Into the Marvel Universe

At the end of this month Margaret Weis Productions is launching their new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Basic Game built on their Cortex+ system which powers their Leverage and Smallville games, among others.  Next month, I will be getting to test drive the new Marvel RPG at a Taste of Marvel at the wonderful Labyrinth Games in Washington, D.C.  I expect the event will be a lot of fun.  I have been impressed by what I have seen of the Cortex+ system.  It appears to be a very flexible, fast playing system that allows for a lot of creativity and imaginative play that should be a good fit for a comic book style game.

Super hero role playing has been a hit an miss genre for me.  I have read a number of games, played a few, and missed many more that have come and gone.  Supers has been a style of play that came out pretty early in the RPG evolutionary tree, I think really flowering first in the early 1980s.  Champions and Villains & Vigilantes seemed to be the games I remember being on the scene early.  The Hero system came out sometime in that distant past too, and all of these were generics, not taking an identity from any particular license.  Then both DC and Marvel did get into the game with respective licenses with Mayfair and TSR.

The old TSR Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) was my first experience trying to play any kind of ongoing supers game.  I was never much of a comic book collector.  I had friends who were fanatics, however, which was good, because I could read their stuff.  While DC and Marvel both got represented in my friends collections, the dominating theme of those days were the X-Men and Marvel.  DC made some inroads with Justice League International and Man of Steel, and (on the other end of the light/dark sepctrum) the Dark Knight Returns, but Marvel just seemed to dominate the majority of my peers' reading and discussion time.  So, naturally enough, there was interest in MSH.

We had a number of abortive attempts to start campaigns (after all it was competing with my sprawling, derivative, and in many ways lame, yet dominant AD&D campaign), but finally it settled in to three characters and the GM.  We had an Iron Man type knock off, a Storm knock off and a, sort of, ROM the Space Knight knock off to start with.  I definitely learned things from our play about runing these kinds of games and about the system TSR put together. 

First, just like any game, you have to run a good story.  There need to be fun bite sized bits you can get through, and you also have to have something bigger going on.  Even if one night's play is, or seems, to be a one-shot, it still needs to showcase the interesting things about the characters, from their foibles to their awesome powers.  So, for example, the game that my character started in was a rather abortive attempt to make an initial campaign that started, as most of our RPG experience did up to that time, in a Dungeon type crawl.  That did not work.  It was not effectively about anything.  Then, as the other players dropped, but I wanted to keep my quirky, strange character, the GM had the very effective plan to drop me into a parallel Marvel Universe, where he then started the other two players, and use the first adventure to basically kill or cripple most of the important heroes in New York.  We watched a horrible moster kill or make disappear most of the Avengers, Fantastic 4, Dr. Strange, etc.  This was great, because it gave us as players a place to fit in, and small and large things to do.  We had to 1) help stop the monster, 2) rebuild the hero teams, 3) find out what was behind the attack, & etc.

As it turns out, the framework to start the new RPG is not that different (now if we could only get paid for having the idea first . . .) as the setting proclaims:

"The Avengers have been disassembled, the Fantastic Four are somewhere in space, and the X-Men aren’t answering their phone. When dozens of dangerous villains are spring from the maximum-maximum security prison known as the Raft, who’s going to stop them? You are."

Of course this is a storyline already seen in the Marvel books as well, and it is a great place to start off because the story is about the player characters and how they can make an immediate impact (perhaps quite literally) on the story.  The problem with established supers universes is that they may have one, two or three already of the kind of character that the players want to do.  Unless you are having them run the established characters (which is a mixed blessing) it can be hard to make space for them.  The problem with a blank slate approach (often the challenge with the generic systems) is where to begin to build your world.  The models that people will think of are complex universes with everything from established teams to alien races and magical dimensions.  You can find yourself biting off too much.  Still, you have room to let the players' characters be the front page news, instead of being a note in the style section while Superman or Thor is on the front page.

I have some (many) more observations, but they will have to wait, as this is to be a lunchtime exersice in trying to write coherently for the next few weeks.  So, for now, adieu. 

Tomorrow more thrillng anecdoes and unfounded opinions.

Superman renounces U.S. Citizenship or how to write badly

So, in the historic Action Comics 900, which invented in many ways the Superhero genre when it introduced Superman in 1938 with Action Comics 1, one of the short pieces has Superman declaring that he will "speak before the United Nations . . . and inform them that I am renouncing my U.S. Citizenship." The story was written by David S. Goyer and titled "The Incident."

There has been all kinds of reaction all over the net and cable TV and plenty of stupid things have been said. The analysis has been shallow on both sides and focuses on the act, rather than whether the story itself holds together.

My thesis here, is that it is a bad story that does not hold together. My thesis can also be summed up as "you don't pull on Superman's cape." Superman is a character with a lot of history and who is quite embedded in the American psyche. He exists in a imaginary universe where by dealing with larger than life issues, he illuminates things about our real world from kindness, to humanity, to heroism, to sacrifice. Superman has been done well and done poorly over his run. Superman seems to work best when his stories are told in the world of fantasy of the DC Comics universe. Bringing in more of the real world has to be handled very carefully. When you just throw in "real world" elements without carefully considering how to integrate such elements into a fictional universe you end up with a discordant and quite possibly silly outcome.

It can be done, but you can't just throw it out there. I would cite Greg Rucka's run on Wonder Woman, which focused as much on her role as Ambassador to the U.N. from the island of the Amazons, Themyscira, as it did on her role as a superhero. If you read those stories, you see how carefully the stories are plotted to blend the gonzo universe of superheroes with mythic, alien, magical, super science, etc. etc. orgins, with a discourse about political, ethical and religious beliefs. Not easy, but, when approached carefully, very satisfying.

I have to say that Goyer utterly fails. The central plot revolves around Superman flying over to Iran (not one of the DC Universes made up countries, but a real country where things are really happening) to witness a protest. He does not do any intervention other than appearing on the ground. This then supposedly causes an international incident as Iran accuses the U.S. of an act of war by sending Superman. Superman is confronted by a member of the U.S. administration who chides him, and he responds that he is going to announce that he is renouncing his U.S. citizenship in order to work more on a global level.

Dumb.

In my opinion, just dumb, unearned and poorly thought out.

Why?

When you write any iconic character, you have to serve the character. You don't bend it to your will to make your point. That does not mean that you can't make your point, if it is in line with the character, but you have to be subtle and respect the source material. Goyer fails.

If you are talking about having Superman intervening in real world events, you start down the road of wondering where Superman is for all the real world events. Why didn't he stop 9/11? Why hasn't he seized Gadaffi. Why wouldn't he disarm nuclear armed countries? You have to live with the conceit that Superman exists to deal with out sized threats to the earth, but he does not exist to solve all of the world's problems. He is not our dictator or ruler or supreme interventionist. He is Earth's protector and servant, but we all still have to do the hard work of making and not breaking our world.

Goyer story paints a Superman who has decided to start meddling in messy, complicated international affairs. But he does so out of the blue. No ground work, no development, no thought. And then, he delivers the punchline, sure to churn the news cycle and to go into reprints, but that makes no sense, the vow to renounce U.S. citizenship.

Superman is a genius, he would have thought a few things through and remembered his history. Goyer is clearly not at his best here, and has not done his homework.

For Superman to renounce citizenship, you have to go through the gyrations of figuring out what citizenship he has. That opens another can of worms that Goyer just doesn't consider. Lots of versions of Superman's origins exist. In some, he is born on Krypton and then sent to the Earth, crash landing in Kansas to end up in an orphanage, or to be taken in by the Kents, or found by the Kents, taken to an orphanage and then adopted by them. At least one version had him in a "birthing matrix", which did not actually "birth" him until it landed in the United States (thus Superman is "born" on Earth in the U.S.). If there is going to be citizenship to renounce, Goyer has to settle which story of Superman's origin gives him any citizenship of the U.S. in the first place. Interestingly, there are considerations of this our on the internet -- link.

A number of legal theories could give Clark Kent, the person that Superman really is, U.S. Citizenship. And that is another thing that Goyer has forgotten. Greg Rucka (one of my favorite authors), has cogently said that Superman is the alter ego, but Clark Kent is the real person, who Superman really is. Whereas for Bruce Wayne, Batman is who he really is, and Wayne is just someone he has to pretend to be to do his job. So, if Superman is renouncing his citizenship, what about Clark (not to mention Mrs. Superman, Lois Lane)? Now, maybe, Goyer could have salvaged this by dealing with the "honorary citizenship" route. At one point, I believe, Superman was granted honorary citizenship in all countries who were part of the United Nations. His story could have had Iran revoke that honorary citizenship and still be provoked by Superman as a tool of the West and the U.S. and then Superman, for a more global perspective, might renounce all his honorary citizenships before the UN, to say that he, as Superman, would always act as some sort of "world citizen." Still not the best, but not nearly as dumb and in the weeds as this story.

Further, Superman can't renounce his citizenship without Clark Kent renouncing. And, it is not a straight-forward process. Generally, you need to leave the U.S. and renounce before a consular official of the U.S. Just making a speech before the UN has no effect. There is paperwork and there are interviews, and there would be a confirmation of identity and a confiscation of any passport.

Well, does Superman have a passport? Clark Kent probably does, but Superman? Would Superman out his secret identity to renounce? What really could happen? Why is Goyer dragging us into the bureaucratic weeds? Superman filling out paperwork and having us ask whether he has a passport is lame.

Goyer not having thought this through when Superman, who is brilliant and extremely well-informed, has failed the character.

Epically failed in my estimation.

The whole thing falls apart.

And after the news cycle churn and the second and third run of the comic happens, then, I expect that it will be mostly forgotten or soon taking out of continuity as if it had never happened.

Because it is dumb.

A smarter more careful writer might, just might have made something of this, but there are better stories to tell and a way to make the points without miring the Man of Steel in the messiness of real world immigration paperwork.

Superman is American, and born of dreams and imagination that happened in America. But he represents the best in humanity, and the irony is, of course, that he is not human, but a "strange visitor from another planet." Superman stories have to capture the strength, the brilliance, and the vulnerability of a person who can move planets, but who knows he cannot do it all alone. Goyer lost Superman's sense of wonder and power and moral authority in his story. And, for Action Comics 900, that is a shame.