Superguy

A shared universe fictional writing list started in 1989 and hosted, in turn, by CSSERVE at the University of Maine at Orono, the UMNEWS server at the same place, the NICBBS server at BITNIC (back in the days of BITNET), the LISTSERV at UCF1VM (a University of Central Florida server) and finally its permanent home at the eyrie.org mailserver.

Superguy is supposed to be quality humorous superhero fiction. In practical terms, two out of three of these will be acceptable. Except of course, that no one actually controls what is "acceptable" and "not acceptable." It's all pure anarchy, which means some stories are tremendously good and some suck wind.

Which stories are the former versus the latter is subject to some debate, though "Tales to Smurfify" is universally accepted as sucking the wind of bigness.

One of the oldest collaborative fiction fora still active on the Internet. Years before the rise of the e-book phenomenon, dozens of authors were cranking out quality superhero fiction here, most of it original, and a lot of it surprisingly good (and funny as hell). The complete archives of all Superguy stories ever written (barring those written since the most recent update) are available via FTP or the World-Wide Web--a rarity in this age of USENET archives like Deja News whose memories grow shorter all the time. Over 70 megabytes of text await the reader who wishes to explore.

A good rule of thumb for reading the Superguy archives is that if an author makes it to 10 episodes, it is usually going to be good. Note that the converse is not necessarily true, however.

The Superguy website, though somewhat out of date, can be found at http://www.eyrie.org/superguy/.