LNH/LNH20/LNHX: The Tao of Reboots

[Martin Phipps]

On Nov 15, 9:01 am, Adrian James McClure <lord_sold... at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> OK, I realize I was still being unnecessarily snippy and trying to
> explain myself, which is always a bad idea. I'm sorry.
>
> Discussing the philosophy behind revamps and reboots is still
> interesting to me, though, so:
>
> On Nov 15, 11:12 am, Martin Phipps <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Anyway, I can understand why people
> > want to start fresh and use their own characters.  I just feel it
> > throws the baby out with the bath water.  But that's just my opinion.
>
> Isn't that what LNHY did, though? It doesn't have ANY classic LNH
> characters, except Exclamation!Master! and Kid Enthusiastic.
> (Respectively a villain who became a hero and a hero who became a
> villain.) I wonder if the difference is in the ambiguous way the
> revamp/reboot is being pitched. It's being handled like a reboot even
> thought it's not really a reboot. It's more like the transition from
> Earth-2 to Earth-1 in the DC Universe, but done intentionally. LNHY
> underwent the fate of all alternate universes in superhero comics; it
> diminished and got eventually ignored. (I also think the tonal clash
> in the setting that resulted from "The Devil Came Down to Georgia,"

Well, to start with, it was only Arthur who was writing LNHY but then
Saxon came along and wrote that and, yes, the tone was very different
from classic LNH.  I think Saxon's inspiration for "The Devil..." was
Arthur making God a character in LNHY.  God isn't even mentioned in
mainstream LNH.  If you think about it, the Authors are the gods of
the Looniverse in the mainstream LNH.  (I've always wondered if God in
LNHY wasn't actually Arthur's writer character.)

Anyway, the tone for LNHY was quite different from the LNH.  The LNH
didn't have horror stories but LNHY had vampires and demons and
mages.  It's ironic that Arthur tried to make LNHY really serious but
then immediately people started writing stuff with very serious
themes.

Martin