AAaA Shanna 2-4
This one was all me. Shocker, I know!
To have proper fun with it, I had to mess with continuity just a little. In the finale of Fans the webcomics series (at faans.com for reasons that seemed good in 1999), Fans-Shanna says she’s retiring from fieldwork, but here she is, right in the thick of it. Still, she wouldn’t be the first cast member to say she’s gotten out and then found herself pulled back in.
I do think that many of the characters seen in Fans have some AU selves in the Guilded Age universe somewhere. And I like playing with my old toys as much as anyone. But I’ve never really cared for the trope of “cross-universe destiny” that would push Guilded Age Shanna to meet up with some version of Will and Tim, so that her social life could reach the “correct” configuration (meaning, what feels “correct” if you read Fans). Shanna indeed does need her horizons broadened, but she’ll be meeting a different batch of nerds and bonding with them for somewhat different reasons.
I love superhero comics and accept most of their absurdities, but where they and I part company is when marketing is substituted for imagination. As I write this, DC is publishing Future State, a maybe-alternate future that features a new version of the Justice League. That League could’ve been made up of Gilgamesh, Draculina, the Living Google, Nunchuku, Kaiju General, and Antifa the Multitude… buuuut of course it’s just new, admittedly more diverse versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, Aqua(wo)man, and Green Lantern. Because the heroic ideal was perfected around 1942, and it’s future generations’ job to replicate it. Look, the audience will accept enby Flash or they’ll accept a blond cishet speedster named “Bluestreak” who doesn’t care about the Flash legacy (until he sees the error of his ways, of course). But you can’t have both!
In terms of appealing to the readers who had followed me here from Fans, bringing Will and Tim and others in would’ve been a similar choice. That sort of thing feels right because it appeals to a nerd’s sense of order: even though some things are different, all the right names are right where they “belong.” And we only have the spoons to really care about so many characters, so introducing versions of people we already know about makes the transfer of affection easier.
But I don’t think it actually says anything that true or interesting about life. If the course of your life is different than it was in some other universe, then it’s far more likely that you’ll make different friends along the way. And you need to be open to new possibilities, or you’ll just end up chasing the past.
This page is one of my favorites.
I’m gonna have to reread Faans again one’a these days.
Yeah, I want to talk about that. Is the archive fully operational yet? I’ve been trying to get a young friend of mine to read Fans! -I’m positive he would love it- but for reasons beyond my ken, he refuses to read anything except on his phone (*sigh* millenials) He tried to read Book 1 months ago, but he couldn’t get too far because it was incomplete at the moment. I want to know if he can give it a second try.
I rarely ever do a lot on my PC for internet any more. My phone works so much better than my computer.
I finished a dive through faans about a month ago. The “page (100*N + 99)’s next button consistently links to page 100*N instead of 100*(N+1)” issue was still around, and there were a few streaks of 5-10 pages that just wouldn’t load, but the bulk of it’s there — at least for web browsers (chrome on Windows). My phone is a phone, not a computer, so I can’t say anything about mobile.
Thanks for this! I had thought I’d fixed that 99-100 issue: I’ll look into it tonight or tomorrow.
I’ll see if I can fix any lingering issues by tonight.
Shanna’s mother is a character in both universes. Also, Shanna has referenced Katherine in an oblique way.
N.B. Something is wrong with the Guilded Age-website. I have trouble loading it on at least five different devices, belonging to different owners. This has been going on for some time now. Most of the days, the front page will load, with bumps and delays, but not any linked pages, including the comment section. I don’t have trouble with other websites.
That is, I will not be able to click any links on most days. Today it goes rather well, by comparison, but I still experience difficulties.
I have the same problem.
The only browser I get it to work on is Avast Secure Browser. Chrome, Firefox, … all fgail.
I haven’t had any trouble getting the website to load on Firefox, including the archives. Do you have any plugins that might be interfering? What version of browser/OS/device are you using? Does it eventually load if you let it sit there and spin for a while? Not being able to click on any links seems weird, though.
It freezes on Safari Mobile about 1/4 through loading. I see about 3/4 of the comic, the rest of the site is black all the way down. When I disable Javascript it loads.
It works on Chrome on Windows, with the Ghostery extension active. So I finally did some digging, and it seems the ads served from “Venatus Media” (as identified by Ghostery) are the culprit.
I hope this info either serves to get rid of the broken ads or helps you guys help yourselves.
An ad is introducing a faulty JavaScript that overwhelms your browser. Get yourself something to get rid of that.
Ghostery works for me. They have extensions for the big browsers as well as a secure browser for iOS and Android.
I’m actually really happy that GA isn’t more connected with Faans or I would feel obliged to read it. I tried once.. and let’s say the art style is a bit too dated for me.
Regarding the nerds GA Shanna did join forces with, I like that you and Flo created AU versions of characters from two different webcomics of yours: Chrissie from QUILTBAG and Xan from Sketchies.
Yeah, that was a somewhat different flavor of self-indulgence that I was fine with, because it didn’t bring up the same issues: no versions of Xan, Chrissie, or Shanna had ever met each other before.
Will and Tim are busy with their Swedish comedy group.
I kind of agree re: multiversal destiny. I don’t mind the implausibility of it in cape comics, because characters become popular for a reason, but the idea that there’s only one correct group of friends a character can have and it’s the one we’re most familiar with is silly. It also carries over to real life like you said – I already don’t believe much in destiny in fiction, and I don’t believe in destiny at all when it comes to real life.