The Apocalypse Will be Virtualized

Meta: Game On by Xander Black

In the world of 2065, the immersive experience of the Cybernet has replaced nearly every aspect of daily existence. It has unified global currencies. It has allowed perfectly safe social interaction in a world that experienced a global pandemic. It provides jobs, entertainment, and every sort of experience possible through the direct stimulation of the brain. Even if the worst possible thing happens and you are killed, it's just an avatar. Your body is perfectly safe. Until it isn't. 

Cyrus and Everett are in the wrong place at the wrong time, when a high-profile personality's avatar gets killed and their actual body is found dead as well. If it only happened once that would be bad enough, but the bodies just keep hitting the floor. Cyrus and Everett, of course, are completely oblivious. Add in the return of an old flame and the involvement of a couple of high-level "metas" - power players in the Neverborn game that defines the virtual world. Top it off with some questionable behavior by the algorithms running the game, and even Cyrus can tell something weird is going on. Someone, or something, is pulling strings to manipulate events in cyberspace.

Fly on the Wall

Flypaper Boy: Coming of Age by Philip "Norvaljoe" Carroll

What do you do with the world's lamest superpower? For starters, you end your first mission getting kidnapped by the bad guys who are determined to brainwash and blackmail you into becoming their next pet supervillain. They're going to provide you with all the training you need, teach you to fight properly, put you through a strength-building regiment fit for the special forces. Not to mention the company of a beautiful girl who makes you the sole object of her attentions. When you're 16, you figure you can handle it. Nothing they can do will prevent you from being a hero.

When it turns out they want you to kidnap the teenage daughter of an Eastern European communist leader. It's for her own good, and it will help rescue the entire country. When it's put that way, it doesn't seem like the bad guys are quite so bad. 

Flypaper Boy nails the title dead on. This is a coming of age story for Jimmy in many different ways. He's a teenager learning what it means to be an adult. He's an agent in training learning what it costs to enter a world of deception. He's a kid with a superpower learning that power doesn't automatically make him a hero. Most importantly, he's a young man learning that compromise begins with the words "That's not so bad," and ends with a cost that can never be recovered. 

We Bury Our Own Dead

Archie Andrews and the Riverdale gang are some of the most enduring characters in comics history. They’ve teamed up with superheroes, met countless pop music icons, taught Bible lessons, and fought Sharknados. Their stories range from innocently humorous vignettes to deeply emotional personal drama; Archie married both Betty and Veronica in divergent story arcs that converged again with Archie’s death. Archie Comics as a company has taken on a number of licenses through the years and never been afraid to push the boundaries of comics as an art form. I guess it was inevitable that the zombie apocalypse would eventually make it to Riverdale.

The Most Magical Comics on Earth

I just happened to be in the Magic Kingdom when I noticed a comic book on the shelf at the Haunted Mansion gift shop, Seekers of the Weird. I didn’t pay much attention. I flipped through the book and decided that if it caught my attention again when the trade came out I’d give it a try.

Five issues came and went. The collected edition hit the shelves. It didn’t catch my attention.

Quite without my knowledge my wife had been buying issues of Figment for my daughter, a huge fan of the imaginary purple dragon. All five issues went into Destiny’s comic box without crossing my line of vision, accompanied a year later by the follow up Figment 2. When my wife discovered they had missed the five issue run of Big Thunder Mountain, she painstakingly tracked down and special ordered every one of them. It wasn’t until Haunted Mansion came out that they saw fit to approach me. “Destiny doesn’t want to read Haunted Mansion,” she said. “I need you to add it to your pull file so I don’t miss any of them.” Ah, me. Les bandes dessinées sont la langue de l’amour.

Scooby Dooby ... Just ... Don't

I love Scooby-Doo, so when DC added a Scooby book to the Hannah-Barbera revival line it immediately caught my attention. In Scooby Apocalypse, we get a glimpse of what it would be like if the Scooby gang met for the first time just as the world ended. It’s a kind of sci-fi version of The Walking Dead, where the Mystery Inc gang is cast as the survivors of a nanotech plague that transformed the whole world into monsters. The main characters are indeed named Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby. They do indeed ride around in a green van they call the Mystery Machine. Their visual models even show inspiration from the classic characters … and there ends any resemblance to anything remotely Scooby-Doo.

Death Race at the End of the World

In the summer of 2016, Warner Bros decided to try and reimagine their popular Hannah-Barbera cartoon characters as more mature versions of themselves. This line included four titles: Future Quest, which united the Hannah-Barbera actions heroes on an adventure throughout space and time; The Flintstones, looking at the stone-age Honeymooners through a modern sitcom lens; Scooby Apocalypse, where the Scooby gang meets for the first time just as the world ends; and Wacky Raceland, twisting the goofy wacky racers into post-apocalyptic speed demons in a world where it’s drive or die.

The old cartoon Wacky Races pitted 11 alliteratively named drivers and their impossible machines on a no-holds-barred cross-country demolition course with predictably goofy results. The new comic book looks like Mad Max meets Speed Racer. The cars now have an attitude of their own, driven by an AI that reflects, distorts, and sometimes clashes with the personality of their driver. These turbo-charged death machines are powered by self-repairing nanomachines and armed to the teeth. While the vehicles are clearly the product of advanced technology, the rest of the world struggles to survive clouds of voracious nanite swarms, monstrous leviathans, once-human mutants, and a blasted, radioactive landscape. The disembodied Announcer continually goads the racers forward with an agenda all her own.

Who is Titantic

I’m afraid my association with Doctor Who is not as extensive or storied as it could be. I watched Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen on PBS with the rest of my generation but I was always more interested in Star Wars and Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. Still, Tom Baker is who I think of as the Doctor and the Fourth Doctor is my Doctor. I have friends who are massive Doctor Who fans and I distinctly remember when Paul McGann’s Doctor movie first premiered that we all threw a party for the advent of the Eighth Doctor.

One day, my daughter excitedly grabbed my arm and said, “Dad, you’ve got to see this show!” She turned on BBC America and there was David Tennant and Billie Piper saving the world. She explained patiently, “This is a rerun. He’s the Doctor but he regenerates into new actors. Peter Capaldi will be the Doctor soon!” I smiled, secure in the knowledge that I had done at least one thing right in her upbringing. Fueled by my daughter’s excitement, the current generation of Doctor Who stories became scheduled family time and required viewing.

Sunstones and Shadowguard

Every so often, I come across a book series that really intrigues me with elements of the setting. Because I really enjoyed his “Keys to the Kingdom” series, I put some faith in Garth Nix and picked up “The Seventh Tower” series.

The six books of the series describe a world in perpetual darkness, where a magical Veil surrounds the planet, forever blocking the sun from the earth below. Above the Veil, the world continues as it has always been. Below the Veil, the planet is shrouded in perpetual ice, cut off from the heat and light of the sun. Bridging the two worlds is the ancient Castle, home of the Chosen, and the foundation of the seven Towers.

The Chosen use magical sunstones to provide light and heat to their home, for only the Towers rise through the Veil to the light. The Castle, as the world below, lies in utter darkness. The Chosen are served by spiritshadows, spirits from the world of Aenir who have been bonded to Chosen and brought back to the Dark World, where they take the form of shadows.

Forward the Foundation

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is most well known as the winner of the Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966, the only series to date to which the award has been given. Asimov himself assumed the award had been created to honor J.R.R. Tolkien and was surprised to receive it. The original short stories were published between 1942 and 1950 in the pages of Astounding Magazine. These were later collected, and additional material added to form the novels known as the Foundation Trilogy.

The impact of the Foundation stories has been felt in every form of series fiction written since its time, and most significantly in the fiction written for tabletop and electronic gaming. Until Foundation, attempts to build a cohesive mythology around an entirely fictional setting had been mostly accidental and abortive. It’s possible that Asimov’s work was taken more seriously than E.E. Smith’s Lensman series (with which it shares many similarities) due to Asimov’s emphasis on science and problem-solving rather than action, and his choice of humans as the protagonists instead of Smith’s Arisians. It also seems likely that Asimov’s writing was more approachable than Tolkien’s heavily literary style.

Atomic Robo the RPG by Evil Hat

Atomic Robo premiered in 2007 as a six-issue mini-series, quickly gaining a cult following and branching out into the two ongoing titles “Atomic Robo” and “Atomic Robo: Real Science Adventures”. The story chronicles the adventures of Atomic Robo, a self-aware mechanical man created by Nikola Tesla. Each story arc focuses on a different era in the life of Robo, beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the near future. The stories imitate the pulp action novels of the 30s and 40s, with a healthy mix of Tom Swift in the recipe. Robo's foundation, Tesladyne, employs “Action Scientists”, which pretty much sums up the book's approach to storytelling. Recurring antagonists include Dr. Dinosaur (an intelligent deinonychus) and the ghost (phasically fluxed corporeal entity) of Thomas Edison. The creators premiered a free webcomic release for the entire series in January 2015 as a promotion for the tenth volume of the series, “Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire.”

Sally Slick and the Miniature Menace by Carrie Harris

Sally Slick and the Miniature Menace returns us to the world of Young Centurions and to the adventures of Sally Slick and Jet Black, first seen in Sally Slick and the Steel Syndicate. This time around we get right into the action as Sally fumes over being shut out of the local tractor races. With the circus in town, Sally decides to race “unofficially”; of course, Sally leaves everyone else in the dust. After showing up the local bullies and drawing the attention of the circus owner, Sally's prized tractor goes missing!

Young Centurions by Evil Hat

Visit a world of pulp action-adventure in the 1910s with the Young Centurions RPG from Evil Hat Productions. If you're new to Fate or to the Spirit of the Century setting, this book belongs on your shelf. If you're already familiar with either of those, take a minute to see if this book is going to add value to your collection before you jump on it.

In Young Centurions, you take on the role of a unique individual, born in the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the new century. You embody a Spirit of the age, an aspect of the new century that shapes your character with the positive energy of things to come. Shadows oppose you, those people born on the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the previous century, empowered by the energetic detritus of what has gone before. It's not always easy to separate Spirit from Shadow in the confusion of the new century, even when it seems you're all working toward the same goals. And oh yes, you're all teenagers.