"Welcome to the Party, Pal!"

And my summer finally draws to a close. This being California, my summer goes on a bit longer than yours does… Our weather outside is really beautiful right now (80 degrees as I’m writing this), but the drop from triple-digits makes me kind of sad, as always. This means I won’t be able to have my 3:00 AM writing sessions on the patio in 60-70 degree temperatures. Going to have to start wearing a jacket again. But can’t complain. Had a very nice looooong summer and soaked up and enjoyed every bit of it.

Just got back from Boise. We do this annual thing—and by “we” I mean me, Aaron, Russ and Tony—that’s a reunion of sorts for us former San Diego citizens (Tony being the only one of us still living there). It’s meant to be a “man” weekend. For us, that also means a “geek” weekend. We get together at the home of one of us (it was my town last year), hang out, smoke cigars, drink beer, catch up on old times, debate movies and comics and politics, watch DVDs (or, more so these days, downloaded video files), and—our favorite part—play videogames.

This year it was at Russ’ place, so the other three of us flew to Boise. Not having a job, I really couldn’t afford an airline ticket, but the other guys all planned this behind my back and split the cost of my ticket between them, which was really awesome of them. To save on the cost, we changed up my flight schedule to where I’d fly on in Wednesday and leave on Monday (which cut the cost almost in half compared to what the weekend-only flights would have been). So I came in a couple of days before Aaron and Tony, got to hang with Russ and the dogs, do some site-seeing, watch some movies (and a lot of Robot Chicken). Then the boys joined us, and after a Friday night on the town, we spent the rest of the weekend locked on the house (the rain that arrived helped with this), mostly just playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which was a total blast. Great game that follows (then adds to) Marvel’s big “Civil War” mega-event. There’s nothing quite like the fun of four-player cooperative gameplay on the Playstation. We made it through the entire game on a 12-hour marathon on Saturday, then started over again on Sunday and did it all again, but this time making the “pro-registration” choice in the game instead of the “anti-registration” path we’d followed the previous day. This makes a difference in which Marvel characters you get to choose from, which missions you go on, etc. Beat the whole thing again. Which is really cool doing it more than once, because the audio running with the closing credits is different each time, and hilarious. The last one was a radio interview with the Hulk that was hysterical.

We all flew back home on Monday, and really enjoyed the chance to hang out again and geek out (and drink much beer). We may be doing this in Seattle next year. We’ll see. There’s even a slim chance that Russ’ job may end up bringing him back to San Diego again, so if that happens, that might shift the location there, which is, of course, AWESOME for me.

Other than that, spent a lot of this past month playing Champions online. Having a blast! KC and Jack know what I’m talking about here, as they’ve being busting some virtual heads, too. Great job by everyone who put this game together. It’s a lot like City of Heroes—which I always loved—but improves on it, and I had a much easier time adapting some of my favorite Forte characters. Tim and I have been running around with Dr. Jackal and Phantasm and taking care of business together when we can manage to hook up (which hasn’t been as much, because Tim’s being having to do a lot of evening studying for some online classes he’s had to take for one of his licenses for work), but with our other characters as well.

Just like in Champions, I find myself more drawn to the physical characters than energy ones, so I have my most fun with my bricks and martial artists. But I do have one powered armor character (in Seahawk), a fire character (Heatspell) and an archer (Quiver) that I enjoy, too. There’s definitely something to be said for ranged attacks. The only downside of the game is that you’re limited to only eight characters. In CoH, there were several different servers, and you could have several characters on each, so you could make new characters all the time, if for nothing else than just to be creative and have fun with the process. But in reality, as many characters as I had in the CoH days, I only ever really played a handful of them with any regularity. Most of the only got played once. So that’s fine. I hope they expand, because I’d like to be able to try some new characters in Champions (I haven’t tried out the gadgeteer class, for example, or an ice character) without having to delete one of my existing characters to do so.

So far it’s nothing but a pleasure to play, and all the familiar Champions universe elements make it feel like home. I’m sure I’ll be playing this thing for quite some time. Just hopefully not all THAT much, as I don’t want to let it become too much of a time-waster. But a couple of hours here and there breaks the day up nicely. I just realized I haven’t played the thing since I’ve been home, which means I haven’t played it at all in well over a week. Better hurry up and put this ‘Times issue to bed so I can get back into it…before I start forgetting what buttons do what…

This Time Around

Another update with no new Forte art. Sad. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have ENOUGH of it, but I always love posting up the new stuff. Not even Comic-Con art this year. I’ll get back to extra-dough-laying-around status one of these days and start bugging artists again…and finding new ones. Speaking of which…STILL nothing from Dennis Martin Willman, he of the “What? You didn’t get it yet? Huh? It’ll be there soon. It’s almost done, and believe me, it’s going to look great!” Coming up on two years pretty soon since the big order I made with him that was allegedly lost in the mail. Many promises since. His last email was the “Huh? I emailed the files of some of those to you! You didn’t get them?” one, with no follow-up since I got back with the “no”. Just sent an email a few days ago for any follow-up. No response. Will keep trying. Will not ever use him again, which is sad, since he really seemed to dig doing the Forte stuff back when he was actually mailing it to me. I could have been a loyal regular customer. Note, also, that he’s one of three artists I’m following up with that still haven’t gotten me the stuff (or the refund) in a couple of years. Yes, I’m a patient guy.

So got one thing this time around, and it’s something I’ve been planning, in one form or another, for a very long time.

Early Forte players will recall when Dr. Jackal, during the campaign, wrote his two tabloidy books. They were your typical celebrity tell-all things, basically him trying to cash in on his fame. They sold well and were critically slammed (a familiar combination in both publishing AND Hollywood…). But the irony, of course, is that in his secret identity as Jack Parker, he actually IS a writer (journalist)…and a really good one (just look at his skill roll). I like to think he purposely dumbed down his writing for those Jackal books to make sure no connection was made with his alter ego.

After I left the campaign, I decided that though Dr. Jackal had retired as a super, Jack Parker—well-known newspaper editor in Seattle—wrote his first book. He felt the need to tell the inside story of one of the more profound events in human history –the Saoshyant invasion of Earth—to the world. The journalist in him felt the world should know. He, as Dr. Jackal, was on the Saoshyant ship with other members of Forte and lots of abducted civilians, but since Jack Parker was also listed among the missing on Earth, he simply wrote this book from the perspective of him (Parker) having been abducted and being out in space for those months with all the others…even changing into Jack Parker to do interviews with civilians (and aliens) so there’d be no questions later. The book was the definitive historical record on the matter, was a best-seller, and won Jack Parker a Pulitzer. Made him pretty well-off, too (which I even bought for him with unused experience points).

After this, in Forte post-campaign history, I decided that Jack Parker would see this as the perfect opportunity to write the book on the history of Forte. The world now knew that Jack Parker had all these “inside connections” to Forte thanks to his time with them in space and all the interviewing he did with them for the invasion book. So he wrote it—very much in the feel of Clark Kent writing a history of the JLA. He had to write it as though he were an outsider interviewing them all (including Dr. Jackal, presumably). But it worked. And it was a monster success. And it even turned into the Forte HBO mini-series that got mentioned in Forte 2000 continuity.

That book was “For a Day or a Lifetime: The Forte Story”. I always thought it’d make for a great read. For a long time now I’ve had it in my head to write some “Forte Year One” fiction, really delve into the events of the beginnings of the team in ’87. It suddenly hit me that I could do that in a more interesting way…by writing the first chapter of Jack Parker’s book. So I did. And by doing this, the bonus fun was that I got to build the Jack Parker web page to present it. Had a gas doing that.

So this first chapter (and no, I don’t plan to write more chapters, and have no plans to write an entire fictional non-fiction book on Forte, so this is probably it) goes right back to November 4th, 1987, the day when Forte first began. It essentially recounts (and kind of reinterprets) and expands on the events chronicled in Forte #1 (which, yes, can be found on the Forte Prime site!), also adding in some backstory information for some of the characters. The stuff you’ll find on Dr. Jackal’s New York years has been in my head for probably near twenty years, but just never made it to paper. And I ran all the Mist stuff by Kaye before the final work was done, too.

Hopefully, it reads just like a non-fiction book about a real hero team would, which is what I was going for. It was fun having to consider each piece of info—from Jack’s POV, he has to be truthful as a writer, but there’s also lots of Forte secret identity stuff and such that he couldn’t, of course, include. So had a lot of decisions to make. I enjoyed trying to write this as Jack Parker trying to pretend like he wasn’t really Dr. Jackal. So I hope you enjoy this sort of unusual method of story-telling, and hope you enjoy a little journey back to where the Forte legend began.

Next Time...On "The 'F' Word"...

No idea what’s coming next time. Just like with my life, it’s all a big wait-and-see thing. And I’m cool with that. But I’ll be here. So see you then. Happy Halloween!

Michael O’Connell
Holding down the Forte