Another special Republic Domain strip comes to you this fine New Year’s Eve day! This strip, like the first special, was included in a steampunk fanzine entitled “Gatehouse Gazette”. You can download this most recent issue (for free of course) over at The Gatehouse website. The request for this strip’s direction was one that revolved around romance and science–the theme of the magazine–so how could I NOT revisit the topic of one of Webtertainment.tv’s earliest lowdowns on “Love” and the chemical/scientific studies done concerning our “emotions”.

I’m mildly embarrassed (and irritated) to admit that the title “Love Hertz”–a seemingly obvious one for this theme–took me longer to come up with than the strip itself.

Fanzine Issue’s Synopsis:

Let “The Romance of Science” enchant you with the fourth and winter issue of the Gatehouse Gazette.

Discover that winter is the perfect season for steampunk fashion in the columns of Miss Hilde Heyvaert and learn that it is the perfect time for gin again from Mr Craig B. Daniel. Read an interview with steampunk artist Miss Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich and enjoy an exclusive preview of the upcoming steampunk MMORPG Remnants of Skystone by Col. Adrianna Hazard!

Download Gatehouse Gazette

I took some time today to re-visit some old comics. I mean really old. Which ones? The New Mutants #100 where the X-Force team is officially brought together for the first time and marking the end of The New Mutants as a series. Then I read X-Force #1 through #9, Rob Liefeld’s plotted run of the comic before he, and other “comic superstars”, left Marvel to start up Image Comics.

The reason I came back to these is because I’ve gotten to thinking about comics nowadays and how they don’t seem to have a lasting effect on me like they did when I was a teen. Perhaps it came down to the time, to the experiences I can now bring into comics, why certain themes impress me more than others? The list could run on and on.

I have started to hit comic book shops in my surrounding area and have started digging through their back stock. I’ve purchased about 80 comics in two weeks during my explorations. Mostly I started grabbing old 90s stuff that caught my eye and I got curious about. In other cases I’d shuffle my fingers through old series I stopped collecting just to see who had what, and was it theoretically possible to try to continue where I left of in the early 90s.

This is what lead me to reading my nine issues of X-Force. I found a small shop with an X-Force back stock box FILLED with the series. I just had to know if I wanted to invest in it once again. Maybe one day I’ll be able to collect the 100 issues of The New Mutants (from the 1980s) that came before X-Force! I’ve got maybe 30 issues between #58 and #100 so this will be a challenge… I need to train myself with lighter goals first.

Below are my quick thoughts concerning these early X-Force comics (#1 -> #9).

9/11 in Comics a Decade Earlier?

Hearing characters use statements like “acts of terror” and “threats to national security” in a series of comics released throughout 1991 was jarring. These are statements ingrained in most of the minds of the US public through mainstream media outlets. It’s crazy to think these terms existed 10 years prior to 9/11 and in the minds of comic geeks everywhere as plot devices.

There was a terrorist attack on one of the twin towers by Black Tom Cassidy and Juggernaut that resulted in one of the towers getting blown up–not completely… but hearing the characters talk about it pulled this comic series forward more than a decade, resulting in a plot that just didn’t seem dated… even though the character hairstyles sure as hell did.

Somebody’s Misery is MY Misery

I am pretty sure I’m not exaggerating, and I’d hate to go back to confirm this detail, but (possibly) every comic had SOMEbody wanting to put SOMEbody out of SOMEbody’s misery. Was this an inside joke between the writer and the editor?! SOMEbody please stop it already… (I wonder if this continued after Rob Liefeld left the series (about issue #9)?

What’s In a Name? “Evil” Presumably.

I’ve never liked the name of the villain group, “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, it seemed out of place and pulled me out of the created reality of the story’s world. What group would rationally apply “evil” into their group name? A group that’s gonna have every righteous team up their asses in no time, that’s who.

I mean the team has villains on it that I actually enjoy seeing work together (or not)… but “evil“… ugh. The black & white obviousness went against everything anti-hero that X-Force stood for!

It was relieving to actually read the writer trying to have Toad explain it as a choice or somesuch to define how they angle their “mutant superiority” agenda by choosing the “evil” path to getting their message out. It didn’t help reason it for me; it only confirmed its ridiculousness and Marvel’s unwillingness to let go of past story-telling constructs (aka making the good guys good and the bad guys bad).

The present “Brotherhood” finally removes the pointless, brainless, adjective which remedies this mental speed-bump that slowed down my automobile of enjoyment.

Gratuitous Threat Making

Every book was littered with threats of killing, or gutting, or bleeding, or something someone… to death of course… until you know… they were dead. Or characters saying “enough with the threats” or that they were going to end threats by doing something that involved their enemies not being able to give the threats, like breaking jaws, slitting throats, or, um oh ya, killing them!

I was amazed that the plot could actually hold up and move along with every page spread having one incident of this blatant XTREME! lingo of extravagant violent acts shoved down the readers’ throats of awareness–OK, that made no sense–I blame the comics.

Where they trying to prove how XTREME! this X-angle of a team was? Man, too much… and still there was a story… it was fascinating experience to struggle through this repeated dialogue but still want to know what was going to happen next. I’m marveled by HOW they actually pulled that off.

X-Gas Masks, X-Smoke Grenades, X-Shark Repellents

About 95% of the characters (ok, so I don’t know the exact percentage… alot in any case) have more bags and pouched on their bodies then they have any actual use for. I mean, if they reached into them once and a while it’d make sense–maybe… pointless still I think, but at least a bit more sense–the pouches would have a purpose!

Otherwise, they seem bulky and unfitting. Not even Batman needs this many pouches–and he’s the token icon role-model for pouch-wearers everywhere! This seems like it was a 90s phenomenon in comics solely spear-headed by Rob Liefeld. Hmmm… is it a coincidence cargo pants became huge in the pants market at about this time?!

In Conclusion

I will indeed be hunting the back bins for–at the very least–the next 10-11 comics of the series. The artist changes which could be good, could be bad–really depends if you can ignore the awkward anatomy Liefeld would get away with.I say “gets away with” because as much as people like to complain about him NOW… HE made that book sell and the FANS made him a superstar. I think comic fans need to stop jumping on opinion wagons whenever it’s the next “cool” opinion ot have. Seriously, stop it.

I’m not of the school of folk that bash him at every opportunity. I think his art holds some value, it was actually pretty simple considering the active line work in the inking, the backgrounds were sparse but at least didn’t distract the action, it was dynamic during combat if somewhat repetitive (aka I’m not a fan of every goddamn character being a stretchy ninja-type), and the accessorizing could have been toned down… but guess what, it sold books and got the story moving along!

Having guest penciler Mike Mignola (from Hellboy comics) do Cable’s back story in issue #8 was a pleasant surprise. Back when I was a teen I can see this art possibly having thrown me off and I’d hate to even think it affected my decision to discontinue buying the series, but alas those were different times. I’m a fan of Mignola’s art style for specific story telling and I think issue #8 delivered when I seriously thought it was going to fall flat. Seeing the art not attached to Hellboy was a little weird at first, but I gained a new appreciation for his hard lines and deep shadowed style after finding a prematurely cancelled episode of The Amazing Screw On Head.

In the end, reading these 10 comics again I came to realize how much I had actually forgotten about these stories and how much of these characters’ personalities just didn’t shine through for me. Coming to them now I can appreciate the less obvious psychological angles being developed that I can only expect where explored during the next 17 years of story telling by other writers.

This makes me excited for when I hit another old series from my old collections for sure!

Publisher: Adamant Entertainment | Author: Mike Lafferty | Pages: 84 | Year: 2007
Adventure: 5 (Awesome) | Substance: 5 (Awesome) | Art & Layout: 3 (Average)

Defcon 1 is an M&M Superlink supplement covering all that’s needed to run Eastern and Western Block heroes in a Cold War setting. This supplement allows players and GMs to decide whether they want to play in the actual Cold War or whether the Cold War is now behind them (but not quite forgotten).

Mike Lafferty does an absolutely tremendous job at making this supplement easy to read and implement without much confusion on the part of any players not familiar with Cold War events. The characters are all very dynamic from a design perspective allowing them to be used as allies, enemies, good guys, bad guys, complications, buddies… I know it seems like I’m repeating myself with these words but what makes an ally doesn’t always make a buddy, what makes a bad guy doesn’t necessarily make him the enemy, etc. Trust me Lafferty does a much better job of making this all straight forward and easy to incorporated into any game.

The introduction story alone sets up the perfect example of what I tried to describe above. The Texan cosmic defender (I know that alone is awesome right… picture it, the guys language is perfect too) get caught up in a city fight with a giant robot until a duo of Russian supers come in and take down the robot. A bit of back and forth happens until Lone Star’s temper causes him to blast the Russian tank in classic four-color comic book fashion where two heroes have to brawl before they end up working together. Awesome.

Section 1: Roleplaying Concepts

All the examples in the book could be great additions to any Superlink game. After describing a concept, the book gives complications, scenarios and nicely backs up each with a couple movie references and comic industry counter parts.

It goes into further details and examples for “Story-Arcs”, “Plot Twists”, and by far my favourite concept, the “Thought Bubble” moment. These moments are prevalent in comics so why not in a comic book inspired roleplaying game? There is a lot of room for metagaming that could weaken the benefits from this roleplaying opportunity. If you can strip your character’s thoughts from your player thoughts, this could add a new layer of entertainment to your gaming session.

Section 2: The Characters

You may still be wondering how a group of players can make US, British and Russian heroes and use them in the same team? That’s what this section breaks down. The keystone to the whole thing coming together is an international security group called UNMSF (United Nations Meta Security Force). Think of them as something like the Security Council with a little mix of United Nations.

Even this group is not without being used with some of the spice mentioned in Section 1. For example, it was common during the Cold War era for governments to post their heroes into the USMSF in order to spy on opposing forces.

First up are the Soviet (or Russian… I go back and forth because it depends on whether you’re playing in the historic setting or in modern times). The book gives some suggestions for Russian phrases, quotes and suggested battlecries.

The character roll follows detailing five Eastern Block characters and seven Western Block characters. They can be used as characters or non-player characters, with options suggested for how to use them as either. Each entry provides a Shtick, a Twist, a Hook, a Scenerio and/or a Complication (mentioned in Section 1 as new concepts to spice up the roleplaying element of your game).

My favourites: Red Hammer. Imagine a Russian old time hero with the scepticism of Nick Fury, the patriotism super-soldier status of Captain America or loyal dedication of Superman, with a demonic connection to Hell’s grasp like Spawn. Except Russian. Great stuff can come of a character like this, as a player or an NPC to move along a campaign.

Second runner up is incidentally Red Hammer’s counterpart… kind of. John Bull is a British hero who went under the same Nazi super-soldier process as Red Hammer. The process wasn’t duplicated correctly and he was the sole survivor, mutated to take on the appearance of a minotaur. The fact that he’s a recluse and paints and gardens on his time off just won it for me. Once I saw the image of him with his stolen Nazi electro-mace, I knew he’d be the Western favourite.

The best addition to this list is the Plot Hook. Six characters have Hooks meaning you have yourself six mini sessions to take up an evening of play.

Session 3: Mini Adventure

The next 30 pages are dedicated to a mini adventures that brings the whole book together and sets itself up as a catalyst for players to continue in this kind of setting if they wish.

A feature I found unique was the way the “action items” of any particular part of the adventure were laid out cleanly for the GM to follow and inject into their game. Things like providing Roleplaying Scenerio (Section 1) opportunities for players to enter into pre-formulated Shticks, Complications, Roleplaying Opportunities, etc.

The adventure doesn’t follow a rigid plan. In a superhero game, more than traditional fantasy (in my opinion and experience) it’s difficult to put any expected actions into a strict formula. Super powers are so random that fluidity in the adventure design is just as important as the variety of objectives that exist to take up an evening of play (or multiple evenings). This mini-adventure provides such scenarios that flesh out a scene as a stepping stone into the next section.

Encounters also provide scaling options for teams that are made to walk all over particular encounters. These are well described and easy to implement. In some instances more setting related sidebar content is added, sometimes connecting adventure bits to the characters described in the Characters section. This helped unify it all once again into a cohesive product.

Appendix I and Appendix II detail The Ice Palace, a Nazi base hidden in the cold regions of Antarctic, which is mentioned in one of the adventures and includes a map.

Conclusion

Final thoughts… Buy the book! I have taken some time off roleplaying in general but this book made me want to either play M&M again or jump back onto City of Heroes and play one of my “flag heroes”… American Eagle, Northwind (Captain Canada), Manowar (Portuguese)…

The only place this book didn’t completely win me over was the art and the use of old propaganda pictures. It wasn’t that either was bad, I just never felt they kept a uniformity over the entire product. The design of the book is very simple and clean which makes it a fast and east read, I can’t really complain about that. I’m just a very visual person. But the art aside, the content was just golden and did enough for me to visualize my own take on the setting which was good enough for me.

Buy at RPG Objects.com

It’s been a while since I blogged about some cool DNA/evolution stuff, and some new shit has come to light… man. Back in the summer we got news of a (near) perfectly preserved baby mammoth that lived 37,000 years ago discovered by the son of a reindeer farmer back in May 2007. What if it could walk and breathe again?

The mammoth: An ancient member of the elephant family with enormous curved tusks that went extinct about four and a half millenia ago. Well, nowadays the term “extinct” is challenged by scientists as something that no longer represents the ENDING of a creature’s time to reign, but as a challenge to reverse engineer species back into existence!

An article on the Science Daily website (Nov 20, 2008) unloaded some goody-goods on me concerning a team of scientists at Penn State are the first to report the genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal… you guessed it–that of the mighty woolly mammoth!

I did some digging on this story and it starts way back in 2005. Initial funding for this study was provided by McMaster University, The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Penn State University. The project also involved paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History (USA) and researchers from Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. [Source]

During this first go-at-it the team’s research was based on 28,000 year old bones that were exceptionally well-preserved in Siberian permafrost. They were able extract about 50% of the mammoth’s DNA from its jaw bone and then compared it to the modern African elephant.

Jumping to June 2008, a new hypothesis came from the team: One suggesting that the mammoth had split into two separate groups about one million years ago. Studies before this research had analyzed only short segments of the DNA of extinct species, this new study generated and compared 18 complete genomes of the extinct woolly mammoth.

This achievement is based on an earlier discovery by the same team in 2006 that revealed ancient DNA survives much better in hair than in any other tissue investigated so far. This discovery makes hair a more powerful and efficient source of DNA for studying the genome sequences of extinct animals. [Source]

Moving on along to the most recent news out of this determined team! They sequenced four billion DNA bases (the size of the modern-day African elephant’s genome) using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA highly efficiently. The team used a draft version of the African elephant’s genome, which currently is being generated by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The issue that remains now is clearing out the DNA that could belongs to other organisms, like bacteria and fungi, from the surrounding environment that had contaminated the sample. Only 3.3 billion are currently assigned to the mammoth genome.

Only after the genome of the African elephant has been completed will we be able to make a final assessment about how much of the full woolly-mammoth genome we have sequenced. — Webb Miller, Penn State professor of biology and of computer science and engineering, one of the project leaders. [Source]

The studies going on here have more to do about learning what possible diseases might have pushed along the mammoth’s extinction then to actually build the tools to bring one back. It’d be pure deception to believe that the future possibilities AREN’T there. This topic has come up with the much more recently extinct Tasmanian tiger, and much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Ninja Cat, slowly but surely, it’ll be right in your face.

By deciphering this genome we could, in theory, generate data that one day may help other researchers to bring the woolly mammoth back to life by inserting the uniquely mammoth DNA sequences into the genome of the modern-day elephant. This would allow scientists to retrieve the genetic information that was believed to have been lost when the mammoth died out, as well as to bring back an extinct species that modern humans have missed meeting by only a few thousand years. — Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the project’s other leader. [Source]

Biologists could reconstruct an extinct species by figuring out the exact DNA differences between it and its closest living relatives. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. [right hand pinkie to the corner of my right lip!]

There are talks on how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final-stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. [Source]

If this process is confirmed to work it could theoretically be used to bring back the Neanderthals–except the moral and ethical implications would be another Humpty Dumpty wall to climb over.

A list of possible holdups in the process of awesomeness and this teams ability to at least TRY and side-wind them [Source]:

1. Ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze; a new generation of DNA decoding machines use tiny pieces as their starting point–his team has two.
2. ancient DNA in bone, the usual source, is heavily contaminated with bacterial DNA; this team has discovered that hair is a much purer source of the host’s DNA, with the keratin serving to seal it in and largely exclude bacteria.
3. the DNA of living cells can be modified only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time; this team is in discussion with George Church, a well-known genome technologist at Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time.

My final thoughts are actually a reaction to quotes by “leading scientists” concerning the possibility of spending $10 million dollars to try to resurrect the woolly mammoth.

This is as close as we’ve got to the complete genome – the blueprint – for an extinct animal. If you’d told me a few years ago that we would already be this far, I would have laughed at you. [The money would be better spent on keeping living animals safe from extinction.] — Ian Barnes from Royal Holloway, University of London, UK [Source]

We currently don’t have the right tools – such as plasmids to deliver the genes – to make any genetic changes within elephants, let alone make the many accurate variations you would need to reconstruct the mammoth. This is a very distant dream. — Michael Hofreiter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany [Source]

A wishful-thinking experiment with no realistic chance for success. — Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge

Really?! I find it absurd to think it isn’t worth $10 million to once again look in wonder at, not only a millennia extinct creature, but marvel at the possibility of the human’s tenacity to overcome “impossibilities”. The modern automobile, planes, the atomic bomb, Tom Cruise, the phone, the internet, LANDING ON FRIGGIN MARS!!! All these things were thought impossible at one time or another, no? yes? OF COURSE! But they still happened didn’t they?

They happened because humans decided that it was their right to screw with things and PROVE that they CAN!

Ten million… pft… that’s how much Paris Hilton probably makes a year on royalties from her green tinted sex tape videos…

{Source Video on YouTube]

This is my favorite video edit of the “ninja cat” from YouTube fame. Creepy, well synched, Alfred Hitchcock audio track just brings the essence of this fantastic scene together!

This is the best video comment reply I’ve seen and one I wish I could have been in highschool again to do for the next video year book!

{Source Video on YouTube]