Welcome
back (and happy new year , it's been a while!). The only thing I've done
recently for the mod is update the script. Issue #7 is 99% complete and I've
moved around some scenes to previous issues (as I mentioned I would in my
previous blog). With the story fresh in my mind, I thought I'd write a little
about that.
I'm an old school DC Comics fan, so I remember comics costing 35 cents and buying them at a newspaper stand. I'm not quite as ancient as you're thinking right now, but yeah I've seen all sorts of versions of our favorite heroes. That's partly why I don't go too crazy anymore when DC launches one of their reboots. I sure used to get annoyed! But with hindsight, I now find it interesting how people yearn for 90s versions of characters - the same versions that were being complained about after Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Not that I don't like the 90s characters. No, in fact, my mod is based on the 90s Morrison-era JLA because I loved that era for the team (along with many other JLA eras). That being said, as a DC old-timer, I longed for the days of the multiverse.
What's that grampa?, you're thinking. ... Multiverse !?, the freakin multiverse is all over DC these days! "52", "New 52", "Multiversity", etc. Well, it wasn't that way when I did the mod. At that point (2003 or so), DC had flirted with the idea again - anyone else remember Hypertime? , but there was still only 1 DC Universe (yeah there were Elseworlds, but let's put those aside for a sec)
When FF Modding was starting to get going, someone named Mahu posted on the FF forums asking for a coder to help him do a JLA mod. I jumped at the chance as I loved the JLA comic and I really wanted to force myself to learn FF modding. Mahu (don't think he's active anymore) gave me just a basic outline - invasion by Darkseid, big 7 heroes - Go! I wrote the basic script, he added a few lines and contributed some early skins and off we went. He kind of dropped out of the community after Issue #3 or so, but I do owe him thanks for starting me on the road.
I loved working on the JLA mod and started writing the scripts for several issues into the future. By 2004, I had written 1-7, which completed the "Pawns of Darkness" story arc. I had plot outlines and about 30% the dialog of 5 other issues for a follow-up called the "The Annihilation Agenda". And I had outlined about another 40 issues with just bullet points, characters, and very rough storylines. There's one particular 3-issue arc which I really loved ("Colour of your Dreams") that I still wish I could snap my fingers and it would be done. Believe it or not, there was a main idea to the whole thing , though, and it was this - Multiverse.
I wanted to bring back the idea of parallel worlds and the characters on them. I wasn't sure yet about Earth-1 and Earth-2. The whole "legacy" thing that DC setup with the Golden-Age characters existing on the same earth as the JLA was brilliantly used in books like JSA, so I wasn't sure I should mess with that (I'm still not sure). But Earth 3, Earth 4, Earth-X, Earth-S, etc. - for me it was time to get them all back and do something with them.
And "Pawns of Darkness" was setting it all up, story-wise. I saw it as my own fanfic, where although I started at a certain point and status quo in the DCU, I didn't have to leave thngs as they were. I never really said anything about it - till now. The only reason I'm saying anything about it now is because DC has gone on to do many of the things I wanted to do in the mod (which is why I made the crack about Johns and Morrison spying on my hard drive - more likely we're all part of a DC "hive-mind" :) )
In the years since my last mod release (Issue #6), DC has:
All these (and more) are things in my 40-50 issue plan, penned over a decade ago. I guess I was recreating the DCU as I wanted to see it. Since I stopped modding however, DC beat me to it. (Other than the New 52, not too happy about a lot of that, but hey maybe Convergence will provide some fixes :) )
While it started as a JLA mod, my multiverse ideas started to really expand this as I added more and more characters (sometimes just for 1 mod issue). The JLA and their overall storyline. would always be at the center of the mod, but it wouldn't always have them as the main stars of a specific issue. I had the chance to tell "other stories" with other characters once in a while. Still not clear on how this will turn out, but we'll see ...