TekWar cards reviewed (Patreon)

As mentioned in Episode 61, listener and Patreon supporter Christian sent me a complete set of TekWorld cards. Here are my ten favorite cards from the first fifty in the set.

Here we have Jake Cardigan, who resembles William Shatner as drawn by Rob Liefeld's loser brother Bart Liefeld. Jake is ambiguously described with a RollerGator-y coyness as "almost fifty." Kudos to card writer (and back-half of Shatlart) Ron Goulart for using two adjectives that start with "hard" to describe our hero. A later card describes a character as "hardnosed" leaving us to draw the conclusion that all the men in the Tekverse are, if nothing else, extremely hard.

Here is the just as ambiguously aged Sid Gomez. Sadly, Cardz™ opted not to include the cool but expensive refractive coating feature where you tilt the card back and forth and it appears Gomez's hair is moving. Fortunately, he remains horny as hell. Big shout out to Goulart for swinging for the fences with the bold "infinite contacts" claim, and then totally wussing out and saying "and such" rather than think of a fourth different type of Bad Guy.

Now we're getting somewhere! The first character in the series clearly written and named by a six year old boy, Dr. Gunsmith marks the deviation of the TekWorld cardz from the TekWar book. Gunsmith's 27 gun hands prove that he's either got a serious hoarding problem or Goulart is just deliberately trying to irritate his OCD fans/James Ngyuen with arbitrarily un-round numbers.

Tek gets its own card early in the series. It's hilarious to me that four of the given examples of the infinite things you can do with Tek just involve minor 'improvements' to your childhood or marriage. "My wife and I fight all the time and haven't been intimate in months. I could either envision a world where I'm married to Kylie Jenner and live in a mansion on Mars or I could just fantasize that I hadn't gotten her a Shark floor steamer for our anniversary last year." It's also awesome that "slaughter your enemies" gets casually sandwiched in there like it's a used car salesman telling you that the car you're about to buy may not technically "have a transmission." Pictured on the card's front is American Gladiator legend Malibu dreaming about slaughtering his enemies in the Atlasphere.

The story of the the TekWorld cards differs from the TekWar story we all know and mocked. For some reason, even though TekWorld has both Beth and Mr. Kittredge, they introduce a THIRD character who is an amalgamation of those two characters. Evidently Bryan McMillan, fearing murder by TekLord, uploaded his consciousness into a decidedly less sexy android than the BethBot in the book. What has not changed, as evidenced by this card's idiotic final sentence, is Goulart's flair for the dramatic. Gives "'I have to go,' said Willow" a run for its money.

I fear we're to be seeing a lot of this grimace from the nearly-fifty Jake for the rest of this series. If he's deploying it to stop your basic catfight, we're certainly going to see it as he's dispatching robo-bulls and Sonny Hokori's goons. I think we can also all agree that "Pulling clear of the unhappy widow" has robot pimp level versatility.

This AirCar chase padded the deck out at least four cards. It gave Gomez ample chances to interject random Mexican things Goulart has heard of into his speech patterns, whereas Jake's final line is an amazing example of his hardscrabble, hardlined, hardtack personality.

A lot going on here. Our story has shifted to Miami, and in between cards #2 and #39 Goulart has invented a new type of criminal: the sinister Footpad. The second paragraph is classic Shatlart sentence construction and a thought that no sane person would ever think to themselves. And then we get an amazingly needless Exact Measurement to cap it all off.

RIP, Huskiest of the Thugs. You were my favorite character.

Hurricane Hannah is played by adult Pebbles Flintstone, and appears to figure prominently in the second half of the series. I would like to know how Gomez's *intent* can possibly be subtle, but I'm too distracted by the perfect Goulartian sentence that caps it all off.