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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134443
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 9:33am | IP Logged | 1
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Correct—tho in 1980 that meant the book came out around August. It was during my time on FF that the cover and release dates got “into sync”.
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Paul Wills
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 18 August 2018
Location: United States
Posts: 930
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 9:43am | IP Logged | 2
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Ah.. I was thinking October was the 'X' month
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 10:00am | IP Logged | 3
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If you asked a Roman, he’d say that was December!!
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Richard Palmgren
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 May 2009
Location: United States
Posts: 328
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 10:10am | IP Logged | 4
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Speaking of months, how important is "keeping track of time" in your storytelling? Do you "map out" timelines to keep track of the flow of time as you write? AF had tons of in-text references to the passing of time between events and makes for an easy job of making a timeline of AF events. Uncanny, not so much. Jean's funeral is a week after they get back and is "months" from Uncanny 139, which takes place in the summer (Uncanny 138 takes place in February?)
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134443
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 10:29am | IP Logged | 5
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I used to track the months the issues would come out, so I could be “seasonal,” but virtually everything being reprinted in paperback “evergreens” makes that rather pointless—and sometimes distracting for the readers.
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Tony Frye
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 10 March 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 218
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | 6
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Speaking of seasonal, I remember experiencing two Christmas holidays during your original run, so as a kid that was my gauge as to how much time had past.
By issue #119, Banshee is released from the hospital and its Christmas. By issue #143 Kitty fights solo on Christmas eve — telling me one year had passed for all of those stories.
However, if you break down how long each adventure may have taken (the Hellfire /Dark Phoenix saga basically happened in a one week period) it would still leave plenty of room for other adventures to have occurred in that year that we never knew about.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134443
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | 7
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Christmas stories fall into the “topical reference” file. Like Presidents and rock stars. They are not meant to indicate actual passage of time.
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Charles Nelson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 June 2012
Location: United States
Posts: 247
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | 8
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I always enjoyed holiday issues or seasonal references as setting without ever wanting to count how many of them had passed.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134443
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | 9
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Holiday issues were fun—and not at all troubling—until I started my journey to becoming a Pro and watched fandom shrink, bringing the fringe ever closer to the center. “You know there have been, like, 109 Batman Xmas stories, right?”sigh
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Greg Kirkman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 May 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 15772
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | 10
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Yeah, at the end of the day, trying to string together a functional chronology is self-defeating and a dangerous form of navel-gazing.
The old OFFICIAL MARVEL INDEX books in the 80s went to great pains to place every story within a set chronology based on seasonal and topical references, with some occasionally strange results.
While it can be fun and occasionally rewarding to perform nerdy thought exercises like these, at the end of the day, it doesn't serve the art of storytelling, and only bogs everything down.
As a card-carrying stickler for detail, I've trained myself to understand what should be considered "off-hours" talk versus what should actually go into the books. It can be a heck of a lot of fun to deep-dive into all of that pointless detail in the form of casual nerd conversation, but the actual stories need to be clean, streamlined, and not tied down by extraneous details.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 01 April 2019 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | 11
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I was chatting with Walt Simonson t’other day when he mentioned a writer of our mutual acquaintance who’d recently pitched a miniseries. In this story, it was explained how a particular character had managed to become an underworld “kingpin” without any indications of such connections in his earlier stories. I chuckled. “You realize he’s probably been chewing on that particular bone for fifty years, ever since the underworld connection was introduced!”All Ts must be crossed!!!
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Darren Taylor
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 April 2004
Location: Scotland
Posts: 6039
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| Posted: 02 April 2019 at 4:33am | IP Logged | 12
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Somethings are better left as a mystery. Incomplete. Unsaid.
I feel this way about Wolverines past/origin. The mystery was the very thing that made him cool.
However beautiful Barry Smiths art is, I really could have lived a life where the series Weapon X just never happened. (Same story about some villain ripping him open to study how it was done, wouldn't have been so bad!)
A wise man (JB) once said that the key thing is to place all the toys back exactly as you found them.
Now the mantra appears to be, 'Change them as much as you can and your star will burn brighter!'
Modern characters are like a clay model that has been over handled. Covered head to foot with everybody's fingerprints, so much so that the once sharp defined characteristics are dull and somewhat homogenised, difficult to be entirely sure what separates it from all the other clay models.
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