dogpoet

They've already retrieved documents that were evidence of a felony from Mar A Lago, so it does make me wonder what they're looking for this time. Phones or PCs with evidence of talking to the January 6th insurrectionists would be my guess, though you'd think even Trump would have the wit to have wiped all of those. (Mind you, Alex Jones didn't, and look how that's worked out for him...)

There's been a few collections of all Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories, Tigger.

Strangely, the collection of them I read was called Black God's Kiss...

On 7/24/2022 at 10:12 AM, JohnMcMahon said:

Not bothered about gender or race or whatever swaps...

Would it sound snide to say that I find all of that hilarious, myself?

Given that Gaiman has spent thirty odd years rejecting film scripts because they weren't completely faithful to his original vision, you'd think he might have had a problem with blackwashing a fifth of the cast and switching one character's gender as well, really...

(One interesting possibility about Jenna Coleman's presence as the modern day Constantine as well as her ancestor is that maybe they're doing this because there's another film appearance for John being planned, and having a separate character in this is going to be less hassle for everybody if that happens.)

Pretty much, yeah.

Whatever you can say against RA Salvatore's character, Drizzt was very popular during the '90s, and there was a flurry of further good guy Drow in other sharecrops, which had the main effect of making him a lot less distinctive. There was even a sourcebook published that gave all sorts of useful game stats for creating a wussy good guy Drow who worshipped Ellistrae or another deity besides Lolth.

Reading The War of the Spider Queen and the Lady Penitent series, I get the idea that WOTC were even less keen on that business than I was.

Amusingly the central character the trilogy is named after ("The Lady Penitent") spends most of the trilogy offstage while the plot concentrates on bickering Drow factions, including the good guy cult.

Saying anything beyond that is spoilery but:

It's almost as though somebody at WOTC decided that the Drow were a lot better when they were all the evil shits from Descent Into The Depths of the Earth and its sequels, and that Drizzt works better if he's the only nice guy Drow out there, rather than Faerun being crawling with them. I wouldn't argue with that.

I thought Doomlord was Tom Tully?

Honest injun, Tigger.

It may be the Express, but even so, it's still tempting to believe the idiot has the brass neck to come out with bullshit like this.

What he'll say when he finds out that the Scarlet Witch is Slovakian in the movies hardly bears thinking about...

A good point, well made.

I dunno about: there's also all the 2000AD stuff, Lobo, LEGION, the Monaive comics festival and The Last American. He's often credited with helping Alan Moore get his foot in the door at 2000AD as well.

There's no question that he was a man with a substantial and influential career.

Hilariously, Putin has been complaining about the Ukrainians  using enhanced supersoldiers to hold off the Russians of late.

One thing that it's worth remembering is that no comics fans will have any problem over wearing masks anyway.

Not what I was thinking: the gender switch might just be to conceal that the lead was originally going to be a retirement age Sting lookalike and this is a storyline that wasn't used because his last comics series only lasted a year.

Now I wonder if this might be a series with its roots in a planned second Hellblazer storyline that DC weren't paying for the other year?

On 7/18/2022 at 11:53 AM, dogpoet said:

The offstage game of Goddesses possibly deserves more attention than some of the other characters in the book are getting: for some reason I'm imagining Lolth as Joan Collins and Ellistrae as Linda Evans...

No hair pulling catfight in a koi pond as yet, though. Just a prologue and epilogue with suggestions that one of the Goddesses (I wonder if you can guess which one?) is cheating.

I'm starting to wonder if WOTC might have had a falling out with Ed Greenwood when they published this By the end of the book it does seem to have been established that only one of KrystleElistrae and AlexisLolth are going to walk away from their sava game and

It's a long while since I've read it myself, but I remember there being some talk about the seas rising and plagues, so that one probably had an environmental catastrophe behind the collapse as well.

It's probably not a good sign to be hoping that a Swamp Thing story where the world has turned to shit will include a reference to a Hellblazer story where the world had turned to shit written thirty five years earlier, if I'm honest.

I thought that looked interesting, but I'm waiting for the collection. Does the ruined future setting in that involve a tip of the hat to that Delano story from #36?

The offstage game of Goddesses possibly deserves more attention than some of the other characters in the book are getting: for some reason I'm imagining Lolth as Joan Collins and Ellistrae as Linda Evans...

Started in on another trilogy by Lisa Smedman which I'm enjoying a lot more than the Yuan-ti one. That's partly because this one is a straight sequel to the six part Drow epic I mentioned a year or three earlier, and in some ways is even nastier thus far. It's set up as a straight conflict between the goodie goodie Ellistrae worshipping Drow who want to go back to the surface and the proper evil Drow who worship a demon Goddess and have a thing for spiders.

Without reading the others any description will be spoiler infested, but there's a lot less Duergar in the first book. Unfortunately this virtue is slightly soured by the presence of a Svirneblin as a main character, but it's possible that he won't survive to the end of the book. Loose ends from the original series are being carefully tidied away.

The most entertaining thing, for me, is that the first book opens with a prologue establishing that Lolth and Ellistrae are playing a game using their followers. This may well be a fantasy cliche that goes back even further than the original Clash of The Titans, but it's impossible now to read it without thinking of The Colour of Magic and sniggering, even if the game is ostensibly being fought to the death and can supposedly only ends with Elistrae or Lolth leaving the pantheon and the canon for good (at least in Faerun). I really can't see WOTC doing away with Lolth or the evil underdark Drow, so maybe the whole thing has been set up to purge Ellistrae and her good guy Drow from the canon? If so, that's probably the first change in any of the third edition D&D I approve of, though I won't be at all surprised if they wuss out of going through with that wheichever Goddess ends up winning their game...

Always a plus, isn't it?

The book I'm thinking of is The World Of caffeine by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K Bealer, perhaps it's one of those Slinger mentions in passing?

I've got a rather good book about the history of caffeine use in the western world that makes pretty much the same point: the author's line is that for the whole time until the fashion for tea, chocolate and coffee started in the tail end of the renaissance, everybody in Europe was drunk all the time because the water wasn't safe to drink until beverages that involved boiling it first came in.

Some very good stuff there indeed.

Bec And Cawl isn't brilliant, but might be of interest to those whop enjoyed the Spurrier Hellblazer for a much lighter (in fact downright satirical) take on the boy Constantine.

Thanks Jason. I look forwards to hearing what you made of it sometime next year.