LNH: LNH 20th Anniversary Special, Part #2

[Adrian J. McClure]

(I'm going to respond to these in no particular order...)

>ANDREW PERRON

> It took me a bit, though,
> to get into comics - moving into a neighborhood where the local
> mini-mart had a spinner rack was a godsend - and a bit longer to put the
> two together.

I miss spinner racks. Of course, nowadays most (non-Archie) single
issues aren't really meant to be read as an unified whole experience,
and that's probably part of what's hurting comics too, but this is
well-trodden ground by now.

> Yeah, not quite.  A problem cropped up that would beguile and bedevil me
> from there on out: a notable difficulty in carrying projects beyond the
> initial surge of enthusiasm.

And I've wrestled with this exact same problem throughout my writing
career. I've created so many different universes over the years that I
dropped when I got stuck that it's not even funny.

>Surfing the Internet, I found myself on a rather
> peculiar corner of the World Wide Web: Unca Cheeks' Silver Age Comics
> Site. (http://www.reocities.com/cheeksilver/)
>

Oh hey, I remember that site! For me it was JMS's Spider-Man comics
that got me into superheroes again after I'd burned out for a bit.
When I drifted away from comics, I got into SF TV. I didn't watch B5
for a long time but my parents spoke very highly of it so I was
curious, and I enjoyed it a lot. This was before JMS's work started
getting progressively worse and worse. I didn't get hugely into Silver
Age DC until later in the decade, when DC put out its Showcase
Presents collections and blogs like the Absorbascon popped up. Then I
got to appreciate Silver Age Superman's bizarre and distinctive
storytelling style and now they're some of my favorite comics ever.
I've seldom successfully written in that style myself though--it's
harder than it looks.

> The Curse of the Skipped
> Issue took hold, and I faded out once more.

I was this close to succumbing to the same curse myself. When I was
stuck with how to end UM, I wanted to jump ahead to a point when the
storyline was over, when Ultimate Mercenary and company had been
kicked out of the LNH and had set up as detectives in Crime Pulp City.
Of course, later I did sort of skip issues when I started UM v20 when
I wasn't quite done with the original series yet, but somehow making
it a new series made it easier to go back and finish it than jumping
ahead in issue numbers.

> I think the real problem was guilt.  Or, rather, a
> combination deal where I couldn't face my unfinished stories, so I left
> them behind and started new ones, but accumulated more guilt with each
> writing project I tried and abandoned.  And I tried - O! how I tried;
> both my hard drive and the Internet became clearinghouses for attempts
> at storytelling.

Ugh. I've been through this same exact thing so many times.

> I never got anything consistent going, and there's one
> thing I haven't mentioned that played into the reason why: feedback.

That's always one of the things I've appreciated the most about RACC
too. I'm still very thankful for the encouragement Tom and Jamie gave
me in the early days. I still find providing feedback to peoples'
stories a little difficult, to be honest--probably because I do so
much of that kind of thing for my work--but I'm making an effort to do
it more.

> Coming out the other end, I found myself in a new city, as a bona fide
> adult, with a real (though temporary) job... that just happened to be
> hella boring.  So, five years after I'd departed RACC's pastures, I was
> finally ready to face it again.  And with my newfound ability to just
> keep working on something, even if my attention got pulled away for a
> while, and damn the guilt, I plunged in - and the rest, good readers, is
> history.

And we're all very much better for it!

AJM (still working on the loving, stable relationship part myself,
but...)