Mutant World

I went in on the Kickstarter for Richard Corben and Jan Strnad's Mutant World reprint. Got the hardback graphic novel that includes Mutant World and Son of Mutant World. In the forward, Strnad states that this edition was built from scans of the Fantagor prints, tweaked by Richard Corben.

I just finished reading the first 60 pages. It's the story of a poor dumb mutant named Dimento who just wants to find something to eat. During the course of these 60 pages he encounters an outrageous bunch of backstabbing, hunger-gnarled muties with names like Weasel and Dimlit. He also encounters a woman in a horse-drawn cart. The woman, whose name hasn't been given, is drawn in Corben's typical style. Large-breasted, full-bodied. But also, given Corben's origins in the underground comix scene, she is weird. Everything is weird in a Corben comic.

There's the idea of the male gaze that permeates pop culture. It is on display here, as it always was in the pages of Heavy Metal, 1984, and pretty much all the pulpy-styled comics of the 70s and 80s. Women are usually drawn with an eye to their sexual characteristics. Men are usually drawn as beefy, possibly ugly as well. Corben's style falls in line with this. His male forms, if not monstrous and misshapen, are muscular and beautiful. Even poor ole Dimento, bent and seemingly mutated, has an Olympian physique. The unnamed woman, who recurs throughout this part of the story, is busty and full and lovely. And she has a horse.

So anyway, everyone in this world seems to be mad and vile. Every single character Dimento encounters is less than stellar if not outright brutal. Not just to Dimento, but to each other as well. It's a harsh world, as one of the characters states. The woman helps Dimento at one point, perhaps for fun. Then she betrays him to save herself. Dimento, who is the nicest person in the comic, is prone to fits of anguish, rage, and sorrow, and he leaves her to her fate with some nasty mutants who rape her and beat her. The beating is on-screen, but the raping is not. It isn't pretty, nor is it titillating. I get the sense that even though Corben draws the woman in a slightly sexy way (again, the male gaze at work), he is sympathetic to her plight and doesn't try to capitalize too much on it. I don't know this to be the case, but given the fact that the story was written in chapters on a deadline and wasn't scripted out, Corben started off by just having a hottie show up and then, as the story evolved, he realized he didn't want to do a hottie comic. Her story unfolds brutally, and she is drawn less-and-less like an object to be looked at and more-and-more like just another brutal individual being brutalized in a brutal world.

Then again, maybe I'm lenient in my critique because I'm biased toward this genre of comic art. She is, after all, tied up much of the time. That could be read a certain way. Yet Dimento is also tied up much of the time. So... I dunno. Perhaps a person with a different perspective would find this entirely misogynistic. I couldn't argue too much with them, though I've seen far worse. All I'd have to say is that if I'm looking for prurient comic book art with hotties I wouldn't choose this. It is not for that purpose.

This part of the story is disjointed and random. It feels like random events in the daily life of poor Dimento. And as Jan Strnad points out in the forward, he was writing the episodes under deadline pressure one at a time. He hadn't plotted this thing out. And it shows.

I kinda like that. I like that it's raw and random. It is a hard read, though. I'm not a fan of bleakness or moral depravity. I stopped watching The Walking Dead because it felt like one episode of despair porn after another. It wore me out and I dropped it.

Mutant World is a bit like that, but in shorter bursts. It's a comic about a fallen world in which people - mutant and human alike - trick, beat, rape, and brutalize one another to survive. And through it moves this truly pitiful figure. Dimento. Poor, dumb Dimento (as he calls himself).

Regarding the art itself, it is classic Corben. Rich and lush and also ugly and crude. Nobody does misshapen like Corben. When I read comics like this, which are richly painted and detailed, I cringe at just how much work must have went into them. Comics are fucking hard work, people. You spend days, weeks, months, fucking years on a comic book that someone can literally "read" in five minutes, then promptly forget. I can't tell you how many hours I labored over comics in my youth. I loved it, mind you. I was totally into it. But at some point the endorphin rush I felt at having created a nice comic page just wasn't enough to justify the labor. Hats off to Corben and any comics artist that can and does endure.

It's weird that I hadn't actually read this comic before. I know I own some old Fantagor books and I have been a lover of Richard Corben's style since I first laid eyes on it in the mid-80s. I know I've seen this comic in the past, yet somehow I failed to actually read the damn thing. Reading it now is like reading a mildly-horny teenager's stab at Gamma World fanfic. There's a lot of good inspiration in here for post-apoc gaming, so if you're into GW or Mutant Crawl Classics and you haven't checked it out you should do so. Just be aware that it was intended for adults and it doesn't pull many punches. Also, it is not a sexy comic. That is, I would not classify this as being pin-up in nature whatsoever. It is raw and ugly in the underground comix manner and I really love the shit out of it for that reason alone.

Dimento is a lonely soul.

FOLLOW UP

I finished Mutant World, which was only a few more pages than I had read when I wrote the original post above. Spoilers ahead.

So basically Dimento and this normal dude are set free by the weird post-apoc military facility and both end up with a clone of the woman from the story. In both cases the woman is wearing a tight top showing her nipples poking through and wearing shorts. In both cases she has been sent by the post-apoc scientist dude to, I suppose, see if he can get them to breed. The comic ends with Dimento scoring with his clone (he has no idea she's a clone... he's only 6 years old, after all, being a genetic experiment himself). He seems happy in the end with his large-breasted woman in their post-apoc ruined trailer.

Next up: Son of Mutant World! I'm guessing, given the setup here, we're going to meet Dimento's offspring. I seem to recall a bald female being on the cover.

The RPG Folder Yer Uncle Randy Runned Over

Another installment in this exciting series.

Tall Tales is Mark Hunt's wild west B/X adventure game. It's a cool game. If you enjoy B/X D&D then maybe you'd dig the idea of doing it cowboy style.

I like how the classic 3 alignments here are Law-Abiding, Neutrality, and Dishonest. This nicely mirrors the way Law, Neutrality, and Chaos are described and used in B/X D&D. Yes, I know some folks argue that these categories are not necessarily about good and evil but if you have actually read the descriptions of them in the game then you'll know why those people are wrong about that. And no, that's not any claim about how alignments may have been described and/or used in other versions of the game. Just this one. Pay attention.

I like how AC is handled. It is exactly BX. But instead of leather and chain you have fancy duds and heavy clothes. Because if you kept the BX combat system and didn't have actual armor (no cowboy was riding around in full plate) then gunfights would be ridiculously lethal. Which would be realistic... but nobody plays these games because they want a realistic experience. They wanna have crazy gunfights that last more than five seconds.

So browsing the character classes I can see some classic western tropes at play, such as the Desperado and Gunslinger. But there's something missing here. Where's the lawma--- oh wait...

This is a small book of additional classes for Tall Tales. And here we find the Lawman, along with the Gambler and the Preacher. C'mon, Mark, how did you leave these out of the main book? Perhaps space or maybe they got dropped on the floor the day of layout? Hah.

Anyway, it's a welcome addition to the core game.

What's this? Check This Artifact? Why, it's a post-apoc, "gonzo" style RPG book by Wampler. Something you might use for a game of Gamma World. Or maybe, if you're feeling super crazy, a game of Mutant Crawl Classics! But what fool would try that??

Hey... wait a second... I recognize some of these nutty drawings. A guy shaving with a giant bee near his face? Yeah, I think I drew that. But don't let that deter you from picking up this slick little number. It's stuffed full of funky items. Like electric razors that attract giant bees.

Arnold Kemp of the Goblin Punch blog has given us the Goblin Laws of Gaming, or GLOG. I have heard rumblings about this in various online posting places but never really took a good look at it.

Ok. This is a simple document obviously not meant to be a nice, flashy, finished package. It's more like the author's personal way of running OSR style games. So I have no criticisms of the plain layout or any of that. It isn't a "finished" product and thus isn't eligible for my nay-nay-saying about it's appearance.

The core mechanic of the game was really weird for me at first. I admit I might be a little stupid because I had read the Base Mechanics section three times before it clicked. The idea is this: You roll under a stat. So if your stat is 11 you need to roll under 11. This is modified by the opponent's Defense, for example. The more the Defense is from 10, the bigger the modifier. So an opponent with Defense 12 means you need to subtract 2 from your stat. You need roll 9 or less to hit that son-of-a-bitch. If the guy's Defense was 9, you'd get +1 to your stat and you'd need to roll under 12.

I get it. This is a method that allows a roll-under-stat that still is modified by difficulty. But it feels a little clunky to me in me old head. I dislike adding complications like adding and subtracting where it isn't necessary. Still, it feels like it would work.

I read on later in the document about combat and I am more confused than before. I attribute this to my own brain because the GLOG seems to have a decent following so it can't be completely broken. I must be the one who is completely broken.

It seems that by level 4 a character is pretty much maxed out in terms of what they get for leveling up. The rules state that any advancement beyond 4 is a result of adventuring. And I quite like that idea. I like any sort of idea that shifts character development to actual play and away from pre-determined hallmarks. I'm actually writing a thing like that right now, so this is a funny little coincidence.

One of the design goals of the game was to eliminate some tables in favor of formulas. I also get this, and I'm not necessarily opposed to it. But if it's the difference between a little ability modifier table vs. a formula for cipherin' my ability mod gimme that fuckin' table. That's just me though. I have no fear of tables, man. No fear.

Convictions is a neat little mechanic that I think would lead to some fun times. A conviction is a thing you believe or that drives you and might make you act in a way that you know is not in your best interest. Doing this earns you 1 point of Conviction. You can spend that point later to get +8 on a d20 roll that is related to a conviction or +4 if it isn't related to a conviction. But then the text after this states that spending conviction has to be related to the conviction... so why the +8/+4 difference if the +4 isn't possible in the first place? I might be a dumbass reading this wrong. It's late and I'm not at my peak performance right now.

Initiative is handled much the same way as The Black Hack. You roll under Wisdom to go before your god-damned enemies instead of Dexterity.

It's pretty funny reading the blog post about GLOG because the author understood the writing yet another hack of D&D is not something a lot of people want to do or see. The accompanying picture of the author in the moment the dread deed was completed is priceless.

There are some interesting hacks of GLOG, such as this one by Skerples and this one by Type1Ninja. There are probably others but I'm too lazy to look.

Foxglove

I drew the foxglove for Jim Wampler's Fight This Mutant, now on Kickstarter! Get it if you dig muties.