Happy Pride!

 

It's Pride Month! I went through my collection, and with the help of some googling, found some LGBT+ superheroes. Not a lot, since most of them fall outside of my golden age theme, but some.

Wonder Woman and Catwoman are both pretty fundamental golden age figures, and both now officially bisexual. Wonder Woman has always been at least subtextually queer, so it's no surprise that it would be confirmed once society caught up, but it was slightly unexpected to learn about Catwoman since she's so often used as a romantic foil for Batman. 

Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were not created during the actual Golden Age of Comics, but their story is set in that era, Hooded Justice being the original "costumed vigilante" of the Watchmen timeline. Their gay relationship was canon from the beginning, though it was basically a side note in the original graphic novel. The recent HBO show fleshed their relationship a bit more, and gave Hooded Justice in particular a lot more depth.

My final Pride superhero is Shining Knight. New to me, the original Shining Knight was a legit pre-war Golden Age creation. It was a couple of reboots in the 2000s that made him intersex and/or trans. 

While the Pride riot/celebration itself postdates the 1930s setting of my game, the core themes of "being yourself", "solidarity with the oppressed", "aggressively resisting fascist violence", and "dressing flamboyantly" are all extremely relevant to *any* decent exploration of the superhero genre, so expect to see at least one more Pride post here before the month is out.

All of these are heroclix except Shining Knight, who is a "half-elf Xhorhas paladin" from WizKids, with a Perry Miniatures head and old-school GW horns.

More Of (and More About) The Silver Legion

 I've finished painting all my Silver Shirts - as with the two test minis previously shared, they are a mix of Pulp Figures US Marines, and GEG + Warlord plastic mashups, mostly the former. Additionally, I've painted up Warlord's Oswald Mosley as William Dudley Pelley, the Silver Legion's founder and leader.

I really do wish the Silver Legion was more widely known; Pelley's background as a reasonably successful artist, his devotion to the aesthetic of nostalgia and sentimentalist moralizing, his embrace of nontraditional religious views, his willingness to criticize aspects of Capitalism, all of these are common (though by no means universal) features of modern fascism, which can nonetheless be baffling to people whose awareness of the movement is limited to mainstream depictions of Hitler and his Nazis.

One might argue that the Silver Legion's lack of long-term success explains its modern obscurity. But while the Legion never filled Madison Square Garden, and Pelley never reached Lindberg's fame or recruited anyone who had, certainly 15,000 members nationwide is nothing to sniff at. If nothing else, we are fortunate that Pelley was a remarkably bad judge of character who constantly delegated his finances to opportunistic embezzlers instead of "true believers", and also fortunate that his organization's sketchiest activities happened to occur within the vanishingly brief period of American history where law enforcement and the House Un-American Activities Committee actually cared more about stopping right-wing extremism than harassing unions and activists.

There are also interesting conversations to be had about how his occult interests put him at odds with potential allies elsewhere on the far right, but I will save that for a future post about how my game will handle factions.

Bringing it back to my tabletop gaming project: as part of his off-brand Theosophical belief system, William Dudley Pelley claimed possession of various psychic powers. Since my game is set in a pulp/superhero world of magic and super-science, he can actually have those powers so as to be a worthwhile antagonist for the players, in which case his administrative problems are solved. And since the central premise of my campaign is either a breakdown or hijacking of the Federal government's  authority, he has nothing to fear from HUAC. It will be entirely up to the Superheroes to stop him!

For more on William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, I highly recommend Scott Beekman's book on the subject.

Malicious Militiamen Minions

 Painted up some test figures for the different antagonist factions. One of my core notions for this game is that, in the 1930s just as much as the 2020s, Americans do not need to go overseas to punch fascists. So I've got three different flavors of historical American fascist for our heroes to beat up.

The Silver Legion (Silver Shirts) are probably the most interesting of the bunch; a brownshirts copy, but founded by a former Hollywood screenwriter who believed himself blessed with occult knowledge and magical powers. Largely due to the organizational incompetence of their leadership, they never posed much of a material threat in real life, but in a world where their founder actually has the supernatural abilities he claimed? We'll see.

One of the Silver Shirts is a Pulp Figures US Marine with a gs mustache, the other is converted from Warlord Games Anglo-Zulu War body, WW2 arms, and a Great Escape Games gunslinger head.

Being America's default white supremacists, The Klan needs no explanation. Although Superman was beating them up as early as 1946 on his radio show.

Pulp Figures cultist, and Gripping Beast Arab body w GEG arms.

The War of Independence reenactor-looking guys have a bit more artistic license in them... to the best of my knowledge, 1930s' nostalgia-flavored reactionaries never actually played dress-up like this, but since groups like the Order of '76 and the Paul Reveres were basically their era's Tea Partiers, I think it fits. The Bioshock Infinite villains are also an influence.

Warlord Games AWI with WW2 weapons.

Really looking forward to seeing these losers, and more like them, get their asses kicked by all manner of costumed adventurers!