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7/16/05

The more I think about it, the more I believe my premise can't encompass that beloved convention of such webcomics as last more'n a year or two: the Crossover With Another Webcomic.

Now, I love crossovers. My fanfiction site is full of them, and that material there was the parent of other material there that was the parent of AKOTAS here. Hell, since King Arthur's, Merlin's and Tristram's were originally all seperate story cycles, AKOTAS is a crossover. When all of us are in our own minds the heroes (or, depending on our self-esteem, the anti-heroes) of our own life stories, a crossover between fictional heroes is symbolic of the perceptive crossovers that are all human interactions. You can see I've put some thought into this. I just don't think a crossover between AKOTAS and, say, PvP would work for dramatic reasons, which are all my own doing.

For one thing, it's been well-established over the past year that my characters don't hang out with other people's characters, they hang out with those people. Like this weekend: Merlin and Arthur aren't sharing Cole and Brent's booth at San Diego, they're sharing Scott's. But that's a side effect of the real reason crossovers won't work.

The real reason is that it's built in to AKOTAS at the fundamental level that my characters don't hang out with other people's characters, they become other people's characters. It's the schtick that's the raisin d'eeter (pardon my French) for the whole work. How can Arthur meet Piro or Torg when he's already been Piro and Torg? How could Merlin and Arthur share a booth with Cole and Brent when, the next time I pull from the filler reserve (which, despite the apparent trend over the last two weekends, won't be tomorrow), Arthur and Lancelot will be Cole and Brent?

So, yeah, I've pretty much concluded that AKOTAS can't stand up to crossing over with another webcomic.

Unless, of course, it were an irresistable story. When I first drafted this essay it ended with the previous sentence but, since then, I've read the archive of Shaenon Garrity's Narbonic. Lord, the woman tempts me.

Webcomics I read mornings: The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge,
Peanuts, General Protection Fault, Todd and Penguin,
Tux & Bunny, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Kevin & Kell, Real Life
Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly,
Questionable Content, Starshift Crisis, Dandy and Company, Queen of Wands, Narbonic
Webcomics I read evenings: LuAnn, Pearls Before Swine, Count Your Sheep, Loserz,
New Gold Dreams, Help Desk, Schlock Mercenary, Sinfest, Irregular Comic, Little Dee
Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Midnight Macabre, Bruno,
Dinosaur Comics, Wapsi Square, Medium Large, Alice!, Sluggy Freelance, PvP
Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: El Goonish Shive,
Checkerboard Nightmare, Gossamer Commons
Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Reasoned Cognition,
Theater Hopper, Shortpacked, Girl Genius, Megatokyo
Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: Digger,
AppleGeeks, Orneryboy, Striptease, Penny Arcade
Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: No Stereotypes, Ctrl+Alt+Del,
Extra Life, The Noob, Get Out of My Head, Order of the Stick
Webcomics I read Sundays: The Whovian Observer, Journey Into History, Butternut Squash,
Stuff Sucks, Lucas & Odessa, Pibgorn, Boxjam's Doodle
See also Talk About Comics, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List,
Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Comixpedia, The Living Comic and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.