I got in a little early, and was able to catch a Mark Henry match, where he beat Sid. I guess they’re counting these for the streak, since a 12 popped up after the match.
After that, I stepped out for a trip to concessions, and I’m sure I picked a bad time, because when I got back, Bret Hart was walking to the back after a match. Figures, on a Canada show, I manage to miss Bret Hart.
Oh holy night, I just got back from the Christmas Raw and it was a DOOZY!
To start off, Jimmy Hart and the LoV are backstage opening presents, with Jimmy wearing a red airbrushed jacked with white fur trim. Shamrock reacts in confusion when he realizes Hart has gotten them Christmas-themed entrance robes. He accepts graciously, but is obviously not impressed.
As 1996 in WWF comes to a close, the WWF Writer’s Room has provided a handy timeline of the year that was in WWF.
April 1996: Shawn Michaels wins the WWF Title at Wrestlemania 12 in an hour-long Ironman match.
May 1996: Scott Hall and Kevin Nash leave the WWF, and jump to WCW. This is where the timelines diverge. Chris Jericho and Rocky Maivia debut. At the May Pay-Per-View, In Your House 8: Heartbroken, Goldust loses the Intercontinental Championship to Phatu after interference from the Undertaker. Phatu quickly loses it to Zip of the Bodydonnas afterward. Shawn Michaels defends the WWF Title against Mankind.
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Imagine, if you will, a world with no D-Generation X. A world without the nWo. A world where Stone Cold Steve Austin never won the King Of The Ring and told the world just what Austin 3:16 says. A world where the WWF’s New Generation becomes something wilder, stranger, and just that little bit more extreme than the one we know. This is the world… of Elseworlds: 1996 WWF.
Late last year, on the Something Awful Forums, poster Little Mac began the 1996 TEW LP, using the popular wrestling management simulation game to pit two writing teams, one controlling WCW and one controlling WWF, in a Monday Night War for ratings supremacy. And we have fought well. Now, we bring the action of WWF to Nerdcenaries readers, starting with the holiday heat of Raw Is Christmas.
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Nerdcenaries: Hello Ramon!
Ramon Villalobos: Hi.
Nerdcenaries: How are you doing?
Ramon Villalobos: I’m doing alright.
Nerdcenaries: Well, you got done with your What If: Age of Ultron issue and you are doing Young Avengers next but I think there was something else you had that came out recently. Am I mistaken?
Ramon Villalobos: Yeah a book called Abstract 3 that my friend Frank is inking for me, written by Seth Jacob.
Nerdcenaries: What is it about?
Ramon Villalobos: Well it’s about a group of superheroes called the Abstract 3 that have a reality warping crisis but I can’t really talk much about the plot.
Nerdcenaries: Ah. Well it has your art on it which is a solid selling point.
Ramon Villalobos: Haha thank you.
Nerdcenaries: Your style to me kind of seems like a Rafael Grampa crinkly-ness meets the sharp cleanliness of Mike Allred. Were either of them inspirations?
Ramon Villalobos: Definitely both of those guys are yeah. Probably Rafael Grampa is a little more apparent in my art. I like the really classy grit in his drawing. Allred I really like because he kind of has some of the quirky silver age stiffness that I really dig but it’s not as conscious of an influence as is Grampa.
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In Jason Aaron’s first arc of Thor: God of Thunder, he introduces a character known as Gorr the God Butcher, an alien who saw his fellow people die when the gods they believed to failed to save his world from drought, famine and injury. The faithful were seen as brutal but weak minded people, driven by conviction in the face of proof via absence that god did not exist. Driven out Gorr eventually finds two of his gods, leads to the death of both and then using the weaponry of one, begins a campaign of slaughter across the universe killing gods, culminating in him rewriting the timeline so that he might kill all gods of the universe using the God bomb. With that power to shape the world, to fell deities, he becomes recognized as a god himself, but does that make him a god?
I’ve been to a few comic museums – Toonseum in Pittsburgh, the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and recently the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum at OSU and so far I haven’t seen that perfect cartoon museum, or at least the one big feature I want to see. I mean all of the facilities I mentioned are very nice – but none of them are made for the comic medium itself and that is the biggest issue.
Comics are sequential art. Comics usually tell a story. Comics usually are not a static moment like paintings are, like photographs are, like statues are. Comics are a serial art form and while a single page can show a lot, it doesn’t capture what a comic is – a way to tell stories. If you only give part of a story, devoid of context, you loose a lot. It becomes all about the art and writing for that page, not how everything ties in, and it removed the comic as a tool to tell stories. When you start posting single pages of original sets of art on the wall for a comic museum, devoid of context, unless that page is an entire story, you’ve messed with the art form. You don’t cut a hand off of a full body statue and put it in a museum as a solitary piece of art. If you post a single movie still, that is not the same as showing the actual movie – and sure it may be helpful to illustrate a directorial style but you miss the context and the actual format of the art itself. A well shot still from a movie is not a movie itself. A single page from a multi page story is not itself.
Powered by a dangerous intellect, a dash of sardonism and the ability to get away with crimes of any and all calibers, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street, Mr. Peabody, is one of the most shocking characters to enter the silver screen in decades. The film follows the irascible Mr. Peabody as he adopts Sherman, played by a very off sounding Jonah Hill, as they help to shape the course of the world, fight several government organizations, and in a shocking twist, are praised for bringing the world safely back from a near-collapse that they actually caused.
I am a fan of RPGs and it is so much easier to get players into RPGs that they can easily visualize what is going on and even more so when they can learn the game easily so my interest in the TSR Marvel Superheroes RPG has been steadily growing because it uses Marvel characters, it is super easy to visualize and the rules make sense. If they don’t I honestly go by feeling like a real Marvel Editor. In addition, all of the books are in a strange legal gray area so you can download them all here, – really you just need the player’s guide and the judge’s book for this.
So now my goal or one of them is to try and make some new content with the Marvel RPG system – update some characters and try some new rules (so many characters had radios as important technological features), especially since Heroclix makes is easier to get exact figures of most of the characters you might want to use, and usually you can get them on a budget (except for a good Janet Van Dyne Wasp and Clint Barton Hawkeye and a few other weird ones). Anyway, go Marvel RPG!
Below is the guide for the Avengers Assemble one-shot which pits the Avengers, or really any team of your choice, against a strong set of interesting enemies while letting your players and yourself learn the ropes of the game. The game works best though with the recommended characters.
Also a big thank you to Chris Sims for suggesting the enemies for this one shot.
Originally played at UD Con 2014.
The Dulles Brothers lead the fight against communism. They lead the presidents to the targets at Allen Dulles was the Director of the CIA and his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State. Two men had the power, connections and belief that shaped the world during the Cold War leading us into Vietnam and the Middle East and without them, the entire world would be vastly different.
Norman Osborn had the power, he had the connections and the beliefs but what ultimately lead to his downfall through the events of Dark Reign and Siege are what made him a fascinating figure.
Osborn became the director of HAMMER after using his Thunderbolts (and information he stole from Deadpool) to stop the Skrull Invasion. He was able to completely oust the former administration, he was able to turn those would would oppose him into pariahs and outlaws and with his public support he could have ruled indefinitely except for one thing – his partners – The Cabal and The Dark Avengers.