Man, if basic many-worlds is too much for GA!Shanna, she’s gonna have a rough time with the magic reality-bending stuff she’s eventually gonna uncover (because c’mon, she’s gonna figure it out sooner or later, she wouldn’t be a story character otherwise).
But if she somehow gets sucked into Arkerra… that’s gonna be even worse for her.
Never heard of Faans and yet I grasp this easily. It’s a variant on the ‘multiverse characters bump into themselves’ story, a basic scif-fi trope.
Ironic that I had no trouble getting this but spent the week struggling to understand the Tomogachi strips that preceded it. It’s a question of what one has been exposed to.
I just reread through Guilded Age and seeing Shanna made me wanna reread Fans. I find it hilarious that I’m reading through that right now and that Shanna happens to appear in Guilded Age. I think I need some oldschool Shanna to make sense of my reality. :D
Seriously though, I think Shanna is my favorite character in the Fans comic. So much character development.
My question to Mr. Campbell is: Do you plan to ever continue Fans? As far as I know the comic hasn’t moved in quite a long time and for all intents and purposes is finished but it’s one of my top five webcomics of all time and I can’t help but wonder.
I don’t have any plans for a straight-up continuation, though I said the same thing in 2005, so who knows. It feels finished. Shanna will be seeing some more action in Guilded Age soon.
I loved how it ended, and it has that nice, finished closure to it.
Yet seeing the good old Shanna, IN COLOR (dun dun dun!) made me want to see more of faans again. Such a great majestic story. Many online authors have tried to do serious story lines in place of, or in addition to, daily gags, but few have succeeded. My hat is off to you!
Good luck. Best as I can tell only half the comic is still online. But…oh, the glory of FANS! was…amazing. That comic was my late teen to mid twenties must browse. Then it did the second series. :-)
It is all online. Check the dropdown list at the bottom of http://faans.com. I know that navigation probably needs to be more intuitive, but it’s all there.
Enjoy it. Fans is amazing. I found it through another webcomic it crossed over with. I had read Guilded Age originally without knowing it was done by the same guy who did Fans. T. Campbell is one of my favorite story writers of all time. His stuff is amazing.
I call foul on Shanna hitting Shanna with the stun shot. Shanna could never hit ANYTHING with those damn things. Well…alright, she could once she was properly trained. I just have so many happy memories of her getting so frustrated cause all the geeks could shoot them like it was second nature.
She was a terrible shot All the way up until she was properly trained sometime after their little war with the General. It was a thing for a long time. :-) Makes her being a crack shot in AEGIS so much more amazing.
That said, the weapons that they used in that arc were a completely different design spec and not much like modern pistols or their blasters. Still, she couldn’t hit anything with them. :-) I might be geeking out a bit.
I had a tough time finding the first instance of Shanna shooting a gun that actually worked as a gun (at least twice, she ended up with guns that wouldn’t fire– one of which she later used as a bluff) but she starts to act like a “grizzled vet” here: http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=883
I can’t help but feel that cyborg Shanna is a reference to the Alt-Penny that became a Starbucks Manager. Cyborg girl that had an espresso machine built in to her abdomen.
O hi, Faans Shanna! Nice to see you turn up here. :) Weird, I always pictured you as a light ginger. To answer Sam’s question: Shanna’s mother totally has a counterpart in the Faans universe.
I guess it was too obscure, but—Guilded Age-Shanna’s clothes and where she sits are a reference to an early Twilight Zone episode, “Mirror Image.” Vera Miles plays a woman waiting in a bus station and runs into herself. It was one of the first shows to explore the idea of multiple universes.
Yeah, she definitely needs broader perspectives. Not just to face what she’s up against, but to become the character she deserves to be.
While Fans!Shanna started out with the same kind of mindset as GA Shanna, the former mostly acted as the “straight man” to the craziness around her. She was nowhere near the awesome character she would later become, but it was fun to watch the rest of the cast annoy the hell out of her. And she didn’t become essential to the story until she had already started her transformation into awesomeness.
GA Shanna, on the other hand, immediately takes center stage and is set up as the Lone Hero. In this role, the closed-mindedness that worked so well as comic relief becomes a burden to her. I feel sorry for her, and I really hope she gets at least a fraction of the character development she got in Fans!.
ah, i admit, i have long loved the ideas of alternate earths and the infinite idea that i think for me, the idea of being able to sit down with myself and see how different paths would have turned out or if certain outcomes were just foreordained.
as for the strip, oh yes. a MILLION times yes. i was wondering how GA Shanna would be different from Faans Shanna. a shame though we probably wont be seeing any more of the cast here. i think it would have been pretty funny to have seen Meighan as one of HR’s PR lawyers pushing for the movie rights (mirroring the world of warcraft movie that’s been so long in development) or Tim and Will working as code-monkeys working for Hurricane (or as Quest Designers) or see Rumy as the obligatory Monk style character (and one who complains how in-game martial arts don’t shine a candle to real ones)
as sad i was to see Faans end a second time. I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed seeing the developments here now that there fewer demands for T’s Attention storywise. (and if there are any ongoing stories i’ve missed, i humbly apologize)
This is exactly my reaction. I promptly read through Fans again after this. I even found another one of Campbell’s comics that I somehow passed over before by the name of Penny & Aggie.
… This would be the point where I raise one eyebrow first at the strip… then at the comments… and then ask…
T… isn’t “faans” with the double-a just what you used for the web-URL because the one-“a” version was already taken?
I mean isn’t it called “Fans!” … or just “Fans”?
Heck, to be honest I’m pretty sure I’ve always considered the canon name to have the exclamation mark in as standard, but it makes for awkward sentences.
A million years ago when I first proposed the series, there was a slang term, “faan,” which basically meant an extra-devoted science-fiction fan. Some people had also proposed “fen” as a jokey plural. I considered naming the print series Fen and ended up naming it Faans, figuring that readers would appreciate the in-joke or at least not be too confused.
However, I’d misjudged the culture. Neither of those slang variations had much traction by the time the series was launched, and so I changed the series’ title not long after going online with it. But by then, “fans.com” was indeed taken, as were a lot of variants. I tried “fansontheweb.com” for a while, but five-letter URLs are easier to remember than most even when they’re not quite right, so I just lived with it.
It’s for the best that we didn’t call the series “Ubergeeks” or something else that would’ve conveyed these fans were more fannish than other fans, because Fans is a celebration of fandom and all, but it’s not really into the geek-cred-measuring contests that turn me off nowadays. A celebration of true extremism, ironic or otherwise, wouldn’t really have had room for Shanna… and it wouldn’t be something I could do for very long. What’s special about these guys is that they fight killer robots and don’t give up, and sometimes use fan-knowledge to do it.
*Faan squee*
Man, if basic many-worlds is too much for GA!Shanna, she’s gonna have a rough time with the magic reality-bending stuff she’s eventually gonna uncover (because c’mon, she’s gonna figure it out sooner or later, she wouldn’t be a story character otherwise).
But if she somehow gets sucked into Arkerra… that’s gonna be even worse for her.
Or how about “Red Shirts”? Universes/timelines parallel for periods of time due to fictional story-lines.
What if [beeeeep].
[Transmission terminated]
DON’T YOU DARE EXPLAIN THIS TO ANYONE. This is for the people who know.
Too late, Google knows all :P
Never heard of Faans and yet I grasp this easily. It’s a variant on the ‘multiverse characters bump into themselves’ story, a basic scif-fi trope.
Ironic that I had no trouble getting this but spent the week struggling to understand the Tomogachi strips that preceded it. It’s a question of what one has been exposed to.
You’d probably like Faans. Reading that back in the day was how I ended up reading this.
I just reread through Guilded Age and seeing Shanna made me wanna reread Fans. I find it hilarious that I’m reading through that right now and that Shanna happens to appear in Guilded Age. I think I need some oldschool Shanna to make sense of my reality. :D
Seriously though, I think Shanna is my favorite character in the Fans comic. So much character development.
My question to Mr. Campbell is: Do you plan to ever continue Fans? As far as I know the comic hasn’t moved in quite a long time and for all intents and purposes is finished but it’s one of my top five webcomics of all time and I can’t help but wonder.
I don’t have any plans for a straight-up continuation, though I said the same thing in 2005, so who knows. It feels finished. Shanna will be seeing some more action in Guilded Age soon.
I think you guys ended it in the exact right way.
I loved how it ended, and it has that nice, finished closure to it.
Yet seeing the good old Shanna, IN COLOR (dun dun dun!) made me want to see more of faans again. Such a great majestic story. Many online authors have tried to do serious story lines in place of, or in addition to, daily gags, but few have succeeded. My hat is off to you!
Why, what’s this? Did I just find a new comic to read?
My feeds, they hunger.
Which is, I suppose, ironic… given that feeds would traditionally refer to stores of food.
Good luck. Best as I can tell only half the comic is still online. But…oh, the glory of FANS! was…amazing. That comic was my late teen to mid twenties must browse. Then it did the second series. :-)
Thanks for all the good comics, Mr. T. Campbell.
It is all online. Check the dropdown list at the bottom of http://faans.com. I know that navigation probably needs to be more intuitive, but it’s all there.
Enjoy it. Fans is amazing. I found it through another webcomic it crossed over with. I had read Guilded Age originally without knowing it was done by the same guy who did Fans. T. Campbell is one of my favorite story writers of all time. His stuff is amazing.
Enjoy the archive binge. Don’t forget to eat. Or drink water.
… Sleep? Sorry, I don’t know what that one is. Just remember those first two things… Especially because I think I just forgot them myself.
I’m enjoying it so far. Made it to Book 3 last night.
Gotta stop procrastinating on work, though…
I think you got your tags messed up. It should totally say “Tags: Shanna, Shanna, Shanna”
Then Banna, Banna, Bo-banna
I think you meant, “Bo-Banna, Banana-fanna, Mo-manna”.
Yo-Mama? o_O
Yo Yo Ma? The cellist?
Funniest. Ask an Adventurer. EVER.
It really was. Next thing I know were gonna run into Aggie as a extra in Sepia World.
I call foul on Shanna hitting Shanna with the stun shot. Shanna could never hit ANYTHING with those damn things. Well…alright, she could once she was properly trained. I just have so many happy memories of her getting so frustrated cause all the geeks could shoot them like it was second nature.
Uh, Shanna was one of Alpha team’s best shots. Only one who could compete with her with a blaster in their hand was Marc.
She was a terrible shot All the way up until she was properly trained sometime after their little war with the General. It was a thing for a long time. :-) Makes her being a crack shot in AEGIS so much more amazing.
That said, the weapons that they used in that arc were a completely different design spec and not much like modern pistols or their blasters. Still, she couldn’t hit anything with them. :-) I might be geeking out a bit.
I hate to mess with anyone’s happy memories, but… I think that’s Meighan McDowell, with the not being able to hit anything! http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=965 http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=967
I had a tough time finding the first instance of Shanna shooting a gun that actually worked as a gun (at least twice, she ended up with guns that wouldn’t fire– one of which she later used as a bluff) but she starts to act like a “grizzled vet” here: http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=883
Shanna was, however, one of the team’s worst hand-to-hand combatants, so that may be where her frustration comes in: http://www.faans.com/books1-6/index.php?p=261
Damn. Well, that’s what happens when you don’t read something for several years, I suppose.
Refreshing to see storyline toons! Wooohooo!!!!
I now ship a threeway between Faans Shanna, GA shanna, and Ultra Nega Shanna. OTT
Yay!!
Kaylee: We’re on a year now, I ain’t had nothing ‘twixt my nethers weren’t run on batteries.
Mal: Oh, God! I can’t know that!
Jayne: I could stand to hear a little more.
So much weird stuff sounds Swedish, like “Borg”.
Meanwhile, Borg Cubes sound like they come from Ikea…
IT ALL FITS!
No, seriously. If it didn’t all fit you couldn’t build one of those desks with nothing but an allen wrench.
I read that “alien wrench” to the surprise of absolutely no one.
No, Borg Cubes are delicacies created by the Muppets’ Swedish Chef.
“Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated.”
Desire to reread Faans rising… RISING…
Had a look at it…meh. Kids like it, though.
I can’t help but feel that cyborg Shanna is a reference to the Alt-Penny that became a Starbucks Manager. Cyborg girl that had an espresso machine built in to her abdomen.
Bestest of cameos. Most bestest of cameos
O hi, Faans Shanna! Nice to see you turn up here. :) Weird, I always pictured you as a light ginger. To answer Sam’s question: Shanna’s mother totally has a counterpart in the Faans universe.
Good points!
Early colorings of Shanna do indeed have her as more of a redhead, but some years passed between those renditions and the Shanna we see here.
I was hoping for Lt. Harry Scott to show up. I always liked him. And the gods know that this Shanna could us some backup
I guess it was too obscure, but—Guilded Age-Shanna’s clothes and where she sits are a reference to an early Twilight Zone episode, “Mirror Image.” Vera Miles plays a woman waiting in a bus station and runs into herself. It was one of the first shows to explore the idea of multiple universes.
That was a good one. That totally is the same outfit.
Sailed right over MY head, but I’m glad to discover it!
Someone needs to alert the Science Fiction Club.
Didn’t someone on the old forums establish that this was “Shannservice?”?
Faanservice?
Oh godammit, I didn’t read the alt text I swear.
This is awesome on many levels.
-The obvious one.
-The Twilight Zone one.
-Shanna has mysteriously acquired a Gilligan hat after the swimsuit cover issue. Godspeed, S.S. Minnow.
… Wait. Did Faans-Shanna just call GA-Shanna stupid?
“Inexperienced!”
She was, if I recall, pretty harsh on her own past self the one time they fought.
*slow clap*
Yeah, she definitely needs broader perspectives. Not just to face what she’s up against, but to become the character she deserves to be.
While Fans!Shanna started out with the same kind of mindset as GA Shanna, the former mostly acted as the “straight man” to the craziness around her. She was nowhere near the awesome character she would later become, but it was fun to watch the rest of the cast annoy the hell out of her. And she didn’t become essential to the story until she had already started her transformation into awesomeness.
GA Shanna, on the other hand, immediately takes center stage and is set up as the Lone Hero. In this role, the closed-mindedness that worked so well as comic relief becomes a burden to her. I feel sorry for her, and I really hope she gets at least a fraction of the character development she got in Fans!.
ah, i admit, i have long loved the ideas of alternate earths and the infinite idea that i think for me, the idea of being able to sit down with myself and see how different paths would have turned out or if certain outcomes were just foreordained.
as for the strip, oh yes. a MILLION times yes. i was wondering how GA Shanna would be different from Faans Shanna. a shame though we probably wont be seeing any more of the cast here. i think it would have been pretty funny to have seen Meighan as one of HR’s PR lawyers pushing for the movie rights (mirroring the world of warcraft movie that’s been so long in development) or Tim and Will working as code-monkeys working for Hurricane (or as Quest Designers) or see Rumy as the obligatory Monk style character (and one who complains how in-game martial arts don’t shine a candle to real ones)
as sad i was to see Faans end a second time. I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed seeing the developments here now that there fewer demands for T’s Attention storywise. (and if there are any ongoing stories i’ve missed, i humbly apologize)
Squee! Shanna times 3
I was wondering how long it would take for this to come up in Ask an Adventurer.
So glad to see Faans!Shanna show up. It just seems like a logical way to handle it :)
This is pretty darn neat, you guys.
Oh wow… wow. wow. Memories….
excuse me guys, I’ve got something in my eye…
Lol! Thanks. I think this answers my question. :-D
I may have squealed. It may be time to reread Faans.
This is exactly my reaction. I promptly read through Fans again after this. I even found another one of Campbell’s comics that I somehow passed over before by the name of Penny & Aggie.
… This would be the point where I raise one eyebrow first at the strip… then at the comments… and then ask…
T… isn’t “faans” with the double-a just what you used for the web-URL because the one-“a” version was already taken?
I mean isn’t it called “Fans!” … or just “Fans”?
Heck, to be honest I’m pretty sure I’ve always considered the canon name to have the exclamation mark in as standard, but it makes for awkward sentences.
A million years ago when I first proposed the series, there was a slang term, “faan,” which basically meant an extra-devoted science-fiction fan. Some people had also proposed “fen” as a jokey plural. I considered naming the print series Fen and ended up naming it Faans, figuring that readers would appreciate the in-joke or at least not be too confused.
However, I’d misjudged the culture. Neither of those slang variations had much traction by the time the series was launched, and so I changed the series’ title not long after going online with it. But by then, “fans.com” was indeed taken, as were a lot of variants. I tried “fansontheweb.com” for a while, but five-letter URLs are easier to remember than most even when they’re not quite right, so I just lived with it.
It’s for the best that we didn’t call the series “Ubergeeks” or something else that would’ve conveyed these fans were more fannish than other fans, because Fans is a celebration of fandom and all, but it’s not really into the geek-cred-measuring contests that turn me off nowadays. A celebration of true extremism, ironic or otherwise, wouldn’t really have had room for Shanna… and it wouldn’t be something I could do for very long. What’s special about these guys is that they fight killer robots and don’t give up, and sometimes use fan-knowledge to do it.
This answered a few of my questions from a bunch of pages back.
In hysterical fashion, I might add.
That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing this universe’s versions of a few of that old gang in cameos or little moments.