Well it's the merry month of may, and this marks my third editorial in as many months, I know that the schedule could hardly be called regular. My crippling workload made the March updates horrifically late, I was still under pressure but managed to get the April stuff done reasonably close to my target. But, What about May? What's my excuse? Well I spent a while interviewing Denny O'Neil, but that was before Azrael #54 even came out. I have a hypertime section ready to debut, but that was written ages ago.

To be honest I don't want to start the editorial off on that tone, because this month brought a lot of things to be happy about. May marks at least three important anniversaries for this site. May 3rd marks both my and Denny O'neil's Birthdays, while let's not forget that Tec 27 was cover dated may, Sure it was shipped in March, but I already had a subject for March's editorial. In six months we also come upon the fifth anniversary of the ongoing Azrael title and that comes hot on the heels of the first Anniversary of the books new title. For that five year anniversary I might revamp the look of the site and I might possibly do another interview with Denny, if he'll let me.

I'm really looking to do interviews with other Azrael creators so if Anyone knows Barry's or Roger's or James' or Demitrious' or Ken's E-mails can the let me know what they are. Also can anyone think of significant Hypertime realities, other than Kingdom, Tangent, Amalgam and Wildstorm?

I've been looking at the New DCX fanfiction initiative and I have to wonder, Is it worth me doing anything for these people? I like to think I'm a skilled writer, I've never got anything less than an A for my creative writing, I've won the odd competition and induced the odd emotional response in my audience, but do I have the time to do what I think should be done with an Azrael fanfiction title? I'm consistently amazed at what people let out their word processor, I've seen most of what I've done for what it is (often crappy and derivative, but even the shit has a spark of orginality and flair), and hopefully learned from my mistakes, but honestly if a picture is worth a thousand words shouldn't you be putting out something like five thousand words an issue? This is fanfiction, it is done in your spare time, but a couple hundred words in a few paragraphs hardly counts as anything more than teaser. While the quality wasn't as bad as I've seen I think the whole project could do with a bit more effort on the part of the writers. I'm looking on it with interest and hoping they'll succeed but my main praise is that they didn't see fit to include a Spoiler title, god knows one thing the world doesn't need is Spoiler fanfiction

But why was the may update so late? What it ultimately came down to was that Azrael #54 was hard to review. A lot of it was quite decent, good even, but the last two pages were hard to read, and for the first time I saw a serious chink in the craft that I enjoy so much in Azrael. To whit they were badly written, maybe pseudo types who only take the shallowest attempt at characterization and "oh that's cute dialogue" may be satisfied but I invest a great deal of time trying to read and understand what I see on a page and this reminds me of some real claptrap. I had to spend a lot of time getting my feelings in order, to write a balanced review of the issue, and I feel I actually did find a lot of decent things about it the more I thought about it. To be blatantly honest those last two pages read so differently they hardly seem like O'neil pages at all, more like Grayson "she of the overrated and cheesy script", my god how horrific, if it weren't for the second last page of Azrael #41, I'd have to believe it were so.

Other than O'neil doing a bit o'the old feet of clay routine, there was another, thing that took up my time, my rant and review of issue #23, so for the second time in two months I'll be bringing you two reviews, (where's Harvey Dent, he's not one to miss that sort of sentence?). That issue reminded me of all I love about Azrael so I haven't had a totally bad reading month. Also NML Gallery gave me more than I was hoping for, THREE Azrael pics, two more than I was expecting, and I think It's safe to say, Azrael looked killer in that animated pic, the costume even looked decent.

Gordon Hope-Murray 30/05/1999 previous columns
15/07/1998
04/09/1998
15/11/1998
15/01/1999
Some time in March/1999
22/04/1999