Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  But Valérian’s sparkling eye candy and bizarre set pieces, while entertaining, feel entirely tangential to the story—and go on so long it becomes impossible to tell what the story is. “To pretend that there’s a plausible or comprehensible narrative line to the film would be a punishable misrepresentation,” wrote an unimpressed reviewer in the Hollywood Reporter (the trade paper wasn’t a fan of The Fifth Element, either). One notable example is Rihanna portraying a shape-shifting “glampod” who, for some reason, treats our reluctant hero to several long minutes of exotic dance. There are deeply problematic aspects to some of the alien representations, which are offensive in much the same way as The Phantom Menace’s worst offenders—with twenty years to do better. There is also a hearty helping of misogynist dialogue and a side of sexual harassment on the job, which comes across even more awkwardly because of the complete lack of sexual chemistry between the two leads.

  It’s a shame the movie didn’t turn out better. But it did introduce the comic to a global audience, and it’s a fun one to discover. Valérian’s originality made it a fan favorite. It’s also surprisingly influential. In his 2007 introduction to the series, French critic and science fiction historian Stan Baretz wrote, “Catching it mid-run or discovering it today, in a world overflowing with heroic fantasy and virtual reality, Valérian might appear simple. Yet another spatio-temporal traveler juggling the mysteries of time and space? Wrong! In its time, Valérian was a groundbreaking series. It’s the original archetype from which everything flows.”

  About that influence. The comparisons to Star Wars extend beyond the awkward depictions of aliens in The Phantom Menace. In fact, many of the film’s reviewers compared it to the Star Wars saga. Like Peter Debruge, who wrote in Vanity Fair, “Written as a kind of cocky intergalactic lothario, Valérian ought to be as sexy and charismatic as a young Han Solo.” (Spoiler alert: He isn’t.) There are plenty of other similarities between the comics and Star Wars: the all-aliens-on-deck festival-like aura of an intergalactic cantina, a hero encased in a clear yet solid slab, a heroine in a metal bikini, and a people who wear hightech helmets to cover their burned faces.

  Mézières, the comic’s artist, also noticed the resemblance. Stan Baretz wrote, “It was in 1977 during the International Science Fiction Festival that had seen the cream of the profession gather in Metz, France. Included in the film program: the premiere of Star Wars in France. At the end of the film, I remember Mézières laughing and telling me: ‘It looked like an adaptation of Valérian for the big screen.’” One panel in Pilote #13 made Mézières’s feelings clear; it shows Valérian and Laureline on a double date with Han and Leia, sharing a table in a dim cantina, a hodgepodge of aliens gathered round. Leia says, “Fancy meeting you here!” Laureline retorts: “Oh, we’ve been hanging around here for a long time!”

  His co-creator, series writer Christin, was more diplomatic. “That’s how it goes in sci-fi: it’s all about copying from one another,” said Christin in an English-translated interview with German newspaper Die Welt. “Or, in other terms, you borrow something from someone else and develop it further.”

  Barets casts a fair bit of shade in his writings on the topic, but concludes with savoir faire, “All creators thrive on influences, of course. Things, as the saying goes, are in fashion, and Mézières has become philosophical about it. He knows, though, that he is one of the fathers of modern science fiction iconography, one of the main inspirations of that pool of images from which all later illustrators drank, consciously or not.”

  Valérian’s core conceit is a pure genre classic: the time traveling space agent and his smart, sexy companion. (Doctor Who first premiered in 1963, so we probably can’t credit Valérian with the concept; it was simply the zeitgeist.) That’s the fantastic thing about speculative fiction—it’s a genre that begs, borrows, and occasionally steals, combining and recombining influences and still always managing to come up with something absolutely new. Some ideas are far too awesome to use only once.

  FRANK ROMERO

  Beyond D&D: Lesser-Known Fantasy Role-Playing Games

  In 1974, a small self-publishing venture named Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) released Dungeons & Dragons. While D&D continues to be the first game that comes to mind when thinking of tabletop role-playing, the 1970s spawned a number of imitators, contenders, and pretenders to D&D’s popularity.

  Tunnels & Trolls is the second role-playing game ever published. Self-published by a librarian named Ken St. Andre in April of 1975 and republished by Flying Buffalo later that year, T&T represents St. Andre’s fascination with fantasy role-playing and his reluctance to deal with the complexity he found in D&D. Tunnels & Trolls combat is decided by a roll-off between combatants. Perhaps the greatest innovation of Tunnels & Trolls is the amount of material supporting solo play, a revolutionary concept then and now.

  That same year, TSR tried to replicate their success by publishing Empire of the Petal Throne by M.A.R. Barker, a Fulbright scholar and chair of South Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Barker went to Tolkienesque lengths to create the fantasy world of Tékumel, creating languages and writing thousands of pages of history. Empire of the Petal Throne provided a deep and complex setting hitherto unseen. Despite spawning five more games, five novels penned by Barker, and exerting influence on numerous other game designers, Empire of the Petal Throne remains undeservedly obscure.

  Not all fantasy games involved wizardry and fighting men, however. In 1976, Fantasy Games Unlimited released Bunnies & Burrows, written by Dennis Sustare and Scott Robinson, and inspired by Richard Adams’s novel Watership Down. Players took the role of individual rabbits contending with warren politics, human encroachment, and basic survival. While the rabbits in the game didn’t swing swords or sling spells, they did use Bun-fu and participated in the first-ever skill-based system in a role-playing game. Bunnies & Burrows transcended the tropes that were rapidly becoming commonplace in the hobby and created a devoted fan base.

  Perhaps the most notable non-D&D game published during the hobby’s infancy was RuneQuest, written by Steve Perrin and released by Chaosium in 1978. RuneQuest introduced a percentage-based combat and skill system. Set in the world of Glorantha, it allowed players to play as the same monsters they battled, including a race of intelligent ducks cursed by the gods. Despite not possessing the breadth of Tékumel, the fresh world that Glorantha provided paved the way for the complex worlds of the Forgotten Realms and the Dragonlance that D&D would come to use as its default settings.

  An original illustration by Ashanti Fortson, inspired by the fanciful world of Bunnies & Burrows.

  While none of these the above games became as popular as Dungeons & Dragons, they each catered to the needs of players that Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t yet served. The 1970s functioned as an incubator, sustaining an industry built on escaping the reality that grew out of the instability of the 1960s and early ’70s. Role-playing games allowed players to create a fantasy world where good triumphed with the strength of arms and the hidden knowledge contained in a spell book . . . simply by throwing some funny dice.

  MOLLY TANZER

  Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play:

  A Grim World of Perilous Adventure

  These days, when gamers hear “Warhammer” they tend to think of miniature wargames, usually either Warhammer 40,000, a far-future science-fantasy setting where Dune meets Paradise Lost, or Warhammer Fantasy Battle, which puts your typical elves, dwarves, men, and halflings in a gritty setting called “the Old World” that has more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than Middle-earth. But in 1986, Games Workshop released Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, a pencil and paper RPG. Warhammer Fantasy Role Play is the grimdark cousin of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, taking its cues less from Tolkien and more from the Conan stories and Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. After all, the first edition of WHFRP tells us right on the cover that the players are entering “a grim world of perilous adventure.” And it’s true, they are.

 
The perils of WHFRP aren’t just orcs, chimeras, and other fantasy beasts, however. Evil exists in the Old World, yes—but even at its worst, evil possesses motive. Evil can be understood, even if it is disgusting to the good (or those who are neutral).

  Warhammer Fantasy Role Play First Edition Core Rulebook from Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.

  The forces of Chaos, on the other hand, are incomprehensible. Chaos has no ultimate goal—by its very nature that is impossible—but if it did, it would be to strip away the warp and the weft of civilization itself. Four gods are responsible for most of Chaos’s influence on the Old World: Tzeentch, the god of unending change; Nurgle, the god of plague and ruin, Khorne, the god of eternal war, and Slaanesh, the god/goddess of excess. Their agents are beastmen who prowl the wilds, sorcerers who traffic with demons, and sworn warriors who consider their mutations blessings. The kindly wizards of heroic fantasy have no place in WHFRP; to use magic is to risk being corrupted by Chaos, and thus your average citizen of the Old World is more eager to see a witch burn than to seek her out for a healing potion.

  Indeed, man’s inhumanity to man is the real danger of WHFRP, a theme echoed by the system’s tendency to round dice rolls down, and always against the player’s interest. Starting players choose “careers” that fit into familiar classes such as warrior, academic, rogue, or ranger, and yes, one can roll a herdsman, a scribe, or a nobleman . . . but one can also come into the game as a political agitator, a bounty hunter, a grave robber, tax collector, or rat catcher. Some of the advanced careers include assassin, demagogue, highwayman, slaver, and of course, witch hunter. And in the end, even a witch hunter with full plate armor or a templar with a horse (most players start with a hand weapon, “sturdy clothes,” and maybe some pocket change) can—and will—be humbled by disease and madness.

  The Old World is unforgiving. It’s best not to get attached to anyone or anything—but then again, if a player flees, their opponent gets a free attack with a +10 bonus. No parrying allowed, and shields provide no protection. For anyone used to the brighter, more merciful worlds of D&D and Pathfinder, WHFRP can be a nice change of pace, nice here meaning “delightfully frustrating.”

  JESSE BULLINGTON

  Kentaro Miura, Grandmaster of Grimdark

  While the term “grimdark” may have initially been coined as a pejorative, it has undeniably become convenient shorthand for describing works of dark fantasy characterized by moral relativism, gritty realism, and graphic violence. George R. R. Martin was hardly the first author to take this approach to fantasy, but his A Song of Ice and Fire catapulted the subgenre into the mainstream consciousness and is widely acknowledged at the quintessence of the form—here in the West, that is. Years before the 1996 publication of Game of Thrones, Japan witnessed the rise of its own grimdark champion in the form of mangaka Kentaro Miura and his revolutionary Berserk.

  A richly detailed world inspired by medieval Europe, rife with intrigue, betrayal, and brutal combat, where mercenaries and knights are pawns in the schemes of nobles . . . schemes soon eclipsed by a monstrous threat growing in the darkness. A cultural touchstone that has inspired countless imitators and been adapted many times over, to television, video games, and the big screen. A creator’s lifework that remains ongoing decades after its inception, provoking endless moans from entitled fans who resent the speed of the artist’s output and the sabbaticals between new installments.

  Yes, we’re still talking about Miura.

  Born in Chiba City in 1966, Miura began creating his own manga at a young age—his first comic appeared in a school publication when he was just ten years old, and by high school, drawing had become an obsession. While attending the Comi Manga School, Miura created a short comic about a hulking warrior taking on a shapeshifting Vlad Ţepeş (AKA Vlad the Impaler). This initial iteration of Berserk won a prize from his art school in 1988, and after working on a few other projects, he returned to his prototype.

  The first official volume of Berserk was published in 1990. It introduced readers to Guts, a mysterious wanderer with a really big sword and an even bigger vendetta against the grotesque monsters that hide amongst humankind. While Miura’s art was impressive from the start, it wasn’t until the series flashed back to Guts’s past that the story transcended its roots to become something truly unique and phenomenal. This “Golden Age” arc, which is the heart of the Berserk saga, was first adapted as a twenty-five episode anime series in 1997 and then as a trilogy of animated feature films in 2012.

  In “The Golden Age,” the overt supernatural elements of Berserk’s early chapters fade into the background as Miura chronicles the heroic rise and tragic fall of the Band of the Falcon, a mercenary company led by the ambitious Griffith. Against a backdrop of medieval action and courtly intrigue, Miura focuses the story on Guts’s complicated relationship with Griffith—and with Casca, the sole female captain in the Band. When the fantastical elements reassert themselves in the text it is to nightmarish consequence, and the grim fate of these three friends is the explosive conflict that has propelled Berserk for the last quarter century.

  “Before Golden Age, I couldn’t decide if I want(ed) to make a pure fantasy story or a piece of historical fiction,” Miura told one interviewer. “. . . However, the moment when The Band of the Falcon took form in my mind, the name of Midland, a fictional country, emerged as well. The ‘historical fiction’ route stopped being an option, leading to Berserk turning into a fantasy story. And if so, I had to try using some trademark tropes of fantasy. Fairies, witch hunts, sorcery, pirate ships, et cetera. The representative features of medieval Europe.”

  Miura is very open about the influences that contributed to his meticulously rendered anti-heroes, their world of gloomy forests and mist-wreathed cities, and the hideous monsters of every conceivable shape and size. He cites everything from earlier manga titles like Guin Saga, Violence Jack, and Fist of the North Star to Paul Verhoeven films and the Hellraiser series to the works of Hieronymus Bosch, M. C. Escher, Gustave Doré, and Pieter Bruegel. Miura even admits to picking up a few things from Disney films and credits an unlikely source for helping him crack open the emotional core of the series when he began the “Golden Age” arc: “As I like shōjo manga (romantic comics aimed at a teen girl demographic) as well, I thought I could change my methods and put in some sad human relationships and an emotional story. Until then, I was exclusively going down the Fist of the North Star route, but couldn’t compare with its author, Buronson-sensei. This is a good moment to try a different weapon . . .”

  From this witch’s cauldron of inspiration, Miura continues to draw forth exciting new chapters as Berserk approaches its thirtieth anniversary. Having sold over forty million volumes around the world and with both a new video game adaptation and anime series released in 2016, Berserk continues to hold global audiences in its dark spell.

  The Ambitions of BioForge

  Released in 1995, BioForge is a vaguely cyberpunk action-adventure game that was literally ahead of its time. Developed by Origin Systems to run on DOS (remember DOS?), the game’s technical requirements were too extensive for most home computers. As a result, only the most dedicated of PC gamers with top-of-the-line hardware ever really got a chance to play it. Such are the risks of creation at the cutting edge!

  BioForge official screenshot from Origin/EA digital catalog.

  BioForge is set sometime, somewhere in the far future. Your character awakens to discover himself stranded in an alien facility on an abandoned moon. He has no memory of how he ended up here. Then it gets worse: He’s apparently undergone a series of body modifications and is now covered in cybernetic implants and metal prosthetics. As he eventually discovers, he was kidnapped by a religious cult called the Mondites, with a penchant for body mods—a story that almost feels like it could be written by Brian Evenson, perhaps our greatest contemporary writer of weird fiction. There’s also a hint of the thinking behind Doctor Who’s cybermen in the aliens’ quest to conquer the galaxy by r
emaking themselves as robots. Of course, the cybernetic implants also come with an advantage—as the somewhat indestructible marriage of man and machine, your character has better chances for survival and escape.

  You wander around this facility, piecing together your past through documents found on terminals or within logbooks scattered throughout the complex. There are several levels to explore, and rooms that contain appropriately cyberpunk alien technology. You solve puzzles to unlock new areas of the facility, and fight enemies using guns, melee weapons, and sometimes your wits. Meanwhile, you’re on a search to figure out how you ended up here and what your captors are really up to . . . a foreboding sci-fi mystery with a touch of horror.

  In 2013, Giant Bomb’s Patrick Klepek interviewed Ken Demarest, programmer, producer, and director of BioForge, and Demarest shared some recollections from the game’s development. “To some extent, it’s a reflection of who I was back then,” he said. “I cared about the technology, and that’s really all I cared about.” The technology was indeed cutting-edge—with running requirements that brought 1995 computers to their knees. But Demarest also fondly remembered his colleague Jack Herman’s “over-the-top crazy writing.” With that writing moved to journals and documents—not essential to the progression of the game, but simply there for players to enjoy at their leisure—Herman was free to explore the setting and backstory in whatever detail he pleased.