User blog:Gilgameshkun/Mirage TMNT transcripts dilemma

I want to start typing transcripts of Mirage TMNT comics. But one of the big problems is navigation&mdash;with the Category:IDW TMNT Transcripts, I could interlink "previous" and "next" easily because there is a well-established official chronology of comics ordering. But technically there is no such official order of Mirage TMNT comics.

One obvious solution would be to go by the Mirage comics continuity timeline at TMNTEntity, and while I don't think he is probably right 99% of the time, it's still not an official ordering.

And of course, in the past, on one of the public Q&As on Peter Laird's TMNT blog, I asked some questions about timeline placement, and Mr. Laird told me point blank that I probably know the answers better than he does...and I respect if this is the case, but it comes back to the primary point that there is no official chronology.

So why not go by the published order of comics within series? To some degree this could make sense for the Mirage main series volumes, except that the backup comics are not always chronologically placed, and the Guest Era issues...forget about it. And the Tales stories are mostly interquels taking place between other established stories (just like virtually all the Castlevania games published during the 2000s), making its published order largely meaningless to chronology. Then there are all the short stories published in the likes of Shell Shock, and Plastron Cafe, and Grunts, and newer Mirage stuff published by IDW, etc.

So basically...there's nothing that works better than TMNTEntity's timeline.

TMNTEntity, for its part, admits that even some of those timeline placements are less than ideal, as there's been enough self-contradiction in the official Mirage continuity that there can be no perfectly-fitting order of stories. (This becomes especially evident with stuff like The Value of Gold, as I'm pretty sure from a technological standpoint that a story revolving around a 3D MMORPG did not take place in the early 1990s...but this placement was necessitated by Casey having not yet retired from his vigilante lifestyle. But J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter's PlayStation being broken by his cousin Dudley as something that happened in 1993, so...this stuff can happen when trying to write "period" pieces in general.  But I digress...)

So, what to do? I don't just want to write transcripts with no interconnecting navigation.