Wherein I Talk About Batman

Batman wears two hats. The first is the hat the rabid fans put on him, where he is a god pretending to be a human. His powers come in the form of resourcefulness and omniscience, rather than thunderbolts, but he's still a god. That's the version we saw in Grant Morrison's run on Justice League, and it's the version we see in latter-day Frank 'Unedited' Miller's work.

The other hat Batman wears is the hat where, for all of his crazy skillz, he is just a human being. He can be caught off-guard by other normal people. Hell, he can be defeated by other normal people, because even a punk-ass can get lucky.

The most successful interpretations of the Batman let him wear both hats.

The Dark Knight Returns is awesome. Everyone remembers it for the story where Batman holds his own in single combat against Superman (without using Kryptonite for most of it). It also includes a story where Batman is defeated in single combat by a non-super teenage lunatic bodybuilder. There's no contradiction, either. Those two stories handily fit in the same volume, and no-one cries foul.

Part of what helps is the frequent glimpses you get inside the Batman's head during the whole four-issue run. Even as he's pulling off his crazy badass nonsense, Batman's inner monologue is frequently noting how much of what he gets away with is luck, or how desperately he has to work at it all. It gives him a kind of vulnerability that is necessary. That the art mercilessly depicts the potato mash that is made of his face or ribs or whatever when he screws up doesn't hurt on that score either.

The Dini/Timm animated version of the Batman is similarly layered. He can take on a swarm of super-androids in one episode, and struggle against a few normal thugs in the next; and it all feels perfectly coherent.

Some people like Batman because he exceeds the human. Others like him because he doesn't. The most compelling versions somehow reconcile both.

Post-resurrective Counselling

I'm a fan of Order of the Stick, which for those of you who don't know is a D&D-based webcomic which is both funny and dramatic.

Anyway, in one of the most recent published compilations of OotS, Rich asks the sorts of questions one rarely hears about characters that have been brought back from the dead. 'If my corpse had dirt inside it, is that dirt still there?' 'Did my intestinal bacteria come back too, and if not, how do I get more?'

In another webcomic which is suspiciously D&D-like, called Zogonia, one of the characters returns from death to a body that is free of all the abuse he has inflicted on it over his life. Teeth he lost in a bar fight are back, all his ugly battle scars are gone, and so forth. One can assume his lungs are now restored from the years of hobgob pipeweed abuse. He immediately refuses to go into battle, because he doesn't want to damage his newly-restored skin.

Back in OotS, the resurrected character has a little trouble resuming his material life after months as a disembodied spirit. Specifically, he needs a reminder that movement is achieved by the use of legs, instead of gentle force of will. One imagines his re-introduction to the concept of physical discomfort was just as hilarious.

I think in an appropriately postmodern version of a setting with resurrection, there might well be facilities to help people through the difficult adjustment period. Yogurt shops for the intestinal bacteria. Tattoo parlors to get your essential art replaced. Helpful bullet points to remind you of all the foibles of the flesh. Maybe even a guy who gives you a little wound, so you aren't paralyzed by the need to keep your newfound perfection intact.

Two Great Tastes

Maybe actually daily updates will come with more practice. Who can say?

Y'know, Wizards of the Coast owns D&D and MTG. Those are their two best-known properties.

How the hell have they not combined them yet?

You cannot tell me people would not jump at the chance to play in Alara or Ravnica; or even Kamigawa and Dominaria. Where are those sourcebooks? They have all the art and flavor text they could possibly need done already.

I mean, I'd like them to hold off on doing such a thing until the system they're supporting isn't ass, but still.

Inaugural Post

Well, I was going to start this journal off with a long post about narrative predetermination in games, but I've just come back from out of state and that's too much like work. So instead you get what I'm sure will be a recurring feature, a hopefully amusing musing from my various geekeries.

In the Warhammer 40K setting...

It occurs to me that some of my readers may not know of the glorious madness that is Warhammer 40,000. For those people, a short description...

It is the year 40,000 A.D., and the universe is a horrible place. Humanity has had its ups and downs over the eons, and right now it is so down that it is presented as the Holy Roman Empire... iiinnn spaaccce! Between now and then, there was a period called the (Dark) Age of Technology when humanity reached dizzying heights of science and engineering, but there have been a couple of declines and falls since. Most of the knowledge has been lost, but the tech was durable and idiot-proof enough that quite a lot of it is still in use thousands of years later. Also, humanity is beset from without by many horrible alien enemies and from within by heretics, madmen, and traitors. The Imperium of Man maintains a vast and poorly-coordinated military to fight these threats. It is largely a pastiche of features from 2000 AD Magazine and is presented both straight as a horror setting and as a knowing parody of itself.

Where was I? Oh yes...

In the Warhammer 40K setting, the most common weapon in use by the human military is a thing called a Lasgun. As its name implies, it is a gun that fires a laser beam. The weapon is not especially effective, but it is very economical as it needs no ammunition. Like all things of value, the Lasgun was invented in the Age of Technology and most of how it works is now forgotten, but the factory-cathedrals keep making them and the soldiers keep shooting them and getting new ones when they break.

A Lasgun draws its power from a power pack, and when this pack runs low on juice (after 20-30 shots), the beam ceases to be strong enough to burn, but can still be used to dazzle enemies and signal allies. The power pack can be recharged in any number of ways, from leaving it out in the sun, to putting it in a campfire, to shooting it with another Lasgun. That last one is the problem, because apparently shooting a Lasgun with another Lasgun will fully recharge the target, providing energy for 20-30 more Lasgun shots and violating the law of conservation of energy pretty badly.

Now, given that this is a setting where people fly spaceships through the afterlife, you might think I'm taking this a bit seriously. Bear with me.

What if what the Imperium calls a Lasgun isn't a weapon? What if the power pack is nuclear or similar, and doesn't actually need recharging? What if it's just a signal flare, and the things they do to the power pack to 'recharge' it just overheat it so it has to vent power through the signal beam, incidentally weaponizing it?

That would make a terrible kind of sense, in a 40K sort of way.

It would also explain a lot of the weapons of the Imperium of Man, if they were all hilarious kludges of better but non-weapon technology. I mean, the Plasma Gun tries to kill its user roughly once every six times it fires, so I suspect it's just a power conduit that got drafted at some point. Chainsword? That's a highly-advanced hedge trimmer. Meltagun? Microwave.

The best part is that even though WH40K humankind is reduced to fighting with overclocked antique kitchen hardware, they're remarkably competitive with the actual weapons used by the various highly advanced alien species that they have to fight. So where are the actual weapons from that era? How bad-ass must that stuff be?