HEROES is dedicated to giving you the best in reviews of a variety of different series from some of the communities top talent.
Welcome to the new Brawl Tells All review column! I’ve been doing Brawl Tells All reviews for some time, and despite a rocky beginning (which I regret and apologize profusely for) it’s a column I’ve become quite comfortable with. With the new volume, I do want to add a new feature to the column- a Tit For Tat program I’ll offer to any site that I review a title from. I’ll do a single issue for anyone I’m not already working with to show I’m not all talk and no action. That said- let’s just right into the thick of things.
Before I get into my first review, I want to talk for a moment about reviewing. There are a few things that make a good review I want to mention. First, I ranted for a bit about constructive criticism on my LiveJournal in October (http://brawl2099.livejournal.com/5017.html ). I’ll leave the link for what I want to say about that. All is forgiven and forgotten in the specific case I mention there, but the principles I outline are something we can all take to heart when reviewing fanfic. There are few other things I want to mention. The first, a synopsis and links are always good. Try to avoid spoilers, but give your readers enough of the story that they’ll be interested and can get right to it. Next, review small chunks. Don’t try to review 9 issues in one pop, but if you do, spend enough time to talk about the whole thing. A single paragraph is not enough to cover 50 pages (or more) of material. Next, always leave the writer something to work on. This is a hobby, but it’s largely something we do to better our writing skills. Again- always be constructive.
Lastly, a few “don’t”’s-
One last thing onto the feature presentation- the Brawl Tells All rating system.
We ready now?
On with the show!
I eat babies. With cream sauce. Maybe you should know that about me going in.
Seeing as this is the first review I've done for HEROES, I think some explanation of my system, as well as why I find infant flesh particularly succulent, is in order. I take single issues and break them down into four sections: Opening, Characters, Plot, and Prose. These are, to me, the essential parts of any piece of fanfic. In our medium, with the sheer volume of material that's freely available to all, it's often the opening of an issue that can make the difference between engaging or repulsing a reader. If the opening is disinteresting, limp, uninspired, and riddled with grammatical/stylistic flaws, I'm usually going to close my browser, and be on my way. If the involved characters are poorly rendered, unevenly written, or just plain wrong, I'm gong to call you on it. If your plot consists entirely of something like, "Spiderman is having a bad day. He fights Venom. J.J. is mad." Then you have bored me and wasted my time. Congratulations. And of course, prose is the stuff narratives are made of. Well written prose can go a long way in soothing any other complaint or irritant. Poorly written prose can make puppies sad, women cry, and a reviewer gouge out his eyes
Oh, and I always make it a point to say something nice towards the end. It makes me feel all fuzzy inside. But that could just be indigestion from all the cannibalism.
I used to hold off on reviewing titles I was enjoying that had stalled mid-storyline because I wanted to be able to recommend titles to others as complete stories, with beginning, middle and end. I hesitated to talk about anything in mid-arc, because if I was leaning towards the negative I might be judging an unfinished work unfairly, and if I was leaning positive I might only frustrate people who went to check out what I was raving about and found an incomplete storyline.
But you know what? There's a lot of series out there with unfinished storylines, and maybe, just maybe, if I review them it will inspire the writers to get on the keyboard and finish them up, which is good all around. So if I read a partial story arc and end up saying "I want more!", that's a good candidate for this service.
Do you have a recommendation for I WANT MORE? Got a favorite fanfic series that deserves more attention, while its author deserves a kick in the pants to get writing again? Feel free to drop me a line at badblood51 @ hotmail . com and I'll work them into I WANT MORE!