The History of Venture Comics!

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
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It is here!

After some formatting disasters, a few frenzied hours over the weekend, and a Daylight Savings-related crash and illness, I am just barely sufficiently awake to post the link to the first compilation.

You can find Venture Comics: The Classic Years here. Just this first volume has clocked in at 72,000 words and 183 pages, with the first ninety characters of Venture Comics properly formatted and laid out according to the revised timelines, along with character creation rules and ten new Principles. I’ve put the full PDF up on my Itch page, but it’s set to not allow money since this is a fan project for a company that doesn’t have formal third party rules. Go and give it a download, and let me know what you think! I’ll be spreading the word elsewhere.

But now that our first volume is released, it’s time for me to pull a bit of a Sentinel Comics myself and slow down my release schedule.

When I put this plan together, I was assuming that two things were true: first, that building lieutenants would be less work than building heroes or villains, and second, that assembling the books would only take a few minutes per character to copy and paste information over and do a bit of light reformatting.

These assumptions have not played out. Building lieutenants is fast mechanically, but the heavy lifting comes in writing up most of a page of storyline for them, integrating them into the setting, and the like, plus building a HeroForge model for them. They’re definitely less work than the heroes and villains were, but not as much less as I’d expected.

As for assembling the book… it is not quick. Aside from copying over mechanical details and adjusting images, I’m finding that I have to do a lot of small adjustments to a lot of characters to reflect how the setting changed and grew, and the fact that everything is being presented in chronological order means that the villains in particular often need rewrites to avoid discussing heroes that haven’t been introduced yet, with those details moved to relevant hero sections. On top of that, a lot of the sections are small enough that I’m needing to add paragraphs, and with ninety characters to format I need to do it several times a week. I do not have that kind of time for a fun side project, as much as I would like everything to be out by the second anniversary, but I want to mark the anniversary somehow.

So I’m threading the needle. This week, the first two Bronze Age characters will release on Wednesday and Friday, as usual. After that, I’m cutting back to two updates a week on Mondays and Thursdays. This will give us the following schedule:

  • Our ten Bronze Age Lieutenants will run from March 12 through April 10.
  • I will be taking that week off I mentioned the week of April 14th.
  • The weeks of April 21 and April 28 will see our final Plutonium Age villain and our last three Plutonium Age heroes. These are all characters you already know, updated to the 2010s.
  • From May 5 to June 23, I’ll be updated our fifteen Iron Age Lieutenants
  • June 26 will see the uploading of the final Diamond Age hero, who will also be advancing the timeline to 2021.
  • June 30, we will break for setup, allowing me to release Venture Comics: The Dark Ages on July 2nd.
  • July 7 through August 7 will be our ten Plutonium Age lieutenants.
  • The weeks of August 11 and August 18 will see our final four Diamond Age villains, who will advance the timeline to 2022.
  • August 25th through October 13th will give us our fifteen Diamond Age villains
  • And finally, after taking a few days for setup, Venture Comics: The Digital Revolution will be released on October 20th, on the second anniversary of this project!

This pushes the D-Listers, failed new approaches, variants, and bad event characters book back to 2026. I don’t want to make any promises for what that release will look like, because I’m already planning ahead eight months and we’re in a rapidly changing world. My fingers are crossed for D-Listers to be finished in April 2026, and then… I dunno, whatever comes next. Slow and steady wins the race!

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More power to you. Writing the background fluff for characters has always been the slowest part of the process for me, regardless of minion/lieutenant/hero/villain ranking. I have dozens of skeletal heroes and villain frameworks waiting for inspiration or need to hang some flesh on their bones. And I’m not having to really integrate them with one another on anything but a cursory level, much less decide where they appeared in a fictional publishing history.

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Fantastic work. Reading this makes me want to write an Astro City-esque anthology series about these characters.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll doubtlessly say it again: your dedication, Friv, is astounding. Having a weekly schedule and a multi-year plan for a RPG fan project — it’s pretty amazing.

Yeah, ditto on that. Doing the mechanical bits for characters takes like, what, half an hour tops (longer for heroes than villains, of course), but writing backstory and personality and such can take considerably longer and be trickier.

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Thanks, everyone! Downloads are already picking up, and it’s great to know that people are indeed interested. :slight_smile:

And thank you for this as well! It’s definitely a bit of a situation where writing this stuff up helped keep me level over the last two years, which have been a rocky road, and I don’t want the whole story of Venture Comics to live on a couple of forums. Having a plan means a way to share it, so the goal helps a lot. :smiley:

If I get to read fanfic about even one of these characters it is going to make my year.

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Is Europa a beta name for one of the characters? I think they’re only mentioned in Golden Guardian’s storyline.

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Having downloaded and looked through Venture Comics: The Classic Years — is that Bozo the Iron Man on the cover? Nifty. : D I wonder, though, is he supposed to represent one of the Venture characters? Flatfoot? The Retriever? And are you planning to use real comic covers for all of your collected volumes, Friv? If so, I imagine that it will get trickier to find public domain ones (and ones that don’t feature a more recognisable character) as time goes on.

Great job on the hero and villain sheet formatting. They look super sleek and similar to the official ones.

And, really, great job on everything. It’s all super cool. However, I do have one suggestion / recommendation on how you might improve it and/or future volumes even more. It appears to be lacking any sort of index or other way to look up the page number of a specific hero or more generally just have a list of all the characters. Adding such an index to the end of the doc or more headings to the table of contents in the front might make it easer for folks to read and use. Another / an alternative thing that might be useful is lists that separate out all the entries into the categories of heroes, villains, ally lieutenants, and enemy lieutenants (perhaps with first appearance dates too?). Regardless, though, even without any of that this is still a stellar thing you’ve put together, and you don’t need to add any of that for it to be top-notch.

(Also, would you like typos pointed out, or would you prefer not? Because I see one on page 4.)

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Good eye! Europa hasn’t received a writeup yet, although I’m planning to mention her in the D-Listers book (even there, probably not with a full writeup). She’s a deep-cut failed Venture into the Unknown hero that appeared only in two issues in 1958.

Yeah, I couldn’t pass up including Bozo, even though he’s a bit too recognizable. In the context of Venture, he’s just a random appearance of a one-off robot on a Cryptic Trails cover, rather than one of the big names. For future volumes, I’m planning to do covers that are built out of public domain and look a bit like a cover in that time period might.

Okay, so.

This is a bit embarassing following the praise, but I was absolutely going to do that and I just plumb forgot.

I’ll put that together over some time period, and release a version 1.1 that has an index at some point in the future.

And yeah, typos are cool to mention. I’ll integrate fixes into the version, so that when the indexed copy comes out it’ll be fixed up. :slight_smile:

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error in Huntsman’s backstory-
“His in the Dark Sea had transformed…”
his what?

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Mirror Mayor

Mirror Mayor
Mirror Mayor400×575 269 KB

Real Name: Isaiah Jefferson, First Appearance: Liberty’s Dream #94, March 1971
Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d10
Motive: Power, Approach: Raw Power

Traits:

  • Field of Reflections: Mirror Mayor and all nearby minions and lieutenants have +1 to their damage saves.

As Liberty’s Dream entered the 1970s and the Comics Code Authority began to loosen, the writers of the title saw the opportunity to create a dark mirror to the organization that Reverie and Bulwark had been building for the past few years. The Community Network had begun to develop as a useful source of supporting cast members, allied fae and humans, and vulnerable people working together to protect their fellows, and the line’s writing team decided that it was high time that the Community Network had their own enemy.

That enemy was Isaiah Jefferson. Isaiah was Autumn Jefferson’s cousin; where she had entered the legal world to help her community, he had gone into politics, becoming a city councilor and working to clean up his neighborhoods. But unlike Autumn, Isaiah was soon corrupted by the graft and corruption that surrounded him. He told himself that it was business as usual, that taking payments was the only way for him to make a positive change. But when his crimes came to light and he was stripped of his authority, he blamed the people who had uncovered his crimes rather than admitting that he’d made a mistake.

Like many before him, Isaiah went looking for a new source of power, and he found a fae who was willing to give him what he needed in exchange for one favour each year. Isaiah considered this a small price to pay, and was given the power to create illusory reflections of others, step through reflective surfaces, and mirror back the ideals and thoughts of others to them, becoming an accomplished liar and building up a criminal network. Isaiah’s activities brought him to the attention of Reverie and Bulwark, leading Autumn and Isaiah to confront each other directly. While they were able to stop his scheme to destroy the councilor who had replaced him, he was able to escape into a mirror.

Quickly realizing that he lacked the power to go toe to toe with Reverie and her network of allies, Isaiah started to build his own Mirror City – a network of businessmen, hedge mages, and minor fae united by shared favors and the pursuit of power. The Mirror City allowed Mirror Mayor to leverage a growing force of minor villains in opposition to the Community Network, with dark fae allies delighted to see how the humans were using their powers to fight amongst themselves. Mirror Mayor sat at the centre of the web, pulling strings and joining forces with other members of the Realm to support their own plans.

Behind the Scenes:

I liked the idea of creating a dark reflection of the Community Network, and then I realized that I could pretty much do it directly! Mirror Mayor isn’t that powerful, and he doesn’t have huge schemes, but he knows it. He acts as a fixer, passing out favors and taking them in turn, almost acting like a fae lord himself, and as Bulwark’s cousin he adds a bit of family spice to the drama.

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Think it was “time” wasn’t it?

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It was, yeah. I think that was a mistake I fixed in the online writeups, even. I just didn’t fix the original. ><

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Mirror Mayor’s cool. Pity that “Mirror Master” is already taken, though I guess you don’t get many supers who call themselves mayors, so that’s neat.

Nifty. Page 4, line 3: “Sentinel Comic” rather than Sentinel Comics."

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Conductor

Conductor
Conductor400×575 263 KB

Real Name: Nicole Watson, First Appearance: The Fearless Flatfoot #51, September 1971

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d8
Motive: Obedience, Approach: Technological

Traits:

  • Chain Reaction: When Conductor would take Electricity damage, prevent it and Boost her equal to the result. Then apply half the result as a Hinder to all nearby enemies.

It wasn’t only heroes who developed new depth and complications over the course of the 1970s. The changing landscape of comics allowed for more complex storylines involving the villains of Venture Comics, and one of the more enduring of those storylines involved a new nemesis for Flatfoot, Conductor.
Flatfoot’s new campaign against the criminals of Ferrisville did not go unnoticed by his enemies. While Steeldriver had no idea that his mysterious opponent was the same Flatfoot that he had defeated before, he quickly began to look for new ways to protect his operations and bring an end to the mysterious vigilante who was causing him so much trouble while moving to enshrine himself as a member of the city’s elite once again. To that end, he announced his engagement to Nicole Watson, the daughter of a local shipping magnate, and soon the two were headliners on the society pages. Flatfoot was deeply worried for the young woman, and attempted to send her anonymous warnings about her fiancée, but she brushed them off and laughed about it with Hank Jr. He didn’t find it so funny; the knowledge that Flatfoot knew exactly who he was drove him to even more heights of paranoia, as he tried to keep his activities from Nicole and destroy Flatfoot.

Events came to a head in The Fearless Flatfoot #60, in which Flatfoot tracked Steeldriver to a warehouse where he was importing illegal power suits designed to channel and deliver electrical blasts. As Flatfoot had Steeldriver on the ropes, a mysterious figure donned one of the suits and emerged to attack, drawing electricity from the robot and shorting out several of his key systems! Although he was able to destroy the remaining suits, the newcomer was too much for Flatfoot and he was forced to retreat.

Hank Jr. was shocked to discover that his savior was not one of his men, but his fiancée! Nicole had known about his criminal activities since before their engagement – she wanted a powerful husband, she was more interested in Hank’s prestige than empty romantic gestures, and she was more than willing to kill to maintain her status – as she primly told him, her father had ruined lives to make his wealth, and it would be hypocritical of her not to be willing to do the same. She joined his organization as Conductor, acting as a loving and supportive wife by day, and learning the best ways to use her suit to support his criminal activities by night. While Hank and Nicole weren’t particularly in love, they were highly effective business partners, and now that Hank could strategize with his fiancée instead of hiding from her, Steeldriver’s organization grew steadily more dangerous.

Behind the Scenes:

I was shocked (no pun intended) to discover that no one had made a ‘Conductor’ pun for a major supervillain, so I grabbed it while I could. I almost called her the Copper Conductor, but that really sounds like an electricity-themed Virtuoso of the Void so I decided to give it a pass.

Conductor’s main trait is, deliberately, one that she can’t easily use against herself. Minions can zap her to create chain reactions (or she can pair with a villain who uses electricity area attacks, which Steeldriver can do with his gadgets), she can fight in an environment that delivers electrictal shocks, or (as her story suggests) she can just Overcome a nearby transformer to create an electrical explosion to hurt everyone, Boost herself off the harm, and then zap everyone with a Hinder. This makes her a pretty weak main villain, but a great supporter. In my first draft, she was an employee with a one-sided love for Steeldriver, but I really like the idea of a supportive wife who puts on a supervillain suit to back her husband up. This also underscores the wibbly nature of motives; this could be considered a Wealth or Power motive, but since Conductor expresses it by choosing to be a second-in-command I’m sticking with Obedience.

The irony here is that both Conductor and Flatfoot benefit from electricity once Flatfoot is in Yellow, so their shared shtick becomes an interesting problem for Flatfoot’s allies more than for her primary nemesis.

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If this was Sentinels, you know that supranym would have been nabbed some kind of minor railroad-themed ally to Fright Train.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to punch your ticket, hero.”

He looks weirdly like George Carlin, of course.

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Bad guys with healthy marriages is a fun story element.

Absorbing Man and Titania aren’t perfect, but they are tying and usually the problems are her taking him for granted and she apologizes.
I remember one where Beast realized Creel was trying to pick a fight with a hero because he was depressed and ended up on a double date with the married couple and her friend Poundcakes.

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I freaking love the “supervillain tries to hide activities from spouse, only for them to find out and join in” trope :smiley:

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I always had a soft spot for Sportsman and the Huntress (back when she was the huntress, anyway), especially after that insane “villains versus heroes baseball game” story they somehow managed to set up. Their continuity has become hopelessly messy thanks to DC’s stupid crises reboot, but AFAIK they’re currently grandparents courtesy of their daughter Artemis/Huntress/Tigress(?) having a kid with Icicle. Presumably the little whipper-snapper will be going into the family business of moderately lame supervillainy when they get old enough.

Or not. Watch the kid rebel and become a dentist or something, all Rudolph style.

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I might as well join in the chorus and add that I, too, like the dynamic betwixt Steeldriver and Conductor. Villainous couples are fun, particularly when both partners are equally nefarious.

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the whole Icicle II + Artemis relationship is also great. If I remember right, he was nasty before getting a loving partner. The weird quartet of them and Hour man II and Jessie Quick was a fun dynamic.

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