Meet Jason Tondro

The first comic book I remember owning was Marvel Team-Up #22, in which Spider-Man and Hawkeye teamed up against Quasimodo. That was 1974. I was six. It cost a quarter. That story was written by Len Wein, who died this September at the age of 69.

I’m interested in superheroes, first in comics but then in other media. I run a podcast devoted to the Marvel shows on Netflix (it’s called Hallway Fights) and I’ve taught classes on the superhero. I teach courses on comics and graphic novels more generally, film, and British Literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, basically the Dead White Guys). Sometimes I write about these things in combination.

I’ve been a gamer long enough that I bought a Players Handbook when it arrived in Gamekeeper for the very first time. I’ve written for many roleplaying games over the years, from out-of-print stuff for Champions and Middle Earth Role Playing to D&D 5e and Icons. I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing superhero and supervillain archetypes, not by powers but by story role: it matters much less to me than Magneto is a Master of Magnetism than that he is a Holocaust survivor and racial supremacist. My current big RPG effort is Arthur Lives!, an urban fantasy Fate game successfully funded by Kickstarter.

I’ve occasionally binged on video games, especially MMOs based on books I already love, and I’ve written about them elsewhere. But I’m trying to put that behind me because, Christ almighty, video games.

I’m here to talk superheroes, film, roleplaying games, and Dead White Guys. Maybe all at once.