Doug McCrae

Re: Re: It's not easy being iconic Do you think Buffy is the current bearer of the 'strongman' mantle? The Hercules of the modern age.

It's not easy being iconic It's not easy creating iconic characters. If any one of us could do it whenever we wanted, we'd be making millions in Hollywood right now. Many of the great comicbook characters - Superman, Batman, Captain America, Captain Marvel - rose out of the Golden Age when 5 new superheroes would be invented every week and the cream rose to the top. No one knows you do it for sure, except maybe Stan Lee and his great period of character creation was very brief. Four years at most, in which almost all of Marvel's iconic characters were created - Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men. For ordinary folks like ourselves and the good people at Hero, I think Busiek and Alan Moore have shown the way in Astro City and Supreme. You steal. You gotta, there's no other way. Take the essence of the character and muck around a bit with the superficial elements. Samaritan's from another time instead of another planet. Supreme got his powers from a meteor. You'll notice also that neither writer changed the name that much either.

I'm the opposite - invariably I buy a comic for the writer. I haven't bought an issue of Avengers since the end of Busiek's run.

Re: Re: Non-alpabetical ordering My thinking is that the best place for the Soon To Be 6000 Project is as a website in its own right or perhaps as part of a website containing resources for superhero gamers. The name list on this putative site could, but would not necessarily have to be, database driven. Everyone would be able to access this as the end product seen by the user, whether driven by a database or not, would be HTML pages. You're right that every name could probably fit within many different categories so the user would see a long list of buttons with all these, click the one required eg. 'Fire' and get all the fire names. Alternatively he/she might click 'Energy Projector' and would get a much longer list. I've seen something similar with a list of gods from many cultures, ordered by category e.g. War, Fertility, etc. A damn useful resource for we gamers. The url is http://web.archive.org/web/20011012083319/raven.cybercom.com/~grandpa/chapter6.html

Non-alpabetical ordering It seems to me that in order to make this list into a really useful resource it would have to be ordered in other ways. Alphabetical is useful to determine if a name already exists but people needing a character name are not going to particularly want one begining with 'S'. I propose two other kinds of ordering: 1) Power base - Categories could include Fire/Heat, Cold, Animals, Weapons and the like. 2) Period - Golden Age, Silver Age, modern. This would be hard work though, I have to admit. The list of names I keep on my own PC could really do with such ordering but I've always put it off as too much effort. Of course the longer I leave it, the harder the job becomes.