*Waves from the other mountaintop*
Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:02 pm
Howdy all!
My name's Jim (Doty!) and i'm not a current Marvel reader/collector (but have been in the past, more on that later), but love indexing and chronology-building and Who's Who writing on another website (Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe) and just thought i would just throw out a few random thoughts to like minded folk.
How do you deal with working with series that you really don't care to be reading? I know that's not too much of a problem here, with so many people contributing to the workload, but i've been working on indexing books between 1986 (Crisis) and 2011 (Flashpoint) and occasionally have to grin and bear it. I've actually found that some series that i would not given a second thought to i started to enjoy and really poured into after a while, others just don't cut it.
What writers (and editors) just grind your gears when it comes to building chronologies? Do character appearances (or maybe overuse?) add or detract from the story at hand? Who uses the "greater fictional universe" to good effect in their stories and who just finds keeping track of this stuff just too much work?
I was a (mainly) Marvel reader from the mid-1970s to about Secret Wars I and was in on the first wave of George O's indices, and i was in heaven! My copies of his indices have LOTS of hand written notes by me, and his work on the largely forgotten Collector's Dream magazine (anybody else love the big Marvel Genealogy article? Lots of story ideas could have grown out of that!) were read until they were nearly tattered. I created a huge chronology/calendar on those large green accounting sheets (before Excel kids!) and thought that Secret Wars was a good place to end it. I wish i had kept up with it. With Crisis, the DC universe was calling me back and i taught myself word processing so i could write out a large Earth-Two (later on a DCU) chronology and my own Who's Who entries. I had always wished that the DC series was as detailed as the Official Handbooks.
Hope to hear from some of you great folks here and keep the discussions going!
Onward and Upwards!
-z
My name's Jim (Doty!) and i'm not a current Marvel reader/collector (but have been in the past, more on that later), but love indexing and chronology-building and Who's Who writing on another website (Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe) and just thought i would just throw out a few random thoughts to like minded folk.
How do you deal with working with series that you really don't care to be reading? I know that's not too much of a problem here, with so many people contributing to the workload, but i've been working on indexing books between 1986 (Crisis) and 2011 (Flashpoint) and occasionally have to grin and bear it. I've actually found that some series that i would not given a second thought to i started to enjoy and really poured into after a while, others just don't cut it.
What writers (and editors) just grind your gears when it comes to building chronologies? Do character appearances (or maybe overuse?) add or detract from the story at hand? Who uses the "greater fictional universe" to good effect in their stories and who just finds keeping track of this stuff just too much work?
I was a (mainly) Marvel reader from the mid-1970s to about Secret Wars I and was in on the first wave of George O's indices, and i was in heaven! My copies of his indices have LOTS of hand written notes by me, and his work on the largely forgotten Collector's Dream magazine (anybody else love the big Marvel Genealogy article? Lots of story ideas could have grown out of that!) were read until they were nearly tattered. I created a huge chronology/calendar on those large green accounting sheets (before Excel kids!) and thought that Secret Wars was a good place to end it. I wish i had kept up with it. With Crisis, the DC universe was calling me back and i taught myself word processing so i could write out a large Earth-Two (later on a DCU) chronology and my own Who's Who entries. I had always wished that the DC series was as detailed as the Official Handbooks.
Hope to hear from some of you great folks here and keep the discussions going!
Onward and Upwards!
-z