[Doctor Chaos] Initial brainstorming about a Kickstart

[Ron Edwards]

OK, this is total brainstorming. Doctor Chaos is a game in development, with a playtest draft well into the Beta stage (not what you've been using, Jesse, that was all Alpha). What I need is extensive playtesting as well as a broad and excited community ready for when the game gets released.

The Kickstart has nothing to do with producing the game itself; in fact, the whole point is that because broad-spectrum playtesting is needed, the game isn't ready. The game would be scheduled for a concrete date well past the endpoint of the Kickstart.

Instead, the Kickstart is to produce a comic book, posted two pages per week on-line, and to be collected as a print product at the end. It would be 64 pages total, built on the "double-sized summer spectacular" model from back in the 70s. Such issues were typically the climax of various plotlines in a superhero comic like The Avengers or the Fantastic Four, and if you came into them right at that point, encountering the plethora of characters and the crazy back-stories all at boiling point was like a two-by-four of comics-fan orgasm. (The crossover series of the 80s and early 90s like Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Earths were very bad imitations of these.)

You get the idea, right? Making a comic that was totally original which was only this issue, and enjoying the fun of pretending that all these characters had years and years of cockamamie backstory in real comics. (credit where it's due: John Ostrander and Doug Rice batted this idea around in my presence back in the late 80s) Who knows, maybe some of the characters and lesser villains would then be worth a mini-series or two.

The idea would be to hire a bona fide comics professional artist and writer (one or two people, depends), and get the Doctor Chaos concept and the skeleton of the plot from one of the playtest games. Exactly how much I'd be involved with the art direction or plot would depend on the professionals in question; it could go pretty far either way and I'd be just as happy to leave it to them.

So the goal is serious business: this is major professional hiring. I wouldn't even start the serious pre-start Kickstart discussions until I found people willing and excited to do it. My internet investigations have found that many comics pros do extensive freelance work, and my hope would be to find one or two who would bring fun-and-love to this project as well as skill.

Everyone who pledges gets access to a plain PDF for the rules to be playtested, with the options of "comment as you see fit" or an itemized response sheet.

The model is based on what I was talking about with Guy in [Sorcerer Kickstart] Limited release strategizing. Every pledge award is $25. All you pledge is some increment of $25, and then at the end, you indicate which ones you want (as many as you paid for) in the survey. They won't be available in any way shape or form after the Kickstart.

The pledges would be (this is a brainstorm/rough list):

- You get a pencil-and-ink portrait of your Doctor Chaos from play
- Your story-from-play becomes a candidate for the plot (non-winners get their choice of one of the other options)
- One or more of your superheroes gets featured in the superhero deck of the game*
- The poster for the comic -- you pay shipping
- A nice laid-out print version of the playtest text with a cover illustration (not the free one you get for pledging at all) -- you pay shipping
- A full analysis of your playtest results and their use in finalizing the game
- I'll playtest your game in development for one session
- I'll write a supervillain essay as it pertains to role-playing, by me and kicked into shape by [famous RPG superhero game designer]*

You can see that some of these are contingent on the pledger actually doing some playtesting. If someone pays for one of those and doesn't playtest by a stated date, then too bad.

Important: in this case, I'm talking about pre-production activity, not a Kickstart about a published game like I was discussing with Guy. That's why "a copy of the finished game" is not a pledge award - again, this is not a "get my game published" Kickstart. It'll be published later, that's solid. You can try to convince me otherwise about that in a later stage of the discussion, not now please.

To clarify about the timing ... during the Kickstart, everyone gets the playtest-PDF just by pledging. Formal playtesting ends at some date after the Kickstart, as much as two months perhaps. The comic would go into serious production after that, mainly because some crucial content is coming from playtest accounts. The game would certainly be finished and released while the comic is in progress on-line, long before it's done.

I'd hope to make some money above and beyond the goal from this, but the real points are to generate the playtest results and really use them well toward the end of game design, to establish the best promotion and cross-promotion for the game imaginable, and, well, to see a cool comic come into existence over the course of most of a year.

Thoughts please!

Best, Ron

* The superhero deck is an ordinary deck of playing cards but every card features a quick-and-dirty unnamed superhero portrait; it's intended to serve as inspiration during play in addition to the card-based mechanics.

** The person I have in mind is a good friend and is well known to anyone reading this post, but since this is brainstorming and I haven't mentioned it to him yet, please permit me to keep the name unstated for now.

[Jesse Burneko]

So, it's kind of like an ashcan process.

So, the Kickstarter is there to produce the comic.  Where does this comic end up?  It seems to me that at a minimum people would want the comic in print.  A fun limited artifact.

This also seems to be taking the idea of a Kickstarter project as something you actively engage with, and not something you just throw money at and then wait by the mailbox for to a new level.  On the one hand I kind of like that, on the other it sort of opens it up to all kinds of crazy criticism.

The whole thing does seem kind of sideways. The goal is playtesting and community building but Kickstart requires a definable project so there's a comic book but it feels like a pretext.  But that may just be a pitch and presentation issue.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

Regarding the comic, I'd like it to be available in print afterwards, and that's incredibly easy given modern publishing methods. I'm even tempted to say to the comics pros, "The comic is yours, the game is mine," in terms of publication and money.* If that were the case, they could go ahead and have it be POD or print it and get it distributed to comics stores if there's demand for it. I don't see it as a limited thing, but as a product they can manage as they see fit. I also don't think it would be a good pledge award because you'd probably have to wait two years for it, and as the Kickstarter initiator, I don't want to deal with people sitting around on my "to do" list that long. There's too much room for the project to go south, to name the worst-case scenario.

I think the game/project/comic connections are tight enough to be legit. A solid component of the comic is going to arise from the playtesting, after all. So by pledging in that way you actually get a shot at contributing directly to the comic. In my most comics-fervent days, how much would I have paid to get my character into the subplots of a real-live comic written and drawn by one or more real-live comics people? A hell of a lot more than $25. So the comic is intended to be an outcome of the community, game-building activity to a significant degree.

The thing to do of course is to make sure that every pledge award is a real thing (electronic or not) which can be delivered whether the goal comes into physical fruition or not. That gets rid of that whole side of successful-but-failed Kickstart problems in which people say, "I paid for it and didn't get it," because the monetary goal was reached but it didn't work out physically/actually for any of 900 possible reasons. Whereas in this case, when it comes to what backers literally pay for - the pledge awards - they get them. Firewalling goal from backer award is really hard for people to get, in our hobby, but once they do, they seem to say, "Hey that makes sense."

People are always going to criticize and react strongly. I was able to keep that to a minimum, even absent, by taking Luke's and others' very good advice and making the Kickstart page available in draft well before I launched, at RPG.net and Story Games. I think that strategy is so important as to be a given. Certain things I wasn't going to budge about, I could explain in a safe environment (because no one was plunking money down yet) and people who offered good arguments for changing what they saw discovered that I was willing to make those changes.

Best, Ron

* Some contractual nonsense would have to be inscribed to handle future bugaboos like movie deals and whatever.

[James_Nostack]

Commentary about the "Giant-Sized Defenders" style comics from the 70's. 

* These were . . . of their time.  Not bad, but very 1970's.  If done in that style, (a) the non-comics reading public will be like, "WTF is this?" and the folks who don't know these generally forgotten comics will also be like, "WTF is this?" which is kind of a lose-lose situation.  I think a lot of your iconography--the name Trollbabe, the whole cartoony demons aspect to Sorcerer, particular taste in comics--stems from the mid-70's, which is awesome, but may need a few sentences of explanation on the inside cover to put the thing in perspective.

* The 70's also saw the dawn of a couple Villain-helmed titles: Tomb of Dracula, Super-Villain Team-Up, The Joker, and I think Secret Society of Super-Villains or something--I don't know DC very well.  So presumably this is Giant-Sized Doctor Chaos?

* Overwritten, probably, since we're looking at guys like Thomas, Englehart, and Gerber as the dominant writers.  It's hard to believe there were people less wordy than 1980's Chris Claremont, but I swear it's true.

* sometime in '73 or '74, Marvel had this thing where, in the bottom margin of the right-hand page, they would advertise on-going comics with a mysterious question or boast: "Who is--Tagak the Leopard Lord?!  Find out in Daredevil, the Man Without Fear!" and that kind of thing.  Matt Fraction satirized this pretty well in his recent Defenders run.  But it's a great way to create a sense of "external continuity" from somewhere else.

* Another nice thing from the era: on the splash page, way up at the top above the title, was a 1 or 2 sentence explanation of what the hell this book was about.  "When Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, he became super-clingy to his decrepit Aunt May, and became the Co-Dependent Spider-Man!" that kind of thing.  Again: nice way to convey a sense of purpose and unity to this thing.  Comics are missing that today, to their detriment.

* DC comics and some marvel teams would have large heads of the protagonists on the side margins, with banners telling you who this person was.  I think this is a must if you're introducing new characters.  Modern comics do this on the inside front cover, which is another decent solution.

* Somewhere in there, you have to have Wacky Exposition Splash Page, showing some grand or cosmic event at various stages of unfolding, with psychedelic backgrounds and many text boxes.

John Rogers is a gamer and comics writer, who is also running the TV show Leverage.  He did a really terrific run on Blue Beetle 1-25 around 2008 or so.  I'm not sure what his payscale is like, but he seems very versatile and into game-related stuff.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi James,

As always, your points are welcome, but in this case, I think you're visualizing something far more retro and self-referential than I have in mind. Your observation about my mid-70s orientation is completely accurate (all the more so since I'm constantly reading for and drafting Amerikkka right now), but the point isn't to recapture and simulate something from that time. A lot of your suggestions are aimed in that direction, and what I have in mind would be simply good and readable in today's terms. It wouldn't necessarily hew to the center (MIller-imitation, Morrison-imitation, Claremont-imitation) nor would it be a pure reproduction that would appeal strictly to nostalgia. What you describe wouldn't appeal to me, for the same reasons you list.

What I'm describing has a lot more in common with The Watchmen than may be apparent. I'm not talking about content so much as simple scope of the story - it's the late, late-stage climax of many different characters' storylines drawing upon at least three generations. (As usual, Moore conformed far more to certain superhero conventions, than he broke them, in this case Roy Thomas' ideal of linking Silver Age to Golden Age.) The characters didn't textually exist prior to this publication, but it looked as if they had,* and as if their prior textual histories were being honored.

If you do want to talk about content, then I'm talking a lot more about fisticuffs and cosmic blasts than can be found in The Watchmen, but with plenty of social context and plenty of soap opera - again, nothing Moore brought in as an innovation, but simply as a later version of Thomas' and Englehardt's not-always-successful ideals. Not to mention a very big dose of extravagant fun, exactly along the lines of Englehardt's awesome version of the Beast, something always in short supply with Moore.

From the early 80s on, American culture has treated the 70s as dismissively as possible, at most mining it for single-image content heavily tagged as retro, and enoyed as "cheesy" as long as one doesn't actually admit to liking it. Whereas I consider a great deal of the politics, art, and lifestyles of the time as seminal, and more so, imbued with vastly more content than the flashier, better-marketed, but essentially stupider work of the 80s.

As I see it, The Dark Knight Returns is grittier, more artistically ambitious, vastly more focused, and perhaps more single-author controlled than, say, Denny O'Neill's work on Batman from 15 years previously. It was also easier to do, with the blessing of a senior editor, as opposed to working with the constraints of a 22-page monthly book and the conventional expectations of the times. It's also ten times more simplistic about heroes and villains, and in terms of actually being about anything resembling real society, ten times dumber.

What I'm going for is 70s-inspired in terms of physical structure - 64-page summer spectacular - and in seeking to maximize the genuinely (not ironically) superheroic with the genuinely good - which if it isn't obvious, relies heavily on the concept of Doctor Chaos. I'll definitely see if Rogers is interested; along with interest, it'll depend a lot on how tied a given pro is to a company at the moment.

Best, Ron

* Yes, yes, the Gold Key characters, blah blah, but that isn't relevant to my point. Those characters' prior histories were explicitly negated and knowing about them doesn't add to enjoying the Watchmen - might even distract.

[James_Nostack]

Point taken, just saying that whoever does this thing is going to run into far more serious exposition issues than the typical comic.  Those particular techniques - a blurb on the front page explaining what this title is about, some identifying pictures of the protagonists, and, Lord help me, text boxes, seem to have been the state of the art at the time.  I think now the general approach is to recap events in a paragraph on the flyleaf with little identifying pictures saying who someone is and what their powers are, which is pretty much the same thing, just relocated.  And the bit with references to other stuff (in-panel footnotes, advertisements on the bottom of the page, etc.) is another way to create the illusion of a larger continuity.

Another thing to remember is that the 64-page super-spectacular consisted of like 20 pages of ads.  This may be a way to lower costs, but I'd be up front about it in terms of what backers are actually getting, if you decide to go down that route.

As to the side topic of the 1970s, I think our culture views the decade as... complicated.  Most of the politics of that era has been deliberately denigrated by the far right, and obscured for most apolitical folks, but it still lives on among the serious Left.  (This, I think, is a one reason why the serious Left sometimes seems totally out of step: the stuff they're referencing has been consigned to the Memory Hole.)

On the other hand, the really large pop culture stuff still survives.  You pretty much can't have all those Classic Rock stations without Led Zeppelin, 'Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Jefferson Starship, Bowie, etc.  Punk, I suppose, really got going later in the decade.  In film, Jaws, Rocky, Serpico, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, are all still influential.  Stephen King's early novels and Vonnegut's later ones, along with Hunter S. Thompson's later reportage, are both quite good and continue to remain in print. 

But I think specifically with comic books, Marvel (at least) was in a really weird spot from, say, 1973 through 1977.  There's very little during that period that seems essential to me.  I don't know DC very well during this period, but like you said, I think the main guy over there was O'Neil, who was killing.

This probably is like the way every other decade gets processed: take the best music, the most popular books, caricature the politics into a one-sentence description and a couple famous images, and mock the fashion until you're out of ideas and then steal it.

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!  The forum is up again finally!

About:

You get the idea, right? Making a comic that was totally original which was only this issue, and enjoying the fun of pretending that all these characters had years and years of cockamamie backstory in real comics. (credit where it's due: John Ostrander and Doug Rice batted this idea around in my presence back in the late 80s)

It's not only an idea anymore, somebody already did it. Who? Well, that hairy Englishman, who other?
http://comicsincontext.blogspot.it/2006/03/1963-6-issue-mini-image-comics-1993.html

The same stunt was used right afterwards in one of the first Simpsons comics:
http://www.snpp.com/guides/comics_rm00.html

Citing these precedents and the differences with them maybe would help in explaining what you want to do with the Doctor Chaos comic book...

[Ron Edwards]

I have learned my lesson. The project will only be described as "Doctor Chaos webcomic," omitting all references to anything resembling its actual inspiration. Otherwise I'll have to be explaining what it is and isn't forever and a day.

Never mind that please. I'd like more feedback about the Kickstart idea. The hump to get over is the pre-order mentality: "I pledge, I get a book." Or rather, simply to admit that there isn't a book, that it would actually be wrong to promise one when the game itself isn't yet playtested enough, that the product will most likely be PDF anyway, and that this is a playtesting/community project, period. And besides you can get a pretty nice playtest-book out of it anyway, if you pledge for that.

Thoughts?

Best, Ron