The History

This is all Shag Matthews' fault.

You see, he's the one who started these DC blog mega crossovers, and since there were blogs left out of his first one I liked, I started trying to figure out how to include them in the next. One blogger in particular we both felt bad about, so I reached out to him and basically said, "we'll just do our own crossover next time, slugger."

I found a neat George Perez pin-up with a bunch of characters, started separating that into pieces I knew certain blogs would represent, and basically planned to recreate Shag's first crossover. However, I wanted a more interactive element to keep readers moving from blog to blog, and with Easter coming up, I latched onto the idea of a scavenger/egg hunt. Add up the art pieces from each blog, along with clues, and eventually find a scan of the whole image. Also, I'd include an email address, and the first correct respondent would win my set of the "DC Challenge" 12-issue maxi series. Well, Easter came and went, I still haven't finished going over the maxi-series, and the pictures stayed in their folder.

A few months back, the drive where I kept most of my files crashed, and recovery has been a challenge in and of itself. Pulling together all those picture files, I realized that the new year would see me back to school, and pursuing other grandiose blog projects. A week before Thanksgiving, and associating the Easter egg hunt idea with Christmas for no legitimate reason, I started emailing people about the proposed crossover.

The plan was to have a slew of trivia/history quizzes, where folks would reach back into their old posts for answers, encouraging readers to really give each blog a chance to win them over. It hadn't occurred to me that many blogs don't have that deep of a catalog, or focus on areas my concept didn't properly address. That's when the idea morphed into a broader puzzle/riddle/whatever challenge. Of course, either way, the logistics were going to be complex, and I hadn't explained my evolving idea to some folks' satisfaction, plus the original proposed start date was clearly inadequate to properly execute any of this. Never mind those holiday things that tend to distract and wind-up people.

In case you're wondering, my own challenges would have looked like some of these, plus this, this, and this. Looks like a lot of work. Oh yeah.

I announced a hiatus until 2010, and built a tutorial blog to help people get started-- basically just offering "challenge" ideas and a very basic construction of their "wrong answer" page, which I've been asking for since November.

Come the second week of January, I've got three people's "wrong answer" pages, and start sending out individual emails to see how things are progressing. For the most part they aren't. On the plus side, a brainstorm for suggestions on a blog gives me an idea that I hope will kick start the crossover, and I set February 1st as the "come hell or high water" launch date.