Thursday 29 February 2024

My Brother the Mekon and Other Thrilling Space Stories

I contributed a couple of articles to online magazine Journey Planet, for their Dan Dare issue - #22 - in May 2015. This is one of my shallow dives into pop culture, padded out by some personal perspective and childhood nostalgia.

The other article is here:

* * *

When I was growing up, space was American. I was born the year of the Apollo moon-landing and in my childhood, all astronauts were American, both real and fictional. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, the other guy, Steve Austin, even the Fantastic Four. It was years before I realized that for a time, at least in fiction, space had been somewhat British, in the form of Dan Dare and the Interplanet Space Fleet.

So I had absolutely no frame of reference when, on a family holiday on the Isle of Wight, my parents’ friend Dave popped my younger brother on top of his new stubby surfboard, hoisted boy and board up high and proclaimed him to be ‘the Mekon’. I had no idea what he was going on about, but apparently Dave was onto something because my dad seemed to agree that a skinny child in his swimming trunks sat atop an oval of toughened polystyrene was indeed compellingly Mekonish. I think, though memory may be betraying me here, that they got him sit cross-legged and drape his hands over his knees, just to compete the look. Certainly the two grown men then proceeded to parade him at shoulder-height across the beach, for we children were informed that this Mekon ‘hovered on a sort of flying disc’.

This then was my first encounter, however bizarrely, with the world of Dan Dare, and just goes to show what sort of impression his original adventures in Eagle comic had had on my father’s generation. As a sidenote to this I would recommend reading Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman’s excellent short story Teddy Bears’ Picnic, set in an alternate timeline where Britain rather than America fights the Vietnam War. In the story, the hapless soldiers - having grown up in 1950s Britain on a diet of Eagle comics - coin their own slang for the Viet Cong enemy - Treens. It makes sense that in an alt-history world where British lads are fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia, that the Mekon’s alien race would become a dehumanising word for the enemy.

But I digress. Growing up in the 70s, kids like me learnt a few things ass-backwards: Paul McCartney was that guy from Wings who we only later discovered had been in some pre-Mull of Kintyre group called the Beatles; World War Two was all the rage thanks to endless repeats of Colditz, The Battle of the Bulge and Dad’s Army on telly whilst its predecessor World War One barely got a look-in; and Dan Dare was the widow’s-peaked, luxuriantly-maned action hero of early 2000AD progs - complete with a cool metal hand - rather than the clean-cut gent in a green uniform from our parents’ Eagle comics.

The Dan of 2000AD was a pretty cool character I thought, especially when the art duties had passed from Massimo Bellardinelli to Dave Gibbons, who gave him a much nicer haircut and that awesome metallic hand glove thing. As with the Mekon turning out to be a green dome-headed Treen, it was years before I found the metal hand glove thing was actually called the Cosmic Claw. Gibbons’ Dan looked more than a little like Lewis Collins, riding high at the time as one of the action stars of The Professionals on ITV. But 2000AD’s Dan stories didn’t really grab me, not as much as the mayhem, lunacy and mega-violence of the comic’s rising star Judge Dredd, and I don’t think I blinked an eyelid when he faded away with prog 126. By the following week, I was too engrossed in the adventures of new character Black Hawk - a Roman gladiator forced to fight aliens - to wonder whatever happened to the Pilot of the Future.

Fast forward many years, much as Dan himself did between Eagle and 2000AD, and I am now writing for Crooked Dice Games, founded by Graeme Dawson and my best friend Karl Perrotton. Their flagship game, a skirmish / roleplaying system called 7TV, draws on classic elements of cult TV and film, primarily British sci-fi, fantasy, and spy genres like Dr Who, James Bond and The Avengers. We used the conceit of a fictional television company that existed in the 60s and 70s to give the game both a rich shared universe between the ‘shows’ and to create an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek ‘real-life’ production history, where I indulged myself by casting actual actors, stuntmen and directors from the period to populate our made-up programmes. As an illustration, I cast hardman actor James Booth as the no-nonsense London copper Frank Skelton, and the boyish Hywel Bennett as DS Lenny Kennedy, in the Sweeneyish crime show The Beat.

In 2011, we started work on a chunky gaming supplement for 7TV called On Location, which would expand the core rules beyond the central settings which had tended towards extinct volcanic lairs and crime-ridden London streets. One of the new locations we would be covering was space, but from a strictly cult TV, pre-Star Wars viewpoint, so we needed to create a suitable show to personify the setting, which is where the spirit of Dan Dare re-enters the story.

Karl had already introduced the concept of A.R.C., the Albion Rocket Consortium, in the core rulebook, with an episode of our ‘UNIT-without-the-Doctor’ show Department X. In ‘The Shadow Over Space’, the department’s star agents Dr Hugo Solomon (played against type by legendary actor David Warner) and Pandora King (Jenny Hanley off of Magpie) joined forces with A.R.C.’s Dr Melody Lake to investigate sabotage aboard the lunar shuttle’s maiden voyage, uncover a secret cult and ‘face an ancient horror from beyond the stars’. So when we got round to developing a space show for On Location, A.R.C. was a natural fit.

We already had the basic concept for A.R.C., taking Quatermass’ fictional British Rocket Group and creating adventurous female rocket scientist Dr Lake for the starring role, played by the gorgeous Diana Rigg at the height of her powers. Now we set about fleshing out the show with cult sci-fi elements - from TV, radio and of course Dan Dare - to give it a unique blend that would feel not only like a loving homage to those influential sources, but also we hoped that would come across as a plausible - though sadly non-existent - show from the late 60s and early 70s.

Working with Karl and artist extraordinaire Wayne Peters, I had a fine old time creating a complete world, or more accurately solar system, for Dr Lake, Professor Kneale and the rest of the A.R.C. crew, from the lunar base Guinevere and rocketship Percival to alien threats like the sinister cerebral Venusian and his warlike Kreeg soldiers, and the faceless Martian force known only as ‘the Enemy’.

To give the show just the right look and feel of the genuine article - maybe around the late 60s as with other 7TV creations - we went the extra mile to come up with authentic-looking TV listings, script excerpts and even an Eagle-style double-page splash of the Percival, complete with knowingly-named technical details. Thus I present to you these following selections from 7TV’s A.R.C. series. Points will be awarded for every homage or shout-out you can spot.

 

5.45 Colour

A.R.C.

starring Diana Rigg

Darc Side of the Moon

by KIT PEDLER

Melody’s ship experiences a series of unexplained malfunctions whilst surveying a remote lunar region. Are they mere accidents, deliberate sabotage or the work of some sinister external force? When radio contact with Guinevere base is lost followed by a complete power blackout, tempers fray and suspicions grow that someone on board is not who they seem…

Dr Melody Lake                 DIANA RIGG

Cpt Jock Hampson             PATRICK MOWER

Valentine                            DAVID McCALLUM

Spinnaker                            ANTHONY MARRIOTT

Fred Roberts                       DAVID JACOBS

The Enemy (voice)            DONALD GRAY

Producer CHARLES CHILTON

Director GERRY ANDERSON


- A.R.C. -

- Darc Side of the Moon -

 

SCENE 9. MERLIN, EXTERIOR

An A.R.C. Merlin class transport seen from directly above, against the Moon's hidden face, cratered, shadowy and inhospitable. The Merlin seems to hang motionless against the lunar backdrop, as lifeless as the Moon itself.

 

SCENE 10. MERLIN, INTERIOR

The ship's cockpit, in near total darkness, save for dim starlight from the cabin windows and that of an electric torch, currently waving around somewhere under the pilot's control panel. Intermittent grunting and muttered curses emanate from somewhere down in the pilot's footwell, near the torch's beam.

It is Jock HAMPSON, on his back as if inspecting the underside of a car, holding the light in one hand and unscrewing an instrument panel with the other. A pair of smart feet appear behind him out of the darkness, followed by the disembodied voice of security officer Mr VALENTINE.

 

VALENTINE (in a clipped tone)

Haven't you finished that yet?

 

HAMPSON jerks with surprise, hitting his head on the instrument panel and swearing in equal amounts of pain and irritation.

 

HAMPSON (through gritted teeth)

It'd go a lot bleedin' faster if you didn't keep creeping up on me like that!

 

VALENTINE's eyes narrow and he is about to issue an acerbic retort when Dr Melody LAKE emerges from the darkened mid-deck.

 

LAKE

Enough, both of you. I can't worry about the ship and you pair at the same time.

 

She breaks into a smile and adopts a mocking, schoolteacherish tone.

 

LAKE

Don't make me come over there and make you sit apart. Now, was there something you needed, Spinnaker?

 

She turns back to the mid-deck, where technician SPINNAKER is standing in the darkness, his back to LAKE. Obscured by SPINNAKER's head, there is a faint reddish glow.

 

LAKE

Spinnaker..?

 

 

5.45 Colour

A.R.C.

starring Diana Rigg

Spaceship Venus

by GERRY DAVIS

A spaceprobe inexplicably plunging into the Sun is the first indication that all is not well with the solar system’s second planet, but soon Professor Kneale deduces that it is moving out of orbit, threatening to extinguish all life on Earth! The crew of the Percival, struggling to endure the fearsome heat of the Venusian desert, are mankind’s only hope of survival.

Dr Melody Lake                 DIANA RIGG

Professor Victor Kneale    JOHN MILLS

Valentine                            DAVID McCALLUM

Zara                                     WENDY PADBURY

The Venusian                     MICHAEL WISHER

Kreeg Overseer                  PAT GORMAN

Producer INNES LLOYD

Director VAL GUEST           

 

 

- A.R.C. -

- Spaceship Venus -

 

SCENE 12. VENUSIAN DESERT, EXTERIOR

The Sun, so much bigger in the sky than they are used to, beats down upon the A.R.C. crew as they trudge doggedly on. As blinding sunlight reflects off the metal of their suits, Dr Melody LAKE, ZARA Kneale and Mr VALENTINE find themselves navigating a series of deep, dusty dunes, not unlike quarries found back on Earth.

 

ZARA (panting a little)

Can't we rest a bit, Doctor? I'm terribly tired.

 

LAKE

Just a little further sweetie, I think I spotted some sort of structure in the distance where we can have a sit-down in the shade.

 

Mr VALENTINE, walking ahead of the other two, gives the tiniest of sniffs at this. He knows as well as LAKE that shelter from the harsh desert is a long, long way off.

 

EFFECT: A distant high-pitched humming coming closer.

 

Mr VALENTINE turns to the approaching sound then drops to a crouch, motioning for the others to do the same. Both he and LAKE draw their pistols as they squint up the slope of a dune to where the humming noise now emanates.

 

EFFECT: Clouds of sand blow down off the top of the dune, as if a helicopter were landing somewhere out of sight.

 

The humming dies down as the three astronauts cautiously crawl to the top of the dune and peer over the sandy ridge. Not far away, a curious metallic platform seems to have settled on the sands. It is flat and disc-like, about the size of a car, with a single rail running around at waist height. It seems to have settled into a shallow dusty depression of its own making.

Disembarking from the hover disc are four alien KREEGS - hairless, wide mouthed and devoid of expression. Each one unslings an odd lamp-like device as they fan out, searching the dunes.

 

ZARA (panicky)

They're bound to find us! We've got to get away!

 

LAKE (laying a reassuring hand on ZARA's arm)

Tish, but we haven't introduced ourselves yet! Mr Valentine, if you wouldn't mind..?

 

VALENTINE nods at her unspoken suggestion and scrambles back down the dune, circling around. LAKE straightens up, dusts herself down and begins walking over to the nearest KREEG.

 

 

How many did you get? Did you spot our nod to the Mekon, and who I cast as the actor to play him, and why?

As Dan Darish as A.R.C. is, our most obvious homage to the Pilot of the Future appears in another 7TV show altogether. Bluntly pitched as ‘Charlie’s Angels meets Thunderbirds’, The Daredevils stars three sisters - glamourous Diana, roguish Katrina and tomboy Charlie - who have inherited their father’s love of high-flying adventures. Aboard their futuristic Dareplanes, these fearless female flyers respond to emergencies around the world at the behest of their perpetually off-screen daddy, who communicates with his ‘devils’ via long-distance speakerphone.

The family name? Dare, of course.


 

- THE DAREDEVILS -

- Operation Skyhawk -

 

SCENE 1. DARE MANOR, INTERIOR. NIGHT.

Night-time in stately Dare Manor.

PAN across the hallways, reception rooms and gallery and library.

Moonlight through tall leaded windows illuminates suits of medieval armour, stuffed animal heads, portraits and opulent furniture.

PAN past a framed photograph of three young girls grinning for the camera, a man kneeling behind them, his face obscured by a replica spacecraft standing in front of the photo.

 

 

Thursday 4 January 2024

Who Watches the Squadron Supreme?

This article first appeared in Journey Planet #77, December 2023.

Squadron Supreme was a 12-issue Marvel limited series that came out in 1985-1986, predating Watchmen by about a year. Written by Mark Gruenwald and (toward the end of its run) drawn by Paul Ryan, it had none of Alan Moore's multi-layered storytelling nor Dave Gibbons' beautifully clean draughtsmanship. But coincidentally, it did ask a few of the same questions, like: Is it safe to hang around superhumans who are in effect walking nuclear reactors? When superhumans fight in most comics, how come nobody gets seriously injured or even dies? What if superheroes really affected the world and how society works? And what if some of them decided that leaving ordinary human governments to run the planet just wasn't working out?

The Squadron's origins begin back in Avengers #85 in 1971, as both an alternate-Earth version of the villainous Squadron Sinister and as a pastiche of DC's flagship Justice League of America, with alien powerhouse Hyperion modelled on Superman, caped crimefighter Nighthawk on Batman, Doctor Spectrum on Green Lantern and so on. As they sporadically guested in various Marvel titles, more Squadron members would be added to parallel the JLA's evolving line-up. Thus we had Arcanna for Zatanna, Nuke for Firestorm and so forth. Prior to the limited series, the Squadron's Earth (or at least the USA: like many American comics at the time they rarely made a distinction) had been devastated by an alien super-intelligence (Defenders #112-114), leaving society in a very sorry state.

In an ongoing 'Marvel Earth' comic (stories set on the world shared by Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men etc), that sort of devastation would have been handwaved by the start of the next storyline; perhaps an opening page or two showing the heroes clearing up rubble and reporting that the President is back in charge, and then onto the next plot. But given that Squadron Supreme is set on an alternate Earth, writer Gruenwald had the opportunity to pretty much do what he wanted with the planet and its greatest heroes over the next twelve issues. And that's just what he does, examining the questions I posed earlier as the Squadron looks at the world with its war, crime, disease and death, and decides to use their great powers and resources to make actual, world-changing differences by instituting their so-called 'Utopia Program'.

Assuming control of the United States, they outlaw guns, get to work on a cure for cancer, establish behavioural modification on criminals and introduce cryogenic 'hibernaculum' chambers for people with incurable conditions. At first, the Utopia Program is a success, even if some of the Squadron's members don’t seem to be fully on board with the 'benevolent dictatorship' approach that they have imposed on society. Things go bad when one of the team uses the behaviour modification device to 'fix' the attitude of his romantic partner after a disagreement, turning her into a clingy, lovelorn puppy. Another discovers that his nuclear powers have had life-changing effects on his close family (mirroring the later Dr Manhattan plot in Watchmen), while others quit the team in disillusionment and disgust.

Things come to a head in the final issue when former teammate Nighthawk and his Redeemers (a scratch band of renegade heroes, untried newbies and desperate villains) confront the Squadron, demanding that they step down and dismantle the quasi-fascistic 'utopia'. A calm and civilised discussion does not ensue. Instead the most lethal super-team battle in the history of comics to date takes place in what is effectively a model for the famous 'airport fight' in the movie Captain America: Civil War. Hearts are stopped, heads are caved in, backs are broken and chests are impaled. By the end of the issue, seven major characters are dead and the dream of a utopian society has died with them. It's a brutal and brilliantly tragic finale to the series.

Squadron Supreme gets a follow-up shortly after in the shiny graphic novel Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe, in which the survivors of both teams must work together to hastily combat a spatial anomaly which threatens to engulf the sun itself. The body count rises again, with some heroes failing to even survive the launch of their space rocket, while another fatally underestimates the simple physics of retarding the growth of a sun-sized entity (the subsequent purple smear effect is quite disturbing). Oh, and somebody's head explodes. The Squadron survives, after a fashion, and goes on to guest star in mainstream 'Marvel Earth' comics, but they never reach the high and lows of the Gruenwald/Ryan era.


A curious epilogue to this tale is that when Mark Gruenwald died unexpectedly young from a heart attack (like one of the main characters in Squadron Supreme) in 1996, his will mandated that he be cremated and his ashes mixed in with the ink of the book he was most proud of. It was the trade paperback collection of Squadron Supreme #1-12. You could say that he loved comics so much that he wanted to be part of them forever.

Suggested Reading

Squadron Supreme Volume 1 #1-12 or trade paperback Squadron Supreme. The follow-up graphic novel Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe.

Neighborhood Watch(men): the street where it happened

This article first appeared in Journey Planet #77, December 2023.

One of the things that grabbed me about Watchmen was all those scenes at the intersection of two streets somewhere in New York: the man at the newsstand and the kid next to him leaning against an electric hydrant thing, reading Tales of the Black Freighter; the fabulously named Gunga Diner where Dan and Laurie meet and where Rorschach stakes out his mail drop; the Utopia cinema prophetically showing The Day The Earth Stood Still; the Promethean Cab Company where supporting characters like Joey work, the guy selling watches out of a briefcase just up the street; the nuclear fallout shelter sign on the wall; the freaky 'Hiroshima shadows' image of embracing lovers spray-painted onto a wall; and of course the bland-looking Institute for Extraspatial Studies building, which is fated to be the manifestation locus of Ozymandias' creature.

The last few pages of issue #11 show many of the series' supporting characters converging by chance at that intersection. Aline has come to see her girlfriend Joey and an argument swiftly turns into a violent assault. Gloria Long is quizzing Bernard the news seller about her estranged husband Dr Malcolm Long before spotting him down the street. Detectives Steven Fine and Joe Bourquin are driving by, possibly on their way home. Milo from the cab company and his locksmith brother Ralph are going for a drink after work. The Utopia is packed with moviegoers and just down the street hundreds of knot-topped music lovers are attending a Pale Horse/Krystalnacht concert.

Then there is a bright, white light from inside the Institute for Extraspatial Studies and everybody dies.
Those wide-screen panels at the bottom of the last few pages of issue #11 show the fantastic draughtsmanship of Dave Gibbons, doubtless directed by Alan Moore's characteristically detailed script. We see the lives of these secondary and tertiary characters colliding – literally in some cases – as their personal storylines lead to a climactic resolution. In another book, these people might emerge from this incident more or less in one piece. They would grow and learn from the encounter on that fateful street corner and perhaps end up as better, wiser human beings. But this is Watchmen, and Moore and Gibbons have just killed them all with a giant telepathic squid monster.

The first few pages of issue #12 describe the aftermath of the catastrophic event in graphic splash pages, dialogue-free until Jon and Laurie turn up in the middle of the carnage. We see the bodies, limp and bloody, strewn across the street, hurled against walls. We see vehicles embedded in restaurant windows and heaps of corpses spilling down the steps of the Utopia. We see the monster itself, a bulbous obscenity complete with titanic tentacles and what I can only describe as a bloodshot 'eye-gina' bursting out of the shell of the institute. It's a powerfully cinematic sequence of scenes.

Not only are those splash pages powerful, but taken as a whole they're incredibly precise and consistent; you see a leg in one page and it matches up perfectly with an outstretched body seen from another viewpoint on another page. Just like the entire Watchmen series, it all matches up beautifully like an intricately disassembled clock, waiting for the reader to piece it all together in their mind's eye. Carnage yes, but beautiful in its way.

Somewhere around my second or third rereading of Watchmen back in 1987, I started to get ever so slightly obsessed about those streets, those corners and buildings where it all happened. I wanted, needed, to be able to visualise it as a whole as Moore and Gibbons must have done, to see exactly which building faced which, to work out who worked at which corner, to figure out how close they all were to the monster when it appeared. So I studied the source material for a bit, deduced what went where and drew a little map on some lined paper (see below). I showed the map to my comic-reading wingman Ian and then folded it up inside the Watchmen trade paperback and subsequently forgot about it for 30 years.

My hand-drawn map from 1987



Then Pádraig (Ó Méalóid) invited me to join the editing team for this issue of Journey Planet, and I thought about digging out my old map and maybe redrawing it. Maybe a bit neater on the computer, and labelling things up. And once I'd done a nice map of the streets before the disaster, it shouldn't be too much trouble to use it as a template for a map of the scene after the event.

I may have got a bit carried away.

Have a look at the pictures below, then keep reading to see how I worked out what went where.

W 40th and 7th: Before

Here’s how the intersection looks throughout Watchmen, up to the point that the creature appears.


W 40th and 7th: After

Here’s the intersection as it looks in Watchmen #12. The creature’s tentacles, crashed vehicles and bodies match up to the artwork as best I can manage. Jon and Laurie are indicated by the blue and yellow dots, where they first appear in that issue. 



How do we know where this is?

Fortunately, Rorschach's journal tells us that he shadows Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk to the Gunga Diner on 40th and 7th, which gives us the exact midtown location of the intersection, not far from Broadway and Times Square.

The problem with Madison Square Garden

In Watchmen, Madison Square Garden is clearly visible from the intersection (seemingly a block south down 7th Avenue from the Utopia). But in our real world (or Earth N as my co-editor Pádraig calls it in his article) the current fourth Madison Square Garden is further downtown, south and west on 8th Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets, and therefore could not possibly be visible as seen in (for example) issue #11, page #24.

So in the world of Watchmen (Earth W), the current (as of 1985) Madison Square Garden must have been built in a different location to its real-world counterpart. Perhaps the existence and actions of Dr Manhattan et al caused this curious divergence in municipal planning? Maybe a Moloch or Underboss-run construction racket in the 1960s resulted in a change in the city’s zoning, or maybe the Comedian just shot the architect. We may never know, but there's probably a very niche fanfic in this. 

The Comedian's apartment

In Watchmen #1 page 4, Detectives Fine and Bourquin are seen leaving Edward (the Comedian) Blake's apartment building and shortly thereafter walking past a Gunga Diner. Does this mean that the Comedian lived just down W 40 Street from the intersection with 7th Avenue? I don't think so. The diner on page 5 sits in a building with a substantial stone corner which is quite distinct from the Gunga Diner seen in (for example) issue #2 page 4. Gunga Diner is presumably a chain, and the detectives were simply passing a different diner.

Midtown Comics

In the real world, the south-west corner of the intersection is actually the location of the original Midtown Comics, a well-known comics store visited by several of the issue's contributors (other comic stores are available). Coincidence? Probably not.

Attending a signing by Dave Gibbons earlier this year (2023) at London’s Gosh! comic shop, I had a chance to inflict my Watchmen streetmaps on him, which he graciously approved of and confirmed that he used his old building surveyor skills to meticulously plan out the layout of the intersection. As if there was any doubt.

References

As well as Gibbons’ faultless artwork, I drew upon actual streetmaps of Manhattan and the following resources:


The work of AYBGerrardo, who I later discovered had undertaken a similar project to mine. Sadly, the links below no longer work, but I did manage to save a copy of their annotated streetmap.
http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/AllyourbasicGerrardo/media/cGF0aDovd2F0Y2htZW5tYXAuanBn/?ref=

The Thing From Another World - a tropogram

Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it? There was that whole Covid thing for a couple of years, and other stuff. I've been busy on other writing projects - mainly tabletop roleplaying game adventures and the 80s incarnation of the 7TV miniatures game - so I've had little to no bandwidth left for sharing whimsical musings, savage comic reviews or the like here. My apologies. 

I've pinned a lot of my self-esteem to 'getting shit written and published', but my work has largely disappeared into Development Hell - for reasons beyond my control - these last 3 or 4 years, so I'm at a bit of a low ebb. It's hard to keep writing and designing and creating stuff when it's all gathering digital dust at various publishing houses.

Aaaaaanyway, I've decided to break my duck with a pretty diagram that I created yesterday (instead of doing my Real Job), for all the film/book/comic/sci-fi/horror/infographic nerds. It can't just be me, can it?

I was inspired by a recent post on the excellent Nightmare Man group on Facebook, wherein top contributor Tristan Sargent wrote another of his articles linking the various versions of the movie The Thing to its book origin (John W Campbell's Who Goes There?) to H P Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness (written two years before Campbell's story) and several Doctor Who stories involving Ice Warriors and Krynoids.

In the post's comments thread I joked about drawing a diagram to link all the inspirations and connections together, like one of those Rock Family Trees they used to do on BBC. Coz you know how much I like doing those sorts of things. Like I did with Alan Moore's Providence comic, and the plot of Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

So I scribbled some notes down, fired up Visio and knocked up an infographic that tracks some of the influences, forerunners, coincidences, homages, rip-offs and sequels of Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi classic.

I've used a colour-coded key of my own devising to track some of the common tropes like Polar Setting, Human Assimilation and Suspended Animation. Hence the term tropogram, which I have just invented.

By no means accurate or compete, I hope it's of some interest. I enjoyed putting it together.

Sunday 17 May 2020

Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker

or: Tabletop roleplaying when real-world meets weird


There’s a very specific problem I am having with a very specific sort of tabletop roleplaying game. At least, I think it’s a problem; it may just be me. Let’s face it, of course it’s just me. But let us assume for the sake of argument that while it is just me, there may be at least one other just me out there who might benefit from the two of us considering the problem.

Here’s my problem: roleplaying characters that don’t believe in weird stuff in a game where weird stuff happens.

Or more specifically (I said it was a very specific sort of problem): playing ‘normal’ characters in their first encounter with weird stuff.

That is to say, playing a regular human being from the (ostensibly completely normal) real world, though not necessarily modern day (in fact, as we will see, much of the very specific problem seems to occur in the 1920s, for reasons some of you will already have anticipated) who in the course of the tabletop roleplaying session will encounter things that are out of the ordinary.


And by out of the ordinary, I am mainly thinking magic, ghosts, monsters and other weirdnesses, particularly stuff which in popular fiction is meant to unnerve or unsettle the characters. The sort of elements that you get in a horror story for example, or a wacky comedy-action film where a bunch of drop-out scientists go around busting ghosts, or where a smartass trucker encounters supernatural trouble in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Example of play – Wail of Wazuzu

Maybe it’s better if I describe a hypothetical gaming session, to illustrate my very specific problem.

A group of friends sits down to play a popular roleplaying game with a horror/investigation slant. Let’s call it Wail of Wazuzu, Wazuzu being an in effable entity of supreme cosmic madness. In Wail of Wazuzu, the friends play ordinary people (probably, but not exclusively, from the 1920s) who are drawn into a story of mystery, death and horror. This is the first session, so the characters that the players create, with the referee’s help, are all ‘ordinary folks’, albeit capable police officers, scientists, reporters and so forth. None of them are psychic wizards or paranormal investigators. In fact, this particular session of Wail of Wazuzu (I want to shorten it to WoW but now realise that that might introduce an element of confusion) is predicated on the fact that the player characters are ordinary folks with no inkling or prior knowledge of strangenesses like monsters, ghosts or cosmic entities, because much of the game’s allure is ‘ordinary meets the extraordinary’.

Thus in the first session of WoW (screw it, I’m going with it), the characters are almost certainly going to encounter something out of the ordinary. A body drained of salt perhaps, or footsteps made by no known animal, or someone claiming to be haunted by the ghost of a 12th century sorcerer. Whatever. The main thing is that the people from the real world are going to be presented, probably at first with hints, of weirdness afoot.


As the game progresses, they will be presented with increasing evidence of weirdness until at some point, they are going to be standing in front of a spectral hound or someone in a robe raising the dead or an invisible lamprey monster attempting to suck out their vital juices. At that point, presumably, the characters will be unable to deny the evidence of their eyes and will have to accept that, to quote an overused quote, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

And presumably, most of the time, the characters accept that weirdness is now part of their new normal and respond accordingly by sensibly running away, desperately shooting at the weird things or rapidly consulting a dusty old tome in the arcana aisle of their local library for a spell of banishment.

SIDEBAR – Sanity Mechanics

Of course some games, perhaps even Wail of Wazuzu itself, have ways of describing those situations using rules that codify each character’s ability to deal with weird or horrifying encounters. Frequently they use some sort of ‘sanity’ rule in which players roll dice to see if their characters are able to function in the face of this new creature or concept. Sometimes they pass the test and can get on with running away, firing their gun or reading from their spell book. And sometimes they fail, and end up being told that their character has frozen in a catatonic state, started blubbering uncontrollably or has curled up into a ball and started humming to themselves.


Such mechanics are what they are, and serve a valid purpose within the roleplaying games. And I do not have a problem with them as such. My problem is in the roleplaying a character’s attitude to the weird right up to the point where a ‘sanity test’ is such exists in the game, is required. Outright denial, glib acceptance, or a tricky middle ground?

In Limbo

It’s the period between the start of the game and the ‘undeniable weird thing’ that I am struggling with. The period when your supposedly normal character from the normal world is presented with a situation which you the player absolutely knows has a weird supernatural origin – because hey, we’re playing Wail of Wazuzu y’all – but your character is not supposed to know about. Because they’re a real person and they have never heard, dreamt or thought of whatever weirdness is waiting in the wings. Sure, we the players know that we are playing Wail of Wazuzu, ‘the game of paranormal peculiarity’, but our characters in this instance are not seasoned psychic investigators with a few spook-busting cases under their belt.

So I, being a neurotic player who worries about stupid things like this, find myself in an odd position from a purely roleplaying standpoint. Which is, “I know that we are playing a game with spooky monsters in it, in fact I might even suspect which sort of spooky monster it is in this case, but my plucky marine biologist character has no idea that they are in Wail of Wazuzu. As far as they are concerned, that corpse drained of salt is a freak medical condition which they are sure science will be able to explain eventually.


So there is no earthly reason for my character to go off and start reading up on local folklore just in case they might turn up some useful tales of the legendary Salt-Sucker to be found. Furthermore, if any non-player character shows up and claims that this is the work of the Salt-Sucker, there is no good reason for my character to accept their word about such a preposterous notion. Therefore I am going to play this all just like a normal person would up to the point when a dirty great Salt-Sucker actually rears up in front of my character and proceeds to suck of the salt.”

In other words, I think there’s a risk of a strange limbo-like period in games where normal folks encounter the weird for the first time. The period of indeterminate paranormal belief between ‘this is the real normal world with no weird things’ and ‘there are weird things in the world that I accept exist’. Let’s call this period Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker. Your character has no good reason to go haring off down avenues of investigation that point to weird things, and if you are a fan of Occam’s Razor, then your character would surely cleave to the most rational explanation for as long as is possible, even if this means balking at the referee’s secret wish that you just pick up some holy water and a wooden stake.

From real world to real world + weird

I have played in more than a few games like this, both tabletop and live action (again, frequently set in the 1920s). It is only a problem for your character ‘the first time’. But given the frequently lethal nature of some of these games mortality rates are high, and that turnover of characters means that there are many games of ‘first time investigators meeting the weird’, and many periods of the limbo between ‘real world’ and ‘real world+weird’.

Now, many people will not have encountered this problem in their games, because it is a phenomenon peculiar to the genre of ‘normal meets the weird’. You don’t get this problem in fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons, because the characters knowingly exist in a world of strangeness and magic. You don’t get a party of D&D players struggling to convey their characters’ belief in a werewolves. “A man, who is also a wolf? The very idea!”.


Nor do you get it in sci-fi space games or superhero games or in fact any game where it is generally accepted that the population of that world or setting knows of the weird and accepts that it is a part of their reality.

And even if you do play some sort of ‘investigation into the weird’ game like Wail of Wazuzu, you as players may simply choose to gloss over the limbo-like period of Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker and get on with the plot. Perhaps it was established, prior to starting the game through discussion with the referee, that your characters already know that the world is bigger and stranger than most people believe. Or perhaps you are simply not neurotic players like me and can’t be arsed to fret over your characters’ internal belief systems and just want to get to the bit where you open up your tommy guns on a bunch of cultists. But for those of us, and again this may simply be me, who do fret over such things, the struggle is real.

SIDEBAR – roleplaying extremes

Of course, like I said this is a very specific problem that not every roleplayer will encounter, because it’s not how they play that sort of game. I’ve been in a few games where players use one or other of the following approaches, which skirt the problem but have their own potential drawbacks:

Total acceptance from the get-go

This player’s character is by default completely down with whatever weirdness the game throws at them and takes it in their stride. There are no moments of shock, disbelief or revelation with this one. They simply take whatever out of the ordinariness the game sends their way and plunge on regardless.


This has the effect of nerfing any potential roleplaying fun the players and referee might get out of playing with the moment, or moments, of ‘ordinary meets the extraordinary’, which might be one of the major attractions of putting the game on in the first place. “Yeah, it’s probably vampires. I’ll get my flamethrower. How do I know it’s vampires? Well, it’s gotta be, hasn’t it?”

Dogged disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence

This player’s character is the arch-sceptic or rationalist. The Scully to the believer’s Mulder. They continue to find a mundane, grounded explanation for the weird goings-on, whether it’s freak weather phenomena, gas leaks or that old chestnut ‘mass hysteria’.


They can be fun to play at first, and make for fun moments when believer and disbeliever characters clash, but there comes a point when this style of play starts to derail the plot by refusing the call to adventure that the referee has laid before them. “Vampires? Bullshit. You are all clearly delusional so I’m calling the authorities to section the lot of you. And put that flamethrower down.”

Column A, Column B

A little bit of either approach in a game is fine, and can add some interesting roleplaying friction to the character group. But total acceptance denies the game’s sweet moments of disbelief followed by shocking revelation and finally acceptance, whereas dogged disbelief eventually becomes a lead weight around the plot’s neck, slowing it all down unless and until everyone gets on board.

The challenge that I am struggling to illustrate here is one of roleplaying a character that sits between these two extremes, and knowing how to satisfyingly pace their journey from disbelief to acceptance.

Getting Round The Problem

Now, I love a good investigation game, and I love ‘real people encounter the weird’, so how can we make it so that I do not have this problem in the future? Here’s a few thoughts, some for players, some for referees and some for both.

Player – play a character with experience of the weird

Games like Monster of the Week have this concept baked into their system, so that even if you are playing a one-shot session sending your team of ‘new’ characters to investigate disappearances from a charming Scottish town, the mounting evidence that a family of medusae are behind it all (actual example, copyright G. MacLachlan) should not be beyond the characters’ credibility, even within the confines of the game’s real-world setting.


You are playing experienced monster hunters. Monsters are real. You may not know exactly which monster this is, but you are able to conceive of the possibility that it is something out of the ordinary. Although see the sidebar on roleplaying extremes for possible drawbacks with this approach.

Player – play a character with an innate acceptance of the weird

They may not ever have encountered monsters before, but they are going to be just fine when they realise that strange things are afoot. Perhaps they are ‘a bit psychic’ or have a belief system that already encompasses people returning from the dead, having encounters with aliens or simply believe the Bigfoot footage.


For whatever reason, they are not going to blink much at the concept of strangeness, and thus they will be able to instantly circumvent the belief/disbelief limbo and get on with the adventure. Again though, see the sidebar on Roleplaying Extremes for possible drawbacks with this approach.

Referee – get through the limbo period of disbelief/belief as quickly as possible

One way is for the referee to confront the players with undeniable evidence early on, but this runs the risk of undermining any mounting mystery that you might want in an investigation game. In a sense, this is what the film Ghostbusters does with a great deal of success. They have an early encounter in a library with a ghost, which is followed by the three ‘player characters’ effectively saying to each other “OK then, as some of us suspected, ghosts are real. Now let’s get on with the adventure of busting them.”


There is still plenty to investigate (and terrifying challenges for their characters to encounter), but the basic premise of ‘ghosts are real’ is a hurdle that has been neatly negotiated very early on.

Referee and Players – give the characters drives to fast-track their ‘road to belief’

The characters all start off as real-world people with real world beliefs, but it is agreed by the referee and players that all the characters will have good personal reasons for moving steadily through the limbo of disbelief to belief, and in turn towards the plot, not away from it. It helps if your characters are built with core motivations which propel them toward both the adventure as a whole and the acceptance of weirdness specifically.



Games like Trail of Cthulhu have this concept baked in with their Drive characterisation, although some drives, like Bad Luck and Arrogance are a little weak in this regard. Drives like Curiosity, Thirst For Knowledge and In The Blood – essentially ‘weirdness investigation runs in the family’ – are all excellent for reminding players to drive their characters toward the weirdness, not to ignore it.

Referee – have a The World Is Stranger Than You Think scene

Movies have these all the time, as do the pilot episodes of supernatural TV shows. Effectively the main (player) characters are gathered round and given a little talk by an authority on the subject of the weird, who – and this is crucial – is someone the players have agreed that their characters respect and thus cannot dismiss out of hand. It might be Egg Shen telling Jack Burton about an immortal ghost sorcerer, or Nick Fury presenting a slide show of documented gods and monsters, or Rupert Giles flipping through a history book of slayers and vampires.


The players have agreed to respect the authority figure in this instance, which allows them (through the referee) to ease their characters collectively from belief to disbelief in a single, managed scene. This still allows for some great roleplaying of the “Wait, so you’re saying this shit is real?” variety, but then positions all the characters on more or less the same page and allows everyone to get on with the adventure in hand.

Referee and Players – play a ‘genreless’ game system

One of the very particular features of this very specific problem is that you the player know that you are playing Wail of Wazuzu, while your character does not. By using a genre-free game system, perhaps one cooked up by the referee, you avoid any expectations of weirdness, because the players do not know that they are going to be playing in a horror game, until the actual horror hops up and starts sucking out their salt.


I myself have run and played several one-off tabletop games like this, using a home-brewed variant of the old Marvel Super Heroes system. Each session had a bland title, if any at all, like ‘The Hawaiian Storm Game’ which did not give any indication if the players should expect to encounter horror, magic, time travel or robots (though in that particular instance there turned out to be all of them. Plus the Highlander). Thus their characters were free to react however their players wanted them to react, with no expectations that they should jolly well get on with accepting the weird and break out the flamethrowers, because in this sort of game, the meta-game of discovering the genre is as much fun as the in-game plot and their characters’ individual roads to belief in whatever brand of weirdness that particular game presented them with.

It is also total legit to use this genreless approach to run a perfectly mundane game with no weirdness elements, which can be fun for wrong-footing players who have fallen into the habit of ‘it’s always vampires’. Playing a Scooby Doo-like game where the monster really does turn out to be old man Higgins in a rubber Dracula mask can be just as fun, especially when the characters have taken refuge in a church and the supposed ‘vampire’ just waltzes right in.

In Conclusion

Have I managed to get my very specific problem across? Have I over-thought it? Does the problem actually exist outside of my head? Perhaps you have encountered this problem and have some ideas of your own. Let me know.