Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20160912200936/@comment-61022-20160914154537

Okay. Seems like this is a good idea. A "standard" is going to be tough because certain character chronologies are very unbalanced. Take Spider-Man for example, the amount of "flashback" stories that expand on his early career as a hero make his first few years are more intensive than characters that first appeared around the same time.

The Fantastic Four are somewhat easy. Since year one day one of the Modern Age happened the moment they became the Fantastic Four, I could -- in theory -- break it up by actual "years" of the Modern Age.

I'm also trying to apply some of the writing style I picked up from writing over at Fandom, to find ways to make each page more interesting and easy to read. They have a word count limit of around 1000 words, that's impractical... But I think a certain standard should apply in terms of length per page, because otherwise it's going to be daunting for people to scan through, and with all the reference tags and images, things are going to get bogged down.

At least since Expanded History pages don't have much in way of layout, it's something I can play with.

The other thing I'm going to have to consider is condensing references if I'm talking about a story arc. When I started doing Expanded History pages I was putting one reference per chronological story and that can be messy, especially when multiple comics cover the same event, and do so differently. I wasn't aware of how to make a reference read something like Fantastic Four #1-10 instead of having a reference for each comic. Also the use of the notation function makes it much easier to delve into variations of stories.

I'm going to put my mind to it.

The only thing I am wondering about now is a standard for the page names. Perhaps the "/Expanded History" sub-page could be a table of contents for each additional page. It's there we can also explain some of the more technical interpretations, such as the sliding timescale, conflicting interpretations of events and other things people would need to know going forward (basically what I try to do in the Preface of the current pages)

I'm thinking maybe the structure could be like this:

/Expanded History - Has the preface for the character, explaining the Sliding Timescale and how that impacts their personal history. This would be exceptionally useful for characters that are prominent in two very specific time periods. Like Captain America who has a wartime history and his time in the Modern Age.

/Expanded History/Early Life - Created as necessary if there is a significant background on a character before they became a hero prior to the Modern Age. The material here would be all about their pre-hero life that doesn't tie directly into a character's origin story. For example, it would plot out Reed Richard's life up until he moved to Central City and began working on his space ship. For Peter Parker it would cover everything up to the day of the experiment that irradiated the spider that gave him his powers. For Deadpool it would cover his history up until he was sent to Weapon X. etc.

/Expanded History/Origin - Reserved for characters who have lengthy origins. That way we have as much room for expansions on the events that happened leading up to the character becoming who they are. A great example is Peter Parker, whose origin has been told down to the most minute detail and has had a billion different additions added to it over the years.

/Expanded History/XXXX 1,2,3,4,5 etc. - Not sure what would universally fit here (Hence the XXXX). But it should be something generic that covers the various years of their life after the origin.

I think for a character who has a career during World War II, we could have each page signify a specific year. Someone like Captain America for example, did a LOT between 1940 and 1945 that it would be justified.

The Fantastic Four, as I've said, could literally have their history broken down by year since the Modern Age starts on the day of their origin and the measurement of time is counted from there.

We could probably get away with a yearly count for everyone who appeared between November 1961 and October 1965 since that's "year one" of the Sliding Timescale. That becomes less practical as you start getting into characters who were introduced later, particularly when your trying to figure out what parts of their life happen before the Modern Age and happened during it.

Perhaps Modern Age History 01, 02, etc would be sufficient enough. But if anyone wants to spitball some ideas that would be great.

Page length is a problem, because how to break up pages really depends on the number of events and how complex they are. But I think a word MINIMUM for deciding if a page needs a separate section or not is sufficient.

I just did a word count for the origin of Spider-Man (from the day of the accident to the Burglar getting caught by Spider-Man), easily the most complex origin story when you factor in all the changes. The body of the text is a little over 1200 words. I think a 1000 word minimum (not including references and notations) would be sufficient.

We could also include pages like....

/Expanded History/Relationships - A more detailed look at a characters personal relationships. This would include romances, marriages, friendships, allies, foes. Dynamics between characters over the years that otherwise is not the central focus of their history.

/Expanded History/Powers - If a character has had a complex history of fluctuating powers, that history could be expanded on here. It would cover in greater detail the function of these powers, how the obtained them, and -- if applicable -- if they lost them.

Thoughts?