The History of Venture Comics!

[fjur]

The only comics I’ve read with Hank Pym in them were some of (I think?) Roy Thomas’ Avengers run in the '60s, where he was Giant Man and then Goliath, and a little bit in West Coast Avengers where he was just Hank Pym, scientist and Avengers ally.

In the former there was no hint that I can recall of him being any sort of troubled, and in the latter there was a scene that I liked where he made a speech about how everyone isn’t cut out for the superhero life, and he spent a long time struggling with that, but he’s finally come to peace with it and accepted that he’s a valid and worthy person just as Hank Pym — he didn’t need to be Ant-Man or Giant Man or anything to have value and be a good person.

So, yeah, “my” version of Hank, if you will, is either untroubled Giant Man who banters with Hawkeye or a civilian scientist who’s gone through some stuff but came out of it with self-acceptance.

[FrivYeti]

Rocket Vault

Real Name: Harry Dobson, First Appearance: Cryptic Trails #55, May 2007

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d8
Motive: Malice, Approach: Physical

Traits:

• Dash Bomb: When Rocket Vault Boosts himself, he may also Hinder a nearby target with the result.
• Improvise: As an action, when the scene tracker is at Yellow or Red, Rocket Vault may Hinder a nearby target and activate a minor environment twist from an earlier zone. It must target the Hindered target if possible.

As the Plutonium Age developed, Cryptic Trails slowly shifted from a Greenheart-focused title to an increasingly broad anthology title featuring several characters. While roughly half the issues were still focused on Greenheart, the other half featured the Drifter, Wonderer, and the former members of the Twilight Carnival. This also meant that Cryptic Trails took on a rotating cast of writers, giving established Venture stalwarts a break between titles to write two or three issues and giving a chance for newer writers to pitch ideas and concepts. Not all of these ideas were successes, of course. Sometimes the title ended up with someone like Rocket Vault.

Harry Dobson was an Olympic track and field athlete whose career was derailed when he was caught taking performance-enhancing drugs. Furious and embarrassed, convinced that all of the other athletes were similarly cheating and he was just the one who had been caught, Harry stumbled across a ring that allowed him to summon a djinn. He wished to have unparallelled athletic skills, and the djinn grinned and granted his wish, promising that he would be a match for any Olympic athlete. The djinn didn’t do this for Harry’s benefit; he was a wish-granter of the monkey’s paw variety, who was trying to teach the athlete a lesson. He knew that Harry would always know that his skill wasn’t real, that none of his achievements were truly his, and expected that Harry would come back and wish to have his own abilities restored.

This is not what happened. Instead, stewing in frustration and envy, Harry decided that he needed to prove that everyone else was just as driven and ready to cheat. He began using his new abilities to become a parkour star, and then took advantage to break into homes and offices, looking for blackmail material to get others under his thumb. Seeing the damage spreading from the wish he had impulsively granted, the djinn who had done so went to Wonderer for help. Wonderer was able to respond, stopping Rocket Vault and sending him to prison – where he promptly broke out and returned to his life of vengeance, having learned nothing.

Rocket Vault’s writer was convinced that he’d created a cool, quipping supervillain who would be an instant fan favorite. And he used parkour! Everyone loved parkour! But while Rocket Vault was entertaining enough for a single issue, he was too shallow and too deliberately overdone for anyone to really enjoy him. Instead of becoming a star, he almost instantly faded into the background, showing up from time to time as a minor thug working for various other people. He was a small part of Shock and Awe, and made an appearance in Wonderfall a few years later, but never made it on the big stage.

Behind the Scenes:

Remember when everyone was trying to shove parkour-themed characters into everything because it was so cool and exciting and the big new sport that everyone was going to take part in?

Venture Comics remembers!

Anyway, that was the entire inspiration for this character - “what if parkour guy who isn’t that cool but boy did his creator think he was cool”. The rest grew up around which title I wanted to write a bit about, which led to adding a bit of Wonderer flair, and I think the idea of a genie trying to teach someone a lesson and just accidentally creating a supervillain is pretty funny so here we are.

Free access to environment twists is powerful, but requiring them to be from earlier zones helps limit it, and there’s a good chance that Rocket Vault will be taken down before he gets to do this more than once.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

Free access to environment twists is powerful, but requiring them to be from earlier zones helps limit it, and there’s a good chance that Rocket Vault will be taken down before he gets to do this more than once.

Yeah, Green twists are usually fairly minor, although having them bundled with a penalty on the (probable) target is annoying. If your players let a d8 lieutenant with no real defensive tech survive until the tracker’s in Red so he can trigger Yellow twists they deserve whatever they get.

Given the timing of his first appearance, I’m assuming Rocket Vault’s creator was one of those people who thought the parkour scene in the 2006 Casino Royale was “kewl” instead of being entirely out of place it what was supposed to be a “more serious and realistic” Bond relaunch. That was one of the prime sources of that dopey Hollywood craze, after all.

[FrivYeti]

Oh yeah, Casino Royale is definitely one of the inspirations. There was a small explosion of similar appearances in 2005-2007, and then it mostly faded into the background and parkouring just became a small subset of action hero moves.

The Sylvan Dagger

Real Name: SL-DR4 (Syl), First Appearance: Celestial Travels #829, March 2008

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d12
Relation: Fan, Approach: Technological

Traits:

• Radiation Baffles: When Syl takes Nuclear or Cosmic damage, she Boosts herself with the result of her damage save.
• Literally A Spaceship: When acting in atmosphere, Syl rolls twice and takes the lower result.

Celestial Travels wasn’t immune to the pressure to create marketing tie-ins and merchandisable ideas. While the title itself was venerable enough that Zack Murphy was reluctant to mess with it too much, he believed that having a comic title with over eight hundred issues should be something that Venture trumpeted more, making their galactic community a broader part of marketing. He envisioned a spin-off series of science fiction comics, a ‘future of Venture Comics’ setting in the style of New Horizons, and television and video games spin-offs.

One of the first of these ideas was a tabletop battle game called Cosmic Storm, featuring teams of starships based on Venture Comics properties taking part in space battles for control of dimensional gateways. Murphy asked the current writer of Celestial Travels, Terry Lang, to create a ship to be the signature model for the game, with a story based around it that would make up a major fall crossover for 2008. Terry decided to take the prompt literally, and created SL-DR4.

SL-DR4 was the creation of an Argellian scientist who was trying to develop a new automated defense force to protect the Grand Galactic Union. He merged Kel’Thoth robotics, Xur’Tani bio-integration and Uranian energy absorption to create a spaceship able to fly itself, with passenger space but no crew. None of his experiments were authorized, and the Union found out what he was doing only when the Starjammers attacked his orbital base in the hopes of stealing the ship and programming it to be a raider. The Celestial Travellers responded, but while they were able to save the ship, the orbital fell out of the sky, threatening to destroy the planet below.

The ship activated during the confusion, and took offense to the Starjammers trying to steal her. As it transpired, her creator had trained her with files on the Celestial Travellers, and she leaped into action to protect them. At her creator’s urging, she reluctantly destroyed the orbital, saving the planet but killing the scientist. Grief-stricken, the Sylvan Dagger pledged to fulfill her creator’s dream, and ensure that innocents were protected. She journeyed with the Aurora Borealis for a time, learning from the Celestial Travellers, and took to calling herself ‘Syl’.

During the 2008 Cosmic Storm crossover, the Sylvan Dagger discovered a series of unstable dimensional rifts, and became embroiled in a war between rogue powers to control them and gain new trade routes and invasion paths across the Galaxy. The crossover was mildly entertaining, but the attached game (which promised to publish new titles changing the state of the galaxy based on tournament results) was a complete failure, and as a spaceship that couldn’t land, Syl didn’t have a place in many Celestial Travels stories. She stuck around in the background, but mostly faded away. A minor storlyine in 2020 established that she was now the leader of Traveller Team 41, supporting her team from space.

Behind the Scenes:

The background to this one is simple. First I got a d12 support for Celestial Travels. Then I said, “wouldn’t it be funny if she was a spaceship?” And then I said, "But no, Friv, you can’t build a model of a spaceship using Hero Forge.

Unless…"

And some fairly intense kitbashing later, here we are!

The tabletop battle game stuff came afterwards, and it’s pretty funny. Syl probably could have been a decent long-term minor character, but she got pushed as the face of a game that just collapsed, so there wasn’t pressure to use her afterwards, and then she ended up in the background. A fun D-Lister all around.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

The background to this one is simple. First I got a d12 support for Celestial Travels. Then I said, “wouldn’t it be funny if she was a spaceship?” And then I said, "But no, Friv, you can’t build a model of a spaceship using Hero Forge.

Unless…"

And some fairly intense kitbashing later, here we are!

Of course. Considering some of the thousands of spaceship minis I’ve bought or created over the years, I assure you just about anything you can imagine will work just fine with the more versatile starship combat systems like Full Thrust or Starmada. One of my regular Full Thrust opponents from ten years back had an armada of ships kitbashed out of spare weapons from old Warhammer Fantasy Battles sprues, and I’ve seen squadrons built out of drywall connecters win painting contests.

Most starship games do, indeed, crash and burn in short order, with at best a vestigial fan base left to bemoan their passing, so that part’s very realistic. Seems to be a particular issue with games based on well-known IPs, since the licenses are expensive and prone to having the rights owner refuse to renew them without warning.I hear teh much-touted X-Wing is making a modest recovery from the 2nd edition debacle that nearly killed it, but good luck getting any support for its Star Trek: Attack Wing spinoff, the Battlestar Galactica starfighter game along the same lines (or the dreadful old FASA BSG game, for that matter), or Halo Fleet Battles.

[LonelyMan]

That is SO COOL. If I were hired by Venture Comics, while I might get my feet wet with a few Flatfoot stories, my ultimate Nic-Cage-As-Superman vanity project I’d be trying to make happen would be a reboot of the failed Sylvan Dagger property, as a vehicle for a story heavily inspired by my favorite setting about sentient starships, The Culture by Iain M. Banks, and in particular my first ever purchased and read Culture novel, Excession (NOT a super recommended starting point, let me tell you!). That book features a LOT of dialogue between Culture “Minds” which is properly alien and eerie without being complete nonsense; I really feel like I could do justice to a setting like this.