Comic Book Resources

Oh.
Um.... thanks...

[backs slowly and quietly out, glancing around in utter vain for a trace of Mon-El or Barda or Zabu the Sabretooth or anybody, anything, like that]

Nice. As both a 40k and comic fan I know better than to ever throw stones at someone else's geekdom.

People working on licened fiction have a rough row to hoe. On one hand the licence brings in fans, fans who already know what a Jedi or a Zerg or a Drakonian is. Who don't want you to waste pages explaining the obvious.

But they also bring in strangers off the street, strangers who have no idea what the Federation is, or the Imperium or Hogwarts.

So meeting these competing needs and telling a story is tough. Text pages and cliffnotes (when done well) are pretty much the only way to go. Which does not make Damnation Crusade a good book, but explains the problem.

The whole idea in Warhammer 40k is there are no good guys, you can play the roid'ed up fanatical super facists, or play slobbering aliens who want to kill us. When done right it is darkly humorous like Judge Dredd or Martial Law.

Personally the page with the mostly naked guy sprawled at the feet of the marine makes me laugh. There's always been a homoerotic subtext in the game and it's nice to see it spelled out so clearly. The Dreadnaught trying to look menacing with its stubby little arms and legs is cute too.

Warhammer doesn't make for good comics...or books really (The 'Gaunt's Ghosts' ones are reasonable). The problem, really, is the nature of the universe in which it takes place means it's close to impossible to have a protagonist you can root for.
There's no real 'good guys' or 'bad guys', anybody who even doubts the morality of the almost-good-guys will get mind-raped and liquidated or will fall to Chaos and end up with tentacles. Anybody not genetically enhanced/with a massive claw hand/psychic is pretty much cannon fodder. You know that this is the case, and if you were reading a book where a lowly imperial guardsman beats a Space Marine in a heroic fight, somewhere at the back of your mind you'd be thinking 'Geez. That guy must have rolled a LOT of sixes!'...Oh, and it takes place in a universe where women are a rare alien species you almost never see.

Space Marines are basically genetically enhanced monks in powered armour. They live lives which basically go like:
Wake up. Pray. Kill Aliens. Pray. Sleep.
Oh, and of course, there are NO female space marines, and space marines are all celibate by nature (and necessity, I suppose, or there would be either crushed women or giant super-human babies everywhere). So they're not fighting for peace or love, just duty (Though now I'm suddenly tempted to write a book about gay space marines in love...Wow, that'd upset some people!).
The tag-line of the series is "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." ...Which is the problem. The reason for the war they're all fighting happened about 20,000 years ago (longer or shorter depending on the race in question) and the people fighting don't do much other than...fight.
Warhammer. Fun game. Not great story generator.

[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI never played Tomb Raider but I enjoyed the movies well enough as popcorn flicks. Atari Force was an entertaining comic book. And lots of people have fond memories of the various Transformers and GIJoe comics. … [...]

I've been a 40k player for a long time and really enjoy the background stories to it. I have most of books published by Black Library and most of them are really good, some are a bit of a let down and others are amazing. I saw some preview stuff of this comic when it was 1st realeased and thought it was so corny, the artwork was good, but oh dear what was going on with the dialogue? It's a shame really as there has been good work produced in the 40k comic.

If you want to see what can be done with the subject, look for the Lone Wolves and Demonfuege stories. Brilliant artwork and good stories

Now, now, now ....
Don't hold back, Mr. Burgas, say what you REALLY think.

If it's of any consolation, I've never played or read any of Warhammer games or comics.

I get lots of mindless senseless violence from reading any Warren Ellis books.

Of course, even the "fun fascism" stuff has a tendency to be read as plain "fun." I can't tell you how many fans I've met at shops and cons who didn't realize that Judge Dredd was a parodic anti-hero.

And apparently, that goes for Sylvester Stallone, too....

2 things...

1. When I was a kid, I played a lot of Double Dragon. I also hated this kid. Let's call this kid... L. Anyways, I wrote a story in 3rd grade about me and a group of my friends fighting L and his group of friends. It was violent. Like, really violent. I wish I still had it, because I'm sure it involved nunchucks and knives and baseball bats, and I'm positive the conclusion was me taking L and throwing him off of a cliff to his bloody death.

When I think about it now, I'm really not sure why the school didn't send me to a psychiatrist. Not that I was seriously violent, but I really, really didn't like this kid, and we ended up fighting a few times. Then the next year we were friends. Children are pretty messed up. Either that or it's just me.

2. As for comics made from RPG games, anyone remember those really really crappy Magic: the Gathering comics? Man, those were indefensible, even by me, and I loved that crap for about two years.

Now, now, now ….
Don’t hold back, Mr. Burgas, say what you REALLY think.

Mr. Burgas usually does, and so do I; but Mr. Burgas didn't write this. Mr. Hatcher did.

I guess Mr. Burgas already wrote up his reaction, not dissimilar to mine as it happens, a few weeks back. Usually I wouldn't go back over ground someone else has covered, but I DID want to give Andrew his shot as promised. And I try to write up everything I get sent, though BOOM sends us so much it tends to pile up on me. Chip Mosher, their marketing guy, has to be the hardest-working man in show business. I dunno how he finds time to write cool books like Left On Mission too.

Aren't the Tau half decent?

I only know about 40k through wikipedia.

From what I've read, the Tau were introduced recently because there were still a few players who wanted to be the good guys, and they'd taken the Eldar (space elves, for the uninitiated) progressively darker.

And, as the good people at tvtropes.org put it:

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge.

Oh yeah, and the Tau apparently believe in government through low-level mind control. So they're probably not that good, just not as bad as all the other species.

"Atari Force was an entertaining comic book."

It probably didn't hurt that it pretty much had nothing to do with the games it was supposedly based on.

Regarding the drawing of violence in comic form and today's zero-tolerance stance in most schools, I completely agree with the case-by-case basis thing. I was a good kid. I didn't fight, didn't talk back, didn't do drugs, didn't come to school with hangovers, and didn't really not-like anyone. However, in today's environment, I would get in serious trouble for the kind of stuff I doodled away at in class.

Back then, if I got in trouble for my drawings, it was for drawing when I should have been listening. Nowadays, it would have been for the content of my drawings rather than the fact that I should have been listening.

The plain fact of the matter is that everyday and in every class (save for P.E., alas), I, in my authority as the artist, killed by the fistful. I was lord over a domain of death. Not only did I engage my doodles in simple firefights, but I subjected my creations to beheadings, impalements, internal combustion, acids, and, well, squirshings. Among other fates. This was partly because I found that drawing things I would hopefully never see was adventurous and partly because my classmates egged me on, cheering the imaginative ways in which I brought to a close the lives of two dimensional persons.

There was nothing wrong with me. I was a quiet, well-adjusted kid who was both good-natured and friendly (if a bit shy). I grasped full-well that the drawings I created bore no import in the world of flesh and of blood. These were not worlds in which I immersed myself in order to escape from the tortures of a world that was too cruel to me (i.e., the real world). I did not harbour secret desires to slaughter the jocks, make the cheerleaders pray to me before I drown them in a hail of gunfire, hog-tie the rich kids in overtly homo-erotic poses in order to shame them forever. There wasn't really anyone at school I didn't like.

A couple months ago, I unearthed several pieces of work from the late80s/early90s that I had doodled up during math and history classes. There was even a comicbook (that was far too influenced by the art of Liefeld and McFarlane et al) in which five of my friends and I discover our teachers hoarding weaponry beneath the school; so we begin a battle from which there are only three survivors.

I think the cool thing was that many of my teachers were fine with it - even if a couple suggested I study my anatomy a little closer.

If you're interested in a good laugh, I had put up some of the doodles here and the thirty-five page comic here. In any case, Greg, it's good to see that there are teachers who are willing to shoot after asking questions.

The Tau are also godless communists. No, really.

http://www.nuklearpower.com/images/tau_poster03.jpg
(courtesy 8 Bit Theater)

Let kids have their mindless violence. When they grow up they might become comics bloggers, so they may as well enjoy life while they can.

Whenever I read about your class, it makes me feel all happy. Hooray!

I like how halfway through this series, one of the issues ends on a cliffhanger that is not only never resolved, it is actually completely ignored for the rest of the series.

I would have to disagree with Mongoose that 40K cannot make good books. It's true that the best books tend to borrow heavily from other styles - Gaunt's Ghosts for example are very Richard Sharpe-esque and the Ciaphas Cain novels practically scream 'Flashman!' right from the first page - but someone like Dan Abnett, Sandy Mitchell or Ben Counter can often craft a likeable, or at least, tolerable, protagonist and a damn good story.

Yes, the general setting is particularly incomprehensible if you don't already know the backstory and all sides are generally portrayed with more negative points than positive, but that's half the fun.

That's not to say that something like Damnation Crusade isn't the sadly mindless pap that often results from the WH40K literature, but I can't dismiss them all out of hand. I wonder, Greg, was Games Workshops' own web page considered off-limits for the purpose of your web search?

I wonder, Greg, was Games Workshops’ own web page considered off-limits for the purpose of your web search?

No, I just ran out of patience for it, that's all. I looked at Boom's site and then just for the hell of it I tried Wikipedia, and about that time I thought, "What the hell am I doing, looking all this up? This should all have been in the damn book somewhere." That was my point. I daresay I'd have had the same reaction no matter which web sites I went to.

I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out that googling Black Templars gives GW's site quite far up the list. On one hand I agree that every comic should be as accessible to a newcomer as it can be, but on the other hand if I tried to summarise all the necessary info for a GW product I think I'd go mad.

I appreciate the time Greg put into this review and his sentiments about my work ethic at BOOM! goes a long with me....Randy Lander over at Comic Pants had a different point on view on the series:

"Damnation Crusade does a damn fine job of exploring a facet of this universe in a way that is accessible even to those who have never once even picked up a box of Space Marines or played their way through a game of Dawn of War."

I have read most of the WH40k stuff out there, and I have to say that I don't really care for any of the comics. For a universe with such a pre-defined visual look to it they just strike me as dull. I like Abnett's fast-paced writing style and I would have thought it would translate well to a comic in a universe he has such a grasp on, but I haven't seen that to be the case in the previous WH40k comics he wrote.

As a fan of the universe I want to defend it, but I can certainly see your point. A lot of it is mindless action, but below the surface there are some interesting themes to be found. It just requires a lot of work to get there. Too much, I'm almost forced to admit. But that's part of the fun of it for me, like those of you that are knee deep in DCU continuity.

And the Tau are, on the surface, like space communists. They are all about the "Greater Good" and have distinct roles, or castes. It's not all happy in Tau land, but the "one love" thing the image they tend to promote.

Oh, Simon Spurrior, who writes the comic Gutsville, wrote Fire Warrior which is all about the Tau.

I have to agree with Greg on this one... he should not have had to do *any* web-research to understand what was going on in the WH40K story. Everything should have already been there. If you have to go to outside sources to understand the basic of a story, then that's a flaw in the writing.

A good story may make you want to read up more on a given topic, but not feel that you *have* to do so.

Ah yes, Fire Warrior. The book that states all you need to have to win through a ship full of super human soldiers indoctrinated and enhanced solely for the purpose of war is a handful of grenades.
Why? Because if you throw one at them, all they will do is scream and die.

If the depth of your research is what you cited, you'd face the same troubles on any subject. You type in "Black Templars" in the search box on wikipedia, and there's a whole page you can skim.

These requests that everything he needs to know should've been in there seem misplaced. What should've happened was an introductory mini-series that provided this sort of information (Blood & Thunder'll make about as much sense to the new guy). Damnation Crusade is more like an arc you'd see in another comic that takes place beyond the initial exposition stage. I mean, you wouldn't expect Joss Whedon to explain who Colossus is EVERY ISSUE, would you? The comparison to movies seems terrible unfair. They're made, from the word go, to appeal to a broader audience.

It would've been difficult for this story to really explain everything. To really understand it all, you would literally need to explain the whole game's background. And you would've had to introduce a Watcher type figure or a non-character narrator to do so, because the very nature of the WH40K universe is one of pseudo-scientific superstition. The Techmarines, the guys in red armor, are the smart guys who maintain the space ships, tanks, and big guns, and they do it all while quoting scripture. The characters themselves lack the knowledge you want to be conveyed, and in a story whose intent is to show the lives of these characters, it would just compromise the story. Skipping the fights to show Raclaw getting cut-up and enhanced, while an Apothecary explained things in captions boxes would've been a way to strengthen the explanation and story, but other than that, their motivation really is "they're not us! Kill them!" And really, every other race pretty much has the same motivation. Even the Tau, with their creepy Greater Good, though they add another step before resorting to killing.

Damnation Crusade really succeeds in getting you into the characters. For these people, there literally is nothing but constant combat and self-denial. They fight for devotion to a cause that will never reward them, to protect a people they will always stand apart from, against enemies whom they cannot ever even begin to understand in any terms beyond what makes the most tactical sense to fight them. To a degree, they are brain-washed, but no worse than the Mobile Infantry in Starship Troopers.

Unfortunately, it's all very boring. Space Marines are, really, very boring. And my gosh but the art takes a turn for the worse by issue 6.