The Book of Masks Homepage

Immediate Plans

So, based on the work I did yesterday—almost ten solid hours of fun but exhausting brainstorming and scribbling—I think I am going to attempt the "big" project I outlined yesterday, the one where I sketch out one-and-a-half alternate seasons of "Marvel's Spider-Man" before turning to write my version of an animated "Superior Spider-Man" storyline.

Those ten hours of work yielded story progressions for almost a dozen major antagonists and another dozen minor ones. About half of those progressions, I'll admit, I took over almost unchanged from the animated series (no reason to do new work when old work will do) but progressions of the other half of the villain cast diverge (sometimes radically) from the animated continuity. Moreover, three of my major antagonists would be new additions to the animated canon, brought over from the comics.

In addition to keeping many of the same antagonists and their plot lines, my design keeps about half of the actual episodes, mostly unchanged but moved to different chronological location. (Again, more saved effort where possible.) My design junks another eighteen or so episodes entirely (including the entirety of "Spider Island") for new stories meant to develop new antagonisms, or antagonisms that will be live for "Superior Spider-Man." There's not nearly enough detail yet to completely fill in the quota of 38 episodes; some of the episodes only have antagonists assigned; and there are four slots where I don't have anything at all. But I think that's okay for now. Those slots can be reserved for episodes that can cover material that I haven't yet realized I need.

As for the heroes: There is less work there, and most of it is subtractive. So I'm also getting rid of Spider-Girl and Spider-Gwen (though keeping Anya and Gwen otherwise unchanged) and altering Miles Morales's story so that he designs and uses spider-tech that mimics Peter's powers instead of acquiring powers of his own. The idea of another Spider-Person still bothers me, but after watching "Marvel Spider-Man" all the way to the current point, I'm much less annoyed by him and his contributions as Spider-Miles, so that is my compromise.

So what's the next stage? There are some important relationship arcs that I still have to plot out over the course of the seasons: Peter and Harry, Peter and Norman, Norman and Harry, Peter and Jameson, plus a few others.

Then it will be on to writing some detailed treatments of these episodes -- something which might yet dissuade me from continuing. If I get half a dozen of those written and still want to continue, I'll think about finding a way to post them for the two or three of you that might want to look at them.

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And what of "Book of Masks," you ask? Well, I'm not going to get to that last chapter I've been dithering over, not any time soon, no matter what. (If this Spider-project doesn't work out, I'll be too depressed to do anything for a month.) But I do have a small trickle of chapters that I can post over the next week or so.

They're leftovers from when I was publishing the branch that introduced Sydney. While publishing it, I polled you guys at each fork to see which way you wanted to go, while telling you that each choice had a chapter already written so that you would be getting a chapter no matter which direction you voted. Mostly you picked the choices that sent the story down the path I had written, but I still have some of those chapters that you voted down. I will be posting some of them—the ones I would like to get onto the record, as they contain plot evolutions that I like or which are pretty important.

The first is here: "A Need for Red Herrings"  (public) + "A Need for Red Herrings"  (interactive). Will has let Caleb have his date with Sydney McGlynn, but he and she have unexpectedly shown up at the old elementary school and want to have a look in the basement. Will has bluffed them out of investigating further, but instead of confessing his occult interests to Sydney, he's going to deny and bluff.