On this 30th Anniversary of Spleling Boy...

Here's what LNH Authors and Readers had
to say about the 5th Anniversary...

Enjoy!

From: Jeff Barnes <dri... at precisionet.net>
Subject: [LNH] LNH Fifth Anniversary Special, Part #1
Date: 1997/05/04
Message-ID: <336CE23E.3323 at precisionet.net>
X-Deja-AN: 239367522
Sender: e... at windlord.Stanford.EDU
X-Date: Sun, 04 May 1997 15:23:42 -0400
Organization: Drizzts 'R' Us
Reply-To: dri... at precisionet.net
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.creative

INTRODUCTION (by Jeff Barnes)

Wow. Five years.

Doesn't seem like it could possibly five years since the
LNH started. Or four and a half years since a certain over-eager
college student started writing a somewhat excrable piece of work
he called CRY.SIG. It's been a fun ride. Ups and downs, but
always exciting.

I suppose I could go on and on, but I'd rather leave that
to my collaborators. Suffice it to say that today, May 3, is the
LNH's official anniversary. Happy birthday, Legion of Net.Heroes!

And that's why you're reading this little post right now.
I decided it might be a cool idea to get some of the past and
present LNHers to write about the LNH on its fifth anniversary.
In typical LNH fashion, about one third agreed to do it -- then
never did. One person fell off the 'net for a while (hi, Rob!).
But the six who did reply with essays have their works showcased
here for posterity. Or, at least, for poor, demented future
LNHers.

So, with no further ado, here's our first writer:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVE VAN DOMELEN

I've been part of the LNH almost since its beginning, arriving
online mere weeks after the whole thing got started...and right in
the middle of the launching of the first real storyline. I
remember what it was like before alt.comics.lnh was deluged with
spam...I remember what it was like before there was an
alt.comics.lnh...I remember what it was like before there was SPAM!
Gods, I feel old. Why, back in my day we had a couple loons with
boilerplates on Bolsheviks, Turks and Holocaust Revisionism, and
that was it.

We've gone from the madcap add-on where no one much cared
about continuity, character ownership, spelling, grammar, logic,
little things like that, to the current setup where I can honestly
say a lot of LNH work out there is better than the stuff I see in
real comics. Then again, I do read a lot of bad comics.

The LNH didn't save my life, or drastically change it, but it
certainly made things more interesting. Here's to another five
years <sudden sound of the Cliche Police breaking down the door and
hauling Dave away.>

-------------------------------------------------------------------
HUBERT BARTELS

Sometime in 1989, I first ran across Sunrise's Kei and Yuri from
the Dirty Pair. A black and white GIF used as a background for a Sun
workstation interested me enough to find who were these two girls and why
did they have such big eyes?

A trip to a comic store turned up Adam Warren and Toren Smith's
comic - which introduced me to rec.arts.anime. An advertisement in the
comic told me about Appleseed and Dominion. Frustrated by the long wait
until the next issue of Dirty Pair came out, I bought my first issue of
Dominion. It wasn't the first issue - but it featured two characters that
I've been influenced by ever since. I'm referring to Annapuna and Unipuma.

At the same time, anxious to see more of the Dirty Pair, I bought
my first Japanese laser disks. Unfortunately, Animagic, the company that I
was buying the disks from, didn't have the Dirty Pair disks in yet - so I
added the first Dominion disk because I liked the comic and it was cheap.
(This was long before any translated video was available in America.
Dominion had failed to make much of a splash in Japan.)

This was the first disk that arrived on my player. Watching the
antics of Annapuna and Unipuma - catgirls with guns - on the screen, I
sorta fell in love with catgirls and anime.

This was about the same time that, I first became interested in
role-playing. I had read a few of the D&D rule books and begun to read the
rec.games.frp newsgroup. In October 1990, Jim Gaynor was setting up a
PBEM Shadowrun game - and Yukipuma, a character I had created, based on
Masamune Shirow's Annapuna, was accepted.

But for one reason or another, the PBEM game's start was
delayed. I was reading alt.cyberpunk for background and ideas - and in
November 1990, Phyllis Rostykus (who was also in the PBEM game) was
arguing that interfacing with the world of virtual reality could be
created with text and words - that it did not need head plugs and direct
brain wiring to be effective. She demonstrated her argument with a short
third-person description. Others picked up her thread to the point that
they were forcibly asked to leave the alt.cyberpunk newsgroup. It was at
this point that alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo was created.

I moved with the group to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo. Jim Gaynor's
PBEM game was still on hold so I began to consider what my character's
background might be like. I created a copy of Yukipuma, called her Nekoko,
introduced her into the world of alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo and wrote
in-character observations to other people's comments. At this time,
alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo was a form of chat-room like alt.callahans - with
people posting discussions and comments. But late in November 1990, I
posted a protest against the stream of people describing themselves as
chrome superhumans, augmented with every cyber-thing in the book and twice
as mean as a junkdog. I illustrated my protest with a short story showing
my character's overcoming her problems with brains, not the use of massive
firepower.

Carl Rigney (who was also in the PBEM game) quickly posted a
response that took my story from a remembrance to an ongoing storyline. I
added to the story and Nekoko's Story was born. Nekoko's Story ran for
about a year in eighteen parts. As I wrote, other people added to the
story or began their own. alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo moved from a virtual bar
to a place to post cyberpunk fiction.

I think Nekoko's Story is where I learned a lot about writing. It
taught me about pacing, mood, point of view, and those other tools that
the writer uses to create fiction. Some of the early parts were discarded
and rewritten several times. But I will never forget the fun in working
with others across the country on parts of the story - or watching other
people take and expand parts of the storyline.

However, in the summer of 1991, I began to become dissatisfied
with the cyberpunk genre. Too many of the stories were violent and
depressing. Other stories featured more of those invincible chrome
supermen, mowing down their opponents in one easy sweep of their
mini-guns. I ended the Nekoko storyline with my cat-girl disappearing into
the shadows and began to look around.

Annapuna and Unipuma had led to an interest in other catgirls.
Feral in X-Force and Pantha in DC's New Titans had led to an interest in
American comics. To find more catgirls, I began to read
rec.arts.comics. Then, one day, a group of posters created the Legion of
Net.Heroes.

On how Panta came to be...

I had not intended to write for the Legion of Net.Heroes when it
first came out; I was amused by the stories in rec.arts.comics. When
alt.comics.lnh was created, I followed the stories to the new newsgroup.
It was around this time that I was becoming frustrated in how Pantha was
being used in the New Titans. Feral was being slowly turned into a monster
in X-Force by a writer and an editor who found her an embarassing leftover
from Rob Liefeld.

'Panta' was created when I decided that I could show how a catgirl
could be written; she would be interesting, intelligent, fun, powerful
without being a Wolverine clone and let me have fun with the other
wonderful characters being created on alt.comics.lnh.

At this time, all the main characters on alt.comics.lnh were
Writer Characters - designed as if the writer had given some form of,
often silly, superpower. Panta was one of the first created to tell a
story. Panta was not a Writer Character - which caused some confusion at
first. It was only later that I found a quote that best expressed who
Panta was:

'"A novel may be said to be the man who writes it. Now it
is always true that a novelist, perhaps unconsciously, identifies
himself with one chief or central figure in his novel. Into this
character he puts not what he thinks he is, but what he hopes to
be. We call this spokesman the self-character. You will find one in
every one of my books and in the novels of everyone I can remember."
John Steinbeck, Letter to Chase Horton, April 26, 1957, printed in
his 'The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights'.

Panta is my self-character - not me, but the one who's hopes, dreams and
thoughts, I could identify with. Panta herself used this quote in Tales of
the LNH #299 as she applied for LNH membership.