Another tiny update since I can’t really plan ahead – and wouldn’t want to accidentally end up not publishing anything for too long a while.

Mostly it’s about existing stuff that got revised or extended, since this tends to have priority so as to avoid people reading obsolete stuff while we have better material to offer.

There’s still a glitch (on Windows-based browsers only) in a corner of the “New” page, but it’s not a major problem and I’m currently stumped by it, so it’ll have to wait until I get a new idea about what the problem might be.

Roll call:

• REVISED ENTRIES. Various improvements in style, clarity, etc. in the following entries. Some time it’s just a few touch-ups, sometimes the improvements are much more dramatic and make an amateur-ish entry look way more polished.
  • Manhunter II (post-resurrection)
  • Jackhammer II (Demolition Team)
  • Meathook (nearly full rewrite, really)
  • Pteradon (Hybrid)
  • Ms. Marvel (writeup 3 – Year One)
  • Viscountess
  • Mr. Fish (includes new, minor data from a recent handbook)
  • “John Henry” (New Frontier)
  • Ali Ka-Zoom
  • Black Widow I (Claire Voyant)
  • Nightcrawler
  • Gunmetal Gray
  • Nunchaku
  • Ivan the kyphotic giant
• THE RED STAR. In this batch, our our old set of Makita notes got The Treatment to reach v1 and beyond. This entry has received a fair bit of beautiful new art, and has been rewritten. Then partially rewritten. Then partially rewritten. Then partially rewritten. The fourth run (v1.1) should be about right. Many of the changes were triggered by a new wave of The Red Star research, so expect more stuff later.
• THUNDERBOLTS. We’ve wanted to do a Songbird entry for a real long while, but for years were stuck with my old, unpublishable set of notes. Then I managed to completely overhaul the Screaming Mimi profile, but that was it. Thankfully Gareth came in, read a ton of comic books and finished the job, so we now have a full-blast Songbird entry. It’s a scream !
• ONYX. Our old entry for the pre-Crisis version of the DCU’s Onyx was about 90% there, so it’s high time it go finished. No entry is scheduled for the moment for the post-Crisis version, though, but at least that version is now properly done. No new art, though – there’s nothing else to work with.
• FIGHTING GAMES. And since batches don’t feel like batches without one of Tom’s video game characters, here comes Takuma Sakazaki (aka Mister Karate) from Art of Fighting and King of Fighters

And thus, we’re now at 4,457 entries.

I found a half-dozen comments that had been erroneously tagged as spam (some dating back to… July of 2010) and pumped them back into the system – I’m so sorry about the delay. Early tests showed the spam filter to be reliable, but it looks like it requires more supervision than I though.

I hope to publish a half-sized batch before the end of the month, since most of the key contributors currently are super-busy. On the other hand, these time constraints mean that the community is more approachable in terms of sheer volume – it’s currently not the 800-mails-a-month firehose of discussion it’s traditionally been.

You can check things out at http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dc-heroes/ – remember that it’s possible to subscribe but then just use the web interface, which allows for following just some specific discussions. It’s also possible to check older and current discussions out to get an idea of the mood and congeniality of the community, which we encourage.

EDIT: The recent WordPress update has destroyed my code, and as it turns out the last full backup of the site is borked. I’ll see what I can do to reconstruct this page tomorrow.

EDIT EDIT: And now that I have to sit down and take time to repair the page, I’ve noticed that the comments blocked as spam *were* spam, actually. Just generic, flattering comments that seemed to match well with the nature of the site but were actually just intended to display some commercial URLs. So it’s not true that flattery will get you nowhere – it will get you a few hours of exposure before I can actually pay some attention. On the other hand the “New” page is nearly repaired.