Strange Visitors
Back in April I posted an idea for a game:
"Plus, I've had another idea kicking around my mind for a game inspired by things like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. You play poor Jewish men living in a cold, grey ghetto in New York City, circa 1938. To work your way through life, you create technicolor fantasies of superheroes and science fiction aliens and horror stories, but these are reflections on your real life. The pulp stories and comics your characters contain aspects of their life: the evil jungle king of an adventure story is played by the player who also plays the slumlord threatening to evict the writer PC, and in writing about this slumlord, the writer can change his character and his circumstances."
Though I haven't mentioned it since then here, it's been kicking around the back of my head. The working title, Strange Visitors is, of course, a reference back to the opening monologue of the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons.
Primary Inspirations:
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. After rereading this book, I'm pretty sure that you couldn't make a roleplaying game out of it directly, but you could use it as a primary inspiration for a game, much like D&D uses the Lord of the Rings, Unknown Armies uses Tim Powers or Vampire uses (used?) Anne Rice. Kavalier and Clay touches on all sorts of cool things to be used in a game.
Jones, Gerard. Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. Is very much like the non-fiction version of Kavalier and Clay. It outlines the lives of a variety of Golden Age comic book writers, and pays attention to the environment they were in and the psychological drives that led them to create four color gods.
Seagle, Steven. It's a Bird.... A comic book writer is assigned to write Superman, and hates the idea. He simultaneously is watching his family die from a genetic disease he may have as well. His issues with writing Superman parallel his refusal to face the disease and deal with his family problems.
Secondary Inspirations:
Asimov, Isaac, ed. Before the golden Age. Which is both a collection of 1930s pulp sci fi and an autobiography about growing up a Jewish child of immigrants in Brooklyn. Either one of those by itself would put the book on this list, but both is a double whammy. Seeing the two interwine and how the science fiction affected the growing up part makes the book even better source material for this game.
Baker, Meguey. 1001 nights. A roleplaying game where stories within the story are used to put forward unspoken desires? Stuff to learn and think about here, once the flavor is removed from the game.
Baker, Vincent. Dogs in the Vineyard. The first time we played Dogs, one of the first conflicts was the question "Will I show real love for the heathens, or cruel, obviously fake love?" which was an internal conflict externalized as a montage of flashbacks that influenced the character upbringing. This got me thinking about how to address internal conflicts in a roleplaying game.
Chabon, Michael. various essays on his website, especially this one and this one but any of the essays about comic books, comic book characters or genre fiction and/or science fiction are golden.
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. The Godfather: Part II. The parts about Vito Corleone immigrating to America, anyway. This game would be all about being new immigrants, or the children of immigrants, so you should consider how difficult the life of a new immigrant could be at the beginning of the 20th century, whterht Italian (as in the movie) or eastern European Jews (as in this game). Plus, as Men of Tomorrow shows, various organized crime groups often had ties to early comics publishers and provided fodder for "true crime" comics.
Czege, Paul. My Life With Master. It's really less a game about struggling wih the Master, and more about your character's internal struggle to build up the courage to face the Master. The game I'm imagining currently is like a MLwM game where the Master is a portion of the character's own mind.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Eisner was the very first person to recognize comics as a legitimate artform, and also the only successful independent artist of the Golden Age. This is him explaining how comics work. Probably Eisner's Shop Talk would be even more applicable to this game here.
Gilliam, Terry, dir. Brazil. My all time favorite movie. In it, Sam Lowry lives a gray faceless life in a city full of skyscrapers, typewriters and fedoras. At night, he dreams of being a cool hero who can fly and fights the Forces of Darkness to rescue a beautiful girl. If Sam only wrote out his dreams, this would be in the primary inspiration section.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. Understanding is about comics as an artform, and should be mandatory reading for everyone, even outside of this game. Reinventing is more about the business of comics publishing, or at least those are the relevant parts for our purposes. Having a vague idea how comics publishing works would be useful to run or play this game.
Psychonauts. The videogame that provided some initial inspiration, and is all about externalizing internal conflict.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Less the James Thurber short story, more the Danny Kaye comedy. Which is probably more due to my love for The Court Jester than any quality or relevance. But it's a story about externalizing a guy's desires and fears in the form of pulp stories. In the movie, all his imagining eventually gives him the ammunition to take actual action.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A survivor's Tale. Which is a completely different intersection of World War II, the art of comics, and being Jewish, but good enough to be relevant and important.
Werthram, Frederic. The Seduction of the Innocent. For all your concerned parent group NPC needs. This suggests an entire alternate setting for the game, circa 1953 when Werthram was diatribing against comics, Congress was subpoenaing people and superhero sales were way down, plus all the standard 1950s America oppression of suburbian life features.
Anything else?
Old science fiction and pulp heroes, obviously. I have not yet checked out, but probably should The Escapists, a comic book sequel to Kavalier and Clay wherein modern comic writers are trying to ressurect The Escapist as a comic within the comic. Probably books on Jewish history, New York City history, and World War II, particularly from the homefront. Somewhere I've got a book which is the front page of each issue of the new York Times throughout World War II, which is neat and could be useful to give a sense what people back home knew and what else was going on at the time.
"Plus, I've had another idea kicking around my mind for a game inspired by things like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. You play poor Jewish men living in a cold, grey ghetto in New York City, circa 1938. To work your way through life, you create technicolor fantasies of superheroes and science fiction aliens and horror stories, but these are reflections on your real life. The pulp stories and comics your characters contain aspects of their life: the evil jungle king of an adventure story is played by the player who also plays the slumlord threatening to evict the writer PC, and in writing about this slumlord, the writer can change his character and his circumstances."
Though I haven't mentioned it since then here, it's been kicking around the back of my head. The working title, Strange Visitors is, of course, a reference back to the opening monologue of the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons.
Primary Inspirations:
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. After rereading this book, I'm pretty sure that you couldn't make a roleplaying game out of it directly, but you could use it as a primary inspiration for a game, much like D&D uses the Lord of the Rings, Unknown Armies uses Tim Powers or Vampire uses (used?) Anne Rice. Kavalier and Clay touches on all sorts of cool things to be used in a game.
Jones, Gerard. Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. Is very much like the non-fiction version of Kavalier and Clay. It outlines the lives of a variety of Golden Age comic book writers, and pays attention to the environment they were in and the psychological drives that led them to create four color gods.
Seagle, Steven. It's a Bird.... A comic book writer is assigned to write Superman, and hates the idea. He simultaneously is watching his family die from a genetic disease he may have as well. His issues with writing Superman parallel his refusal to face the disease and deal with his family problems.
Secondary Inspirations:
Asimov, Isaac, ed. Before the golden Age. Which is both a collection of 1930s pulp sci fi and an autobiography about growing up a Jewish child of immigrants in Brooklyn. Either one of those by itself would put the book on this list, but both is a double whammy. Seeing the two interwine and how the science fiction affected the growing up part makes the book even better source material for this game.
Baker, Meguey. 1001 nights. A roleplaying game where stories within the story are used to put forward unspoken desires? Stuff to learn and think about here, once the flavor is removed from the game.
Baker, Vincent. Dogs in the Vineyard. The first time we played Dogs, one of the first conflicts was the question "Will I show real love for the heathens, or cruel, obviously fake love?" which was an internal conflict externalized as a montage of flashbacks that influenced the character upbringing. This got me thinking about how to address internal conflicts in a roleplaying game.
Chabon, Michael. various essays on his website, especially this one and this one but any of the essays about comic books, comic book characters or genre fiction and/or science fiction are golden.
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. The Godfather: Part II. The parts about Vito Corleone immigrating to America, anyway. This game would be all about being new immigrants, or the children of immigrants, so you should consider how difficult the life of a new immigrant could be at the beginning of the 20th century, whterht Italian (as in the movie) or eastern European Jews (as in this game). Plus, as Men of Tomorrow shows, various organized crime groups often had ties to early comics publishers and provided fodder for "true crime" comics.
Czege, Paul. My Life With Master. It's really less a game about struggling wih the Master, and more about your character's internal struggle to build up the courage to face the Master. The game I'm imagining currently is like a MLwM game where the Master is a portion of the character's own mind.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Eisner was the very first person to recognize comics as a legitimate artform, and also the only successful independent artist of the Golden Age. This is him explaining how comics work. Probably Eisner's Shop Talk would be even more applicable to this game here.
Gilliam, Terry, dir. Brazil. My all time favorite movie. In it, Sam Lowry lives a gray faceless life in a city full of skyscrapers, typewriters and fedoras. At night, he dreams of being a cool hero who can fly and fights the Forces of Darkness to rescue a beautiful girl. If Sam only wrote out his dreams, this would be in the primary inspiration section.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. Understanding is about comics as an artform, and should be mandatory reading for everyone, even outside of this game. Reinventing is more about the business of comics publishing, or at least those are the relevant parts for our purposes. Having a vague idea how comics publishing works would be useful to run or play this game.
Psychonauts. The videogame that provided some initial inspiration, and is all about externalizing internal conflict.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Less the James Thurber short story, more the Danny Kaye comedy. Which is probably more due to my love for The Court Jester than any quality or relevance. But it's a story about externalizing a guy's desires and fears in the form of pulp stories. In the movie, all his imagining eventually gives him the ammunition to take actual action.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A survivor's Tale. Which is a completely different intersection of World War II, the art of comics, and being Jewish, but good enough to be relevant and important.
Werthram, Frederic. The Seduction of the Innocent. For all your concerned parent group NPC needs. This suggests an entire alternate setting for the game, circa 1953 when Werthram was diatribing against comics, Congress was subpoenaing people and superhero sales were way down, plus all the standard 1950s America oppression of suburbian life features.
Anything else?
Old science fiction and pulp heroes, obviously. I have not yet checked out, but probably should The Escapists, a comic book sequel to Kavalier and Clay wherein modern comic writers are trying to ressurect The Escapist as a comic within the comic. Probably books on Jewish history, New York City history, and World War II, particularly from the homefront. Somewhere I've got a book which is the front page of each issue of the new York Times throughout World War II, which is neat and could be useful to give a sense what people back home knew and what else was going on at the time.