Please don’t resurrect the Joe Schmoe joke, it was harder to kill than Thanos in the first place…
I don’t think it ever died.
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Writer’s Room: A story about the Host (after they were named and explained)
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Yeah! We had the Singular Convergence, so now I want to see the Congregation of the Host! (Or whatever it’s called when they’re all together and we get to see a lot more Spirits!)
Writers room Justice Comics 67
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Pursuant to this conversation: “Papa Legba’s” origin story, in which we learn that he’s not the real lwa and he just stole the name and aesthetic because he thought it was cool.
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“The Soul Seeker story is really cool,” says Christopher.
“Well,” says I, “I’d really like to hear that cool story, then!”
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Ok, this is about as general of a topic as you can get, but how about “A story with an unorthodox format.”
Just a comic where the format of the story is presented in some creative way. It could be as simple as a story with no dialogue, or a complicated, nonlinear time travel story. Maybe a bizarre La Capitan or Wager Master story where reality is breaking down and it leaks throughout the panels. Something like the “10 Seconds” story from the Chrono Ranger episode, or something else entirely.
And if the topic is too general, if C&A already have a story like that they haven’t told, they could put that up for voting instead.
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I love this idea! There is a Batman issue called “The Clown at Midnight”, which is about the Joker’s (duh) clowns which I think is a perfect example of what you’re thinking. It’s written sort of like an illustrated storybook - extremely atypical for a comic book.
Example Picture (clowns)
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I think Xtreme Freedom Five story that’s basically The Road Warrior fits this.
A Day(?) In the Life: Free Radical
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There are many things Christopher and Adam are excellent at writing. But properly plotting and planning out a good time travel story is one of the most difficult tasks a fiction writer can tackle, and to be blunt, even C&A aren’t that good, nor do they have the particular talent necessary to do such a thing even without being superlatively skilled. Their time travel writing is on the Doctor Who level, which means it isn’t really about the time travel, and doesn’t even try to do time travel right, it just tells a fun story with time travel as a cosmetic backdrop (the equivalent of using scientifically inaccurate dinosaurs because they’re cooler, and barely handwaving some explanation about evolutionary microclimates that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny since that isn’t the point).
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the movie Primer, which does time travel basically perfect, but is boring and difficult to watch, having been made on a shoestring budget. If the Primer guys (who I would say do have that specialized talent I mentioned) could have afforded a bunch of special effects and fancy costumes and such to liven their story up, then C&A would be great to bring in as creative consultants, designing a bunch of cool stuff to put in some epic high-tech future which the time machine goes to… and the Primer writers would concentrate on the time travel itself. (A good example of the middle ground is Back to the Future, which is about 70% of the way towards the Doctor Who extreme, but makes a fair amount of effort to be consistent, though nowhere near as much as Primer does.)
TLDR… this is a cool idea, but it’s off-brand for the >G team.
The real perfect time travel movie is About Time, which I personally highly recommend!
(Of course, I am of the mindset that the story is way more important than the time travel itself, part of why I enjoy C&A’s stories.)
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I agree that it takes a lot of planning to make a good time travel story work out, but this isn’t about talent. It’s about the effort the creator is willing to invest in that planning and plotting, and the ultimate message they want to convey with the story, and whether the two agree well enough for the payoff of the story product that comes out.
In other words, the stories C&A are telling are fundamentally comic book stories. So when they tell a time travel story, they’re going to tell a comic book time travel story. That doesn’t require that the science work out correctly or that there be a ton of threads that come out self-consistently. That’s why you’re more likely to end up with the Sentinel Comics version of Back to the Future than Primer, regardless of the talent involved.
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I get what you’re saying, but you misunderstand what I meant. It’s not that talent is a stat and I’m saying C&A don’t have enough of that stat to write a Primer-with-superheroes, or even a BTTF-with-superheroes. It’s that writing either of those stories would require a particular type of talent, as well as some degree of skill, and C&A have enough skill for most writing, but they posses a different type of talent.
To illustrate by way of example, let’s use the Dungeons and Dragons rules system. In D&D, specifically its 3rd edition, you roll a D20, add your Attack Bonus, and need to exceed or equal (I’m not sure which offhand) the Armor Class of the target. So if your target is AC 15, and you have +5 to attack, then you’ll hit if you roll 11 but you’ll miss if you roll 9. So let’s say that to write a time travel story that’s good, you need to roll higher than 20, and critical hits aren’t a thing, so it can’t be done unless you have an additional bonus. The task has AC 34, and so if you only have +12, that’s not enough. So you take the feat “weapon focus”, and the same GM who took away critical hits also said that +1 to hit isn’t good enough for a feat, so instead it’s +3. So with the feat and +12, you can hit on a 20 or maybe a 19… but only if you’re using the weapon that you picked Weapon Focus for.
That’s the point I’m trying to get at. C&A have a way better writing skill than I do, but this particular task is too difficult for all but an incredibly talented writer, or someone who has the Writing Focus: Time Travel feat. I don’t have that many points of writer skill, but I do have the feat, and a certain guy I know has more skill than me, plus the feat, but he’s busy doing other things, so he can’t write anything unless someone pays for his time. My time, on the other hand, is still relatively plentiful and worthless, so I could do this, or I could help someone else do it.
- Writers’ Room: Tyler Vance sans Bunker Suit
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- Writers’ Room: An Issue That Was Published in the Metaverse During the Very Same Month and Year That This Very Episode of The Letters Page Is Being Recorded And/Or Released in the Meta-Metaverse
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Uh, are they that far along? I’m thinking it’d have to be RPG era, or maybe Vertex. I could have my timelines mixed up, though.
I’d definitely like to know more about Vertex, but I think at this point our reality has already outlived the Miststorm Timeline…
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The OblivAeon Event occurred in 2016. According to the Vertex episode of The Letters Page, Vertex began “a few years” after OblivAeon, so I’m assuming 2018-2020. That same episode says that it lasted for 5 or 6 years, so 2023-2026. So, even going with the most conservative guess, we’d be able to see the tail end of the Misstorm Universe before it implodes.
The RPG Timeline, on the other hand, we know begins practically right after OblivAeon, so 2017. Presumably it continues indefinitely into the future until the end of time. We don’ know how far C&A have planned, though. They haven’t released any adventure issues past the first year, methinks, but they have hinted at futures plans that seem to be relatively far way. (Although I doubt they’d reveal anything too secretive.)
Then again, perhaps just “Any Vertex Issue” might be a better topic?
Or “every Vertex issue”…