Uncle Quark’s Sunday School

Sep02
by on September 2, 2014 at 8:24 pm
Posted In: Pluggage

So what do I do when I’m not drawing Martian Cat-Dudes and plucky Girl Reporters in Skimpy Outfits? Would you believe I write about obscure stories from the Bible?

I’ve always had a fondness for the weird, little-known stories in the Bible; the ones that get overlooked and the ones you don’t usually hear in Sunday School. I suppose it’s the confluence of being a Pastor’s Kid, liking storytelling, and liking just plain weird stuff. But a couple months ago, I started a blog which I titled, “The Ones You Didn’t Hear in Sunday School” for stories like these.

Everybody’s heard of the story of David and Goliath, or Jonah and the Whale, or the Parable of the Good Samaritan; but how many of us remember the story of Abigail and her Really Stupid Husband, or the Daughters of Zelophehad, or the Parable of the Sleazy Embezzler?

Some of these stories are overlookes because they’re less flashy than the famous ones, or because they don’t have simple moral lessons, or because they have sex in them, or sometimes because they’re just plain weird. But for better or worse, they are part of our Western religious heritage.

Stop by and take a look and see what weirdness you can find.

The Ones You Didn’t Hear In Sunday School

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Visiting Dark Redemption

May24
by on May 24, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Posted In: Gaming, Pluggage

strephon

I started a blog several years ago titled “Cold Steel and India Ink” which I originally intended to be about the role-playing games I was running. As it turned out, my write-ups didn’t keep up with my games and so I quickly let it slide. Then after a while I was using the site to archive some gaming-related pieces I wrote for another blog, (now sadly gone) titled Pop Thought. Unfortunately I didn’t have many of those intact as most of them were devoured in a seige by Chinese hackers which horribly mangled thePop Thought website.

About a year ago, I decided to revive Cold Steel and India Ink to host another old project of mine. This one, too, is gaming related.

A friend of ours named James Crowther, whom my wife and I met on a Harry Potter fansite under the name of Lord Jex Featherbunny, started an online game he called “Dark Redemption.” It was a wainscot fantasy set in a medium-sized city in Britain where creatures of the supernatural lurk behind the modern facade. Jex’s original plan was that the game would take place on two levels: The characters would bounce off each other on a Chat Room format, and they would also each have an online diary in which the players would record their other adventures.

As things went, the live interactive aspect of the game never really clicked, but the individual journals, taken together, sort of formed something like a shared-world novel.

I was rather pleased with my own character’s adventures, and so I decided to take his story and serialize it on the blog.

It’s a somewhat rambling thing, as stories written in serial form often are; and I never actually finished it. I hope to extend the story once I finish posting the material already written and maybe even conclude it.

The first chapter of Dark Redemption can be found here

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Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Apr05
by on April 5, 2014 at 8:29 pm
Posted In: Books, Pluggage

iconconsuite color

It occurs to me that I really ought to mention some of the other projects that I’ve been working on when I’m not drawing Martian Cat-Men.

I’m a fairly regular poster on the political website Daily Kos.  Occasionally, my posts are political, as one might figure; but for the past few years I’ve also been writing a weekly series on my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels for the site’s Readers & Book Lover’s Group.   My Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club diaries for the most part have been detailed examinations of some of the great science fiction and fantasy from Jules Verne to Douglas Adams.

Currently I’m taking a break from the series, but you can find a listing of my SF/F Diaries at my Nifty Sci-Fi/Fantasy Index.

And I have cross-posted several of my pieces at Poplitiko, a blog maintained by my good friend, poet and Minnesotan Alex Ness.

Share and Enjoy!

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Steampunk G.I. Joe

Mar08
by on March 8, 2014 at 6:35 pm
Posted In: Gaming

ccj duke

One of the things I did at the Fire & Ice gaming convention last month was run a GURPS game based on the old G.I. Joe cartoon but reto-fitted into the Steampunk Era.  In some ways the game was challenging; nearly all the names are based on jargon which did not come into existence until a century after the period; but the villains fit into the Steampunk millieu so easily that I had to give it a try.

In the final days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln brooded long and hard over the problem of reuniting the country once Confederacy had been defeated. One of his ideas, which he gave the name “Josephus Project” for reasons not terribly clear, was to create a special corps of the military composed of soldiers from all the services and from every region of country representing many different nationalities. The corps would symbolize both the diversity of the Nation and also it’s unity.
Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction were cut short by an assassin’s bullet, and his successor never took up the project; but the next President, Ulysses S. Grant, saw value in the experiment, and had the military clout to push it through. Some wags in the Army took to calling the soldiers selected for this group as “Grant’s Irregulars”, or “G.I.’s”
And so was born the fighting force that became known as the “G.I. Joes”.

(Yes, that was a convoluted explanation to justify the name).

For the convention game, I had the Joes sent to investigate some irregualrities at a remote fort near a utopian community being built by a Prussian industrialist named Von Destro.  Yep, you can tell where this is going.

The actual Fiendish Plot I lifted from a lesser-known Jules Verne novel titled The Begum’s Fortune and involved a humungous cannod designed to fire shells filled with poison gas.

As I usually do for my convention games, I made up some character portraits on index cards to give to my players as souvenirs of the game.  Here then, are my Steampunk G.I. Joes:

Duke

Scarlett

Roadblock

Tunnel Rat

Snake Eyes

Spirit

And of course, a couple villains:

Destro

Baroness

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100th Chapter of Cat-Men

Jan11
by on January 11, 2014 at 6:54 pm
Posted In: Cat-Men from Mars, Hannibal Tesla Adventure Magazine

tesla cat 100x teaser

This week marks the 100th page of Cat-Men from Mars.  As you can see, Ginger is excited about the celebration.

The story started out as a RPG campaign I ran with my Sweet One Lute several years back.  It was a space opera set in the Pulp Era in which her character, Ginger, was captured by alien invaders, inspired by the Tiger-Men of Mars from the old Buck Rogers comic strip.

As the campaign progressed, her character returned to Earth and had more adventures, meeting a heroic scientist based on Doc Savage named Hannibal Tesla.  Ginger’s meeting with Hannibal and their adventure in Tibet became the basis for the first storyline of my webcomic, “Sky Terror of Weng Hu”.

My plan was to introduce Hannibal and his team in “Sky Terror”, and then go back and fill in the story of Ginger’s Martian Adventure, to explain some of her background and where she got her tail.  This was complicated when a big chunk of my archives got wiped out, but I suppose it serves me right for doing things backwards.

So what comes next for Ginger?  Well, she still has an invasion to thwart, but I hope to wrap up this storyline and get her back to Earth by the end of the year.  After that, I plan on re-posting “Sky Terror” — probably doing two or three pages per week until I get caught up.  That will give me time to work on an all-new adventure involving Hannibal’s father, his arch-enemy and a Death Ray!

Keep Watching the Skies!

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