Podcasts/Episode I-40

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The Letters Page: Editor's Note 40

Original Source


We did this one LIVE! For everyone!

Show Notes:

Run Time: 1:37:15

We had a great time with this one, even in these trying times. You can watch it here!

Upcoming schedule:

  • Tuesday, April 7th: Episode #140 - Writers' Room: Miss Information’s April Fools
  • Tuesday, April 14th: Episode #141 - Writers' Room: A pre-OblivAeon Benchmark story
  • Tuesday, April 21st: Editor’s Note #41
  • Tuesday, April 28th: Episode #142 - Creative Process: The Visionary Supporting Cast

And here's a calendar!

Stay healthy and safe out there, everyone!

Characters Mentioned



  • Post-OblivAeon, could someone travel back in time to before Universe 1 was cut off from the Multiverse and at that point could, say, La Comodora transport that person to other realities? Ok, so they’ve said in the past that it was the Shattering of the Timelines that allows time/reality travel, but there are characters (specifically La Capitan/Comodora) who, due to the nature of their specific power set, can actually time travel within the same reality. Could somebody in Universe 1 travel to before the OblivAeon event in that manner? Using the precedent that before the OblivAeon event, La Comodora became aware of a point which she couldn’t travel forward past (which got her to look into why that was and how to stop it), they think there’s a similar block that would prevent travel the other way as well. There can be little micro-adjustments to time (slowing, speeding, small loops, etc.), but you’re not going to have somebody jump you back 30 years or whatever. At any event, there are no canonical characters in Sentinel Comics who is doing this sort of thing right now, so all of this is just theoretical. That being said, even if La Comodora was around and able to go back, she probably wouldn’t as she wouldn’t want to butterfly effect her way into OblivAeon succeeding (regardless of whether or not she actually could change things, she wouldn’t take the risk). They also don’t want to give the impression that there’s not ever going to be time travel in Sentinel Comics - there’s no way that it would remain off the table for writers forever (plus this whole conversation prompts stuff that both of them want to discuss with one another off-the-air), so there’s probably got to be something that prevents changes to the OblivAeon outcome beyond a moral imperative to not change things. They will say that there is no time travel happening in the pages of Sentinel Comics right now, at this early stage. Anything that looks like it (like in Adam’s RPG games online) is probably actually some kind of localized reality warping that simply presents itself in a “time travel” manner.
  • Regarding heroes coming through the Mist Gates, which of the following is (most) accurate regarding the heroes who were present in the main continuity when the Rook City destruction timeline split happened: 1) since the Mist Gates were connected to OblivAeon all of the alt-universe heroes wound up in Universe 1 when the split occurred since that’s where OblivAeon was (and if so, could some Mist Gates have opened in the new Vertex timeline and allowed that version of our familiar heroes to cross over), 2) the Mist Gate heroes are not tied to OblivAeon, but as they’re not from the timeline that undergoes the split they themselves do not split and so we might have a portion of them in either universe, or 3) when the timeline splits all non-Singular Entities split and so we wind up with copies of any Mist Gate heroes in both timelines (and if so, could both copies have potentially found their way back to their home reality and so now there’s two of them there)? They think it’s something between options 1 and 2. The Mist Gate heroes don’t get split, but they’re here to fight OblivAeon and so they stay where OblivAeon is at that point in the story. Because the Mist Gates are not automatically sending people to their home reality afterwards, it would be possible for some of the Mist Gate heroes to have wound up in the Vertex timeline later on, but not as part of the split effect itself. The Mist Gates were a “fire and forget” thing to get people to the fight and they’re not really being controlled for anything after that part of the process. Getting home is tricky and/or a matter of luck more than anything you can reliably control.
  • How successful were La Comodora and Chrono-Ranger in hunting down other versions of La Capitan? Very… as far as they know they cleaned it all up. We know (from the story they told in Episode 107) that at least one is still out there.
  • In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, did Sentinel Comics ever do special issues for the holiday? Definitely. Probably something were Wager Master shows up painted green (he could just make himself green, but no he just covers himself with paint or something). Guise and Setback are also good candidates for a St. Patrick’s Day issue.
  • What if La Capitan went to the future before OblivAeon happened (causing the barrier that La Comodora couldn’t get past) and was therefore stuck there - would she still be around? This is highly theoretical, but unfortunately also gets into stuff they can’t talk about now. Sorry.
  • Which heroes and villains are most affected by social distancing? Absolute Zero in that his entire existence post-accident is enforced social distancing, but that means that the current reasons for everybody doing it don’t really affect him much; he’s both the most and least affected depending how you look at it. Beyond that, maybe the Dark Watch team? They’re really tight-knit, but that means they’d probably just quarantine together. It’s probably difficult for Tachyon because she’s used to going everywhere and doing everything and now she has to just stay put? She’s also a scientist and so understands the full extent/ramifications of her going out - so she would follow the rules, but it would bother her.
    • Citizens of the Sun (either they all get it or none of them get it)? They’re pretty isolated already; the question would be whether they’d make a point of getting it now while everybody else is dealing with it or wait it out and run the risk of getting it once the rest of the world has mostly gotten a handle on it. Nobody’s really bringing the fight to them anyway, though, so they’re basically on their own timeline for this kind of thing.
  • Did Sentinel Comics ever do a Magical Girl comic as part of a licensed property? Violet Heart [Maggie’s RPG character from their live streams] is a magical girl. They’ve talked about there being anime/manga-verse stuff out there. They’ve even got it established that there were Japanese comics - unlicensed at first, but there are Sentinels manga out there.
  • Which hero would be most likely to be used by Sentinel Comics to do a PSA about germs? Tachyon because she’s a scientist. Legacy because he’s Legacy.
  • Would the Hakas be something like “Dual Entities” (compared to Singular Entities)? Well, the term applies because there are only two of them in the Multiverse, but it’s not like they’re at the scale of what Singular Entities are (the fact that they’re unique beings is only part of the designation; there’s also a lot of power/connection stuff that goes into it). That being said, the Hakas are far more powerful than they know.
  • Can Proletariat create copies of himself that wouldn’t have, say, a virus that the original had been infected with? Viruses and whatnot are also copied.
  • [They’re moving on to Questions about Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game, but it’s worth noting that they’ve made the Starter Kit PDFs available for free, along with the already-free “Stolen Legacy” and “Urban Infestation” adventures. Go grab the Roll20 service or the GMnitron Discord bot to facilitate online play and get started playing together, from a distance! They also say they’re in the “home stretch” in terms of getting the core book finalized.]
  • When running the Starter Kit, I had a player playing Legacy who tried to remove spider-bots from Akash’Flora using an Overcome to brute strength his way through the problem, but the scenario dictates that this is not a way to resolve the issue (the heroes are supposed to find the “mothership” that’s producing them), but having more bots show up after he successfully cleared them seems like “taking away his success” which shouldn’t happen; how would you guys have handled it? Is it up to the GM to decide what kinds of solutions can or can’t work for a given situation? Is a successful Overcome check always automatically a valid solution? It’s not always a valid solution - that scenario in particular, for example, dictated that you can’t solve the problem without discovering the source of the spider-bots. Rather than just being “you have discovered that clearing them doesn’t solve the problem” as the reward for the successful overcome, maybe it should be “you have discovered that clearing them doesn’t solve the problem, because they keep coming from those eggs that are being laid by the mothership over there.” Use their success as a means to have them discover the source of the problem as their contribution to the forward progress of the story. If something is truly impossible, they’ll often stop their players to say as much. So maybe you could also interrupt their action with something like “You don’t know. It seems like there’s just more and more of the darned things coming up from the water” as a clue that maybe their action isn’t going to do something, but still in a character-focused way in that it’s something the character would get the impression of, so that the player doesn’t waste their turn. So, either make their success still worth something or preempt their attempt ahead of time with a reason why it won’t work. A success doesn’t mean that they’ve solved the entire situation, but they are working towards that solution.
  • The rules for Mods say that they affect the single Effect Die that’s being used in the action taken; but what if there are multiple effects that are keyed on the same Effect Die (say, you Overcome with Mid, but also take a Minor Twist that you lose health equal to your Mid)? Does the Mod get applied for every effect or is it only applied to one? It gets split off for every effect. Like, the physical die number isn’t being changed, so if you have one Ability that has you do some Action with your Mid, but then you also use a Reaction that keys off of the Mid, a Bonus would only be applied to one of those two things leaving the unaltered die value in place for the remaining one.
  • You have to declare that you’re using a Bonus before your roll, but when do you declare which Effect Die you’re applying the Bonus to? Like, if you declare that you’re using a +2 Bonus on a Blinding Strike, do you also have to declare if you’re applying it to the Min or the Mid ahead of time, or can you see the results first? You get to pick where it goes after the roll, as long as you say you’re using it before the roll. It gets some strategic use if one Effect Die is doing an Overcome and you can see whether or not the Bonus would bump you up into a new category of success or not - if it wouldn’t you don’t need to “waste” your bonus on that effect if you have something else you can put it towards on the roll.
  • How should I handle a player who made a character with the Principle of Whispers (Overcome a situation using knowledge that you have no way of knowing) but then metagames it by actively refusing to learn anything about what’s going on so that everything is something they don’t know about (to the point of plugging their ears to avoid hearing exposition)? How often/strict is the Principle of Whispers supposed to work - if you have friends who could tell you about what’s going on, would that prevent the whispers from working? How about just having the capacity to track down a lead? Ok, so if you’ve got a player being actively negative at the table, that’s a problem. If the character’s in a room getting some exposition from the mayor and the player plugs their ears and goes “lalalala” to not hear it, that’s fine. Whispers can’t be invokes because the character was there and, even if they weren’t paying attention, their friends were and so are able to fill him in on the situation (getting by the “no way of knowing” aspect of whispers). You’re under no real obligation to do the exposition again for that player if you feel like making a point about their behavior. [They do a fun roleplay of how this plays out from around 38:15 through 39:00.] The other thing to do would be to take that player aside at some point and have the “do you want to be part of this” conversation, because the way they’re acting is to metagame by not being part of the game, which seems like a weird way to go about things. If the point of the game is for everybody to make wacky gimmicky characters and everyone is on-board with this kind of thing, that’s different, but in a mostly straight game, this is just poor behavior. Now, beyond all of that metagame stuff we have the fact that the Whispers aren’t controlled by the player, they’re controlled by the GM. Depending on the nature of these Whispers, they might have their own agenda or something and the character maybe shouldn’t be leaning on them that heavily lest something terrible happen down the road. They don’t have to be adversarial - Time-Slinger has this Principle to represent CON’s presence and that’s a friendly relationship - but then again there was Adam’s character Starblight whose Whispers weren’t his friend at all. All of that being said, the vast majority of negative table experiences like this come down to people not being on the same page in terms of why they’re at the table in the first place. The core book will have a sizable section regarding how to set and manage expectations with everybody who’s playing.
  • Which Sentinel Comics book was popular in black and white reprints in Britain, only to be cancelled in the States and reimagined as a “new” character in the UK, only to eventually be imported back into Sentinel Comics continuity later? This sounds like a trivia question and you have somebody in mind. Have we given the impression that this is true for a particular character? Sorry we don’t have anything in mind. [This was my question in the chat which was prompted by the discussion earlier about the Japanese market and manga tie-ins, but I didn’t get it in during that round of “questions from the chat” and so it’s a bit out of place here. That discussion had gotten me thinking about Fawcett Comics’ Captain Marvel and its re-imagining as the “original” character of Marvelman in the UK after Fawcett was forced to cease publishing their book. I didn’t have a particular Sentinel Comics character in mind. Maybe something in the History of Sentinel Comics book will be along these lines.]
  • Did the Bloodsworn gladiator team The Lucky Number Seven (from Episode 128) survive OblivAeon? At least some of them did.
  • If a player character becomes a villain, should I just try to adapt the hero sheet (swapping out Principles for Masteries or whatever) or would it be better to just use the Hero sheet as a reference when building a Villain version from scratch by the normal process? The mechanics for Heroes and Villains are (intentionally) not one-to-one and so just lifting the hero abilities and tweaking them a bit isn’t really recommended. Using the Hero as a reference when going through the Chapter 5 Villain build process and looking for things that fit thematically is probably a better way to approach it.
  • If Proletariat sneezes hard enough, could that result in a copy being created? Not in itself, but if it was a violent enough sneeze that he stumbled into something or banged his head that could do it indirectly. It’d have to be quite the bit of slapstick to get that to happen, though. It’s not like getting slapped in the face would trigger an involuntary duplicate. However, if he’s concentrating on making a duplicate the threshold is lower. If he wants to make a clone, a slap or a particularly violent sneeze could be enough.
  • Do you have a particular Power Source (in the RPG sense) that you imagine Omegas falling into? Nothing definitive in their heads ready to go. They’d probably have to consult the list to say “this is the one”, but as is often the case when building a character, there isn’t necessarily “one way” to do it. As such, Experimentation, Accident, Radiation, or even Unknown work just fine (we, the readers/players know what Omegas are and how they work, but that’s not really something known about in-setting). [I note that in the Power Sources episode they had called out Radiation as being a good option for Omegas, but again, that doesn’t rule out whatever else you want to use that makes sense for the character.]
  • Is there a way for my Pouch Beast trainer character (as a Minion Maker) to have a roster of specific minions that he uses? Yeah. Just say that every time you “make” a certain type of minion that it’s the same unique being. [Now we have another new meta-verse IP to go along with Our Tiny Horsies and Shear Force.]
  • Is there a reason that the Training and Genius Power Sources are so similar in terms of Power choices and Abilities? They’re both more mundane Power Sources in general. The ways they diverge are still useful/interesting and so they remain distinct, but that’s why they’re similar.
  • Can Proletariat be incapacitated by forcing him to make a lot of clones and then separating them so that they can’t join up again? You can incapacitate Proletariat just by making him make a lot of clones. There’s a RPG Starter Kit scenario that touches on that. Physically separating them so that he can’t get his mind back would definitely work, but it’s also a really mean thing to do.
  • What art style is the RPG book going to be? As Adam’s art has evolved he’s talked about redoing some stuff (in other styles even), but does the RPG art we’ve seen represent the “current” style in Sentinel Comics generally? Was there a Japanese/Anime influence in the ’00s? The art for the book is modern, with a few outliers, and is meant to be the “current year” or whatnot. The Anime influence in comics came in in the ’90s and never really went away. That’s not to say that comics are just Anime/Manga art, just that the influence came in and aspects of that style got adopted and further evolved into the mainstream style.
  • If Fanatic hates ghosts, what does she think of Muerto? Have they interacted before/will they eventually? [This is an incredibly entertaining letter from around 50:25 to 56:30 where they argue about it] The basics are that Christopher’s opinion is that Thiago died and is now in a spirit form, and that makes him a ghost. Adam posits that “He’s a collection of electrical impulses.” “So are you!” For the sake of argument, if we assume that Muerto is a ghost, is Re-Volt a ghost too? He’s also (by the time of the RPG) disembodied electricity, so is that the same thing? Muerto died and remembers dying, but Re-Volt doesn’t think about what happened to him in that way. Re-Volt makes a really good point of comparison for the “Muerto is a ghost” angle: Re-Volt went from being a series of electrical impulses that were in a body like normal to being a series of electrical impulses that didn’t really need a body. Muerto was killed and then all of the cosmic/magic/etc. weirdness in his circumstances brought him back as a spirit that has the ability to interface with electronics without being the electrical impulses himself. Adam still thinks that from Fanatic’s perspective there’s some spiritual aspect of “ghosts” that isn’t in play with Muerto. Christopher thinks that she might lie to herself to try to make an exception for him to justify not smiting him. Adam thinks that the cosmic magic weirdness that created him is different enough from your standard “ghost reasons”. “It’s ultimately just semantics.” “It definitely is. Welcome to The Letters Page.” It’s not like Muerto is here for unfinished business and once he gets that done he’s gone. “Are you certain?” Christopher follows that up with the fact that Thiago wanted to be a hero, he never got the chance in life, and so now he’s doing so as a ghost. On the spectrum of ghosts, he’s definitely a far outlier due to the circumstances of his origin, but he’s a ghost, and he’s tormented by his desire to be a hero. Adam really comes down on the side that it’s all just the Space Magic nonsense, but Christopher doesn’t think that just anybody would have come back in this circumstance (in fact, a lot of people died in the Freedom Tower destruction, but he was the only ghost), Thiago’s personality/desires factor into his return. As such, Christopher still thinks that Fanatic would probably still have a problem with him. She just really hates the unliving. Re-Volt may have had his physical form destroyed, but he didn’t die and she can wrap her head around the difference as you are not your physical form. Muerto died and came back. Other people might be able to vouch for him to keep her from smiting him, but that’s probably also true of other ghosts too. Like if Argent Adept, NightMist, and Ra were to stand up for some random ghost that was helping them, they could probably deflect her (while keeping an eye on it).
  • Since Fanatic hates goats [a reference to a case where they misspoke “ghost” as “goat” at one point in the past discussion on her hating ghosts], but she’s generally a pretty serious character, have there been any funny stories with her dealing with a goat? Not so much funny, but the kind of story that would happen would be her dealing with a goat demon of some sort. Like, it’s a goat but then it stands up to reveal itself as Baphomet or something.
  • Would it be possible for a powerful character to “ascend” to become a Host spirit (for example, could NightMist have pulled that off)? It could be theoretically possible but it’s not something they’ve codified. The way that they’d invent for it would be for somebody to so completely embody an emotion so that your spirit is one with that thing and then do a ritual (or have some other weird nonsense happen) to actually make the transfer to the Host. It’s not like the Host is “heaven” or an afterlife in general, but you could engineer a means of getting there.
  • How long does the “Haunted Fanatic” arc last? Does it affect her relationships with other heroes (like the Prime Wardens)? Does it help her develop her own humanity and/or change her outlook on ghosts? Christopher, off the cuff, thinks it lasts maybe just shy of a decade, while Adam thinks it’s a maximum of two years. It wasn’t just a storyline, but a long-lasting change to the status quo for the character, so it might come down to how long that sort of change tended to stick in that era of comics and what kind of timeline of events they’ve already got in the spreadsheet at this point. They want to talk about this more, but they’re saving it as a topic until October/November.
  • What are some of the random things that Fanatic can “just do” without much explanation (like reaching into the Void to rescue Argent Adept)? It’s not like there’s a list, but it would happen (“common” may be too frequent a term, but not really uncommon) when she’d just do a thing, people would question if she could always do that or whatever, and she’d reply with something along the lines of “It needed to be done so I did it.” Early on, that was handwaved away by her angelic powers and later just as the weirdness that goes along with her being from the Host.
  • How would an EMP affect Muerto and Re-Volt? It would just kick Muerto out of whatever electronics he was inhabiting at the time, but it could potentially “kill” Re-Volt (he’s a recurring villain - it’d dissipate him and take him out of whatever situation he was in, heroes could assume he’d been killed by that, but then he’d probably just show up again later after recovering/re-forming elsewhere; it has the potential to really kill him just like a bullet has the potential to kill Baron Blade).
  • If Fanatic would potentially smite Muerto for being a ghost, what would she think of ghost-haunting-his-own-zombie Mr. Fixer? She would hate that thing. Like, she knows these people [Dark Watch], but that thing is an abomination.
  • In reference to Hell dimensions, how does Fanatic think about them? How does she feel about non-Apostate demonic beings? Fanatic thinks that “hell” is a place that bad people/things go to/come from. Demons are beings that are from hell. Cut and dry. “Her worldview is not particularly nuanced.” Also, a lot of how people generally think about hell come more from things like Paradise Lost than from the bible, and that kind of translates to how Fanatic’s view on things shows up in comics.
  • [Andy in the chat]: How can Fanatic automatically hate everything that's died and come back; that describes Jesus? It's not just the coming back, but the how. If she believes that something has been sent back by God, that's obviously going to be ok because according to her belief system anything done by Him is by definition ok.
  • Rules question: if Writhe has “Caliginous Form” in play and has 3 damage coming his way, is the target after the redirection taking a hit for 1 or 3? The new target takes 1, the redirect happens after the damage reduction.
  • When Fanatic pulls off one of those “out of the ordinary Fanatic stuff” things, is there some kind of special visual effect? We’ve seen some glowing “holy symbols” in her deck, could some other magic user replicate these holy effects using these symbols? The power signature comes from the way she believes her magic works. Some effects have cross shapes not because the cross shape is intrinsic to the effect she’s producing, but because she believes that her holy might would manifest using the power of the Cross as a signature. Somebody copying the runes on Absolution wouldn’t get power from the runes, the “power” of the runes actually comes from Fanatic herself (and her connection to the Host). This is separate from the effect that crosses and whatnot have on Vampires, though, as they are sensitive to items of faith in general and so is broader than just the stuff that Fanatic’s doing.
  • Where did Fright Train get his love of trains? He just likes them.
  • How would the regression darts work on Fanatic? They would work and take away her powers. However, the reason they’d work on her is because she believes that they work on her. The regression darts (in the narrative rather than simple game mechanics) are something to “take away powers”. That can mean temporarily weakening the person and their powers. It can mean completely erasing their powers. It takes things to the extent that is demanded by the story being written at the time.
  • How does ’80s Parse treat cops in Rook City given the whole “corrupt cop” thing in Rook City? Her story isn’t one where she’s like crusading against the corruption in the force, but she’s definitely killed dirty cops. If she’s taking out people at a drug den or something and some of the people reveal that they’re cops, that’s not going to stop her from murdering all of the criminals there (a category that includes the dirty cops after all).
  • Wouldn’t gangs start putting two and two together once this guy with no left hand joins a gang the rest of that gang winds up murdered in short order and become wary of him/“take care of” him? You’re assuming some kind of gang message board where stuff like this handless guy joining up would get posted so that others would know that he even existed. Sure, there’s probably a story eventually where Lefty gets in trouble because a gang has noticed this going on. Then there’s the options for disguises or a prosthesis.
  • Were there any plans (by editors, writers, etc.) to make Lefty and Parse a couple? How far along in the process did that get? Were there any shippers in the fandom? Definitely shippers. You just can’t stop that. They don’t really know how long he was even around (other than “at least a few years”) and how many writers would even have been involved in that time. There might be something developed at some point where he’s kind of got Stockholm Syndrome, but it’s only that as a one-sided thing. He’s just a tool for her to use. These are dark and dire stories without a lot of room for love. Even the amount of care he has for her is framed as part of the dire situation where he feels compelled to continue to help this horrible person do horrible things and not just skip town.
  • How long does brutal murderer Parse stick around before getting a revamp? Does she use any kind of martial arts or just the bow? She doesn’t appear to have a quiver, so does she use some arrow-in-hand fast-paced movement style of archery or more modern styles? She has a quiver. Some artists would have done a back and others a side quiver (and it probably wasn’t infrequent for them to neglect to include one either). People have probably had to run in somewhere with a few arrows in hand, shoot some people, and then grab those arrows out of the bodies as she ran past so she could reuse them. She’s not so much martial arts. Like, her deal is precision, evasion, and stealth. If somebody jumped out right in front of her with his dukes up, she’d be more likely to just shoot them point blank. She’d get beat in a fistfight and she knows it and wouldn’t use the bow to hit somebody. How long was she like this? Not long - she shows up in the ’80s and by the early ’90s had already started to reform. So, at most she was a murderer for 10 years, but she also wasn’t a consistent presence in comics over that whole stretch. Also, most of her crimes are in Rook City, and Rook City is notorious for not keeping good criminal records.
  • How dark did the ’80s actually get for Sentinel Comics (prostitution, drug use, strip clubs, etc.)? How much is implied rather than shown? Did Mystery Comics get to Sin City levels of sleaze and violence? Well, due to the Comics Code, it would pretty much all have to be implied. However, you can go a long way with implication. Even then, all of the ’80s aren’t dark like that. Mystery Comics certainly is and hits its grimdark peak in the late ’80s/early ’90s.
  • Will we ever get to see covers for the issues that you did story treatments for before Writers Room episodes became an official thing? Adam would love to draw covers for all the thousands of comics that they have said exist, but time is the limiting factor. If he gets a chance he would like to do covers for those issues, but we’ll have to see.
  • [In the honor of Adam’s new baby, there are a bunch of Sentinel Comics dad jokes from 1:18:27 through 1:19:38.]
  • We have Thiago, Young Legacy, Idealist, and Unity for younger heroes/sidekicks, but that’s a relatively small roster; was there an editorial mandate that largely prohibited teen heroes/sidekicks or do they just not factor into the large crossover events that SotM is meant to model? The latter. They think the ratio of young/teen heroes to adult ones is about right, but there are also a lot of minor characters in Sentinel Comics that just never make it into SotM in the first place and most of the younger heroes fall into that category. They really only show the A-list heroes. I mean, you get the Sentinels which seem like D-listers when compared to the others in the game, but they’re really more like B-list overall. Things easily go down to D or E for characters that would never rate appearances in SotM-level events.
  • Any other teenagers out there that would have served as inspiration for things like the Neo-fighers show? Did Kid Cosmic ever make the leap from animation to the comics like Unity? Any sidekicks ever get in over their head to the point where they were killed? Kid Cosmic was unique to the show other than the animated universe tie-in comics outside of the mainline continuity. There were teen sidekicks and whatnot around, but Sentinel Comics is very different from DC and Marvel in a bunch of ways, and that’s one of them; they never had a teen-hero/sidekick focus like those companies did. That being said, post-OblivAeon they add things like Freedom Academy to introduce more of them in modern comics and we get things like Daybreak as the first real notable “teen team”. Any such things in the past would have been really cringe-inducing 50-year-old-trying-to-write-teenager stuff that didn’t do well.
  • [At the suggestion of MindWanderer they pull up and listen to the clip of the “mummy voice” that researchers produced by scanning and 3D printing the voicebox of a mummy that they mentioned in episode 134. This is from about 1:23:00 to 1:25:00 - they’re underwhelmed, but think that might be part of the trap of the mummy’s curse.]
  • Permission to call team-villain Ambuscade “Glambuscade”? Granted.
  • How do you keep track of new stories that you make up (like how they thought of the name “Luminary”, didn’t write it down, and then had to go through the process of thinking it up again later on)? When you make stuff up in a podcast, do you write it up separately or just bookmark that episode? They’re a lot better about writing stuff down now (although they did just make some stuff up earlier that day that they still need to record somewhere). They generally use a series of Google Docs these days. Christopher has a bunch of notebooks too, but their purpose is to hold things until they get uploaded to the Google Docs rather than being the copy. Their problem is that they’re pretty much constantly inventing things when they talk. Another problem on the original point that they still have, however, is that one of them will think of something, the other will say “that’d be great for [project down the line a while]”, but then they don’t write it down until they’re working on that project. Don’t do that. Write things down now even if its for a thing later.
  • If you could have one story arc (besides OblivAeon) that could be real print comics, what would it be? Christopher thinks either some Baron Blade thing, but it’s real tempting to do Baptism by Fire. Adam just wants a run of consecutive issues of a comic, like Freedom Five or whatever, during the mid ’90s that’s between the big crossover events. Just 6 issues of the normal monthly comic stories. Maybe the Dark Watch #1-6 arc they did a while back.
  • Do Hugh Lowsely and Paul Parsons know all the dad jokes? Nobody can know them all. [This prompts some additional dad jokes from 1:29:20 through 1:29:50.]
  • [Rabit writes in a heartfelt letter of thanks to close things out today starting at around 1:30:29. He addressed it to Paul as well and he comes in when he hears his name through the wall of the office. It’s worth listening to.]