Remembering KC Ryan

My friendship with KC Ryan began back in 1989, through a rather interesting turn of events.

At the time, I had been living in Raleigh, NC, for about a year or so. I was fresh out of college, working my first job at IBM. I was in a new city and state, meeting lots of new people at the apartment complex where I lived, etc. One thing I was missing though from my college days was having a regular role-playing game outlet. I was still actively developing characters and such for my Champions game world and wanted to share ideas with others. I was a regular subscriber to the Comic Buyers' Guide weekly trade paper and decided to use my free advertisement (given upon subscription renewal) to see if any of the readership wanted to swap gaming ideas. A letter came some time later (back then we didn't have email or the Internet) from Rexx Joyner who gave me the contact information for Tim Watts, the original Central Mailer of the Clobberin' Times APA. I contacted Tim, sent some money to join the roster and soon received my first issue of the APA - issue #5.

It was through the pages of the Clobberin' Times that I first got to know a number of folks who are still close friends today. Many of them knew each other from playing in campaigns over the years that were game-mastered by KC Ryan. It was through his 'zine "Captain KC's Corner" that I got to know more about this person. In those early issues, he would run a number of short articles that worked as springboard ideas for GMs running games. Some were one shot ideas, others were for longer running subplots. Together they all were just the sort of thing this Champions player was looking for. Also from those early issues, I would find that KC had a rich game-world of his own, a little bit mixing some DC and Marvel but focusing a lot more on original creations - both his own and those of his players. I would learn about the Forte campaign, a broad-sweeping game with amazing heroes, interesting villains and an incredible amount of detail that incorporated real-world facts into the mix. This last aspect was something that the players all really enjoyed about KC's games. If KC read about something interesting in a magazine, be it Scientific American or National Geographic or anything else, he would save off the article for potential use in the future for his games.

Let me digress a second. On Monday of this week (8/16) I was driving home from work, listening to Jay Thomas' afternoon show on XM. You might remember Jay from his stints on such TV shows as Mork & Mindy, Cheers, Murphy Brown and Love and War. Jay had this ongoing thing called "Holiday Road" this summer - segments about interesting places to visit on vacation. The segment that day was about Opus 40, a place in Saugerties, NY, that was man-made, hand-built artistic locale done from old quarry stones (http://opus40.org). The funny thing was I actually spent part of 1986/1987 in Kingston, NY (a hop-skip from Saugerties - I was even dating a girl that lived in Saugerties for a time). When I got home on Monday I actually thought to myself "hmmm, that's the kind of place KC would have gotten details about and worked into one of his games". It must have been some kind of cosmic-fate-thing that would put that thought in my head on that particular day; the next morning I would get an email from Mike telling me that KC passed away in his sleep on the 16th. Maybe it was KC's spirit that put the thought in my head. Hard to say. I like to think that was the case though. It would be just like KC to remind me of something he'd do like that.

Back to the early days of the Times, I would correspond to KC both inside the APA via mailing comments back and forth as well as occasionally through direct letters (waiting two months to see responses to mailing comments could make for some long drawn-out discussions). What I found is that he and I had a number of things in common. He spent some time living in Western NY which is where I grew up and went to college. He had a great love for the silver age and bronze age of comics, including DC classics like Superman, the Flash and Captain Marvel (I've always been more a DC guy than a Marvel guy yet I've come to appreciate much of both companies through back issues, reprints and such). Like myself, he was a writer first and foremost - though his artistic skills were always better than my own. He had his own unique style, almost caricature-like in some aspects, that made his art unique. I would always love getting a big manilla envelope in the mail from him because that usually meant that he tried his hand at interpretting some characters from my 'zine. I still have every piece of art he ever did for me and will cherish it always. Of the group, he and I were the closer in age too - a few years older than most of the rest of the roster of the Times. That sort of gave he and I a different view occasionally for things (or at the very least he and I might come up with a more dated reference that the others might not readily get - us having been kids for most of the 60's). We were sort of the Times' "old men" (wink).

It was the mid-90's when I first met KC in person. He wasn't the first Times member I met though - that title goes to Joel whom I hung out with for an afternoon while in San Diego in early 1991 (Aaron and Ben weren't around the apartment on the day I visited). KC was going to be in North Carolina for some family event (it might have been a wedding or something). He flew into RDU airport and decided to stay overnight so he and I could get-together over a meal. It was wonderful to finally meet him in person. His love of comics, gaming and storytelling made it really easy for us to get along.

My wife and son reminded me of something I had totally forgotten tonight (8/19). When my son was just a toddler (around 1996 or 1997), KC had sent him a package with a couple gifts in it. One thing was some T-shirt or something (none of us could recall for sure). The other thing that was included we all remember very clearly: a Winnie the Pooh backpack. It was my son's very first backpack, made a fabric material and was about the size of an average notebook. As a little kid, he took that backpack everywhere. Seriously! He'd fill it up with Matchbox cars or Pokemon plastic figures or whatever he was into at the time. He would use it to carry stuff around the house. That backpack brought a lot of joy to my son. For a child with a brachial plexus injury and only decent usage of one arm, it allowed my son the capability of moving a lot of things from one place to another in a single trip. That helped Drew to be independent. In fact, I still believe we have it downstairs (surviving two moves in the past decade or so) in one of the plastic totes full of "treasures" - things my son wanted to preserve as keepsakes. I know how much KC loved kids. He had a lot of nieces and nephews and often told us about taking them here and there or teaching them about classic cartoons and comics. I really think he would have made a great father - he had such a big heart and could so easily relate to younger folks on their level. I also think he knew how much a gift like that backpack might be helpful to my son.

Besides the APA, letters and an occasional phone call, KC and I wouldn't get to see each other again until the summer of 1999 when the guys all convinced me that I needed to come out to San Diego for the Comic-Con. That year was the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Times and we were going to have a big celebration with whoever could make it out. Trying to recall now - I am pretty sure KC and I even decided to room together at the hotel next door to Kansas City BBQ (if we didn't share the same room, I know he stayed in the same hotel as did Jeff). This was my first time to Comic-Con so I was a newbie to it all. All of guys all made me feel right at home! It was like we'd all been friends forever. I remember KC ran the "Clobberin' on Infinite Earths" game that year - I got to play Galeforce, my player-character from Sean Fannon's UNISO campaign for which I was currently involved in. The game was a blast (we always had fun during those Con games - be they at the hotel next to the convention center or at Mike and Aaron's apartment). Another thing I remember about that Con was that KC got this twelve-inch the Thing action figure (complete with removable trenchcoat and hat). He got it because Mr. Grimm was, of course, the official mascot of the Clobberin' Times. I remember how proud he was having managed to locate one.

I always looked forward to getting the Times every two months. And I always knew I could count on KC's zine to deliver a lot of enjoyment. His fiction of the Four Aces was always a favorite of mine. I was so excited when he brought them back recently in the Online APA. I also enjoyed the exploits of Hornet, his DNPC hero in his Forte world. I especially enjoyed when she would have run-ins with Summer Silversmith, a villainess I always wanted to see a full write up for and someone I could easily see having a doppleganger in the World of Maenza gameworld. And, of course, can any of us forget the "Enemies From Sheboygan", that tongue-in-cheek send up of Enemies supplements that KC and Brian Curley put together? Not me - that one was such a hoot.

I got to see KC again in 2001 when I once more came out for the Con. This time I was even convinced to run the big game. I was a little nervous to GM the "Clobberin' On Infinite Earths" game, especially since I always saw myself as the outsider of the group. Here most of these guys had gamed together for years - with KC running the Forte campaign and many of them playing in it. It was both KC and Mike, though, who helped ease those nerves - they both had faith in my story-telling abilities and the strength of my campaign world. It turned out to be a really fun night all in all with the gang making a lasting impression in my world history. Another big part of that trip was our celebration of KC's upcoming wedding. We guys took him out for a bachelor party night in the Gaslamp (first dinner at Dick's Last Resort, then some bar hopping that ended at an Irish pub - fitting given KC's own Irish heritage). We all knew KC wasn't a big drinker so we purposely kept it relatively low key. It was about good friends celebrating an upcoming event with a person who was so key in bringing so many of us together in the first place.

As the early 2000's, the sections of the Times were getting a little bit smaller than they had been during the early years of publication. But KC was there issue after issue, especially contributing stories and artwork to the two shared-world projects: the ConTinuum and the Omniverse. It was in the supplements of the former that one of his long standing characters Americana debuted (more on her in a bit). Now, where the ConTinuum project was limited to six writers who attended the Comic-Con one year, the Omniverse was open ended to all members. It was in that later supplement that I was able to do a writing collaboration with KC. It was the tenth issue of my Lodestone stories. I had the idea to bring my heroine up to St. Jude, KC's fictional Omniverse stomping grounds, to look at a college. Of course, I had to do a story involving some kind of big adventure just so I could team her up with KC's own Silver Sentinel. It was sort of the youngest hero of the Omniverse teaming up with one of the oldest (all age speaking). Now, luckily technology was advanced enough so we could exchange emails about the story, where I could share passages and even allow KC to help me tweak the dialogue that his creations would speak in the tale. It was a fun tale to do and I enjoyed our working together immensely. Our hope was for KC to return the favor - to do a tale of his heroes teaming up with my own Magnet and Steel - there was even a footnote in my tale teasing that upcoming story. Alas, KC never got around to doing it as the paper Times folded shortly thereafter, putting all of our stuff on hiatus for a few years. I would have loved to see how he would have handled my heroes. I am confident he would have done them justice.

When the paper version of the Times came to an end about six years or so ago, it seemed like the end of an era. The gang had started to go their seperate ways. Technology made doing a bimonthly paper APA distributed through snail-mail as a bit archaic. I believe it was Mike and KC who actually had been talking about perhaps doing something online. I had already been playing around with putting my Lodestone stories together online with an Omniverse website before the paper APA folded. Going completely online with the Times seemed a natural way to go. Thus, we stepped into the 21st Century and gave ourselves even more reasons to sit at our keyboards and stare at our monitors for more hours in the day.

Going online allowed KC to continue the exploits of Americana, the African-American woman would would serve as a beacon of justice as one of the few heroes in the ConTinuum world. KC really seemed to connect to this character a lot. For someone to write nearly one hundred and fifty stories starring the same heroine, you know he had to love doing so. I can't name many comic book professionals who can even make that kind of claim. Like his campaigns, KC infused factual information into Americana's stories. Not only did I find myself being entertained by them but I even learned things too. And the stories were fun. They had a silver age feel to them. Clearly everything KC loved about comic books was mirror in the types of stories he wrote. We all could feel that. And then there are the art galleries - hundreds of pieces of art KC scanned in (some he did himself, many he commissioned other artists to do). All of these pictures celebrated and supported the stories he wrote. That's some dedication that any of us love to be able to devote to the hobby we love. I know I would.

But KC and I weren't limited to our communications online to just the Times every other month. KC often would read and comment on my blog. A lot of times it was about the comics I had been reading and reviewing. In some instances, I think I may have tuned him in to a couple issues or titles that he might not have gotten otherwise. At other times, we'd debate about the direction of modern day comics and how things seem to have gotten more darker, more complicated and less interesting to us old-time readers. I always welcomed his comments - even when we would decide we would have to agree to disagree. We had a friendship like that which was built upon mutual respect for one another's opinions.

I am going to truly miss KC. Though we didn't see each other very often or speak directly over the phone, we reached one another through our words on the written page and cyberspace. I will miss the grand adventures he would tell, in a style that was very uniquely KC. All I can think of, with a smile, is that he's up in Heaven with many of the great comic book creators he loved over the years and who too have passed - and together they are spinning the greatest of adventures.

- Martin Maenza (8/20/10)