Another Amalgam!
By Editor in Chief Bill Kte'pi

I don't like groups to repeat each other. As a writer, I understand wanting to have multiple "telling the X-Men stories in present continuity" sites, because hey, if Writer X has everything locked up and overly dibbed over at Site Y (which does, has, and will continue to happen, and it's one of the biggest banes of group fanfic, and is absolutely detrimental to the community, but that's a rant I'll save for when Jason asks for ... well, rants), that kinda bites and maybe Writer Z would like a try. So a new site starts.

But as a reader, I just can't keep up with everything. And as an editor, I want any site I start to answer a specific need, to address a specific absence in the community. I think the Year Two groups do that.

And now, I think Another Amalgam will do that, too, although the absence being addressed is a much different one.

You remember the Amalgam comics from 1996 or 1997 or so. I know you do. Speed Devil -- Ghost Rider + the Flash. Spider-Boy -- Superboy + Spider-Man. Lobo the Duck. C'mon. You remember.

Well, most of them sucked, didn't they? Yeah. They did. They had a cute idea, or a neat twist, but everything was smooshed into one-shot issues with no room -- and very little desire -- for character development or real storybuilding. Even the best writers on the project were shoehorned into gimmicky books. There were bright moments -- I think Dark Claw actually came out very well, for one -- but there were also things like "Shatterstarfire."

So, we're not going to do that. We're going to do it right, with ongoing titles which are designed to be ongoing titles -- Amalgamated concepts which WORK, not just ideas that make you go "Oh, how cute" or "Oh, that's funny."

There are a number of ways to do this, and I've had a lot to say about what I see as the guiding Amalgam philosophies. One way is to take two sympathetic concepts -- for instance, Batman and Daredevil, two dark-ish vigilantes -- and combine them into a third. Another is to deliberately play against type, combining, say, Batman and the Silver Surfer, and playing it for contrast. Still another approach is to synergize two concepts which lead into something different altogether.

We have some of all of that. My Iron Man title is of the first sort, combining Iron Man and Green Lantern, with elements from both their histories and a strong dose of the Swamp Thing. My Sandman title is of the third sort, combining the criminal Flint Marko from Marvel with Dream of the Endless from DC, but changing nearly everything about the final product -- a criminal who accidentally becomes the Lord of Dreams. I mention my titles simply because I don't want to make assumptions about the underlying philosophies of the other writers, but we have everything from the J-Force -- an X-Force-like team led by an Azrael/Cable combo -- to Legion X, the school for superpowered teens in the 30th century -- to Spider-Woman, following the adventures of the Amazon Arachne in Patriarch's World.

And there's more stuff on the way. The Amalgam world is one with a history -- Iron Man has been around for ten years -- but unlike other sites, that history is almost entirely unknown to the readers. We'll be exploring it, in depth.

http://slayerfanfic.com/amalgam/