mattingly

The first time I met Darren Watts, I was in the middle of a game at Gen Con. He gave me his DOJ business card and wanted to talk to me after. He respected my work on fanzines such as Haymaker, Rogues Gallery, and The Clobberin' Times. He and Steven S. Long later offered me a job writing and editing at Hero Games. The timing wasn't right for me, sadly, but I did get to manage/edit the in-house magazine Digital Hero for its full run. We always had a blast together, hanging out at the booth, running or playing games together, or otherwise just shooting the breeze. I usually acted as the GM Assistant in Darren's "Build & Brawl" Champions games, in which players started with a blank character sheet and dozens of books spread around the table, with Darren and I as rules experts to help players get going. I was surprised at how many first-timers we'd get, and they'd always come up with great ideas: a first-time player made a superhero who would push her opponents into a different dimension with no way back the planet Earth, who apparently had a secret ID, and would occasionally fight other superbeings a brain in a jar who wore a domino mask to protect his secret identity as another brain in a different jar I helped run the special Champions 30th anniversary game along with Rod Currie, in which Foxbat had somehow changed the timeline and made himself an honest-to-gosh superhero, admired by millions (Foxbat and His Amazing Friends). Darren, Steven, and Jason Walters were the VIP players, along with several lucky other gamers, who went back in time to prevent him from kidnapping Steve Peterson, George MacDonald, Raymond Greer, and Bruce Harlick and forcing them to change his character origin in the original source material. For the past three years, I've loved listening to his Explain This, Comics Guys podcast, where he'd take us all on a behind-the-scenes tour of the early days of the comic book industry. Every episode I'd learn a dozen things that I didn't know, despite being a lifelong nerd myself. Darren's passing will leave a hole in the industry and in my circle of friends. Darren was a hero.

Correct, Pariah! You're up.

What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 1/2 goat?

A lawsuit

Uh, how? How? How? How?

I dunno... It seems like the kind of sign that penguins would put up as a trick...

I remember talking with him about this under the title The Raiders of the Last Orc.

John Carpenter's The Thing. It's been a while since I've seen it.

Technically, it's Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.

Greta Thunberg as Gollum (A.I. generated)

Victor did the same thing, and even re-created the universe from nothingness.

Losing its special district?

I asked the girl at the greeting card counter if she kept stationery.

Looks like the ice crop is coming in pretty good this year.

Inside you there are two wolves. Inside Mozart there were like ten or twelve.

Thor dressed as Hercules fighting Hercules dressed at Thor...