True Metal: Attacker

I've seen the Attacker album Battle at Helms Deep floating around the internet for years but I can't remember actually listening to it until today. I didn't expect it to be awesome. But it is.

The sound is pure heavy metal. This was from 1985, merely two years after Slayer and Metallica debuted. Metal was just starting to develop sub-genres, but it would be a while before we became obsessed with such divisions. This isn't thrash, death, black, grindcore, or speed. It isn't power or pirate metal. It's just heavy metal. Thrashy crunchy riffs with soaring and screeching vocals, rock and roll rasping vocals, and hard rock drumming. Plenty of tempo changes and shredding lead guiarts.

It's a true metal masterpiece, if you ask me. This is in the vein of Saxon, Raven, Judas Priest, and Mercyful Fate.

 

Artists I Like: Philipe Druillet

Philipe Druillet is now 80 years old. That's amazing. I hope I live to see 80.

I did not know of Druillet when I was younger, though having some access to Heavy Metal Magazine means I most likely saw something of his work without actually knowing it. Once I finally actually looked at his work and paid attention, of course I was wowed and blown away.

This French artist was famous before I picked up my first funny book. He was one of the founders behind the French adult comics magazine Métal hurlant (Howling Metal!). The success of that magazine lead directly to the American version we all know and love, Heavy Metal.

It was only very recently (this week) that I actually picked up my first Druillet books. I got the hardback editions of Vuzz and the first three Loan Sloane books from Titan Comics and Statix Press. These are nice books, roughly 9.75" x 12.75" inches... which isn't an American standard and it's not a A size either (A5, A4, etc.). So maybe it's a European thing.

So I sat down and said "Let me read a Druillet for the first time." And I popped open Vuzz... holy fuck.

Vuzz is a single volume about a single character, Vuzz. It opens with a series of 8 pages tales, often silent or nearly wordless. They are all done in exquisite line art... perhaps with a dip pen and/or brush. I'm not sure. The printing is dark blue, not black. Looks great.

Later in the book we get La-Bas, which is a much longer narrative, perhaps 48 pages or something. Then the book ends with a short gallery of covers from the original comic series.

Ok... Vuzz is fucked up.

This is a rather ugly character, both in appearance and attitude. Roughly described, he is a loner warrior/rogue type... a Conan but weirder. He is not smart. He is not eloquent or wise. He seems handy with a sword, but the stories don't describe or depict him as having any greater prowess than other warriors, though he does come to lead a large gang of them in La-Bas, so it is inferred that he's a cut above the rest.

Vuzz is one nasty, amoral motherfucker. The back of the book sums up his character: he needs to fight, eat, and make love. That's it. And by "make love", they mean rape the shit out of women. Because that's what he does... over and over. Eats, rapes, kills. Usually in that order.

He dwells in a savage post-apocalyptic world of magic and weirdness. I would describe the aesthetic as very "Heavy Metal" but... ouroboros and all that. Anyway, Vuzz is the scum of the earth.

SPOILER ALERT...

Vuzz kills a lot of people, many or most of them not necessarily deserving, he rapes a lot, he steals. He's nasty. Then he dies in the end (he chooses death, actually... felt like Druillet said "enough of this guy, I want him dead").

OK, enough about Vuzz. It's a beautiful book, visually, as are the Loan Sloane books that preceded it. Well worth checking out. This guy is a legend. I don't need to sing his praises. His comic pages often look like psychedelic posters.

Budda Budd!

 

A GOZR image. Not part of the book, but perhaps it'll go into the next one or be a poster in the Kickstarter.

GOZR is RISING

OK, time to let the Doomslakers B/X book simmer for a bit while I circle back to fuckin' GOZR!

The pages are back on my drawing board for hopefully final edits. Maybe I can put this bastard out into the wild soon. I had taken a step back from it while playtesting was happening and in order to give myself some breathing room. Now I'm feeling it again and things are looking up for the ugly gooz.

During playtesting, I would update the document with rules tweaks and clarifications and name each iteration alphabetically. I am super duper thankful that my friends Andy Solberg and Dyson Logos each ran GOZR for different groups and provided valuable feedback. I was a player in Andy's game, which as a real stress test for the system as we adventured around Andy's wonderfully silly Gooz York. I think Dyson's playtest, which I wasn't in, was more directly based on the Den sequence from Heavy Metal - probably the chief inspiration for GOZR in the first place.

Cutty Sark: Die Tonight

 I don't know shit about Cutty Sark. Are they still active? (edit: doesn't appear so)

Die Tonight was a good listen. For me. But hey, if you didn't grow up in the time when this kind of album was being made then maybe this will sound like hot garbage to your ears. It isn't clean or exceptionally produced. It's rough and basic and I dig the shit.

So I'm not a music expert. In fact I'd call myself a music IDIOT. I like stuff, I don't like stuff, and I really struggle to identify why. I also struggle to compare music or talk about it in a meaningful way. That being said, this album reminds me of metal groups from the 80s such as Mercyful Fate and maybe Accept or Running Wild. If you like that shit, you might like this shit.

The cover is interesting. The name "cutty sark" is a ship, right? So this is a stark contrast to the art.

Gaming it: A band of madness-plagued desert warriors ravage the land, burning stone monuments (?). The PCs must track them and put a stop to their evil! The leader, Cutty Sark, has a demon sword that possesses his soul and the souls of his band mates.

Messiah Force: The Last Day

I love finding old metal albums I haven't heard before. Messiah Force is a band I had never heard of until recently. I love the shit out of the album cover! A good cover can sell me on a record that might actually be just OK.

Is this a good record? Well... it's a record of its time. I think it's pretty good. I didn't turn it off, I finished it. I like the female lead vocals (?), and it's got some nice 80s crunch (date on the YouTube upload says 1987). If you're into 80s thrash and metal then you probably can't go wrong here.

I'm guess the theme of the cover and album is nuclear winter, like so many 80s metal albums. Man... I used to live in fear of nuclear annihilation. Thanks, Cold War. Fuck off.

Messiah Force: The Last Day

GOZR: Towers

GOZR time! For more about GOZR, check here. For further more about GOZR, click here too.

It's been about 1 year since I started working on this project. In that time I have put a lot of hours into it, off and on. I put it down for a month or two, then I pick it up and work on it relentlessly for a few weeks, then I put it down again. Such is the way until I reach the point of no return.

Current page on the drawing board is about towers.

The land of GOZR is a far-future sci-fantasy wasteland in which the Pretty People angered the Sun and were wiped out for their affronts. Now only the lowly gooz remain... the ugly ones who served the Pretties so long ago. The ruined world is full of ruins. Gooz, poking their heads out after all these years, are bold enough to explore them.

The ruins include a lot of towers. Any party of PCs wandering the wilds has a 2 in 6 chance of spotting a tower on any given day. Of course the GM is free to pre-populate the setting with towers as they wish. This game is not proscriptive about how you play, it isn't terribly procedural, though it does include lots of procedures for generating randomness. It's a god damn romp, after all, not VCR instructions.

So right now the towers page is just a few random tables to determine height, thickness, and general traits. I might include an example tower too. We'll see.

One of the things that sparked my imagination while doing this page was a little table I included about the tower's vertical situation. One possible result is that it is already fallen over, so you could have a little tower crawl through a fallen tower where all the inner space is agog.

I could cap this at one page, and probably will, at least for now. Just a simple page of random tables for tower generation. I went a bit over the top on magic (10 pages) so I'm already swollen bigger than my intended 28 pages (I'm at 33 and not finished yet).

Far too soon to say, but my hope is to publish this as a "issue one" and then get into a second floppy that has more options. Like... you can just use the first floppy and be fine but if you want more fun shit you get the subsequent issues. We'll see how it pans out.

Warrior Path: The Mad King

Warrior Path: The Mad King

Power metal! I am not a fan. Generally... I don't enjoy power metal. Which is weird because I cut my teeth on bands like Helloween and Iron Maiden. But the high-end singing and faux-symphonic music styles I just find to be a little bit too cheesy, even for a bastard like me.

But sometimes a power metal album comes along that I happen to listen to and enjoy. This is one of them.

This album is awesome! Killer riffs, cool solos, and driving song compositions keep this one on fire. Cheesy? Fuck yes it's cheesy as fuck. But it's nice cheese. Not stinky.

And of course check out that sweet ass cover art by Dimitar Nikolov. That could be a dwarven king in a dwarven hall. Dunno, but it kicks ass.

Zebu: Reek of the Parvenu

It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. So I'm a gonna post some music albums here and there. Note that this is not a "review" series, at least not in siprit. I'm just posting shit I found that I have some reason to talk about. Very very often it will be because the album cover art caught my eye.

This one is part of the Chicks on the Cover series. I think that is self-explanatory, isn't it? Come for the cover, stay for the tunes?

Zebu: Reek of the Parvenu

This is a really good Greek metal band. If you like the band Death, this will appeal to you, I think. Mostly because the vocals are similar. But this is a solid band with a heavy doom sound that doesn't fall into the overtly Black Sabbath end of the spectrum. The riffs aren't boring.

There's a backing vocalist on one track who I could have swore was Michela D'Orlando from Power Symphony, but turns out is really Katerina Kostarelou from Bacchus Priest. There's a deep cut for your ass.

The cover is by Mike S. Putrefurnaced and it depicts a witchy looking woman with lovely blue hair being hauled down by little ghosts or faeries or something. Epic!

Richard Corben

Like many people, I probably laid eyes on Richard Corben's work for the first time on the album cover of Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell. Epic pic for sure. Left an impression, kind of like David Fairbrother Roe's unforgettable cover for Nazareth's Hair of the Dog.

(Ahhh... what happened to great album cover art? Like so many book genres, I suppose the switch to digital and the need for clear thumbnails has lead to a decline in cover art and a rise in simple design. I'll proudly wear my grognard suit on this one and say I miss great covers on books, music, etc. These days it's just a bit of graphic design with huge letters. Then again, I haven't really LOOKED at album art in a while. Maybe I'm wrong? Tune in to the end of this post for the answer.)

Richard Corben's art is weird. It's in that category with Frazetta and Vallejo (two artists I do not consider to be equals, sorry Boris but you're often boring) as sort of "epic" and "fantastic" but also it's underground. Richard Corben was a comix artist, after all, and he liked to draw tits and schlongs on his characters. His figures were also in the "I just stepped out of the gym and boy am I ripped" category, while also being in the "I'm big and soft and round" category. His proportions were strange while not being exactly wrong. And that inspired me. I have said many times how much I despise things that are too clean, trim, and polished. Corben's art, even when it has a careful polish on the surface, is never perfect. And I love that.

I keep saying things about Corben in the past-sense, as if his life is over. But he went on to achieve great things in the 2000s, doing Hellboy arcs and being inducted into various halls of fame. He is one of those great artists, like Vaughn Bode, who achieved greatness but not flatness. He was never a household name. They say Rush is a band's band. Richard Corben is an artist's artist.

Album Covers

Well, I did some Google-fu on recent album covers. What I found was that things haven't changed so much. Most of the pop type stuff or hip-hop is a face shot or body shot of the artist with the title. Kind of normal. Metal album covers are same as always... lots of epic themes, Satan, sci-fi landscapes, etc. So not much has changed. I suppose it's mainly the book market, particularly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, that has changed in response to digital books. You need a clear thumbnail for your e-reader so you can see the author and title on a screen of a dozen books. That's the function that a book's spine used to serve on the bookshelf. Then you'd pull it out and see the awesome cover art. There's a lacking of awesome cover art in books right now. /rant

Musical Musings: Gaskin

Here's another odd old heavy rock find. The album starts out letting you know exactly what you're in for with a straight up 1981 heavy metal/rock riff that makes your Camaro start without a key. The rest isn't bad. I'll have to give another spin but I didn't hate it. There's a cowbell. And the bass player can be heard, which is super cool. Too many albums in the mid to late 80s decided we don't need no stinking bass for some fucked up reason. I blame Metallica. Fuckin' Metallica.

But the cover art. Hmm.. "End of the World" is the title and we see two people who seem to be huddling near burning houses. Who is burning their house? Nay, ALL the houses. And why are they in their undies? Were they awakened from sleep and rushed out to avoid the flames?

And then you see it. You zoom in and you see it clearly. That chick is topless. WHY is that chick topless? I guess we'll have to email Danny Flynn and ask him. Like, did the band request she be topless? I'm not complaining, Danny. You know me. I'm all about it. But it's kind of weird, right?

Oh, and we can see the white dove of peace flying away. So is this wartime? If so, how inefficient is it to go around burning individual rural homes? Takes serious dedication. Maybe they're using smart bombs. Fuckers.

Musical Musings: Testament: Titans of Creation

Testament: Titans of Creation

Speaking of great music. I randomly clicked on the new Testament album Titans of Creation and lemme tell ya this motherfucker rocks. It grabbed me from track one with a nice powerhouse riff and I was shocked to discover that track two was another powerhouse riff and the damn thing just kept going. After hearing the entire album I can't think of a track I would call weak. And I can name several I would call badass.

If you like thrash, this is the shit right here. And from one of the all-time great thrash bands! This is so god damn good to see.

Thematically... there are tracks about cults, nuclear annihilation (a staple of the thrash scene), and witches. I'd say this is gameable as all fuck.

Musical Musings: Kreator: Coma of Souls

And here you thought this blog was just a place for RPG stuff. Nonsense!

(Well it's mostly that, naturally. But I like doing what I want, so...)

I click on a lot of random YouTube videos when I'm drawing. YouTube knows that I like metal, among other things. So I clicked on Kreator: Coma of Souls this morning. And... I was slightly pleasantly surprised.

Kreator is one of those early thrash bands that I just didn't like back in the day. I remember buying one of their tapes (remember... I'm 49 years old... when I say "back in the day" I'm mostly referring to the cassette tape era, though as a young man in the 90s I clearly bleed into the CD era as well). I put it in the deck and gave it a listen. I ejected it after a song or two. Like my reaction to Candlemass, I just couldn't hack it. Where Metallica, Megadeth, WASP, and AC/DC had killer riffage, this album seemed to be just rapid fire guitar banging with machine gun polka drumming. It was a little more on the Slayer end of the metal spectrum and Slayer was as far on that end of the spectrum I cared to go.

In fact, this band dead up sounds like a Slayer cover band to me, at least during the verses. I know that's not fair since Slayer was the big dog and anyone with fast tempo and somewhat screechy vocals could be compared to them. But y'know...

This album definitely has that polka-blast thing going on. But there are some tracks, such as People of the Lie, where a nice groove is established... a thrashy groove you can headbang to, not just a nuclear assault of speed.

The whole thing has that crunchy high register typical of the time period that is also a bit of a turnoff. It's a product of the late 80s, after all. But it's not bad. If you like thrash, this is not a bad album to check out.

That is the extent of my musical reviewing chops. I am a lifelong listener, but not an aficionado. I don't even know what the word "register" even means, in musical terms. I just know what tickles my earholes and I like to share it.

I would ask my dear readers if they want to see more of this kind of thing, but since I do what I want anyway it kinda doesn't matter, does it? You all are used to me going all over the place.

Next up: chainmail chicks!

Musical Musing: Slift: Ummon

This album is so good. It reminds me of everything wonderful about 70s/80s sci-fi and sci-fantasy. It's prog, it's a bit metal, it's psychedelic. I hear tones of Pink Floyd, Hypnos 69, and even Donald Fagen (think True Companion).

The song "Hyperion" in particular is really heavy. If you listen to the whole album, this song hits you like a hammer. In context it is heavy as fuck. Of course, comparing it to straight up heavy metal songs it won't seem as heavy. But that's a really neat trick about albums: they provide contrast. They build soundscapes. I'm a huge metalhead, but I gotta say that most metal albums that try to be all heavy all the time fall flat because there's no story, no flow.

This album has a story. It is a journey.

Not to mention a sweet ass Caza cover.

So what is this album about? I've already said that the music is fucking unreal. But what about the lyrics? I actually have no idea. I haven't paid any attention. I just love the journey the music takes me on. So let's look together and see what is happening here. Is it gameable?

Here's Ummon:

Set the controls to the earth’s surface
From the night we have waited
Bring the fire to your sleeping brothers
From the night we have waited
Now we’re climbing through the ancestral stones
All the night we have waited
From the center to the earth’s surface!
A blade, a sword coming from the void
Titans, Gods, they’re coming from the void
A blade, a sword, it's coming from the void
FROM THE CENTER TO SURFACE!

Oh hell yeah. Gameable.

So it sounds like we have something massive coming from the center of the earth (possibly a void?) to the surface. An arising? An awakening?

Here's Hyperion:

From the deepest ocean to the highest mount
In the storm and nebula fury we hear now his name
He was born and raised where the chaos rules
He’ll be the thunder in the night when the lights will be gone
From the deepest ocean to the highest mount
In the storm and nebula fury we hear now his name
He was born and raised where the chaos rules
He’ll be the thunder in the night when the lights will be gone

Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time
Lead us beyond, tides and traps of time

So yeah. Gameable as hell all over the place. I like the there are very few actual lyrics on this whole album. It's poetic.

Mutant World

I went in on the Kickstarter for Richard Corben and Jan Strnad's Mutant World reprint. Got the hardback graphic novel that includes Mutant World and Son of Mutant World. In the forward, Strnad states that this edition was built from scans of the Fantagor prints, tweaked by Richard Corben.

I just finished reading the first 60 pages. It's the story of a poor dumb mutant named Dimento who just wants to find something to eat. During the course of these 60 pages he encounters an outrageous bunch of backstabbing, hunger-gnarled muties with names like Weasel and Dimlit. He also encounters a woman in a horse-drawn cart. The woman, whose name hasn't been given, is drawn in Corben's typical style. Large-breasted, full-bodied. But also, given Corben's origins in the underground comix scene, she is weird. Everything is weird in a Corben comic.

There's the idea of the male gaze that permeates pop culture. It is on display here, as it always was in the pages of Heavy Metal, 1984, and pretty much all the pulpy-styled comics of the 70s and 80s. Women are usually drawn with an eye to their sexual characteristics. Men are usually drawn as beefy, possibly ugly as well. Corben's style falls in line with this. His male forms, if not monstrous and misshapen, are muscular and beautiful. Even poor ole Dimento, bent and seemingly mutated, has an Olympian physique. The unnamed woman, who recurs throughout this part of the story, is busty and full and lovely. And she has a horse.

So anyway, everyone in this world seems to be mad and vile. Every single character Dimento encounters is less than stellar if not outright brutal. Not just to Dimento, but to each other as well. It's a harsh world, as one of the characters states. The woman helps Dimento at one point, perhaps for fun. Then she betrays him to save herself. Dimento, who is the nicest person in the comic, is prone to fits of anguish, rage, and sorrow, and he leaves her to her fate with some nasty mutants who rape her and beat her. The beating is on-screen, but the raping is not. It isn't pretty, nor is it titillating. I get the sense that even though Corben draws the woman in a slightly sexy way (again, the male gaze at work), he is sympathetic to her plight and doesn't try to capitalize too much on it. I don't know this to be the case, but given the fact that the story was written in chapters on a deadline and wasn't scripted out, Corben started off by just having a hottie show up and then, as the story evolved, he realized he didn't want to do a hottie comic. Her story unfolds brutally, and she is drawn less-and-less like an object to be looked at and more-and-more like just another brutal individual being brutalized in a brutal world.

Then again, maybe I'm lenient in my critique because I'm biased toward this genre of comic art. She is, after all, tied up much of the time. That could be read a certain way. Yet Dimento is also tied up much of the time. So... I dunno. Perhaps a person with a different perspective would find this entirely misogynistic. I couldn't argue too much with them, though I've seen far worse. All I'd have to say is that if I'm looking for prurient comic book art with hotties I wouldn't choose this. It is not for that purpose.

This part of the story is disjointed and random. It feels like random events in the daily life of poor Dimento. And as Jan Strnad points out in the forward, he was writing the episodes under deadline pressure one at a time. He hadn't plotted this thing out. And it shows.

I kinda like that. I like that it's raw and random. It is a hard read, though. I'm not a fan of bleakness or moral depravity. I stopped watching The Walking Dead because it felt like one episode of despair porn after another. It wore me out and I dropped it.

Mutant World is a bit like that, but in shorter bursts. It's a comic about a fallen world in which people - mutant and human alike - trick, beat, rape, and brutalize one another to survive. And through it moves this truly pitiful figure. Dimento. Poor, dumb Dimento (as he calls himself).

Regarding the art itself, it is classic Corben. Rich and lush and also ugly and crude. Nobody does misshapen like Corben. When I read comics like this, which are richly painted and detailed, I cringe at just how much work must have went into them. Comics are fucking hard work, people. You spend days, weeks, months, fucking years on a comic book that someone can literally "read" in five minutes, then promptly forget. I can't tell you how many hours I labored over comics in my youth. I loved it, mind you. I was totally into it. But at some point the endorphin rush I felt at having created a nice comic page just wasn't enough to justify the labor. Hats off to Corben and any comics artist that can and does endure.

It's weird that I hadn't actually read this comic before. I know I own some old Fantagor books and I have been a lover of Richard Corben's style since I first laid eyes on it in the mid-80s. I know I've seen this comic in the past, yet somehow I failed to actually read the damn thing. Reading it now is like reading a mildly-horny teenager's stab at Gamma World fanfic. There's a lot of good inspiration in here for post-apoc gaming, so if you're into GW or Mutant Crawl Classics and you haven't checked it out you should do so. Just be aware that it was intended for adults and it doesn't pull many punches. Also, it is not a sexy comic. That is, I would not classify this as being pin-up in nature whatsoever. It is raw and ugly in the underground comix manner and I really love the shit out of it for that reason alone.

Dimento is a lonely soul.

FOLLOW UP

I finished Mutant World, which was only a few more pages than I had read when I wrote the original post above. Spoilers ahead.

So basically Dimento and this normal dude are set free by the weird post-apoc military facility and both end up with a clone of the woman from the story. In both cases the woman is wearing a tight top showing her nipples poking through and wearing shorts. In both cases she has been sent by the post-apoc scientist dude to, I suppose, see if he can get them to breed. The comic ends with Dimento scoring with his clone (he has no idea she's a clone... he's only 6 years old, after all, being a genetic experiment himself). He seems happy in the end with his large-breasted woman in their post-apoc ruined trailer.

Next up: Son of Mutant World! I'm guessing, given the setup here, we're going to meet Dimento's offspring. I seem to recall a bald female being on the cover.

Mörk Borg

I think the creators of the wondrously metal Mörk Borg really want you to know how metal they actually are. That's a faint emboss on the spine. Between the letters of the book title it reads "Psalm VII" and has an inverted cross at the end. Pretty fuckin' metal.

One of the brilliant little bits of the book is the Calendar of Nechrubal on page 16. Here we find a page of psalms and some simple mechanics that dictate when the world will end, by random roll. When the seventh psalm is reached, the world dies and you are instructed to "burn the book".

I will be watching for YouTube videos in which people actually burn the book or throw knives at it (which you are also encouraged to do).

EDIT: This physical book is lovely and makes you want to just touch it over and over again. Just sayin'.

Albumart Maximus: JC Guerrero's Sagan

I will be posting more varied content on my blog because I'm not a one trick pony and I have interests that I think intersect pretty well with my art, gaming, and comics life. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: I like rock album covers.

Sagan is a "protospace" rock band. It's a new genre I wasn't aware of!

This is killer art by JC Guerrero. We have two astronauts on a mission who suddenly become aware of their third companion's ill-met fate... soon to be their own?? It has this really nice old comic book vibe complete with blood and gore juxtaposed against a kind of realistic space backdrop. But you can see all that, can't you?

Music isn't bad. Sort of riffy instrumental rock in the stoner tradition.

A.P. Furtado Art

My friend Anthony Furtado did this badass pinup for me years ago when my comic Pan-Gea was being published by Ape Entertainment. I haven't dusted this off in a LONG time. It's so sweet.

The characters are Brig Iceclover in the rear and Fawn Rainchild in the front. These are both Daughters of Gea, essentially amazonian princesses in my grand personal fantasy mythos.

Anthony once did a short comic for Heavy Metal magazine and he worked at Ka-Blam. He's a top notch illustrator.