"Mac" is a nickname given because of the band.

Lye or Li is a play on worlds for Lie, as in untruth, and there's a whole story reason for that pseudonym that I've never got round to telling. In the Parodyverse I refer to him as Mr Li and I think I might go back to that for the novel.

I know about the London Necropolis Company, that fine Victorian firm that owned various major cemetaries and dominated the undertaking world. They even operated their own funereral railway trains, complete with black crepe and plumes, to specially built railway stations within their cementaries (one for Anglicans, one for Catholics, and one for non-conformists like methodists and Baptists). When I first used them as inspiration for villains I actually called them the London Necropolis Company; Westminster Necropolis Company is me trying to change the name to avoid a real-life institution.




I've never seen the Hellraiser movies so I wouldn't know.

In actual fact the five members of the PV Hellraisers team were all loosly inspired by the creatures in an old video game called Dungeon Keeper. Amongst the various creatures available for deployment are the Knight, the Dungeon Mistress, the Bile Demon (a vile obsese farting creature), the Vampire, and the feral Horned Reaper. When I wanted a pack of monsters I re-dressed some of these to offer backgrounds, powers, and motives. I hope that what I did with them was sufficiently original to move them far away from their original jokey source.

Sir Lucian, the Chain Knight, was the one that was most original. His inspiration in the game was simply a knight in armour. The prehensile chains, the bloody armour, the abilities with locks and bonds, his origin and everything else were all from me.




I didn't mean to imply my intention to remove Vinnie from the Parodyverse. I know some authors prefer to do that with their creations but I think with Vinnie that ship has sailed. He's here and he's staying. His alternate-reality self can star in a book in another part of the multiverse. Likewise the various other characters I mentioned as accompanying him are still around in the PV and available for use. Hell, if I took all my characters home I'd be wandering off with a fair old percentage of the total cast.

As far as I'm concerned, providing nobody's making a profit off my work, Vinnie and the rest are like every other PV character, free for people to write about on the Parodyverse board. As his creator I presumably get some say in how he's used, in the same way I try to accord other creators control over how I use their characters. Other than that, all the characters here probably get covered by that provision in copyright law about use of characters for parody purposes anyhow.







We're suffering from low turnout, that's for sure. But I didn't mean to imply I'm taking anything away from the PV, including myself of occasional Vinnie stories.







I think it's impossible to erase e-trails these days. The Wayback Machine and other old webpage storage sites still hold some PV tales going right back to Baron Zemo's Lair. The Avengers Message Board archives for around September 98 still contain some of the very first stories.

I'm relatively comfortable with us retiring poster characters after their poster has vanished for a while. I usally try to make it permanent enough to explain why Character X isn't rushing in to the rescue during the maximum crisis but not so irrevocable that they can't miraculously return if their poster rediscovers and interest.




I think it's organic. If you look at the "regular" cast from even five years ago it's different from the characters getting the emphasis today. I don't think we're quorate enough or organised enough or prolific enough to shape things in any more planned way.

Of the current crop of active poster-characters, the only ones whose posters aren't around too much now are: Lisa, Donar, Hatman, G-Eyed, Nats, Sorceress, Xander. All of these are posters who "stay in touch", either by occasional postings or through association with one or more active posters. All of them have expressed a willingness to have their characters continue to appear in the Parodyverse.

The other recent change is that for the first time I've written in a Lair Legion line-up that includes two characters from a single poster (me and you) and a couple of non-poster characters.

In other words, the changes you suggest are probably happening naturally.







I think these founders would have to express preferences.

An example would be Scott. A decade ago, as Amazing Guy, Scott was probably our most prolific and enthusiastic poster. Later, getting the novel-writing bug, he decided to stop using some of his characters in the Parodyverse - the vampire children Annabelle and Roland, Justin Tyme, and maybe others. He asked that these characters not be used any more. He also asked that other of his characters, Amazing Guy and Trickshot, be retired; fortunately I had a Parody War that could help with that.

Now we can't physically erase every reference made to Scott's characters without deleting roughly 60% of everything that was written during the Scott years. Nor would Scott expect it. All we can do is respect his wishes regarding the characters and keep things as open as possible so that if Scott gets bitten by the PV bug once more he can slip back in.