Jess's Impossible Territories (Amazon), a companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is out now, and you should definitely go buy it and give him some royalties. He's got a new mouth to feed!
On a personal note: I started the Annotated Sandman back in 1991* on Usenet, which as far as I know is the first comics annotation on the net, and is, I think, directly the forerunner or inspiration of other annotations, like Jess's. So on the one hand, I'm tremendously excited and pleased and proud for my friends to see works like this find success in the real world outside the net, and on the other hand, I'm inexpressibly jealous. And also pissed off that I was too lazy to do it myself. I could have a Northhampton phone number on my speed-dial! Curse you, Nevins!
*Corrected from first draft.
But, really, congratulations!
Incidentally, with respect to the genesis of the Annotated Sandman, while I had Eclipse's Crisis Index and LSH Index books, those aren't really annotations, and certainly don't cover the same material in the same way, nor are they online, where the Annotated Sandman documents could be much more living and I was quick to edit in contributions from other readers. So I really do think that I did something without direct inspiration. Also, it seems likely that there could have been similar projects on Compuserve or GEnie, but I know nothing of them, and I think most of the subsequent annotation projects since AS trace back through one or two generations to AS.
Also, I did the Annotated Sandman mostly because I was irritated, which is apparently a powerful force for creative action in this world (cf. pearls). I started the AS, at least in part, so that newbie Sandman readers could have something to explain to them who Cain and Abel or the Martian Manhunter were, instead of irritating me by asking repetitive questions on the newsgroup. I think I did it annotation-style to promote thoroughness, rather than doing it via FAQ (which were relatively rare in those days). I was more civic-minded in my younger days, responding to a perceived gap by trying to fill it usefully. Nowadays, even though I'm more of a socialist than ever, I mostly want somebody else to get out there and fill that gap. This amuses me.
Anyway, that's how I remember it. Probably other people remember different things.
Posted by Greg at September 5, 2008 6:08 PM
Thanks!
You started the Sandman annotations? Huh. I don't think I knew that. My own inspiration was Scott Hollifield's annotations to the Golden Age, which may or may not have predated the Sandman annos--I don't have the time to search the Usenet postings to be sure.
But, to be honest, my experiences with online fandom have so burned me out that I very nearly wish I'd never begun them. When I reach that point, I'll wish that you'd done the League annotations, rather than me.
Google's earliest copies of Annotated Sandman are from Doll's House and Dream Country in late 1991, and I'm pretty sure I did 'em in order, so P&N annotations would be a month or two earlier. So that's a couple years earlier than Annotated Golden Age ('93). (And a couple years earlier than I remembered in the body of the main post! Which I'll just go and fix right now.)
I've been online since before the web. The Sandman stuff was the first annotation I recall seeing on Usenet. Whether Gopher, Archie, FTP or Veronica had 'em, I doubt it. People used to put absurd things in their finger names, though. And the Rolling Stones used to have a lot of annotated lyrics on the mailing lists.
And then of course there was Martin Gardner.
There were group-authored Watchmen annotations on Usenet and on Compuserve, but not at anywhere near the level of detail of the Annotated Sandman, or Jess's stuff (which moves past "annotation" nearly into "concordance" territory). I mean, no one was listing every instance of knots or water or injury-to-the-right-eye imagery (though someone should--it'd be fun!).
Mixed vibes. The Watchmen Annotations weren't really the same sort of thing. They refered to stuff wuithin the book, as I recall. Well, let me check. Whoa!!! Major nostalgia trip, there are messages from Glenn Carnegey and Mike Kelly.
Doug Atkinson's Annotated Watchmen dates from Feb 28 1993; In that thread, Dani Zweig references the original Usenet discussion of Watchmen, but the implication is that it's an archived discussion and not an organized work.