The Knights of the Dinner Table

Okay, so I promised a writeup of my epic re-read of my entire collection of Knights of the Dinner Table magazine. (The collected comics from vols. 1-86 in softcover compilations, plus my collected run of Vols. 130-151 of the magazine, since I started picking up the strip at my local comic shop.) The strip was created by Jolly Blackburn and is still drawn and mostly written by him, with some additional writing from a fairly small team of contributors.

Here's the important thing that I want you to take away from this entry. After re-reading nearly 20 years worth of these comics in order, I'm convinced that this semi-obscure niche comic is humor of the highest order, on a par with my some of my other all-time favorites, names like Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and Terry Pratchett. No kidding. It's that good.

Instead of the truly epic writeup I had considered, you're going to get a midsize, slightly rambling, and entirely unproofread entry from a tired blogger. But that's okay. Truth be told, you'll have more fun reading KODT than reading my blog entry about reading KODT. I'll provide some handy links to a few good, quick KODT web-comics below. Also, there's a pretty good Introduction to KODT on the site of its publisher, Kenzer & Co., as well as a good Wikipedia entry on KODT. So if you want to read the full background and more about the cast of characters, I see no need to recreate them here.

The first thing a new reader notices about KODT is that it is possibly the geekiest thing ever created: a comic book about playing Dungeons & Dragons. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, driven by characters and context, and endlessly addictive. Worry not, you really don't need to know much at all about D&D to appreciate the comic. The comic isn't about Dungeons & Dragons; it's about characters playing Dungeons & Dragons and therein lies a world of difference.

Like many fine inventions, Knights of the Dinner Table started as an accident. KODT creator Jolly Blackburn published a small role-playing-games fanzine called Shadis while he was in the military, and he had planned to run a comic page in the back of the magazine. When no comics came to him, he drew a little two-character comic of his own. The strip struck a chord with his readers, was eventually picked up by Dragon magazine for a while, and finally led to a standalone KODT magazine that launched in 1996 and has now run more than 150 issues: a truly remarkable accomplishment in a shrinking comic and magazine market. In that time the cast has grown from a core of four or five regulars to include dozens and dozens of characters ... and character is at the heart of KODT's appeal.

The cast of characters began with a single group of gamers in the comics early years. It soon expanded to include other gaming groups, the local gaming shop, and eventually the publishing company that creates the role-playing games that obsess them. The Knights and their fellow gaming groups venture into a wide variety role-playing genres -- westerns, spy thrillers, superheroes, space wars -- often to hilarious effect. But most of their time is spent with their first love, Hackmaster, which is their version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Here are three pages from a very early story called "Lair of the Gazebo." You'll have to click on the individual images to make them large enough to read.

(I'll post these three panels for ease of access, but will just link through to the KODT Web Comics site for most of the citations. Unlike my larcenous beagle-haiku business model, my point here is not to swipe their content, but to get you interested enough to buy somebody else's content.)

Knights of the Dinner Table, "Lair of the Gazebo", page 1, page 2, page 3.

This early story provides a pretty good example of the space in which KODT's humor works: the gap between the world of the characters that we see on the page and the imaginary worlds that they explore through role-playing games. The humor comes from the contradictions and conflicts that ensue. There's also a real sense of cameraderie and fun that carries the story cheerfully through its detour into a back-alley of absurdity.

As the comic has continued through the years the characters and stories have grown consideribly in depth and complexity, but I think the heart of what makes this comic work can be found right here.

You might also have noticed that the drawing style of this early story is ... well, um, shall we say "simple?" Though the artistry has improved a bit over the years, this basic style hasn't changed much at all. In truth, the comic often reads much more like a script with the world balloons serving merely to show which character is speaking. Let's face it, as fantasy comic artists go we have Frank Frazetta and John Buscema holding down one end of the scale and Jolly Blackburn holding down the far other end of that scale. (Sorry, Jolly.)

What's really interesting to me is that this has turned out to be a real strength of the comic, another fortuitous unplanned accident. The real action usually takes place in the imaginations of the characters as they play. But by keeping the visual aspects of the comic firmly in the real world, that gap between the real world and the game world is emphasized. And as I said above, that gap is what fuels this comic. I've read a lot of other fantasy and role-playing-based comics that featured artists with far more technical skill. But none of them have ever come close to capturing fantasy's sense of sheer unleashed imagination in the way that KODT does. Even the fiercest of dragons drawn by the best of artists can't compete with the dragons of our own imaginations.

(I digress a bit, but this is a storytelling truth once exploited effectively by filmmakers with limited special-effects budgets and technology, and the ability to show nearly anything onscreen has proven to be a weakness in the age of films filled with relatively inexpensive computer-generated special effects. Two of the most notable horror/monster flicks of the last ten years -- "Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" -- generated their thrills by bucking this trend and relying on the fear of the unseen. It's a good lesson for storytellers of all genres and mediums.)

A few standard role-playing props do appear occasionally: dungeon blueprints, miniature figures, and hex-grid boards. But I don't recall so much as a thought bubble with a monster or a character. Those things can only be seen in the imaginations of the characters and the imaginations of the readers.

I came across an editorial comment in one of my various readings that indicated that Jolly Blackburn looked pretty seriously for a replacement artist in the comic magazine's early days. Remember, his goal was to publish a games magazine, not to create a comic, much less become a commercial artist. Fortunately, he was eventually talked out of it. This was a good decision for the long-term development of the strip because in really forced an emphasis on the sort of things that don't take much artistic skill, but are vital for the success of any long storytelling effort: character development, pacing, plotting, etc. Jolly has become a much more effective artist over the years, but the stripped-down style remains, and it's all to the good.

Here are a few more good stories that have been posted as web comics:

"Brian's Challenge" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One take on Ol' Rotgut the Swack Iron Dragon.

"Baiting the Hook" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One settle down in the homey village of Fyron.

"I Heard the News Today ... " page 1, page 2, page 3. A very nice strip run a few weeks after the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax.

"Movie Night" page 1, page 2. Bob & Sheila at home.

And finally, since the intersection of the Internet with the Halls of Commerce has been a bit of a theme here lately, this strikes me as a good single-panel to close on, "Anything for a Customer."

So check it out and let me know what you think. There are about a dozen or so pages posted above. If you like them, there are another 3,500 or so out there, waiting to be enjoyed.

Review Ragout Meets Frankenstein

It's been several weeks since I've inflicted some reviews of my 2010 reading list on you all. So let's catch up some, shall we? The reading has been quite good lately...

--Scott Pilgrim, Vols. 5 & 6, by Bryan Lee O'Malley - We begin with a quick mention that I finished off the Scott Pilgrim series with volumes 5 and 6 -- Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe (2009) and Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (2010). I don't have much to add about the series beyond what I wrote in the August roundup but the final two books were both great fun and lived up to the earlier volumes. I highly recommend the series, and I'm really looking forward to catching the movie when it finally hits Netflix.

If you do want to read the Scott Pilgrim books, you should definitely start with Volume 1, Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. The whole thing'll make a lot more sense that way. At least, it'll make about as much sense as it's going to make.

Next up: two Nero Wolfe novels:

--Prisoner's Base (1952) by Rex Stout
--If Death Ever Slept (1957) by Rex Stout

This was simply further continuation of my habitual re-reading of the adventures of my favorite fat detective. These two novels come from the peak of the series in the 1950s. There's really no need for me to recount the plots here. Both are great reads and strong entries, but if you've never read a Nero Wolfe novel, and would like to try one, I'd say that Prisoner's Base might be a slightly better bet. It's really one of the best of the entire series.

--The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi

Well, whaddya know? I bought the novel that would go on to win the 2010 Hugo six months before it won the Hugo this year. Alas, I didn't get around to reading it until now. (Okay, technically it co-won the Best Novel Hugo with China Mieville's The City & the City after a rare tie. It's still a winner)

I'm glad I finally did pick this back up off my pile, since it's well worth the read. Bacigalupi creates a truly amazing and complex post-peak-oil world in the brutal Bangkok of a hundred years or more from now: an environmental-police state of carbon limits and vast swaths of genetically engineered plagues and foods from the calorie companies that rule the world. The "Windup Girl" herself is Emiko, a beautiful genetically engineered servant/sex toy left behind to fend for herself in a city in which genetically engineered "New People" are illegal.

The last hundred or so pages of this book thunder down the tracks with great speed, plot turns, and revelations. Unfortunately, the first 250 or so pages of set-up are hampered by slow pacing, a lack of sympathetic characters, and a couple of truly brutal scenes. If you pick it up, my advice is to enjoy the scenery as Bacigalupi builds his world in the first 2/3 of the book. Rest assured, it's all going somewhere.

--The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

It'd been a couple of decades since I last read Gatsby, and I was curious to see what I'd think about it with the benefit of a couple of decades of perspective -- especially the experience of having lived through our own Gilded Age when I was in Silicon Valley during the dot.com boom.

Yup, it's still a great book, and it just gets better with age. Most people read Gatsby while they're in high school or college, but so much of the book is about regrets for choices made early in life that I found that reading it at a later stage in my own life really deepened it for me. If you haven't read it in a couple of decades or more, you might want to give it another whirl.

I could type on and on about Gatsby at this point (as I did in many an English class in college ... really, by the time I finally graduated I could crank out a 12-page Gatsby paper before most students finished Chapter 1) but instead of going on for pages about Gatsby, I'd rather mention something to you that hasn't had millions of pages already written about it and that could use the plug:

--Knights of the Dinner Table: The Bag Wars Saga by Jolly R. Blackburn, Brian Jelke, Steve Johansson, and David S. Kenzer.

This graphic novel collects up a long-running thread in strips from the Knights of the Dinner Table (KODT) comic book over the last 15 years, The Bag Wars Saga. However, it's not a strict reprint. It instead collects up all of the old Bag Wars material, adds 35 pages of new material to it, and gives new artwork to all of it. The result makes a great graphic novel: complex, readable, fun, and very funny.

For those who have never read Knights of the Dinner Table, the comic tracks a batch of friends as they play Hackmaster -- their version of Dungeons & Dragons -- over the years. (Here's a link to an overall KODT review that I wrote last year.) One of the most noteworthy things about this comic is that while the artwork of most D&D-based comics are chock full of dwarves, dragons, and demons, KODT mostly just shows four or five people sitting around a table talking and rolling dice.

The real action takes place in their heads, and by extension in our heads as well, and this mechanism somehow perfectly captures that role-playing game spirit.

Part of what makes The Bag Wars Saga so extraordinary is that it starts out with a small side-joke in the game when the players stash a platoon of soldiers in their "Bag of Hefty Capacity," then forget about them for several years. Needless to say, Sergeant Barringer and his men are not amused.

Hilarity ensues, as worlds within bags within worlds within games collide.

If you've never read KODT, this makes a great jumping-on volume. Give it a try!

The 2010 Reading List Wrap-Up

I enjoyed listing and reviewing the books I read this year. I don't intend to keep it up comprehensively in 2011, but don't be surprised to see occasional plugs for things that I particularly enjoyed reading in the future. I'm not really sure what, if anything, I learned from the exercise. After all, I could've told you all beforehand that I tend to read tons of older mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy from past and present, graphic novels, and the occasional bit of history, biography, or non-fiction.

It feels to me when I look at the list of books in full that it's skimpy in terms of non-fiction and heavy in terms of "fun" reading, so it is worth mentioning that my I still read considerably more in terms of sheer words from newspapers, sports web sites, work e-mails, indexing projects, magazines, village information packets, and other sources than I do from books. And I tend to do my book reading late at night before I go to sleep. So, it's no wonder my "book" reading skews towards less dry material.

All work and no play makes John a dull boy, indeed. Fortunately, there's lots o'fun still in my reading habits.

And with that, I present the Final Review Ragout (of 2010, anyway)

Where There's a Will (1940) and Not Quite Dead Enough (1944) -- Yeah, more Nero Wolfe re-reading. Where There's a Will was one of Rex Stout's last pre-World-War-II mysteries in which three overachieving sisters hire Wolfe to sort out their brother's murder and the puzzling bequests in his will. It isn't the best of the corpus, but it's a fun enough read.

Not Quite Dead Enough collects two Nero Wolfe novellas -- "Not Quite Dead Enough" (1942) and "Booby Trap" (1944) -- set during World War II. During the war Archie served Uncle Sam as a Captain in Army Intelligence assigned to assist Wolfe as he unraveled security problems on the home front. This assignment wasn't Wolfe's first choice. He initially tries to get in good enough shape to join the infantry, claiming, "I am going to kill some Germans. I didn't kill enough during 1918."

Much of the first novella involves Archie's attempts to persuade him to accede to the Army's request that he joins their intelligence efforts instead of volunteering for the infantry. The second novella has Wolfe and Archie hip-deep in a series of murders spawned by an industrial intelligence plot.

Both books were packed with good stuff. It's also worth noting that I've been reading them on the lovely new Kindle that Monique bought me for my birthday several weeks ago. I've been trying to go back through and re-read the Wolfe books in more-or-less chronologic order, and the Kindle made it a snap to pick up these two that I couldn't find among my collection.

Sweet Tooth in Captivity (2010) by Jeff Lemire -- The continuing post-Apocalyptic story of a young boy with antlers who was one of the first born after a strange plague of some kind led to the end of human births and to the beginning of an era in which all babies are animal/human hybrids of some sort. Several people whose opinion I respect really love this comic, but for some reason it's come up just a bit short for me. I might pick up the next volume, though.

Witchblade, Vol. 1: Witch Hunt by Ron Marz and Mike Choi -- I'd never picked up a Witchblade comic before, and I discovered that it was much better than I expected. The basic premise is that NYPD detective Sara Pezzini has been blessed or perhaps cursed with a mystic blade and armor that she uses to defend our world against otherworldly threats. This volume collects up issues #80-85 of the comic, which is where Ron Marz came onboard as writer. I picked it up because I'd heard a couple of good reviews of the comic, and this was a special $4.99 re-issue designed to lure new readers, so I reckoned it was worth the gamble. (Alas, the binding of this issue fell apart as I read it ... perhaps a $5.09 price point would've supported a bit more glue.) The art is lovely, the writing is sharp, and I'll undoubtedly be back for more.

Spider-Man and Human Torch (2009) by Dan Slott and Ty Templeton -- Collects up a fun five-issue mini-series that reviews the relationship between Spider-Man and the Human Torch over the years. One of the best features of this was that each issue reflects the comic style of the decade during which it was set. The late 1970s-ish issue that revives the ill-conceived Spider-Mobile and in which Spidey saves the day with Hostess Fruit Pies is truly tremendous. It's a good read for any Spidey fan.

Conan the Barbarian, Issue #100 (1979) by Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Ernie Chan -- Okay, it's not quite big enough to be called a graphic novel and qualify for a review-ragout review, but I wanted to review it, anyway. And since this is my blog, I can do whatever the heck I want.

I picked up this original double-length comic in a sports-card-and-used-comic-books store in Glens Falls. Having re-read much of the original Marvel Conan the Barbarian saga recently, I think this was probably its creative peak. Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Ernie Chan had all been on the book for years at this point, and this comic really benefited during its first ten years from Roy Thomas's writing and direction as he moved Conan forward through his career. Just 17 issues later Thomas would be off the book; Conan would become an itinerant, directionless do-gooder; and the comic would lose its truly epic sweep. In issue #100 Conan's long run as a pirate and companion of Belit, the Queen of the Black Coast, came to an end. Really and truly this is one of my all-time favorite comic books, so I'm genuinely pleased to have an actual copy.

Comic Series

I thought it also worth mentioning in this wrap-up a few of the ongoing comic-book series that I read consistently this year, and will continue to read in 2011:

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel) -- This book was really erratic during the "Brand New Day" era of the last couple of years as a rotating cast of writers and artists worked on it. I'm pretty optimistic, however, about its direction in 2011 now that Dan Slott has taken over as the full-time writer. I really enjoyed his run on She Hulk a few years ago, enjoyed the Spider-Man/Human Torch miniseries he wrote a couple of years ago, and have enjoyed the first few issues of his run. I'm more optimistic about this title than I've been in quite a while.

Fantastic Four (Marvel) -- Jonathan Hickman's been taking this venerable super-team on a wild ride for the last year or two. This has been one of the best comics on the market lately, and I truly look forward to seeing where it goes.

Knights of the Dinner Table (Kenzer) -- The ongoing "adventures" of a group of friends sitting around the table playing Dungeons & Dragons in Muncie, Indiana -- a cast that has has grown from the original five to include dozens of quirky and unforgettable characters. I've reviewed this series elsewhere in this blog before, so let me just say that KODT is simply the funniest comic on the market today. If you aren't reading it, you should be.

Usagi Yojimbo (Dark Horse) -- Stan Sakai's samurai rabbit series has really grown on me since I first picked up a collection a couple of years ago. Each new issue goes to the top of my pile.

Conan (various incarnations) (Dark Horse) -- Dark Horse wrapped up their Conan: The Cimmerian series by Tim Truman and Tomas Giorello with issue #25, the conclusion of a great adaptation of "Iron Shadows in the Moon" and will publish two ongoing Conan series in 2011. Truman and Giorello will start a new King Conan book with Conan's adventures after he seizes the thrown of Aquilonia. Meanwhile, Roy Thomas -- my all-time favorite Conan comic writer and the man who first brought Conan to comics -- will pick up Conan's earlier adventures as the writer for the new Conan: The Road of Kings with art by Mike Hawthorne. I believe a good year portends for Hyborian Age.

Red Sonja/Queen Sonja (Dynamite) -- I've enjoyed the various Red Sonja titles from Dynamite over the past few years, though it all seemed to have gotten a bit muddled last year. Still, I look forward to seeing if they can sort it all out in 2011. Dynamite's been an interesting company in terms of having a really good business plan. In addition to signing some books by big-name comic creators, they've brought quite a few classic characters (Lone Ranger, Green Hornet, Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, The Phantom) back to comic-book life with solid creative teams, great covers, and persistence. Somebody at that company has a plan, and it's been fun to watch it play out.


The Unfinished List

These are books that I began reading at some point this year, but haven't yet finished for one reason or another.

High Seas Cthulu (2009), ed. by William Jones -- A collection of Lovecraftian short stories set on the high seas. I enjoyed the couple of stories that I read, but somehow it got set to the side. I'll try to pick it back up again this year.

The Children of Hurin (2009) by J.R.R. Tolkien -- Frankly, it kept putting me to sleep. In defense of Tolkien I was using it as late-, late-night reading, and there's something about the cadence of this "Elder Tales" tome that just lulls me into the arms of Morpheus. Given my occasional problems with insomnia, this may be a good thing. I'm sure I'll finish it off eventually, but I suspect it'll be two pages and a night's sleep at a time.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, et Simone Beck -- I've been taking my time and cooking through this a chapter or so at a time. I've spent quite a bit of time with the butter sauces (mmmmmn ... butter) so it may be time to move along to other taste treats. I liked this one so much that I asked Santa Claus for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 2 (1983) so as to continue down this delicious path.

This Time Is Different (2010) by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff (2010) -- This study of economic crises over the last 800 years has been really interesting, and I've already learned a ton about where our 2008-09 disaster fits in historic context. I set it to the side during the election when I was about halfway through, but look forward to picking it back up later this week.

On Deck

Eric (1990) and I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) by Terry Pratchett -- I Shall Wear Midnight finally arrived from the Science Fiction Book Club last month. But I've been loath to start it because I resent the fact that I don't know how many more of these Terry Pratchett will be able to write due to his struggle with early onset Alzheimer's.

My favorite writers should not age, get sick, and die. They should just go on and on, writing books for my enjoyment. In an admission that reality does not always accord with that decree, I bought Eric for the Kindle, so that I now have two as-yet unread Discworld novels in my greedy little hands. Sure, there are still more than a dozen more that I haven't read, but I hate the fact that at some point soon the count of Terry Pratchett novels will hit its final number.

Still, if Pratchett's mortality saddens me, one of the true joys of reading is knowing that there are books by a favorite author that I haven't yet read. I've been savoring that feeling by carrying my unread copy of I Shall Wear Midnight around the house, and after I finish it off, I'll take great joy in knowing that the final tale isn't yet told.

And indeed, there are plenty of great books that await me in 2011. So that's it for the reviewing, and now ... back to the reading.