Blogging A to Z: X is for X-Men

When in doubt, go back to your root right? Well, comic books is where it all started for me. Yeah, the gateway drug into the greater nerdery. As a kid, I think Batman was a favorite but when I entered my teens, I discovered the X-Men. And things changed for me. This was the first time that I could really identify with the characters. Sure, they were mutant rebel outcasts, but I was going through puberty when I discovered them and those changes alomost seemed like a mutation. Add to that that I was almost cataclysmically shy, just got braces, had to start wearing glasses, grew to be a 6'2" super skinny (oh, yeah, that was long ago wasn't it?), and all the rest, and I really felt like a mutant. Since my mother had remarried and we relocated to Nuremburg, Germany from Mascoutah, Illinois - yeah, I felt like an outcast as well. So the X-Men spoke to me for sure. For me, the classic team was Len Wein and Dave Cockrum. The John Byrne/Chris Claremont idea is good (and many folks cite it as the best X-Men era), but I tell yah, Len and Dave really hit a home run. Afterall, they are the team that is responsible for bringing us the New X-Men team of Storm, Colosus, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Thunderbird. Not to mention that Dave Cockrum's work on the X-Men is top notch. Witness this classic image:


Good stuff for sure. If you want to see more of Cockrum's work you can visit this tribute web site here. along with his X-Men work, he did some fantastic stuff for another one of my favorites, Legion of Superheroes. It's well worth looking up his stuff.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Neurodiversity and Dragons - the adventure begins!

Image
  Tl;dr: Kia ora all! I don’t often post much about my personal life, but as a parent of two neurodiverse teens, I reckoned that I’d post some of my experience in gaming here on our journey. My daughter was diagnosed with autism almost a year ago and my son is dyslexic/dysgraphia with ADHD like presentation. Both are incredibly bright and very different from each other (my son has lots of friends and is very bright and gregarious if also very lazy while my daughter is very retreating and shy but incredibly driven and motivated). They both love fantasy and fantasy literature, movies and gaming has been a way for us all to connect. Though often what works for one, doesn’t necessarily work for the other. This brings me to my point, I am working on trying to best accommodate the needs of my neurodiverse daughter and include her in an experience that she very much wants to participate in, but often feels frustrated and overwhelmed by. This is an introduction to our journey so far.   For s
Read more

More Thoughts on my Campaign System

So, I’ve been thinking of my campaign world again and my magic system a lot lately. I’ve been reading a lot of Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga and the Hobbit (what a strange dichotomy!) and they have both influencing my thoughts on magic systems. I’m becoming more and more intrigued of having only a single “class” and everything else being a trapping of that. For my campaign world, I’m steering towards an everyman approach were you purchase “disciplines” as you advance to create different character types. I’m not really interested in creating a whole new retro-clone system per se, but building on top of either the Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry White box. For what I have in mind, the S&W Whitebox might make even more sense. So I’m thinking that the normal adventuring type guy would have a base d6 hit die. You’d have some starting amount of experience to spend on disciplines to start down the road of customizing your character. So for instance, if you wanted brawny fig
Read more

I like pie!

Cyclopeatron made an interesting blog post which I tend to agree with. Most conent posts don't get responses but opinion posts do. I've noticed the trend in my own blogging as well. There is some incredibly interesting content being generated out there in OSR blog land. I think folks tend to react more to opinion pieces because no one really wants to 1) either say your stuff sucks on a blog post or 2) only say "that's cool man". I tell you what, I cherish the "that's cool man posts", it at tleast let's me know folks are paying attention. As to the your stuff sucks, well those are OK too as long as they tell me why they think my stuff sucks so I know how to try and improve it. At any rate, I like pie. It even tastes better when I had to kill an orc to get it ;).
Read more