Paul Gadzikowski
scarfman@iglou.com

On This Time Round

Once upon a time on alt.comics.creative, a poster called Kielle created the Sub-Reality Cafe. This was a fictional establishment where the characters appearing in stories posted to the newsgroup could gather, outside all restrictions of continuity (i.e., aware that they are fictional characters), and discuss (or complain of) the way authors treat them in their sourceworks (much as they do in Fred Hembeck's cartoons) or even in the other fanfiction appearing on the newsgroup.

I learned of this on alt.drwho.creative when Tyler Dion, a reader of both newsgroups, decided that a.dw.c needed such a forum too. He created the tavern This Time Round, where DOCTOR WHO, crossover and alternate universe characters gather to gripe to or about each other, play poker, and drink to excess. And, not infrequently, kill each other:

A significant subset of the This Time Round stories is the To Die For or "Psycho Nyssa" series, in which the gentle Trakenite from DOCTOR WHO's eighteenth through twentieth seasons indulges in a fiendish delight for repeatedly murdering DOCTOR WHO's boy genius Adric in successively more inventively bizarre and violent ways. Psycho Nyssa was created in a series of short This Time Round pieces by Erin Tumilty, and the TDF stories are primarily the works of Adric fan Doug Killings and Nyssa fan B.K. Willis, who being anime fans have made it into a cosmically dysfunctional romance. (There is an alt.drwho.creative archive where these stories can be reviewed.)

In the a.dw.c tradition of writers championing characters that they favor but who are otherwise unpopular, I put out a This Time Round story arc in which Peri Brown romanced and married the Doctor. All eight of him. At once.

Another popular element of the outside-continuity phenomenon on alt.drwho.creative is Imran Inayat's Look Who's Talking, the day care center Outside Continuity. Look Who's Talking is just down the road from This Time Round with baby versions of the characters who drink at This Time Round. (Were you a kid, or did you have kids, in the 80s? Remember Baby Muppets and Baby Flinstones and Baby Mickey Mouse?) I followed Imran's lead and created H.G. Wells Memorial High School, on the street between This Time Round and Look Who's Talking, and then incorporated it into the Peri arc.

Only the Peri arc of my This Time Round stories is archived here, except for one earlier, quasi-related arc.

April 19 2001 was the 25th anniversary of the first of my Daily cartoons. Since at the time I was writing for alt.drwho.creative regularly instead of drawing cartoons regularly, I comemmorated the anniversary with the wedding of the Doctor(s) and Peri amongst truly epic self-reference.

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