On Oct 21, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: It may be that my point has gotten lost amongst the rhetoric here. Personally, I'd vote to keep any article on a costumed character in Marvel or DC with appearances in multiple issues. The problems are not in terms of what is important. The problem is... well, let's pull up a solid midlist Marvel character - Speedball. 1603 word article. Only 500 words of that pertain to the real world instead of the fictional world of the comics. That's the problem. Fancruft is in many ways a poor choice of terms for this. Especially since it's not even necessarily the case that the information itself is the problem. The problem is that virtually the entire article was written so as to pertain to the Marvel Universe, with occasional citations of issue number. It's not a problem unique to any area, either. I'll wager that any fictional text that has spawned articles about its individual characters has at least one article like this. (Oddly, the exception to this seems to be Pokemon, where all of the articles I've glanced at [Admittedly just a sample] take an out-of-universe perspective.) Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer(a)english.ufl.edu You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

On 21/10/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Surely one would expect that an article on a fictional character would feature far more information on the character itself (within the fictional world) than on real world things (character development, &c.)? I haven't looked at the article, but I would say that a 2:1 ratio is pretty damn good. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

Earle Martin wrote: I suppose that a crusade is just as socially acceptable among Muslims as a jihad is among Christians. Sloth as one of the [[Seven deadly sins]], dates back to the seventh century, as does Islam. I take due note of your modern seventh-century solutions to these problems. Our comic book aficionados would disagree that they are indiscriminate in their treatment of the subject. Wow! There goes a pillar! Ultimately, yes. Excellent! It establishes that you were preaching the lesser jihad whereby thes comic book articles would be conquered by the sword, instead of having people examine their own motivations for expanding these articles. Ec

Earle Martin wrote: My apologies I thought I was only feeding a troll. I couldn't resist the temptation to respond to the introduction of the concept of jihad. The reference to the lesser and greater jihad was a fantastic opportunity for me to inform myself about an element of Islamic theology. Connecting this with sloth inspired me to look into the origin of the theology of the seven deadly sins; I learned something else. It was disappointing to realize that I was only dealing with poetaster theology. Some of us who feed trolls should also know when to stop. A further apology for crediting you with the ability to understand the metaphorical. I have the bad habit of forgetting that fundamentalists have this problem. Thank you, I won't discuss Hemingway. Ec