Nice(r) Belt Buckle

Prompted by the recap at House to Astonish -- in particular the glowing praise of George Perez's last hurrah as penciller on the Avengers main title -- I dug out my copies of "The Nefaria Protocols" and noticed something a bit odd.

Remember Captain America's rather insulting response to Hawkeye's new costume?

Well, in the reprint in Marvel UK/Panini's Avengers United #27, the exchange is different.

That's a bit odd, no? Unless some editor at Panini also found the lettering a little suspect and decided to remove the "offending" bubble(s).

Où est la Bibliography?

This is as much for me as anyone else, as I've sort of lost track of what I've done over the years.

I am the main artist or writer on underlined titles; everything else is a contribution as part of a group of artists and writers.

If you think of anything I've forgotten, or got wrong, then please let me know.

2001 The Girly Comic #1 - "The Wait" (art)
2005 Solar Wind #6 - "Donny Darto" (art)
2005 Sunny For Girls #2 - "Team Spirit" (art)
2007 Paragon #3 - "More Than You Can Chew" (art and writing)
2007 The O Men #2.5 - "Fluke" (art and writing)
2008 PJANG #1 - "Rooms for Writers" (art)

2009 B/X Companion (art)
2009 Fight On! #4 (art)
2009 Fight On! #6 (art)
2009 Fight On! #7 (art and writing)
2009 Fungoid Gardens of the Bone Sorcerer (art)

2010 Fight On! #8 (art)
2010 Fight On! #9 (art and writing)
2010 Fight On! #10 (art)
2010 PJANG #5 - "The Ex-Men" (art)
2010 Old Dragon: Módulo Básico (art)

2011 Advanced Fighting Fantasy (one small drawing on one page. Other editions were released in 2012 and 2016)
2011 Carcosa (uncredited; one teeny tiny blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit of art)
2011 Fight On! #11 (art)
2011 Fight On! #12 (art)
2011 Fight On! #13 (art)
2011 Lands of Ara Compendium 2011 (art)
2011 Too Much Sex & Violence #1 (art)

2012 Caverns of Slime (I have no memory of this! I think I probably did some art)
2012 The Complete B/X Adventurer (art)
2012 Death Love Doom (art)
2012 Fight On! #14 (art)
2012 The Girly Comic Book 1 (reprints "The Wait")
2012 Theorems & Thaumaturgy (art)
2012 Too Much Sex & Violence #3 (art)

2013 Old Dragon: Regras para Jogos Clássicos de Fantasia (art)
2013 Too Much Sex & Violence #5 (art)

2014 Dwimmermount (art)
2014 Dwimmermount Illustration Book (art)
2014 Forgive Us (art, maps, and writing)
2014 Petty Gods (art)
2014 The Secrets of Cats (art)
2014 Thulian Echoes (art)
2014 Zombre: An Undead Anthology (art)

2015 From the Vats (art)
2015 Petty Gods: Revised & Expanded Edition (art)
2015 The Secrets of Cats: Animals & Threats (art)
2015 The Squid, The Cabal, and The Old Man (art and maps)

2016 The Secrets of Cats: Feline Magic (art)
2016 Slugs! (art and a tiny bit of writing)
2016 Wormskin #4 (maps)

2017 Death is the New Pink (art)
2017 The Weird That Befell Drigbolton (art and maps)
2017 Wormskin #6 (maps)
2017 Wormskin #7 (art)

2018 Fish Fuckers (art, maps, and writing)

2019 Midvinter (art, maps, and writing)
2019 More Than Meets the Eye (art, maps, and writing)
2019 Adventure Anthology: Fire (new art for The Doom-Cave of the Crystal-Headed Children)
2019 Adventure Anthology: Death (reprints Death Love Doom)
2019 Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas (art)

2020 Adventure Anthology: Blood (literally hundreds of pictures)
2020 Barbarians of the Ruined Earth (art)
2020 The Seed (art, maps, and writing)

2021 Comes Chaos (art)
2021 Green Messiah (art, maps, and writing)
2021 Oakfell Vale (art)
2021 The Excellent Travelling Volume #13 (I think I did a picture for this, but I'm not sure if it got printed)
2021 The Slave Mines of Vindicus the Terrible (art)
2021 Terror in the Streets (art, maps, and writing)
2021 Terror in the Streets: Huguenauts and Other Distractions (art, maps, and writing)

2022 The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero (art, maps, and writing)
2022 The Expiration of Barrington Peake (art, maps, and writing)
2022 Strict Time Records Must Be Kept (art, maps, and writing)

2023 BEE-WARE! (art, maps, and writing)
2023 Big Bee's Pamphlet of Spells (art and writing)
2023 In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard (art and maps)
2023 Magic Eater (art, maps, and writing)
2023 Winnie-the-Shit (art, maps, and writing)

2024 Fight On! #15 (art)

2025 Fight On! #16 (art)
2025 Altar of Madness (cover art)
2025 The Music of Ericha Zann (art)

Ruining Childhoods Since 2023

It is at this point that I should mention -- since I completely forgot -- that my new Lamentations of the Flame Princess book is now out:

Can you guess the source material?

James Raggi asked for a Cocaine Bear pastiche, and this is what I did. To be fair, there is a bear in the book, and the bear does engage in substance abuse, but the overall focus is a bit different. It's a mini wilderness crawl with anthropomorphic -- and murderous -- animals, a massive idiot, and a conceptual entity that will -- I hope -- befuddle your players and maim their characters.

It went on sale at Ropecon and Gencon a few weeks ago and is now available from the LotFP EU shop. It's not yet on sale at the US shop or DriveThru, but I will try to remember to update you when it is.

(It's now available from the US shop here, or in pdf form here. I remembered!)

The Fifth Place

So this happened:

I have mainly been using it to play the PS4 games that won't fit on the tiny hard drive inside my PS4, and to benefit from the "PS4 Pro Enhanced" features that I obviously cannot detect with my ageing brain and eyes.

It's a fine machine. It's huge, about the size and weight of a small family hatchback, but at least it's nowhere near as noisy or power hungry as its predecessor. I have two complaints:

1. The build quality feels wonky. For such a bulky thing it feels flimsy, even cheap, and I'm not fond of the shiny black strip down the middle that does nothing but attract fingerprints and smudges.

2. The user interface is bonkers. Gone is the lovely simplicity of the XMB, or even the PS4's chubby menu, and instead we have an insane double menu system that seems to combine both, but in the most non-intuitive way possible. Utter madness that feels like it was designed at 4:30pm on a Friday and released before anyone noticed.

All that grumbling aside, the happiness in the image above is genuine.

Moving Without Travelling

I have never played Traveller.

No, that's not true. I did run a very brief Traveller: The New Era campaign when I was 15 or 16 but:

1. TNE is its own weird thing and doesn't feel like proper Traveller.

(Although I do quite like the updates it made to the setting. I think they restore a bit of fun OSR-type exploration and uncertainty to a setting that sometimes felt stale and static, and also sidestep around some of the issues regarding how real world technology has outstripped the predictions of 70s science fiction.)

2. I was teenager and had no idea what I was doing. It was equal parts Bablyon 5, Call of Cthulhu, and utter rubbish.

Anyway, I would quite like to play proper Traveller one day, and this excellent series of posts from Sir Poley on the "four table legs" of classic Traveller only makes me want it more. Go and have a read; they are very good pieces and make a lot of sense.

Always Daring and Courageous

Although I was just about the right age for it, for some reason Star Fleet/X-Bomber passed me by. Which is a shame, as it spawned glorious stuff like this, from Brian "Badgers" May and Eddie "Van Halen" Van Halen:

I've Seen That Bethor

Thor: Ragnarok (2017):

No, in fact this is from Paul Pope's 2013 graphic novel Battling Boy. There's a clear Thor influence in this part of the comic, so perhaps there's an ur-example that Pope and Taika Waititi are both referencing, but the similarities with the opening sequence of the best Thor film are striking.

(Battling Boy is quite good, by the way, but alas it finishes just as it's getting going and there was never a proper second volume.)

Kind Words

John Arendt over at Dreams in the Lich House is embarking on a grand quest to review a huge pile of Lamentations of the Flame Princess books, including a few of mine!

You can read John's review of Magic Eater here.

And his review of Bee-Ware! is here.

And a review of Winnie-the-Shit here.

Elsewhere, The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero gets a good review at, er, Reviews From R'lyeh.

Finally for today, there's a review of More Than Meets the Eye that is mostly positive and makes some fair criticisms too:



If those reviews have enticed you, you can buy the books in the usual places.

PINKROBES

PINKROBES, not fluffy: Armour 14 (as leather), Move 120', 3+1* Hit Dice, 14hp, two-handed sword 1d10, Morale 9, Number Appearing 1 or 2. Half damage from bludgeoning or crushing weapons.

PINKROBES are pink, malevolent -- possibly fey -- spirits that take the form of floating, ragged monk-like robes. Cruel and mischievous, they delight in capturing and murdering sentient beings. They favour large two-handed swords, as they think they look cool. They have no physical form beyond the robes themselves; as such they are very quiet -- they surprise unaware opponents on 1-3 -- except when they communicate with each other, which they do in howls and moans.

Once per day a PINKROBE can go into a berzerk fury and attack 1d6 times in a Round.

PINKROBES are not undead, although they seem similar, and are intelligent and spiteful enough to pretend to be in order to trick, for example, clerics into wasting their turning abilities. Bastards.

PINKROBES obey the howling, moany, commands of higher-ranked *ROBES, and can order REDROBES, YELLOWROBES, GREENROBES, BROWNROBES, and BLUEROBES about.

BROWNROBES

BROWNROBES, but fire isn't brown: Armour 14 (as leather), Move 120', 2+1* Hit Dice, 10hp, two-handed sword 1d10, Morale 9, Number Appearing 1 or 2. Half damage from bludgeoning or crushing weapons.

BROWNROBES are -- you will find this surprising -- malevolent -- possibly fey -- spirits that take the form of floating, ragged monk-like robes. Cruel and mischievous, they delight in capturing and murdering sentient beings. They favour large two-handed swords, as they think they look cool. They have no physical form beyond the robes themselves; as such they are very quiet -- they surprise unaware opponents on 1-3 -- except when they communicate with each other, which they do in howls and moans.

Once per day a BROWNROBE can, instead of attacking, produce a fireball with a range of 240' that causes 3d6 damage to anyone in a 20' area.

BROWNROBES are not undead, although they seem similar, and are intelligent and spiteful enough to pretend to be in order to trick, for example, clerics into wasting their turning abilities. Bastards.

BROWNROBES obey the howling, moany, commands of higher-ranked *ROBES, and can order REDROBES, YELLOWROBES, and GREENROBES about.