Wormy: The Dragon‘s Dragon
It begins with an imp, some dwarves, a stolen set of bowling balls, and a cigar-smoking dragon in a flat newsboy cap. It gets stranger from there, sprawling through an epic of long-jawed mudsuckers, oddly literate stonedrakes, bad puns, bounty hunters, and some of the most spectacular color comics pages you can imagine.
I’m talking about Wormy, a comic by David Trampier which ran in the back of Dragon magazine, one to four pages per month, from 1977 to 1988. Trampier, whose artwork helped define the feel of First Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created a lush, memorable tale, one that deserves to be better known today. You can see a large chunk of it here, though most of the comic seems to be offline.
What was it about? As I said, it began with Wormy, a green dragon with a cigar, who’d stolen some bowling balls from a group of dwarves. The dwarves show up to try and get them back, which leads to complications involving a group of brutal but occasionally cunning card-playing ogres (Wormy steals their poker pot when they’re not looking), a minotaur, a talking bear in a Robin Hood hat, a whole community of trolls, and a Brooklyn-accented imp. Then somewhere in there one of the balls gets broken, and a demon comes spilling out. So when we cut to a wizard named Gremorly, “somewhere at the end of this weird world,” plotting to steal the dwarven treasure, we’re not that surprised.
Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
This is the fourth in a series of posts investigating the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy (you can find the first part 
This is the third in a series of posts looking at the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy: that is, the first fantasy to be set entirely in its own fictional world, with no connection to conventional reality at all. It’s an innovation traditionally ascribed to William Morris, but I think I’ve found an earlier writer who deserves that honor.
Many of my contemporaries believed that one of the most amazing comic book series ever was Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which ran from 1989 through 1996 – formative teenage years for me and my peers – originally by DC Comics and (from issue #47) under their Vertigo imprint. Now it looks like The Sandman has been re-optioned for consideration as a television series. Though the series creator isn’t associated with the show, there’s still reason to be hopeful.
Early on in this film we see Bruce Willis with hair and looking young, and not Die-Hard bashed up, and we wonder absently if this time he’ll actually finish the film as scar-free as he began it. The Willis we begin with is quickly established as a ‘surrogate,’ the robot avatar of the real Willis character, Tom Greer, and it doesn’t take long for both Greer and his surrogate to get bashed up in familiar form.
Have you ever woken up in an extremely good mood, found you were left enough hot water for a skin-peeling shower, stepped on the scale and found it down two pounds in spite of the bacchanalia of the night before? Have you ever leapt out of bed feeling euphoric and thought, “I really love my life?”