Schlock Mercenary

Justice League is a lot of fun. Also, it shows promise. Maybe, just maybe, DC Comics films will finally shake free of the desaturated joylessness that has been their hallmark for a decade. This summer’s Wonder Woman was brilliant and beautiful, and Justice League, though not quite up to that standard, is fun, and triumphant, and (eventually) colorful. Yes, it begins with sepia-toned misery, but then? Well, okay, then things get worse, but the film doesn’t wallow in that for too long. Okay, yes, it does wallow in that for a while, but then it finishes wallowing and gets on with the heroic, colorful business of being a superhero movie that reminds us why we love comic book heroes. Justice League clears my Threshold of Awesome, and it also clears my “must own the soundtrack” bar, because Elfman reprised not only his own 1989 Batman theme, but also John Williams’ 1977 Superman theme.

I have a new favorite Marvel Movie. Thor: Ragnarok was amazing fun. It cleared my Threshold of Awesome, it nabbed my top spot for 2017, and yeah, I saw it twice within 14 hours. I’m looking forward to picking up the Blu-Ray as soon as it’s available. I could write about all the things I loved, but then I’d be spoiling the movie for you, and I don’t want to do that. The trailers didn’t want to do that either. It’s kind of cool, really. Certain key-frame scenes don’t happen the way the trailer plays them out, preventing spoilers. In some cases the background is different. In others the costuming and incidental make-up is different. And in still others the scene doesn’t actually happen with those people in it. I’ll give you a low-impact example: In this still from the trailer the background looks kind of urban—perhaps it’s an alley? In the actual film, however, this is not the setting for the action in question, so when the event happens in the film, we’re not expecting it. We’re not in that alley we remember seeing in the trailer. I like this practice a lot. I want trailers to give me a sense of how the movie is going to make me feel, but I don’t want any of the big reveals. Okay, yes, I suppose the bit about Cate Blanchett’s character catching Mjolnir is a big reveal, and if you haven’t actually seen any of the trailers I suppose I should apologize for posting this snippet, because now it’s out there, but hey, maybe it’s not the REAL Mjolnir, or maybe it’s a dream sequence. Am I off the hook now?

The Kickstarter for Munchkin Starfinder closes on Thursday. If you’re just hearing about it now, that’s okay. The project was on an accelerated schedule, and the Kickstarter is only ten days long. As of this writing we have two of those days left. Along with the usual stretch goals, there are some social media goals associated with this project¹. If just 27 more people become Munchkin Starfinder fans² on BoardGameGeek.com, a Kickstarter-exclusive card will be added to the “I Want It All” box. With a few more Facebook shares³ there will be a digital Christmas card, suitable for at-home printing, shared in an upcoming backers-only update. This means that if you’ve already backed the project, Facebook and BoardGameGeek are places where you can increase your loot without spending more money. If you haven’t backed the project yet, consider this your penultimate notice (at least from me.) I’ll post again Thursday morning, and I think there will be a nice essay from me about the technical aspects of creating a new art style for a Munchkin deck. ¹ I’d never seen social media stretch goals before, but I totally get why they’re there. It’s a cool concept.

Geostorm is to climate science what Armageddon was to rocket science. It’s also to rocket science what Armageddon was to rocket science, but if I keep going I’ll have described an entire course catalog. The message of the film, “let’s take care of our planet responsibly,” is delivered a little heavy-handedly, and since the audience for the film is the crowd who’s just there for the popcorn, I’m not sure it’ll be received as intended. Still, it’s nice of the filmmakers to give it a shot. Geostorm arrives on my list at the lower middle of the “not awesome, not disappointing” pack.

The Munchkin Starfinder project launched Monday afternoon over at Kickstarter, and has already funded and blown past the first two stretch goals. I illustrated the cover and the cards, and aside from the fact that it was huge fun, I am psyched have gotten to contribute to the Munchkin product line¹. This project is on a very short timeline. It closes in just ten days, on November 2nd. I’m confident that Steve Jackson Games will be printing enough of these that you won’t be required to participate in the Kickstarter to someday buy them, but Munchkin Starfinder will ship to backers before it shows up in stores. ¹ The full product line is large. Fortunately, you don’t have to buy all of it to enjoy it. In fact, if you’ve never played before you can absolutely make Munchkin Starfinder your very first Munchkin set.

Steve Jackson approached me at GenCon Indy and asked whether I’d be interested in illustrating a Munchkin deck. Oh, and if so, when I might have the time for it? My answer, paraphrased, was “yes,” and “I will make time.” That was late August. I made a whole bunch of time I didn’t even know I had the materials for during September and October, and for contractual reasons I spent that entire time referring this very exciting gig as “super secret project.” Today I can finally point you all at Munchkin® Starfinder and say “I helped make this.¹” The cover art is a riff on the cover of the source material, Starfinder, the brand-new sci-fi+sorcery RPG from Paizo: See what I did there? The cover was one of the very first illustrations I did for the project². I can only take credit for the line art—the coloring and layout is someone else’s work, and they did a brilliant job of taking my riff and sticking the landing. It’s beautiful. Steve Jackson Games³ is Kickstarting this project on October 23rd. Don’t tell me how you can’t wait. The 23rd is close enough that it might as well be now. I have been waiting since August 20th. ¹ My contributions, specifically, are the line-art. I don’t know who is doing the coloring, but they’re crushing it.

The Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter closed at exactly $75,000 on Friday evening, all stretch goals met. Thank you! We’ll be printing the book, the Bristlecone ship coin, and then, in February, we’ll do a shirt-specific Kickstarter using designs that this project paid for. In coming weeks the project page will be updated with samples from the bonus story, which was written by Sandra Tayler and Bob Defendi, and illustrated by Michael Mayne. We’ll also post progress reports weekly, keeping backers and lurkers apprised of how things are coming along. There may be yet opportunities for latecomers to pre-order the book. I’ll be sure to announce those here, complete with linky things you can click on. I’m excited to put this book into people’s hands, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to tell stories and draw pictures for a living. Thank you!

The Random Access Memorabilia Kickstarter closes Friday at 8pm Eastern time. Today, with just 30 hours left, I finished the line art for the Bristlecone ship coin. I’ve cleaned this up a bit in Photoshop, but most of what you see is ink on paper (and some white paint on ink.) The next step is to send this off to Travis Walton for coloring, and then it’s off to the coin design folks. Yesterday I did some repair work on the cover, because the spacecraft streaking past in the background isn’t the right version of that ship. Here’s the original (with blue lines) And here, complete with paint smears, is the corrected version. Travis gave me the colored version in time for me to re-lay the cover this morning, so as of this writing, this is what the front cover of the book looks like: Every time we produce a new book we get a little bit better at it, so it doesn’t surprise me that this is our best book yet. The absence of surprise is not the absence of “wow,” though. Wow. This book is going to be great.

The Kickstarter project for Random Access Memorabilia: Schlock Mercenary Book 13 closes this Friday. Today I finished the first real draft of the cover: There are a bazillion tiny tweaks yet to make, including color nudging every element, and then re-laying the entire thing in InDesign, but as of right now, the image above is a very fair estimate of what the final cover will look like. All the details about this book project can be found here.

As part of the Random Access Memorabilia (Book 13) Kickstarter we’ll be doing a ship coin for Bristlecone, which featured prominently in books 12, 13, and 14. I’ll be drawing this ship again for the coin, and doing so for the first time in a couple of years at least. In order to get it right, I made a model sheet from some of my favorite drawings of the ship. The image in the upper left was rendered by Jeff Zugale¹, who did all the ship design work for Planet Mercenary. Everything else was my line art. I’ll probably be drawing the ship using a camera angle similar to the upper center, but with more detail, like the images in the lower left (in front of the tufted wing shark¹) and lower right corners. In the Planet Mercenary RPG, Bristlecone is defined as a Celeschul Orbital Foundries Wyvern-class vessel. The hull and A.I. were built and integrated in the 26th century, but improvements in annie-plant tech led to numerous upgrades. The full history of the ship won’t fit on the coin, but we’ll hit the highlights. The tufted wing shark² won’t appear on the coin anywhere. ¹ Jeff “Starshipwright” Zugale is doing an art book Kickstarter WITH SPACESHIP TOYS right now, and you should go look at it.