Comic books have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, maybe six or seven years old, I spent countless hours digging through this giant box of random comics my grandmother bought for me at a yard sale. I distinctly remember it containing several issues of Chris Claremont’s classic Dark Phoenix Saga- literally my first exposure not only to X-MEN but also to some of the darker, richer themes that comics could explore. A few years on, I was reading Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN and Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and visiting this tiny little comic shop every Saturday after my bowling league to pick up the new books.

When I was 25 I got my first tattoo- a Rorschach inkblot that features prominently in WATCHMEN. And this past weekend I went to go see Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT, an absolute masterpiece of crime drama and undoubtedly the best comic book film ever made- it almost single-handedly reinvents what the term “superhero movie” can mean. As a lifelong comic book fan, I think it’s about damn time that Hollywood has finally realized that respectful, serious adaptations of comic book properties can make for great cinema- not just product placement opportunities and CGI demo reels.

But one medium that still hasn’t caught up with the virtually limitless potential for the complex characters, compelling narratives, and unfettered imagination present in the comics form is hobby gaming. Strangely enough, there are scant few games with comic book or superhero themes and the few that are out there are usually tragically flawed, completely dull, stupendously awful, or worst of all- collectible. It’s kind of surprising that even though both hobbies sort of came of age in the 1980s, back when your average retail outlet catering to the nerdy pursuits carried both games and comics, that there wasn’t more of a crossover between the mediums. Thinking back, there were a few roleplaying games (including a DC comics one) but very few board or card games with superhero themes or licenses outside of the terrible mass-market cash-in games. You know the kind, the ones where four players all get to be a different color of Batman—or where you try to perform an operation on The Incredible Hulk without making him buzz.

It just doesn’t make sense that superheroes and comic book milieus haven’t been fully exploited as source material for game themes. It would seem that special powers and abilities would provide designers with fertile ground for developing interesting mechanics and styles of gameplay; that story development and narrative would serve to inspire interesting types of character advancement beyond the usual pseudo-RPG concepts we see in any number of fantasy board games. Heroism, swashbuckling, adventuring, and other super heroic concepts are practically ingrained in adventure gaming in general but for some reason the buck stops somewhere short of the capes and cowls set.

And I don’t get it at all. Does fantasy gaming always have to be about elves and dwarves? Why not costumed crime fighters and science heroes? There are plenty of times where I’d rather be fighting a megalomaniac super villain instead of orcs. Again.

Some designers have tried to come up with comic book themed games, but almost always there’s something that just seems to waylay their efforts so we’ve wound up with a whole lot of HOWARD THE DUCK and no THE DARK KNIGHT. The most common pitfall that seems to send superhero games spiraling into the Phantom Zone is a lack of licensing- it sucks to play a comic book game about a bunch of nobody heroes made up solely for the game. It’s strange how it works out like that; no one complains when Steelewinde Hawkesbloode the Elf is just Legolas in dime-store drag or when “Weelings” or whatever stand in for Hobbits to avoid litigation.

The most high profile casualty of this phenomenon has to be Quest Machine’s otherwise not too bad HEROES INCORPORATED. It was a pretty fun game overall despite shoddy components and it was easy to get into and play. The mechanics were sound and the expansion added a lot of good stuff to the game. The problem? A bunch of surrogate characters that had obvious analogues to real comic book characters. Who the hell cares about scab characters like “Huntarr”, “Stampede”, and “Paragon”? The number one appeal of comic books- and therefore the comic book theme- is characters. And no-name surrogates strip the game of having any real connection to the audience. The supposedly extremely good and impossible to buy CAPES AND COWLS also suffers from this syndrome; it’s hard to get kids excited about “Baron Necro” and “Battery Man”. Licenses are just simply essential for superhero games- ‘nuff said. (Editor’s Note: Capes and Cowls is in fact nearly impossible to find and also incredibly entertaining. Diablo Azul rocks!)

There are quite a few licensed games out there though that will let you get your spandex jollies- if you’re willing to pay the price. The gigantic mega corporations have been awfully lenient in offering their licenses to the hawkers of collectible games such as Upper Deck and WizKids, makers of VERSUS and HEROCLIX respectively. Collectible card and miniature games seem to be the real hotbed of superhero hobby gaming going all the way back to OVERPOWER but the sad fact is that collectible gaming really kind of sucks. Sub-par game designs padded by a bunch of cool looking cards or miniatures is de rigueur for the format and unless you’re more interested in collecting ten different versions of Spider-Man so he can beat up on The Green Lantern than playing a well-designed game then there’s just not much here of interest and almost nothing to justify the long-term cost. Sadly, these games are also the only place so far where the DC Universe has been explored at all. The collectible superhero games have been popular over the years, likely because they appeal to the same market that made foil covers all the rage a few years back.

Fantasy Flight Games, in conjunction with Nexus, tried to head off the collectible miniatures games at the pass with MARVEL HEROES a couple of years ago- a fully featured board game from a great design team (the boys who did WAR OF THE RING) and a set of painted, nicely sculpted miniatures depicting The Fantastic Four, Marvel Knights, The Avengers, and The X-Men. It was fully licensed, had tons of great Marvel art and comics-inspired graphic design, and promised a lot of fun gameplay and adventure as players got to run around town solving crimes, busting super villains, and interfering with the best laid plans of rival super teams. Done deal, right? Well, the game has been discontinued and is “no longer supported.” It received wildly mixed reviews and even the best notices were filled with “ifs” and “buts”. I thought it was OK, but (see?) it was over-designed and more awkward than Ben Grimm test-driving a Hybrid. “Clobberin’ Time” never seemed to come and the game now languishes on my shelf, looking damn cool but never being played. Richard Borg’s two X-Men games from the early 1990s, X-MEN ALERT and X-MEN UNDER SIEGE, offer pretty similar gameplay sans a lot of the contrived mechanics.