Now THIS is what I call research!

It's Friday night, so what better to do than pull a bunch of old Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe and Who's Who for DC, and browse some entries. Here's part of my collection...

Right away, I flip to Superman, and it says he could lift one of the Great Pyramids... and that is about 600 million tons. So... a little stronger than Hulk (100 tons)... um. yeah. The entries in the Marvel books are so much richer and more specific (and lean towards trying to sound scientific). The Who's Who books are, on the whole, more hand-wavey. I'm not sure, but I have a 40-year-old memory of reading something where the DC editors and writers wanted more freedom to re-imagine powers as needed, whereas once something was in print for Marvel, fans could immediately start challenging the comic stories vs. the 'facts' of the Handbook - it says Thing can lift 75 tons, but he lifted something that should be over 100 tons, and that's more than he can lift... yaddah yaddah yaddah. Superman can be as weak or strong as the story needs him to be. He can lift a Pyramid one month, and struggle to lift a tank the next, and the writers don't have to justify these against hard numbers that are in print. As a reader, I always wanted the numbers, but now as a sometime writer, I like having a little more wiggle room so that I can challenge heroes within the context of the stories I write. 

And about Stalwart:

- I've added a few more gifts and some minor tweaks to the Companion. It's at 12 pages, and I don't think there's too much more I can add... I want to go through it with a fine-tooth comb, but I might lock it down, add some art, and 'release' it this weekend.

- I hit 50 copies sold today of the core rules for Stalwart! That's a big milestone for me - in less than two weeks, I've sold 50 books, which is a really great number for me. Another very positive review was posted this week as well, so the momentum is there... I hope it keeps building. I think that the potential audience for this is in the low thousands... we'll see. 

- I'm working on some actual play that blurs the lines - it would be an adaptation of a backup story that appeared in Doc's comics... so I'd be playing through the plot of the backup stories, and then my actual play will become 'canon' for what happened in those issues. It's kind of meta, but everything about this is kind of meta, so I guess it fits right in.