FULL BLEED: BUT EVERYTHING THAT I KNOW LIES UNDER

Tricky subject this one, since it wanders over into nostalgia, critical and otherwise. Nostalgia is a poison or the greatest thing ever, blah blah blah. I'm not here to litigate that. Both sides are right. I've seen nostalgia-poisoned dudes do terrible things in order to reshape the world into something more their liking. Hell, we're seeing it happen right now, roll that clock back to 1950. Or 1910. I have no patience for that.

That said, I make no bones about liking what I like, and a lot of that stuff is old. Whether it's for the texture of the thing or association or having a sense of continuity even in popcult garbage that I consume, knowing that the best stuff always came from the margins and only occasionally was it ever deemed a success worthy enough to even exploit much less explore or let breathe. How are we to square that two of the greatest modern horror films, arguably those that opened the doors to various subgenres in a contemporary fashion, Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre only exist and are beloved partially because they were exploited, profits stripped from creators and even in one case the copyright altogether. Yeah, that means that Night of the Living Dead got saw far and wide but Romero and everyone else working on it got royally screwed? But then that work became immortal. Largely the same with TCM. Yeah, exploitation.

So there's talk today about the latest outrage perpetrated on Dungeons and Dragons as a cultural artifact by its parent WOTC or is that Hasbro? I can't keep 'em straight anymore. I guess they're going to AI-ify things or whatever it is they're doing these days to try and squeeze a few more drops of blood out of that particular stone. Lots of people are upset about it and while for me it's upsetting on an abstract level, anything that removes humans and human effort from the equation (and what are these games but human effort and emotion being shaped by a ruleset and random outcomes?) is bad. But it's not personally upsetting to me. I'm going to show you why.

Dungeons and Dragons was a big thing for me. When I was a literal kid. Like at the end of the seventies. Before I was even into comics and only played videogames on a Channel F. It was a big freaking deal. As were the Microgames like Wizards, etc. And, honestly, I spent more time reading the rules and background stuff than I did actually playing the games, which was sessions largely far between. But those books and illustrations and the miniatures? Absolute imagination fuel. In some ways even more so than the reading I was doing, probably because Tolkien is not the easiest thing to read at age 12. No, I was not a genius who immediately got it as a pre-teen. Sorry to disappoint. I tried a couple times before it really took. But then I tried writing a few times over a couple decades before it really took. Maybe I'm just slow.

D&D was a kind of instant adventure setup though. Now, none of it was organically built up. It wasn't a world that made sense except on the most surface of levels. It didn't need to, really. The whole point was to start out with a setting that you could work with and build upon. You didn't have to understand the depths of the economies suggested or church vs secular conflicts etc etc. It was made as a playground. Populated with great monsters. Peppered with crumbling ruins or entries to vast underground vaults. Even featured a crashed spaceship with robots and strange flora and fauna to meet and get destroyed by. It felt like a place where anything could happen. Which is what you want when you're 12.

Or I did. Maybe I'm just weird. Anyways. I spent a lot of time with those books, making up strange combinations or establishing settings, maybe my first fumbling attempts at worldbuilding. I might've even started building stories out of some of these parts, but I wasn't really worried about that. That worry would come later.

In fact, I still have those books. Scope the bottom half of that photo. The hardbacks and a reconstituted collection of the original modules (most of them far more trashed than even my old copies, but have you seen prices for these things in anything above "reader" copies?). They're sitting on a shelf within arm's reach of my desk in my office. I only look at them very occasionally. I can't say the last time I actually tried to read through any of them, even for the amusement value of things. But they're still there.

Now, Dungeons and Dragons might be just a corporate IP that they're running electricity through to make it dance from time to time. But that really doesn't matter to me. Why would it? I haven't played the game in literal decades (I'm old). I don't care about the various wars over editions or systems. I. Do. Not. I got what I wanted, maybe even needed, from things a long time ago. Back in a time where things were not quite so calcified and categorized, and maybe even a littler freer than they are now. After all, the games back then were being made by weirdos (I mean stone weirdos) for other weirdos. They were barely professional, particularly the first first editions. By the time I was getting into it, they did have money for semi-professional artists (and I say this in terms of level of appreciation, not skill. But by the same token, they were making David C. Sutherland III work awfully hard, illustrating half of the Monster Manual it seemed. There was a freedom to things because they weren't putting out a professional product. It was getting to the cusp of it (about the time they could afford color covers on their modules). Still, outsiders though. So anything went.

And even in the decade or so that followed, there was a sense of anything going only with much more polished artwork and writing. But I thought something was lost when the desperate sweatiness got rubbed out of the work. The artwork became slicker, much more appealing, less weird even when it was depicting more outre works and setting like Planescape etc. Still, to me it looked like commercial product. It was well-packaged, but no longer magical. This is not to denigrate the work of those artists and writers from that period (or those after). Simply a personal response. But then I'm pretty sensitive to texture in these things, and I like the weird and bumpy and oddly-proportioned, something with some personality. And it felt like all that got left behind in favor of broader appeal. Or a more unified aesthetic, perhaps.

Little digression here as I'm on the subject. We lost John Blanche this last week. I was a big fan of his work, particularly in the Warhammer 40K setting in the first three editions of the game (though his impact felt like it was waning then.) His was a powerful imagination and sense of design and style. His work was never clean or perfect. Even in the depictions of vast Imperial war machines, you got a sense of a raggedness, of a grandeur that had been lost and would never be recovered no matter how many times it got patched up. His battle scenes were vast and frantic and kinetic, never triumphant. His empire was one that was in decay that was irreversible. It was not one that was going to win, to ultimately declare victory over chaos and the alien and even the fallen among mankind. Which made it interesting.

Warhammer 40K today doesn't have any much of that sense for me. It's all very gleaming and hard-edged, gothic arches and improbable weaponry that is clean and perfect and not feeling like precious heirlooms of a bygone time. It feels like the Imperium of today's 40K will win, is destined to win. Which is, frankly, dull. Unless you like that sort of thing, and then you're in luck because there's a lot of it now (and it's very expensive.)

Blanche's work had personality, even in small vignettes and spot illustrations. Warhammer used to have that as well. And now it's product. (Yes, it was product before, but again, it was produced by sweaty weirdos (complimentary) for sweaty weirdos (ambivalent)).

I have first edition 40K books still on my shelf, right next to the D&D books, truth be told. Yes, there's some second edition books as well, though you could tell by then they were going for a more unified and focused aesthetic, as opposed to the cobbled-together and in many ways ramshackle assemblages of styles and textures. Like, I said. Freer. Taking from more influences, unafraid to put them together in different ways because the work was basically disposable at this point. Yeah, I'm not happy with the economic realities that the creators were dealing with then (or now, having just read up on the whole Obsession production thing, which I suspect is far more common than anyone wants to say). The work that came from it is lively and vibrant and even feverish.

Franchises of all kinds tend to shed what's interesting and stick with what has the most mass appeal, sand down edges, shy away from what was unintentionally brave at the start and lean into these sorts of audience-reinforcing thoughts and themes and often to the detriment of things in the long run. But hey, did you see their third quarter? Yeah, numbers are up up up.

So the franchise steps away from what made the thing special in the first place to just become more of the same. Maybe work is only meant to be special for a short time and it matters when you're first exposed to it. There's some truth to that, nostalgia and all.

Then it should be easier to walk away from things, right? Everyone who's upset about this latest D&D thing can just drop it and find another system. Take what they want from the world and move on. Oh, but then they won't get those internet bells and whistles and game over IP etc. Only you still could. Paper and pencil and dice and skype. It's all right there. You just have to choose your level of engagement and product line you're engaging with. Of course, that's the real issue these days, where consumption is used as a gauge of commitment to whichever popcult thing is yours. Consumption-based-identity. Yeah, that old sack of bones, unfortunately still with us.

That thing that you loved in whatever creation that became a franchise juggernaut is still there. That can't ever be taken from you. No matter what the ownership class does with it, no matter what perversions and transformations and flensings the loved creation undergoes. It's still yours somewhere. For instance, Disney could shutter Star Wars tomorrow or triple down on exploitation of it in the most grotesque fashion imaginable and I'd still be tracking down last bits of Star Wars (not A New Hope, Episode IV) books and magazines and debris from when it was a genuine cultural force and not simply a money mine. I still have those D&D books right there. They're living in my head. So's the 40K stuff. So's even the early Blizzard material I've gathered up. WoW is struggling along on its last legs (I still play) but I don't mind having a record of when it was Special and a new thing and of a completely different texture than it is now.

Don't let the trademark owners take it from you. You don't have to. You can only choose to.

Oh, that other shelf? The one above? Yeah, that's my work. I keep a shelf of the work I've done over the decades in some relatively permanent form right above the stuff that helped serve as a seedling bed for it. (Yes, there's CDs of music I've been involved with and some animations/effects work as well.) There's some SF novels on another shelf, but not so many of those. Several books of comics, mostly Bronze Age Marvel that I keep around even after a pretty thorough purge last year. But yeah, I'm vain enough to have a body of work in sight as a reminder that it all does matter, it does all add up to something, even if I'm the only one to keep track of the legacy. Even if it dies with me and that stuff ends up boxed or landfilled. I'd like to think it wouldn't, but I'm realistic.

So there's a weird tension between this small body I'm working up and the large bodies of the franchises that I've walked away from or only perfunctorily participate in now (The Mandalorian and Grogu was a fun time at the movies, really). That old stuff isn't really an identity, just material reminders of what the work can do at its best. The new stuff is out there and hoping to inspire someone else one day. I keep working on it.

Speaking of which, I've mostly solved the problem of You'll Never Have Time, that being the new Hazeland book. Probably going to be a single book, not two separate stories. I mean, there are two stories but woven together. I hope to have the actual outline (as opposed to a giant collection of possible pieces) by the end of the month. And I've got some edits to do on My Gifts Are Hungry and finalize the cover before I do the page layout and such. And summer's coming, which means pretty soon it'll be too hot to think during daylight hours. So I best get a move on.

Until next time.