The Global Frequency is an independent rescue/crisis response team of one thousand and one members. Each are selected for missions based on their individuals skillsets, locations and backgrounds. So let's say a government created, cybernetically enhanced monster is set loose on L.A. Aleph, the main operator/co-ordinator for the global frequency dials up GF agents in L.A. and co-ordinates with them to neutralize the threat. These aren't just ex-military personnel. There are scientists, technicians, athletes (one episode focused on indian girl in london who was a Le Parkour adept... ahem... expert), occultists, hackers, assassins, cops, pilots, anthropologists and more. And based on who is in L.A. in that moment, they are tasked and co-ordinated to stop the cyber-monster. Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?

It's a graphic novel I read, and when it was recommended to me, a friend said, "you'll like it, it's very Shadowrun". And while it is not shadowrun, it bears some similarities. The combination of unorthodox operatives is one. One technician was an inventor of "less-than-lethal" technology, who quit when his technology was used in riots by police and people were killed. There was a depressed ex-commando with a powerful cyber-arm. A alexander Crowley wanna-be, a Le Parkour adept (who had get across london, across the thames and to the top of the London Eye to diffuse a chemical weapon.

The best one was an interesting dilemma. Where a techno cult of about a hundred people, believing that the internet is their god take one floor of a skyscraper hostage, wire the floor with explosives, and then they all take a slow acting poison, and the bombs go off when the biomonitors attatched to the "supreme leader" fail to pickup a heartbeat. They make some very silly demands of the government and wait it out. Unfortunately for everyone, they only broadcast this through their website, which no one other than the members read. Global Frequency finds out though, so two operatives are called. One is an aboriginal street cop, the other is a female british assassin. They have to get onto a certain floor of a building carrying a whole lot of guns, and get past a hundred fanatics who are, according to schrodinger, already dead for all intents and purposes, whose leader is wired to a bomb that no-one knows about. It's a very fun comic to read.



The point of this thread is to suggest to other Dumpshockers graphic novels that make good shadowrun inspiration. So go to it. I often get graphic novels from local libraries, as it becomes more common for them to stock decent collections. I have one more suggestion for now:

Transmetropolitan. So funny, and an amazingly colourful and disturbing impression of a futuristic sprawl. It's somewhere inbetween shadowrun and the fifth element.

.

If you can get your hands on it, it's hilarious, amazingly clever, and you'll be amazed by such things as the bowel disruptor. It also gives a great idea of what the Shadowrun media would be like, access-wise.

Transmet is written by Warren Ellis, a funny and intelligent british champion of graphic novels.



Well that's enough for now. Anyone else read any graphic novels?

heh, depends on play-stile . . one could argue about the crow comics and the warhammer 40k comics . . excuse me, GRAPHIC NOVELS . . i'd probably throw in Deadpool just for Kicks and mybe the Wolverine Comic-Series . . There's a Graphic Novel in the post Tron2.0 Setting one could throw in too . .

When I saw this thread I was going to add "Transmetropolitan but you already done so. I have all 10 volumes, there is almost nothing in that comic you couldn't borrow and add to shadow run. what we really need is Shadowrun stats for Spider, his Filthy assistances ,Vance, hell lets throw in the Cat too as well as some of the tech as well.

Thinking about the whole bunraku thread, the Slavers trade from the Punisher MAX series is pretty disturbing.

seriously? Marvel comics. pretty much the whole line, right now, at least those in the 616 universe. Civil War/Initiative is seriously some of the best dystopic popular fiction on the market today.

Global Freq was good--really good. another really good one that might not immediately come to mind is Army@Love. it's a very fast, left-field look at near-future war, technology, and pop culture.

Hellboy is a good one; the folklore it presents and distorts is good shit.

Silent Dragon

Neuromancer

I mainly liked Hellboy for the art style and appropriation of imagery and folklore. Which is funny, because a lot of my fellow graphic novel readers (like this chick Hryssa, a big tank girl/Sand-man fan) really couldn't engage because of it.

Speaking of Warren Ellis again, I found This wierd thing. He refused to call it cyber-punk, preferring "decadent sci-fi". Very short and wierd.

He also did one called Ocean, where a United Nations weapons inspector goes to a space station orbiting the Europa Moon (the one that's an ocean in a frozen shell) and ends up in conflict with the mega-corporation Doors (yes, a hilarious microsoft reference), where all the workers have downloaded worker personalities, and have had their real names and personalities data-locked from their consciousness as stipulated in their contracts. An amazing inspiration for uses of P-fix technology. For example, when the corporation wants soldiers, it hands an employee a gun and loads the "corp soldier" p-fix and activesofts and there you have it. A paper-pusher turned commando. And if he survives, then he can easily go back to his desk!

oh, speaking of Wildstorm--Point Blank and Sleeper. fantastic noiresque crime/espionage. then there's 100 Bullets and Criminal. shit, just google Ed Brubaker and buy anything he's ever written. Brubaker is man who is not afraid to destroy his characters.

Death Note: What happens when a teenager decides to start murdering convicted murderers using ritual magic.
Blame!: Probably what would have happened if Deus won.
Wanted: Super powered criminals
Black Magic
Ghost in the Shell
Gunnm
Blue Sonnet
Petshop of Horrors

Not being afraid to destroy himself puts things in perspective.

Seriously. He wrote a semi-autobiographical graphic novel. Not one of these collections, trades, premiere, absolute, omnibus, etc. It was an honest-to-god graphic novel called A Complete Lowlife which would be a nice intro for how a somewhat normal person can slide eventually down towards SINless and possibly shadowrunner status (or just die).

People talk about "street level". His work is the epitome of street level. From the non-superhero focus in Gotham Central to some truly heinous things he wrote in Catwoman, and the sheer amount of Hell he's put the title characters through in his DC and Marvel books. This guy was the man who killed Steve Rogers after basically pyschologically torturing him for the first twenty-four issues in his run on Captain America. He put Daredevil in prison, and then got Punisher in prison. That was great. He saw a cop nearby, saw a pimp, and killed the pimp in front of the cop.

I've read almost everything he's written from the last ten years. It's one of the few runs of Authority that I could bear to read. Sleeper/Point Blank, Criminal, everything. It's nothing but inspiration. He got Charlie Huston on Moon Knight and Duane Swierczyski on Cable (Cable. This is the man who wrote Wheelman, which is as far from superheros as you can imagine while being in the pulp crime genre).

But just to distinguish, I can't stand graphic novels. Most of them are self-indulgent tripe written by people who think they're the next R. Crumb or Harvey Pekar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Brubaker

Cairo: five strangers - a drug runner, a journalist, an American ex-pat, a troubled student, and an Israeli soldier - find themselves on a quest to recover a powerful stolen hookah. Written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by M.K. Perker.

The Losers. Stop whatever you're doing and go read it.

It's been said, I've said it myself and I want to prepend this with a flat statement that I find most manga boorish and insipid.

Ghost in the Shell, anyway you can get your hands on it. If it isn't magical, GitS probably talked about it. There are so many great hooks for runs, NPC's, SOTA gear, and so forth. If you can get your hands on the original manga I recommend that you get the one that has the authors notes in it. The sidebars he has with himself and the reader are pretty damn insightful especially since things can get pretty complex graphically.

Planetes, great little hard sci-fi space story. It's a near perfect realization of a future where something we think is totally awesome (going to space) is something everyday and mundane (being a trash collector in space). Word of Warning: The animated series is craptastic. This delicate interesting interplay between characters gets smashed by all sorts of crap writing. They also introduced characters who's sole purpose is to provide comic relief, something unforgivable in my mind.

And Transmet has made more than a few appearances in my games. Baby Seal Eyes anyone? They're delcious and healthy!

For magical inspiration I turn to Hellblazer. The writing and art varies through the series as the people who worked on it changed, but as a whole it had some great crunchy bits. It's certainly my inspiration for "Everyday Magic In a Modern World." The magic in Hellblazer is subtle, obscure, and utterly unforgiving. There's a great scene where Constantine has been forced out of his body and is being chased by some horrible beasties that feast on his essence. He has to stay alive long enough to figure out a way to get back into his own skin. There is also great inspiration for off brand geas, variations on ritual spell casting, alternative traditions, and paracritters (flying vampire children trapped on an island full of toxic spirits anyone?) If your groups magic user isn't terrified of magic (as mine isn't) this is great source material to remind them that magic is weird, doesn't care what you want, and will utterly destroy you in a heartbeat. It's also a great way to demonstrate that magic can be mind blowingly powerful without ever having to throw a fireball or equivalent.

For less technical, but with a little hint of strange powers with one of the villains: Weiss Kreuz.

-Secret orginization under the Japanese Police Force
-Team of guys, each with combat skills AND other skills which compliment them and each other, and their own personalities, who are all assassins on top of it(ok, wetwork specialized groups to exist)
-Assassins with cover job(Flower Shop), with the Fake ID so to speak
-They have Code Names
-They have a kind of permanent ''Johnson'' they work for that gives them missions
-Secretaries and other 'contacts' that give them info
-Going against major bigwig rich crime guy
-Enemies, four of which are pretty much Adepts/have 'magic' ability in some way(one guy can even see a few seconds into the future, one guy is telekinetic, one dude obviously has Pain Tolerance 10, Increased Strength and alot of Body, one guy must have a big score in Improved Reflexes and Jumping)
-Crazed scientist at one point doing biomutation stuff

It's got alot of stuff in it that reminds me of Shadowrun for some reason; even though it doesn't have any cyberware so to speak.

Dude! I used to read the original series when I was a kid. I never had a clue they made a new series. Thanks!

Eden. Cyborgs, criminals, world-spanning deadly illness, dystopia.

Appleseed by Shirow.

Came here to post this. It ain't got no cyborgs or magic but I don't know of anything that comes closer to a Shadowrunner's daily work.

I got that vibe off the Losers but I could never pin down a copy of the first TPB so I keep forgetting to buy it.

Not graphic novels but I've been reading old time pulp stories and they're wonderful run fodder. I guess it's just written into cyberpunks genetic heritage.

Also I'm surprised no one has brought up Sin City for that very reason.

And Martin? What plot arc of Authority was he in charge of?

Just posting for a related bitch. Just got my hand on the second volume of Global Frequency, and some fucker has cut the last pages out of at least two of the stories. Who the fuck does that to a library copy graphic novel? Do you need to deprive unknown future readers from an ending from your anonymous position, or did you just need to have the end of a narrative on your wall? What the fuck?

On the upshot I've got the second volume of Y: The Last Man. My god that is such a crazy and fascinating premise. In case you've never heard of it. In a single moment, every single male mammal on earth spontaneously dies in a plume of blood. Except for Yorik, an amateur escape artist and a pitiful example of the last male of the species. The comic consists of him getting angry and picking fights with girls who either want to capture and sell him, use him as a surrogate for their dead men or kill him to rid the world of the final patriarchal figure. But it's an amazing portrayal of a society without men. So I'm not so angry.

DMZ. I was reading it during my brainstorming for NYC 2070 and it definitely fits with how I imagine New York in the period of time between the Quake and Reconstruction.

Scalped for the NAN

Ah yes, DMZ is one of my favorites. There's some new "Reporter In Peril" (cant' recall the actual name at the moment) tpb out. I was pretty excited until I flipped through it and realized that it depicted American military members as blood crazed faceless (they all have crazy Ghost Recon masks) maniacs who take pleasure in shooting civilians with robots and executing elderly women in exactly the same fashion as that famous Vietnam picture. I'll be the first to admit that American service members have done awful and illegal things in Iraq (And around the world). I'm of the pretty common group of people who believe they should be put to death, possibly by being eaten by wild dogs. I know it's a comic but jesus, an Lt. Colonel (O-5) personally putting down an elderly person... AROUND CAMERAS? Not only is he an evil bastard but he's a goddamn idiot on top of that (if only those two things actually went hand in hand).

Maybe the overall portrayal is more fair. I'm more than happy to embrace something other than "American Service Members Always Save Babies and Shit Healthy And Nutritious Apple Pie" but good god, do we have to loop around to the other side?

That's one of the reasons I liked DMZ (at least the first TPB, haven't been able to get the 2nd) there were some real assholes in uniforms tooling around out there but there were a few humans too. I particularly liked the urban super sniper that decided to go native and hang out in his impenetrable fortress of DOOoooom, with no bullets.


Y: was one of my favorite comics for a good long while. The problem is that I got too invested in the story and became unconvinced that it would have a satisfying conclusion. I call it "The Lost Effect". I'd rather not follow a series than follow it and find out that The Big Pay Off totally blows and the writer was just stringing us along.

Let's try some European stuff:

Nathan Never(monthly ongoing) - Noir detective stories in a cyberpunk future (infamous for ripping stories from movies and novels)

Live War Heroes (stand alone) - Mix a renegade company man, an anti-corp extremist, a merc based reality show, corporate machinations and media manipulation, and you get a brilliant little gem.

Reality Show - Think Lone Star running a reality show with its star detectives. Set in a cyberpunk Barcelona. First story arc features an inhuman serial killer with a twist, the second combines alleged Islamic terrorists with media manipulation.

Carmen McCullum (alternative link, Delcourt seems to be offline for some reason) - NewIRA terrorists turned merc gets involved with cyberpunk megacorps, AIs, transhumans, and the Yakuza amongst other things. Has since spun off into a second series portraying the character's early years.

Travis- Set in the same universe as Carmen McCullum (there have been a couple of crossovers), the stories of a shuttlejockey/undercover Interpol agent (Travis), a hardcore shadow operative/street sam (Vlad), and a hacker extraordinaire (PacMan). The villian in the first story arc is brilliant, the second arc is more down to earth, and the third kicks off with some serious action. Also had a spin-off series following PacMan's hacker clique Karmatronics. Suggestion: get the boxed set with the first arc.

Well, I can't go without inserting a shamless plug for my own Shadowrun webcomic : Another Runner in the Night

I hope I'll be able to resume my work on it soon.

Never read the manga,its out of print as far as I know. But I love the anime,well worth checking out regardless of what Doc says.

I will say that I only watched the first couple episodes so it probably got better. I was just so turned off by the first couple of episodes (probably because it was so different from the manga) that I couldn't get into it. Mostly I didn't like how they changed the characters and I absolutely hated the generic comic relief boss characters. Honestly if those two fell out an airlock I probably would watch the show again.

How many seasons have they done?

Keith Giffen is going to be writing the arc that streamlines and reorganized magic and Hell in the DCU. Since I have lost track, I am not entirely sure how this will affect Constantine or the Vertigo Hell, but my guess is that it will.

Keith Giffen Talks 'Reign in Hell' - Newsarama



Volume 3. While they have taken over the United States.

Also, to be perfectly honest I think Criminal is better than Sin City. Mainly because Criminal is realistic. "If a person jumped off a building in Criminal, they would die." - Bru

With Brubaker's work, the plots are generally about as complex as what Shadowrun campaigns should be like. I'd almost swear he at least knows of the game. Maybe Cain can track him down in Seattle and ask. I'll have to check my podcasts and see what his regular comic shop is.

Hey, just 'cause your life isn't like Sin City...

How do I put this?


You were wrong.


Thankfully.

Elephant Men

It's about a megacorporation that uses it's private army of genetically engineered soldiers to make a play on Africa and Europe. But the part that reminds me of Shadowrun is that the artwork reminds me of Bladerunner. Not the anthropomorphic rhinoceroses (they're cool, though), but the background cityscape. Groovy stuff. I want it to do stuff to me.

Second, Elephantmen and it's precursor Hip Flask. Very Bladerunner/European-style cyberpunk art. I've been digging through a lot of Heavy Metal magazines from the late 80s and early 90s and they have lots of Shadowrunner/cyberpunk style stories. Teddy Bear is one the best off-hand but there are many others.

I would recommend Punisher Volumes 1-3 (not to be confused with Punisher "Max"). These collect the "Ma Ganucci" story arcs, and showcase Frank Castle at his scum slaughtering best. Especially good is volume two, where he travels to Gran Mercy Island, a place in the Pacific Ocean inhabited by mercs and general lowlifes, and nukes the whole damn place, literally. They're also quite funny, but it's a very dark, gallows type humor. The downside: all three seem to be difficult to find...I tried a while back and came up with nothing. For some reason, Marvel seems unwilling or unable to reprint them. Two more under appreciated gems from the comics world: "Quantum & Woody: The World's Worst Superhero Team", and "Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja".

...David Mac's Kabuki

Cool blend of Tradition, tech, and manipulation.

Particularly Circle of Blood and Masks of the Noh

...Little Sister is Watching you...


...Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

Offbeat alternate near future view, Corps, Guns, talking cats with cybergloves, televised firefights, hot babes, neat sound effects...

That would be Lazarus Churchyard. Originally printed in a British weekly comic called 2000AD, there were seven or eight stories done IIRC and I believe there's a trade paperback of them floating about now.


Seconded - during the first job where they chopper-jacked the military guys as a means towards their main target first thing that jumps into my head is shadowrun. That and I just loved Jensen.

It's been optioned to be made into a film and is in pre-production so I await to see whether it actually gets made and how badly they butcher it.


Damn, beaten to another one. It's also good for any kind of freelance journalist in an urban hellhole storyline. I've got no idea if that's the direction they're going to take but I see the DMZ as a lot like the Feral Cities locations would/will be or places like civil war Poland or the Balkans.


A series that I'd highly recommend is the recently finished Queen & Country. It's about Tara Chace who is one of three Minders, agents that handle high priority and direct action missions, for the British Secret Intelligence Service (often mistakenly referred to as MI6). It's not so much James Bond as John le Carré since it's written in as realistic a way possible (considering the story lines) as possible. Actions have consequences, people are fallible and weak at times, plus all the inter-office squabbles both internally and with other parts of the government and wrangling with foreign agencies. I'm seriously not doing it anywhere near the justice it deserves, go out and buy it.

Short of a game based on 'real world' intelligence themes and methods set in the 2060s that I doubt anyone apart from myself and a few other people would probably enjoy this is probably the best way to run a Shadowrun spy game. Back when State of the Art: 2064 with its espionage related chapters this is what I immediately thought of.

Edit: And it seems you can now download the first issue absolutely free from here.

Checkmate, also by Greg Rucka (who did Gotham Central with Ed Brubaker. See these things all glom around the same handful of people. Bru, who does Immortal Iron Fist with Matt Fraction, whose Punisher War Journal has some James Bondesque espionage moments and more to come and also writes Casanova which is a great spy book itself, but who also worked with Howard Chaykin on the Iron Fist Annual and this month's one-shot, who did America Flagg... AND SO ON.) is great for the kind of superhuman espionage games Shadowrun avails itself of, although the rumor mill is that it's being cancelled.

I've run realistic espionage, but it's really hard since it means doing the opposite of the James Bond nonsense and like 90% of what's in State of the Art, and also a great deal of the more splashy stuff even in these books. Sleeper is great, and the post-human stuff missions are swell and all, but what makes it are the interactions between Holden and Tao and Holden and Lynch, and Holden and Grifter in Point Blank. There was a deleted scene in Syriana that sums it up perfectly: Spy work isn't about training seminars and gold stars for attendances. It's about two people sitting in a room and one of them is asking the other for a favor that's a capital crime in every country in the world. A hanging crime.

In three decades of gaming, I've only known a handful of players/GMs who could pull it off.

To digress for a bit, State of the Art is understandable, but not particularly useful. Clearly Jon Szeto has a background in the military, and clearly he has a background in the more "technical" side of the work. But he reminds me of these guys in the 80s and 90s who thought that because human intelligence is hard, but yet the U.S. can launch a fleet of satellites to ensure Global Battlespace Dominance that spies aren't necessary because satellites can do all our work for us. And we all know how that turned out.

I tried to read one of the newest, if not the newest, Q&C novel where there's a disclaimer or warning that, yes, the Uzbek government does indeed boil people alive. I guess I've only been able to digest some of this stuff in small bits anymore, or something else, because while the tradecraft seemed pretty spot on to shadow an old British woman, I couldn't get into the book. It's like... "Sure. But a lot of the craft stuff also seems authentic in the Rogue Warrior novels, but they still suck." As far as novels go, Richard Clarke's second, Breakpoint, is practically set in SR's 2070 tech level (but is actually set in 2012) sans simsense.

Superhero/Superhuman espionage is a fantastically amusing genre that comics have covered well, especially in the last decade because of the same group of authors over and over again. The entire premise behind most of Marvel's crossover events have been based around covert manipulations and bureaucratic conflicts. But you can't even pick up a single issue of Captain America or Iron Man (or the Invincible Iron Man series Fraction will begin writing in May) witout being punched in the face with the fact that it's clearly an exciting field. Read the Winter Soldier arc of Captain America. The second issue has Cap and Nick Fury and SHIELD assault (one of) a multinational corporation's headquarters to arrest former Soviet/Russian Gen. Aleksander Lukin (who now runs one of the most powerful corps on the planet) for blowing up part of downtown Philadelphia only to be forced to apologize to the man and turn tail and leave because the Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States and an Undersecretary-General of the UN ordered them to respectively after the good guys had the temerity to interrupt their meeting with Lukin. Meanwhile, in Iron Man Mandarin has so thoroughly mind-screwed and manipulated the Secretary of Defense (a position, btw, once held by Red Skull in secret and Tony Stark openly) that he's gotten people in SHIELD and the UN and even the President to doubt Stark's ability to lead SHIELD because he's either crazy because of Extremis, fell off the wagon, suffering from PTSD or a combination of all that and more (one and three seem to actually be happening to him, though not to a debilitating degree).

I just got Cairo a couple weeks ago, and it was really good and also very Shadowrunny. One that I recommend is Desolation Jones, also by Warren Ellis. It's about a former MI6 agent who burned out after undergoing a super-soldier treatment and got shipped off to LA, where he makes a living as a PI amid a seedy underworld of the refuse from worldwide intelligence agencies. Seems like anything Ellis does is gold for Shadowrun.

Well there is an exception in that his novel is godawful.

But even so, it was Shadowrunny.

Warren Ellis has started a cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk online comic called FreakAngels which can be found here: www.freakangels.com. He also did a short, online comic about an idoru meme taking over the world. Illustrated by Collen Doran. The name and the website are escaping me... When I figure it out I'll post a link. I don't personally care for them but Ellis' Doktor Sleepless and Angel Stomp Future might be of interest to some of you.

Frank Miller's Robocop published by Avatar and based on his original manuscript is a must-read for Shadowrun players. Juan Jose Ryp artwork. Pretty!