Whatever it is, it does it very, very well.

I've always loved the WL series, with the crazy normal oddly twisted mirror of our own world that it occurs in. Eight years is a long time to carry a torch -- this is not a dig, just an observation -- and I feel like my anticipation has been rewarded.

But...

The writing has improved, I think. I just finished re-reading the entire series to date, and that much is unmistakable. It has a much... higher level of craftsmanship, let's say. That said, I found myself wondering several things as I read it. I'll just throw them out there.

* Meg Bennett -- and Zoner, for that matter -- barely get a mention, it feels like (Zoner has some screen time, as it were, at least :). I understand that they're not the focus of this particular piece, but I'm hoping we see more of both, because I really dug the 'buddy movie' vibe that Gryph and Zoner had, and after all the setup, I'm eagerly awaiting the payoff of the Bennett thing. It feels unfinished right now.

* Gena d'Amato (I think I spelled that right): was she a one-off original character? I'd love to see more of her, and she felt like a character that was meant to be recurring, but so far, nada. Again, I grok the latest bit isn't about her, so she doesn't need to appear; I'm just pointing out that she's joined the list of characters that I'd love to see more of who are Persons Not Appearing In This Episode.

* The dates given seem slippery to me, but I might have misparsed them. If I'm reading it right, this latest bit takes place a month or so after the one before, which means that Sakura has... developed really, really fast. If that's intentional, phew, she's a prodigy, but it's a minor bit that just doesn't ring right to me for some reason.

* The X-Men references are... well, they're nifty, no doubt, but (touching back on the above) I feel like they're more characters that are being introduced that I don't want to see wind up on the scrapheap. If I'd my druthers I'd rather see more of the existing cast than new ones... dunno if that's not possible due to plot points or what, though.

--sofaspud
--

Well, the Meg plotline was pretty much the real-life Zoner's work, and he's not on the active list these days - we live far apart and he's got a lot more stuff going on in real life these days. Myself, I'm not sure what to do with it now. I sidestepped that in 06 by just not dealing with it; there's -mention- of it in 07 (which I'm putting the finishing touches on now - well, not right now, I'm replying to your post right now, but you know), but she doesn't actually appear. Barring future developments IRL, which is always possible, I suspect she and what she's doing are going to be present in-universe but mostly offscreen, as if she were the star of a spinoff series that airs on a different night.

>* Gena d'Amato (I think I spelled that right): was she a one-off
>original character?

Gena's partially original; she's based on one of the drivers in Crazy Taxi, but since they aren't really characters, as such, most of the detail about her in Battle 05 was made up by us (along with her last name).

She lives in Boston and may well reappear later on; basically, what I've been doing over the course of the series is building up a "stable" of characters who are part of our main heroes' lives, but not necessarily in them all the time, so that when they do reappear it's a bit of an occasion. The other World Warriors (apart from Cammy) are the same sort of thing, e.g., Ryu's not going to be in every episode, or even most of them, but he's out there, and when he's needed, he'll be around. Gena's kind of the same deal. The Street Fighter games themselves rather work that way, so it seems in keeping with the spirit of the material.

>* The dates given seem slippery to me, but I might have misparsed
>them. If I'm reading it right, this latest bit takes place a month or
>so after the one before, which means that Sakura has... developed
>really, really fast. If that's intentional, phew, she's a prodigy,
>but it's a minor bit that just doesn't ring right to me for some
>reason.

More like two months - Gryphon mentions at one point in 06 that he and Sakura have been training together for about seven weeks by the time of the Alkali Dam mission. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that she wasn't a normal civilian when they met. When she first appears in Battle 03, she's already got roughly the set of moves (if not quite the experience in using them) that she had in her first game appearance, which was enough to make her a viable player character in Street Fighter Alpha.

The dates are a bit liquid in the later eps, because (as often happens in serial fiction) the pace of production started lagging behind the original setting such that I decided to slide the whole universe from specific dates (the first few eps, as you see, are all set specifically in 1994) and into Non-Specific Present Day Comic Book Time. That's why, for instance, the journal entries in Warrior Dawn: The Contract have those (Capcom-style!) "19XX" dates.

A good illustration of this is the change I had to make to the scene in 06 with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. In the original cut of that scene, the Brigadier gives Gryphon a floppy diskette containing all SIS knows about the secret Shadolu facility where Cammy's being held. When I updated the scene for release, I changed it to a USB flash drive so that the scene wouldn't be so obviously in-period, and in the next episode Zoner's Motorola Droid plays an important role.

>* The X-Men references are... well, they're nifty, no doubt, but
>(touching back on the above) I feel like they're more characters that
>are being introduced that I don't want to see wind up on the
>scrapheap.

Oh, they won't. Logan and Jubilee are in WL in the first place because I made a remark about how I wanted to get someone from every Capcom fighting game into WL at some point, and someone asked, "Even X-Men: Children of the Atom?" thinking I would say, "Well, OK, maybe not that one." :) But that said, Logan's an important part of G's backstory, an integral part of his network of contacts, and he'll be back. One thing about Wolverine is that he'll always be back. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.