Artists I Like: Stan Sakai

This week I'm looking at Stan Sakai... legendary creator of legendary rabbit samurai Usagi Yojimbo!

Usagi the protector... he's just a good guy, you know? He does the right thing most of the time. And his skills are off the charts.

He is brought to life by Stan Sakai's masterful pen. The stories are great. Simple, and direct. But it is the high quality linework that makes them stand out. There's a nifty walkthrough of his process on Stan Sakai's website.

I saw Usagi here and there as a youth but never in the wild, always in a magazine or something. I didn't get my hands on any of the comics until I picked up Fantagraphics' volume one collection. I was probably 30 by then. But since my 30s were extremely formative for me, artistically, it was good timing and I hope something of Sakai's magic rubbed off somewhere in my doodles.

Doomslakers to Black Pudding

In 2016 I was fishing around for a zine. I knew I wanted to make one, just wasn't sure what it was going to be. One of my early ideas was Claw Claw Bite, but that title was already taken by a Pathfinder zine, I think. A few days later I settled on Black Pudding.

But before all of that, there was Doomslakers! After all, I already had the blog. I don't remember why I didn't roll with Doomslakers as the title other than maybe I didn't want it confused with the blog. I'm not sure.

But here is the original cover for the first issue of what would become Black Pudding. Of course I used this art for Black Pudding issue 2... I felt like issue 1 needed to have an actual black pudding on the cover, so I drew one.

 

Artists I Like: Tony Salmons

In 1985, when I was 14, the Savage Sword of Conan issues 113 and 118 were published. The first had Earl Norem's Conan on the cover and the other featured a classic Joe Jusko with a bikini lady and Conan and a monster. You know the one.

In the back of each issue was an 8 page story. The first was called "A Quiet Place" and the other was "Alchemy", each written by Don Kraar and drawn by Tony Salmons*. My only knowledge of Tony Salmons came from those stories in SSoC.

Each story was short, brutal, and to the point. The first was about Conan, tired, wanting a quiet night of rest. But of course thugs had to ruin it and so they died. My favorite part of that story is when they kill all the roosters before they can crow so Conan can sleep.

I know Salmons has done other comic book work, but I'm not familiar with it. I never hear his name mentioned. What is his story? Did he give up on comics or just never make a huge splash? His pacing and choice of framing are incredible. I believe they informed my own instincts about comic book art. For example, the way Salmons makes little short series of silent panels and zooms in on details, such as Conan's horse being nearly dead from exhaustion or his sword being bloody as he rides up to the inn.

We get a lot of detail with very few lines. His forms remind me a little of Herb Trimpe and also Frank Miller. I'm not sure who is influencing who, but Trimpe obviously predates either Miller or Salmons. I would also say Mignola's later work has a touch of Salmons' charm, whether it was a direct influence or not.

*Let's give love to the letters: Jack Morelli on "A Quiet Place" and Diana Albers on "Alchemy".

Artists I Like: Amy Jean

Amy Jean is a funky artist who does a lot of music posters. I found her through falling in love with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Her style meshes perfectly with the band's aesthetic.

I would describe her work as funky, psychedelic, and blacklight poster style. Also... pinball machine backglass! Oh... and tee shirt ready.

 

Status and Doomslakers RPG Notes

What's going on with me right now?

Life is happening. Family life is pretty good. We're dealing with the dystopia of the United States one day at a time. How fucking hard it is to get rid of an obvious existential threat to your own nation? Pretty god damn hard, it seems.

But I digress.

Creatively: I'm in a weird place. I have not been drawing very much. I doodle here and there. But my main energy has been going into creating the Doomslakers RPG. That progress stalled a bit a few weeks ago as some drama creeped up, but I started running a playtest of the rules last Monday and I'm excited for that. I'm running The Gardens of Ynn by Emmy Allen using the Doomslakers rules. The setting is completely different, but this playtest kind of happened suddenly and I wasn't ready to run the full game with its own setting. Since I had been wanting to run Gardens for years, I seized the moment.

Here's a quick and dirty overview of the Doomslakers rules:

It's a d6 pool. Basic roll is an exploding 1d6 (1d6e). You add dice based on the skills you have, tools, and other factors. You need at least one success. A success is either 4, 5, or 6, based on difficulty and all that. It's a fairly standard success-based pool system.

Instead of hit points, you rack up damage. There's no upper limit for damage. If you take 6, you add 6 to your running total. At some intervals, you have to make an impact roll. This is a 1d20 roll + current damage. So if you have racked up 12 damage, you roll 1d20+12 on an impact table. The results range from minor hindrances (usually reduction of pool dice) to death.

So you can die in one roll from one blow.

There is a meta currency. Luck points are earned when you roll your lucky number in an action roll. Since the number is 1-6, it will come up pretty frequently. You will earn luck points multiple times per session. I hope that leads to players being willing to spend luck freely instead of hoarding it.

One of the things you can do with luck is defer your impact roll. Ultimately you must make the roll, but luck can put it off. There are other mechanics that can reduce damage. So the idea is you might be able to reduce your damage total before being forced to make an impact roll, thus giving you a better chance at not being killed or knocked out.

One of my concerns is that the impact rolls will be too frequent. I mitigated it by having thresholds for when they are made. You don't make one every time you get hit, unless you get hit pretty hard. But there are triggers that force the roll no matter what.

At the end of a fight, if you have any damage, you have to make that impact roll. Luck can't prevent it.

Anyway, that's the core mechanic of the game at the moment. It applies to all actions, not just fighting.

But I am toying with the idea of changing it to a d12 pool. The only reason for doing that is to get some granularity out of the numbers, which is just another tool in the kit. But that also makes luck points less frequent, so it might not be worth the trouble. I need those luck points flowing because they do a lot of heavy lifting.

The Doomslakers RPG itself is based on the setting (implied and explicit) of Black Pudding. It is an original system and has no direct basis in D&D... so it isn't a Black Pudding RPG, directly. Black Pudding zine remains a classic D&D based zine, at least for the first 8 issues. This game is a riff on the ideas within where you play the role of an agent of the Doomslakers Adventure Company, taking nasty, dangerous jobs in the seedy city of Seapath. If you see it in Black Pudding, you will probably see it in Doomslakers in one form or another.

True Metal: Attacker

I've seen the Attacker album Battle at Helms Deep floating around the internet for years but I can't remember actually listening to it until today. I didn't expect it to be awesome. But it is.

The sound is pure heavy metal. This was from 1985, merely two years after Slayer and Metallica debuted. Metal was just starting to develop sub-genres, but it would be a while before we became obsessed with such divisions. This isn't thrash, death, black, grindcore, or speed. It isn't power or pirate metal. It's just heavy metal. Thrashy crunchy riffs with soaring and screeching vocals, rock and roll rasping vocals, and hard rock drumming. Plenty of tempo changes and shredding lead guiarts.

It's a true metal masterpiece, if you ask me. This is in the vein of Saxon, Raven, Judas Priest, and Mercyful Fate.