When you're a very young kid reading comics you don't really pay attention to the credits.
Before I became a serious collector in my late teens/early 20s, I was picking up random issues as and when I could find them - either the original colour American comics or the black and white reprints that came out over here.
But I couldn't tell you who drew them. To be honest, I doubt I could have even told you who had written them!
I'm not sure when it happened, but the first artist whose style I recognised as distinctively different, and actively sought out, was that of Gil Kane. I liked his stark lines.
Then my tastes expanded to being able to pick out the work of Carmine Infantino whose art, to my untrained and uneducated eye, I thought was quite similar to Kane's work.
But it's Kane's illustrations that have always held a particular nostalgia for me, taking me to being a little kid, with my comics spread across the bedroom floor, following the adventures of sundry superheroes around imaginary cities, throughout space, and even into different dimensions.
Monday (April 6) was the 100th anniversary of Kane's birth.
This weekend found Nick and I back at our local wargames' show, Cavalier, at the Angel Centre in Tonbridge.
It was my first time in a couple of years and while I wasn't feeling one hundred percent, I was determined that my excitement would see me through. And, thanks to Nick stepping in as my ad hoc 'carer' (in the absence of Rachel, who was at home with Alice), I managed an impressive (for me) three hours at the show.
The highlight of the day came early, when Nick and I had barely seen a quarter of the displays and traders, as a gentleman from the Maidstone Wargames Society invited us to join in their Labyrinths of Mars participation game.
This was one I'd mentally flagged ahead of time, looking at the list of games on the show's website, because - as I suspected - it was John Carter themed.
The game was a reskinning of the classic family board game Labyrinth, which I'd played with Nick and his son, Alec, several years ago. However, this iteration included fighting and treasure hunting, and was scaled up to feature 28mm miniatures.
My dynamic duo of Barsoomian warriors before battle commenced
The ever-moving Labyrinth of Mars
Nick's team (top) make a strategic withdrawal from my gang (bottom)
As with the boardgame, you always start your turn by sliding a spare tile into the layout - pushing all the other tiles in that row on one space, thus constantly reconfiguring the Martian (Barsoomian) maze, and making planning ahead quite challenging.
There were four of playing and we each had four objectives to find before we could escape the labyrinth, be they treasures, allies, or boosts, and you could earn special cards as well that gave you extra abilities or bonuses.
I'd got three of my objectives (a couple of artifacts and a Barsoomian prince), without making too much of a scene about it, but the last thing I needed for my 'collection' was The Great White Ape (pictured above).
The only problem was The Ape had just joined Nick's team, as Nick had played a "brain transfer" card on it, giving it a Barsoomian brain... rather than a raging great ape's brain!
So, I had to attack Nick's party! Aided by the prince, we overpowered Nick's characters (and with some lucky die rolls) and the ape opted to join my "stronger" team.
Then on my next turn (again more by luck than judgement), I was able to slide the walls of the maze to open a straight avenue to the exit... where I was declared not just the winner, but WARLORD OF MARS.
I suspect Nick is never going to forget how I robbed him of potential victory!
After this, we resumed our patrol of the main hall, and the first person we bumped into - who was demonstrating his grid-based Vietnam War game - was Paul of Pazoot, a wargaming YouTube channel I have recently discovered (thanks to his work with Big Lee of Miniature Adventures).
This was my first - in-person - encounter with an actual YouTuber.
Paul's 'Nam game, which he was putting on with the East Kent Wargames Society, will be the second of his Battle Chronicle range of narrow-focused rules sets across different historical periods. The first is 1812: Retreat from Moscow, which Big Lee is working on.
Here follows a brief selection of some of the other games being played at Cavalier:
Shepway Gamers' The Englishman's Castle: a 28mm Wars of the Roses conflict
Of course, as well as gaming, these events are also for shopping. Both Nick and I, in our own way, were surprisingly restrained this year. While Nick didn't buy anything, I managed to restrict myself to items for my Dead Man's Hand (Wild West) game.
I found myself mainly being drawn towards terrain, as I have enough unpainted gunfighters etc already, waiting to sent off for painting.
Amazing fantasy terrain at surprisingly affordable prices - I'm impressed I resisted
Pumpernickle Games do some lovely stuff - I hope to get some desert bits from them at a later date, but, in the meantime, who doesn't want their own Stonehenge?
At the end of the day, I only purchased a Western bank, from Beowulf, with interior fixtures and fittings; a pair of metal cacti and a pair of resin outhouses from Debris of War; and a log cabin.
My haul from Cavalier 2026
It was a great time and I'm glad I persevered. I'd wanted to play at least one participation game, but wasn't sure if I was up to it. So I'm delighted it happened to me one I was looking forward to checking out.
I did have one "funny turn" - after squatting down to look at some items that were being displayed on the floor, then bobbing up again. But Nick kindly offered me his arm and helped me to a chair, where I could rest a while.
Once I got home (Rachel came and picked me up), I was totally zonked out for the rest of the day, then had a rough night of near-continuous coughing. But, you know what, it was so worth it.
I had a fantastic time with one of my oldest friends, we got to play an awesome wargame... which I won, we chatted with a ton of people, and I got myself some more bits for my PROJECT 60 wargame of choice.
And I've already have made a shopping list of future bits and bobs I can order from these traders online.
Below, you will see a 17-minute video by Model Paint Whatever of the sights and sounds of the day, which shows off way more of the games on display than I have:
And here's a piece from Big Lee himself about Cavalier:
After the gonzo epicness of Uwe Boll's first In The Name Of The King movie, the sequel, Two Worlds, is a strangely low-key affair (presumably for budgetary reasons).
Ex-special forces officer Granger (Dolph Lundgren) is whisked away from our world to the war-torn Kingdom of Ehb (where the original film took place) by the sorceress Elianna (Natalia Guslistaya).
Time has moved on since the first movie, Farmer is dead and a new king sits on the throne, Raven (Lochlyn Munro). He needs Granger to fulfil his role in a prophecy and slay the leader of his enemies, The Dark Ones.
Accompanied by the court physician, Manhatten (Natassia Malthe) and a small detachment of soldiers, Granger heads off into the wilderness to assassinate The Holy Mother (Christina Jastrzembska) - belatedly finding out everything isn't quite what it seems.
Two Worlds is an enjoyable, if not wholly original, romp that doesn't overdo the "fish-out-of-water" shtick (Granger actually adapts to his new situation very quickly, although never makes any effort to blend in with the locals).
Hampered by an unnecessary, and thankfully infrequently used, voice-over from Lundgren (which I mistakenly took at first as the 'audio description track' as it was just telling me what I was seeing on the screen) and odd lines of clunky dialogue, Two Worlds nevertheless reinforces my belief that the fantasy genre is the much maligned Uwe Boll's strongest.
There's also a sad lack of monsters (only one - a CGI dragon - makes an appearance) and The Dark One's costumes are remarkably unremarkable, little more than fancy dress ninja suits.
While the "earth-man saves alien world" aspect works surprisingly well with the clever plot twists sown into the story, and the ending is clearly left open for a sequel (it was very John Carter-esque in that sense), I hope that when Uwe returned to this well for a third time in 2014 the next In The Name Of The King movie - this time with Dominic Purcell headlining - would be more akin to the original. Two Worlds is fun but reminiscent of so many other low-budget fantasy flicks, while the first film at least had a flair of eccentric exuberance about it.
Isekai (Japanese: 異世界; transl. 'different world', 'another world', or 'other world') is a sub-genre of fiction. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, webtoons, anime, and video games that revolve around a person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe, with or without the possibility of returning to their original world.
Portal fantasy, also called portal-quest fantasy, gateway fantasy or crossworld fantasy, is a plot device in speculative fiction, particularly fantasy fiction and science fiction, in which characters enter a self-contained fantasy world through a portal, typically within a quest-based narrative that focuses on exploring and navigating that world. Portal fantasy works typically feature protagonists who enter alternate realities, explore unfamiliar landscapes, and encounter distinctive characters. Overall, portals in speculative fiction act as catalysts for narrative movement, worldbuilding, and thematic exploration.
With a new vision of C.S. Lewis's Narnia coming to Netflixat the end of the year and the fact that I am listening to the BBC radio play adaptations of The Complete Chronicles of Narnia, I'm entertaining different approaches to hooking players into any future fantasy roleplaying setting I conjure up.
Given that the current hot contender for "game du jour" is the upcoming video game and anime-inspired Twilight Sword, I can't help but be drawn to the concept of isekai (see the definition above if you're not au fait with the term) - although I don't know if it would be appropriate for that particular game (on the other hand it is baked into Break!! as a core character concept).
But, more specifically, my current travels in Narnia have got me wondering about the idea of "child adventurers".
I know these days this is a much more common concept - thanks to the ubiquity of Stranger Things, a whole heap of anime, and RPGs like Tales From The Loop and Kids on Bikes - but it's an idea that takes me back to the early days of Steve's Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the 1980's, where a core concept was you play "yourself with superpowers".
You didn't roll random numbers to generate your statistics, but rather you and your fellow players 'graded' each other on a scale of three to 18 for the the primary stats of your characters, then you generated random superpowers and bingo! That was how the Acrobatic Flea was born.
But, of course, the big difference between superhero roleplaying games and Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy adventures is that supers games are generally skewed towards keeping the player characters alive, where as dungeon delvers tend to be fragile, little snowflakes when they are just starting out.
There is a long literary tradition of "child adventurers" - in fact many of my favourite books have juvenile or young adult protagonists (e.g. Philip Reeves Mortal Engines saga, The Wizard of Oz and, of course, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland) - but literary tropes don't necessary work as written in a roleplaying format.
I like the idea of "Earth" men and women traveling to an alien world (e.g Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter books), as it means you don't need to explain everything to the players beforehand and they can explore the world as they go along, and I have no qualms about tooling up imaginary child characters with swords and bows, but what are the logistics of such a starting point?
How would I go about generating statistics for the player-characters? Would the players play younger versions of themselves (as per Villains & Vigilantes) or roll new characters? How would players, particularly those who were parents, feel about putting (fictional) young characters in harm's way?
The brilliant Luminism channel brings us a pair of featurettes examing great fantasy films that managed to bomb at the box office (often due to a marketing failure by studios unable to grasp genre pieces).
Andrew Stanton's take on John Carter isn't a pure adaptation of A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burrough's literary launchpad for his Barsoom cycle - but a distillation of elements from the first couple of books, with some elements added or expanded and others abridged.
Nineteenth Century Southern gentleman and cavalry captain-turned-treasure hunter John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) finds himself transported to ancient Mars (or Barsoom as the natives call it) and drawn into an alien war beyond his comprehension.
A mysterious race of shape-changing beings called Therns - and represented by the coolly evil Mark Strong - are manipulating the humanoid Red Martians of the cities of Zodanga and Helium into an apocalyptic conflict.
In the meantime, Carter is captured by the Tharks, a tribe of giant, four-armed Green Martians, who have their own conflicts with the Wahoons (another tribe of Green Martians) to worry about.
While with the Tharks, Carter meets the gorgeous Helium Princess - and scientist - Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), whose marriage to the leader of Zodanga, Sab Than (Dominic West) could spell an end to the conflict... if it wasn't a duplicitous trick to leave Helium vulnerable to invasion.
Carter, naturally, falls in love with Dejah (and vice versa), and while striving to find a way home he also aids in turning the tide of the war... by getting the Tharks involved.
The sundry machinations of various parties make for a quite complex plot, against which the love story of Carter and Dejah plays out, and if the film has a fault it's that the motivations and objectives of the Therns aren't explicitly spelled out.
However, that's a small price to pay when we are presented with some of the most exquisite world-building I've seen on screen.
Barsoom, its creatures, its landscape and language come alive at the hands of master storyteller Andrew Stanton. He manages to simultaneously re-invent Edgar Rice Burrough's 100-year-old classic for the 21st Century and lovingly pay it tribute.
Remember - if you're old enough - that feeling you felt the first time you saw Star Wars at the cinema (the original, not the prequels)? Well, brace yourself for a return performance.
This is a sweeping, epic, summer blockbuster that you actually have to pay attention to, not a popcorn slugfest like the highly enjoyable MCU but an intelligent and layered piece of pulp sci-fi.
I always had high hopes for John Carter, but the reality far exceeded my expectations. It is a truly impressive feat of film-making that deserves a far larger audience - and far more acclaim - than it got upon its release at the cinema.
Everything about it - from the nuanced performances and special effects to the breath-taking realisation of Barsoom - is pitch perfect. No-one involved with this masterful movie should be ashamed to say they had a part in bringing the iconic science-fiction character of John Carter to life.
Ignore a lot of the nonsense that has been written about this movie - and the negative reviews - and be prepared to visit another planet for the adventure of a lifetime.
I sincerely hope that - eventually - Disney gets round to making a well-deserved sequel to John Carter, but perhaps learns from its mistakes and markets it a bit more aggressively (like they did with its MCU movies) next time round.
Like a great many geeks of a certain age, I love - and am continually inspired by - Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series of pulp novels.
Way, way back in 2018 Modiphius Entertainment was Kickstarting a John Carter roleplaying game (one of their 'everything at once' splurge releases of multiple books, miniatures, dice, tile sets etc) and, for a minute, I was 'all-in'.
But then, it struck me that (a) I'm not really a fan of their 2d20 house system, (b) releasing everything at once means a LOT of reading (and their books tend towards the tiny text-heavy), and (c) none of my gaming group had ever expressed any interest in Barsoom or John Carter, which would mean having to 'teach' them all about the Martian cultures, language etc on top of a new set of rules.
So, I cancelled my Kickstarter pledge and consigned the game to the dusty halls of my "what could have been" dream storage unit.
As far as I could tell, after the initial gush of books (that were part of the Kickstarter), Modiphius didn't do anything else with the setting and let it fade, with the system only popping up in the occasional sale listing.
Books from Modiphius tend to be beautifully produced, often hardbacks, and sport a heft price tag.
I've got their Conan The Barbarian core rules book and the more recent Dune one, but mainly to look nice on my shelves. Both of these were acquired via eBay for a fraction of their 'recommended retail price'.
The license for Conan has reverted to Heroic Signatures, who are publishing a fresh roleplaying game through Monolith, which is due out later this year.
And with that, John Carter - as a roleplaying game - slipped out of my mind.
Until, the other day, when an advert popped up somewhere for a Modiphius "moving warehouse" sale. And I thought: why not take a look?
And I was gobsmacked: the few John Carter items they had listed were going for pennies.
I didn't really need a new game, but how could I resist the core, hardback, rules for £4; tile sets (airships and ruins) for £1.50 each (which have potential utility in a variety of settings); and a player's guide and character cards/tokens set also for £1.50 each?
With postage, I got this lot (see picture at top of article) for under £20, saving almost a hundred quid on their original list price.
Will I do anything with these rules? Who knows? Or will they just sit prettily on my shelves next to Conan and Dune?
At least, now, seven years later, I actually have the John Carter core books in hand, and I'm sure there are other companies out there manufacturing John Carter-inspired miniatures to sword fight across the deck of my airships!
Of course, I could let this slide on a technicality by reminding you that John Carter himself - before he was transported to Barsoom/Mars - was an American Civil War veteran, a Confederate captain from Virginia, which kinda makes him part of my on-going Western theme.
Like John Carter before it, The Lone Ranger was another victim of Disney's marketing team not understanding how to promote a classic pulp character to the general public.
The Lone Ranger also suffered from being saddled with its connections to the successful Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and Disney's obvious desire to kickstart a similar series of movies - with the attendant lucrative merchandising.
The central performance by Johnny Depp as Tonto isn't really that much of leap from Captain Jack Sparrow. It's as if he only has the one arrow in his quiver these days when it comes to blockbuster action flicks. And did I miss the nerdrage at the racebending casting of Depp as the world's most famous fictional Native American?
But before you start thinking I didn't enjoy this film, I have to say there is a lot to enjoy about it and when the William Tell Overture kicks in for the climactic chase sequence you need a heart of stone not to be transported back to a childhood filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, cap guns and Lone Ranger action figures.
The film's grand finale is truly breathtaking - without a doubt the most incredible extended stunt sequence I've ever seen in a Western.
The problem is the film takes so dang long to get there. In total it's almost two and a half hours in duration and that's simply way too long.
Arnie Hammer plays John Reid, a greenhorn lawyer, returning to the West to see his brother, Dan (James Badge Dale), Dan's wife, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson) and their son, Danny (Bryant Prince).
He joins up with Dan - and is deputised as a ranger - to track down dangerous cannibal killer Butch Cavendish (an almost unrecognisable and decidedly evil William Fichtner).
Cavendish's gang ambush the rangers, leaving them for dead, but John is found by Tonto and nursed back to health. He then takes on the guise of the "masked man" to track down Cavendish and his confederates .
This is all well-and-good as a classic origin story, but the waters are further muddied by a very cliché plot involving a nefarious railroad man, Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson).
Like Pirates Of The Caribbean, the script - by Pirates alumni Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and Justin Haythe - blends the action with humour, but this is a bit hit and miss.
There are also suggestions of a mystical angle to some of the goings-on, but - unlike Pirates - the script seems unwilling to commit to whether this is really happening or is a product of Tonto's deranged imagination.
The story also has a framing device of an elderly Tonto recounting the tale of John Reid to a boy in a 1930s' funfair, which primarily serves to give the scriptwriters licence to play with the idea of Tonto being an unreliable narrator, so they can muck around with the linear nature of the story.
This works, but isn't really necessary. The Lone Ranger could have done with losing about 30 or 40 minutes from its running time, but ultimately the main stretch isn't arduous - just sometimes feels it's going round in circles - and the magnificent grand finale is worth the wait.
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
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