LNH/META: Villains!

[Martin Phipps]

On Nov 3, 7:05 pm, Tom Russell <joltc... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 3, 9:46 pm, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > The truth is that it wasn't just a question of punishing you when I
> > said you couldn't use Master Blaster: you had just told Jesse that he
> > couldn't use your characters and, the truth is, your use of Master
> > Blaster was a problem of similar magnitude: he was becoming your own
> > character with his own catch phrase and maybe you creating a Mister
> > Blister clone was the right thing to do before things got too out of
> > hand.  The more we argued the harder it would have been to tell you
> > what to do and what not to do with the character.
>
> I think I would have deferred to your wishes if you said "hey, don't
> do [x]", but I understand your point of view.  W/r/t Jesse, I had told
> him, "hey, don't do [x] as it retcons a bunch of my stories and
> completely changes the personalities of those characters", and then he
> did it anyway.

To be honest, I don't remember much about Teenfactor.  I remember some
series you wrote some time ago with Easily Angered Man (or whatever)
and Lunchbox Lass and a really good parody of Blade Runner and a nasty
villainization of Britney Spears.  (I still like her.)  Then I
remember Net.Heroes on Parade and Speak and the Green Knight and Jolt
City and stuff with zombies, gorillas and snails...  Anyway, you told
us to forget about Teenfactor even though it had gone over a hundred
issues.

Anyway, Jesse was a strange case.  He claimed that his stuff was being
read by "people who don't normally read RACC" but most people seemed
to find his stuff dense and incomprehensible.  (He would have
characters talk in every issue and I didn't know if they were brother
and sister, husband and wife, former work mates, former class mates,
former team mates, former lovers or what.)  He told me that he did
this deliberately so people would go back and read old issues to get
caught up.  Really.  By contrast, you were recapping in every issue of
Net.Heroes on Parade, which is probably erring a bit too much on the
side of caution.  But Jesse loved to write and it pained me to see him
go.  You can probably count on two hands the number of people who have
written stories on RACC and never managed to offend anyone.

Martin