Review: End of Month Reviews #72 - December 2009 [spoilers]

[Saxon Brenton]

Trying desperately to clear out in-boxes that have been left to accumulate Stuff for far too long...
On 1 Feb 2010 Scott Eiler (seiler at eilertech.com) wrote:
> On Jan 30, 6:15 pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
 
[...]
 
> Have any of you ever had a problem diving into a comic-book universe
> that's been around for twenty years or more? I haven't successfully
> made it into Legion of Net.Heroes before now. Usually I trip over the
> inside jokes. (Seiler smash puny Dvandom Stranger!) I'll keep
> looking at the new material, but I'm not going to try to catch up with
> the old. But I do see some hope...
 
Yes.  And not to try and scare you off or anything, but actually going 
through the archives of even one long-running series can take ages.  A 
number of years ago, after the Omega imprint had effectively become 
defunct, I decided to broaden my RACC readings by printing out a copy 
of Chad Imbrogno's _Covenant_ series and read it while on a long bus 
trip. Even with my usual habit of reducing margins and type size to 
fit two columns of print on an A4 page, the size of the printout was 
massive.  I enjoyed what I read, but the sheer size was exhausting.  
Similarly, my grasp if Superguy imprint is pretty shallow because my 
knowledge is limited to details presented in the few series I've read 
as they come out.  And even though I'm an ASH fanboy, there are a 
number of series written by other-than-Dvandom which I still haven't 
done more than skim to get the general gist.
 
That said, this seems to be a problem with most fiction universes, and 
not just comic book ones.  Of course, these days we have it slightly 
easier than in the past, since we have these sinful modern type internet 
wiki pages and suchlike to give summaries of the series, and the 
archives are instantly available online/on demand.  Compare that with, 
for example, the way that fans of HP Lovecraft deliberately set out to 
create Arkham House publishing in order to keep the Cthulhu stories 
in print.
 
 
>> Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #33
>> 'Gathering Dust'
 
[...]
 
> Just one quibble: I think it's kind of silly to change the name of
> Nevada (Neva.Dir? How about Net.Vada?), but I guess it's no sillier
> than Gotham City. And in a shared universe, a rule's a rule.
 
To be honest I'm pretty sure it was simply the first net based pun 
that came to my mind.  And as this topic came up a few months ago, I 
can only reiterate: If you've got another pun for a city name that 
works just as well, use it.  Some cities may have multiple possible 
punned names, and Net.vada is as good as Neva.dir.
 
On a more meta level, it does raise the subject of having people 
recognise that this 'rule', at least, is extremely flexible in its 
application.  The problem is that newcomers may not recognise this.  
In the hypothetical case of me ever doing an update of the Looniversal 
Gazetteer, that would probably be a principle that would need to be 
stated in the first paragraph.
 
---
Saxon Brenton
 
  		 	   		  
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