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”…
Oof, not another list episode. I skip those.
Which Vertex story, though? There’s so much we don’t know about. They have said previously they’re not opposed to telling some of those stories even though the products are all on indefinite hold.
My choices would be:
A For Profit story - I want to see Hippocalypse in action!
G.L.A.S.S. issue, specifically P.R.I.S.M. Paige and team at work, maybe when they’re freeing Parse from captivity? Mostly just want details about the team because I couldn’t associate all the first names from the acronym with characters.
Catastrophe and Verge in the Miststorm Universe. We heard a little of what they’re up to in the Sentinel Comics Universe, but otherwise they’ve been mostly mentioned then forgotten.
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Reading a list is a much different experience from hearing someone else read a list.
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The Naturalist & Akash’Thriya Foes episode made me wonder…
- A Void Guard issue where Void Guard Guards against the Void
… because I still don’t feel like I have a good idea of what they do.
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Good one! While we’re at it, though…
- Creative Process: Southwest Sentinels Villains
Let’s see if we can get C&A to reveal who they’re planning for the Sentinels’ DE Nemesis to be.
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- Principles deck quick hits
There are 30 of them, so we wouldn’t be able to get more than 1-2 minutes about each. But we could get the character’s name, what their basic deal is, any team they’re on, what’s going on in their art, maybe once sentence about their Disparation issue if it’s been developed, that sort of thing.
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Honestly that might work better as simply an Editor’s Note type question.
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Creative Process: Block Inmates who are neigther human non alien.
Or maybe just more generally
Creative Process: Block Inmates
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Just how many robots and lava-men do you think are locked up in that place?
(Technically the answer really ought to be ‘a nigh infinite number’, since a single prison for all the criminals in a billion billions of billions of billions of universes just doesn’t seem feasible. C&A have never really properly addressed this little knot in their logic.)
76 “other” inmates exactly
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