The Coins of Aerovian Continent.

 

One of my biggest irritations with the D&D system is it’s hideous “gold point” system, that reflects nothing of actual monetary practice in Europe from 400-1600. This makes developing any kind of background economy very difficult, and disrupts and undermines what should be the main story telling features of quasi-medieval fantasy economies. In a game where treasure accumulation is an important measure of character success, having a rational background to the money system is important; after all what separates a serf, from a kulak, from a merchant, from a lord is the same thing that divides 1stlevel characters from 9th level characters; money.

More importantly, it defines the resources that money can command. In the actual middle ages there were a number long term trends; inflation, depreciation, and so on that can be overlooked, but only if you see the long term consistency; Land is wealth, the cost of armor and weapons makes those who have them rare and powerful, trade is dangerous because it requires large investments with huge amounts of risk.

The currencies of the middle ages descend from late Roman times, and they were already economic chaos, various reforms following reform as the Empire bled itself of metal to pay for the armies, bribe barbarians, build churches and fill them with treasures, bribe barbarians, build  monasteries and fill them with treasure, bribe barbarians, build city walls, bribe barbarians, and build ships to try and hold the economic and military Roman world together, all while dealing with a manpower drain to monasteries, disease, and war. Over the few final Roman centuries a whole smorgasbord of coins were minted and melted, and reminted, some by towns, some by emperors, some by desperate generals, and what began as a simple system of As and Denier bushed out into a bewildering fecund forest of metal.

D&D reduces this amazing variety to a decimal system and introduces coins in metals that were almost never seen. Platinum was unknown to the middle ages in Europe (when conquistadors first encountered it in South America they tossed it back into the rivers they were panning, hoping it would mature into silver). Copper was never coined, though some bronze coins were molded in the late Roman Empire, and in dark age England. By the year 1000, the usual start date for middle ages, they were effectively gone from European commerce. (except when they weren’t, China and Asia pumped some in from time to time).

Medieval Europe relied on three major kinds of coins descended from Roman models; a large denomination coin, the Shilling , the everyday silver coin that most people would be familiar with called the Penny, and an occasional Gold large denomination coin called an Ecu or Noble. A Few types of Shilling were minted in limited areas of Spain from Electrum..but that was a rarity. Later in the middle ages the richest cities would counter inflation with an even larger coin; The famous Florins and Ducats and Byzants based on imported coin type from the rich east, these coins were needed by spice and cloth merchants to pay for ship loads of goods, and by kings to hire the very large “state” armies of the many 15th century wars. .

All these coins were essentially bullion guaranteed by the issuing authority; often a king, sometimes a town, or a bishop, or a baron even...but effectively interchangeable pence to penny, shilling to sou. Florin to Mark.

That’s pretty much the scene; three kinds of coins ultimately amounting to no more than bouillon guaranteed with the King’s mark. Which was why kings liked them...they could cheat and debase the coin a tad, and it, like the dollar, would still spend as it’s face value since it be reckoned as if it were bouillon. To counter the kings and barons, bankers and merchants would use a touchstone; a bit of slate upon which a coin was rubbed, the lines being compared to the color of known quantities, detecting (hopefully) the cheats.

Real medieval coinage is based on the value of a pound of silver. One pound of Silver divided evenly into 20 portions (or sometimes 22 or 24, this isn’t an exact science here)- the Shilling/Sou/or Roman Soldus… itself divided into 12 silver pennies. The penny was the main coin of European transaction.

There were many other coins, but all based on multiples of one of these two; larger values minted in gold like the Noble (6 shillings), or smaller ones (usually in silver as well) like the haypenny. Notice the 12 and 20 relationship? That's because dividing coins this way is easier. A circle can be bisected easily by eye three times to produce 6 surprisingly precise equal parts, 5 is a much harder division to get right...and people get fussy when you give them “short change”.

D&D coinage is based on a decimal accounting, it’s easier book keeping, but it isn’t right. And it’s bugged me for years. I keeps the system locked into the computer like tyranny of sameness, reducing a perplexing, ambiguous, and colorful riot of names and values into mere “gold points” so bland and uninteresting and patterned that one may as well be playing a video game, and an old one at that.  

    my desire is to make regions distinct with their own coins so that a breath of wonder and suggestion of depth comes into the game.  Also age; hoards of coins that are very old being distinguished from what is current, and that from what was brought from far away...

So, what to do? I’ve tried developing conversion tables, to turn the D&D gold points into reasonable facsimiles of Deniers and Ecus and Solidos and whatnot. That totally failed. It would require rewriting every rule book and treasure table to be functional on the fly. I don’t have the oomph for that. So my new compromise is this; a simple name change table, allowing the complexity of unique coins from different regions without having to engage in crazy conversion tables.  Later I'll compose a similar one for the ancient past, and for places farther away...

Noah Berlatsky / October 8, 2020

John Fawcett’s 2000 Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps is usually discussed as a feminine and feminist allegory: “the most complete feminist horror film ever made,” as this site’s K.E. Roberts puts it. There’s no doubt that the linking of the werewolf cycle to menstrual blood, and thus to female adolescence and female stigmatization, demands a feminist reading. Hidden inside the story about women, though—like a dirty secret, never to be spoken—is a story about queerness. The tragedy of Ginger Snaps, in fact, is that patriarchy makes queerness unspeakable and unthinkable. As a result, the film can imagine no future for women in patriarchy other than death.

The movie starts, in fact, with imagining death. The Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), live in a dreary, lower-middle-class, mostly white Ontario town, which they hate, and which hates them. Disgusted at the thought of being normal, they swear to each other to die together before they get old. To seal their love affair with death, they create a kind of slide-show horror movie as a school project, with images of Ginger impaled on suburban fences and run down by suburban lawn mowers. The bloody show is successful in nauseating their instructor. It’s also a winking ironic foreshadowing: the sisters are about to experience the horror movie story they long for, and it’s not going to be fun at all.

But beyond that, the film–within-a-film is a camp signal to the viewer that all is not as it appears. Or rather, it’s a signal that all is exactly as it appears. The movie shows the Fitzgerald sisters as they use fake blood and special effects to stage bloody scenes of death, just as the filmmakers of Ginger Snaps stage their dog disembowelments and nightmare janitor eviscerations. The truth of the movie, which you know going in, is that it’s fake. And the thing that is most obviously fake is not the blood and gore, but the pretense that the Fitzgerald sisters are sisters.

Obviously, the actors, Isabelle and Perkins, are not sisters. They look nothing alike. Isabelle as Ginger is a conventionally attractive movie lead, while Perkins as Brigitte is mousy, big-nosed, and human- rather than Hollywood-shaped. You’re supposed to suspend disbelief about their blood ties. And yet, the movie pushes at the edge of that suspension, as if it wants you to notice the artifice. The girls are not twins, but are in the same grade: Brigitte skipped a year, Ginger too casually explains. The boys in the film notice and comment on the fact that the two don’t resemble each other. And in a queasy scene towards the films end, Ginger, more than half-transformed into wolf, leans into Brigitte and husks, “We’re almost not even related any more.”

If sisterhood is a convention, rather than a truth, then the girl’s intense friendship, and indeed their shared room, takes on a different valence. So does their alienation from their peers. The narrative provides no real reason why the Fitzgeralds feel like outsiders, or why they’re hated by their classmates. But if you accept what you’re actually seeing, then the dynamic is obvious. Two girls who really are not sisters are engaged in a passionate, intense, open same-sex relationship. Their peers hate them for it.

In this context, Ginger’s transformation isn’t just a metaphor for female adolescence; it’s a metaphor for queer adolescence, in which increasing evidence of deviation in gender and sexuality must be pushed ever further into the closet. Ginger grows a tail—a penis metaphor, surely—and hair on her chest, even as she gets her period for the first time. She becomes more femme, wearing tight clothes, redoing her hair, flirting with boys. At the same time, she becomes more masculine. She just about sexually assaults Jason (Jesse Moss), a boy she’s making out with, after he asks her who the guy in their relationship is.

The chaotic confusion of gendered presentation and gendered desire could be a metaphor for trans experience, for lesbian experience, for male gay experience. The common through-line is social ostracism, shame, and a need for concealment. Most of the movie is devoted to Brigitte and Ginger’s efforts to keep Ginger’s condition closeted, so that she can pass.

Part of obscuring Ginger’s condition involves hiding it from the film’s viewers. It seems likely that Brigitte and Ginger were made sisters in the script specifically to defuse queer possibilities. The erotic tension between them is expressed through misdirection, and routed especially through relationships with guys. Ginger has unprotected sex with Jason, infecting him. Werewolf Jason later almost assaults Brigitte, who stabs him with a phallic needle to cure him. In a parallel triangle, Brigitte has a possibly more than platonic relationship with local drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche), who Ginger then tries to sleep with. And most explicitly, Ginger viciously murders a school janitor who she believes has been staring at Brigitte. “I don’t like the way he looks at you!” she hisses. That could be read as the anger of an overprotective sister. But it could also be jealousy.

Brigitte and Ginger’s desires aren’t just hidden from onlookers, diagetic and otherwise. They’re  hidden from themselves. When Brigitte first approaches Sam for help with a werewolf cure, she tells him that she’s the one infected, rather than Ginger. That’s an admission as much as a lie; if the curse in the movie is queerness rather than lycanthropy, then it touches both (supposed) sisters. Brigitte, notably, still has not gotten her own period, even though she’s 15. Her femininity is queer too.

Ginger, for her part, says that she has a hunger inside her that she at first mistakes for a desire for (heterosexual) sex. But then she realizes that what she actually wants is “to tear everything to fucking pieces.” We learn what that means in practice when she claws two men to death, and then suggests to Brigitte that the two of them “swap fluids” and go away together. You have to wade through apocalypse, blood, death, and the destruction of all things to get to a place where you can love that girl who is not your sister.

There’s a moment when the movie seems to foresee a plausible happy ending for that love whose name it never speaks. The sisters’ mom, Pam (Mimi Rodgers), discovers that Ginger is killing her way through her classmates. She’s understandably upset, but she doesn’t turn them in. Instead, she reacts the way you’d hope a small town mom would on learning that her kid is queer. She offers to burn down her house and chuck her mediocre husband to support her child.

The filmmakers aren’t as supportive, alas. Brigitte does agree to swap blood with Ginger, making some feeble denials to Sam about how it’s the only way to lure Ginger out to cure her with the good heterosexual injection Sam’s whipped up. But, inevitably, the taste of Brigitte causes Ginger to rage ever more out of control. Brigitte, knife in one hand, injection in the other, tries to save her, but Ginger again chooses the wrong thing to impale herself upon, and expires in the arms of her sister, who can’t be her lover.

“I’m not dying in this room with you!” Brigitte shouts right before the end. It’s a rejection of the teen sisters’ suicide pact, and an embrace of adulthood and possibility. Or, alternately, it’s a stifling acceptance of heteronormativity. “To die” is a standard double entendre, especially when it’s used to refer to what you’re doing in a bedroom. Ginger is beckoning, with bared fangs, to a realm of monstrous difference, where the girls can admit they are unrelated, and still wrestle and thrust and experience release together. Brigitte says no and kills her rather than be consumed by queer desire.

Ginger Snaps is about how patriarchy destroys women. But, as its callous title indicates, the film itself is only ambivalently opposed to that process of destruction. The movie cares about Ginger and Brigitte, but it’s also invested in denying some of the possible ways they might care about each other. In Ginger Snaps, death is better than, and the natural result of, girls loving each other intensely, or too well. Ginger wants to tear down the whole world. Ginger Snaps tears down Ginger instead.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Daniel Elkind / October 6, 2020

Mort Künstler illustration for a March 1960 True magazine story on “America’s Mystery Giant,” Bigfoot.

During Christmas 1879, the last known wild tarpan (Equus gmelini) was run off a cliff somewhere in Ukraine. Native to the forests of Poland, this undomesticated horse species had survived in Europe’s ancient woodlands since at least the time of Herodotus. Apart from a few individuals scattered among various zoos, its death left Przewalski’s horse the sole wild species. 

Apparently some wild horses remain in Poland’s managed old-growth Bialowieza Forest, but their population is the result of Nazi-era experiments in back-breeding extinct animals, the tarpan included, from captive specimens. Lutz Heck, a Nazi zoologist and head of the Berlin Zoo, was not alone in his enthusiasm for resurrecting the dead. He and his hunting buddy, Hermann Göring—who, in addition to being propaganda minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, was also Reich Hunt Master and Forest Master—intended to reinvent a host of ancient and endangered “native” animals like the auroch and wisent to populate their future game reserve. In the future Europe they imagined, they and other elite Nazis would retreat to lodges in forests like Bialowieza to hunt and kill these impossible animals.  

Impossible animals—animals that do not, should not, or cannot possibly exist—have been part of human iconography and myth from the art of cave paintings to medieval bestiaries. Their absurd anatomies have been used to symbolize and subjugate, to parody and portend. (Think of the details in The Garden of Earthly Delights.) Ironically, it was the discovery of very real fossils belonging to implausible behemoths in the earth beneath our feet that renewed a belief in fantastic creatures. Since the dinosaurs were extinct, however, living anachronisms would have to be found. And because science values “skulls and skins” above all, a whole menagerie of freakish and often fraudulent specimens have cropped up to support one claim after another of isolated species still stalking remote parts of the globe. 

With the introduction of photography, new opportunities for deception arose. Using nothing but their father’s camera and some painted specimens, two girls from Yorkshire managed to fool Sherlock Holmes inventor Arthur Conan Doyle into believing that fairies lived all around us. Obviously, Conan Doyle was less of a skeptic than his invention. In dispelling the shadows, he seemed to believe, science had also purged the world of mystery: “Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare,” he wrote, “like a landscape in the moon.” 

First American edition, 1959

In the early days, these pretenders tended to come from the ranks of the learned—from disciplines such as evolutionary biology, zoology, and Egyptology. Their hoaxes appealed not to fear but to the equally compelling desire to confirm whatever pet theory one had already developed. George Montandon, for example, was happy to christen De Loys’ Ape (Ameranthropoides loysi) a new species based on nothing more than a single, staged photograph taken by a Swiss petroleum geologist named François De Loys. After much publicity and speculation, however, this new primate species turned out to be a dead white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Erudition can entrap as effectively as ignorance—perhaps more so. Montandon apparently “endorsed and required the creation of a large, vaguely human-like South American primate because—as a supporter of the then seriously regarded ‘hologenesis’ hypothesis—he needed a primate that could serve as an ancestor of South American humans.” 

Sergei Isaakovich Freshkop (often Frechkop), a mummy expert from Moscow, was an early proponent of another theory, now likewise discredited: the initial theory of bipedalism, which suggested that all mammals started out upright. One of his most promising students at the Free University of Brussels was Bernard Heuvelmans, who coined the term cryptozoology, and dedicated his 1955 opus Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (translated as On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1958) to his former mentor. 

Heuvelmans’ book is an exasperating, encyclopedic bestiary located at the “frontier of science and fantasy.” It’s also a beast of a book, a doorstop-sized chunk of zoological history with no less than 50 photographs, 120 illustrations—from the “monkey-eating eagle of the Philippines” to a “reconstruction of the abominable snowman”—and five hand-drawn maps. (To my eternal disappointment, neither my home state of New Jersey nor the Jersey Devil seems to merit any mentions.) If you’ve ever wondered about how we got from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and nineteenth century Forteana to the Weekly World News of the checkout aisle, you would do well to look him up.  

Heuvelmans, who died in 2001, lived through some radical transformations in the state of the art. On the one hand, he was a trained zoologist with a dissertation on aardvark teeth; on the other, he marshaled folklore as scientific evidence and wasn’t shy about slapping his name on sensational pulp. (Allegedly, the Yeti bits in Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet derive from his input.) For Heuvelmans, as for Conan Doyle, it was all about bringing back a sense of faded romance. Along with German mammalogist Ingo Krumbiegel and Ivan T. Sanderson, Heuvelmans is often considered one of the founders of the field of cryptozoology. Perhaps more important, he embodied the embattled crypto figure as a righteous scholar who stalks the unknown while reminding the “armchair naturalists” and stuffy old Pharisees in the academy of the great mysteries that still remain in the forests of Minnesota. 

Much of Unknown Animals is thus spent in attempting to “confound the skeptics”—i.e. agreeing that we cannot say we don’t know for sure—rather than in attempting to demonstrate that there is any evidence for his claims. Heuvelmans casts this power struggle as a kind of religious schism. In Searching for Sasquatch (2011), Brian Regal attributes the contest between “eggheads” and “crackpots” to the growing professionalization of natural science as a discipline. Folklore scholar and zombie expert Peter Dendle puts it even more diplomatically: 

Unconfirmed species served as an implicit ground of conflict and dialogue between untutored masses and educated elite, even prior to the rise of academic science as a unified body of expert consensus.

What’s particularly interesting about 1950s cryptozoology is the way it seemed to exploit this haunted zone of possibility between fiction and verifiable fact, using doubt to its advantage. After all, dinosaurs, too, were once considered the stuff of fantasy. It was only with Cuvier and the bones unearthed by American paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh in the 19th century that the systematic study of fossils could take place, bringing dinosaurs closer to the realm of nonfiction, if not yet science. But Sanderson and Heuvelmans went even further. Leveraging their status as outsiders, they argued that dinosaurs not only existed, but likely still survived in some remote corner of the globe. Though they claimed to despise the academy, the cryptozoologists simultaneously aspired to remake it in their image. At the same time, they were right to call out the overreliance on fossil evidence and the role of colonialism. Too often native accounts were dismissed, while white administrators who rarely left the comforts of their coastal abodes were given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters in the interior. Then there was and still is the practice of naming a new species after the first western interloper to lay hands or eyes on it. 

Fawcett Publications, 1970. Cover art by Frank Frazetta

Take the gerenuk. Native to Somaliland, where it is known as garanuug, this beautiful giraffe-necked creature is often called the Waller’s gazelle because in 1879 a hunter-naturalist “discovered” and named it after the Waller who procured the specimen. Ditto Clarke’s gazelle, Père David’s deer, Burchell’s zebra, Hunter’s hartebeest, Meinertzhagen’s forest-hog, and so on. But in what sense can one claim to discover something well-known or to name something that already has a name?

It echoes an earlier struggle, during the 18th century, when European naturalists were skeptical about biological life in the New World. The Comte de Buffon was especially vocal in his doubts that any significant new species remained to be discovered there. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the founder of American paleontology, disagreed. Jefferson had a network of people supplying him with newly-discovered fossils, specimens that ultimately convinced him that mammoths or mastodons must still exist somewhere out in the American wild. “It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth, as if it still existed,” he wrote in 1785’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? […] [the north and west] still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.”

In sowing doubt and helping to bust down the door to amateurs, Heuvelmans and his descendants also opened up the flood gates to crowdsourced conspiracy, in which one begins with the desire to believe and then seeks corroborating evidence among the like-minded. The more corrupt our political and environmental reality seems to get, the more technocratic the solutions proposed, the more desperate the reaction from people with nothing left to lose. In a world of constant contact, ubiquitous information, and surreptitious surveillance, doubt has become a powerful weapon against orthodoxies of all kinds. For some self-styled freethinkers, it serves as a shield from truths too ugly and dangerous to perceive directly. It reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles, an anonymous graffiti phenomenon that started with tantalizing mosaics pressed into the asphalt of major cities in the US and abroad, promising some kind of utopian TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE ‘2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER, but ultimately spelling out a paranoid Protocols-like media conspiracy: MURDER EVERY JOURNALIST I BEG OF YOU.

We need monsters. Without them, the world is somehow more terrifyingly rational, shrunken, diminished. The imagination rebels against such austerity, casting shadows where they didn’t exist. “But then everyone thinks himself better than his neighbours and gives them beastly habits or animal appearance,” writes Heuvelmans. “Most of the ancient travellers gave tails to the savages they found, especially on islands. Marco Polo mentions men with tails in Sumatra. Gemelli-Careri finds them in Luzon, Jean Struys in Formosa, the Jesuit missionaries in Mindoro near Manila, Köping, a Swede, in the Nicobar Islands.” Then, as if looking in the mirror, he turns back to Europe and the West: “in Europe in the seventeenth century the Spaniards believed Jews had tails, in France the people of Bearn attributed them to the Cagots who lived at the foot of the Pyrenees, and in England the Devonians believed the same slander about their Cornish neighbours. . . . Every savage believes in someone more savage than himself.”

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

 

 Been a while since I made a good Battletech post.  I just finished Mr. Pardoe's recent novella "Divided We Fall".  It's a great BT yarn, exciting, fast moving, engaging, and a real page turner.  Also it has a special charm for me, as, in it,  I am one of the  fans Mr. Pardoe honors with an official alter ego in the Battletech Universe.

      I've loved the game since it was first shown to me in 1987...  Ah, High School, a terrible time in many respects, but my first friends were made over games of Battletech, and the universe has had my, sometimes near obsessive, attention ever since.  Lord knows how much mayhem my imaginary other world self has caused, though I take pride in knowing I've always done all I could to minimize casualties, avoid the Civvies, and uphold the Aries Conventions...  

  

 

     I couldn't be more jazzed that a  Character with my name is now a Cannonical part of the Universe; Brianne Elizabeth Lyons (Battletech Me) is a Colonel in Wolf's Dragoons!  the best of the best!  assigned to Logistics, which is exciting to me because I love thinking about Battletech logistics and strategic problems, and always imagined myself in that universe doing Operational Planning more than tactical field work.   And, to boot, the Character pilots one of my favorite of all Battlemechs; the Urbanmech.  I couldn't have asked for a more delightful and perfect representation, and it was all unasked, making it all the sweeter!  Thank you Mr. P!  You made one of my dreams a reality! 

  Anyhow, in the real world I've never quite felt comfortable with other super fans of the franchise, being a transwoman kinda has it's complications, even if they are usually inner ones, and I've shunned the community for the most part.  It certainly doesn't help that the one tournament I entered; Amigocon '89, was ruined for me when I had to abandon the game because my Dad showed up and made me leave as we entered the final heat.  I am sure I would have placed, but the cost to my familial relationships would have been severe...  You know when you are really "in the zone" on something?  you can see a few moves ahead, you know exactly what to do, and how to do it, and you can feel the victory in your fist?  yeah, it's a rare exhilaration, I've felt it a few times, some hard fought chess games, and a couple of really busy Battletech games...  And that day I totally had it.  my Lance of Mediums; my Griffin, my pals playing an Assassin, a Centurion, and a Hunchback, we'd bested Warhammers, Riflemen, Marauders, and were still in good shape, fighting on a neat underground terrain board, using first rate tactics; scooting and shooting with care...  it was a good free for all, and I would give my eyeteeth to see how it would have ended if I'd been allowed to stay and finish.  it's my third greatest regret in my life.  Well, that's all ancient history and water under the bridge as they say.

Times have changed since the late 80s... in the real world and in the game world.  The Dragoons have  a new logo...classic mech designs are re-imagined, and the clans have come, changing everything, everything except the one eternal truth; there will always be war so long as humanity remains...human.

Richard McKenna / September 17, 2020

James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art
By Maureen Cawthorn Bell
Jayde Design Books, 2018

Stuff has to happen when it has to happen, I suppose. Back in the summer of 2018, I’d pre-ordered a copy of James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art, but by the time it was released, the family health issues that had been increasingly dominating my life over previous years had consumed it completely. When the book arrived, I didn’t even leaf through it; just unwrapped it and stuck it on a shelf, registering only that it weighed a ton and must be hundreds of pages long. And perhaps because of its association with a sad time, I completely forgot about its existence for a couple of years, only finally opening it the other night on a sudden impulse. Would what it contained be powerful enough to burn off any negative personal associations and also not be the kind of dismal self-congratulatory fannery that makes you want to chuck all your books away and start getting into metalworking or something? Well, yes it would—James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art is absolutely fucking mind-blowing.

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, Cawthorn was everywhere: the covers of his comic book adaptations of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories were a fixture on the wall of every head shop, goth shop, comic shop, second-hand bookshop, and pawn shop I entered until I was in my mid-20s, and I’d grown up seeing his illustrations in things like New English Library’s Strange World of Science Fiction, the Savoy Books edition of Moorcock’s The Golden Barge, and the four kids’ sci-fi anthologies that Armada books put out in the 1970s. But, weirdly, it wasn’t until I sat down with this volume that I realized just how deeply his work saturates my own aesthetic life. Which is to say, my life. Not that I’m claiming my aesthetic or actual life are of two shits’ worth of interest to anyone except myself, of course, but it’s a strange feeling to suddenly realize that the blur that’s always been there at the edge of your attention is actually one of the spinning flywheels driving your mind—reminding you how many of those people existing on the margins of the culture remain marginal despite their contributions to shaping it. Cawthorn—who passed away in 2008—is a recognized figure among genre obsessives, but how did someone so interesting and idiosyncratic, who was once so ubiquitous, fall into such relative neglect?

• 
• 

Cawthorn was a child of the North East, an unfairly disregarded region of England, historically far from the money of London or Manchester, that has suffered massively since the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher set in motion the definitive closing down of the mines, heavy industry, and shipyards that had been the area’s backbone for centuries. As the final remnants of the steelworks and shipyards are gradually sold off to venture capitalists, that process of neglect is now pretty much complete, yet it’s a beautiful and magical place with its own strange magic, with deep links both to the ancient past and to the future—which makes sense, given how much of the future the locals dug, hammered, and welded together before they were sold out by the Tories. If you’re in any doubt about the North East’s futurist vocation, just remember that some of our culture’s most pervasive images of the future are the handiwork of another product of the region, one Ridley Scott, who certainly took inspiration from the vast petrochemical complexes lining local rivers (as anyone who ever flew into Teesside airport at night can testify). A self-taught, working-class illustrator, Cawthorn seems like a perfect reflection of that local genius, and in a way his relative anonymity mirrors that of his native land.

James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art contains (apparently—I didn’t count) something like 800 color and black and white illustrations that cover his entire career. The contrast between the scratchy detail and dense chiaroscuro of his b&w work and the vaguely lysergic glow of his color art highlight how the two exist as entirely distinct entities, which, however, complement and complete one another when seen together here. And his color work also inspires the thought that perhaps Cawthorn’s relative oblivion is partly due to his style being too outsider-ey, too delicate and lurid (in a good way) to work at its best in the medium that was most lucrative and that offered most visibility during the time he was working—the paperback cover.

In fact, one striking thing about Cawthorn’s work is that it always retains the beauty of the obsessive amateur, never feeling glib or by-the-numbers. Even in the drawings that look most rushed, you can feel the commitment animating each piece—the euphoric sensation of watching cheap felt-tip pens somehow create entire new worlds. And unlike many other artists, Cawthorn’s aesthetic becomes more, not less, compelling and intense the more of it you see, as he endlessly mines and refines the mineral splendors of his own imagination in pursuit of his totally individual aesthetic. Looking through the book, it rapidly becomes clear that Cawthorn’s best-known images—to those who know them—aren’t even his most striking. In fact, it’s difficult to illustrate this review properly because some of his most memorable work doesn’t exist even in the daunting repository of everything that is the internet, and I don’t want to bugger up the spine on my copy.

The book has clearly been a labor of love for Cawthorn’s sister Maureen and publisher John Davey, and Maureen’s evocative and delicate memoir of him casts a lot of light on the personality behind the portfolio of artwork. Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock (a close friend of Cawthorn from his youth until Cawthorn’s death) both provide genuinely touching contributions, and the ever-reliable John Coulthart does a lovely job of arranging and presenting everything in a way that makes sense of the ridiculous amount of material, which ranges from the comics Cawthorn drew at school to the lovely t-shirts and birthday cards he produced in mind-boggling numbers for family and friends. 

So like I said, James Cawthorn: The Man and His Art is absolutely fucking mind-blowing, a reminder of the violently surreal and inspiring power that imagery of this kind can possess when emptied of retrogressive cliché and self-satisfied rhetoric and filtered through a distinctive talent. It’s a potent inducement to pick up a pen, or a pencil, or a keyboard, or just anything, and put your imagination into use.

Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.

 

Michael Grasso / September 16, 2020

Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue
By Aubrey Powell
Thames & Hudson, 2017

There’s always a danger of excessively romanticizing the era of the vinyl LP. Issues of sonic fidelity and durability aside, though, there’s one aspect of records on 12-inch wax that seemingly everyone does miss, and that’s the full-size record cover. Album covers during the heyday of psychedelic rock and roll were gateways to other worlds, their art often the province of esteemed painters and illustrators, their cryptic surrealism often filled with esoteric codes and symbols. Probably no other artistic collective was more famous during this decadent era than the London partnership known as Hipgnosis. From its edenic origins palling around with the rising stars of the late-’60s London psychedelic underground through to its mature period making iconic platinum album covers for global sensations like Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, and Led Zeppelin, the creative forces behind Hipgnosis gained a rightful reputation as artistic visionaries whose work didn’t merely create identifiable brands and images for a musical group. Hipgnosis covers added to the mystique of the music, creating a visual component that rendered itself an indelible part of the listening experience.

“Album covers… defined you,” says Hipgnosis founder Aubrey “Po” Powell in his “Welcome to Hipgnosis” history in 2017’s Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue, a 300 plus page full-color hardcover monster that reproduces the collective’s entire album cover output from 1967 to 1984. “The covers gave an inkling of your personality, your musical tastes and preferences, and just how up to date and hip you were.” Powell, Hipgnosis’s photographer, met his creative partner Storm Thorgerson at a hashish-suffused party across the street from his rooming house (that was suddenly raided by the police) attended by much of Pink Floyd. In that afternoon, a bond was formed between Powell and Thorgerson, a graduate student in film at the Royal College of Art. In these swinging, soon-to-turn-psychedelic times, Thorgerson and Powell were at the center of a music and art scene that would break out of the cozy confines of a few odd students and onto the global stage. Named after a piece of graffiti that Floyd’s Syd Barrett scrawled on the door to their apartment in pen, Thorgerson and Powell’s partnership (Throbbing Gristle member Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson would join in the mid-1970s) created some of the most memorable album covers of the era.

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Hipgnosis’s first rock client was Pink Floyd: seen here are three of their Floyd covers: the Dr. Strange-meets-real-life-alchemy of 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets, the recursive design of 1969’s double album Ummagumma, and the iconic 1973 cover for The Dark Side of the Moon.

Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art . itself is equal parts fond (post-)hippie memoir and hard-nosed realistic account of what it was like to run a business in the often high pressure, big-money business of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll. The book contains a brief—if frank and fascinating—foreword from Peter Gabriel, who worked with Hipgnosis while leading Genesis and for his first three solo album covers. Throughout the hundreds of album covers, Powell provides a wry and informative running commentary on the personalities, problems, and sudden moments of inspiration—provided by both musicians and the cultural and natural environment—that contributed to Hipgnosis’s success. The Surrealist movement of the 1920s and specifically photographer Man Ray get quite a few name-drops in Powell’s assessment of the Hipgnosis catalog, and it’s easy to see why. The nude human form, out-of-place manmade objects juxtaposed with the organic, obvious, and often unnatural-looking photo collage: all of these definitive Surrealist techniques appear with frequency in Hipgnosis’s early output.

Much of the overall aesthetic of psychedelic rock took its inspiration from long-past artistic movements with Romantic, back-to-nature overtones: Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts, notably. With the surrealist edge of Hipgnosis’s designs, however, a flash of danger and alien weirdness was added to rock’s visual lexicon. Hipgnosis’s efforts at whimsical storybook-style covers for the Hollies and Genesis stick out like sore thumbs: solid efforts, but very much against the subversive grain of most of their work at the time. The covers where Hipgnosis unites Victorian twee with counterculture edge—such as using century-old techniques to hand-tint pastel color on Powell’s contemporary photos—do provide a pleasing synthesis of old and new. 

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Gentle nostalgic folkie Al Stewart’s understated style might not seem like it jibes with the fantastic scenes conjured on Past, Present and Future (1973) and Time Passages (1978). On the other hand, Dark Side of the Moon producer-turned-bandleader Alan Parsons’s 1978 album Pyramid was directly influenced by Parsons being “preoccupied with the Great Pyramid of Giza,” to the point of “obsession” and “out-of-body experience.”

But it’s not just the art movements of the past that provided Hipgnosis with ambient inspiration. The counterculture’s well-attested conscious fusion of old and new, of the esoteric with contemporary pop and outsider culture, including science fiction and comic books, is on display throughout the Hipgnosis corpus. One of their very first commissions, Pink Floyd’s 1968 A Saucerful of Secrets, very obviously embodies this fusion, with its mixture of images from “Marvel comics and alchemical books.” Powell and Thorgerson attest to their being “avid followers of Stan Lee… Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby,” all while recognizing that “in those heady days of 1968—a man was soon to land on the Moon, alchemy was a hot topic, extraterrestrials were a certainty, Tarot readings and throwing the I Ching were de rigueur—the search for enlightenment in the East was a definite must.”

Whichever way the cultural winds were blowing, Thorgerson and Powell always forged a link to the music in their designs. Even in cases where the imagery looks too mystically epic or weird for the music on the disk, such as the covers for Scottish folk musician Al Stewart’s Past, Present, and Future (1973) and Time Passages (1978), the music’s overall themes—remembrance, nostalgia, prophecy, and folk memory—contain a tenuous throughline justifying figures leaping through strange mystic portals or tuning into a radio station that glitches out all of reality. All these strains of the magical and surreal, from Renaissance alchemists to haunted Victorian portraitists to avant-garde plumbers of the post-World War I collective unconscious to Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer—Hipgnosis synthesized these with the subconscious themes of the music to create visions that defied reality. Powell’s photographic eye and Thorgerson’s dreamlike visions found common cause in composing images that looked like set pieces on strange alien worlds or in magical faerie realms. But even with all the photographic trickery and post-production flourishes available to them as they moved out of student darkrooms and into their own studio, Hipgnosis still found inspiration out there on our Earth’s weirdest real-life spots. From the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland to a cracked, dry Tees estuary in the North of England to deserts in North Africa and the American West, Hipgnosis’s most memorable landscapes are worlds where something has gone awry, where weird monuments, alien beings, and strange hauntings abound.

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Hipgnosis had a knack for using unique real-world backdrops to create eerie scenes for their album covers. Italian rock progressivo group Uno’s self-titled 1974 album depicts a mysterious hieratic harlequin with a glowing geodesic dome for a brain emulating the pose of the famous English chalk figure, the Long Man of Wilmington.

Of course there are the usual stories of rock star excess in the book, with the personnel from Hipgnosis being flown all across the world for photo shoots and consultations with the biggest names in ’70s corporate rock. In many cases, the musicians and managers themselves couldn’t resist being part of the process. Paul McCartney enjoyed hamming it up on the cover of Band on the Run, and a few years later Macca wanted to be the one to personally place the giant letters on a London theater marquee for the cover of Wings At The Speed Of Sound. Noted hard case Peter Grant, the imposing manager of Led Zeppelin, was giddy—he “burbled with glee,” according to Powell—over Hipgnosis’s proposal for a worldwide scavenger hunt of a thousand replicas of the eerie totem from the cover of 1976’s Presence. One could argue that Hipgnosis, Led Zeppelin, and Peter Grant invented the music industry alternate-reality game in 1976 (sadly, the surprise Presence publicity stunt never got off the ground after it was leaked by the music trades).

Powell is honest throughout the book about the various misfires; he finds some of their ideas in ridiculously poor taste upon reassessment and most modern observers would be hard-pressed to disagree. The collective’s pinpoint arch visual humor certainly sometimes misses the mark. If I were to sum it up: the Hipgnosis catalog contains a few dozen stone-cold classics, a bunch of forgettable designs, and a few that look like rejects for Spinal Tap’s album Shark Sandwich. Hipgnosis’s wit was used to best effect when channeling those common cultural currents mentioned above: for example, 10cc’s classic cover for their album Deceptive Bends—the creation of which is broken down in great detail by the late Thorgersen in a contemporary piece from 1977 included in the book—talks about the physical and logistical challenges in place from the beginning but also places the imagery of the diver carrying the helpless damsel in its proper context with “monster” B-movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and Robot Monster (1953). Trawling our collective pop culture unconscious, Hipgnosis called forth all kinds of creatures from the deep over their less than two decades on Earth, creatures that walk amongst us long after the collective’s demise.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

 Exhibit / September 15, 2020

Americanism, 1982

Object Name: Americanism 
Maker and Year: Tsunehisa Kimura, 1982
Object Type: Photomontage
Description: (K.E. Roberts)

Unlike his younger compatriots Shusei Nagaoka, Hajime Sorayama, Eizin Suzuki, and Hiroshi Nagai, who broke into the American illustration market with glistening airbrushed futures and breezy, pastel-colored beach scenes, Tsunehisa Kimura’s output was absurd, darkly surreal, and often apocalyptic. He remembered the devastation wrought by the war, and aimed his photomontage squarely at imperialism, colonialism, and, during the 1980s, a locked-and-loaded America whose leaders were playing an increasingly dangerous game that might have enveloped the entire globe.

Kimura’s most recognized piece is probably Waterfall, circa 1979, which shows Manhattan beset by, or rather integrated with,  Niagara Falls. The scene evokes disaster, but there’s something serene about it too—the riotous natural world and the built environment appear to commune, as is the goal in traditional Japanese architecture; not so in America, where we build things to keep nature—including other people—out. New York is frequently Kimura’s muse: New York encased in crackling ice; New York encased in fire at the end of the world (or is it the violent beginning of the world?); an ocean liner (is it the Titanic?) stands in for the Hindenburg, running aground on the Empire State Building.

There’s nothing serene about Kimura’s cover to the 1984 Midnight Oil LP Red Sails in the Sunset, either, showing a bombed-out, scorched-earth Sydney. A simmering red sun settles in the dust, similar to the black sun that precedes the atomic explosion in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1982-1990). And his cover for Space Circus’s Fantastic Arrival (1979), where American astronauts caper about on the Moon—while on fire—is similarly uncomfortable. Waterfall, in various edits, has also appeared on several LP covers.

Americanism is a pointed critique of both WWII-era (the photos are from the ’40s) and ’80s America, consumed with consuming and not much else, though the world (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) may burn. The ironic nonchalance of the juxtaposition is, once again, striking. The Statue of Liberty is drowned (a long-standing visual motif in sci-fi) in a 1977 photo, and an untitled piece from 1984 shows the noble lady once again, this time hurtling over (or towards) the New York skyline under the power of six American ICBMs—which huddle beneath her skirts!

Kimura’s work was collected in 1979’s appropriately title Visual Scandals by Photomontage, as far as I know the only such collection published in the US.

      Svobod the Mule smiled to himself.  Things had sure turned for the better.  He couldn't help a satisified grunt as he stretched slowly and extended his muzzle into the trough for a breakfast of good oats.  These new friends were first rate folks, and he'd decided he'd look after them.  

     Munching away, his mind turned back to the old witch, one of a long line of cruel, dumb, and selfish "owners" who'd come into his life since the old Poopseller had passed, Bless his soul.  The witch was the worst, tying him up in that Barrow while she rummaged for something called the Table service of King Jaques, bah, the gelly cube that ate her did the world a favor.

     Why are hoomans so silly anyway?  I mean, they take the God's good oats, beat them, crush them up, dry them out, THEN put them back in water, heat them till they boil in an iron pot, THEN put them into yet another bowl, and wait for them to cool off again, and all that takes time and effort,mind you,  before they finally eat, which they have to do out of special little magic tableware?  what nonsense!  Svobod snorted so hard oats flew up his nose.

       Well at least these new ones were good fellows, it's nice to spend the night in a warm barn with nice smelling straw, the grooming girl does a good straw rub-down, the other stalls have interesting horses from all over with all kinds of horse-gossip, the oats are first rate...and not a whip or chain in sight.  No...these new adventurers were under his protection now...  if only they'd stop calling him Francis...a girl's name...so demeaning. 

 Got to run the Eldorath/Baconbach D&D game with Scott and Raven today.  

The party consisting of ; Helin Fiter -the student of Rustfus Ranquesoc who directed him into the service of St.Botewes.  Lighter Graves- a youthful tough and gruff prestidigitator of amateur accomplishments, but great potential.  Once a student of the hedgewitch Gundabarda, but since her death, a masterless youth seeking adventure.  their friend Sylvester; an enchanted sentient bedsheet, whose principle combat skill is impersonating a halloween ghost, but is kindhearted, sweet, and has hidden talents where magics are concerned.  The party is joined by Carbunkle, a childhood friend of Helin's haling from Oldsoc Village.  Carbunkle's passion is pretzles, he's a journeyman pretzle baker, but his old master having passed and unwilling to work for the new, has taken up adventuring to make the money to open his own bakery.  He's a nice asset to the gang as he is pretty muscley after an apprenticeship hefting bags of flour and hand kneading dough every morning for years. He's also a good natured and dependable friend.  

These brave souls are exploring an old barrow about an hour's walk from town, a place that has been a nuisance to travellers on the king's highway, just enough for Sir Sangramore to bother hiring some very inexpensive and expendable amateur dungeoneers to look into it.  It is said to be the burial mound of Aelpas, and ancient Wizard King of the Vertimorci Tribe in the days before the Remian Elves came to Aerovia.  But how much faith can one place in a legend attested to in only one line of the few scraps remaining of a lost book of Aerovian History?

Well today's adventure saw the gang explore a new room, discover some gems that turned out to be glass, fight rats, befriend a placid mining mule (now named Francis)  who, unknown to the party,  can see in the dark and has a fine sense of direction, and little tolerance for abuse.  They were pleased at the discovery of a gargoyle that spouts a stream of quicksilver, encountered a room with yellow fungus and a nice tapestry, and happily, had no encounters with the dreaded Pickwicky.

     In town they got taken for a large sum of money by the town's Banker-Merchant in a sour deal for a great Tapestry (of the baker of Wooton Major), discovered the humility of the penitents crawl to the crypt under the vault of the cathedral, and it's magical healing, and enjoyed the warm comforts of the Cracked Cask.  

More would have been done, but my teeth began to buzz (the Aura warning of my migraines) and I decided to pack up and flee for home.  good thing too, the winds are roaring outside, and that pretty typically gives me the kind of migraine I have tonight.  Still, a nap and my brain pills has broken the worst of the pain, leaving me feeling like I've been swimming in a river for hours. 

Spending time with my friends makes this a great day, no matter what.

 So, some friends painted a mural for the state fair...  but there always seems to be a chicken display placed in the way.  for some reason the idea was both maddening, and kind of interesting.  I decided to incorporate the chickens into other paintings...and it amuses me.

So, I found some pictures hiding in my desktop folders of the Hide Behind creek RR project I kinda sorta have abandoned.  It's a walmart toy train set I intended to use for both a Christmas layout AND for wargaming a fictional Civil War campaign in the Hidebehind Creek valley of the fictional border state of Franklin...  got kind of derailed..but maybe I'll take it up again sometime.  the train runs allright on the three rail O gauge track, but while it does fine on Marx turnouts, it can't handle the lionel ones, too shallow.  it definitely isn't very strong at pulling, three cars, including the tender are about it's maximum on level track.  I have an idea for up-powering it.  at ten dollars a train set, you could bash a couple together, hide more powerful battery pack in the tender and use a second motor to give the engine some power...maybe.     so the engine was brush painted with an alkyd oil paint for the blue boiler as an experiment, but the purple was sprayed on.  the yellow was also a rattlecan paint.  decals would have cost money, so I just printed paper and cut out the "lables" or stickers and glued them on, sealing the whole with a spray krylon. 
the little house in the picture here is a cut up and reassembled BMC gettysburg playset "headquarters" building.  I used some old green "dish scrubby" with a few dots of paint for "flowers"...to make the plants around the base of it.

Features / August 28, 2020

ROBERTS: I started watching (mostly rewatching) disaster movies old and new about a week into lockdown, which I suppose makes perfect sense. The genre turns on spectacle and catharsis, but it also pacifies: no matter how bad the real world gets, it could always get worse—so be grateful that it’s not worse. But make no mistake: Irwin Allen and co. make perfectly clear that bad stuff is on the way, always, and we have to be prepared to persevere. “Shit happens” is embedded in our national lexicon. Take your lumps. Deal with it. Just do it. Be a leader, not a follower. It is all so bedrock America that I hardly care if it’s bullshit anymore—bullshit precisely because it’s allowed to be true. We live in a land where where there are only winners and losers: those who can buy their way out of catastrophes—catastrophes that are often preventable or mitigable but made inevitable by systemic bondage to profiteers, by explicit repudiation of the idea of community—and those who can’t.

It occurred to me last week, as I rewatched The Poseidon Adventure for the umpteenth time—inarguably the peak (heh) of the genre—that it is a representative piece of American mythology, as indispensable in its way as Red River or The Big Sleep or Easy Rider. “Hell, upside down,” the theatrical poster gushes. “Life is up there,” says the Luciferian Reverend Scott to resigned Belle Rosen, as if in response. “And life always matters. Very much.” It is the Dantean journey that gives the film so much gravitas, but the (dis)honorable Reverend, in his pre-catastrophe sermon, channels the Duke, not the poet:

So what resolution should we make for the new year? Resolve to let God know that you have the guts and the will to do it alone. Resolve to fight for yourselves, and for others, for those you love. And that part of God within you will be fighting with you all the way.

This ain’t the RMS Titanic, in other words. Americans don’t play show tunes as the ship goes down. No. We clamber up enormous, tasteless fake Christmas trees, traipse through fire and corpses, and swim through flooded engine rooms to get to the cast iron hull, just as the improbable rescue team (never give up, never surrender!) is set to blowtorch a three foot square passage to sunshine-y safety.

MCKENNA: I have vague memories of watching The Poseidon Adventure for the first time in its debut showing on British television over the 1979 Christmas holidays, and it felt like I was being initiated into a new understanding of the way the world worked. Back then, the UK was a very different place—stoic certainly, but a lot less given to mors tua vita mea walk-it-off lead-don’t-follow bullishness than our increasing alignment with you lot over the last few decades has made us. Plus it was—for the most part—relatively safe and stable-seeming. So the lesson I took from The Poseidon Adventure, call it the Irwin Allen Doctrine if you will, was that stability is fragile and that in any moment, reality can be turned upside down (bum-tish!). The takeaway of my child-of-’70s Britain brain was not the perhaps more logical “be brave, fight on, struggle through” preppery conclusion, but a kind of anxious resignation to disaster that, after the many disaster movies I would see over the following years, would be taken to its logical extreme in 1984 with the BBC’s nuclear war disaster movie Threads. Weird how the same stimulus can provoke such different reactions when the context is different.

Watching it now for the first time in decades, I’m struck by several things. Firstly and most superficially, Roddy McDowell’s atrocious Scottish (if it is even supposed to be Scottish) accent, and the awe-inspiring shittiness of the model work that opens the film, which looks appalling on a telly, so it’s inconceivable that on a cinema screen it didn’t provoke howls of outrage. I’m also struck by how great Pamela Sue Martin and Stella Stevens and Ernie Borgnine (as Linda and Mike Rogo) are (predictably, it’s Borgnine who pulls out the one moment of genuine pathos in the whole film), and by how much I’ve missed Shelley Winters. But mainly I’m struck by what a dick the Rev. Scott is. Sure, he gets his little gang of followers—well, some of them—up to the propeller shafts, but seemingly as much by luck as by any actual plan or talent above and beyond not giving up. How many other little groups of survivors led by some other manic Hackman convinced he knows the way are trying to do the same thing and don’t make it? The film makes it easy for itself by following the only one that does (we know it’s the only one because the rescue helicopter pisses off as soon as they’ve emerged), but the whole thing feels like we’re watching someone—the Reverend Scott—grandstand their way through their issues with their own feelings of impotence and frustrated. I suppose it’s kind of in the cards that this is the case, though, given the way Scott tells the congregation at the sermon Kelly mentions above that “God likes winners.” I mean, it’s not like I’m much of a Bible student, but God likes winners? I thought he was planning on giving the planet to the meek?

Perhaps the whole thing is implicitly seen from a winner-loving God’s-eye POV, keeping the focus on the people that God likes so much while the losers all get smashed to bits. What do you think, Mike? Does that feel like something that was echoing through these films, until Threads proposed a disaster in which surviving was actually worse than dying?

GRASSO: For me personally, 1970s disaster movies have more often been something to analyze rather than enjoy; they do speak so clearly to a certain high American imperial bloat: bigger casts, bigger spectacles, longer running times, bigger publicity campaigns, cheesier gimmicks. So I think that’s why, when re-watching the arguable Big Three for this piece—the original Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974)—I was a little shocked to remember how downright boring all three of them are. Nothing specifically against the star-studded (and undeniably talented) casts, but so many of the actors seem to be content to hit their marks and pick up a paycheck. With the exception of standouts like George Kennedy in the Airport series (who goes from salt of the earth mechanic in Airport ’70 to “largely in on the joke” full airliner captain by the time The Concorde… Airport ’79 staggers across the finish line), or the unbeatable (yet somehow still slightly disappointing!) ¿quién es más macho? duo of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in Inferno and the always, er, compelling Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. These big Hollywood names, a good number of them washed up and forgotten at the time, just look slightly on the side of mortified that their careers have brought them to this. But again, as you guys mentioned, these movies were also the biggest box office hits of their day, the star-studded, effects-laden blockbusters that ruled the cinemas and drive-ins before the coming of Star Wars. What gives?

I could trot out the usual rigmarole about these films speaking to a Nixon-era sense of American decline, of watching the technological wonders we’d built during the Cold War begin to decay and fall apart—and don’t get me wrong, that’s a really solid analysis! But I think there’s more to the ’70s disaster film than just a deeply buried sense of American masochism. Because there is that Rev. Scott-inspired sense of “we’re going to beat this thing with good old American know-how and good old American aggression” threaded throughout all these movies. Whatever else has been said ad infinitum about the supposed malaise of the 1970s, we know now, a half-century later, that most Americans literally never had it better economically than when these movies came out. And I think on some level, the writers and producers knew that. They knew that living in American society as a patriotic white American male between 1970 and 1975 was easy—possibly the easiest it had ever been, despite the dual prongs of Vietnam and Watergate—and that Americans on some level can’t abide the living being easy. The restless American needs conflict, he needs adversity, he needs a sinking ship or a burning building or a sudden earthquake to fight against to really prove we’re winners.

There is one thematic element of the early genre that is worth praising from a political perspective, though, and that’s the multi-level plots and the innocent bystander characters who get to prove themselves and their mettle during the disaster. Every B-level star or Golden Age of Hollywood re-tread gets a juicy character development scene or a subplot, and while, yes, the stars are the stars and the heroes are the heroes, in each one of these movies there are plenty of Just Plain Ordinary Folks among the square-jawed heroes. Maybe it’s not socialist realism or Brechtian dramatic deconstruction, but it’s the closest that the American blockbuster can bring itself to provide: a relatable, identifiable proxy for the ordinary schlub or harried housewife in the audience. It’s small “d” democratic in the best tradition of American literature and drama, and I unabashedly love it as a trope, whether it’s the aforementioned unexpectedly heroic Winters in Poseidon or Geneviève Bujold in Earthquake or countless other examples, ordinary doughty folks (including plenty of women!) get to save lives and be heroes. That seems like a fine and necessary moral and political lesson to come out of these things.

ROBERTS: I think these films are democratic in more ways than one. In The Towering Inferno, it’s the greedy developer who refuses to evacuate the building because he has a big deal at stake; in The Poseidon Adventure, the owner’s agent orders the Captain to push on at full speed to save money, rendering the ship unballasted; in Earthquake, architect Stewart Graff puts his firm in jeopardy by demanding a prize client pay for necessary safety measures in his new office building; in Twister, the bad guys in their shiny black vans are “in it for the money, not the science”; in Dante’s Peak, the town’s business leaders don’t want to evacuate because they’ll forfeit the windfall of the annual Pioneer Days Festival (just as the Mayor in Jaws refuses to close the beach during the summer tourism peak). Is this sounding familiar? Anyway, the list goes on. In the 2000s and beyond, climate change is often the culprit (with all the histrionics of an Aaron Sorkin script), and once again greed is at the core (heh) of the resulting cataclysm. Life  may matter “very much” to Reverend Scott, but his country (and God, apparently) routinely sacrifices it so that the rich can stay rich.

These films also display and require shared sacrifice, often on a global scale—an unthinkable suggestion in America since at least the Vietnam War (bone spurs, anyone?). The rich can’t buy their way out of a burning (The Day the Earth Caught Fire) or freezing (The Day After Tomorrow) planet, though sometimes we have a distinctly undemocratic “ark” situation (When Worlds Collide, Deep Impact, 2012—yes, I watched it!), where the elite or “chosen” few get the chance to start a newer, better world. I think that’s why Richard has a different reaction to these films: Brits had no choice but to share the devastation and deprivation of World War II, among other tragedies.

The phrase “washed up” (heh) got me thinking as well. Not just in terms of the past-prime-time actors, who give the audience a sense of stability and hope as the cinematic destruction unfolds, but in terms of the country itself, as Mike alludes to above. As Rambo and his ilk fought and won Vietnam retroactively in the ‘80s, so the disaster films of the ‘70s gave us an enemy that was worthy of us, an enemy we could bear losing to, an enemy that could not be sympathized with—and at the same time an enemy we could claim a moral victory against.

MCKENNA: That’s a thought that struck me too, Kelly—how differently these films must have played in the States to the way they did everywhere else, even somewhere as nominally similar (as in, not at the time actually that similar at all) as the UK. Obviously a lot of the same mechanisms would have been at play, but it seems to me that—apart from the emphasis on thrills and catharsis—the focus over our way at least was perhaps more on the “disaster” part than the “movie”: on the implicit warning against hubris that set the superstitious protestant wiring buried beneath the country’s modernizing surface humming.

But then, only America could have afforded to make this kind of thing as a throwaway entertainment anyway: even second-tier Irwin Allen-ery would have been beyond the coffers of our national film industry, and presumably most others too. Only the US could assemble the means necessary to create mass acts of propitious magic showing the nation’s chutzpah win out over bees or bigfoot.

It’s no coincidence that the disaster movie came of age in a period of history when popular culture in all its forms was beginning to accept that the Earth was not simply an endless source of resources for us to to burn or melt down into aftershave bottles, and that if we kept hacking away at it, it might start hacking back. That schism in belief feels like it’s seeped deep into the bedrock of the zeitgeist since then, and the disaster movies of the decades that followed the ’70s have reflected that shift away from the surface. I’ve watched 2012 too, and, like so many of the modern disaster movies I’ve seen, it’s profoundly unsatisfying. For all that the special effects and stunts of the originals were considered epic at the time, there’s a staginess to the classic disaster movies that I think is an intrinsic element of their power (which makes me wonder about the parallels between the American disaster movie and the British tradition of pantomime, where marginal celebs and not-quite-has-beens are brought out around Christmas time to camp up old tales). A truly realistic disaster movie doesn’t quite hit the mark—the staginess, perhaps like the model ship in The Poseidon Adventure, is an essential part of the package, as is the weird bus-tour melange of character actors and stars. Those TV Guide-of-yesteryear casts you point out, Mike—they’re comforting. An American extrapolation of Brian Aldiss’s “cosy catastrophe,” which, like Kelly says, amps up the nation’s psychological needs.

GRASSO: As far as more contemporary disaster movies go, documentarian Adam Curtis had a stunning bit at the center of his most recent film, HyperNormalisation, where he presents a series of scenes from ’80s and ’90s disaster movies featuring titanic explosions (replete with crowds looking up at them in stunned awe) that seemed to spookily and accurately predict the traumatic images of destruction we all remember from September 11. Alien invasions, climate change-driven tidal waves, asteroids and eruptions from the Earth’s core—all these apolitical disasters fed into a spectacular idea of what our collective societal rupture point might look like. And then, suddenly, it all became real. This sort of special effects spectacle was echoed in the city-destroying pillars of light in the post-9/11 superhero film. Of course, with the 2000s superhero film, the “good guys” now have their own superhumans, wealthy tycoons, or secretive military organizations sporting a team of emotionally-stunted misfit recruits to fight against the city-destroying bad guys. The ordinary schlub from the 1970s is now nothing more than a bystander with no agency and certainly no impact.

The 1970s disaster flicks are necessarily smaller-scale, in both spectacle and stakes. I think back to how I first saw many of these films produced in the decade of my birth. Most of the time, it was either a lazy weekend afternoon movie on UHF television or a similar filler on cable superstations. Those are also the venues where I saw the more laughable disaster flicks, ones where the casts are closer to C-list than B-list. Two of the lesser-known ’70s disaster movies that are near and dear to my heart—made-for-TV Airport ripoff SST: Death Flight from 1977 and the Canadian City on Fire from 1979—featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s pre-cable season on Minneapolis UHF station KTMA-23 and were standard parts of many UHF station’s syndicated film packages. As the ’70s went on, the disaster movie held on by its fingernails, reusing the same tired tropes and plot beats until 1980 came along and America decided it was time to laugh at all those tired tropes in the classic comedy Airplane! (whose plot points and even lines of dialogue were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from Arthur Hailey’s 1957 screenplay Zero Hour!). I think about David Zucker’s subsequent transformation into conservative “satirist” and a few elements of the original Airplane! that stick in my mind, like the titular airliner’s destruction of a Chicago (!!!) radio station “where disco lives forever,” and wonder if Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’s repudiation of the ’70s disaster film was a harbinger of Reaganite reaction. But then again, I probably think that about most cultural events from 1980.

Most of all, I miss that very cosy catastrophe nature of these films, and Richard, you’re spot on: I think the ’70s disaster film is the American version of those very British Cold War apocalypses. When I see people on screen I recognize from classic black-and-white movies or from then-contemporary sitcoms and game shows, I feel on some basic level like everything is going to be all right. As the disaster film evolved in the ’90s and beyond, my comfort as a viewer was not a concern: all that mattered was overwhelming the viewer’s senses with physical destruction and dislocation, or having spandexed übermenschen militaristically fight against the destruction (which often had the effect of fomenting yet more mega-destruction). Glaringly mortal Shelley Winters isn’t coming to swim through the chaos and save us anymore. Make room for Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.

ROBERTS: Here are two more idiomatic entries for you: God helps those who help themselves, and every man for himself. Both come deep from the well of Western culture (Greek tragedy and Chaucer, respectively), and both were codified in American Puritanism. For the Puritans, you never knew if you were saved or not until you woke up in Heaven (or “Hell, upside down”), so you simply exerted “a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned.” And of course they were obsessed with the Book of Revelation, the foretelling of the disaster to end all disasters. Basically, they were not a lot of fun.

Do you remember the Pastor in 1953’s The War of the Worlds, an early sci-fi entry that’s also a proto-disaster film? He thinks he can make peace with the invading Martians, and slowly walks up to their hovering war machines, clutching his Bible and quoting the Lord’s Prayer. He’s immediately blasted into ashes. And yet, at the very end of the film, the protagonists are reunited in a church filled with silently praying refugees, and as the Martians begin to attack the Lord’s House, they start to drop dead. You just never know which God you’re going to get.

In one of my favorite scenes in The Poseidon Adventure, Scott and his flock are shocked to come across another, even more bedraggled, group of survivors. They file past in a line, heads down, resigned, plodding. The leader, a doctor, explains that they’re headed towards the bow, which Scott explains is underwater. They are the damned, just like the survivors who refused to climb up the giant Christmas tree. And Scott represents both faith and reason. In the end, God pisses on him too—a punishment for the prideful, mortal perseverance that got him to the finish line.

As you’ve both said, these narratives have become a glut and blur of superheroes and CGI. I guess they were never very much more. Disasters befall us in disaster movies because we’re fallen, because we fuck everything up and yet still have the nerve to believe we’re exceptional, “elect.” And they’re supposed to remind us that we’re part of a human community after all, something that real disasters do. Or did, I should say. That trust is gone. The appeal to reason is gone. God is a gun. It’s the war of each against each. We’re the disaster now.

Noah Berlatsky / August 25, 2020

Tom Brokaw popularized the term “The Greatest Generation” in 1998 to describe the Americans—and especially the American men—who survived the Depression and fought against Nazism in World War II. Brokaw saw this cohort in valedictory, heroic terms.

They answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs.

They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible…

In line with this hagiographic blueprint, discussions of World War II veterans are mostly nostalgic and congratulatory. They saved the world for us. Of course, we all know they weren’t perfect (insert obligatory nod here to Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps). But we nevertheless owe them a debt of gratitude for their service and their sacrifice.

But did people at the time see the Greatest Generation as the greatest? Ira Levin’s first novel, 1953’s A Kiss Before Dying, suggests the answer is “not so much.” Levin, who was born in 1929, just too late to participate in World War II himself, presents the men who fought against Hitler much as later writers would present the men who fought in Vietnam. Rather than saviors preserving the nation, the “greatest generation” for Levin is subversive, unstable, and a danger to order and social verities. That characterization of the young gives the book a queasy, disorienting relevance, as if Levin confusedly thought he was writing twenty years later—or forty. Or seventy.

The novel’s main character is Bud Corliss, the good-looking, working-class son of an unsuccessful father and an over-indulgent mother. Corliss is drafted, fights in the Pacific in World War II, and is honorably discharged in 1947. He goes to college, determined to make his fortune by marrying a wealthy woman, and starts dating Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of industrialist Leo Kingship. When she becomes pregnant, however, he realizes that her father will disown her for immorality. He kills her by pushing her from the roof of the municipal building where he has lured her, ostensibly to be married. He successfully makes her death look like a suicide, and there is no police investigation.

Corliss then sets his sights on Dorothy’s older sister Ellen. Using information he obtained about her from Dorothy, he woos her and becomes her fiancé also. She becomes suspicious of the cause of Dorothy’s death, however, and when her investigation threatens to expose him, he kills her too. He turns to the third Kingship daughter, Marion, and she falls in love with him too. However, Gordon Grant, a DJ who met Ellen while she was investigating Corliss, uncovers his plotting and warns Leo and Marion. They confront Corliss in Leo’s factory, where they semi-accidentally force him to fall into a vat of molten copper.

Corliss is a veteran, but he is not portrayed as a paragon. On the contrary, he’s lazy and vain, and these qualities are highlighted, or exacerbated, by the G.I. Bill. He drifts from acting school to Stoddard University, “which was supposed to be something of a country club for the children of the Midwestern wealthy,” his tuition guaranteed by the government.

The war, and social programs for veterans, allow the lower classes to mingle with their betters, resulting in boastful ambition and sociopathic violence. Corliss is evil in part because of his burning sense of entitlement beyond his station, an ambition nourished by the social dislocations of war and welfare. While he’s fighting abroad, his father conveniently dies in an auto accident, symbolizing the son’s emancipation from his past class status and the old hierarchies. Society and family alike are shattered and upended, freeing him to go down “the road to the success he was certain awaited him.”

The novel’s anxieties about Corliss’s class mobility are tangled up with concerns about gendered disorder. He pushes Dorothy to get an abortion (a plot point notably excised as too scandalous in the 1956 film adaptation), underlining the younger generation’s disdain for traditional family values. More, Bud himself is feminized—A Kiss Before Dying is a noir, and Corliss is cast in the seductive femme fatale role. He is fussy and meticulous about his appearance, and determined to advance through sexual wiles rather than hard work.

At Stoddard, as Bud starts dating Dorothy, he orders Kingship industrial pamphlets (“Technical Information on Kingship Copper”) and reads them with devoted intensity, “a musing smile on his lips, like a woman with a love letter.” When he romances Dorothy, and Ellen, and Marion in turn, he is really courting Leo Kingship, the patriarch. Leo’s daughters are merely convenient, interchangeable erotic pathways for Bud’s queer, singular passion. This is Eve Sedgwick’s “male homosocial desire,” in which men’s lust for other men and men’s lust for other men’s wealth and status are intertwined, displaced, and inseparable. Bud has one of his few honest, visceral emotional experiences towards the novel’s end, when he is being given a tour of the copper plant. He sees it as a “heart of American industry, drawing in bad blood, pumping out good! Standing so close to it, about to enter it, it was impossible not to share the surging of its power.” He is at once ravished and ravisher, entering into and filled with intoxicating patriarchal oomph.

Corliss also feels that pulse of eroticized dominance after each of his kills—and especially after his first murder, which takes place during the war. Corliss gets separated from his unit and stumbles upon a lone Japanese soldier, who tries to surrender to him. The enemy urinates in his pants in fear, and then Corliss shoots him, with a sensual deliberation.

Quite slowly, he squeezed the trigger. He did not move with the recoil. Insensate to the kick of the butt in his shoulder, he watched attentively as a black-red hole blossomed and swelled in the chest of the Jap. The little man slid clawing to the jungle floor. Bird screams were like a handful of colored cards thrown into the air.

After looking at the slain enemy for a minute or so, he turned and walked away. His step was as easy and certain as when he had crossed the stage of the auditorium after accepting his diploma.

The phallic gun, the yonic wound, and the orgasmic cries of the birds give way to a post-coital satisfaction more thorough than any pleasure Bud experiences in the arms of the Kingship daughters.

War awakens something in Corliss; he learns the pleasure of violence, which he carries back with him to unsuspecting and vulnerable civilians in the US. The dynamic is similar to David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood, in which veteran John Rambo unleashes a one-man Vietnam war on a sleepy American town. Rambo’s violence is notably racialized. Part of what happened to him in Vietnam is that he became infected with Southeast Asian methods and Southeast Asian anti-Americanism; fighting the non-white enemy turned him into the non-white enemy. Corliss, too, becomes what he fought. In the moment before he is forced into the copper vat, he soils his pants, and he remembers the soldier he killed.

The front of his pants was dark with a spreading stain that ran in a series of island blotches down his right trouser leg. Oh God! The Jap…the Jap he had killed—that wretched, trembling, chattering, pants-wetting caricature of a man—was that him? Was that himself?

Corliss’s identity and that of the Japanese man are confused as victims, and therefore also as aggressors. The vision of the Japanese as pitiful cowards substitutes for, but does not erase, the more prevalent image of the Japanese as implacable monstrous “fascist maniacs,” to use Brokaw’s term. Like Rambo, Bud as a soldier is stained with foreign violence. His assault on the status quo recapitulates the assault of a foreign enemy, and his death recapitulates that enemy’s defeat.

Levin, then, presents Corliss as an amalgamated threat, vaguely associated with a range of disparaged identities—young, working class, feminized, queer, non-white, non-American, veteran. This agglomeration of marginalized threats must be squashed by a perhaps overly strict but still essentially legitimate white, patriarchal order.

This familiar conflict is usually seen in pop culture through a generational lens. Levin’s portrayal of Bud foreshadows invidious stereotypes of lazy, feminized, racialized hippies and lazy, feminized, racialized millennials. But if even the youth of the Greatest Generation were smeared in this way, maybe the problem is not the kids themselves, but the conventional, persistently invidious stereotypes of rebellious youth. Every generation, even the greatest, is viewed as a potential betrayer, ready to overthrow the white male capitalist order. And so every generation, even the greatest, must be dumped into that copper vat, melted into the same mold, its old form erased and forgotten so the next generation’s demands can again be portrayed as novel, without history or legitimacy. The greatest generation is always the last generation. The young are supposed to kiss them before dying.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

 Yesterday was fantastic! 

 I got to reprise my love of Dungeon mastering low level Old School Dungeons and Dragons. 

 I introduced my dear friends Scott and Raven to my Eldorath campaign world, a place I've been developing since High School in the late 80s.  The characters began in the Barony of Baconbach, a place I've been using for Knightly Fightly wargames in recent years. 

and the Characters are now based in the regional mercantile metropolis of Rosewich, recently annexed by the Barons of Baconbach.

 

The experience was carefully planned by Scott to be totally social distance appropriate (none of us are healthy enough to risk Covid, and our families are even worse risks) so Scott set up video equipment to project the small erasable game board I had, and the plastic fantasy figures (toys) to keep track of the locations of various characters, which was both easy to use and really helped narrate things clearly while keeping us at totally separate tables.  I feared masks would make DM-ing difficult, but they were not a problem at all, so we were able to get the social immediacy you need for a good game and still maintain safety.  Kudos to Scott and Raven for the brilliant plan.  It indeed deserved to have a tail stuck to it and be called a weasel.

Scott wrote up a precis of the adventure a dungeon crawl in a small barrow dungeon, and I'll share it here so you can enjoy the flavor of our game;

Today began the adventures of Hēlin Fitor and Lighter Graves, cleric and wizard out to explore the lands of Baconbach.

We were met by an unarmored noble, who promised us both 20gp to explore a nearby dungeon. We would later meet at the small town of Rosewich to collect after we made a report of the contents.

With that we gathered our supplies and ventured within, encountering fire beetles feasting on the corpse of a badger. At first, we attempted to catch one in a bag to be sold as spell components to the local apothecary, but they proved too quick—at first. Three dead beetles and one live one in a sack later, we returned to town to sell out new treasure. The Apothecary was receptive to the beetle and offered store credit—which was immediately depleted on replenishing my spell components for my Magic Missile spell (special mistletoe).

We enocountered a sheet named Silvester, who enjoys butterflies, who joined the party, becoming a guide of sorts. Silvester was able to tell if items were magic, and this proved useful. 

Exploring to the south led us to an alcove with a grinning unicorn carved into the keystone of the arch. It was a dead-end, containing a skeleton, which, once poked, animated and requested in a spanish accent some water, which Fitor offered from his waterskin. The skeleton acccepted, uttering only "Gracias" and picked a green emerald from its nares. It then collapsed into a disanimated pile of bones.

Having determined that nothing else of interest was in evidence, we turned north and explored there.

Upon returning to the room where we met Silvester, we listened carefully at the door to the north. Raven's character thought there was a sound of something moving amonst metal, trying to be quiet. We opened the door, and were surprised and the wizard was knocked down by a cross, talking pig which carried a silver spoon for a weapon.

After everyone recovered, an argument ensued. The DM used the word oleaginous, so I'm repeating it here; indications were clear this pig was not to be trusted. Slippery fellow, though perhaps not as well as he might have thought himself, as shall be seen.

He gave the name of Pickywiggy Boldpants and joined the party, filling the role of a thief.

After progressing into a room filled with rotting shipping barrels, the sound of sobbing was heard, emerging from the only intact barrel. This proved to be a dish, which, as soon as Hēlin freed the dish from the barrel, caused the silver spoon Pickywiggy had brandished as a weapon to speak: "Marsha? Is that you?"

The dish also spoke: "Jaughn!"

They seemed to require each others company, but Pickywiggy declined at first to part with the spoon, claiming value well beyond the copper, then gold pieces offered.

A brief battle ensued, and this time, we caught the pig in a burlap sack until he consented to accept the 2 gp payment offered. Once he agreed, he surrendered the spoon,   took the 1gp (the second to be delivered in town), but he ran off as soon as he was released from the bag, claiming we had not seen the last of him.

The Dish and Spoon were then married by the cleric, and stored in a backpack together. We have no idea what to do with them at this point. I'm pretty sure it makes small sense to sell sentient silverware.

Digging through some offal with a gigantic rib netted the party a ring (which Silvester suggested was ordinary), and we then encountered a basin with water tricking into it. It seemed ... clear enough, so Hēlin filled his waterskin and sipped it, and promptly fell into a deep sleep which lasted an hour.

After rousing from slumber, the party left the dungeon to rest and prepare for their next foray.

Treasure:

1. 1100 cp (tithed to the church in town)
2. 10 £c. (banked)
3. green emerald mucolith (yet to be appraised)
4. ring with a gem set in it (also yet to be appraised).   

The sheet, named Sylvester is a magical bed sheet with a curious back story; he was the winding sheet of a powerful wizard whose dying magical powers seem to have seeped into the cloth and given it life, he's a kind heart-ed, child like, and even a bit dim (sheets are not known for intellectual pursuits after all) fellow, whose one combat skill is taking the form of a charlie brown ghost and going "boo". 

     The dish and the spoon had tried to run away together, hiding in a barrel of dishes going to Rosewich.  Thier origin seems to be in a pewter-ers work hut. Fearing sale and separation they fled. Sadly bandits attacked their caravan and stashed the barrels in the barrow dungeon where they were found. Though completely distracted with one another now, they are kind people, and have some talents that the future shall reveal.

and lastly, Pickwiggy, an unpleasant cad whose love of stealing boysenberry pies from windowsills led him to rob one from the local and powerful witch Ogenhilda, she, naturally took umbrage at this and cursed the odious footpad with life in the body of a pig.

 

a coat of polyeurethane really glosses up the blah acrylics.

Hey there all, Here's a bit of update. I got a backdrop made for the table, hopefully it will help make my pictures better. and the Benton Hussars are drying, tomorrow I can put the gloss coat of polyeurethane on them, and make a box. I think I should play a practice game of A Gentleman's War with them, to try them out, ASAP!

the backdrop was done with spraypaint on cardboard, easy peasy thing. brown sprayed on first. Then I masked with paper bag torn into shreds and some twigs.  then the sky was sprayed on, silver first, then light blue, purple, and white just randomly blasted on at the same time, darker towards top.

the hussars are, of course, my home casts, from home made silicone molds.

 

 

 wanted to use a spinner to randomly give movement points.  also some paperwork and cards, just ideas in progress for the civil war game. the idea with the card is to shuffle all the units in a deck, then turn the card over, some have the unit that moves next, others have random effects that modify the battle conditions.

Still painting on the Benton Hussars.  got the faces done, so pretty nearly there, dark blues, the flag, and the odds and  ends details.  maybe one more day on it should do the trick?

 gaming campaign map. Goosegau vs. Rubenschmeckerrau.