DOOMED WIZARD DIARIES

Here's more evidence that I thought I knew what I was doing. Back in '88, I decided to take a crack at turning the Valiant Four into a comic book series. Mini comics, ashcans and fanzines (this was before the Al Gore changed the publishing world forever with the internet) cost about a fifty cents a piece to produce, so it just seemed like a cheap way to get my stories out there. I had recently written "Lawyers, Guns & Money," what I thought was my best story so far*, so I decided to illustrate that one first, rather than go back to square one. I roughed it out to be about thirty pages long and managed to complete almost all of it before common sense took over and I shelved the project. Looking back over the pages, which I unearthed after my first V4 post, they're very indicative of the late 1980s and were fun to read, though a bit humbling, so I've decided to post them here on a semi-regular basis, starting with the cover below. *With apologies to the...

Egad! Awhile back, my friend Chuck uncovered some pretty incriminating material that I did over two decades ago and the masochist in me just feels the need to share. Pictured below is the first issue of a series of short stories I wrote revolving around my friends and I...sort of. Back in the fall of '86, my friend Steve wrote a short story about us rescuing my parents from neo-Nazis (for what reason exactly I'm no longer sure). I was so caught up in the idea that I, with Steve's blessing, started churning out a number of sequels, adding a bit of a science fiction angle to the stories. There was an 18' foot tall female robot in one, for example. Eventually I went back and tweaked Steve's original story "The Valiant Four" to coincide with the science fiction angle of my stories. Instead of neo-Nazis kidnapping my parents, it was an aged Nazi scientist who found out my friends and I had found his secret formula for creating "super soldiers."...

It's been awhile since I blogged regularly, so I'm trying to get the ball rolling again. What better (easier) way to get started than with a big ol' phamily photo dump? The perfect match: Karen's butt & daddy's face. Busted! Karen's first french fry. We can call them that again, right? Not Freedom Fries? Batgirl's secret identity revealed?! Sleepy Karen Arlaux on www.barbie.com "Time for me to slide." The lesser-known REO song. Atticus reading Spiderman. Karen just watchin' the world go by. Atticus at 2009 Preschool Graduation! Jeep & Karen at graduation ceremony. Reward for a job well done! Atticus at the park in his Green Lantern costume under a Spiderman tank top. It's what happens when we let him dress himself. That does it for this time around, boppers. Keep it here for more whackiness!

It was a battle royal last Saturday night as some friends came over to help me test out some of my new rules for character generation and combat for my super hero role-playing game. Some of you may recall that awhile back I was testing the rules to a fantasy RPG after being inspired by "Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell." After a few game sessions the whole thing just kinda fizzled for me. As I've been a gamer since '81, I've just become burned out running fantasy games. But since I've yet to play a super hero game I really liked, I decided to adapt the rules for my fantasy game into a super hero game. The result has been spectacular thus far and the rules are complete enough, after much revamping, that I felt it was time to launch a full-on campaign. Here's how it all went down: The year is 1981... Three down-on-their-luck super villains, Stinger, Thermo & Big Horn (tentative names on those last two) decide they're just tired of getting bea...