Comic Books as Secret Urban Fantasy-Possible new Approach?

[order99]

  I love Comic Books-Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, some of the Modern stuff, Weird Tales, Planetary Romances, etc. Comic Books have it all! I adore great writers and artists and will follow  them from publication to publication-but even the hastily-produced and sketchily-drawn stuff (a side-effect of WWII /The Draft) has merits.  Every genre ever written has more or less been in a Comic-Gothic, Hard Science Fiction, Fairy Tales, and run the gamut from the incomparable works of Will Eisner to the (also incomparable) visions of Fletcher Hanks and Whatever Drugs He Was On .  I love them.

  And yet...there are a number of bugaboos that nag me when I put the Comic down. Not a demand for Realism, Grodd forbid, but-consistency? Verisimilitude? I don't expect consistency from a Casper comic, or Archie, and the Unreality of Little Nemo in Slumberland is practically the point of the strips. But the sequential series? There is a lot more continuity  in a series with recurring Cast, but there are also Plot Holes big enough that they qualify as Tropes:

-"Reed Richards is Useless"

-"Cut Luthor a Check"

-"Paper-thin Disguise"

-"Secret Identity Apathy"

-" I Want my Jetpack"

 (no I did not Link directly with TV Tropes-I am not that cruel)

 So why is the world filled with Wonders-and nothing changes? Why are the Heroes not pro-active and working towards Utopia instead of catching counterfeiters? Why does S.H.I.E.L.D have a Heli-carrier  and Flying Cars in the 1960's but I only get an affordable Home Computer in 1998?  In Doc Savage:His Apocalyptic life, Phillip Jose Farmer pointed out the sheer number of horrible things that routinely happened in the series, and some of them happened in remote locations and could be kept secret-but at other times the War Zeppelin or the Deadly Gas or the Horrible Plague happened in New York City itself, and many died. Why was Clark Savage Jr's view from his window not that of a Warzone during a temporary truce?  How did the city (or the Nation for that matter) not go insane from a dozen '9-11's per year? Why do we not know of the Secret Empire or Hydra or Leviathan when the Government couldn't even cover up Watergate. the Iran-Contra scandal or MKII-Ultra?

  Well, the short answer -"because COMICS, Duh!"- is perfectly valid, and in the few works that have tackled these issues, the Heroes either became pro-active and either failed utterly to change a thing due to (Societal Inertia, The Illuminati, Supernatural Meddling etc) or the comic rapidly approached a a state of  Trans-humanist Futurism and then skirted the mythical Synchronicity before running out of either stories to tell or an audience. This answer however, does not satisfy _{that tiny nattering voice in my synthetic brain}...

 And then, during my routine maintenance (during which I do a lot of web-surfing as the machines check my Calorie Turbines and Protein Stacks) I ran across two articles back to back that blew my mind (good thing I was in HQ with Back-ups available, right?) located here:

magickuser.wordpress.com/2021/06/27/dungeon-design-dungeons-are-angry-houses/

throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/08/d-doesnt-understand-what-monsters-are.html

 My mind kept glitching over certain phrases-

"An uninhabited house begins to dream, and given enough time, the house loses its sanity and its dreams begin to present anomalies: the dream of the house invades reality in an attempt to replace what it’s missing."

"The things of the dream that invade the reality of the uninhabited house modify its structure. The house longs to be inhabited, thus becoming a beacon that attracts strange things, both from the dream side and from worlds that do not belong to human reality: monsters and madmen."

"Gone mad at last, the house begins to attract (or develop) strange technologies: traps, riddles, tricks. "

"And what happens when someone stays long enough locked up in an abnormal house? The house changes him."

"The most sensible thing to do would be to destroy this anomaly, to set it on fire, to eliminate it from reality."

"Monsters are made to be so."

"Take your favorite bestiary, select a creature, and ask yourself the following question:What would cause this to become a monster?"

"All this will inform the setting at its core - what forces are disrupting the world?"

"A monster is a symptom that somewhere, somehow, the world has gotten f****d up."

  Mad Scientists and Gimmick Villains and Mobsters nearly always HQ at an Abandoned Place. A Lonely Place. If the criminals are holed up in a regular office or townhouse or bar than they're just numbers-runners or racketeers, hoodlums and dips. But the ones who don't look quite right, send riddles to the cops, come up with gizmos the Army doesn't have, who can toss desks one-handed or perform brain transplants or build mechanical men-these men and women have come from High Towers and Remote Monasteries and Abandoned Farms . Lonely Places.

 And Superheroes, Magic-Users, Mysterymen and Fighters? They aren't really that normal either. They have become Infected, infested with energy from those very same places. Some of them trained in those very same places, remote Monasteries in Tibet, haunted houses, other planets, faraway islands. And the world we know, which barely acknowledges such places-largely ignores them as well.

***********

  A policeman is fatally injured.Somehow he survives-just barely-and a contact of his takes him to an Abandoned, Lonely Mausoleum to recover. Once nearly dead, he recovers without any drugs or surgery and suffers no degradation of ability nor skill. He puts on a tiny mask that could not possibly hide his features, and now somehow nobody knows him if he doesn't tell them who he is. He knocked down a door with his fists last week without breaking every bone in his hand. He gets hit with lead pipes to the face and shrugs them off, plows through four and five trained fighters in moments, fears nothing, vaults across rooftops like it's a morning jog to him. He tells his enemies that they can't kill him...again. His foes are beginning to believe it...ask the guy on the street though, the guy is just another myth. like Bigfoot, leprechauns or the Bat.

  Your team has tracked the Mastermind to the Warehouse on Beech Street. The door is locked tighter than a drum, but the blond bombshell in fishnets grabs a hairpin and rusty chains part like the hairs of her wig. You really didn't think she'd make it to this shindig-she was tossed off a four story building last month and even though she landed on her feet her left knee popped out of joint as loud as a gunshot. But she isn't even limping! And when you went to see her in the infirmary she was showing off a new trick, shattering coffee mugs with just her voice just like those Opera guys were suppose to be able to do...

 The basement has a Vault Door bigger than the Chase bank-no way you're getting in! But the new guy in the fashionable coat, Rick, waves his necklace at it and mutters a few words and the darn thing opens up like a mother embracing her child. You like Rick, you don't get all that spooky hand-waving he does but at least the both of you have more fashion sense than to dress up in Halloween costumes. You check the blueprints again-this Vault was definitely not on them. And neither was that long corridor, nor those branching corridors..."Yeah", you mutter to yourself, "let's go to City Hall and get the layout before we break in...useless, just like all my plans." Sometimes you don't know what they see in you...too bad you didn't have access to the same teachers Rick did, the only books you got to read in your  cell back in Badhnesia was thirty-year-old newspapers.

  A dozen men in skeleton costumes charge at your buddies-Rex opens a bottle of his Special pills, the ones that made you vomit when you tried them but power him up like Popeye on Spinach, but Ted and Al wave him off and he puts it away. Fists crack on jaws and neither one of the boxers even skin their knuckles in the process, jaws rip away from skulls and Holy Mother Mary those were not costumes! Some thug with a rifle takes aim at Ted from behind, but you toss a knife at the ugly mug and he drops it, and when he charges you turn to the left and put your sap to his noggin' just like Dinah showed you-then some skinny dude gets you in a full nelson and tries to bite your neck-you bite him first right on the schnozz  but it's like biting a rubber tire, then somebody throws some salty water in the guy's eyes and he turns into a bat and flies away, say what? Then Rick makes with that crazy amulet of his and the skeletons burst into flames and stay down.

 The room you arrive at  is bigger than four football fields and taller than three and there is no way that Beech Street can be standing above this place, just no way...and at the other end is a giant metal man, three stories tall or you're the Queen of England, and a shoulder cannon goes all Chicago Typewriter in your direction. You and the Acrobat and the Boxers all duck behind some cabinets but Rex takes his Special Meds and then stands right up and the bullets act like they're afraid of him, and he launches into the air like Fred Astaire, then the Metal Man spits fire at him but that just makes him mad when he's had his Spinach, and the Man of the Hour leaves a car-sized dent in the thing's shinbone. Rick makes with the necklace and the screaming and when the steel giant tries to step on Rex its knee locks up, welded shut.  Ted, Al and Dee run up the catwalk and you spot who they're after, a guy in a white lab coat and a Moe Howard bowl cut, holding some blinking breadbox. Yeah, this isn't your first rodeo, that guy probably controls the machine, so you take the left stairwell to cut him off if he scampers away-yeah, Moe Howard Wannabee you can probably handle..

 But Moe hits a button on that crazy box of his and part of the catwalk melts away, leaving three frustrated teammates on the wrong side. You watch the guys make a human chain with Dee in the middle and they toss her across the twenty-foot gap, but right now Doctor Bowlcut is headed your way and it's all on you for now-and when you pull the pistol he skids to a halt. "End of the line Pal" you growl in a James Cagney imitation that even you think is lame, and hope the Labcoat buys it-you can't hit the broad side a barn with this gun and the safety might even be on...too bad Moe doesn't buy it one bit, outdraws you with some funnel-shaped thing and webs you to the steps like a giant fly. And then the metal giant pivots on one working leg and aims the flame-cannon at you.

 Jay isn't here-he's in Arizona doing something, you could blink once and Jay would have you in a new sportscoat sipping coffee at HQ before you opened your eyes again. The others are racing across the room but you're dead and Jay is going to blame himself for the rest of his life and you can't do beans about-no there IS something you can do, buckle up and die like a man, so you take a deep breath, so deep that everything turns purple for a minute, and roar defiance at the idiot that is ending your life. "Say You" you scream as loud as you can Why don't you take that STUPID breadbox and that STUPID vaccum  cleaner and GO TO HELL!!!!!"

 Okay, good Last Words, didn't wet yourself, great success. But you open your eyes and you aren't dead, your buddies are all clinging to scaffolding or ropes and the floor has turned to boiling lava. Rex leaps over, frees you with a single swipe and tosses steel cabling towards the entrance, and even you can rappel enough to make it out. But when Rex closes the Vault door on the whole boiling mess he just gives you this look and says-

 "John. I know he was trying to kill you. I know we were getting pounded. But don't you think you were a little...brutal back there?"

 

 Brutal? Seriously? "Rex, were fighting for our lives and you want to take me to the mat for cussing? You swear more than I ever have! I mean, yeah, I could apologize to Dee I guess, but she out-swears both of us!" Dinah just chortled at that, Rex stared at you like your bow-tie had grown wings and a tail-and that giggling was in your head again. Stress probably.

 Not one blasted bit of the escapade made the news. Page Four of the local mentioned a possible break-in where they'd been, nothing missing...and no vault, no tunnels, no lava, nothing. Absolutely bupkiss. Well, you're going to just not think about it for awhile, take your daughter Peachy out for custard and just relax-you can't allow yourself to go Nutso, you're the only normal guy in this weirdo family of yours...

  Well, i'm going to review some more Comics and see if my new Paradigm holds water-I might not be done with this mad theory of mine yet. Feel free to discuss and ponder whether I would be better suited to Happy Pills, Electroshock or Exorcism....

[Adminenkainen]

The idea of dungeons, in Dungeons & Dragons, being semi-aware and creating their own monsters and treasure is a conceit I've used for a few years now. I suppose it could apply equally to H&H if I wanted it to, though putting too much thought into the why of things feels like it would run counter to the gonzo creation process of golden age comics ("I have to bang out this story today!").

I have a bigger problem with saying that heroes are just tools being manipulated by the hideouts the same as the mobsters inside them; that doesn't seem black and white the way comic books should be. If anything, IF hideouts are aware and setting up conflicts inside of them, then the heroes need to be aware of that and become the guardians/keepers of these hideouts, making sure to always cull the troublemakers inside them when they start to spill out -- or actively hunt the hideouts themselves and seek to destroy them, without focusing so much on the bad guys inside.

[order99]

Jul 5, 2021 17:42:11 GMT Adminenkainen said:

 If anything, IF hideouts are aware and setting up conflicts inside of them, then the heroes need to be aware of that and become the guardians/keepers of these hideouts, making sure to always cull the troublemakers inside them when they start to spill out -- or actively hunt the hideouts themselves and seek to destroy them, without focusing so much on the bad guys inside.

  Exactly! The Hideouts influence the things around them, attract the strange and unusual, and often effect the weak-willed. Heroes however, are not weak-willed...

 Heroes often have Origins in similar places, and are sometimes affected by extended stays in them. Much of their Super-science (which doesn't seem to translate to or have long-term effects on the mundane around them) can be traced to Anomalous influence, as can their Super-human Powers or Magic spells. Even those who claim to be mere mortals seem to achieve feats of strength, speed, skill and daring that only the greatest among us can accomplish-and continue to persevere at long after the Olympic sprinter has worn her knees to raw bone, when the World's Strongest  Men are having spinal surgeries and the most brilliant minds begin to succumb to Orthodoxy. And as I pointed out, they are affected by the strangeness of these places.

  And as you pointed out so much more concisely than I could (and obviously failed to do) Heroes are not tools of the Hideouts that they visit extensively. They are not manipulated, and they do not succumb-because they are Heroes. We have a word for people of great potential who succumb to their environments-we call them Supervillains.

 And I completely agree that Heroes should actively track down those places and take care of them. They won't always be able to, legally or without drawing enough attention to impede their own missions-and sometimes after enough Righteous Action those trouble spots cool off for awhile and that Haunted House might slumber for years after that Exorcism, that Abandoned Cannery might lie dormant when the Skrulls are forced back to the Mothership, that Ghost Town may slumber after Hell's Excise-men are imprisoned once more...and if a family takes advantage of the housing market, the tuna return or a vein of Uranium replaces the exhausted silver while Hideouts slumber deep? Well, it isn't completely unheard of  for the Mad to recover Sanity, for the Embittered to find new Hope, and for the Lonely to slowly learn to love again...

 As long as we're mentioning D&D Tropes-remember those adventures where some petty nobleman hires the PCs to clear out that out that abandoned Keep, tells them they can 'keep whatever they find' in addition to the money he's fronting?  How sometimes the Baron finds the remote holding more trouble than it's worth and grants it to the PCs as a minor Fiefdom-guaranteeing further adventures as the PCs beat back the approaching Wilderness once more and slowly make things safe again for the surrounding isolated villages? Or  how sometimes one of the many unexpected Treasures in that Keep was a Deed to the property?  

 Once in awhile, it wouldn't be amiss for a bunch of Heroes (who just keep meeting up with each other a lot and find they work pretty well together) to make a formal arrangement of things...and what better way to tame a truly troublesome Hideout than to make a Secret Headquarters out of it?  I mean, nobody else wants that Abandoned Bomb Shelter deep inside the Haunted Mesa with the periodic UFO sightings, do they? And yeah it's a real fixer-upper, but the Realtor just quoted you a price less than that Rolls-Royce we were all drooling over in town, soooooo?

  The 'Secret Reality' also explains why Superman abandoned his "My Way or the Highway" attitude early in his adventures. Despite his amazing abilities, he was raised by Kansas farmers, and "If it needs fixing we'll fix it ourselves" was heavily ingrained in him. Besides, he'd already seen what one man could do to improve things-FDR going against the political zeitgeist and ramming through the New Deal made a huge dent in the damage left by the Great Depression, and a huge impression on Clark Kent.

 So Clark becomes a garishly-clad vigilante. And on the personal level it works tremendously. But when he levels an entire Slum to force a rebuild? Well, it is eventually rebuilt-at the lowest bidder and with much corner-cutting, and now a lot of the poverty-stricken renters couldn't afford them. Some good came out of it-and a lot of consequences.

 It happened again, when he went on a One-man Crusade against shoddy vehicles and the damage they were causing-his hijacking of a radio broadcast made a bit of a stir, and his systematic destruction of defective merchandise undoubtedly saved lives-but many dismissed the message as a hoax, and blamed the sabotage on a garish gang of anarchists. Gritting his teeth, Clark Kent assaulted his typewriter and gave the Daily Star a series of incendiary exposes on the subject, and a few others about matters that made him want to roll up his sleeves and fight-and people began to talk about the issues, write letters to the Mayor, demand quality from the dealerships. This had been a job...for Clark Kent.

 And so Superman narrowed his focus, searched for root causes, went after corrupt Bankers, uncaring Mine Owners, greedy Munitions Manufacturers. And because sometimes men made bad decisions out of want or shortsightedness or apathy, all it took was a Damascus Moment to make many of these men aware of their actions and reform-and as each powerful man did so, entire companies and industries improved the lot of the Common Man.

 He tried it with Nations too...but somehow it didn't seem to take, ceasefires and truces were temporary. Maybe Superman slowed it down a bit, but who really knows? So Clark Kent fights a never-ending battle for Truth and Justice...but when Mad Scientists make ransom demands and Mechanical Men rob bank vaults and Aliens invade? That's when Clark gets to put on the cape, crack his knuckles and let off some steam-because those problems can be solved with superpowers and a good right hook.

 Bruce Wayne has a different problem. Gotham isn't nearly the broken place he'd seen it as when he was a child. One minute he'd been enjoying a movie about a masked vigilante with a rapier taking on an entire corrupt government a few thugs at a time-the next he was kneeling in blood and garbage and the echo of gunshots and nothing made sense any more. For the longest time, after making a stupid, childish vow that no one person could possibly keep, Bruce had teetered on the ragged edge of sanity. Criminals were everywhere. Crime was a disease. No one was safe, ever, not ever...

 But as an adult, Bruce could see the truth. Gothamites weren't  leaving the city in droves, fleeing the place to preserve their very lives. There was criminal activity, corruption in politics and business and the Force, of course there was, but really it was no worse than Chicago, and better in many ways-Jim had shown him the statistics, and in Gordon's eyes his transfer to Gotham had been a step up...in truth, Bruce's crusade to eradicate all Crime forever had been a way to hold back the losses for awhile, to deal with his pain-and years of support from his legal guardian, the money to travel and explore and train with bounty hunters and stage magicians and the colleges and the FBI had left his mind clear, his body toned and his spirit more whole. Really, Bruce had been living an honest-to-goodness Doc Savage novel, even if he'd been to bitter to realize it then. No, Crime couldn't be eradicated by the heartfelt vow of a half-insane child. The best way to handle criminals was to reform them, the best way to cure systemic criminality was to change Society, a bit at a time as only one wealthy man and his supportive friends could.

 No, Gotham's problem wasn't Crime per se, but the type of crime. There was a tiny sub-section of Criminal that Gotham seemed to give rise to-damaged people, madmen, obsessives. And unlike Bruce, they hadn't had his advantages of companions and money and time. He pitied them-but they were hurting people, and ordinary policemen and methods and solutions didn't work on them. There were places in Gotham, like the one that had claimed his parents, places like those he had seen in his youthful pilgrimage-he'd faced them, left them, sometimes improved them. They were places of power, and attracted the broken people, and made them strong and brilliant and...twisted.

 Bruce was a bit twisted himself, though, despite all the support he had gotten-and he knew this type of place. So he had chosen his Totem, made a costume  to terrify others and to focus himself, and invaded those Terrible Spaces, took that power for himself and did his best to safeguard Gotham and maybe even rescue those broken people. No lethal force, no killing if he could help it-he'd found out early that Murder only made the Bad Places worse...and he'd beaten back the tide...quite a bit actually. And the strangest thing was that half of the 'normal' citizens and police of Gotham barely noticed when a souped-up sedan driven by Dracula zoomed by...

 But tonight Bruce was alone in the Cave, unable to eat and shaking like a leaf in the darkness...because Harvey Dent was in Arkham now.

 Harvey, Jim and Bruce, together, had done Gotham so much good. Jim moved his cops away from key locations when he knew the Bat needed room for his unique form of surgery, and had been putting together an elite strike team of investigators-not honest cops, though they were...but cops who could see the real. Bruce had been there with them, offering to purchase certain dangerous mills, renovate slums and hire former Convicts-he was no Rockefeller, but what money he had he wielded with precision. Harvey ensured the proper permits when a place needed either renovation or demolition, prosecuted Mob bosses with ruthless intensity but worked with judges and Defense to secure the Broken ones in a place where curing them just might be possible, one day. And of course the Bat, who only showed when an extreme solution was required.

 And then one of Dent's greatest triumphs turned on him, hurt him badly. No one knew if surgery could save his looks, but Dent didn't wait. Something had broken in Harvey and he escaped to one of the Abandoned Places-and by the time the Bat had found him it was too late, he had attacked all of his clothes with scissors and needles and thread, torn the bandages off of his injuries and left them raw to the open air, muttering about multiples of two and duality and Robert Louis Stevenson and the poetry of William Blake-and then he'd just flipped a coin, smiled with pure joy and held his hands up for the cuffs...

 If Gotham's Darkness could take Harvey Dent, it could take Bruce Wayne. He needed safeguards. Jim probably knew his secret-he wasn't stupid. But Jim was already on the front lines, in just as much peril...and he had a daughter now. And Alfred was...no longer young.  He was going to have to tell Dick.

 Dick Grayson had a taste of what Bruce had gone through-he'd lost everything too, and to a petty thug just like Bruce had. Bruce couldn't walk away. He'd opened up his home and his heart, surprised at his own openness and warmth-and Dick had responded, and grown stronger and healed faster and better than Bruce ever had, maybe ever would. He was upstairs with Alfred right now, breaking up his studies with light exercise and conversation and the Inner Sanctum Radio Show.

 Dick might be furious when Bruce told him about the Bat and the War and the Cave-Lord only knows that Alfred had been-he might try to have Bruce committed (and if it came to that Bruce would let him). Worse, there might be enough anger and determination and sheer curiosity to want to even join him in his semi-mad crusade, Heaven help the both of them...well, Dick would have to be told regardless. No one could afford to face the Darkness alone, especially in Gotham...

 

[order99]

You know, there must just be something in the water this month:

bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com/2021/07/scripture-megadungeon-part-2-destroyer.html

 Not exactly the same approach, but the idea of the Dungeon as a breakdown into Chaos of Creation (and Monsters as mockeries of actual living things) might be just too good to pass up! Once we get past Origins for all the PCs then I just might pull out a few purely random Hideout filled with purely random Mobsters in this campaign. If the adventures get too 'Melmoth the Wanderer' on us it might make a nice Gonzo 'palate cleanser', and if the Hideout later disappears after being 'cleansed' I won't have to make sleepy Lighthouse Bay the size of New York...also, I rather fancy the idea of the Players pointing at me and demanding 'Why the Smurf did Dracula have an army of Velociraptors and a pet goat?" 

 I've probably beat this concept to death with a shovel by now but how could I not include an Article that included the phrase "To fully understand the portrayal of Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit in context of the megadungeon..."