X-Men 97 and In Medias Res

So I have had a little time this week - summer school is done, and the girls are at a diving camp on the other side of the country... so I've had some time. I went for the longest bike ride of my life (somewhere around 40 miles), spent a few hours with my friend Bob making characters for a game of Swords and Wizardry that he's starting (and which I am incredibly excited to play in), and watched the first five episodes of X-Men 97.

I've told you about my first comic book character - the Renegade (from like 1984), but I've never told you about the follow-up book. It was called "Phoenix Force", and it was entirely and completely inspired by Byrne's run on Fantastic Four, but it was all X-Men character swipes. The team was led by "Pulsar" (Cyclops with Reed Richards' brains), with a girlfriend called "Mind Girl", and two other characters named "Frostbite" (who happened to be able to make his ice into huge slip and slides, of course) and "Borg" (who looked like Colossus but who had the Thing's "I'm such a monster boo hoo" persona). They lived in the Phoenix Tower and battled a scientist/sorcerer called the Overlord, who was ruling a different Eastern Eurpean nation from a different castle, so therefore a completely original character. 

Yesterday, I'm watching X-Men 97 and halfway hoping the Overlord just made an appearance. Just for a second.

I could write a full review, but I'll just say this - it's everything I could want it to be. The pacing is fantastic, the characters are compelling, the conflicts have high stakes, and the emotional connections I'm building to the story are legit. It's just really, really well done.

But I stopped watching at episode 5 and I'm just going to let it marinade for a bit (maybe until tomorrow if I can help myself)... because I know now that this is the sweet spot. I haven't read an X-Men comic since about 1988, so I know of half the characters just from their images and other things, but know next to nothing about their stories; the characters I do know have grown up a bit since I last saw them. So, it's all new to me. As a result, I was genuinely surprised by the events of episode 5. I thought the show was going one direction, and it zagged on me. Now, I'm sitting here with the world in ruins, the bad guys seemingly too big to overcome, and with no clue what happens next.

It's awesome.

This is how I felt the whole time between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It is how I felt between Infinity War and Endgame. It is how I really, really hope I feel between Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. There's a big difference between feeling as though I'd like to see what happens next and knowing that I NEED to see what happens next. After Jedi, I wanted to see more, but I also understood that if I never saw anything else, that was enough. I was going to be okay. I was not okay after Empire. If Jedi never came out, I would have had significantly more childhood trauma to work through.

And from a gaming perspective, this is where I would want to be as a player. You've set up this rich world with great characters, and then blew the whole thing up. Now, you hand it off to the players and let them figure it out.

I want to move Doc's story forward. Kind of. But there's a part of me (maybe a bigger part) that just wants to sit here (here being 1985), and let things sit where they are. Skye Stalwart has just been rescued from the Null Zone. Meridian is rebuilding. The world has been shaken by the Null Incursion and now the (impending) discovery that there may be aliens among us.

And I've realized what Doc would do next. He would want to destroy Null the Devourer and close all access to the Null Zone forever. It has taken his wife, it took his daughter's childhood, and it took the peace and security in Meridian that he had fought for years to maintain. I could see him being somewhat obsessed with this, and I could see this taking him away from earth for a 12-issue run in his own book. Earth has just awakened to the presence of aliens, the Hall of Victory is closed, and the Victory Legion is scattered to the four winds.

This is where the game just sits. April, 1985: The Mighty Doc Stalwart #265 ("Turning the Page", where Doc sets off on a solo mission into the Null Zone to destroy it forever), Skye Stalwart: The Girl Who Fell From Earth #1, and Stalwart Team Up #8 (which was a bi-monthly series at the time). I know that this is what I have room to 'backfill' to. I keep thinking of the 'back issue bin' of expansions where I do for Doc's older stories what I have started to do with Team Up - tell the story and then stat it out in game terms. I've already written a pretty cool Doc Stalwart invading Simian City story that goes somewhere in the continuity, but I haven't figured it out yet - but it's a chance to flesh out the city in more detail, outline some of Simian Prime's tech, and add to that facet of the world a little bit. 

Just for reference, these actual books came out in April 1985: Secret Wars #12, Crisis on Infinite Earths #1. So, it's a good place to sit for a while. Amazing Spider-Man 260 (with one of my favorite covers of all time), had just come out in January. This is my 'golden age' of comics collecting - I'm getting back issues as much as I'm getting the new issues, absorbing all of this story at once. I remember I was reading the reprint series of the original Amazing Spider-Man books (Marvel Tales) while also collecting the ongoing Amazing SM and Peter Parker books, and loving how long and rich the history of this character was. It was later into Byrne's run on FF, Spidey was still dealing with the drama of the alien symbiote costume, and all was right (and by that I mean wrong) with the world.

When I launched Stalwart only a few months ago (but what in some ways feels a lifetime), I did so under the belief that I'd start to roll the clock forward in this world. But I want the game to feel like I did collecting both the Amazing Spider-Man and his reprint book at the same time. 

   

ALL of this got me thinking that it might be time to start putting EVERYTHING together in one big book. It would be all of the Stalwart game stuff I've released, some notes I've got going for GM advice and expanding/clarifying how to use Hero Points (Cyclops using his consussive blasts to fall safetly in Episode 1 was a great example of how I want hero points to work - you use your power in some very stunt-like way that you cannot just do all the time - you create a cool storytelling moment for your character without suddenly amping up their powers exponentially). I've got SO much stuff at this point that getting it all under one set of covers, unifying and simplifying it, and putting all of the miscellaneous references (and a lot of stuff from the Stalwart Age blog that nobody has ever seen but which fleshes out the game world in so many ways) into this one book seems like it might be worth the effort. 

And this time, Doc Stalwart finally ends up on the cover. For a game centered on him, I'm kind of surprised that he's never been the cover character for any of the game releases... and I think it's called Stalwart '85. Just 'cause.