Iron Age Design Journal #3

Author Spotlight on... Jon Leitheusser and Seth Johnson

What made you want to write Iron Age, apart from the fame and fortune and admiration of M&M fans everywhere?

Jon Leitheusser: Don’t underestimate the powerful draw of the admiration of M&M fans! Okay, well, besides that, I’d edited a number of M&M books in the past and I was interested in doing some writing as well. I love M&M and talked to Steve Kenson about what he might have available. He said he had a new setting book like Golden Age coming out, but for the Iron Age and asked if I’d be interested in working on it.

I’m a big fan of a lot of comics and characters from the Iron Age, so I signed on pretty quickly. I figured it’d be a blast to delve back into comics from that period and come up with some interesting information for the book. I also really liked the idea of presenting some new crunchy bits to the game and giving options that help reflect the genre more closely.

Seth Johnson: I love superhero games in general and M&M in particular, so I would have jumped at the chance to write just about anything for the game. But Iron Age was a great book to tackle, if only for the chance to break apart the mad mess of the period and find the gems that resonated with comic fans of the day and continue to influence comics today…and then translate it all into M&M terms and make it useful and playable in M&M campaigns.

How did you research background material for Iron Age?

SJ: First, I broke out all the comics I’ve been collecting for decades. Next I called my parents and said, “I told you these would pay off some day!”

Then I read lots and lots of comics, a bunch of interviews with comics creators and professionals of the period, and gave myself a crash review of late twentieth-century history. The most useful thing I did while doing that research was to construct a timeline, including both elements from comics and the real world. I knew and remembered well many of the big comics, events, and trends of the period, from Watchmen and Image Comics to Wolverine and Knightfall. But it was really interesting to place them all together as a continuum and contrast them against the influence of real-world events, to slowly piece together how the Iron Age juggernaut grew from a single story in the early 70s until it consumed most comics of the 80s and early 90s.

JL: As you can tell from his answer, Seth did most of the heavy lifting in terms of research. However, we discussed the background often…just to make sure we were both presenting information from the same perspective. Overall I think for the work I did, the comics of the period were the biggest source of inspiration for me. I had a great time rereading a number of Iron Age comics.

Who is your favorite Iron Age comic book hero, and why?

JL: A single favorite? That’s tough, but I’d probably have to say Rorschach from Watchmen. He’s just a perfect example of an Iron Age character; practical, suspicious, capable, violent, and just a little imbalanced. But, he’d be pretty hard to have as a character in a roleplaying game, so, if I had to choose my favorite character (or three) from the Iron Age to have as a character, I’d have to say Ghost Rider, the gray Hulk, or mainstream DC universe Batman (after The Dark Knight Returns was released).

SJ: Jon may have taken most of the good answers, but he didn’t take all of them. Two of my favorites are a little more obscure: Marvel’s Deathlok, which really epitomized the social struggles of the time—unease with rapid technological development, distrust of what often seemed like menacing megacorporations, racial tensions, and more—and wrapped it all up in a four-color cyborg super soldier, guns blazing. Also, Hex, where DC took an old west cowboy and arbitrarily thrust him into a post-apocalyptic Iron Age nuclear wasteland—not just crazy but straight on past it to crazy FUN. I would have loved to have been in the editorial meeting where that project came together.

A third character is probably pushing it in a question asking for a single favorite, but I also have to mention Matt Wagner’s Grendel in all its iterations, from Hunter Rose to Grendel Prime; if any character reflects not just the Iron Age but all its possibilities from the psychological to the epic, it’s Grendel.

JL: Ooo, those are good choices. I’ll add those to my list, too.

SJ: I bet we can make the list even longer. Ask us again tomorrow.

What’s your favorite Iron Age comic book story?

JL: I hate to repeat myself, but I have to say its Watchmen. It’s a great, self-contained story that has all of the elements and characters necessary for a perfect Iron Age story. Plus, it was a key in kicking the whole genre into high gear. It took the tropes of comics and tore them apart and put them back together in new ways that were really exciting and different from everything else going on in comics at the time.

SJ: As much as anything else, the Iron Age was about deconstructing everything that had come before, studying it to see what made it tick, throwing out anything that seemed like it didn’t work in the new, modern age, and putting the parts back together. So while it’s not quite as dark and gritty as most Iron Age stories at the forefront of fans’ minds, I’d have to hold up DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths as one of the perfect Iron Age epics, with high stakes, a high body count, real emotion, and a very real sense that when the story was done, nothing would be the same.

What was the most fun part of the book to write? What was the most challenging?

JL: For me, the part that was the most fun was the character write-ups. Everything from coming up with which archetypes to use to the game stats to their backgrounds and suggested plots was a lot of fun.

The most challenging part was probably presenting the genre information that was in the core M&M book and add information that players would find informative and useful. Those sections from the core rulebook were very well written, but what I wanted to do was give readers more information that might get their creative juices flowing and inspire some ideas of their own.

SJ: The history section of The Iron Age was like piecing together a Swiss wristwatch from a box of loose parts—incredibly challenging, but enormously rewarding to accomplish and it’s probably the section of which I’m most proud. Most fun was probably the weapons section of the book; as a kid I collected a full run of G.I. Joe and the Punisher Armory specials, so as an adult it was pretty cool to provide the tools so that M&M players can set aside their generic “assault rifle” and carry a GIAT FA-MAS with a recoil buffer, flash suppressor, and red dot sight system—or even a B57 tactical nuclear weapon.

JL: You’d let players in your game run around with a tactical nuclear weapon?

SJ: If they have the points, you never know when it might come in handy…

Okay, maybe not. But it’s good to present the stats so that heroes know the stakes when they’re trying to defuse a nuke.

It can be tempting, in retrospect, to look at the Iron Age as something of a parody of itself—the giant guns, the over-the-top megaviolence and such—how did you take the genre seriously in the book?

SJ: We go into it in the history section of the book, but what’s particularly interesting about the Iron Age is that it was born of the noblest of motives: bound up in the straitjacket of the Comics Code, comics creators like Stan Lee, Len Wein, Neal Adams, and Denny O’Neil just wanted to tell stories that were more realistic. When they won a little bit of freedom, they pushed for even more, for diversity and the chance to tell more meaningful stories. Finally, by the 80s’, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and other creators of the period had the chance to break comics apart altogether and tell stories that would have been impossible fifteen or twenty years before. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns—those are serious books with something to say not just about comics as a medium but about society as a whole.

Of course, alongside and after the work of those creators was a strong, wide current of others who were just caught up in the times or saw the successes of the time only in the most simplistic terms and created the storm of characters and comics that were at best crassly commercial and at worst stupid, which did indeed risk making the entire Iron Age a ludicrous period in comics history. But time has already started to wear away the worst of those stories, making it easier for us to tease out and focus on the true strengths of an arguably interesting period in comics that reflected a fascinating and turbulent time in modern real-world history.

JL: I don’t want to say I ignored the big guns, and over-the-top violence, but I definitely didn’t play it up as much as comics from the time did. Instead, I wanted to present the genre, rules, and information in a straightforward manner that allows players to use the book however they want. If the players want to play a serious, investigative story about superbeings secretly taking over the government; great! Or, if the players want to play a street-level game about taking down super-powered mobsters; that’s great, too. I think this book is generally pretty useful and should supply GMs and players with a lot of ideas that they can use any way they want.

Apart from Iron Age itself, what’s the #1 resource you would recommend to M&M Gamemasters looking to run an Iron Age game?

JL: The #1 resource for any M&M game, in my opinion, is comics. Comics from any time period are rich with story ideas – even the crazy stuff can be mined for ideas and turned into adventures and plotlines for a game. Secondarily, I like to look at the real world and see how the issues of today can be used in the game; cloning, religion, the speed of technological advancement? They all make great launching points for campaigns.

SJ: Yeah, definitely the comics, though outside of them, you can’t go wrong soaking in the pop culture of the real-world Iron Age, especially the bombastic big-budget action movies of the time. But to ground everything in the proper gritty feel of the era, I recommend David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets for a street-level non-fiction account of crime in the mean streets during the heart of the Iron Age.

Thanks very much for your time, guys.

JL: You bet! Thanks for asking us to contribute to M&M.

SJ: I can’t wait for the book to get out into the hands of players—it’s time for the shadows in their games to get a little darker…