How I do things around here...
The site mission:
- To present accurate and sober information on fictional characters and worlds.
- To become a major source of information on the Internet. The objective is Alexa.com's top 100,000.
- To get information on fictional characters presented as a cultural object across the borders. The goal is to have a distribution of visitors across the World that reflects the distribution of Internet access.
Values:
- All info is based on reliable sources, e.g. original publications and interviews. Rumors and hearsays may be added but will be pointed out as a rumor or hearsay.
- No character is more important than others. Some are more popular than others and/or have more story/background than others, but all characters and publishers will be treated with equal respect.
- Diversity is king. As the opportunities becomes available and time allows it, the characters presented here will represent the widest range possible in terms of genre, country/culture of origin, media and age.
- Keep it clean. The objective is to tell about the characters and make them look cool and interesting on their own terms, not ragging on the characters, creators, artists, or series.
- Language barriers should be broken down as much as possible. Removing the barriers completely is impossible at the moment, but by faithfully translating the pages to other languages, it is possible to remove some of them.
- Relevant links to the publisher, non-profit organizations/fan sites etc., will be added to the pages. If you find the character interesting, it makes sense to be able to find the publisher so you can buy the books or find other people who are interested in the same character.
- Relevant links to similar characters will be added to the pages. If you like a character/series, there may be similar characters or stories from other publishers that you might enjoy.
- While this is not a professional site (I do this in my spare time), it is and will continue to be based on the principles for best practice for Internet sites. Programming, safety and communication is just as much of an art as writing and drawing, and is treated with the same care and respect.
- This is not a politically correct site. You can't please everyone, and someone somewhere in the World is going to be offended by something on the site. Showing the characters as they are, take precedence over anyone's sensitive feelings. I will on the other hand not show anything that has been created just to pick a fight (like the Mohammed cartoons from Jyllandsposten), or created to fund some war or illegal activity unless it is of historical value (e.g. comic or cartoons from WWII or the Cold War), and graphics with a violent or explicit sexual content will be equipped with a warning sign, if they can't be avoided.
Structuring of the information:
The information on the pages is highly structured, as this is how I work. The information is devided into two separate groups, the "in continuity" information and the background/bibliographic information.
The "in continuity" information is the information relating to the character in the stories. This is things like known family, date of birth, and what they do for a living in the stories. In this part is also the important parts of the character's history like origin for super-heroes, if they get married or something happens that affects the general continuity in the stories. This includes keeping track of the various retcons. The history is arranged chronological to the character's time line, not the date of publication. The history is strictly limited to the information relevant to continuity for two reasons: Information overload and not ruining the experience for those who want to read or watch the stories.
The background/bibliographic information is the real world so to speak.
Character selection:
One of the things that really annoyed me about projects like the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe was the lack of supporting characters. Imagine Superman or Spider-Man without a supporting cast. It would never work... On the other hand space is clearly a problem. In an ordinary comic book you can portray around 20 characters depending on the size of the book and how much space you use on each character. The supporting cast on Spider-Man alone would easily be four issues. At the same time, source books don't sell all that well which is why almost nothing was published between 1997 and 2004. Marvel started doing some specialized handbooks in 2004 with at least some of the supporting characters and DC is publishing a little as a part of their Secret Files & Origins books, but it's a far cry from the old days with source books. On a site like this, the limitations in space are not as severe and additional space on servers is cheap.
The order in which I do the characters is partially random. It has been important for me to start with the lesser known characters to avoid doing what everyone else is doing. There are hundreds of pages with Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and all those major character, so me using time on those characters does no really add anything new to our knowledge and understanding of these characters. I'll do some work on them along the way, it's just not my main focus.
Names:
Usually projects like this one list the characters by their codename. Also, if there has been more than one with the same codename like Captain America they are usually given the suffix I, II, III, etc. I have three major reasons for NOT doing this. 1: Sometimes the suffix is really the name. There are three characters called Sentinel that I know of. They would be called Sentinel I, Sentinel II and Sentinel III. Unfortunately Sentinel II is an actual name for a character related to one of the Sentinels, what would I call him? 2: Some characters use the same codename more than once. I know of eight characters with the codename Starman. Of these, Starman II and Starman VI (in chronological order) is the same character at different points in continuity. Which number is the right one to use? And 3: IT IS NOT THE CHARACTER'S NAME!!!
The art:
I can't draw very well yet. At the moment I am able to draw simple characters and make them look right. The process I use for the site usually looks something like this:
1. I find a useful picture and scan it. Often the original picture is very small, or lacks details or parts because it is hidden behind other objects. On the picture of Pappy Poopdeck here, the stance is good, but he's looking in the wrong direction compared to where is body is pointing. At this point I also scale up the picture, so it's easier to work with the details.
2. The first thing I do is add and/or remove the details I want or don't want, or in this case flip the body while keeping the head still to make Pappy look right. Sometimes the picture is composed from several pictures, and from time to time I transfer the picture to paper to make a pencil and paper drawing to get the details right. It's always a good idea to see if you can actually make the picture look the way you want, before the actual inking process.
3. From here on, it's just a matter of retracing the picture. I like having a thin inking of the pictures, which often leaves room for some nice details. If I'm adding things like a missing hand or foot, I make a point of studying how the artists draw the object on other pictures to get the right shape and feel on my addition. The finished picture is always done in black and white.
4. When the black and white picture is done, I put some color on. Here I look at the original pictures. I try to get the original feel of the pictures rather than the original colors used. The paper often changes the coloring, so using the original colors, makes the coloring look wrong on the white background on the computer. It's the same problem they have with reprints going from the original brownish paper to modern stark white paper. Using the original colors or the colors in the originals is a matter of personal taste. I happen to like getting the feeling of the original coloring from when I read the comics.
Some times, as can be seen on pictures of Karbunkle to the right, some of the pictures requires a bit more modification than others, and with no color guide, I have to make a guess when I add color.
It takes a long time to do the pictures this way and it would be much faster to just scan a picture, but I want this site to be my work, as much as possible, and I want the pictures to be as cool as possible. The characters I can't draw yet, I try to get the best possible picture from whatever source is available to me.
The references:
Wherever it has been possible, I have put in the references. Some of the information I have is from Danish publications, which means that I don't know the original publication name, issue etc. The use of references is both a way of keeping track on where I have the information from and for letting the readers know where to look if they want to read the stories.
The information:
I have tried to stick to the written facts... or the equivalent in films. If there are things, which I have deducted from what I have read, it should be clear in the text. There is the distinct possibility of wrong information due to bad translations. For some reason Danish translations are really bad. A part of the problem is in the Danish language, but some, like Harry Potter's magic wand being made from a feather from a phoenix in English and from a double chimera horn (whatever that might be) in Danish, is pure incompetence. I have tried to use the original material as much as possible.
Layout:
Reading a page should be with as few distractions as possible. One of the things I personally dislike in web pages is the use of hypertext links within the text. One or two would be okay, but some pages have wall-to-wall links in the text. I have tried to keep the pages functional and easy to read by splitting them up in a section containing the actual text and another section containing the relevant links.