I’ve been thinking. I know, I guess I’d better have been thinking because I sure as heck haven’t been posting anything here in a while. A few years ago, one of my friends, Scott Burnham, passed away. I met Scott when I was in college. I had just bought the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, and we wanted to play, but had no one to run for us. We didn’t know how to run games, so we went to the college gaming group and started recruiting. Scott volunteered. Over the years, I played in a number of Scott’s games and he in mine. And when he passed away, our local comic book store purchased his original art, comics, and gaming materials in the estate sale. They told me, because there were quite a few pieces that I had done among the collection. I’m told this one was his favorite:
Now, don’t get all judgy. Scott was a lonely guy. I know why, but that’s not my story to tell. And now that he’s gone, it doesn’t really matter. We had a couple of fallings out over the years, but I still considered him my friend. Anyway, the owner of the store didn’t want to spend the time going through the box because most of the artworks was of Scott’s own characters and the market wasn’t very good for something like that. So, I was given the opportunity to buy all of his art pieces and non-book gaming stuff, character sheets and all for $300. I didn’t really have $300 to spend at the time, but I did it anyway, with the thought that I could probably sell enough from it to at least break even on the deal. And I’d have a lot of my artwork back that I did decades ago.
As it turned out, among the pile in the box, and that’s exactly what it was–a pile in a box, I found this piece:
I promptly sold this drawing on Ebay for $300 and the bargain was made. Anything else I got from the collection was gravy and I had all my artwork back. I spent some time going through the pile. And I found some gems, and some not-gems. One of the fun drawings I found was this one:
And where did I find it? Inside a sheet protector with character sheets for Psiren! There were dozens and dozens of character sheets for Champions in the box, and as I sorted through them, I remembered encountering most of the bad guys in there, and some of the heroes, too. Then it occurred to me that with all of the myriad characters I’ve created, I don’t want them to end up in a pile in a box. So, I am creating The Masquerade Files.
Back in the early 90s, I belonged to a Champions amateur press alliance (APA) called The Clobberin’ Times, and my zine was called Of Masks and Men. So, every two months, I would put at least one character picture and their background in, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who style, and sometimes I would include a character sheet.
Yes, that is indeed a dot-matrix printer page from my Tandy DMP-107, and I wrote it on a Tandy 1000 SL2! Radio Shack at its finest!
With today’s technology, I can do a little better than that!
Now, Abattoir has an interesting history. I was teaching at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, and I had a Vietnamese student who did, indeed, get suspended for getting jumped because the vice principal assumed that, being Asian, he knew Kung Fu or something. I stared at him, dumbfounded. That part of the story is absolutely true. To my knowledge, he was not recruited by an evil corporation and was not experimented on. But then again, it’s been a long time.
Abattoir was the main villain in a Clobberin’ Times gathering at Chicago Comicon one year. A whole bunch of us midwesterners played our main characters in one big game. As was our habit at the time, there was a vote at the end of the game for who played their character best, and that person won the original art, which is seen in the profile box.
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Moving forward I will be taking good, long looks at some (or all, if I live long enough) of the characters I’ve created for gaming, comics, and just fun, and I’ll be assembling them all into one big file. I’ve had to go back and relearn InDesign all over again to make the template, but I think I have a handle on it now.
