Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #1 / Adventures in the Rifle Brigade #1

I was never a role-playing geek.  There was one time, in my early teens, that a group of friends got together to play the Marvel Comic’s Superheroes role-playing game; but we got into an argument over some aspect of the game and we never got started. Beyond that, I wouldn’t role a d10 until college. I’ve always been somewhat surprised that I didn’t find my way into the gaming world as much I have with comics and sci-fi. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I was a solitary kid and comics gave me the chance to escape into fantasy alone without having to socialize if I didn’t want to. 

I mention all this to preface the fact that when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hit the stands, my knowledge of D&D was limited to the advertisements I saw in comics.  These ads for D&D were ubiquitous in comics in the 80’s. Painted images of menacing dragons staring intently at the reader, or a band of adventurers fighting sorcerers or monsters in a cave or on a castle parapet were as common as letter pages.   Again, I was more a sci-fi geek than a sword-and-sorcery geek, but I knew a dwarf from a dragon.  Escapist fantasy is escapist fantasy regardless of the setting. So when DC Comics put out a line of comics based on TSR Inc.’s role-playing games, of course I wanted to take a look.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was part of a small line of comics based off TSR Inc.’s line of role-playing games; Dungeons & Dragons being one of the most popular.  (Don’t ask me why the flagship title of this line was called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and not just Dungeons & Dragons. My guess is it was a licensing issue, the cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons was still popping up on TV and these comics had nothing to do with those characters. But that’s complete speculation on my part.)   Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is pure “sword and sorcery” style storytelling, showing a world full of knights, warriors, mythical creatures, and magic-galore. Unfortunately, the comic does nothing but trot out all the genre’s standard tropes without investing anything particularly original or interesting in them. We get introduced to your standard multi-ethnic cast of characters—a humanoid noble knight, a dwarf, a magical elf, a centaur, another humanoid rogue-ish warrior—with names like Agrivar, Timmoth, Vajra, Cybriana,  etc., and everyone’s dressed like members of a well-budgeted Renaissance Faire. Since it’s based on D&D there’s an odd mix of trying to tell an original story while also very obviously having to include as many aspects of the source it’s based on as possible.  Take this snippet of dialogue from the story’s villain: “Even a hero’s flesh melts like sealing wax when touched by the staff of withering.” You have to wonder: a) why didn’t writer Michael Fleisher  go all the way and add “…with its 2-5 points of damage!” to the sentence and b) if hero’s flesh melts like sealing wax, does non-hero flesh melt like candle wax?

This comic breaks the cardinal rule of role-playing:  it fails to be interesting. Had Fleisher not been in such a rush to cram in all the world-building in one issue—had he started off with one character, taken time to flesh them out as a character and slowly bring in the rest of the cast, then there’d be more of a reason for the reader to be invested. As is, it’s a completely passive experience; the reader is given an info-dump and expected to enjoy the settings just because it hits all the categories on the scorecard. It’s no wonder I bought the first issue only, and haven’t read the thing since it came out in ’88.

I remember the TSR line of comics being a pretty quick flash in the pan, but a quick search online shows Advanced Dungeons & Dragons lasted 3 years. While not a particularly noteworthy run, three years isn’t as fast a flame-out as other  titles that came and went in 1988, so it must have had some following. (For example, a contemporary licensing tie-in comic, C.O.P.S , also published by DC, lasted only 15 issues.)  And though  the idea of a line of comics based on a line of role-playing games doesn’t seem like the greatest idea in the world, you have to give DC Comics credit for being willing to try out ideas that weren’t straight-up superheroes.  In fact, DC was always willing to try something new.  While Marvel had it’s Epic Comics imprint, by the late 80’s it was clear DC was the company more willing to promote something that wasn’t meant to be just for kids. In fact, if you squint your eyes just so, you can actually see how something like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was one step on the evolution of comics as something that could be for adults as much as kids.

In fact, you can actually see the seeds of Vertigo first sprouting in this comic. Not in the story itself, but physically on the inside cover. That was where features a “publishorial” by then President and Publisher of DC Comics, Jennette Kahn. This particular essay extols the virtues of newfound artist “Dave McKean”, who might be known to some people because of the covers he had created for Hellblazer. But Jennette was certain McKean’s stature would only rise because of the work he was doing for an upcoming graphic novel called Arkham Asylum (written by “a brilliantly macabre young writer” named Grant Morrison).  However, Arkham Asylum was still a ways off so people would first get a good look at McKean’s art in a mini-series called Black Orchid, released the same week as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, written by this British guy called Neil Gaiman. Hell, even Karen Berger (editor and “also our British Liason”) and then-Hellblazer scribe Jamie Delano gets a mention.  The beginning of Vertigo Comics is written about right here, without any idea of what would all come out of it. (One other omen: there’s an in-house ad touting the first issue of Sandman, “a horror-edged fantasy, set in the DC Universe.” Baby steps, everybody. Baby steps.)

Next to this editorial/press release is the obligatory DC checklist, spotlighting what comics are being released this week. What I love is legend at the bottom which explains the different formats. There’s the “standard” format—your basic newsstand comic. There’s the “new format”, which AD&D was printed in: heavier stock paper (brighter at the time but after 24 years things have dulled a bit) allowing for coloring beyond the four-color standards of newsprint, and “available at Select Outlets” which was DC’s term for the direct market—a publishing distribution system that bypassed traditional distribution companies selling to drug stores and newsstands and allowed stores to buy directly from the publisher.  In the late 80’s the trend to sell comics directly to specialty stores (comicbook stores) was really expanding. The direct market allowed comicbook companies to offer titles that fit a niche market—not the average kid buying random issues of Superman, but older customers with a little more purchasing power. The direct market system allowed for more profitability from smaller print runs, recouped in part by the higher cover price. This allowed DC Comics to put out a niche comic like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or Hellblazer for nearly twice the price of then-newsstand comics and still make a profit. 

One last little time capsule I must point out, one that has nothing to do with comics: the back cover features an ad for one of the then-popular of Time-Life music collection series. This particular ad was for “Classic Rock” and the big selling point was that the series was now available on compact discs. “1965! All the hits ...  in digital sound!” boasts the ad. All you had to do was cut out the coupon and select which format you wanted the album in: two LP Records ($14.99*), one Double-length Cassette ($14.99*), or one Compact Disc ($16.99*) (*plus shipping and handling). How fascinating to see that, in 1988 a “new format” comic cost $1.25 and a CD cost $16.99. 24 years later a “new format” comic cost $3.99 and a CD costs $9.99. Or you can just download both items for free* on Bit Torrent (*plus prosecution for copyright infringement).

Anyway, now that I’ve waxed nostalgic on the foundations of the Vertigo line, let’s jump to the year 2000 and see what’s been built on those foundations. Specifically, Adventures in the Rifle Bridage, one of Garth Ennis many, many comics dealing with World War II. I’m a fan of Ennis’s work; like most people, I first found him thanks to his run on Hellblazer, and followed him through Preacher and Hitman. Rifle Brigade post-dates all his “classic” work. By 2000 Ennis was an established pro, one of the top-tier comicbook writers and one of the marquee creators at Vertigo.  So, naturally, he creates something that’s a cross between Sgt. Rock, Monty Python, and Beavis and Butthead.

Let’s be clear here: Rifle Brigade, to use Ennis’ home-country’s vernacular, is a piss-take. Everything is exaggerated, from squad leader Captain Hugo “Khyber” Darcy’s overblown British diction to artist Carlos Ezquerra’s cartoonish depiction of extreme violence. The humor is part absurdist (When the brigade poses as German soldiers, the German’s think nothing of Darcy talking to them using every British cliché—“Jolly nice talking to you… toodle-pip!”—but realize the Brigade are Englishmen in disguise when they see one of the Brigade’s uniform has a button askew) and part juvenilia (Closeted Second Lieutenant Cecil Milk feigns death to get Darcy to kiss him). You’re reading this for a laugh, provided you like your laughs dumb and deviant, and if want something more—boy, have you come to the wrong place. 

Personally, while I’m all for gross-out humor, I’m not too interested in reading something that is nothing but. Gross-out humor has always been part of Ennis’s stock repertoire, but in best work Ennis always balanced it out by making sure his stories had a mature core. For example, as outlandish as things got in Preacher, the Custer/Cassidy/Tulip dynamic, was the true heart of the series and helped temper the more absurdist elements like Arseface and Starr’s degradation. In Rifle Brigade there’s no attempt at all to treat anything seriously. This leads to characters that are really just caricatures, and mostly one-note jokes like Corporal Geezer who says nothing but “YER AHT OF ORDAH” or The Piper, whose bagpipe playing makes people bleed out from their eyes, ears, and nose. It’s like The Six Pack from Hitman, only not nearly as cute.

The misadventures of the Rifle Brigade may not have been my cup of tea but Ennis and Ezquerra came back for a second mini-series a year after this one but nothing since (The two previously worked together on the mini-series  Bloody Mary a title which also went through two mini-series before disappearing. Coincidence?). I don’t think this sort of series was what DC had in mind when it first launched Vertigo but, if I can force the theme of this entry a bit, it once again shows that while not every off-beat title would succeed, at least DC was willing to try.

Next Issue: We return to the land of spandex to join a recently married couple as they take their honeymoon . . . in an apocalyptic future a thousand years from now. While there, they raise the son of the husband and his previous wife, who happened to be a clone of the husband’s now-wife.  Beats the hell out of Disneyland.