1986: Champions

Champions (1986) #1-6 by Dennis Mallonee, Chris Marrinan et al.

Oh, what fresh hell is this.

It’s a comic book based on a super-hero role playing game? I couldn’t be less the intended audience for a comic book if they’d tried.

But, hey, I can consider this an anthropological excursion.

Whaaa? The first issue is drawn by Carol Lay!? I love Carol Lay.

But it doesn’t help. As super-hero comics go, this is super lame. The fight scenes (and there are mostly just fight scenes) are static and unexciting.

But you have to love that “pl-pl-pp!”

By second issue Lay is gone, of course: The mystery is that she had gotten involved with this project in the first place. Chris Marrinan takes over pencilling, and a variety of inkers don’t do that much to help.

Apparently role-playing games have a lot of back-story, so reading this is like reading issue #452 of a book that you’ve never heard of before.

That was never any interesting in the first place.

OK, so here we have the meat of the, er, issue: Combat rooms and character descriptions. The readers are encouraged to send in their own designs, but as there were no new combat rooms in the last two issues, I guess nobody cared that much?

“Qualified approval.”

It’s kinda fascinating in a boring way how they credit the creators of each character when they introduce them.

You are, Malace! You are!

Oh, didn’t I say anything about the storyline? A bunch of characters swapped faces and genders and there was fighting and rapes and murder.

I must admit I found it hard to pay attention.

*insert funny joke here*