Comment Log
It is the coolest thing in the world that people are even reading this website in the first place. It's a very personal project; the content is the product of a very small group of friends, while the actual text of the website is almost completely my own. This is really "Matt's headcannon, the website", and any time anyone ever spends reading it is just a gift.
I started posting people's comments a few years ago, but it got a little hard to keep track of, so I decided to move it all to it's own page. I'll be keeping the most recent comments here, while moving the older ones over to the Comment Archive. |
Also, I'm going to start setting up a FAQ, because some questions just aren't ever going to stop happening. If nothing else, it will give me something to link people to when they insist on explaining to me why the extra Lantern Corps are actually cool. (They're not.)
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I went ahead and included Volcana over in the FAQ page for this topic.
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~"Is the apocalypse cult that gives Jane her powers the Cult of The Unwritten Book? Or is it something else? (Also as I’m writing this I just noticed the little pixel art of Jane, cute!)"
~"Wait now I’m noticing (almost) everyone has a pixel micro! Does it help keep track of who’s on teams at certain times?"
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There aren't specific plans for just what that Cult is, at the moment. It wasn't originally invented as being Doom Patrol related, it was just an apocalyptic event that the Shadowpact needed to stop. It was only when looking to define our version of Jane's origin that we came up with associating her with this event... although it certainly COULD be the Cult of the Unwritten Book, right?
And yes, we started doing the pixel sprites this year! One of my best new friends from the Discord Server, Crackpot, would often share their sprites to help illustrate the different team lineups. I asked Crackpot how he got into it: "It started off as me wanting to visualize the Kingdom, since I thought that was such a fun-sounding team with almost zero art assets, and it grew from there." They just has such a fantastic visual language that I felt like tied the whole project together. I spend a while working with them so that they can start making sprites for the whole site. They're basically working their way down a massive checklist, and of course, remember, this is a hobby for everyone involved, so they'll only be added as they're able to finish them, but you should be able to see more sprites added with every update! |
Well there's a simple explanation for that: I completely forgot that I said that.
To be honest, I'm not the most visual thinker in the world, so while I do sometimes have comments about how one character or another might look, I often am more comfortable leaving those choices to people with more artistic sensability than I have, which is why Crackpot's Pixel Sprites have been SO much fun. They've done a much better job of remembering and expressing my own ideas about how characters might look that I have myself! Check out Major Disaster & the Doom Patrol's pages again: Crackpot updated them. Thanks for your reminder! |
The organization of the Supporting Cast pages is one of the things I've spent way too much time trying to make organic when laying out the website. It's never as cut and dry as you want it to be, and one of the complications has always been supporting characters who have supporting characters of their own. Kara is, and will always be, part of the Superman Family. So while she absolutely does have her own supporting characters (Her roommate Nia Nal, for example, is 100% a SUPERGIRL character), for the purposes of our website we're just going to keep them both under Superman Supporting Characters and trust that you'll be able to work out the difference.
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I guess at this point you can't see the specific list of supporting characters, since we took it off the poll when we started working on it; the list is as follows: Thomas & Martha Wayne, Lucius Fox, Batwing, Tony Zucco, Jacob Kane, Alysia Yeoh, Karon & Slam Bradley. We're not DONE with the Batman Supporting Characters after this, this is just the last of our original black book timelines.
I made sure to google Sebastian Ives before I responded here just to make sure he didn't play a role in any major stories I had missed. He's essentially a friend of Tim's from school... so I think I can safely say that while he probably does exist in the world of the DCCP, he'd need to actually be part of some canonically relevant events for us to make him a timeline. |
The pitch they're referring to happens on this page, in the entry under Greg Saunders. I can absolutely see the comparison you're making, and to be honest that's maybe the biggest problem with this story idea, because we absolutely do not want it to feel like that at all. The idea is that it's not a team being gathered, but rather a one-off event that these seven characters get pulled into. If we're not able to do something with it to KEEP it from feeling like Legends of Tomorrow, then we probably just flat-out won't be able to use it.
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Good thing I made a new FAQ page where I can answer exactly this sort of question!
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~"I was reading over the Psycho-Pirate suggestion for J'onn again and it got me thinking that he'd actually make for a really good "human face" of sorts for the cosmic demonic cataclysm that Grundy, Kent, Kendra, Arthur and Adam face, because for me at least whenever I think of Psycho-Pirate I always think of his insane ramblings about Crisis in Arkham before anything else, and I could easily see this event leaving him in a similar state, especially considering how Icthultu was directly ripped from Lovecraft and Lovecraft stories often involve someone being left in a state of total madness like that."
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That would certainly be interesting. I particularly like how this actually mirrors Johnny Sorrow, another human avatar of a Lovecraftian Horror whose powers are yellow mask-based? Whenever we start creating new stories for characters I'm always nervous about just fully reinventing them into something new and unrelated, but this doesn't actually necessarily conflict with what's already there...
We still don't quite have a complete idea of just what his actual deal is, and we still haven't really connected him in any way to Martian Manhunter, have we? Still, these are some interesting ideas to the stew as we consider ways this character might someday work. |
This comment was on Katma Tui's page. I've commented on this specific topic before, and yes, I totally get why a person might want to keep her around. That's totally valid, and I encourage you to do so in your fan timeline. In ours, we think her death is an important part of the overall lore of the Green Lanterns.
Also... maybe I shouldn't comment on this, but "I and many others" is such a funny way to start your comment. It's like you were elected their spokesperson somehow? Do you guys have meetings? Can I come? |
Sorry to dissapoint, but in my defense that would be an absolutely herculean thing for me to try to do. the number of changes I'd have to make and links I'd have to update would be in the... lord... probably tens of thousands? I understand that actual comic canon DOES move forward; we're just not doing that.
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~"Do you have any plans for Xanthe Zhou? They're a very new character, but I think they're easily one of the most unique new characters to come out of DC in the past decade and I could especially see them shining in this context, where the resident sword-wielding Asian person connected to the spirit world (that's an incredibly reductive way of framing the character but still the similarities are there) is firmly retired now."
~"Do you have plans for the first Vigilante, Greg Saunders?"
~"Did the Red Hood Gang exist in your universe? And if so, did the leader becomes the Joker?"
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We haven't had a big batch of "Do you have plans for this character" questions in a while, but with this fun influx, I actually went and updated the FAQ pages so that this has its own section. the answers to these questions can be found there, along with all the other characters people have asked about!
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~"this ask was originally gonna say "what if you did a optional side thing where you made drastic revamps for DC characters" but then i thought of something else. there's a option on this side for fans to submit their own timelines, but maybe in the near or distant future of this site, since not every fan will have a big ol timeline, but maybe a few good ideas, what if there was a place on this site for us to submit this drastic revamp ideas or character reworks. (maybe with the possible feedback from the site-runners, who knows)"
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We actually already have a place where you can do this! Our Discord is full of the creations and imaginings of all the members. People have their own channel on request that they can use however they want; we have one user who imagines their own DC movie universe, one who is doing a Transformers timeline, one person who is basically just keeping us updated while they watch all of Ben 10, and of course a ton of discussion about DC headcanon. You can hop into the Patreon if you'd like to join!
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~"Flash Rebirth and Flashpoint are inherently unsatisfying stories because the moral of the stories is just: Thawne wins. The end. He &*@#s with time and erases several innocents from time via time travel and just gets away with it And our protagonist is condemned for attempting to put things right. You can't change the past unless your name is Eobard Thawne in which case go right ahead The central part of the retcon is also why it is Fundamentally broken."
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I'd actually take it a little further, because both Rebirth & Flashpoint suffer from the same original problem; they are trying to build some sort of narrative interest in Barry Allen. So much of what we consider the story of Barry Allen; the murder of his mom, the "It was me, Barry!" antagonism of Thawne... none of it actually comes from the original character. This begs the question... if you have to work so hard to come up with something about this character to tell stories about... why bring them back in the first place?
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~"The one thing that really throws me off with Rose being on the Suicide Squad is that she's still a minor when she's recruited; Waller's an immensely sketchy person in countless ways, but I feel like she still isn't so far gone that she'd throw a kid into a warzone, especially when her whole motivation is rooted in the loss of her own children"
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We’ve talked about this elsewhere, believe it or not; there have been periodic references to Lynn actually being John’s cousin, and one reader (hi crackpot!) Actually brought receipts that writer Tony Isabella originially imagined that Lynn might be related to John when he invented the character, although no one at the time followed up on it.
All that said, within our project we don't in fact think that making characters related to each other just because they share last names actually helps, so much as it just makes the world seem unnecessarily smaller. Particularly when we’re essentially talking about the two very first black superheroes in DC history. |