Superfreaks: Night Man and Moon Boy

Martin Phipps martinphipps2 at yahoo.com
Tue Sep 12 16:38:37 PDT 2006


Tom Russell wrote:
> Martin Phipps fired a somewhat-inaccurate and self-serving salvo in the
> form of a notes section:
>
> > This was originally intended as an 8FOLD story but Tom
> > had some reservations.  For starters, he questioned
> > some of the bad language [...]
>
> Notice that this story contains only one "fuck".

> > He objected to the Joker clone having the
> > obvious name the Kidder and suggested that this
> > practice reduces the impact of the serious story and
> > makes it a parody.
>
> I objected more to the name "Pussywoman".

Oh I'm not saying you didn't make valid points and that I didn't make
changes.  If I mislead people at all, I think I might have erred on the
side of making it appear that I simply wasn't willing to make changes.
I'm sorry I came across as "self-serving".  I was actually only
interested in explaining the whole process by which I decided to post
this as a separate imprint.  That's all.  I felt I had to justify
creating another imprint because I then had to let Russ know about the
"Superfreaks" tag or else every issue would face moderation.

> > 8FOLD already has a Batman clone in the Green
> > Knight so there would be the question of where Night
> > Man had been operating all this time seeing as how he
> > couldn't imagine Jolt City having enough crime to
> > warrant two Batman clones let alone a whole set of
> > implied JLA clones. :)
>
> Actually, that's taken a bit out of context, Martin.
>
> Firstly, I didn't point out the Green-Knight-Batman-analogue thing in
> reference to _this_ story.

Oh I know and, in Jamie's case at least, I made a point of saying that
Jamie's comments were not about this particular story.  I was just
listing the sort of reservations I was getting.  Note that I do realize
that the "reservations" were not "objections" but, accumulatively, they
apparently made it so that neither of you would agree to giving me
carte blanche in posting stories for 8FOLD and I just felt that neither
of you had the time to read and comment on each of my stories before
they were posted and that it was easier for all three of us if I just
went my own way. :)

> And I never called the Green Knight a Batman clone.

And I wouldn't have thought of Green Knight that way myself.  I
appologize for the use of the word "clone" here BTW.  I should have
said "archetype".

> > Jamie had reservations because I tell
> > stories using dialogue and I don't use a lot of
> > narrative description.  Well, frankly, I don't want
> > to.  I figure that readers just need to be able to
>
> Which is your perogrative.  And I, for one, would be happy to let that
> pass; who knows?  Maybe if you took the time to discuss it with Jamie,
> he might have said okay too.  But the next email you sent after Jamie
> provided what I found to be constructive criticism was the same email
> in which you stated your intentions not to set it in Eightfold.  This
> was some nine hours later.

Yes but Jamie had been reading the stories at work and I felt *GUILTY*
about that.  I actually sent Jamie two e-mails (forgetting to CC: to
you the first time) and I felt guilty about that too, so guilty that I
thought that it was too much asking Jamie to read and comment on my
stories and maybe make some suggestions and then actually discuss with
me about them to boot and if he was going to do this for every issue
then it was simply too much to ask of him.  He had work to do.  Real
work.

> It was a month for this story, and twelve days since the first issue of
> the SUPERFREAKS series landed in my mail box.  I don't really think
> it's that long of a wait.
>
> But when you're used to posting things *immediately* after writing them
> without any editing, rewriting, or proofreading, I can see how twelve
> days can be an inordinate amount of time.

When I put two characters in a room, what they say is what they say and
what they do is what they do.  Put in more characters and you have more
possibilities and suddenly there is a need for rewrites because you
read it over and you see how some of the characters didn't get enough
dialogue or how some of the dialogue could be attributed to somebody
else and it might actually work better that way.  But there is a point
where I consider something finished and I'm just waiting to know if I
can post it, yes. :)

> And no, Martin, I'm not mad at you. :-)
>
> I just had to clarify some of your statements.  Since you chose to take
> them to the public forum, I'll answer them in the public forum.  I make
> no apologies for the tone and nature of my rebuttal.

Talking about stuff discussed in private e-mail is a grey area.  I
summarized lengthy exchanges into two paragraphs and whenever you
compress data like that there is a loss of resolution.  It would have
been very, very improper for me to have directly quoted private e-mail
in a public forum though.  I tried to not cross the line between "Tom
had reservations about these things" and "Here's what Tom said".  I was
actually trying to put the issue to rest because I *didn't* want you or
Jamie to be angry at me but rather simply understand my point of view.
And I posted it in a public forum because it was an accurate
description of my own point of view and was not intended as a
deliberate distortion of anything you or Jamie might have said. 

Martin




More information about the racc mailing list