terrance Dicks wrote over a third of those that I got (and still have). I liked the way Dicks stayed faithful to the original stories, providing the closest thing I could get to watching the original without actually watching TV/video. It seemed to me like only occasionally would he deviate slightly from the original script (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse).

And more than any of the other Doctor Who books, I wanted to collect novelizations of the missing stories. Many Doctor Who serials (that is, multi-episode stories, each one of which would typically have one corresponding novelization) from the 1960s were missing some of its episodes, the British Broadcasting Corporation having purged them. And my State's public TV station did not show any Doctor Who serial that was missing any episodes (with the exception of Invasion of the Dinosaurs). So the best way to find out about what happened in those stories was the novelizations. And there was just one missing story whose novelization I couldn't find at any of my local stores: The Abominable Snowmen. I tried asking and writing to people, looking for some way to order it by mail, but nothing worked out. It was especially frustrating as I read The Web of Fear multiple times; I generally avoid reading a sequel before the original.

Also, in VHS format, I got a hold of the surviving episodes of the serials I didn't see on TV. At least, I got all of those episodes I COULD get on VHS at the time. That included episode 2 of The Abominable Snowmen. But all I could get for the other 5 episodes was a brief, vague summary that didn't make for fun reading.

After about a decade, I grew tired of Doctor Who and stopped reading and watching it. About a decade after that, I grew un-tired enough to read a few of my old novelizations. By that time, I had started ordering old books through Amazon from third-party sellers. But whenever I looked for The Abominable Snowmen, I only found copies being offered for insanely high prices. I thought that maybe they were rare by that time, and I despaired of ever getting a copy.

Later, I started getting a craving to see - or read the novelization of - The Sunmakers, which was in the minority group of those Doctor Who novelizations (of the 1963-1989 series) that I had never gotten. But again, when I looked on Amazon, I found only prohibitively expensive copies.

But later still, I heard about ThriftBooks.com, from which, last year, I ordered The Sunmakers as novelized by Terrance Dicks. I figured: Great! Dicks always stays true to the original!

Well, maybe not. Granted, I haven't seen the TV serial in roughly 30 years, but as I read the book, I felt pretty sure that the dialogue had many differences between the TV serial and the book. I seem to remember more eloquent lines in the televised version. I still had fun reading it, especially because I had forgotten a lot of the plot points and action scenes. But I can't feel certain that the plot and action are exactly the same as in the original, since I know that the dialogue isn't.

This year, I finally got Dicks' novelization of The Abominable Snowmen from AbeBooks.com! Again, thank you Aberzombie for telling me about that site. I feel fortunate to get this opportunity to read it, after all these years. But while I read the part that adapts the second episode, I felt certain that the dialogue in the novel is different from the televised version, even more so than in The Sunmakers. And I also felt pretty sure that the action happened a little differently. Maybe Dicks was drawing from the original script. Maybe the director, or someone, changed the televised version to make it fit the show's limited budget. Maybe the differences in the book are a GOOD thing.

In any case, I'm glad of the chance to read it at all.

My Dad got me into it when I was around 7 and by 11 I knew more about it than he did.

Yeah, I got my son into Pathfinder when he was 6. I wrote about it on these boards at the time.

By the age of 9 he knew the game better than I did. I remarked about it in this post.

So what you're saying is... high schools need more grizzly bears in them.

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Wow.

Years ago, when I was high on my Conan kick, I got Conan Saga issues 22 through 25* because they reprinted Roy Thomas' adaptation of Hour of the Dragon. The main reason I wanted that story was that first issue, in which Conan first met Zenobia, the one woman that Conan ever married, and thereby made the queen of Aquilonia. That first issue was definitely the high point of the story; the other 3 parts were kind of slow and dull, in my opinion.

And you went and bought the original printing of that first part? "Just for s$&ts and giggles"? I... sort of... envy you. I haven't bought anything in a comic book store in years; I found it much cheaper to buy comics online. Gone are the days when I just see a comic book on a shelf or in a bin and buy it on a whim. And you went and picked up Giant-Size Conan #1, just like that.

* And the following is more detail than I'd expect anyone to want to hear: I also got Conan Saga issues 26 and 27 because they reprinted Roy Thomas' adaptation of The Treasure of Tranicos, a story that I quoted on this very thread last year. I mention this because my getting those issues proved a stroke of luck; issue 27 reprinted the final page of Hour of the Dragon which was accidentally omitted from issue 25. That was the page in which Conan first announced his intention to free Zenobia and make her queen of Aquilonia.

Ant-Man and the Wash (the power to become super-small reveals its downside when our hero accidentally gets tossed in with a load of laundry)

Honey, I shrunk the laundry?

I'm reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

It's been years since I read The Incredible Shrinking Man by the same author (and at least 5 of his short stories). I felt that book - although it had some good points - could have been written better. At that time, I heard that I Am Legend was his greatest work, but I didn't see the appeal of a vampire apocalypse story.

Years later, I watched Santa Clarita Diet, a silly comedy about zombies. It's arguably the only long-running video series that I watched in entirety TWICE; I liked it that much. Among other things, the heroes work to prevent a zombie plague from getting out of hand and (possibly, theoretically) starting an apocalypse.

That made me curious enough about the genre to make me watch George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (from 1968) and its first sequel, Dawn of the Dead (from 1978). I could go on and on about the weaknesses of those movies, but - after all these years of wondering what the big deal is - I began to understand the appeal of a zombie apocalypse story.

I figured there are so many zombie apocalypse stories out there, there must be some I would like better than those George Romero movies. So I sought out a few others. For instance, I started reading World War Z by Max Brooks, which I was greatly enjoying, and to which I should return soon. (I should also write a post about World War Z on this thread someday soon.) And one of these days I should read the comic book series The Walking Dead, and maybe look into a few other stories like that.

But I started reflecting. When I caught myself thinking that Night of the Living Dead started the whole sub-genre, I thought: Is that really so? Romero obviously must have been inspired by I Am Legend, which goes all the way back to 1954! Maybe I should read THAT to appreciate the sub-genre better.

Also, I was curious. The protagonist of I Am Legend is - as far as he knows - the only human left in a world where everyone has become a vampire. How would that work? How would the vampires feed, if there are practically no humans left? Would they kill and drink the blood of... other vampires? Or animals? Or what? If they kill other vampires, how would they be any more evil than a human who kills vampires? If they kill animals to survive, how would that make them any worse than us meat-eating humans?

So - although not even halfway through World War Z yet - I took an aside to read I Am Legend, which - like all the other Matheson works I've read or seen - has not terribly impressed me. The novel is too vague about what these vampires are like. Every now and then we get a brief flashback of the main character - Robert Neville - with his wife or friend. And I mean BRIEF. When Robert discovers that his wife, or whoever, is undead, we see only a split second of Robert having that revelation. Then the book goes on and on about how horrifying his experience felt. Why can't we SEE what these people are like when they're undead? I feel like the author gave us only the fuzziest picture because he couldn't figure out how to make it scary.

A lot of the time, the book goes on about Robert's feelings of loneliness or despair. Did Matheson really need vampires just to tell a story about that?! Sometimes Robert wonders what's the point of going on with his life, which certainly does nothing to dissuade me from wondering why I'm bothering to read about it. Just let those vampires kill each other! They can apparently do so without Robert's help.

And... I know that horror stories are generally very implausible, but come on! Robert is no biologist, but he just reads books about the subject and suddenly he can discover things that a world full of trained professionals never could? He just looks under a microscope and identifies the virus? How could he know which of the many viruses around is the culprit? And that nonsense isn't even necessary to get the plot moving! Even if it were, the author could easily have written that some scientists had managed to make some discoveries, the results of which got published in newspapers that made it to the public libraries during the final days before the human race went kaput. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man, this book could have been written better.

Now I just want to finish this book already so I can go back to World War Z.