Part II

**** L N H 2 0 Y E A R S ****

ANDREW PERRON

Wheeeeeee. @-@ Here ya go:

----

To tell the story of myself and the LNH, it's necessary to start the
story of myself and the superhero genre. Let us pull back the curtain
of time...

My infatuation with the most awesome of all storytelling models began at
a young age. I grew up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, on Captain
Planet, on BraveStarr and on Power Rangers. It took me a bit, though,
to get into comics - moving into a neighborhood where the local
mini-mart had a spinner rack was a godsend - and a bit longer to put the
two together.

The thing that moved me from Archie and Harvey to Spider-Man and the New
Warriors was the Marvel Universe Series III collector cards. Seeing
them at school lead me to beg my parents into visiting whatever outlets
carried them, which lead me to seek out the characters in other media.
(The X-Men animated series helped; I was a bit young to really get into
the tone of Batman: TAS.)

So I got into comics right at the crest of the Dark Age. There's a
lesson there about the importance of having widely-available entry-level
products, but let's keep going. I was mostly a Marvel zombie, though I
did get the Death of Superman TPB for Christmas. The crossovers, the
shock storylines, the holofoil gimmicks, none of them dampened my
enthusiasm; the thing that finally did was moving cross-country, away
from that handy spinner rack and from any real source of comics.

It was only about a year after that that my parents split up. But when
I went to visit my dad a couple of summers later, I discovered that he
had something amazing and new - an honest-to-goodness Internet
connection. I don't remember which of those old search engines I made
my first query on - Lycos? Yahoo? AltaVista? - but I quickly got around
to typing in "Mystery Science Theater 3000". This lead me to the Blue
Light Productions page (still around at
http://www.eyrie.org/~thad/blip/blip.html), where I found a .gif with
three unfamiliar letters on it: LNH.

This, then, was my introduction not just to our fair shared universe,
but to Usenet and comics fandom beyond the letters page. I eagerly ate
up everything on the BLiP site, and sought out alt.comics.lnh and RACC.
I was temporarily stymied by the end of that summer, but when I came
back, I was so inspired that I wrote a preview with not one but two WCs,
and when I got my own computer (sure, it was theoretically shared
between my siblings, but I knew what was what), it seemed like I had
stepped right into position as a new LNHer!

Yeah, not quite. A problem cropped up that would beguile and bedevil me
from there on out: a notable difficulty in carrying projects beyond the
initial surge of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I tore through the Eyrie
archive, grabbing enormous chunks of story and stuffing them into my
brain. I stretched out, visiting Dave's site and getting into ASH,
finding the Roster and the author's pages, untangling crossovers, and
plotting the day that my characters would burst onto the scene.

But, eventually, my interest waned. Never completely, but every so
often, there'd be an interruption - a broken keyboard, a break in
service, a malfunctioning hard drive - that would keep me from RACC for
a while, and catching up waited until I was in the proper mood. Nor did
it help that I had fallen into an "anime and manga uber alles" stage.
For a time, my fervor for American superheroes took a rest.

But other things were going on in my life, and in late 2002, through
various tribulations largely of my own making, I found myself with an
Internet connection, a mess of frustrated productive impulses, and an
excess of free time. Surfing the Internet, I found myself on a rather
peculiar corner of the World Wide Web: Unca Cheeks' Silver Age Comics
Site. ( http://www.reocities.com/cheeksilver/ )

This man's burning passion for all things ridiculous in sequential art
reignited my love of superheroes - incidentally transferring my primary
preference to the DCU - and I decided to stop by RACC, see if the old
place was still kicking. Turns out it was, undergoing a period of
flourishing after the Age of the Apathy Beast, and in a fit of
creativity, I took all the Japanese influences I'd accumulated and spun
them together with the classic LNH intro story and an updated version of
what a character based on my personality traits would be, and out came
Digital JUMP! #1!

The response was encouraging, and I immediately dashed out #2, and soon
after #3 - and ran right into the same problem all over again.
Procrastination and distraction began to take over. I managed to stay
active in RACC, at least, and a year later (a significant chunk of which
was spent on a framing device that I never got to work and eventually
tossed out entirely), pushed out #4.

Not that I was otherwise inactive in the LNH. I started up on my habit
of providing feedback to all sorts of stories, I contributed to the
ill-starred Bride of C'thulhu cascade, and in 2005, successfully kicked
off a cascade of my own: Just Imagine Saxon Brenton's RACCies!

But I wouldn't be around to see it end. I had gotten a sudden idea for
a Digital JUMP! story, bringing back my WCs of yore, and decided to skip
forward, writing #11 - and sealing my fate. The Curse of the Skipped
Issue took hold, and I faded out once more.

There were RL circumstances associated with it - the rigors of college
and suchlike - but I think the real problem was guilt. Or, rather, a
combination deal where I couldn't face my unfinished stories, so I left
them behind and started new ones, but accumulated more guilt with each
writing project I tried and abandoned. And I tried - O! how I tried;
both my hard drive and the Internet became clearinghouses for attempts
at storytelling. I never got anything consistent going, and there's one
thing I haven't mentioned that played into the reason why: feedback.

The most important resource to any writer - heck, to any creative
person, and especially when they're developing - is feedback. And in
leaving RACC, in letting my inability to confront the unfinished drive
me away, I cut myself off from it.

Somewhere in there, I hit ultimate unproductivity. I reached rock
bottom and, to rip off a far better writer, I bounced. Fed up with
myself, I tossed all the guilt I had for not finishing things out the
back door, buckled down, and focused on my studies and my goals - and
while I was doing so, just happened to find an awesome, loving, stable
relationship.

Coming out the other end, I found myself in a new city, as a bona fide
adult, with a real (though temporary) job... that just happened to be
hella boring. So, five years after I'd departed RACC's pastures, I was
finally ready to face it again. And with my newfound ability to just
keep working on something, even if my attention got pulled away for a
while, and damn the guilt, I plunged in - and the rest, good readers, is
history.

**** L N H 2 0 Y E A R S ****

ROB ROGERS

For a long time -- much longer than I am prepared to
admit -- I believed I could become a super-hero.

This was not as ludicrous as it might seem.

After all, I was lucky enough to live in a small town that had its
very own nuclear power plant. I also knew that before I was born, my
father had been exposed to all sorts of dangerous -- and, hopefully,
mutagenic -- chemicals during the Vietnam War.

I believed it was only a matter of time before my nascent
super-powers manifested themselves, and I could get down to the serious
business of fighting crime.

As late as my college years -- by which time I really ought to have
known better -- I'd hang around my roommate's biology lab on stormy
nights, hoping that an errant bolt of lightning might strike the racks
of chemicals and change my life forever. At the time, it didn't seem
any crazier than buying a lottery ticket.

It wasn't the powers themselves that I craved. Don't get me wrong
-- I'd love the chance to fly, or throw lightning bolts, or move at
superhuman speed. What I really wanted, however, was not the powers
themselves but what I thought they could give me: confirmation that,
despite all available evidence to the contrary, I was somebody special.

Because that's what I loved about comic books. They gave me a
world in which that nerdy-looking guy on the subway -- the one with the
messed-up hair and rumpled suit, whose glasses are crooked and whose
aftershave is a little too strong -- might be Superman. Or Spider-Man.
Or the Hulk. Anybody you met might have a hero, a monster, or both
lurking inside of them.

The heroes I read about in comic books seemed to have the same
problems I did: trouble relating to other people, trouble getting a
date, trouble finding time to do all of the things they wanted to do
with their lives. What made them different was that, from time to time,
those heroes had the opportunity -- and the courage -- to let their
secret selves shine, to go out in their underwear and show the world
what amazing people they really were.