Here's another I prepared earlier...

A quick introduction
Regular readers might remember that I posted, last December, my long-delayed recantation on the topic of roleplaying as art. This here post has nothing to do with roleplaying (in the sense of tabletop rpg's, just in case there are those among you who immediately think that there is an element of roleplaying in costumed historical re-enactment); it's just that it too has been sitting on the rack for a couple of years.

So, why post it now? Or, to put it another way, why not post it then? On the latter point, there were 2 reasons I can recall:

• I had (and still have to some degree) mixed feelings about using my blog as a platform to intervene in actual ongoing discussions from afar, ie. when I'm not joining in at source. "But that's exactly what blogs are for, dummy!" I hear you cry, dear readers. Well, you live and learn, eh?
• I felt the article was too political for RD/KA!.
  

The main reason why I chose to post it now was simple enough: I needed some material because I'll be unable to attend to the blog this week. I daresay the Euroelection results also made the topic seem sadly all too pertinent. This all the more so since, not long after the furore over the SBG at Salute, a BBC reporter went to a militaria fair. And what did he discover? Yes, you've guessed it dear readers, the SBG's ranks were replete with neo-nazi ultra-reactionaries.

NB. As with the article on roleplaying and art, there are some temporal references which are well out of date. Again I'm just leaving them as they were first written.

Dubious bedfellows: the 2nd Battle Group
You might remember a few weeks ago when I said that I didn't believe the execrable 300 to be "some kind of crypto-fascistic parable." (Here's someone who thought otherwise by the way; via Ken MacLeod's The Early Days of a Better Nation.) I also said at the time that the "charge that art might celebrate fascistic impulses is... very serious..." Which is why I felt that I just had to comment on the furore which has raged all week over at The Miniatures Page - a hub of the miniature wargamers' ecommunity.

The subject which generated so much invective in nearly 500 posts over 3 threads (first report on the event; Salute organisers offer their apologies; Salute organiser resigns) was the appearance at Salute 2007- Britain's leading independent wargames convention- of the Second Battle Group, a WW2 re-enactment group who choose to represent the 1 SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, ie. Hitler's elite bodyguard.

Without going into too much detail, I can summarise the overwhelmingly negative response something like this:

• The choice of the SS was offensive because of what they represent, but it might've been better if some Allied units were represented too, for the sake of balance.
• Even if you can accept the validity of representing an SS unit, dressing your kids up as Hitler Youth was a step too far.
• And selling Hitler mugs and Nazi flags (a.k.a. "novelty items" in the words of one 'astute' TMP poster) was just beyond crass.
• Battle re-enactors are a bit weird too, aren't they?-: so SS re-enactors must be outright freaks.
• Above all, this was a terrible image to present to the world of the wargaming hobby at a major event which was right in the public eye.

The dogged and vocal minority opinion can similarly be summed-up something like this:

• Stop whining you wusses!
• PC's gone mad, I tell you, mad!
• The Nazi's might've been bad, but war is hell, and anyway, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China were worse (which is true actually).
• Why is it wrong to dress up as the SS if it's not wrong to sell books and models featuring them- which, as we all know, are very popular in WW2 wargaming circles?

Now please don't be misled by my flippant tone. I don't for one minute think that the morality of war toys and militaristic hobbyism is a trivial matter. In fact it is a subject I have puzzled over for many years. My parents' qualms about my brother and I having war toys aside, the issue raised its head for me personally over 30 years ago.

Like many of my generation, my entry into what eventually became my gaming hobby was through making Airfix kits. After a few years throwing together the familiar aeroplanes I discovered tanks, and I was hooked. Tamiya kits quickly followed, and soon I was enough of a hardcore teenage tankie to have a regular order for the Military Modelling magazine at my local newsagents. Oh happy days!

If my memory doesn't fail me, this was at about the time that the first political campaigns were being waged against war toys. One day, I read that toy guns had been banned in Sweden. The case was that playing with war toys contributed to the militaristic culture which was then widely discredited because of the carnage of the Vietnam War. In my youthful innocence I thought that this was frankly bizarre. Surely- I thought- we had war toys because of war, and not vice versa?

Sometime thereabouts I read- in the pages of my Military Modelling I seem to recall- the strange story of how Airfix had to hire women to sit down with scissors and snip the swastikas out of their WW2 German Luftwaffe airplane kits' transfer sheets so that they could be exported to Germany, where the depiction of swastikas was illegal. This too I found odd. The obvious issue of a historically authentic representation came to mind; but more than that, I couldn't help but find something funny at the idea of genuine German neo-Nazis saluting a tiny 5mm swastika clipped from the transfer sheet of a 1/72nd scale model of an Me109.

Strangely enough, this issue resurfaced many years later. I was sitting in a pub one night when I overheard an interesting conversation nearby. Glasgow pubs being what they are, I invited myself into the company: an aging local, and a young German visitor. At last!- I thought, my chance to ask someone about the peculiar issue of the Airfix transfer-snippers which had so perplexed me 2 decades previously. Unfortunately the young German's English was poor, while my German was worse: being the useful conversation-stoppers you learn from a youthful diet of British war comics. This communication left the young German uncertain as to the drift of my questions, so that I left with my curiosity unsatisfied.

All of which brings us back to Salute, the SBG, and a certain disingenuosness on both the SBG's part and that of the 'stop whinging' minority over at TMP. I mean to say: it's not as if they don't have a case. After all, the only 'clean' armies in history would be those which never saw action, and, if such a beast can be found, it's hardly going to interest those whose hobby is centred on a fascination for warfare- real or imagined, past, present or future. So if we accept that one side in any given war can be represented, in whichever media people prefer, then we have to accept that any and all other sides must also be represented- clear historical perspective at the very least requires this, surely?

And the dressing up? Well it's not for me, but let's be honest here: is dressing up really that much more weird than playing with toy soldiers or pretending to be an elf, or what-have-you? Or is dressing up only acceptable at parties, or when someone else has written your lines?

This is all very well, but it's an abstract defence of people's right to 'do history' in any way they see fit. Where the SBG, and the minority over at the TMP were being a bit disingenuous is that the matter of depictions of the SS is not just a matter of history. And I'm not here talking about the feelings of the survivors of the Nazis' genocidal rampages, however pertinent those feelings are. What I'm talking about is the present and future fact of the growing electoral presence of neo-Nazi parties in Europe, parties for whom the SS are symbols of martial prowess, however strenuously this is denied.

And there's the rub for the SBG it seems to me. Let them have their costumed historical reconstructions. I mean, if a famous movie director lavished a vast budget on doing exactly the same, Golden Globes, BAFTA's and Oscars might well be on the cards. But selling Hitler mugs and Nazi flags as souvenirs? What's that got to do with historical re-enactment? Hmm?

New Timeframes?

Sunday gaming was cancelled a couple of weeks ago due to an impromptu daytrip to Dundee, my old home town. The visit was occasioned by my discovery, from his twitterfeed, that Warren Ellis was due to appear as a headline speaker in Timeframes, the comics programme of the Literary Dundee festival (as fB friends and tweetfellows might remember). Warren Ellis' Wildstorm superhero series The Authority was instrumental in reviving my interest in contemporary comics after a layoff during the 90's, and I set off thereafter on the familiar completist's quest: to get my hands on as much of his work as possible.

Alan Grant's name in the programme was just the icing on the cake. Grant wrote many of the seminal comic stories of my youth, Judge Dredd being the best known. On top of that, I'd bumped into Alan Grant once in a comics store in the old Dens Road Market in Dundee back in the early 90's. He proved to be genial, interesting and generous.

The journey to Dundee was uneventful, although finding the venue for the event wasn't quite so straightforward. I grew up in Dundee as I said, and my dad was a university lecturer, so the area in which the event's venue was located was quite familiar; or, at least, it used to be. As I doubled back in search of what, inevitably enough, turned out to be the first likely looking building I'd seen, I was amazed at how much the area had changed in the past decade: new buildings were everywhere; none of which had anything in particular to recommend them.

I arrived late. At this remove from the event it is impossible for me to give more than capsule impressions of the talks I sat through.

The throng of fans descends upon the stars!

The programme
The first programme item I attended - under the 'British Science Fiction Comics' heading - was Bill McLoughlin and Keith Robson's talk about DC Thomson's Starblazer, a comic of which I was only vaguely aware during its 1980's heyday, and which I never read. The pair weren't the best speakers but their subject was interesting and they came to life when, their individual contributions done, they began to bat the topic back and forth. An interesting snippet was how many of the writers and artists who went on to enjoy fame on both sides of the Atlantic in the 80's and 90's began their careers on Starblazer. There was an open hint of resentment on the part of McLoughlin and Robson at how little this has been acknowledged.

There followed Peter Hughes Jachimiak's lecture:

' Days of Future Passed' [sic]: 1970s Britain, Economic Downturn and Utopian Futures in Children's Science Fiction Comics.

The academic styling of this title was matched by the tone and poor delivery of the speaker. It was a real shame that Jachimiak apparently can't tell the difference between being scholarly and academic because his subject was fascinating, and one that I hold close to my own heart (cf. eg. 'A Parcel of Rogues' - tangential I'll admit, but germane I'll avow). All I can here add is that Jachimiak at least succeeded in awakening in me an interest in the literature of comics' studies.

Jachimiak's lecture left me with no appetite for another taste of comics being drained dry of their abiding thrills by the inappropriate register of the academic text. This was a bit of a shame really, because the subsequent item sounded promising:

David Bishop, 'Time Twisted': A look at Alan Moore's treatment of time frames in 2000AD.

In any event, I don't know how Bishop's session went, because I spent it in a nearby pub.

Alan Grant signs my Batman/Judge Dredd: Vendetta in Gotham graphic novel

Keynote #1: Alan Grant
I returned in time to hang around awaiting the first keynote presentation of the day, by Alan Grant. Billed as 'My Adventures in Comics', Grant began by announcing that the intellectual standard of the preceding lectures had led him to rethink. And so we were treated to a cogent and highly stimulating cri de coeur appealing for story, a case made by the grandfather of 4 young children (11 years and under) who also just happens to be equipped with the insights of a lifetime's writing in comics and multimedia.

It is obviously impossible to give more than the briefest of hints of the themes of Grant's half hour talk, especially at a week and a half's remove. The best I can hope to do is to pick out a few of his key themes:

• Grant's central bete noire was the role of corporate marketing and branding in reducing stories to bland, conflict-free narratives where they're not removed altogether (ie. in puzzle/activity books).
• Thus we find that young readers aren't being exposed to essential features of the role of story in character building; that is to say, narratives dramatising:

1. Morality.
2. Hope.
3. Rebellion, and the irresistable lure of the ever-necessary challenge to authority.

• The consequence of all this Grant argued is that we are seeing a young generation grow up who lack the frames of reference that'd enable them to avoid being swept along with what Grant called the 'Platonic stories' of the powers that be; eg. the drive to war in Iraq in 2003, to note just one example cited by Grant.

There was a lot more to the talk than this, naturally enough, but that's the gist of the key themes. I have to say I didn't agree completely with all of Grant's points; but he was never less than interesting. I'd really like to hear more of what he has to say on this subject.

Warren Ellis with my copy of Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories

Keynote #2: Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis' style stood in sharp contrast to Alan Grant's, beginning as a rat-a-tat-tat of aperçus and anecdotes drawn from what is obviously a wealth of material, and woven together with biting wit into a whole which became increasingly greater than the sum of its parts as the talk gathered momentum. The naturally meandering style of the born story teller meant that there was less of a definite theme to grab hold of in Ellis' talk than there had been in Grant's. So I really can't comment all that much on what Ellis said, other than to note that it was never dull, often provocative, and well worth the price of entry. I'd be keen to hear him talk again.

Elsewhere
No comics event featuring star writers and artists would be complete without signings, which duly took place. I also made an effort to talk to other people there. I particularly enjoyed meeting some young GW fans, with whom I shared a pleasant chat about all things Warhammer- 40K especially, naturally enough.

Who's watching who? The official photographer and I share a wee jape

Final thoughts
Timeframes was the 2nd comics programme to feature at Literary Dundee. My caveats notwithstanding I enjoyed a stimulating day out; my complaint wasn't so much the scholarly approach to understanding the place of comics in culture as it was the overly academic way in which this scholarship was put across. In any event, I was pleased to be in such an intellectually challenging environment, and hope to be able to return next year. A palpable hit then, I guess. ;)

Games a gogo!

The vicissitudes of everyday life have taken their toll on my blogging- key amongst which has been my labours to get my painting table up and running again after my long layoff; and a future onslaught is already on the horizon. Meanwhile, here is a quick roundup of last weekend's gaming.

Combat Commander
Badger was due round for another dose of Combat Commander last Friday. He was expecting us to continue our Stalingrad campaign. What he didn't know was that Mark and Robert were due to visit again. Hoping therefore that he might get chance to taste revenge after the pastings he'd suffered at Mark's hands last mayday, I suggested to Badger that we play an official scenario, something we could set up and play more quickly than the campaign with its decision tree and record keeping.

CC:P Scenario #B: Ambush at Mogaung
Learning that I had trimmed the corners of all my CC:P counters in readiness for CC@UK Expo'09 (what did he expect, hmm?), Badger decided that he wanted to try out another PTO scenario. Continuing from where we'd left off, as you do, we found ourselves in Burma (linkage to a nifty BBC animated map showing the course of the whole campaign) in June 1944.

The operational area; & its place (inset) in the '44-45 Burma campaign

The scenario represents an impromptu ambush by weary Chindits on a similarly ragtag Japanese column; and features an unusual variation on preplotted setup, in which the Commonwealth player has a range of predesignated setup hexes, plus some whose location can be chosen. The kicker is that these last must be chosen before the Japanese player sets up. The overall effect is similar to that of Scenario #20, A March in December.

Random selection gave me the Japanese. My dispositions gave me a plan with 3 elements:

• A weak northern force (NB. north isn't conventional on the scenario map) which I was essentially willing to sacrifice.
• A strong central force, featuring my best leader, and squads positioned to come to his aid as quickly as possible.
• A middling southern force, which would break for the board edge and exit VP when circumstances permitted.

Long story short: Badger was slaughtered, eventually conceding when I was on 32VP and he was just 2 casualties from surrender. This despite an early setback to the Japanese plans when Badger turned up a double 6 to gain a mutual KIA in a melee I'd overstacked; how spammy is that!

As the dust settled, Badger was blaming the Commonwealth deck, which he'd not shuffled properly. True as this might be, I have to suggest that leaving the 3VP exit point wide open and so gifting me 20VP might just've been relevant? This was just one way in which I think Badger was humped because he simply didn't play towards the victory conditions and their special rules.

Score
Green troops? 0
Wily old wardog? 1
:-)

Battlestar Galactica
I noted last month that FFG have scheduled a Battlestar Galactica expansion for an autumn release. This news has given me extra motivation to get in more plays of the basic game before the changes that'll be wrought by the expansion. Neither Andy, Donald nor Gav demurred, so Sunday saw us play our 5th game of this fine adaption of a truly magnificent TV show.

I'd decided I wanted to play a fighter jock this time, a decision I stuck with even after Gav drew Starbuck. Thus it was that Starbuck was joined by Boomer (me, natch), Saul Tigh (Andy) and Laura Roslin (Donald), all attempting anew to save humanity from the twin menaces of itself, and the Cylons.

The humans won, in a game which showed some of the strengths and the weaknesses of the design.

The strength was seen in the atmosphere of paranoia, for which I was largely responsible. A crisis resolution skill check had revealed the presence of a Cylon before the Sleeper Agent Phase. Events led me to believe that it was Gav, so I campaigned to have him put in the brig. Andy, the Admiral and the actual Cylon was only too happy to oblige. Soon enough, Roslin followed Starbuck into incarceration (and a Cell Block H spinoff?). It was only when I got a chance to look at Andy's Loyalty card that I learned he was our enemy within.

The weaknesses demonstrated in Sunday's game can be summed up in a simple phrase: it was the dullest game of BSG we'd yet played. The reason for this was that so little happened, which was largely down to the synergy between 2 abilities enjoyed by Boomer and Laura Roslin. These gave us a degree of control over the flow of the Crisis cards sufficient to ensure that Cylon attacks were few and far between. This wasn't helped by there being so many characters in the brig, because there is no crisis phase in a player's turn when their character is in the brig.

Even so, the game was quite close in the end. The shift in fortune needed to turn our victory into defeat wasn't at all great. That, and some tighter play on Andy's part could've made all the difference.

Score
Long-suffering humanity 1
Complacent Cylons 0
:-)

Settlers of Catan
With enough time on our hands for another game before heading off to dine at Nanakusa, one of Glasgow's newer Japanese restaurants, we rapidly settled on this hardy perennial (my hankering for another game of Nexus Ops notwithstanding). The game was the same tense confrontation it always is.

I had a resource base which enjoyed a good range of resources, but a poor spread of numbers: each of my 2 initial settlements' regions were on the same 3 numbers. I suffered from this exactly as I expected. On top of that, I repeated my recently all too common mistake of not getting my first city up until it was far, far too late. Andy got himself trapped with minimal space for expansion, but he was still able to put up a better show than did I (which just goes to underline the importance of that 1st city). The final score was:

• Andy: 8
• Donald: 8
• Gav: 10
• Me: 7

Recent games are marking out Gav as the man to beat at Settlers. He just seems to have a knack for resource management.

Score
All too human 2
Not quite human enough 1 each
Identification pending 0
:-/