Robert Munroe (Ensign, Lexington militia, KIA 19 April 1775, Lexington Green)
Brent S. Cole (CWO, 1st Bn, 82nd CAV Bde, 82nd Airborne Div, KIA 22 May 2009, near Tarin Kwot, Afghanistan)

And all in between.

My eulogy is here.

Keith "Doc" Herber, author of many marvelous Call of Cthulhu scenarios and campaigns -- The Fungi From Yuggoth, Spawn of Azathoth, The Trail of Tsathoggua and much more besides -- died early this morning.

It wasn't all globetrotting horror. Herber's Return to Dunwich revisited Lovecraft's questionable town and provided unpalatable answers, in one of the two or three best books ever written for the game. In that book, Herber took his place with Ramsey Campbell as a chronicler of the human half of the Mythos; it's a paean to despair more immediate than some purists' disdainful "cosmicism" would allow. (And it has giant monsters in it.)

Doc also helped design "Raid on Innsmouth," one of the most revolutionary scenarios ever for any game; and his "Haunted House" is a dungeon crawl to make the saints weep. He wrote the first Clanbook: Tremere, which is considerably better than you'd expect, even if you were expecting something by Keith Herber.

He left game writing for years, fed up with the myriad miseries attendant on it. And then he got back in, starting Miskatonic River Press to publish Mythos-related books and games.

A little while ago, he sent me review copies of his two latest books. Full reviews of both remain forthcoming, but I can tell you that if you play Call of Cthulhu you won't regret going ahead without me and getting New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. Doc contributed one of the six scenarios there, set in "Foxfield."

And even if you don't play, do pick up his newly re-issued Dead But Dreaming, an anthology of Mythos fiction edited by Keith Herber and Kevin A. Ross. It's among the best Mythos anthologies ever published; it's almost certainly the best one of the decade. Adam Niswander and Ramsey Campbell are only the highlight names.

But the name that means the most, the guarantee of quality, of actually caring what goes between the covers -- that name is "Keith Herber."

And now we can never have the moment that might have redeemed the inevitably disappointing remake, when the big chair swivels around, and Patrick McGoohan stares Jim Caviezel down and says "I am the new Number 2."

No. 6, William Blake might say, has escaped.

It's very difficult to assess Patrick McGoohan without such drifting toward Gnosticism: he always made me believe that he was somehow secretly creating a better, usually grimmer, show than whatever you were watching him in. He had that trait of elevating the base clay of his role or of the story he was inhabiting, imbuing his surroundings -- from Ice Station Zebra to Columbo to Braveheart -- with a kind of glow, a kind of Illumination, if you will. In great material, he was still greater -- his villainous turn in Scanners makes that movie function as drama, buttressing its virtues as paranoid style and head-explodishness. Perhaps this was all "borrowed charisma," taken from No. 6 by me. Or perhaps, in No. 6, McGoohan made plain and easy the work he was forced to labor at elsewhere.

He was an actor who wrote -- a joke of a concept, if you don't remember Shakespeare.

He didn't write King Lear, but he created the single greatest television series ever. That's something to take with you, out of the village and off the island.

Game designer and legendary killer GM Erick Wujcik died Saturday. I heard about it on iamnikchick's LJ, and shortly thereafter in a flood of emails from industry colleagues and friends.

Erick was that kind of guy, someone whose sheer driving presence made him known and felt by rival designers, friends, and (unusually) the gaming public at large -- he founded Ambercon, one of the very first cons to approach gaming from an intellectual angle as much as from a "let's all get together and play" angle. He is best known, and rightly so, for creating the Amber Diceless RPG, which was, like Erick, something that once you've encountered it you always feel somewhere. But that said, I always looked forward to reading his Palladium work, which partook of a very different design philosophy, but was still expertly done. (Actually, I first read Eric's writing unawares; I owned Weapons and Assassins in Oklahoma in the 1980s.)

Erick and I met a few times at various conventions; I don't think I could claim to be a close friend, but certainly meeting Erick and talking to him made such questions irrelevant while you were doing it. He was always in the moment, intensely interested in games, giving off that interest in palpable waves, like there was a jet of magma inside him that couldn't wait to erupt.

As others have no doubt already said, since God doesn't play dice with the Universe, He's now got a GM who does likewise. And God had better be on top of His game, too, or Erick will just brutalize His character.

Gary Gygax, the Troll Lord Games forum tells us, has died at age 69.

To my knowledge, I only met him twice; once, when we were both guests at a game store grand opening, and once at GenCon 2007. History should record that he didn't seem particularly interested in me either time, and history will also record that there's no reason he should have been.

After all, everything I have accomplished professionally has come about, directly or indirectly, as a result of his efforts.

But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."

And it was Gary Gygax' work that first pointed me at the works of Jack Vance, for which, again, no words -- not even Gary's words, redolent with pulpy fronds and antiqued thesaurus-hide -- can properly express my debt.

Gary, like all of us in the creative business, rolled his share of fumbles, but his hits were all natural 20s. Somewhere around Elysium's gaming tables, he and Fletcher Pratt are already arguing about flanking bonuses.

George MacDonald Fraser, author, screenwriter, and curmudgeon, died Wednesday at age 82.

For my money, the Flashman novels -- which, should a vengeful deity have left you unaware of them, concern the exploits of rogue, satyr, and coward Sir Harry Flashman, V.C. -- are the way to write historical fiction. Rather than regurgitate his research into tiresome expository passages (although Fraser was constitutionally incapable of writing tiresome passages), Fraser provides footnotes to the novels, often in a tone deploring the attitudes and historical arguments of his protagonist.

Of course, my selfish reaction to the news is consternation that I shall never get to see Flashy Reb or Viva Flashman! -- Flashman's exploits in the American Civil War and the Maximilian Intervention in Mexico being running gags to rank with the giant rat of Sumatra or Wilson the canary-trainer. But I should rather be glad that I got introduced, via Flashman, to the British invasion of Abyssinia in 1868, to the Central Asian wars of the 1850s, the First Sikh War, and the Tranby Croft Scandal, to name four episodes of nineteenth-century history I first stumbled across in Fraser's pages. Even on topics I knew quite well, Fraser and Flashman found plenty to tell me, and neither one ever, ever bored me.

Easily the most important and worthwhile cultural historian of the last century, Norman Cohn died July 31, but I just now found out about it. (This is what I get for not reading gbsteve regularly.)

Those of you inclined to a dim view of cultural historians as a class will note that Cohn started out his scholarly career as a linguist.

I've read all his main works except for Noah's Flood, and none of them are dispensable, although they so completely bury the needle in their area that virtually all serious books written after Cohn simply begin from the ground he so laboriously cleared. Hence, it's hard for modern readers to see what all the hubbub was about 50 years ago.

That said, there's even more in his study of apocalyptic religion, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, than its main takeaway point -- that Nazism and Communism are simply reiterations of a cultural pattern that goes back to before the Anabaptists of Munster, Joachim of Fiore, and the Beggar's Crusade. In the course of the work, Cohn also finds the "Final Emperor" trope of great import. (We call him "King Arthur" around these parts, but there's lots more to it than him, and it's Cohn who identified the first one, Constans I.)

Europe's Inner Demons is less essential, as its primary task -- the clearing out of nonsense about witchcraft -- has been completed to the satisfaction of historians everywhere by Briggs' Witches and Neighbors. But Cohn's depiction of the "template of persecution" is unbeatable for clarity and strength, and robustly complements his other works. Cohn's study of apocalypse and dualism, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, is likewise excellent, and was one of the first books to begin the amazing recovery of the Persian influence on Western society that 2,000 years of (justifiable) Herodotos worship had managed to obscure. But again, Stoyanov's The Other God has more than satisfactorily expanded on Cohn's initial work. Contrariwise, nobody has yet written a better book on the contemptible Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery than Cohn's Warrant for Genocide, so if you're curious, this is the book to check out.

Rigorously accurate, impeccably literate, incisively imaginative, and capable of simultaneous synthesis and analysis, they don't make them like Norman Cohn very often.

"I took the BMT to City Hall and walked to the Brooklyn Bridge. It seemed to me a spectacular way to make an exit. Suicides love bridges: it is by far the most dramatic exit from this Stage of Fools. The Golden Gate Bridge has a record of leapers that almost equals the Brooklyn Bridge, even though it's not as old.

A swan dive into eternity. Or oblivion.

To hell with Bobbie. To hell with all women. To hell with humanity, which was going to blow itself up soon anyway.

I walked on in my gloom and only occasionally, involuntarily, noticed the beautiful view from way up there."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Vol II: Down to Earth, page 23

I first read Robert Anton Wilson based on Steve Jackson's earnest recommendation in the Designer's Notes for the Illuminati card game. (I read pretty much everything else mentioned there, too.) Suffice it to say, I was smitten, even after the heady scent of patchouli had ceased to move me. I hunted up a lot of RAW in the ensuing years, including the much-sought-after Historical Illuminatus! Chronicles, which I almost like better than the original trilogy.

Suffice it to say, also, that both my audience and my art comes in large part from his vision, which comes entirely from noticing the beautiful view (or, better, the beautiful views) from way up there, and literally laughing in the face of despair.

From the LJ of irishspy I see that Martin Nodell* has died. Green Lantern has always, always been my favorite superhero, although my GL was Hal Jordan, whose creator (Julius Schwartz) died some time ago. But I actually met Martin Nodell at a comic convention, and he was as gracious and sunny as they came, and although I'm sure he heard "Green Lantern is my favorite superhero" more times than I've heard the El go by, his reaction to me saying it to him was one of pitch-perfect startled pleasure. Somewhere, I have a GL comic autographed by him with a little Alan Scott sketch in it.

Apparently, Nodell studied at the Chicago Art Institute before moving to New York and comics immortality -- a nice hometown connection between me and the man with the ring.

* He also co-created the Pillsbury Dough-Boy, although he never, to my knowledge, revealed to the world the harrowing World War One experiences that gained the friendly pastry confidant his name.

The Mad Scientist has gone to a Better Tomorrow.

Although I count Avram Davidson my genre fiction touchstone, people would be more than forgiven for considering me nothing but the cheap nonunion Indonesian gray-market ripoff of John M. Ford. He wrote (among many other things) alternate history horror mashups, Star Trek tie-in material, doggerel, RPG supplements, spy stuff about Christopher Marlowe, urban fantasy set in Chicago, snarky posts on the Pyramid message boards, and roleplaying game reviews.¹ Only his stuff, see, was really, really good. We even shared credit on GURPS Infinite Worlds, which mostly boiled down to me being smart enough not to change John M. Ford's writing.

I only met him once to my certain knowledge, at either Origins or GTS one year, and tried to avoid being a big idiot fanboy at him. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was the right call,² but at the time, I thought I'd see him again, surely. I almost got to hang out with him at another GTS (and use Neil Gaiman's tickets to see Penn & Teller with him, which is kind of a geekgasm of Six Degrees there), but his health didn't allow the trip at the last minute. He emailed me once or twice of his own volition, at which I was awfully chuffed, and he was nice enough to write the foreword (in dog-Kiplingese) to Suppressed Transmissions 2.

I'll miss the rest of John M. Ford's writing, and I'll forever miss the chances I didn't know I missed, to work with him or talk with him or just be a big idiot fanboy.

[1] For Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. One hesitates to say that John M. Ford made me a roleplaying gamer -- but his reviews sure didn't slow the process down any. It sounded so fun!

[2] By contrast, when Poul Anderson died, I was kind of shamefully glad I'd been a big idiot fanboy to him the sole time I met him. After all, what else do I really have to say to Poul Anderson or JMF except something like "I totally love your stuff, pretty much without exception, and I have ever since I figured out how to read an adjective." And it's not like writers don't like hearing that.

About a half an hour ago.

In 1990, when he came to visit Chicago for my M.A. degree ceremony, my friend muckefuck heard about two or three words out of his mouth, and greeted him with "You must be Mr. Hite."

Indeed he must.

More later, perhaps, either here or at mollpeartree's stand.

Jim Aparo is dead.

He was perhaps the first comic book artist whose name I noticed, way back in my First Bloom of Comic Love, when my dad would stop at the drugstore, buy one issue of every comic depicting someone hitting someone else, and throw them in the back seat to keep me quiet. (mollpeartree does the same thing, except that she subcontracts the comics purchasing to me.) There was a reason, my seven-year-old brain figured out, that Aquaman only looked really cool in Brave and the Bold, but like a dork in Justice League of America. There was a reason that the Phantom Stranger was the Best Ever, except maybe for the Spectre. ("He turned that guy, into a mannequin, and he melted him! Melted him!") Eventually, the penny dropped -- somebody drew these heroes that way, on purpose. It wasn't just that DC Comics followed Batman around with a Bristol Board and a camera, this was a choice, made by a real artist. An artist named "Jim Aparo." The Spectre wasn't cool -- he was, like Jessica Rabbit, drawn that way.

Hence, every single artistic opinion I have ever had owes not a little to Jim Aparo, who taught me what "style" meant before I knew it.

What else can I say? The Batman comics in Heaven look a heck of a lot better starting today, that's for damn sure.

Robert Munroe (Ensign, Lexington militia, KIA 19 April 1775)
Matthew Scott Lourey (CW4, 1st Sqdn, 17th Cavalry Regt, 82nd Airborne Div, KIA 28 May 2005)

And all 553,473 in between.

But Will Eisner, sadly, is not:

(RIP Will Eisner, 1917-2005)

Except, of course, that he is -- he will live on, through John Law, Hawk of the Sea, A Contract With God, A Life Force and the canonical many many more.

And also in the very existence of the graphic novel as a storytelling format, as well as in the derivative work of thousands of less-gifted (and a bare few equally-gifted) writers and artists.

But for me -- and here, no doubt, I betray a fundamentally bourgeois sensibility or something -- Will Eisner would still be the greatest figure ever in adventure comics if he had created nothing but The Spirit.

I have no idea which Spirit reprints I have, or how complete my series is; I've bought several different chunks of several different reprint series. (I haven't been buying the latest one from DC, solely because it's in well-deserved hardback, and thus a trifle too rich for my blood.) For all I know, I may have two or three copies of some storylines. But it's all good.

I don't know how many of you read B.C. Boyer's very entertaining series Masked Man, published by Eclipse Comics in 1982-1984 or thereabouts. Boyer's hero put on a mask and beat the hell out of bad guys; the tone was whimsical and ironic. In short, it was about as clear a Spirit ripoff as possible, missing only the farcical "death" of its protagonist. But Boyer, apparently, had never read The Spirit. He had simply re-assembled his comic out of the shards of Eisner's shadows and imitators. His editor, Cat Yronwode, had read Eisner's work, however, and one imagines an interesting series of conversations, a hustle to find reprints, and the dawning of that appalled yet amazed feeling (oh so familiar, and feared, by writers) which comes with discovering that the unknown valley you've been exploring is someone else's footprint. Boyer published his response in Eclipse Monthly #8 in a story called "Phantom Man." It's worth finding, if you can.

Failing that, just re-read a whole whack of Spirit comics and assemble it yourself.