LNH: 20th Anniversary Special, Part #1

Adrian J. McClure mrfantastic7 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 29 12:45:27 PDT 2012


On Apr 29, 3:04 am, Arthur Spitzer <arspit... at earthlink.net> wrote:

> SEAN CHRISTIAN DAUGHERTY

Hey, welcome back!

> The sad truth of the matter is that if Rob Rogers hadn't managed to
> track down my email a couple of months back, I wouldn't even be aware of
> the 20th anniversary.

Well I totally forgot RACC existed before the end of last year, so.

>  I obviously didn't
> expect the writers of Doctor Who or the Legion of Super-Heroes to be
> aware of the scribblings of a mad teenager on the Internet, and I was
> acutely aware that, when I wrote fanfic, I was at best a squatter in
> someone else's continuity. The best I could hope for would be that the
> landlord didn't decide to sic the cops on me.

Well, with Doctor Who the boundary between canon and fanfic has become
very porous indeed, since Doctor Who fandom was what kept the show
alive once it as off the air. I know Paul Cornell, at least, started
off writing fanfic. Tom and Mary Biernbaum in the LSH did too, but
that didn't work out so well once Keith Giffen left.

> The only problem was, I didn't know how best to get myself involved. The
> generally easy-going rules about respecting the turf of others seemed
> daunting to me at the time. So, well, I kind of cheated. I came up with
> Brain Boy with very little concept of how he slotted into the Looniverse
> itself, and worked in references to existing net.heroes and places
> later, as I gained a bit more confidence.

I think by the time you joined that was more or less normal. There was
less of an emphasis on shared continuity and the series were more off
in their own little world. That didn't really reverse until the middle
of last decade when Tom, Jamie and Arthur started doing more with the
"Public Domain" LNHers again. In my case, I started Ultimate Mercenary
in an alternate timeline during Flame Wars VI, a Crisis on Infinite
Earths parody, so I got to set my series in its own context and tie in
with a crossover at the same time.

I have to admit I haven't read a whole lot of Brain Boy. It was a
while before my time and because it was so self-contained it never
much impacted what I did. But I did enjoy the issues I read...

Oh yeah, there was one point where I was considering picking up on
what you were doing. Monark. I think you were the one who first
started the whole Monark-as-Mephistopheles thing during your crossover
with NWO 2012, and Jesse picked up on it in Boy Redundant Lad. He was
one of the more prominent writers when I was starting out, so his work
influenced me a lot even though I (like everyone) had my share of
disagreements with him. I liked the idea of Monark as an empty suit
who had no fixed past a lot. I had an elaborate time war storyline in
mind, and Monark would have been a free agent who manipulated both
sides, who couldn't interfere with history directly unless he made a
pact with someone, or something like that. But that whole storyline
went nowhere and when I picked the book up again I took things in a
completely different direction (though still involving time
paradoxes).

> I met a lot of really great writers during my brief stint as an LNH
> writer. And maybe I'll actually fulfill my promise to come back one day.
> Especially now that I've told everyone reading this about my promise,
> and I wouldn't just be lying to myself anymore.

I sure hope so! The more the merrier. And if you want to do something
completely different you can take a look at LNH20.

AJM (if I only had a brain...)


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