Am I Dieselpunk?

In support of Wild Skies: Liberating Strife, Brandon and I have been recording a few podcast appearances. Most recently we were on The RPG Brewery. Since we’ve called Wild Skies a dieselpunk game, we also appear on the newest episode of The Dieselpunk Podcast. They asked a question they ask of all their guests; “When did you know you were dieselpunk?” My honest answer to the question is: “Only when you told me I was”.

To step back a little bit: while Brandon and I were developing Wild Skies we always said we wanted it to be dieselpunk. The game was always set the 1930s and took inspiration from the ’20s and ’40s as well. To us, it was about staying in the technological brackets of “after airplanes” and “before jets”. The “punk” comes in with the idea “all problems can be solved by adding a bigger engine”. With these ideas set, I don’t feel we had to work that hard to make our game dieselpunk. We looked to the political, cultural and technological elements of those decades for our inspiration and naturally remixed them as we saw fit.

John and Eric of the Dieselpunk Podcast use the definition “retro futurism of the 1920s through the 1950s” when they talk about what dieselpunk is to them. I first encountered that definition last fall when John interviewed Brandon about the release of Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. By that definition, some of my favorite pop culture is dieselpunk even though I never called it that before: The Rocketeer, Batman: The Animated Series, Dark City and Nausicaä Princess of the Valley of the Wind. If I push the definition a little more to include what was actually produced in the ’20s-’50s, virtually all of my favorites are dieselpunk: Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, noir films like A Touch of Evil and the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters. I’m dieselpunk. Who knew?

Being on the show was great. I listen to a bunch of podcasts, but that was only the second time I have been on one. Brandon and I know what we like about our Wild Skies setting and about role playing while our hosts know about trends in dieselpunk, but almost nothing about role playing games. There was a lot of room for us all to learn from each other.

One idea mentioned in passing on the show which I want to weigh in on is the question: is dieselpunk about the particular technology or about the aesthetics of a setting? For me it’s all about the aesthetics and the attitude of remix culture. It’s what I call the blender. It what you put in the blender comes from the dieselpunk era, what you get out of the blender is dieselpunk. As with steampunk and cyberpunk “genres” before it, so much more fits under the umbrella of the name than just the technology of the time in question.

I have an important point about this. The remix is needed because the pop culture of so much of the past was so one dimensional; that is, white male heroes. For me, remixing the past in a “punk” way allows women, people of color, homosexuals and anyone else who tended not to be in focus, or allowed to be heroic of escape from stereotypes to become the center of action on their own terms. Again, steampunk led the way and it’s one of the things I appreciate about it.

I think dieselpunk – at least what I want it to be – should do the same thing. As a creator I need to open up the playing field so anyone can have adventures in the textures of this period. We’ve tried to make the right steps with Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. We present women in our NPC crew and in leadership positions. Our supplements include gender non-conforming and gay characters as well. As we assemble Liberating Strife, I realize there is still room to grow as my own awareness of the importance of representation grows. As a person who can so easily see myself in the pop culture I love, I feel an extra pressure to present my remix in a way where other people can see themselves as well.

A Review: Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943

5 of 5 stars.

For a while one of my “grail books” has been David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau’s Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943. When I walked into a bookstore recently and spotted it on an endcap from across the room, I had to buy it. It is a reprint copy, but I am not a collector looking for first printings; I just want to look at the art.

I first encountered David Levinthal’s work as an art student. His work focuses on toys or models shot with dramatic light and in soft focus to create a kind of emotional verisimilitude. I once saw an exhibition of his Modern Romance series and I smile whenever I see his work on the covers of Sarah Vowell’s books. Garry Trudeau is well known as a cartoonist. I was interested to see what these two cooked up together about the Second World War.

The collaboration is described by Trudeau in the beginning of the book. He was trying to find the right historic photographs to illustrate a fictional story we wanted to tell about a Russian solder on the Eastern Front. Levinthal was working on a series of photos capturing the lifelike horrors of war without necessarily making realistic looking photos. They combined their efforts and rather than using real photos to illustrate a fictional story, they manufactured photos to illustrate the real history. There are real quotes and a few real photographs to round out the project. It becomes, as the title says, a graphic chronicle of the Eastern Front.

One thing that has stuck with me is Trudeau calling what they made a “paper movie”. It is such an odd phrase to read today when comics have triumphed as a medium and “graphic novels” can be of any genre and regularly make it onto bestsellers lists. I suppose in the mid-seventies when they were working on Hitler Moves East the concept of a “graphic novel” didn’t really exist. That was even before the “serious” comics revival of the mid eighties. Even though Trudeau went on to make comics himself, he couldn’t have called this project comics, it was a more serious work than than name implied.

As a long time comics reader and someone who loves “sequential art storytelling”, I think Hitler Moves East works. There are Trudeau’s words to tell you what happened at each stage of Operation Barbarossa and the selection of ephemera such as identification cards and propaganda posters lend their own authenticity. Then there are Levinthal’s washed out, or grainy, or almost over-exposed photographs of figures dashing through train yards, or hunkered in pill boxes, or laying cold and still in the snow. Much of the narrative impact is conveyed by the photos. The whole is surprisingly effective in giving the reader a hint of the ravages of war. It is a book one does not read so much as experience. That is what art does.

Just to be clear, though it has a similar name to another book about the Eastern Front, it does not share that book’s apologetics of the Wehrmacht.