http://www.bloodforthebaron.com/phpBB2/ ... .php?t=794
Seemed a shame the guy who started it gave up on the idea partly because the devils due stuff wasn't staying true to the original joe stuff. I thought this quote from a Larry Hama interview on Yo Joe was apt:
http://www.yojoe.com/faq/hama/hama07.shtmlHave you read any of America's Elite over the past 2 years as a point of research for the stories you want to tell?
LH: Not a lot. I don't read a lot of comics, and I never have. I had never read any of the Wolverine material when I was asked to write that title. I asked the editor to sift through the chaff and just give me what were the essentials, so it was a short stack. Mostly Claremont, Miller and Barry Smith. I figured they were the best, so treated their stories as the canon and pretty much ignored the rest. That's how I work with Devil's Due. I say, "send me over the stuff that counts." What's the point of sticking to continuity if part of the continuity doesn't cut it? Sometimes I would write a Wolverine story and the editor (or one of X-Boys in the office) would point out that some writer so-and-so had written a story in the Giant Man-Thing Annual that contradicted my plot line, and I would go look up the story, and if it was totally ass-kicking, I'd change mine, but if it totally bit it, I would say, "but it is major sucky! Let's lose this office copy and pretend it never happened!" Characters get better if creative juices are let to flow freely. Stick to the canon but sweep the mistakes out the door.
I think the beauty of these alternate worlds is imagination - the comic/cartoon/audio story/etc none of them is a definitve account of what happened or is happening in the joe universe they're just starting points - how many games did you play as a kid that followed "the rules" laid out in the comic? I know I didn't - my figure that drove the SAS Panther had his own codename and was a kind of cross between red jackyl and storm shadow so what if the data card said he was stalker!
I think some kind of broadly agreed timeline linking the AF and joes would be really cool. What seaneley outlined in the post that started this feels like a good starting point for me, for example the idea that Red Jackal could not be the real Destro really appeals to me - maybe the guys who created Jackyl worked for MARS and based the face mask on their boss?! Having a common timeline would be cool as a starting point for folk to write stories that fill in the gaps, create their own characters, etc - but it doesn't have to remain completely fixed like mr Hama says "Stick to the canon but sweep the mistakes out the door."
What do others think?
