Dear Sweet Lord

OK, so my schedule this week just got totally f'ed up beyond all belief, so sorry True Believers, I've gotta drop this on ya now.

I just had to do this. I did.

But I can't just drop the Feared Friday (Now Sunday) Post on y'all without some sort of heads up. It would be cruel on so many levels. So without further ado, I now bundle up all the credibility and goodwill I've ever had on the comicsblogoweb (shaddup!), tie it up in a basket, and dangle it by a single thread over a pit of alligator ninja pirate robots.

In a word: gulp.

***GEEK ENGINES WARMING UP***

Before City of Heroes, City of Villains, HeroClix, Vs., or all that, way back in the halcyon days of 1986, outside of a few (mostly crappy) video games your choices for comics-related gaming were limited.

Unless, of course, you were able to grab a few of your close comic friends and sit down for a good old fashioned dice-rollin' stat-keepin' game of Marvel Super Heroes, the official Role-Playing Game of the Marvel Universe.

I was not "cool" enough to have friends that would play this game. The jury's still out on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"DAMN YOU, MARVEL!" I shouted at the heavens time and again. "How on Earth can I enjoy comic-related gaming goodness on those frequent occasions when I find myself wishing I had a few comic geek friends conveniently around in a gaming mood?"

(I was quite the verbose 11 year old.)

And yea, verily, Marvel heard my prayers and shouts and delivered unto us:

***GEEK ENGINES IGNITION***

Marvel Super Heroes Gamebooks.

Finally! An opportunity to star in the comic adventures of my favorite heroes! In convenient paperback book format!

Oh man, did I love these things.

The idea was simple: it's a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but with more math.

Each one of these dandies (there were 8 published, I believe) took you through the adventure of a certain hero; Spider-Man, Captain America, The Thing, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Wolverine, etc. You got a "character bookmark" included with each one that was absolutely indispensable, for reasons that will become apparent.

For example, check out the bookmark from Daredevil: Guilt By Association.

I love how after all the "standard" hero stats (Fighting, Agility, etc.) they always threw in some "hero-specific" stats that absolutely no other hero would even think of getting rated in. Like on Daredevil's character you've got "Agility With Baton". Captain America had "Shield". You think Spider-Man sat around worrying about his "Shield" rating? Hell, no. He was too busy pumping up "Webbing" or "Angst".

(Side note: not having ever played the full-on MSH roleplaying game, I never knew what kind of scale these numbers were on. All I knew was that higher was better, and if Daredevil rates a "15" on "Agility With Baton", then most of us normal folk probably rate a "-23".)

(Additional side note: I'd like to think that if I had a MSH Character Bookmark of Myself, that I'd have skills like "Eating Tacos: 14" or "Napping: 11".)

***GEEK ENGINES AT FULL THROTTLE***

The mechanics were simple: Read a passage in the book, roll a die, fudge the numbers according to what the book told you, turn to the next passage. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Another neat feature was Karma points, that were basically a form of sanctioned cheating with moral repercussions. You had a set number of Karma points that you could use to affect die rolls, add health points, etc. Being smart and helping people meant this:

Doing un-Presidential things like this:



Usually ended up like this:



It's a neat little device to keep you in the "Hero" mood, assuming that you were still actually playing by the rules by halfway through the book.

Oh, did I mention the damn die-rolling and statkeeping and erasing got incredibly tedious after a while?

See, let's say you rolled a 4, added your "Psyche" stat which made it 8. But the passage would say something like, "Make a Psyche Check. If it's 9 or less, turn to 123. Otherwise, turn to 456."

Higher is always better, right? So you just knew that if you kept that 8 you rolled then the next passage would say "Your head has exploded. You are dead", or something like that. And then you'd get pissed, because you totally forgot to keep a finger on the original passage so you could just go back and roll again and pretend that everything was copacetic, but dammit now you've lost your place and HAVE to start the damn book all over again! ARGH!

And who wants that?

This is where the bookmark became truly indispensable: cheating death. You could just go back, pretend that friggin' lying die roll never happened, and continue on your merry way, because you are sure as shit NOT spending another 45 minutes flipping back and forth through passages you've already read just to get here again, nosiree.

The really neat thing about these books is that every now and then it really did feel like the comic. Check this shit out:



Holy shit! Viper's hypnotized Captain America! I am so screwed!

Reading them nowadays is like being transported back into Marvel Comics circa 1987 or so; for example, in the Cap book the Avengers making guest appearances are Wasp, Namor, and Captain Marvel. Peter Parker isn't married. Wolverine's not a complete dick. And by and large it's all straightforward superhero storytelling, part novel, part geekazoid dice rolling.

The really strange thing? I set out to dig these up to make fun of them (and me) in sort of a 'ha ha, look at what I thought was the shee-ot back in the day' kind of way. But take away the admittedly silly die rolls and stats and just read it through as a Choose-Yer-Own-Adventure, and...they're surprisingly decent. It's like finding two or three old-school Marvel comics in a quarter box; the purple prose is kept to a minimum (mostly), and the stories typically keep everyone in character (by 1987 standards)! (They're kind of like Anti-Bendis Serums.)

I wish I could say more good things about the art. But I can't. It's...OK, but by and large it was clearly an afterthought. Every now and then you had some cool half-page black and white panels describing a passage (and often spoiling ones you hadn't read yet...argh....), but mostly it was repeated images to break up blocks of text, like this:



No, I don't know what the significance of the gun is either, unless it's the author exhorting us to keep reading the book or die.

Peter David actually wrote one of these things, a Spider-Man one called "As the World Burns". Computer game designer Warren Spector wrote The Thing: One Thing After Another. I am actively hunting for these books, like a mongoose stalking its prey. But all the authors generally did a pretty good job with these.

The real innovation in MSH gamebook design came with the X-Men book, where you got to play as FOUR DIFFERENT X-MEN! It was shit-hot when I was reading these as a kid, and on Sunday I'll lead you all through the wonder that is "An X-Cellent Death", where we'll play as Not-A-Dick Wolverine, Mohawked Storm, Plot-Device Nightcrawler, and Punk-Rock-Hair Rogue! It's such an odd book. You'll have to see for yourself. It's probably the best example of the coolness and the geekiness and the just plain weirdness that these books offered.

(No, I won't actually be blogging the whole book. That would be torture on levels you can't even do on the Internet. But I'll hit the, erm, high points.)

So stop by Sunday; I'll bring the bookmark, kay? Hey, where's everybody going? Guys? Guys?!?