The
Collected Adventures of Phil and Dixie What’s New #1
I’m a fan of Phil
Foglio’s work. I used to have his Myth Adventures adaptation. (What did I do with that? I continually shocked remembering the cool
things I got rid of and the crap I’ve kept.)
I haven’t kept up with his latest online strip, Girl Genius, but it’s very
good-looking. Of course, one of the
highlights of old issues of Dragon
magazine, was Phil’s What’s New
comic.
I’d seen this album advertised somewhere long ago and desperately
wished I could obtain it. And here it
was! It was just ran into it in a dollar
box amongst a bunch of random recent independent titles. I could scarcely believe I was holding this
unicorn in my hands. This might have
been the first thing I pulled out from those 12 boxes of comics I was thumbing
through, which no doubt influenced me to keep going through them.
This is a normal-sized comic, square bound, 48 pages, and
printed on rather thick paper with a very durable cover. It was $6 when released and printed in
1991. This surprised me, because all of
the material inside is from the 80’s and I’m sure I saw this advertised before
the 90’s. In any case, this would have
been an expensive buy back then. These
comics were originally published in a magazine.
I’d sort of imagined this was in an old graphic novel-sized album
format.
As for the comics, it starts with a new eight-page color
story that shows Phil and Dixie’s origin story, which is very cute. It then goes into a short black and white
section, which was how the comic was originally published. The rest of the strips are in color.
And I’m kind of dancing around it here. The comics aren’t that great. I have a feeling Foglio himself would say, “Yeah,
the comedy is a bit rough here. I’ve
done much better writing and visual storytelling since.” The artwork is fine for comedy, but other
than the Sex and D&D running gag
(which always teased, but never paid off), the jokes aren’t that great. Part of this comes from Phil himself saying
on the back page that he was making up the strips without actually playing the
game. It shows at times.
What’s
New
did set the standard for comics in Dragon
magazine. It was always pretty funny and
looked good. I assume Volume 2 of this
would have some of the better material that I remember. At some point, Phil must have at least
cracked open a D&D book for new ideas.
The most inspired running gag was the evil Dixie storyline where she
changed alignments. Those strips were
classic.
In sum, this was a disappointment. Don’t purchase this at collector’s prices, but
it’s worth it at much less than the cover price, at least for historical
value.
Munchkin
#8
Munchkin is a
popular fantasy card game, which I haven’t played, but I’d be more willing to
try it than getting involved with the cardboard crack that is Magic: The Gathering. (And I have way too much pride to ever be
caught dead playing Pokemon. Well, unless Dizzykitten wants me to play with her, but I think she only
collects the cards. I don’t think she
plays.)
In any case, I decided to try the comic, thinking it might be kind of light-hearted fun in a fantasy vein. The artwork was appropriately cartoony and reasonably appealing. Unfortunately, the two stories (one continuing, one standalone) were really simplistic and not that funny. There’s only two characters and neither are developed well enough to provide much comedy by themselves.
On the back page, there’s an actual card for game use, Baby Boomer. If you bought another issue, you might get a
different card. At $4 an issue, that
would be pretty expensive. I also like the
ad for the figure. It’s pretty well
done. If card series artist, John Kovalic (of Dork Tower), were doing this series, I’m pretty sure it would be
great, but he’s a busy guy.
Pathfinder
Worldscape #5
Paizo’s
Pathfinder made a conscious effort to create iconic characters to represent
their RPG line. They created the notion
of iconics during their stewardship of Dungeon
and Dragon magazines, but they never
named them or statted them out. Now,
they have characters can be used in various media to promote the game,
including comic books.
This issue was part of a mini-series featuring the
Pathfinder iconics along with Red Sonja,
John Carter of Mars, and Tarzan.
I’m still trying to figure out why or how Marvel didn’t reacquire the
rights to Red Sonja when they got Conan
back. Unlike their own superhero comics,
Marvel has done a good job making Conan comics.
(I’ll be reviewing a Conan comic in the next part of this Holiday
review.) Dynamite is nonetheless the current publisher of the warrior redhead. I haven’t noticed any Tarzan comics from
them, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
I also haven’t seen any John Carter comics, but it’s hard to miss the Dejah Thoris comics they’ve been
putting out.
This issue does contain a battle map with a poster on the
reverse, neither of which are all that great, if not worthless. The inside artwork isn’t as good as the
cover. I do not appreciate the artistic
choice of Red Sonja’s appearance in the pages.
She has this wild-haired Irish berserker look. While Sonja is a Robert E. Howard character, the look of the character was developed
by Marvel (and had pretty much nothing to do with Howard’s original
character). I’m kind of surprised
Dynamite can still use the chain mail bikini.
I’d almost say the big hair look was done to make her 25% different to
avoid copyright issues, but she has the classic look on the cover.
Coming in with Issue #5, I have no idea what the story
is. It wasn’t very engaging, in spite of
the all-star cast (though Tarzan doesn’t really show up in this issue). Two of the female iconics are lesbians
apparently, as is the villain. Well,
that’s all I got out of this. There are
stats for Tar Tarkas, the Green
Martian, in the back. That would be for
the previous version of Pathfinder now, and I seriously doubt any DM would let
you bring this character to their table to play with.
That’s three more strikes.
Let’s see what’s next.
Part 4
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