The Word Of xmung

There are some benefits and some downsides to having a long running comic like Magellan.

The key benefit has been being able to really sink my teeth into a project that I love. As it currently stands, I would have a hard time running out of stories – the Magellan universe is so expansive, with so many characters and the opportunity for so many situations… it’s just an awesome sandbox to play in.

On the flip side, that expansiveness has led me to trip myself up on more than one occasion!

The genre savvy of you will be aware of the Word of God trope…

A statement regarding some ambiguous or undefined aspect of a work, the Word of God comes from someone considered to be the ultimate authority, such as the creator, director, or producer.

Readers who have followed Magellan for many years, possible even from it’s early days on Comics Genesis to Graphic Smash and to its current home at this URL will know that I’m prone to making comments under the comic, sometimes explaining some element without it having ever been in the comic itself. The Cast Page is also a pretty good example of this… for example, under Ranger Bill it notes he is not native to the Magellanverse reality but from an “unknown realm”, a factoid never noted, let alone addressed, in the comic itself. Will this ever be explored in the comic? Maybe? I’d like to! In my mind I know what that realm is and what it means for Ranger Bill, whose name is actually Jake Smith-Smith (also never addressed!!)

Anyway, the other day I found an archived page on the Drunk Duck site, where I had apparently been running a mirror of Magellan for long enough to have people reading and commenting. If you check out the page in question you’ll note it is from Chapter 2 where Brelvis, still in Sydney, replies to Kaycee via email to her address @magellan.mg. A reader points out that .mg is the Madagascar domain and asks if there is no Madagascar in the Magellan universe.

Probably I should have just said that Magellan just got in there faster when the domains were being handed out and Madagascar had to make do with something else. That would make more sense! But no! I said, and I quote, “It sank. Atlanteans sank it. Yep, that’s what happened to Madagascar… it’s great to be called out on stuff like that, means I can make up stories to fit over the top. Atlanteans. That’s what happened to Madagascar in the Magellanverse. Really!”

Reasonable enough, except up until I stumbled back across the page I will admit I had completely forgotten writing that. So, is something written and forgotten still count as “Word of God”, even if the ‘god’ in question had farted it out on a mirror site and then promptly totally forgotten it?? And worse, how many other proclamations are there that I’ve likewise forgotten but which might form a reader’s understanding of the comic?

I got a sense of that when I was browsing through the Magellan entries over on TV Tropes and found that I’ve said more than a few things about this, that or the other thing to do with Magellan – possibly on the now dead Graphic Smash Forum, or maybe in the comments section, or who knows where – but which I’ve since forgotten. Oh dear.

Some answers and comments I make will, of course, be based on Magellan facts I already know, and are a concrete part of my narrative structure. Other statements originally aren’t but become so… the backstory about Charisma’s mother and how she came to give birth to Epoch’s daughter being one of those! But I suspect there are many long forgotten ideas.

What I plan to do, to deal with this, is to locate everywhere there is old and orphaned or archived material and then scrape it together and compile it into a Magellan Bibliotheca (I’m not calling it a ‘bible’!). It won’t happen overnight, but I just wanted you to know I’m on the case. Plus, from now on, as I say stuff – whether in commentary or as a comment – I’ll make sure I add it too.

I hate story inconsistencies, I certainly want the logic of the characters, history, and the broader Magellan universe to stack up, something that can’t happen if I’m unwittingly contradicting myself! Anyway… I’m on it!