This is part 2 of my weekly series on Dave Van Domelen’s Academy of Super-Heroes universe, a collection of musings, interviews, writerly insights and historical notes about the free super-hero serials (which started on the newsgroup rec.arts.comics.creative back in ’94 and recently released as Omnibus editions.)
Guest post by Dave Van Domelen
This is part 1 of my weekly series on Dave Van Domelen’s Academy of Super-Heroes universe, a collection of musings, interviews, writerly insights and historical notes about the free super-hero serials (which started on the newsgroup rec.arts.comics.creative back in ’94 and recently released as Omnibus editions.)
How To Read Academy of Super-Heroes
The Academy of Super-Heroes universe, now in its seventeenth year with about three hundred issues and quite the cast of characters, can seem intimidating at first. But written in the style of comic books, there are arcs and series that hold up well on their own, without the need to read every story in sequence. Continue reading
I’ve added e-book editions of Academy of Super-Heroes to a special collection in my iBooks:
What is Academy of Super-Heroes? It’s a shared-world superhero setting that has been around since 1994. The invention of Dave Van Domelen, he opened the ASHiverse to other writers like Matt Rossi III, Marc Singer, Andrew Burton and me (far from an exhaustive list). The stories were (and still are) distributed free on the newsgroup rec.arts.comics.creative in plaintext format. Continue reading
I’ve been playing role-playing games since ’82, and sometimes that hobby intersects with my writing.
I’ve always loved superhero games, and when DC Adventures came out this year I was ecstatic: it combined Mutants and Masterminds‘ D20 rules with the classic DC Heroes system. It’s the perfect fill-in game for my group, since we can do quick pick-up games with familiar characters and histories without rules or background overload.
I designed their current adventures based on an Academy of Super-Heroes arc. ASH is a shared-world superhero fic in the same vein as Wild Cards, only published free on rec.arts.comics.creative. I learned the craft partly through writing issues of Conclave of Super-Villains starting in 1997 (though at the time I didn’t think I’d go into writing professionally).
Conflicto, fan art by Joe Singleton
F&SF writer and linguist. Winner, 2015 Aurora Award for Best English Poem/Song.
Also 2015 Aurora Awards finalist, Best English Short Fiction; former finalist, 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; finalist, 2008 Aurora Award, "Best Short-Form Work in English"; Second Place winner of the Writers of the Future Contest (volume XXIII).
Tony Pi, F&SF Writer 