Rex Killiante:
Well, it all started in 6th grade. I had this nutball idea to start my own comic, so I looked around a number of local magazine stores for inspiration. Lo and behold, here was this Sonic the Hedgehog comic sitting on the rack, and I just HAD to have it. I was even more amazed to find in it characters that had seemingly been wiped off the map in '95; the entire SatAM cast.
You can't imagine my astonishment that there were still storylines being circulated around about my favorite Sonic universe. In fact, it was kinda disappointing. Needless to say, I became an avid reader of the comics.
Sean Catlett:
How did you get started in fanfiction?
Rex Killiante:
Well, I became so enthralled in the comics that I felt obligated to know the storylines that came in issues before. This led me to find Sonic HQ as well as the Sonic Foundation, and, well, all roads lead to Dan Drazen.
Sean Catlett:
Or The Wiz of Oz of Sonic, to some.
Rex Killiante:
That, in a nutshell, was how I got interested in fanfiction. I later found Robert Brown and Francis Tolbert to be my favorite writers...at least to a point.
Sean Catlett:
A point, huh? You sayin they jumped the shark?
Rex Killiante:
Actually, they're still writing. I have no idea how many chapters they now have in their "Post-SatAM" epic, but everything after the 30th was unnecessary.
SatAM has enough characters. They didn't need to add so many more.
Sean Catlett:
Maybe it's one of them experimental type projects.
Rex Killiante:
Don't get me wrong; Bookshire made perfect sense as a fill-in character, along with a few others. But there gets to be a point where the fanfiction is no longer about the main characters that we know and love, and it's the point of no return.
In my opinion, Archie comics shares a good part of that blame. Or at least, things were that way when I stopped reading them. I haven't checked.
Sean Catlett:
When did you stop reading them?
Rex Killiante:
It was right in the middle of 11th grade. During that year, I had a lot of things going on, particularly involving leadership duties at my school, and there just wasn't enough time to catch up on everything that was happening in both the comics and in the web fanfiction circles.
Sean Catlett:
Were you writing at that point?
Rex Killiante:
I'd been writing for about a year and a half, I believe.
Might have been 2 years. It's kinda hard to say when I started writing fanfiction. But I pretty much stopped everything in one fell swoop. Since then, my main outlet for Sonic has been you and Steve Zacharus.
Continue to Part Three
