13 Assassin #4

No idea how I ended up with this. It's from TSR (the company that originally published Dungeons & Dragons) during their short-lived foray into comics. Let me assure you, there were reasons why it was short-lived.

Title: 13 Assassin
Issue: 4
Publisher: TSR
Date: 1990
Writer: Mike W. Barr, Scott Haring
Penciller: Robb Phipps, Frank Springer
Inker: Alfredo Alcala, Steve Mitchell
Letterer: Pete Iro, Teresa R. Davidson
Colorist: In Color, Les Dorscheid

So at some point in the early 1990s, among a number of bad business decisions, game publisher TSR (the folks who brought us D&D) launched a line of comics. This particular issue ties in with their espionage roleplaying game, Agent 13. Now if you played any roleplaying games in the 1980s, you might be saying to yourself, "Wait a minute. I thought that TSR's espionage roleplaying game was called Top Secret". Did I mention that TSR was making bad business decisions around 1990?

So this is a comic based on a game that pretty much no one ever played, and it includes a card-game tie-in that you can cut out and play, which I doubt that anyone ever did.

Two stories here. First up is the conclusion to the ongoing main story. It was complicated. There were disembodied spirits and various henchpersons involved, but basically it came down to a villainess named China White and a magical emotion-manipulating crystal that she finally got her hands on and planned to cause mayhem with. This alien artifact could be used to project emotions. For instance, when a group of soldiers try to arrest her at one point, she points it at them and gets them to start fighting each other. Following so far?

So her plan is to put the thing at the top of the Sears Tower and use it to make the whole United States emo. More so than it already is.

To illustrate this, there is a scene that is so unintentionally hilarious that it may have actually been intentional satire. If that was the case, my kudos to writer Matt W. Barr. It goes like this: In order to show that the gem is causing chaos, the scene cuts away to Washington and the Senate Subcommittee on the Environment, where the Senators are ripping up and burning the important paperwork they had been working on, making paper airplanes, and demanding booze and loose women.

Get it? Clearly the crystal has absolutely no effect at all on members of our government! Well, thank goodness for that, because the good guys weren't being to successful at stopping China White up to this point.

Eventually, 13 (the hero; I hadn't mentioned him so far because he's not very interesting) does indeed save the day, and it can be assumed that the Senate can go back to their normal business of making paper airplanes and demanding booze and loose women.

The backup story involves three people from different secret conspiracies all on the run together. Eventually they begin to suspect that this might all be one big conspiracy.

There were actually a lot more plot developments in both stories, including a few interesting moments and one pair of characters who were actually quite likable (a henchwoman who has fallen in love with one of the disembodied spirits), but so little in this was done effectively that the effort put into plot falls flat along with the rest of the book.

The game, by the way, is a card game of good and bad emotions that looked pretty simplistic, but had a fortune-telling vibe to it that was at least interesting in flavor.

TSR was heading toward serious financial problems when this was published. And this definitely was not helping them.

Rating: 3/10