Human Slaves Of An Insect Nation-part 4

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Poor, unkillable, lonely slayer of teenagers…

Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, part 4-The Horrors of Horror

Aaahh, horror. Now that’s a genre that’s been tossed around a lot. Movies try to do it but barely succeed

and games do it, even though sometimes horror was not their original focus or intent:

Make no mistake: Horror is not an easy genre to master or to use. It is, in fact (along with comedy) among the toughest genres to work with, mostly because it is based on manipulating your audience and knowing exactly which buttons to push and a masterful understanding of narrative flow for maximum effect.

Here’s a scene that mixes both these elements in a competent fashion, only to be ruined by the forced insertion of the Benny Hill Theme song, thus ruining what could have been a funny scene, by poking your ears with sounds that were tailored to make you smirk:

But why did that scene work, before the Benny Hill Theme ruined it? What was it about a scene of zombie SS troopers and a handful of survivors in the snow that made it so? And what was it that stopped it from being even better?

Short answer is: too much information provided. A longer, more eloquent answer is provided by Mr. King himself

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”  

Stephen King is a man who has made a living out of horror and therefore understands how it works and in fact explains the very mechanics of horror in less than 100 words in the quote above. 

tl;dr: it’s scary when you don’t know what it is, what it does, where it came from or how it works. It aslo works much better when you can’t see it.

Movies, which are a visual and acoustic medium, find it very hard to work on that basis, since depriving the audience of these factors will result in something that’s barely even watchable or qualifies as a movie. 

Behold! The (technically) scariest movie of all time!

Movies instead seek to work with mystery, with using sharp tense trills of violins to make you jump when appropriate and by presenting monsters or hazards that work with their own ruleset. But movie logic dictates that the eerie ruleset needs to be explained and overcome (at least in Occidental horror).

 In Oriental horror, on the other hand, you’re supposed to shrug, go ‘meh, ghosts’ and die screaming.

Video games, on the other hand, require that the horror element must be a challenge for the player to overcome. Sadly, most developers equate this notion with

Doom comic: 90’s videogame satire condensed in 16 pages.

While the chosen few choose to go with games like, say, Amnesia, where you are a powerless helpless little German, who can only wave his lantern and soil his pants as the invincible creatures stumble out from the darkness and kill you with a swipe of their hands, everyone else arms you with heavy artillery and expects you to be scared of the four-legged humanoid that you can cut to shreds with a couple shots.

Here’s looking at you, Dead Space.

Tabletop RPGs suffer pretty much the same fate, because like videogames, they deal with horror as an obstacle, instead of a situation or a state of mind. People play D&D, GURPS and every other game, because they want to start off as relatively underpowered schmucks and then rise to near-godhood by sheer virtue of their brains, brawn and arcane and/or technological aptitude.

Except for Exalted, which reels you in with its siren song of riches and invincibility and then slaps you across the mouth with its Cock of Despair. Also, everybody hates you.

To openly admit that you are going to run a Horror game to your players is to deny them this prospect of rise to power right off the bat. Because if your players start off as a group of aspiring mud-farmers, armed with their fathers’ stolen swords and armor and haven’t become giant-slayers ten sessions in, then you’ve just lost your party, son.

Because powerlessness against the adversity (or, at the very least, the inability to beat up the Thing From Another World), is another staple of Horror. But players cannot and will not (understandably) back down from killing something, unless an alternative has already been presented to them. It’s not so much a problem on the game’s behalf, as much as your own. You expect that a team of magically superpowered sociopaths will for some reason choose to not stab said monster in the face and steal its stuff, when the same tactic has worked wonders for them in the game all this time!

“Guys! This thing has no AC, no hit points and it keeps getting up everytime we kill it! Free XP!”

Horror’s tough to pull off, but not impossible. It requires considerable suspension of disbelief on your party’s behalf and a lot of time and effort on your own but you know what? It’s totally gonna be worth it, man!

With that in mind, here’s:

THE SHAPESCAPES GUIDE TOWARD ACHIEVING HORROR IN TABLETOP GAMING:

Phase One: Make sure your party’s up for it.

As I mentioned before, Horror does not work with startling or surprising your audience. It works by building the foundation of the emotion you want to invoke. And to do that, you need a party of players willing to be the mortar.

Yielding, quivering mortar, spiked with just the right amount of baby blood.

First off, make sure they know they are going to play through a horror campaign. Explain to them that you are willing to run a game based on supernatural terror with a lot of build-up and all the specifics described above. Use a great horror game as reference and they’ll get it.

I’m just gonna leave this here…

See who sticks around and work with those guys. Do not try to force your idea down everyone else’s throats, because it will not work. Some people downright do not like Horror as a genre of gaming, because they’re either not into it, or they’re just a load of fucking pussies.

Yes, Jim. I am talking about you.

Make sure the party who’s up for it has a grasping of what Horror stands for. If a guy considers Evil Dead 3 as a legitimate scary movie, then maybe he’s not the best person to have around mid-game, when he suddenly realizes that his rogue evil hand has not turned into a murderous doppelganger just yet. 

With that in mind, proceed to…

Phase Two: Setting the Tone

Horror, like Communism in Greece, comes in all sorts of flavors. It can be gory, viscery, cosmicy, psychologicy

Or serial-killery vanilla

And this is just a tiny, insignificant portion of the available genres and subcategories of Horror! From a distance, they might all seem similar, but upon closer inspection are in fact quite different and are each governed by their own set of narrative rules and foci.

So before you go ahead and start talking to your friends about “YOUR AWESOME HORROR CAMPAIGN IDEA” make sure you know what kind of story it is you want to tell. For the sake of convenience, here’s a very brief, generalized summary of each flavor of Horror outlined above:

Gory Horror (Or Gorror, because that definitely sounds smarter): Gorror is all about bone, blood and intestines. It’s about axes to the gut, melting faces and chainsaws to the dick. It’s also about body horror and terrible mutations of the flesh and all sorts of messed-up stuff that can ruin your appetite.

PROS: Gorror is easy and requires only a sick, twisted imagination. It is also good for a laugh or two and makes for straightforward stories and villains.

CONS: Rapid acclimation of the players toward the subject matter. Pretty soon, you will be tired of coming up with increasingly horrible shit and your campaign will devolve into a Monster-of-the-Week marathon.

Visceral Horror: Visceral horror is what is sometimes called ‘small-scale horror’. It’s a genre that focuses on the players and the people surrounding them and it’s about disasters that target them and only them, in ways that no one but them can comprehend. It’s essentially the end of the players’ world, instead of the whole shebang.

PROS: Visceral horror is a very rewarding genre in and of itself, since it focuses on the players. Provided the players invest time into it, then they can pretty much get the campaign going on their own.

CONS: Visceral horror is exceptionally hard to pull off, moreso than the other genres, because it requires a level of maturity on behalf of the players that is very hard to come by. It also requires you to avoid  scaling the challenge beyond the borders of the players’ world, which is much harder than you can imagine.

Cosmic Horror: Made famous and given its most iconic representatives in pop culture by the Lovecraft Mythos, Cosmic Horror is about the inevitability of mankind’s demise, our unimportance in the greater scheme of things and of little people giving their lives to keep the Ancient Evils at bay, if only for one more day.

PROS: Cosmic horror is chock-full of great material for you to work with, whether you draw your ideas from the Lovecraft Mythos or any other related media.

Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

It’s also a genre that starts off terrible and pits the players against impossible odds, giving you some head start right off the bat.

CONS: Media oversaturation. Cthulhu and his buddies are in comic books, podcasts, youtube shows and plushies and have long since been reduced to a joke. They are also so very well known that any seasoned nerd knows everything there is to know about them, dispelling the power behind a big reveal.

Psychologic Horror: Like visceral, this is a genre that requires focus on small portions of the world falling apart around the players and investment on their behalf. However, where visceral horror deals with ‘small-scale’ terrors, psychological horror can be about fucked-up shit going on and ‘Everyone’s crazy! Everyone but me!’. Psychological horror also deals with mind-shattering, very sensitive matters, with supernatural complications.

Pictured: the most twisted fucking thing ever to make it into a game, when presented in context.

PROS: You got the entire Silent Hill series of games (except for 5 and that shit one on the PSP) and a ton of movies and books to draw inspiration from. You can also count on your pumped players to help right along.

CONS: See PROS.

Once you’ve picked your tone, move on to…

Phase Three: Setting

I covered settings back in a previous article and went on for pages on how important world-building is for a tabletop rpg campaign. Well, if that seemed like a long and arduous process, then you’re about to get horse-kicked in the teeth and then dragged through jagged glass, because Horror settings are a thousand times more important!

 â€œYou’re um…in a town, in um…Illinois. Now give a shit!”

Since Horror is a genre that requires horrible things happening to the audience or the people around them, you must focus on building a world that the players will care about. There’s a reason why small towns and archetypal characters work best in the genre and that’s because the audience can more easily identify with them and therefore give a damn when the Shoggoths suck the skin off their bodies and dump them from the church’s belltower.

A Horror setting needn’t be extensively detailed or planned out from start to finish. But it needs to be something that the players can invest themselves in. Try to get your group to chip in and help make the world a little bit their own. Have them make up a backstory for their characters, their family lives, etc. This way, they will give a fuck about the herd of ghouls living under the graveyard that has been manipulating the town council, exchanging the bodies of the dead for arcane power.

If, on the other hand, your players make crazy, senile characterswithout family and extensive knowledge on the use of heavy artillery andexplosives, then kindly ask them to sit in the timeout corner. 

Make also sure that you milk the setting for what it’s worth and try to make them think it’s worth fighting for. If you get the players to invest themselves in Podunk, Illinois, only to have it overrun by zombie sex cultists three sessions in, then you fucked up.

With the setting done, move on to…

Phase Four: Antagonists

So who is the enemy, exactly? Who or what are the players fighting against? Remember, this is a genre that is based on the concept of information being withheld from the players, in order for it to work but that doesn’t mean you can make shit up as you go!

The small town Cthulhu cult were alien rogue agents from the planet Zorblax working for the guv’ment all along! OR WERE THEY?

The good thing about Horror as a genre is that pretty much EVERYTHING can be an antagonist. From cultists, to ancient gods, to monsters to aliens to the land itself! Treat the genre like a 2-dollar whore. Do whatever the hell you want to it. Research ancient history or conspiracy theory and tweak it so you make something new.

So the mad scientist old lady that’s been living in the old train yard has built a monster out of the parts of stray cats and small children. Or the thing that lives in the forest is an alien guard dog that survived a spaceship crash for god knows how long. Or the town was built on an old Viking settlement from 500 A.D. Who knows? Sky’s the limit here, really.

But no matter what, the antagonist needs to be clearly defined, explained and limitations set to it. Even almighty Old Ones cannot casually stroll into Earth and even ghosts are trapped inside their haunting. Above all, the enemy must seem impervious to harm, without actually being so.

With that in mind, move on to…

Phase Five: To Kill a Great Old One

Well, not kill him. Even death may die and all that, but at the very least contain or dispel him. Either way, with the Antagonists set up, you still need escape clauses and means for the players to fight back. Remember: Horror is the genre where you cannot beat the monster up with fisticuffs, but you can at least trap it in a piece of amber that has been dipped in the heartblood of a child.

 Like say, this one. This one looks good.

Escape clauses also need to be put in place. A good horror story has one of them set up, as a failsafe toward utter and total party death in the hands of Urr-Shaggai, the Patient Watcher from the Stars. A great horror story, on the other hand, has three.

Allow me to explain: when developing your antagonist and escape clauses, try to think in videogame terms. Make up three possible outcomes, and a fourth that dictates that the players earned their horrible deaths, having missed or fucked up every other chance they got. 

Think of them like this:

Good ending: The players find the Sleeping Stone, the magical guardian of Podunk, set up there by the Navajo since time immemorial. They manage to interpret the spell and realize that Urr-Shaggai is in town before the Laughing Moon ritual comes to fruition, thus trapping the creature in the stone. Few people die.

Good-Bad ending: The players stop the cult, but not the ritual. The Sleeping Stone is now useless and Urr-Shaggai is contacted. The Sleeping Stone cannot help them, but Urr-Shaggai has not yet become manifest and is therefore unable to exit his summoning circle. Perhaps the players can collapse the old mine around him and trap him there, stopping the threat, but not eliminating it.

Bad Ending: The players miss all the clues or do not do anything that actually stops the cult or the ritual. Urr-Shaggai is made manifest and tears through the town, killing everyone and the players get away by the skin of their teeth. Now they only have to live with themselves…

Fourth Ending: The players missed everything. They are killed by the cult or Urr-Shaggai in increasingly horrible ways. None of them survives.

Of the four endings, only one results in complete failure, each of them giving the players a fighting chance and a glimmer of hope. A proper Horror story dictates that the victory of Good over Evil is pyrrhic, but is a victory nonetheless. A story where the bad guys come on top and good is extinguished is just a terrible story all around.

With those things in mind, your campaign started off, leading us to the final part…

Phase Six: The Entire Game

Okay, here are some hard truths, delivered blogger-style!

Sit down in dat chair right there, lemme show you how it’s done.

-Your players might not be scared: This is true of all horror campaigns. Your players, jaded by decades of movies, games and books, might not be awed by your terrible death-metal voice impression of the Voice Without Mouth, oracle of the Old Ones. In fact, they might shrug or downright laugh. Make sure you do not give a shit. They might not have come over to shit their pants, but because you have managed to make them invest in the story or just because they like the fucked-up things you present to them, week after week.

-Avoid unnecessary detail: Horror is the art of laconic presentation. Do not do voices if you cannot do voices. Do not use music

But if you do, play this album. It’s creepy as fuck.

And for the love of god, do not use monster image props! Remember: less is more in horror.

-Player interest is key: Make sure you do not lose it. It’s what made the campaign happen and will cut your own workload in half.

-Scale the threat carefully: Don’t drag your heels for weeks before the Big Reveal but don’t shove it in their face right away. Make them work for it and guide them so they can discover it on their own. They’ll think they earned it and you’ll be the crowned King of Awesome.

“The King in the Table’s Top! The King in the Table’s Top!”

-You are not the Lord of Terror: Or you might be. I sure as hell am not, which is why I wrote this guide, as an experienced Horror GM to those starting off. Maybe you can make your players shit their pants or cry with the flick of a word. But if you’re a regular schmuck, know this:

By following the steps on this article, even in the loosest sense, you’ve made something entirely your own and it will show and your players will love it. Yes, writing it down might not get you a publication, but it will get you the respect and interaction you are looking for in your players.

And that, son, is a fucking win right there.

Addendum:

On the subject of shitty movies, I just realized I did not mention that other piece of shit everyone keeps referring to as ‘da scariest moveh of ull tiem’, 

Rosemary’s Baby:

More shit happens in this trailer than in the entire film. Rosemary’s baby is a lullaby of a horror movie that’s slow as fuck and doesn’t lead up to anything and ends right when the director and the crew are done jacking off and the audience gets invested.

“But Kostas, this was made in the 70’s. Movie pacing was slow in the 70’s.” Okay, asshole, I’m game. Let’s look at another awesome scary movie made in the 70’s.

Oh shit! Slow but well-crafted pacing, a great premise and a whole load of scary yet awesome shit taking place constantly! Hmmm, well I guess Rosemary’s Baby is horse-dookie after all.

PROTIP for all of you cunts supporting this mindless loop that exists about Rosemary’s Baby:  just because your artfag older brother, your dad or your mom like that piece of shit, doesn’t oblige you to like it too. You’ve got your own fucking taste and things like a pregnant woman crying over everything for 2 hours and a scene where an ape-devil sorta has sex with her in her sleep might not be your cup of tea. So please, for the love of God Internet, grow some balls!

They’re bouncy, colorful and loads of fun! Bitches also love them.

What I Think About Stuff- The Metabarons Retrospective, Part 1

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Oh my God.

I absolutely LOVE the Metabarons.

And there you have it. That should have been the entirety of this review, but you’re not here for that of course. You’re not here to see me treat my fanboy reactions with dignity, or even watch me as I try to be objective about it. You’re here to watch me slobber all over it and by Jehovah, this is what I’m gonna do!

 

But first, a little bit of backstory:

Growing up a comic book geek was exceptionally hard in Greece back when I was little, mostly because we didn’t have any sort of comic book stores up until the late 90’s. The only place we could get our sequential art fix from were newsstands and kiosks and the kind of comics we could get our grubby little hands on were pieces of crap like these:

pictured: horse shit in comic book format

Truth be told, we’d oftentimes get lucky and find the one newsstand that hid a couple of translated Conan paperbacks and some translated X-men (or god forbid, Spiderman) issues, but that was it. But then, another problem would rear its ugly head. Try to spot what kind of problems could occur for a 12-year old possessing a comic book with this kind of cover, if found out by their parents:

Hint: the above picture contains two different kinds of mature theme

I won’t say it was easy. The work was hard and the payout sucked most of the time, but you know what? No matter how many times we were thwarted, we persevered. We grit our teeth and we said ‘screw you mom and dad, I like comics!’; we waited for a day of reckoning, but it never seemed to come. Sure, there came a weekly comic book magazine called 9 (Ennea to all you barbarians), but most of its stories were posted in serialized form and were French little piles of disappointment like this:

on your right, you’ll see a magnificently drawn pair of LIES

But we’d just sigh, say c’est la vie, and keep on going, like good little soldiers. After all, that was our lot in life. Until one day, little old 14-year-old me pops one of the magazines open and suddenly sees…

In my mind, that forcefield hummed like a thousand lightsabers waving in salute to the first notes of Blind Guardian’s Mirror, Mirror

One nerdgasm later, I could find myself wanting for more. And can you blame me? From the first page, Alejandro Jodorowsky promises an epic space opera with lasers, awesome battles and Gimenez delivers with breathtaking visuals, the style and grandeur of which I have yet to see reproduced outside of this series.

For those of you not in the know, the series’ writer, Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French 70’s spiritual superhero, who made a lot of crappy movies and another awesome comic book series, called the Incal, to which I’ll go into detail later. Along with the Metabarons and Technopriests, these series formed what was dubbed the Jodoverse. A colorful, epic and expansive science fiction setting, which I would marry and have a litter of kids with, were it a woman.

Juan Antonio Giménez López, is the man responsible for the Metabarons’ fine artwork. Instead of wasting your time and my space (get it? Get it?) by talking about it, here’s a few samples:

If you want another reason to gawk at the screen like a star-struck fool, visit his page here
http://www.net-cafe.hu/fantasy.php?pg=1&ct=162

But enough with the gawking and the geeking. Let’s get into the story.

Like every good epic, the narrative is based on the in medias res method. Our story begins at some point very near the end of the Metabarons saga, inside the impregnable Meta-Bunker (yeah, Jodorowsky has a thing for prefixes). The tale is told to us via one robot narrator, Tonto and his audience (and abuse victim) Lothar.

Post-Singularity’s first dysfunctional couple.

Under the grasp of unspeakable boredom, Tonto gives in to his robotic companion’s pleas and decides to recite to him the tale of the great caste he has served for almost two hundred years. And what a tale that is.

First, the story of Othon von Salza,

or as I like to call him, Badass Zero.

a former pirate and son-in-law to Berard von Castaka, a marble sculptor and old-school martial arts master.

Berard von Castaka: choking himself to death with his mind before it was cool.

After a visit by a team of techno-priests, looking to order marble for the construction of a new palace for the Imperial Couple, they realize that the Castakas posses a mysterious element that generates an anti-gravity field. Once the news goes out, an immediate bid for the planet begins, which quickly degenerates, as the Black Endoguard decides to cut the middle men and take the planet for themselves.

Having both numerical and technological superiority to the Castakas, the Endoguard think that the fight’s over. After all, what’s a bunch of backwater hicks armed with medieval weapons going to do? Send in their son-in-law armed with a short sword, so he can kill them with his bare hands?

Short answer: yes.

I told you this would happen, Steve! I goddamn told you!

With the Endoguard defeated and his wife killed in the battle, Othon takes his only son to a private planet that he bought after the huge bid given to him by the Empire. He’s also given a cloned horse, the last surviving member of its species in the universe.

 There, he lives his solitary, miserable days with his son, who blames him for not allowing him to take place in the battle. In a twist befitting a Greek tragedy, pirates attack them with the intent of stealing the horse. Othon kills them all, but his son who slipped away without his father’s knowledge to join the fray, gets killed by his own hand. At the last minute, a dying pirate takes a shot, which maims Othon’s family treasures. Othon of course saves himself by using cybernetic implants, which sadly include no reproductive organs, since his scrotum was atomized.

When I was little, I thought it was the hole that made the speech bubble. Couldn’t sleep for a week.

Othon of course, lacking the sexual means to vent his frustration does what each of us possessing six gazzilion kublars and no dong would:

Pimp their spaceship and stuff their bodies with enough weapons to destroy a solar system.

Using his awesome new abilities, Othon faces off against a pirate armada destroying it single-handed and saves the abducted conjoined progeny of the Imperial Couple, making him the most feared and respected man in the universe.

His actions in the Empire’s service of course impress Couple, who in turn promise to give him a wife. Othon refuses, not having any genitals and all.

 
But let’s face facts: with a ship like that, who needs girls?

It’s at this point that the leitmotif of the saga is set. Each of the Metabarons has these traits: they are all maimed and have replaced their lost limbs with artificial counterparts. They all suffer a tragic past. And they all, without exception, have a shitty sex life, which produces one heir at a time, who makes the cycle anew. I think this is because Jodorowsky wants us to be at the same time amazed, as well as appalled by these warrior gods. To be perfectly honest, most of the Metabarons (Othon included) are more like invincible serial killers than heroes.

Othon’s story takes a radically different turn, when he meets Onorata, a Shabda-Oud sorceress (a cult of space witches aiming toward universal domination)

kinda like the Bene Gesserit, but with less sex and more Azathoth worship.

 

Othon’s part of the story ends with a magnificent bang and a very cool battle scene, where he and his wife bust out zero-g kung fu against her cultist brethren, but the story leaves you wanting for more. Even though Othon reappears later on, he is not the sort of character that leaves you a lasting impression. He’s just an angry as hell bastard with a wafer-thin personality. It’s clear that Jodorowsky used Othon merely as a narrative excuse, a means to kickstart this series and set the leitmotif. Nothing less, nothing more.

Othon’s tale ends with Onorata confessing that she’s pregnant to a boy, the one and only son of Othon von Salza, the next Metabaron; and in my opinion, the best of the lot for a number of reasons.

Next week, we take a look at the story of Aghnar, the greatest of the Metabarons:

Motherfucking Aghnar.

What I Think About Stuff-the Metabarons Retrospective, Part 5

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Part 5-Nameless the Aggravating and Unsung Heroes.

DISCLAIMER: This article deals with a series of inconsistencies in the Metabarons narrative and may contain spoilers from the Incal series. If you find yourself becoming frustrated by this, then take a deep breath, relax and cease your mental processes.

The Nameless Metabaron is a strange, strange case. First of all, he is the very character that this series led to and the Ultimate Metabaron. He’s also a recurring character from the Incal series, which played a significant role in saving the Universe in its entirety. Yet he doesn’t appear in the actual Metabarons series in the flesh.

Except for that one time, when he attempts to kill his robot slaves for some bullshit reason.

To make matters worse, Nameless is the kind of character YOU NEVER GET TO KNOW. He’s kind of like the main characters in some shitty made anime, who’s mysterious and badass and awesome and kills a ton of people and blows shit up and makes the fangirls’ panties disintegrate when he shows up in the frame and you’re 17 therefore you don’t know any better so you think that this is what great characters are supposed to be like but then the series ends because that’s what the Japanese do sometimes and you never learn anything except that this guy doesn’t die and kills shit and you end up hating this kind of character and then you realize that EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN COMIC BOOK AND SERIES YOU OWN has this exact kind of bullshit character in there, so you burn them all in a drum barrel and your heart shrivels until it’s just a lifeless little piece of flesh inside your chest barely beating, pumping bile up into your brain, turning you into a cynical bastard that nitpicks everything and everyone thinks you’re a troll trying to spoil everyone else’s fun, when the only thing you really need is a good book and a hug.

And um…guns. Guns with tits on them. ‘Cause that’s how men deal with shit!

I originally hated Nameless for this exact reason. I liked him when I first read the Metabarons but as the years went by and I realized that Jodorowsky was going to pull a LOST on me and just pile up question upon question without bothering to give me some answers, I turned my back on him as fast as possible and decided to ignore him.

Until I read the Incal, that is

This scene makes much less sense if put in context.

The Incal is a glorious space opera set in the Jodoverse that’s part comic book, part Doors music video and part tantric sex exercise with a gigantic bullshit conspiracy theory concerning some occult underpinnings about its layout, which I shall go into detail in another retrospective.

Pinky promise.

What’s important is this: canonically, Nameless’ first appearance was in a comic book that was printed in the 80’s and took place several decades AFTER the events of the Metabarons series, which in geekspeak makes this series a prequel. HOWEVER, a series of inconsistencies in the narrative of the two series (and glaring ones at that) proves that these series aren’t in fact chronologically tied together, despite the fact that they’re set in the same universe.

For example, Nameless’ first appearance is not treated as a pants-shitting moment (like every other appearance of every other Metabaron in the series, never mind this guy WHO KILLED SPACE WITCHES WITH HIS MIND WHEN HE WAS AN INFANT). Instead, nobody even recognizes him, except for a select few in the higher echelons of the Imperial Hierarchy and some other weirdos.

He’s this indy alternative mass-murderer in the service of the Emperoress? I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of him.

These inconsistencies obviously became apparent while Jodorowsky and Gimenez were halfway into the Metabarons saga, which forced them to pull a setting 180 and suddenly reveal that Nameless is from another universe (the one the Metabarons originated from) and that he travelled to the Incal universe (which is parallel to his own), in order to save it.

That’s all well and good, up until while I was reading the Incal, I realized that the Metabaron never left its universe (which was presented as the only possible one without any parallels whatsoever), which he obviously did at some point, so he could return and rain horrifying exposition on Tonto and Lothar (and by extension, the reader).

Everybody got that? Great! Time for me to blow shit up.

WHAT? HOW? WHEN DID THIS-HOW DID THIS-

Okay. There’s no other way I can present this so it makes sense, so spoilers:

In the Incal, the Universe is being slowly devoured by the Darkness, a primeval force of pure evil. The Metabaron and a select few are the only ones who can stop it (they don’t quite make it) and it kills most of the people in the universe in the process. This has obviously already happened in Nameless’ universe of origin. Which means that nobody’s alive there.

Except that Tonto and Lother meet perfectly living planetfulls of beings during their tale right after this exposition, which means that the Darkness is either a shitty exterminator or that Jodorowsky just went “Meh, nobody important is gonna notice” and ignored his own continuity.

Actual quote.

Now that we’re done with the confusion, let’s get into the man that the whole damn article’s about, Nameless himself!

Fuck yeah, Nameless!

Nameless makes his first appearance in Issue #1, when Lothar inquires Tonto about his master’s deformity, thus presenting the great tradition of Metabaronic initiation

The only documented cases of justified child abuse in fiction, except that time when King Joffrey gets *SPOILER*.

Note that this is the only piece of backstory we get from Nameless up until the end of the series, which helps build up the mystery around this character. Another interesting thing to note is that Aghora doesn’t bother going too much into making a spectacle out of hirs son’s maiming. After all, Nameless proved his worth in battle mere hours after he left hir womb. This is mostly used as juxtaposition compared to every other Metabaron, driving home the point that Nameless is the last and greatest of his line.

After that, Nameless appears only as a Bio-Electro-Gram, an electronic automaton with a limited AI, imprinted with some of the memories of the original Metabaron, used as a defense measure for the Metabunker in the course of the series.

And a brief respite to the torrent of verbal abuse heaped upon Lothar by his diminutive boyfriend.

The only other time we get a hint to his backstory is when his BEG beats the everliving shit out of Lothar for having the audacity to inquire the cause behind Nameless’ scar on his eyebrow, the only hint at any sort of weakness on his behalf and a constant of this character since his appearance in the Incal.

It’s later on, about halfway through the series, when Nameless reappears, drops the Exposition Bomb on their heads, explaining how his robot slaves are the only beings privy to this knowledge, then says:

After centuries of abuse, Lothar’s finally been turned into a submissive little bitch.

And then he blows the fuck out of the Metabunker and we don’t see him again until he’s born (goddamn this sentence confused the shit out of me for a second there). Oh wait, he gets a line in between:

“Oh, a prerecorded message. That’s odd. It appears to be Tonto, calling me a goddamn hypocrite over and over again in binary. I shall cherish this.”

I am told that Nameless’ tale goes on for a while after this and does give some closure, as well as hint at a completely different, entirely new series, based solely on Nameless’ exploits after the events of the Incal and the Metabarons which was, of course, never made. For all intents and purposes, this retrospective’s presentation of Nameless’ tale is done, at least until I get my hands on those precious last installments of 9 (Ennea).

As Nameless blows the Metabunker into space dust, Tonto uses the bullshit space witch powers he picked up from Onorata (exactly how he did this or the fact that he’s a 500-year old robot with psychic powers is never mentioned again) to save both his hide and Lothar’s. He does this by teleporting randomly light years away, to an unimportant little backwater planet somewhere among the stars, populated by dinosaurs.

Apparently Tonto’s teleportation settings are set to ‘Locate coolest shit in the sector’.

There, the two of them fend off the local fauna and start their century-long task of building another Metabunker, because there’s no one left alive worth talking to and they’re robots, therefore got shit better to do with their time until the radioactive half-life of their radioactive cores ends, apparently.

 

Just a couple thousand years, Lothar. Then we can die and be done with all this horse shit once and for all.

Now I keep mentioning about the dysfunctionality of this robotic couple, but that’s actually their best, most memorable characteristic. These characters work exactly because they’re like Laurel and Hardy, only if Laurel and Hardy were a gay couple who were stuck together on a desolate rock in the middle of a dying universe and had grown tired of each other’s company after the first couple of decades.

Let’s take a look at the characters individually, shall we?

On the one hand, there’s Tonto. Tonto’s the Castaka’s bottom bitch, their most faithful servant since the days of Othon Von Salza. He’s seen the greatest warrior in the Universe killed and replaced by another, more powerful, crazier warrior. 

Metabarons come and go, Young Metabaron slays the Elder and I keep on paddling.

This guy has seen them all born, raised, going through their personal hells, rising to power and then falling. He’s seen organic life at its highest and its lowest. He’s borne witness to a series of increasingly dramatic calamities befalling his native universe one by one and at the end of this glorious life, what’s his reward?

To wait for his master (who’s been gone for nearly a century according to the series’ first issue) and care for his manchild of a companion, Lothar. This is why, after careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that Tonto, sometime before or during the series, went insane. Not the ‘Haha, pow pow’ kind of insane, no. I’m talking about the ‘You’re all a bunch of maggots and I’ll systematically exterminate every last one of you the minute I get to the root of bypassing my programming’ kind of insane. 

“What was that, Voices? Bathe in the blood of organic children you say? What a refreshing idea!”

On the other, there’s Lothar. Lothar is the polar opposite of Tonto in every way that matters. He’s a lumbering, huge brute with the attention span of a cucumber,

Visual representation

the patience of a ten-year old and possibly programmed as a deterrent to Tonto’s encroaching madness. Despite his many flaws, he is essentially the agent that brings about the telling of this saga by Tonto and one of the funniest characters in the series. What’s also intriguing is how, later on, when his original body gets smashed, he builds a newer, stronger and much more powerful body, which he immediately uses to pay Tonto back for every bit of abuse he ever received in his hands and then some.

Imagine this as the equivalent of beating your wife, then waking up one day only to find out that she’s suddenly a Terminator.

When I was younger, I honestly could not see the point to these two and thought that they simply wasted space in an otherwise awesome series. But now that I’m older, I understand exactly what these guys are: they’re wave breakers, little deterrents that ease the story into your mind, by breaking the epic into smaller pieces that are far easier to digest.

Keeping in mind my metaphor of how this series is a five-course meal, Tonto and Lothar are the cheep little herbal cigar you light up and occasionally puff between dishes. And it does wonders toward helping you cope with this hefty feast.

The kind you light up right away and start puffing at, so people won’t think you’re holding a turd between your lips.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the conclusion to the Metabarons Retrospective on my behalf. Note that this is only temporary, at least until I get my hands on the remaining issues and pay this series the respect it deserves.

You might think, after reading these articles that the series is silly. That it’s a dumb little space opera with only impressive artwork going for it and little else, but this is not the case.

What the Metabarons is is a space opera of insurmountable magnitude that works like some kind of new-age sci-fi mythology. In many respects, it’s like the Hadron Collider:

It is an ambitious idea of staggering magnitude, it crashes new and interesting concepts together just to see what happens and most of all, it takes risks, the kind of risks few comic book creative teams dare take and I’m not just talking jetpack swords.

I’m talking about a series that has the balls to slap adult themes in your face using increasingly zany, hand-wavy means and you just sit there and you take it, because it’s just that good. Trust me, I may have grown cynical toward comic book series and stories in general, I may bitch and moan, but when Jodorowsky and Gimenez take the goddamn wheel, I shut up and listen. 

I suggest you do the same.

Sadly, despite its bitching cover art, the RPG version doesn't stand up to the challenge

Addendum:

Good news, Everyone! Apparently Humanoids Publishing, finally freed from the horrible yoke imposed on it by DC comics, is planning to reprint the series in the English language in 2012!

Which means that I can both finish the retrospective as God intended and you can buy the shit out of it, thus supporting an awesome series! Hooray for you guys!

                                                                                                       BUY IT NOW!