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Comment Room Archive

Comments for the week ending February 26, 2007

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Count me as one person concerned about the problems with the "Ask Greg" archives. I hope that Gorebash fixes it soon (assuming that he's aware of it).
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Possibly. But he did say "Clans tend to split after their membership gets up into the range of about eighty."

Possibly he was talking only of adult membership. I would like to ask if that is the case, actually.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Maybe someone was asking about how many eggs were laid and how big the clan was and Greg gave the number 80 because he was thinking more along the lines of breeding age or adult gargoyles. There were 72 breeding gargs and beasts in 988 and maybe as few as 8 gargoyles older than that. Maybe when he gave the 100-110 number he was including the whole clan with all the younger generations. I know thats a strecth, but it seems to make sense, and the numbers kinda back it up.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Long ago, there were gargoyle clans all over the world... but I was not aware any of them had survived..." - Goliath, "The Green"

Greg did say that 80 is the general splitting size for any clan, although elsewhere he said the Wyvern clan may have split because the humans would not tolerate any more than 80. And that included Beasts, so we can't leave them out of the numbers.
I still think we should ask Greg about the numbers. I think it can be phrased in a way that isn't an idea. Before he settled on 80, he initially said the Wyvern clan split when it got to 100 or 110 members, which sounds more reasonable to me.

Sunlight > Humans are diurnal and have generally, across all cultures, been afraid of the dark and of wild animals/bandits/ghosts/monsters that come out in the dark. I think this is simply something in human psychology that unfortunately worked to the detriment of gargoyles. Specifically thinking that gargoyles are demons would of course only come about once the Christian church got going, and especially when it started labeling all sorts of Pagan beliefs as "demons", including in some places faeries and gnomes. I don't know about the actual horns/bat wings/barbed tail part of demons. Some of that imagery seems to go back to the ancient Greek idea of how the Furies looked. But whether any of it was inspired by gargoyles, I have no clue.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Todd> About the evil demons and sunlight. It's hard to say with that. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Did gargoyles turning to stone during the daytime make people think they are demons because demons hate sunlight or did humans think gargoyles were demons already and so came up with the story that demons hate sunlight?

DPH> I think we have to consider something else here. As Patrick mentioned, how big a clan could get depends a lot on local characteristics. Wyvern may have split when it was smaller than most clans that split simply because Wyvern couldn't support them all anymore and/or the humans would not tolerate such a large clan. If the New Olympus Clan, lets say, has expanded to 300 members, that may be simply because they have no reason to split (enough food and resources, no humans getting annoyed with their numbers) and wouldn't have anywhere to go if they did. The Wyvern Clan probably was under a lot of pressure to split, and they probably had lots of places they could go.

Vaevictis> A female gargoyle who mates will concieve her first egg when she is 49.5, will lay it when she is 50 and it will hatch when she is 60.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Long ago, there were gargoyle clans all over the world... but I was not aware any of them had survived..." - Goliath, "The Green"

Vaevictis>> Three of the 36 eggs were beast eggs, so if you're looking at gargoyle numbers, calculate with 33 eggs.

Also, Greg isn't big on quantifying things; which is fine given that, you know, it's a cartoon, and all this math isn't necessary for expository purposes. Even in most stories I can't imagine it would be necessary.

But you're certainly free to ask when the chance comes up again.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Thanks Alex Garg. Phew, I don't have to re-do all my math.

Even with the mortality rates gargoyles faced during the last few millennia of human oppression, 100% mortality after age 90 is pushing it. It doesn't really make sense for the Wyvern clan, or for any other clan.

I think next time the queue opens, we should run these numbers by Greg. Not the population simulations, but just the estimate of how many breeding adults would be necessary (before the split) to lay 36 eggs at Wyvern. That 36*2 being 72, that leaves only 8 total children and old folks. Ask again how many gargoyles there were at Wyvern before the split, and how many are generally in a "full" clan.

Vaevictis Asmadi

TODD: Oh yes, I have to agree with that as well -- Isn't sunlight another "downfall" for Trolls as well, hence the whole "under the bridge" thing?

On the current topic, I do agree that 80 is probably just accurate for the massacred Wyvern Clan, but odds are it's got to be close for MOST clans in the world. I mean, New Olympus has got to be the exception, otherwise that island be SWARMING with Gargoyles (and we didn't see ONE of them in the New Olympus ep either!). Makes me think that when things get crowded there, a bunch decide its time to enter the real world, with the New Olympians playing the role of "Be my guest, but I'M not going out there!"

PATRICK: I have to agree with this as well, but hey, there IS one crucial element in Doc Brown's Time Machine that we just know all the details to, and that is the Flux Capacitor. We really only know that Doc discovered it after falling in the bathroom and that according to him, it makes "Time Travel" possible. It's ridiculous to think this is what the writers of BTTF were thinking, but I've always accepted that the "Flux" in the FC handles this issue of the world spinnning and the Universe getting larger . . . somehow. And at least now that I've accepted this, I can just enjoy the movie, which is AMAZING (just saw the three last night infact, before Kim Possible!)

Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

Vaevictis>> 50, egg 2 at 70, egg three at 90.

Matt>> I don't think we can make even educated guesses about clans we haven't met. There are far too many variables that we just don't know - time in or degree of isolation from humans, population after their last event (a massacre or clan split), availability of resources, colonizing efforts (all likely failed), age demographics, etc. It's like the Drake equation: Sure, you have all the variables, and maybe a few hard numbers, but otherwise it's flat-out guesswork.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Patrick - <Not only is earth spinning on a wobbling axis as it orbits the sun, the solar system itself is racing outward through space with the momentum left over from the Big Bang. Any would-be Doc Brown needs to think three-dimensionally before even considering the fourth dimension.> Thanks. <And I still say 80 is a b.s. number.> I have to agree. A clan splitting at 80 doesn't work unless practically no gargoyles live beyond 90. Given their incredible immune system and stone sleep cure-all and then add that gargoyles age at half the rate of humans, it's like saying humans start dropping like flies sometime between the age of 45 and 55.

If you stick to the idea that a full gargoyle clan is one that is capable of producing x number of eggs for the next 3 reproductive cycles, then the minimum size of that clan, just to support the continued breeding is x (number of eggs) times 10 divided by 3. Let's say that a clan splits at 80 (we're just counting the population 90 and below). By reversing my formula, we arrive at a clan producing 24 eggs per breeding cycle when it splits. Now if we work with 33 eggs from the Wvyrn clan and assume they were laid equally between 3 different generations and that capacity was expected to continue, we get a population of 110 gargoyles plus any above the age of 90.

As far as size of gargoyles clans, I'm only go to rank them from largest to biggest with a why
1)New Olympus - this potentially has to be the largest gargoyle population. No human interference, best medical technology. basically the environment's capacity to support living beings limits the size of this clan
2)Japan - I'm going to say this is the 2nd largest. They work openly with humans.
3)Lochness clan - no human contact plus plenty of food.
4-6 is toss up between Xanadu, London, and Korea. The big reason: wars in those areas and currrent government
Xanadu clan - only some major
London - with the bombing going on during ww2, I kinda suspect several members were killed inadvertantly - I'm betting this one is bigger than Korea
Korea - with the Korean war going on, I see this clan having lost several members but it should be bigger than Avalon's
7)Avalon clan - obvious reasons
8)Manhattan - 6 - future somewhat better than Labyrinth - Angela and Katana will help start building this clan's size up
9)Labyrinth clan - 5 - potential distaster with only 1 female and no known mates for anybody else
10)Mayan clan - 4 but with 32 eggs waiting to hatch, this clan doesn't need support to rebuild

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Does anybody remember what at age a gargoyle lays her first egg? I've tried to look it up but the archives are broken.
Vaevictis Asmadi

DPH > The entire universe is expanding, so the calculations required to make a time machine end up at the same geographic spot on planet earth would be insanely complex. Not only is earth spinning on a wobbling axis as it orbits the sun, the solar system itself is racing outward through space with the momentum left over from the Big Bang. Any would-be Doc Brown needs to think three-dimensionally before even considering the fourth dimension.

So all the world's gargoyles have a collective brain fart in 2198 that gets every egg in the world wiped out? What a rosy future that is to look forward to. :P

And I still say 80 is a b.s. number. The population level at which an areas resources become maxed out is going to be dependant on the local environment. Ten acres of South Americna rain forest can support much more life than ten acres of African desert.

117 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]

I think that Greg Weisman said that a Gargoyles clan will split in two when it reaches 80 members. Or, at least, he said that about the Wyvern Clan. So I think this would hold true for all clans, no?

I can't see, if this were true then, how ANY clan would have more than 40 members.

Battle Beast - [Canada]
That is all I will say.

The size of 80 does seem weird, but like I have been saying, gargoyles are not forced to mate only with members of their own clan. Before they became so scarce, gargoyle clans would have been in contact with neighbor clans.


There is a problem with the archives. All the responses from before April 2001 are not showing up. A bunch of material from Gargoyle Biology and Gargoyle Beasts is just plain missing. At the bottom of every archive is this message:

"Something's broken if you're seeing this. Sorry! I blame chipmunks."

Vaevictis Asmadi

Matt - <definition of a full clan> The way I see it we really need to define to both 1)full clan and 2)mature clan. I do question if my definition isn't strict enough, though. Let's see what my definition really minimally requires. 7 couples, age 90, 7 couples age 70, 7 couples age 50, 7 males/7 females age 30, 7 males/7 females age 10. That's what it takes to guarantee the next 3 generations have the ability to lay 20 eggs. That's 14 * 5 or 70 gargoyles to be a minimal full clan under my definition. Eek. No way that a gargoyle clan splits at 80 members unless the surival rate after having your 3rd egg amounts to practically nill within 10-15 years.

I think we need to go over the math at Ask Greg.

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Patrick: So I forgot to say "robot" mosquito. Sue me. ( ;

Any my understanding of things is that DNA comes from the nucleus of the cell. Animals in the mammalian class have denucleated red cells. No nucleus means no DNA. So in mammals, it would be tricky to get a good sample from our blood. But mammals are actually the exception to this. Just about every other vertebrate has nucleated red cells. So I'm just hypothesizing that gargates do, as well.

Matt: The New Olympus clan looks pretty full compared to the others. I'm wondering how many of them are without a mate (it's foolish to assume there are 150 males and 150 females, and those numbers are equally divided among gargoyles and beasts), and what New Olympus revealing itself to the world might eventually do in that respect.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"Six Stars of the Northern Cross, in mourning for their sister's loss, in a final flash of glory, nevermore to grace the night..." -Rush ("Cygnus X-1")

PHOENICIAN - I think that stone sleep has helped endanger gargoyles' existence in another way besides simply leaving them helpless in the daytime. When early humans (and even humans much later on) saw gargoyles turning to stone as the sun rose, their obvious response would have been that this was a sign that gargoyles were evil demons. The concept of sunlight incapacitating evil creatures is a very common one, and it would be easy to interpret gargoyles' stone sleep as part of the same phenomenon as, say, vampires collapsing into dust when hit by the sun's rays. Stone sleep could have as easily helped encourage anti-gargoyle prejudice among humans as the batlike wings, clawed hands and feet, fangs, and glowing eyes.
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Patrick> "Matt, I would hope all the gargoyles on the planet would be smart enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. To gather all the eggs of all the clans together in one place would be a monumentally stupid thing to do."
-Well, come March 21st, 2198, thats precisely what they do. The initial founding of the thirteenth clan will be a disaster for the Gargoyle Nation. As Greg has said, someone should've told gargoyles that 13 is not a lucky number.

I must say that I'm loving this topic, I'm sure there are people in here bored to tears with it, but I think those of you participating are really making some great points. I honestly thought I was the only one who thought about this stuff. The "Where is New Olympus?" question is a good topic too.

DPH> After some thought, I'm leaning towards liking your idea of what constitutes a full clan better than mine. A full clan shouldn't be one on the verge of splitting, but rather a clan about to split is something of an overfull clan. I think that at least a few of the clans in 1996 are overfull clans, this explains why (as Vaevistis noted) pretty much all the clans have maxed out (I'm reading this to mean become full clans) by 2198. If a few clans have many excess members, it'd be easy for some of them to spill over into the less populated clans, not to mention the two clans founded between 1996 and 2198.

Anyone have some good guesses on clan numbers in 1996? I think we should all take our best educated guesses and then we can average those guesses to see what our general consensus is. I'll go first, though as a disclaimer, I reserve the right to modify these numbers later. Also, these numbers do not include eggs or beasts:

London Clan - 175
Ishimura Clan - 200
Mayan Clan - 4
Korea Clan - 150
Xanadu Clan - 150
Loch Ness Clan - 100
New Olympian Clan - 300
Avalon Clan - 32
Manhattan Clan - 6
Labyrinth Clan - 5

Maybe later I'll ad how many eggs I think are in each clan next to the population number, but first I wanna hear peoples thoughts on these numbers. Some of them are flat out guesses, but I tried to think about each clans unique situation. *Shrugs*

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Long ago, there were gargoyle clans all over the world... but I was not aware any of them had survived..." - Goliath, "The Green"

Patrick - "Wow... suddenly the reason why there are so few gargoyles left becomes more clear. They've precipitated their own eventual extinction by not sticking together and forming societies large enough to compete with man."

For me, the very fact that to figure out Gargoyle breeding is a devilish process really does work against them as a species -- perhaps why they evolved as a Clan. Without multiple support, the species would have an even MORE hard time to surive.

And then don't forget another species-downside, which is their daily stone sleep -- at least since the invention of stone-breaking weapons. Being defenseless for 12 hours a day can't help species numbers either. That's probably no doubt why they became a symbiotic species to humans as well.

And the just the concept that as a race willing to put themeselves on the line for all of humanity and have these reproduction/surivial issues just makes the story ever more epic.

Yeah . . . I think I'm going to whip out my City of Stone eps on DVD to watch from all this talking . . . or better yet, the Avalon Tryptich!

Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

DPH>> Obviously the location of New Olympus is known but to Greg, but in my imagination:

Plutarch wrote in his history of Quintus Sertorius that he (Quintus) in his travel to Cardiz had encountered sailors who spoke of islands: "{T}wo in number, divided from one another only by a narrow channel, and distant from the coast of Africa ten thousand furlongs. These are called the Islands of the Blest; rain falls there seldom, and in moderate showers, but for the most part they have gentle breezes, bringing along with them soft dews, which render the soil not only rich for ploughing and planting, but so abundantly fruitful that it produces spontaneously an abundance of delicate fruits, sufficient to feed the inhabitants, who may here enjoy all things without trouble or labour."

(No, I don't have Plutarch on hand to quote. I wish! I got that here: http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/sertoriu.html)

The islands Plutarch described have since been interpreted as the Madeira islands, which Wikipedia claims - without citation - were also known to the Phoenicians.

Let's assume that the islands *were* known to the seafaring Phoenicians, which in turn might have led to their being known, even if only vaguely, to the long-lived Olympians as they prepared to flee the Greeks. With these easy-to-manage islands in mind, they build their fleet of ships and sail west, out of the Mediterranean and towards these islands. When they get there, however, they find either a third (well, fourth, as Plutarch's history is sans one uninhabitable island) habitable island; or, because they figure it might not be too long before the humans rediscover this island group, they keep sailing on, although the current would likely push them towards the Canary Islands.

In either case, we have a few good models to base New Olympus on.

From the first scenario, there's the island of Madeira: 286 square miles, a peak of 6,100 feet with plenty of other mountains, and so far it has sustained a population above 200,000.

From the second scenario, there's first the island of Tenerife: 785 square miles, a volcanic peak of 12,000 feet, and a current population of over 800,000.

Then there's the island of La Palma: 273 square miles, a peak above 6,500 feet with a similarly-high mountain chain along its north-south axis, and a current population of 85,000.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that it's not difficult to imagine an island of a few-hundred square miles, with mountainous terrain for gargoyles, that can sustain a fairly large population, and that is also within range of some well-learned and determined Greek refugees.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Alex Garg - There's a couple of questions that I have with New Olympus:

1)what size is the island?
2)where is it?
3)how high above sea level do most of the population live?
4)what kind of defenses against weather?

New Olympus might be the perfect example of how large a gargoyle clan can get when it does not have to worry about predators, but natural resources. All it would take for New Olympus gargoyle clan to be low is being 'plagued' every few centuries with 1 or 2 rookeries that are severely unbalanced - mostly males or mostly females.

You have to realize that the size of a gargoyle clan is limited by the ability of the land to support the clan. 80 gargoyles living in an area may be the max that an area can support, but that's problematic. Gargoyle clan leaders would be all too paranoid about putting all their eggs in one basket so neighboring clans wouldn't want to share one giant rookery because it makes a much bigger target.

Patrick - <This sound suspiciously like having to get the time machine up to 88 mph to make it work.> I always thought the in-story reason was the doc wanted a speed that wasn't easy enough to reach and his portal generating equipment wouldn't have to stay on for every long. Of course, in retrospect, I question his train was capable of arriving on earth, not in space because the earth is constantly in motion in space. 1 month from now, the earth is in a different location than it is now. <Wow... suddenly the reason why there are so few gargoyles left becomes more clear. They've precipitated their own eventual extinction by not sticking together and forming societies large enough to compete with man.> But how do we know that didn't happen and it failed? Gargoyles could have built an entire giant city and then get smashed and humans claim as their own. Gargoyles could have decided to live in smaller groups thinking smaller = greater chance of somebody individually suriving?

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Vaevictis>> 100% in the first few generations, 93-98% in later generations due to homosexuality and/or gargoyles with physical disabilities which prevent breeding. As I discussed earlier, I dismiss the idea that a healthy, heterosexual gargoyle is going to overcome the rigid schedule of nature and somehow choose to not breed; and so far I've found that the lack of mates is a very rare thing to have happen and only affects a few gargoyles from all three generations combined -- and, in those instances, one could imagine mating pairs from different generations (e.g., Yama/Sora) thus reducing the prevalence. And also keep in mind that only 84% of any generation I simulate lives long enough to produce three eggs; throw in the homosexuality/disability factors, and that's 78-82% of any generation actually producing three eggs. So while I may be overly generous with the percentages of how many available breeders are actually breeding, I'm at the same time cutting down that available population's ranks significantly.
Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Alex, what percent of fertile adults are you counting as breeders? I used 90%.

Patrick, I think the main reasons gargoyles are dying is because humans hate them, and they're defenseless by day. 1000 gargoyles in a clan, they still can't help themselves when the sun comes up. And I think that although clans split, neighboring clans still keep in contact and members sometimes mate with members of other clans.

Also, a gargoyle pair must have 2 offspring to make 0 population growth, so I don't think they can do that in 40 years. But your comment and Alex's numbers make me think I'm making a gigantic mistake somewhere. What are the ages at which a gargoyle female lays eggs? I thought it was 50(25), 70(35), and 90(45). Am I wrong? Is it 30, 50, and 70 instead?

Vaevictis Asmadi

DPH>> I haven't looked at New Olympus specifically, but as I said before I ran my "Colony Clan" simulation out 50 generations, or 1,000 years, and from the original population of 60 gargoyles I ended up with over 5,400 gargoyles. By the end of the run I was getting an average 20 year growth rate of 8.013%, and if we do a straight-line projection with that number for another 50 generations, we'd get over 250,000 gargoyles.

So... yeah.

Matt>> I haven't been interested in *clans,* per se, just a general gargoyles population. Given x number of gargoyles, y average lifespan, and z number of years, how many gargoyles will there be? How they've divided themselves into clans over that amount of time is a lesser concern (I certainly don't think that there would ever be a single clan of 5,400 gargoyles); so I haven't come up with any definitions. On the fly, however, I would consider a "functional" clan to be one in which all three possible generations of breeders are present and breeding in a sufficient number to maintain genetic diversity. But I haven't given much thought as to how that breaks out into various degrees and what the corresponding numeric levels would be.

Vaevictis Asmadi>> I get a gargoyle population doubling in size between every 160 and 180 years, but then our assumptions for the percentage of gargoyles breeding and their lifespans are quite different.

And while it's in bad form to deviate from Greg, I tend to dispute the 80 gargoyle clan limit, if for no other reason than because Wyvern would have to be a pretty glaring exception.

As we've mentioned, 33 eggs would have to be produced by 66 breeding gargoyles of whatever generation combination, and I don't think that three breeding generations on their own would compose 3/4 of an entire clan. I mean, that only leaves you with 24 gargoyles either 30-years-old and younger or 90-years-old and older, and that seems unlikely (in fact darn near improbable), especially if there hadn't been any interruptions in breeding up to the time of the massacre.

Like with any healthy population, ages build up in a pyramid, where the younger generations make up the largest sectors up until you have a relatively small elder population. So far, based on the assumptions I outlined earlier, I'm finding that the 30-year-old and younger population makes up about 39% of a clan's population, and the three breeding generations 44%. If we go and plummet the survival rate beyond 90 years to near zero, that doesn't do anything to remove the fact that, assuming the eggs are surviving, the two younger, non-breeding generations are together almost as large as the three breeding generations. That puts Wyvern well over 100 gargoyles at the time of the 988 breeding and the split thereafter.

But, hey, Wyvern might well be an exception; or there was a disaster that took out a chunk of 10- and 30-year olds prior to 988 which, when coupled with low survivability past 90, kept Wyvern's population low and composed of mostly young-adults. I don't know.

And of course I now can't ask Greg, since I've pretty well jumped off into original idea territory.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

What makes 80 the magic number? This sound suspiciously like having to get the time machine up to 88 mph to make it work. It's a number with no logical basis. Here we have a species that takes forty years just to produce enough offspring to sustain zero population growth. That's not the kind of species that benefits from trying to spread the population out. Wow... suddenly the reason why there are so few gargoyles left becomes more clear. They've precipitated their own eventual extinction by not sticking together and forming societies large enough to compete with man.
Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]

Sebastian > No, since mutates were created from humans, cats, bats, and eels, they can't mate with gargoyles. They might not be able to mate with humans, either.

Matt, Greg stated that a gargoyle clan is "full" when it reaches about 80 members. That's the size they can get before they have to split.
He also said that in 2198, all the clans had "maxed out their locations." So while I don't know if that includes Avalon, it would include the other 11 clans.

So far, my calculations have yielded an 80 year replacement rate: that's the time it takes for a breeding pair to see their second biological offspring reach breeding age.
Following the "stone age assumption" to represent the conditions gargoyles evolved under, I calculated a 240 year time for the population to double. That's assuming that every 10 years, 25% of the population above 160 dies, and 100% above 190 dies before turning 200. I'm allowing for 10% of each generation to forego breeding for whatever reason (sterility, homosexuality, lack of available mates, exile, being antisocial, etc.) but I did not accounting for gargoyle beast reproduction, however, since I don't know what percent of the population they are. It also doesn't take into account when a clan needs to split. For one thing, it is difficult to figure out what ages the colonists of the new clan will be. I had to guess at the start of the simulation. But furthermore, splitting a clan will have the effect of making each generation smaller in number, limiting mate choice. I figure that in optimal prehistoric circumstances, gargoyles must have had contact between neighboring clans and occasional mating between clans. But I can't know for sure.

Vaevictis Asmadi

SEBASTIAN - Greg Weisman indicated that Demona would be capable of bearing a child after the Weird Sisters rejuvenated her (though, given the sort of love life - or lack of it - that she has, I doubt that that's been an issue yet). Of course, there's also the question of what happens to the baby in her womb after "The Mirror" (Greg's given contradictory answers on that one).

As for the Mutates, I doubt that they'd be biologically compatible with gargoyles, any more than great cats, bats, or electric eels would be.

Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Todd - Did you know that during each State of the Union address in the US there is always at least 1 cabinet member not in attendance? They do that as a contigency plan against all other security measures failing. I imagine that, for security's sake, both the #1 and #2 leader of each country would not be present.
dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

PATRICK - I've sometimes wondered myself whether the projected opening of "Gargoyles 2198" was designed in part as a warning against "putting all your eggs in one basket", and not just in the sense of having all the gargoyle eggs in one place. All the world leaders are also in one place (Queen Florence Island), and the Master Matrix in Antarctica apparently runs the entire planet. Thus, all that the Space-Spawn have to do is to strike two locations - Queen Florence Island and Antarctica - and they can easily take over afterwards.
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Hello all,

Very interesting topic. I've spent much too much time going through the archives, but I could not find out whether this was adressed. Is Demona still viable for giving birth. I had assumed that she would have bred with other gargoyles post Wyvern clan and probably reached an age where she could not breed anymore (correct me if I'm wrong). Did the spell making her younger/immortal restore her viability, and if so, is she capable of reproducing every cycle?

Another question. Are the mutates considered gargoyles in a breeding sense? They weren't made from gargoyles but from bat/panther/eel mix. They wouldn't produce eggs would they? Just confused by their status.

Thank you

Sebastian

More stuff to make you think:

Anybody work out a situation where after 1000-2000 years, the New Olympus clan isn't practically busting at the seams where every egg laying produces 32 or more eggs?

Matt - < I am thinking of a full clan as a clan in which all generations (at least age 0 through 110) are represented and which produces 30 or more eggs each reproductive cycle.> Interesting definition. I see one problem with that definition: that's about the point where the clan needs to split in two. I'd rather stick with a different definition: A full clan is a gargoyle clan which is capable of producing 20 or more eggs each reproductive cycle for at least the next 3 reproductive cycles and during each reproductive cycle 3 different generations of gargoyles lay eggs. Under this definition, a clan founded with 32 eggs (16 male/16 female), potentially could become a full clan in just over 110 years. Under Matt's definition, it would take the same foundation 190 years to become a full clan. I'd like to add another term to the mix: A Mature Gargoyle Clan. A mature gargoyle clan is a full gargoyle clan that can donate at least 2 eggs each reproductive cycle to another clan without losing its status as a full gargoyle clan.

Here's one more page that I just started on: http://home.windstream.net/melvinsh/garg-genetic-population.html . I gotta assign parentage before I can go any further with that page.

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Sevarius wasn't using mosquitos, he was using little robotic bugs that looked like mosquitos. There's a difference. And you can't get DNA from blood? That's news to me.

Matt, I would hope all the gargoyles on the planet would be smart enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. To gather all the eggs of all the clans together in one place would be a monumentally stupid thing to do.

118 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]

I think we need to define "Full clan" before we go any further. I don't know how you guys are defining it, but in my head I am thinking of a full clan as a clan in which all generations (at least age 0 through 110) are represented and which produces 30 or more eggs each reproductive cycle. So, in 988 the Wyvern Clan was a full clan, but after they split they are no longer a full clan because though all generations are probably represented still, the clan would probably not have been able to produce 30 or more eggs in the 1008 laying period.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Long ago, there were gargoyle clans all over the world... but I was not aware any of them had survived..." - Goliath, "The Green"

I dunno if every clan is going to be a full clan by 2198. Avalon almost certainly isn't. I think in 1996, there are probably more than a couple clans that are bursting at the seams and much larger than would be typical in a normal clan. London is one of these clans probably, and they won't split because it is potentially too dangerous to do so. However, I think Griff will lead many of his clan to New Camelot when the Camelot Clan is founded. So, although Greg has said that the Camelot Clan would be populated by gargoyles from all over, I think gargoyles descended from the London Clan will be the most common type there.

Anyway, by 2198, it wouldn't surprise me if some clans were still rather small, maybe not yet at the "full clan" stage. Avalon, Labyrinth, Manhattan, Wyvern, and Mayan clans are probably bringing far fewer eggs to Queen Florence Island than Xanadu, Korea, Ishimura, London, Loch Ness, Camelot and New Olympus are. Of course, we don't know much about a lot of these clans, perhaps they have had a massacre recently as well...

The point is, all the clans are bringing their eggs together to form a new clan and show gargoyle unity, they are not neccesarily doing it because the twelve existing clans are overpopulated. Keep in mind, Greg has also said that after many of those eggs hatch on Queen Florence Island, some of them would stay there to form the new clan, but many of them would be taken back to the other twelve clans to grow up there.

It's interesting to think about just how many eggs were sitting in that volcano waiting to hatch. Maybe hundreds.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Long ago, there were gargoyle clans all over the world... but I was not aware any of them had survived..." - Goliath, "The Green"

These numbers are making my head hurt. I would murder for coffee right now.

Something else I was wondering: does anyone else here think the gargoyles might have nucleated red blood cells? Sevarius was using mosquitos to get their DNA, and it's tricky to get a good DNA sample from blood if the red cells have no nuclei. So I'd suspect that in gargates, their red blood cells are nucleated.

Unless the mosquitos weren't collecting blood. The syringe was clear when Sevarius took the sample out of that one mosquito.

Anyway, I'm not trying to deter anyone from the current topic. Just don't have much to say on it myself.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"Six Stars of the Northern Cross, in mourning for their sister's loss, in a final flash of glory, nevermore to grace the night..." -Rush ("Cygnus X-1")

Interesting topic here. I wish I could contribute, but my genetics and population calculating skills are a rusty.
Asatira

This is a great topic, Matt. Good idea. :)

I'm working on a population model that includes all generations, not just the breeders. It isn't done yet, but my initial conclusion is that the populations grow VERY slowly and are extremely fragile. I'm calculating based on a stone-age assumption: no humans with iron maces. This represents the conditions that gargoyles evolved in and to which they are adapted, and will give an idea of how robust their population growth species was originally. So far it takes 80 years for a pair of mates to raise 2 biological offspring to reproductive age. The actual doubling rate will be much slower than that, because old folks are dying of old age. I'm being generous about aging, again because I'm aiming for an optimistic estimate that will lead us to a minimum 1998 estimate.

If we truly want to extrapolate the 1998 population backwards from 2198, we'll have to accept a great deal of uncertainty. Pushing for a very low minimum population is probably the best bet to avoid over-estimating. We will probably not be able to count eggs hatched in 1998, since we don't know how many were laid in Guatemala or anywhere else, really. Well also have to be careful thinking about how many Labyrinth clones we count as part of the minimum population. I figure we can assume that Delilah takes a mate from the Labyrinth, and that at least one other male clone finds a mate, but we can't assume that all the male clones will mate. We also can't count Demona, since she probably won't mate anybody now that she's broken with Thailog.

Greg has said that 80 is about the maximum size before a clan splits, although as others have pointed out, modern times have not been a good time to split. But we know that in 2198 all 12 clans are full, except (possibly) for the Avalon clan which, if nobody has joined from outside, will still not have hatched its first rookery and will still be only 35. We know from the 2198 contest that large clans contributed members to small clans, I assume that means Manhattan, Labyrinth, and probably also ChacIxChel. I think it is also fair to say, or to hope, that Xanadu would be contributing beasts to the various clans to make sure that most beasts are able to mate with somebody and have eggs. They are the guardians of the beasts, so I'd hope that with the Gargoyle Nation forming, and clans contributing to each other, they would think about the beast situation worldwide. The thing is, with numbers such as 3/36 in a rookery, beasts are going to have a lot of difficulty finding mates, and will be even harder hit by massacres and deaths. Beasts can luckily lay 4 eggs and probably have an easier time mating outside their generation, but still.

80*11 is 880, and 880+35 is 915. This is my minimum estimate for the 2198 population, assuming that when Greg spoke of 80 as a "full clan" he was including all gargoyles, not just adults. I do wonder about the population on New Olympus, however. They have been isolated for at least 2000 years, and living in peace. We don't know what their founding population was like, but if it takes 200 years for a breeding population of 32 to produce the first rookery of 32 eggs, then 2000 years will feature genuine population growth and possibly, more than 80 gargoyles on the island. Has the clan split? Could we count all the gargoyles living on New Olympus as one "clan" even though there may be more than 80?

Vaevictis Asmadi

Greg has said that most or all of the clans were destroyed or driven to extinction by humans. So, we can assume there may have been hundreds of clan massacres, maybe more, maybe a lot more.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Harvester>> Gargoyles used to be a worldwide species, but as of 1996 there are only 10 clans, one of which suffered a massacre in the last few years. I don't think there can be a realistic number tagged to how many clans were slaughtered, it's enough to say that they were once flourishing but ultimately pushed to the brink of extinction.
Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Jack: You should get the DVD. Then you can watch it and the other twelve episodes of the first season uncut.

Warcrafter: They might have just been using their wings to "correct" themselves, or make a minor adjustment to compensate for a shift in air current. From what I've seen, their wing muscles can make the wings flap, they just aren't strong enough to lift the gargoyle off the ground (that, and the gargoyle body structure is probably too dense).


Hmmmm, if the London Clan is a full clan, they must have been pretty well-hidden. Europe probably wasn't a very good place to be a gargoyle for most of the second millenium (which also makes me wonder if the fire in 1666 might have impacted the London gargoyles in any way).

Something else I was wondering: has Greg ever said how many massacres occurred down through the centuries? We know of at least two that took place in Scotland (unless I'm mistaken, I'm assuming that the Scottish clan Demona refers to in "Hunter's Moon, Part Two" was the one Malcolm Canmore destroyed), and an implied massacre in England.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"They're not going to listen to reason. Take them down, we'll sort this out after." -Xanatos ("City of Stone")

Deadly Force was on ToonDisney tonight Yay! :-D . Once again they cropted it to only show her face, but hey it is better then them not showing it like how they used to not show it :-).
Jack Danya Kemplin
Jack Danya Kemplin = HOLYGUYVER

Sorry for the double post.

I wanted to respond on the genetic diversity issue.

If we are talking about a clan that started out with 32 breeding individuals, I wouldn't be too worried. First of all, gargoyles have scent abilities which help them avoid incestual relationships, but more than that, I've been doing some number crunching and theorizing. As long as gargoyles tend to mate with other gargs that either look significantly different from them or smell too closely related, they will generally avoid mating with first cousins and such (which is the closest relation between two gargs of the same rookery generation). That said, further simulation (of the kind I've been doing for six years now) reveals that with a starting population of 32 or more, the most inbreeding you are likely to get is such things as "my grandparents were her great-grandparents", which is not all that closely related, certainly not dangerously so.

Another thing I wanted to add concerns my favorite clan, the Mayan Clan. Greg has said the 1998 rookery consists of 20-40 eggs. Applying my formula to a hatching population of 20, 30 and 40, I come to realize that the road to recovery is going to be a long one for my beloved clan. I'm not particularly worried about the genetic diversity (see above), but for a number of generations, there isn't going to be very large generations. For instance, Zafiro (2198) is born in 2158. If the 1998 rookery only has 20 eggs, his rookery may only consist of 10 gargoyles or so, if there are 40 eggs, the number may be more than 20. Hopefully, there are more eggs down there than 20. But honestly, I think there would have to be. Maybe this is wishful thinking, but before the 1993 massacre, I think it is likely that the Mayan Clan was a full clan, or nearly so. A full clan probably generates 30 or more eggs, so I hope thats the case.

Another random thought about the OTHER gargate species. Though generally there seem to be less beasts, they can produce 4 eggs (starting one generation lower than gargoyles) so thats good for them, I'm sure Xanadu is crawling with beasts. My random thought however is this, considering all the numbers with beasts, and the fact that there were three beast eggs in the Avalon generation, I conclude that one of the other beasts (besides Boudicca) is 95% likely to be a sibling to Bronx. Just a thought.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

DPH> Ask your question if you want, but I highly doubt Greg will provide a meaningful answer, you know he isn't big on quantifying things.

I've been doing these simple population growth charts for years, and they looked essentially like the one DPH provided. It was not until recently I begin to make charts that were more realistic. The fact is, between 1996 and 2188, two new clans will be formed the Wyvern Clan and the Camelot Clan. And in 2198, all existing clans will bring their eggs together to form a new clan, later called the Liberty Clan.

I don't think it is unrealistic to say that these clans will not have enough population to form. It may be that in 1996 there are clans that are so large that if they had been in an earlier point in history, they would have split already as the original Wyvern Clan did. Though we don't have all the information, we know that London and Ishimura are "full clans" and New Olympus, Korea, Xanadu, and Loch Ness may very well be also. If six of the ten existing clans in 1996 are full clans, perhaps even bursting at the seams with members, then it won't be much of a problem to bring the other four clans (Manhattan, Labyrinth, Mayan and Avalon) up to a good population, though I suspect that Mayan and Avalon could do alright without assistance.

My point is, I wouldn't worry about there not being enough gargs to populate all ten clans with steady numbers. By 2198 it seems the twelve existing clans will be in fine position to form a new clan together. Some clans may bring more eggs to the hatching than others, but I think all the clans will be in good shape by that time.

By the way, lots of good thoughts on gargoyle reproduction everyone, I'm glad I brought this topic up as it is one that interests me greatly and everyone's responses have been insightful and interesting.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Alex Garg - <4th generation> - I noticed that. Of course, that makes the 4th generation a good one for study if you're looking for traits that skip every other generation.

Of course, in my model, I haven't checked for sufficient genetic diversity. Have you guys checked for sufficient genetic diversity?

The reason I was counting down to the point where you have 3 consecutive egg layings of 32 or more is that's the point where you can take 1 set of eggs away to start a new clan.

There's something else we need to figure in. Given today's technology, *all* females can give birth, regardless of being mated. The problem with that situation is making sure that no single male contributes to breeding all the unmated females.

http://home.windstream.net/melvinsh/garg-population.html <- simple html file with the table and the basic story of my optimized situation. I stopped with the 13th generation, because that reached the point that I was looking for. What's interesting in my optimized situation is it takes 200 years for a new clan of 32 to produce its 1st generation of 32. Talk about long term planning. The clan as a whole must put enormous pressure on the females to give birth during each breeding just to ensure its own surival. Without significant use of cloning technologies, I'd wager that you would have to stretch your timeline out quite a bit to get to 16. Right now, there's 10 clans and by 2198, we have clan #13 being founded.

When the submit gets reactivated, I might slip a question about if G.W. has mapped how we get from the gargoyle population in 1996 to where it is in 2198.

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Sorry for the double post but I noticed an error in my previous post. The first time I said "flying" I meant to replace it with something like "in the air".
Warcrafter - [grafixfangamer1 at sbcglobal dot net]
Humans are such easy prey for a gargoyle!........oh, and my new gamertag on xbox live for 360 is Avalon123

Well, It's nice to see we aren't talking about that certain subject anymore :)

I recently just watched "Temptation" and noticed something. After the first break (after first commercial) when we first see Demona and Brooklyn flying, it looks like their wings are flapping, like they are flying and not gliding. Am I correct in saying that's an error?

Warcrafter - [grafixfangamer1 at sbcglobal dot net]
Humans are such easy prey for a gargoyle!........oh, and my new gamertag on xbox live for 360 is Avalon123

Given that gargs don't have personal contact with their offspring, I'd imagine even those who don't like kids would mate to contribute to the survival of the community. I imagine there must be some gargoyles who don't much participate in raising the young, but that's no reason why they can't make an egg for the clan to raise.

The math stuff seems very interesting, but I'm just too tired to look at it right now.

Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]

DPH>> I get 32 eggs being laid for the 14th generation with a total population at the time of breeding 143 (as opposed to 145 in my earlier simulation). However, I have serious concerns about this line's genetic viability. There is a severe bottleneck early on: The first generation is only 16 eggs, the second generation is 15 eggs, the third generation is 13 eggs, and the fourth generation (i.e., the first clutch laid by the first generation) is a mere 8 eggs. The numbers pick up as the next generations start to breed, and the sixth generation is the first one laid by three generations of breeders, but I have my concerns.

But returning to the question and restating my answer, my simulation has the fourteenth generation being the first with 32 eggs, and each generation thereafter being larger. So not much off your and Matt's runs; but I figure if you were looking for larger numbers in later generations, we'd have a much wider gulf.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Patrick -- I agree. The fact that the ability to reproduce is so rare, that I doubt they see it as anything short of being sacred.

And I could ONLY imagine seeing a Gargoyle Clan having 9 Generations with the 10th being laid. The odds of Gargoyles living that long jus seem incredible, since I imagine most die on the battlefield anyway (Though I do agree that New Olympus and Ishimora and probably Avalon will be stable clans).

Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

Gargoyles have a rigidly determined breeding season, while humans can reproduce any time they want to. For that reason alone, gargoyles are likely to have a much different outlook on reproduction than humans.

119 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]
"Yo, I know pi to a thousand places." - Weird Al Yankovic

DPH> Believe it or not, that very question is the reason I started all of this number crunching a day ago in the first place. I was trying to figure out the world gargoyle population in multiple eras, but honestly, this is an almost impossible task.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Matt - Yes, I was calculating based on perfection. I was giving you a relatively simple challenge. The real challenge is taking what we know about the gargoyle population in 2198 (in terms of clans) and working our way backwards to the past (aftermath of Hunter's Moon part 3), based on Ask Greg revelations about the present number of clans to figure out minimum size of the gargoyle population to support what we know about the future. What would be interesting is mapping out the gargoyle population from 1998 to 2198 for every ten years in terms of breeding population. I would be willing to bet that the New Olympus gargoyle clan would probably be among the largest simply because, relatively speaking, it faces the least amount of dangers.
dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

DPH> Your numbers correct assuming that you always get a perfect 1:1 ratio between male and females in every generation AND all of them are heterosexual AND all of them choose to produce eggs at every oppurtunity AND all of them live long enough to have three eggs AND all of them are fertile (none are sterile). Basically, as you probably know, that is highly unlikely.

So, if everything went perfectly and was geared towards maximum population growth, then yeah it'd take 11 generations for a group of 32 gargoyles to produce a rookery of 32 eggs. Using the formala I used before, however, it would take 18 generations to get to that point. And as I said to AlexGarg, my calsulation might be too optimistic, so perhaps it'd take 20 generations or more...

Really, as Vaevictis has pointed out, which Clan during which time period can really have an impact on these numbers. A full clan like Ishimura with a large and stable breeding population and little chance of death before old age is probably producing several dozen eggs or more every generation. On the other hand, when the 20-40 eggs in ChacIxChel, Guatemala hatch, it is still going to take centuries for the Mayan Clan to be producing rookeries containing 30 eggs or more, and thats not even considering that the Mayan Clan has much more danger facing them than their friends in Ishimura, and thus a higher death rate.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

I agree with you, Alex Garg, about gargoyles and the choice to have children. Remember that even among humans, the idea that anyone would choose to remain unmarried, or get married and have children, is only a very recent idea and is still restricted only to families where both the man and the woman are well educated, and is generally restricted even then to developed countries. I think it is quite fair to assume, especially in the waning centuries of their race, that the great majority of heterosexual gargoyles would lay eggs, and some of the homosexual ones may even feel pressure to take a mate for purely reproductive reasons.
One thing to point out - I, for example, don't want to have kids because the idea of raising them frightens me. I hate kids. But if I knew that 1. I'd have to be a mother/aunt of other people's kids anyway, and 2. I would not be solely responsible for my own biological offspring, would definately make me less reluctant. So there is even less reason for gargoyles to choose not to have children.

Regarding mortality rates, this is one point that is going to vary quite a bit, depending on the safety of the clan's current situation. They could be on the run from human hunters, like Demona's clan, or they could have a relative secure position with good human allies, like the Ishimura clan. I think that we can only work with ideal numbers for the time being. And in my opinion, modern human survival rates probably won't be terribly off. Remember that the majority of human mortality is caused by disease, which has very little effect on gargoyles, and much of the rest of human mortality is caused by war (which we aren't factoring in) and malnutrition, which gargoyles can probably deal with to some extent by their ability to absorb thermal energy.

As for running simulations, I think the best approach is to start with this scenario: a gargoyle clan reaches about 80 members (including children) and splits. 40 leave the clan without taking their eggs. Take those 40, guess at the initial ratios of generations, and start them laying eggs when the youngest generation is 10.

If the high end of gargoyle mortality is 200 years, then at the most 9 generations can be alive within a clan at any one time. The 10th generation will be layed as eggs just as the last of the 1st generation expire.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Alex Garg & Matt - Here's a simulation question for you. Assume 16 males and 16 females (heterosexual) starting a new clan and they just turn 50, the 1st time they can lay eggs. How many generations of eggs have to be laid before you can get to 3 continious egg layings of 32 or more? My math shows 13 to reach that goal, but I'm curious what you guys calculate when you factor into mortality rates.
dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Aaah, math. Something I got As in, and still didn't like.

I was watching "City of Stone" all this week at a rate of one episode a night, before bed. Something that I found amusing from this viewing was how quickly Demona took to the human custom of naming. She actually seemed to enjoy the idea of having one (probably due to the fact that it might instill fear). Just reminded me of someone mentioning in here, not too long ago, that Demona might be more "human" than she knows.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"They're not going to listen to reason. Take them down, we'll sort this out after." -Xanatos ("City of Stone")

AlexGarg> I think the fact that we went about our number crunching in very different ways and still came up with very similiar numbers adds a lot of weight to our numbers. My numbers are a bit higher than yours because I figured that though some gargoyles may die in youth, once they reach their mature breeding age their death rate lowers a bit because they are in the prime of life. After their third egg conceived, they began experiencing the trials of age and the death rate picks up again. I could be wrong in this assumption, however.

I agree with your comments about gargoyles not choosing to mate. I believe this is what Greg was talking about when he mentioned that there is some pressure to mate, both internal and external.

Vaevictis> The most basic way of describing how I got my numbers is that I started with a (relatively) small group of gargoyles and factored out how many eggs would be in each generation assuming 90% parented an egg. From there I just kept going over generation after generation in this manner until I came to a number of eggs in a generation that was near 33 (the amount of gargoyle eggs in the 998 rookery). Then I backtracked to see how many (roughly) eggs there were in previous generations. I rechecked this data by running the experiment several times with different numbers and breeding rates, thats why I have a range like 28-30 eggs for the Trio's generation. There are too many unknowns to know for sure, and even a range of three i probably too narrow.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Er, that's: mean = 123.280, standard deviation = 32.982
Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

Matt / Gargoyles breeding>> The biggest challenge I ran into when doing my own number crunching project - for an entirely different reason - was figuring out the mortality rates. The availability of mates, or lack thereof, will more likely than not be determined by whether or not all hatchlings make it to breeding age.

What I ended up doing was very simple: I got the life expectancy data from all countries from which it was available, multiplied by two and came up with a very crude survival curve (really a Gaussian distribution with &#956; = 123.280, &#963; = 32.982). With that, I got 98.69% survival to the first breeding, 94.69% survival to the second breeding, and 84.35% survival to the third breeding. I plugged those numbers into a "colony clan" of 60 gargoyles -- 1:1 gender ratio, 20 50-year-olds, 20 30-year-olds, and 20 10-year-olds -- assumed no population disasters (like, Vikings showing up at dawn with hammers or overhunting depleting available resources to raise a large or multiple clans), and chugged away for 50 generations.

8 generations into the simulation I got 32 eggs (close enough to the Avalon generation) {and the total population as of breeding: 145}, which, working backwards, gave me 26 eggs for the "Trio"'s generation {123}, and 22 in "Goliath"'s generation {116}. "Hudson"'s generation would have been 19 eggs by my simulation {68}, but that was the second generation in which only two generations were breeding. As you said, there are a lot of assumptions which have to be made going back that far (at least until Greg launches "Dark Ages"), and there could have been a larger population at Wyvern Hill at that time, or it could have been small, and I have a hunch that there were gargoyles older than 70 at Wyvern Hill at the time of the 868 breeding. Only Greg knows.

My simulation assumed that, in order to bootstrap the local gargoyle population, all available mates mated for the first several generations, and I didn't start making assumptions about homosexuality (for which I toyed between 2-5% based on the 1995 University of Chicago study "Sex in America: A Definitive Survey") until many generations down. And, yes, my simulation has other problems, not least among them that the size of the "colony" was arbitrary and the basis of the survival curve was based not only on human life expectancies but *modern* human live expectancies; however, until Greg publishes a statistical report on the many aspects of gargoyle life, I'm generally comfortable with my assumptions.

Assumptions aside, what I think this does show, however, is that there does need to be a fairly large clan of gargoyles present to produce a clutch of the size of Avalon's. Outside of the 66 breeding gargoyles, you're going to have the non-breeding population -- the 30- and 10-year-olds and the veterans -- and a handful of breeding-age gargoyles who are, for whatever reason, not breeding. But to answer Vaevictis Asmadi, I recall Greg saying that there was an exodus from Wyvern shortly after the 988 breeding due to the large size of the clan.

One thing I cut out of my assumptions, however, was this issue of choice. I've had this discussion with a number of other people, and in my opinion (not necessarily those of the people with whom I was talking) the idea of choosing whether or not one has a child/egg is a purely human concept. I can imagine a gargoyle might entertain the thought in the non-breeding years, but I tend to think that as the breeding season approaches, instinct takes over -- if there's a mate to be found, then mating occurs, "choice" be damned.

Gargoyles have always struck me as giving much more deference to their instincts than humans do, and when you've got a glacially slow population growth with a decent likelihood that you're not going to make it to egg number three, I think nature is going to weigh in heavily and force couples who might otherwise have reservations about egg-rearing to breed anyway; if not for them, then for the clan.

It's very difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which a heterosexual gargoyle pair *decides* to not have an egg.

Alex Garg - [fiatnox at gmail dot com]

33 eggs means at least 66 adults (33 females laying in that rookery). But Greg has said that 40 or 50 is a maximum size for a gargoyle clan, or was the maximum the Wyvern humans would tolerate. That goes with what he has suggested elsewhere, regarding the Avalon/CoS model doubles, that the clan split after the last rookery was laid, and the spin-off clan did not take any eggs with them. So of the 66 gargoyles who parented eggs in the last rookery, we could guess that 33 stayed at Wyvern.

I don't follow how you arrived at most of those numbers, but good job. :)

Vaevictis Asmadi

Well, alright. I think we've talked this thing to death. I do believe we have hit upon every opinion on the matter, no?

Can we please change the topic now?

So, I've been doing some serious number crunching. I was curious about rookery populations, particularly among the Wyvern Clan. Here are a few things we know that I used in my calculations:

-The number of gargoyles (excluding beasts) in the first Avalon Clan generation (which would have been the 998 rookery) was 33 (36 eggs minus 3 beasts eggs).
-Greg Weisman has said that while not all gargoyles mate due to a variety of reasons, there is some pressure to find a mate and produce eggs due to slow reproductive rates.

Using that information I began calculating how many gargoyles were in each generation. I was also able to calculate how many gargoyles in each generation were parents. In each generation, I guessed that approximately 10% would not produce eggs due to preference not to mate, homosexuality, death before or during their reproductive age, or unavailability of mates. This figure may be low, but factoring in the pressure to find a mate, I decided it was not unreasonable.

So now, I was able to produce some numbers that can tell us the rough size of each rookery generation assuming the Clan has been more or less steadily growing for a hundred years or so.

For instance, in the Trio's generation (hatched in 958), I hypothesize that there were about 28-30 gargoyle eggs (plus some beasts ones). In Goliath's generation (hatched in 938), I believe there was approx. 27-29 gargoyle eggs (including Goliath, Demona, Othello, Desdemona, Hyppolyta, and Iago). Of these 27-29, I figure that maybe 24 mated and formed 12 reproductive pairs. This means, of course, that probably about 12 of the eggs in the Avalon Clan formation generation came from Goliath and his rookery siblings.

Another use for this information is to see how many gargoyles were at Wyvern in 994. Sometime before this date (but after 988), there was a spliting of the Clan with roughly half of the gargoyles going off to form a new clan elsewhere. If Goliath's generation consisted of 27-29 rookery siblings than in 994, 13-15 of them probably remained at Castle Wyvern. This means that we know of nearly half of all Goliath's generation that was at the castle during the Massacre. I think that is pretty cool.

Another cool thing is that I can go pretty far back (though I figure that the farther back I go, the more unreliable the numbers). Hudson's generation, for instance, may have only had 21-23 eggs in it, and only 18-20 of these may have parented eggs.

Anyway, I know this information is utterly useless, and may very well be in error, but I think I did pretty well knowing what we know. Hope it is interesting to you guys as well, and hopefully it gets us off this even more useless comic topic...

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

The guy at SLG did say he plans on renewing the contract after 2008. It remains to be seen if Disney wants to renew, though. And yes, if they make this approving delay a regular occurrence, the comic will probably not be bi-monthly, and we won't get through nearly as many issues as we expected before the contract is up for renewal. And if the comic never enters any kind of regular, dependable schedule, I fear the sales never will pick up to Disney's satisfaction.
Vaevictis Asmadi

We might not even have the comic at all if Disney keeps up their delays.

For instance, television programs that don't perform well can be due to number of things:

-Bad time slot.
-Not advertised enough.
-Aired too many times, therefore becoming redundant.

Yet, the network will always assume it's due to bad quality and not their handling of it.

Same goes for the comics, if they are doing poorly due to bad scheduling and lack of advertising, Disney isn't going to admit that they're responsible. They're going to assume that the readers aren't interested.

And we're paying for the comics that they approve, so they owe us quality service. And as I already mentioned in business you don't shirk duties on the ground that you don't feel like it.

Antiyonder - [antiyonder at yahoo dot com]

I'm with Purplegoldfish. I'd rather have the comic, and all the attendant stress and worries and delays and pessimism, than have nothing at all...
Kaylle - [kaylle at ladyavalon dot com]
GargoylesDVD.com

Todd: No offense, but speak for yourself. I think most of us here would rather have something than nothing, with or without delays. The thing that I'm worried about (and I'm sure a lot of people are here too) is the comic's future if these delays are the norm rather than the exception, which they are right now.

I wonder if there's any way we could contact the people in charge of approving the book. Maybe write them letters expressing how much we're looking foward to it. That might get them to act quicker.

Purplegoldfish - [skydragonn at aol dot com]
"Whoa, Tiny, you mean there's more than one of you?" "My name is not Tiny! I am Goliath!" - Elisa and Tiny

Greg B. I couldn't find it in last weeks comments, but I seem to recall in the previous weeks that someone was quoting from SLG how they were somewhat disappointed by how the Disney contract was selling(Not just gargoyles) and how they were just braking even. And that if things didn't improve that there wasn't much point in renewing the contract in 2008(or 2009, I can't remember) Something along those lines. So, since we're going to get regular holdups from Disney for approval on the comics-it stands to reason that we're not going to see many issues before the contract expires.

I stand to be corrected. May not be cancellation per say, but sounds like we might not get a good chance to see the book find an audience before the contract expires.

Wingless

DK2> but I think that in terms of their overall operations, approving their own comic books is probably the smallest priority or the least thing Disney can supply their manpower too(my opinion).

That strikes me as them being unprofessional. Approving a comic that is to be sold isn't like writing a fanfiction or running an unofficial website. We pay money for the product they're approving, so big or small, it's still a priority none the less.

Antiyonder - [antiyonder at yahoo dot com]

One more thing on worry! Why worry, it'll just give you wrinkles (or more wrinkles in the case of older fans) and nothing back in return. Instead of asking when the next comic comes out maybe you should ask why anyone deserves the new comics. So for your own mental health don't worry be happy.
Vinnie - [tpeano29 at hotmail dot com]
Remember the old Gargoyles comics!

I can't believe what I posted has made people worried about the comics future. Its not the end of the comic book series. Theres nothing to worry about. If you've noticed the SLG run of Disney comic titles, the other 3 books all come out ill frequently as well. Keep in mind their numbers are lower than Gargoyles. From what I understand about licensing a property, Disney would've been paid a licensing fee from SLG to have the rights to these properties. That fee has been paid off for the whole deal. This was what 88MPH Comics had to do when they got the Ghostbusters license from Sony Pictures (which too for a 4 part series, came out sporadically). I assume its the same here. So all SLG has to do is make the comics and get them approved by Disney. Of course Disney needs to see the near finished products to ensure that its not being interperted incorrectly or have anything improper. I'm sure Disney realises that Gargoyles is more aimed at older readers (in fact I think all the SLG/Disney titles are for older readers). I too don't like Disney taking too long with the approval process, but I think that in terms of their overall operations, approving their own comic books is probably the smallest priority or the least thing Disney can supply their manpower too(my opinion). With the new issue of the Previews catalog, not only is issue #5 listed, but they're offering issue #2 again. This is just to ensure that the issue can be offered to more readers if needed. This means probably that #2 was possibly overprinted again by SLG. I really don't think we should be worried about the comics future. I think these are good numbers for a small publisher. Also what has contibuted to #2's drop in the Top 300 listing rank is that Marvel & DC Comics have had so many of the big event non regular books in this list. Anywhere from 10-20 titles that wouldn't be in the list at all (Civil War & 52 books). So if these books didn't exist, than Gargoyles would be slightly higher in the lists rank. For anyone who doubts my information, go to http://www.cbgextra.com, then click to the sales chart link on the left.
And we certainly haven't had any worrying words from Greg Weisman or SLG about the comics' future. I mean he's far ahead on the scripts and SLG has taken the means of extra artists on future issues to help get the comic out more often. These efforts woudn't be happening if the book was in any jeopardy. And remember again that Amazon.com is the extra source for people to get the comic out there to readers. How many comics get that as a selling outlet?
PS: just so I'm not gloating, I managed to get the promotional poster for the Gargoyles comic book from a local comic store. Its kind of neat to have, its only as big as a magazine 2 page spread.

DK2

The part of this that I don't quite understand is why Disney's review takes place at the very end. What happens if they want a change made, and the coloring and layout is already done? Suddenly you have to halt the presses and end up another two or three month delay.

120 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]

WINGLESS> There are NO rumors of cancellation. Where did you pull that idea out of?
Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I don't think they are trying to make it fail. That would be too much effort.

It isn't just that Disney cares only about profits. It is that they care only about BIG profits. Gargoyles has turned a profit as far as I can see, but apparently it hasn't made a huge enough mass of money for them to care. I don't think they are deliberately dragging their heels on #3. I think they haven't even thought about approving it, haven't even looked at it.

Vaevictis Asmadi

A delay in the comic doesn't bother me so much. What does is the possible loss of the more casual fan that would more likely pick up the comic if it were out on a regular schedule. There are those people who will get frustrated with the delays and just forget about it. I know we won't(I certainly wont*big toothy grin*). what does bother me is that it's Disney that's holding it up. It's almost as if they're setting this up to fail. Gargoyles has always been their black sheep of sorts, despite what we think of it. It might be too dark an image for what they want the studio to represent, who knows(The whole demonic factor perhaps, I don't know). I'm very grateful for the DVDs and they did a nice job on them. I'm also thankful for the chance at the comic - but it's hardly being given a chance and we're already hearing rumors of cancellation. Personally, when you license something like this and you're going to hold it up for approval, the parent company(Disney in this case) should be liable for costs and losses for the holdup. Also, the contract should be extended for the allotted time that each comic was held up for approval. Seams only fair to me. Then again, I guess that would be in a perfect world.
Wingless

No, Todd, I will not be happy if the comic is canceled.

Maybe I should just stop posting.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Vaevictus: <After what happened to #2 and the resulting sales drop, I think we have every reason to worry that finished comics are sitting on a shelf somewhere without approval.>

Meh. A sales drop by about 600 doesn't worry me (if DK2's info is accurate). I'm more worried about myself right now. I've abstained from coffee for the next forty days, and I've got this horrible Gargoyles/Aqua Teens idea that refuses to be silent.

Concerning "Vendettas":

I always found it amusing that Wolf refused to let Hakon continue to possess him. If things had kept going down that route, he every well could have won. Guess Hakon's pride and arrogance haven't thinned down through the centuries.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"My son is not a Communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a Communist, but he is not a porn star!" -Abraham Simpson

Should have worded my post better, but that was more of a comment on Comic Book fans altogether than anyone in here. Check out the forums at newsarama or CBR some time. The guys over at DC and Marvel literally get death threats from hardcore comic fans.

Believe me, all the worst comments on anything here are quite tame by comparison.

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I agree with Vaevictis. There is a big difference between whining and verbally expressing a worry.

I've heard people whine about the art and this and that, but I actually havn't heard much, if any, whining about the delays. Most of us fans seem to be handling it well. Now, I've heard lots of people express how they are worried about the delays or what the delays signify or could cause. But this is not whining.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

I guess I am one of the few who aren't worrying about the delay. Yeah, its disappointing, but I don't dwell. It will come out when it does. Complaining and worrying won't make it help me or anyone else. So I move on. When they release it, I can jump with glee. Till then, I'll just surf the web, play wow, and make music videos :P
Siren - [Click my name for Gargoyles' Femme Fatales Music Video!]

My point is that it's making this comment room much too gloomy when almost every single post consists of worrying about the possibility of another long delay. All of that worrying is not going to make the next issue come out sooner. (Though I find myself suspecting that at this rate, if the comic book winds up getting cancelled, the news will probably be greeted with a subconscious relief over "No more worrying that the next issue will be delayed by several months".)
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Sorry for the double post.

I know that the #2 delay was said to be caused by art difficulties, and they seem to have that problem solved now, which is good. But there is still a delay, Disney for some reason won't/doesn't approve the comic, so I don't think you can say that everything is smooth sailing now, or criticize people for being worried.

Even if the comic is a year late it will be better than nothing, but I worry that Disney may cancel the contract altogether.

And of course we wouldn't have anything to worry about if there was no comic. We'd have nothing whatever to look forward to, either. Good things are worth worrying about. It's a bit like saying you wish your kids hadn't been born, because then you wouldn't have to worry about them taking drugs.

Vaevictis Asmadi

After what happened to #2 and the resulting sales drop, I think we have every reason to worry that finished comics are sitting on a shelf somewhere without approval.


Anyway, yes, Vinnie's situation isn't very realistic, but it is funny. It reminds me of Agrajag in the Hitchhiker's Guide.

I never believed that Bodhe was right. It seemed like a silly notion when Canmore was so obviously after Macbeth and Lulach from the start.

Vaevictis Asmadi

TODD> This could be an on time monthly comic, painted by Alex Ross with voice acting, or $.50 and people would still whine about something.
Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

TODD> This could be an on time monthly comic, painted by Alex Ross with voice acting, or $.50 and people would still whine about something.
Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I've said this before but, whenever I read all these nervous comments here about all the delays, and even more possible delays, I start to wonder whether the revival in the comic book was really such a good idea after all. It's not the delays that concern me half as much as the spirit of near-panic here over the delays; it seems as if the revival is making us even more miserable than the original cancellation of "Gargoyles" did.

About "Vendettas": to me, its weakest point was that Hakon's team-up with Wolf felt so anticlimactic after "Shadows of the Past". In "Shadows of the Past", Hakon and the Captain were subtly working against Goliath, using his troubled memories of the Wyvern Massacre to undermine him, waging a psychological battle. In "Vendettas", Hakon and Wolf have a simple big fight against Goliath and Hudson, and that's that. It has a few amusing moments (especially when Wolf's talking eagerly about how he's going to swat the gargoyles like bugs - and then gets sent flying through the wall before he even gets an opportunity to do anything!), but on the whole, it's a less interesting story.

Vinnie, on the other hand, I found very entertaining (though at first I thought it far-fetched that the motorcyclist from "Awakening Part Three", the security guard on board Air Fortress-1, and the Gen-U-Tech security guard from "The Cage" were all the same guy). He's the one person in the series who ever gets revenge on Goliath (though it helps that he used baked goods as his means of doing it), and Goliath is just left wondering what on earth that was all about.

At "Ask Greg" today, Greg mentioned that the English had really allied themselves with Canmore against Macbeth for other reasons than getting rid of the gargoyles, and that the "crusade" against Demona's clan was just an excuse for their invasion of Scotland. I find that very easy to believe, since two events in "City of Stone Part Four" make it seem all the more probable that their real goal wasn't to get rid of the gargoyles:

1. After Demona and her clan desert Macbeth, the English (though apparently aware of their defection) still go ahead and sack Castle Moray. If their real quarrel was with the gargoyles rather than Macbeth, they'd have left Castle Moray alone and gone after Demona's clan instead.

2. It's indicated in the episode that Canmore overthrows Lulach and becomes King of Scotland in his place (plus, it's the outcome of their war in actual history). If the English had only allied themselves with Canmore to get rid of the gargoyles, they'd have dissolved the alliance the moment that Demona's clan was wiped out with a tone of "We've done what we came here to do; now we're going home", and Canmore would have been left without an army against Lulach. But if the English really had other goals in helping him fight Macbeth, they'd have stayed around to see to it that he won and was crowned King of Scotland.

Which indicates that Bodhe's advice to Macbeth to abandon Demona was not only bad advice from a moral standpoint, but also bad advice from a pragmatic standpoint; the English would have simply found some other excuse to help Canmore and continued the war.

Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Writing and coloring them in a timely manner won't help much if Disney doesn't approve them.

I watched Vendettas. People who talk to their weapons, and weapons that talk back. Hmmm. o.o

I don't really have much to say. The banana cream pie was pretty funny, but I wish I hadn't known about it before it happened. I keep wishing I hadn't read all these spoilers, but oh well. What's done is done.

Vinnie is pretty comical. He has terrible luck, and he's a little off his rocker, too. He worked awfully long and hard just for a quick gag. I wonder how much it cost to get that special gun made? And he just throws it away afterwards! If I had a giant pie-gun I'd keep it.

I wish Hakon hadn't come back. He's one of the nastier villains in the series and I'd just as soon leave him buried underground forever. He's having altogether too much fun in this episode.

A good line was "Since when do werewolves fly?" even though technically, Wolf isn't a werewolf.

It took three views before I caught that Goliath had elbowed Hudson in the face. Oops.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Well, if it makes you feel better, Karine has been posting periodic updates in her LJ. She's apparantly drawn the entire issue out, and is now ten pages into inking it. After that, Steph colors it, and it gets sent to Disney for approval.

I also read that issue 4 is done inking, and I think Dustin Evans is coloring it now... so, if this is all done in a timely fashion, we should be good.

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I'll probably have forgotten what Greg just wrote by the this time next year when #5 comes out.
Battle Beast - [Canada]
That is all I will say.

I assume the president is Clinton, but I doubt we'll ever see his face or any suggestion as to who it is. It seems more likely that he'll just be "the president." In addition, Greg doesn't want to hit people over the head with the fact that this comic takes place eleven years in the past.
Jurgan - [jurgan6 at yahoo dot com]

Do we even now if Clinton is the President in 1996 in the Gargoyles Universe?

I guess we'll find out soon (hopefully soon)...

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

I just ran through the Top 300 comics sales charts from Diamond Comics dist. and found the numbers for the Gargoyles estimated sales/order numbers:

JUNE: #165-Gargoyles #1 7,500 copies
DEC: #205-Gargoyles #2 6,900 copies

I'm not sure if a 600 differance in drop is a anything to worry about. This is perfectly reasonable drop. In the comic market sales, usually 1rst issues have the highest orders, then 2nd issues have a decent drop in orders as comic book retailers settle into what their customers want and don't want/what readers read, etc. But still can't wonder if the long delay did contributed a little. But to me I'm impressed it wasn't more drastic. I think it'll settle around a 6000 average. We must keep in mind that issue #1 sold out at over 10,000+ copies.
Here: "Our partners over at Slave Labor Graphics have posted their Press Release confirming that nearly their entire initial 10,000 copy print run of Gargoyles #1 has sold out. Dan Vado, "Supreme Commander" of SLG. Printing even almost 40% over initial store orders was insufficient to meet the demand."

So issue #1 had an extra overprint amount and sold out. I was unable to find #1's 2nd print numbers on these sales charts. I'd assume it was a small amount for sure. We must keep in mind as well that this probably doesn't include whatever amount Amazon.com sells either. Diamond is only on comic stores alone.
I'm not even sure how the Amazon copies count? I mean is it like newstands when they sell comics, its separated from the direct market sales as well? So in my mind the SLG run of Disney titles can't be as bad as they have that other outlet with Amazon.com. The Gargoyles comic should be a lttle more safe for now. But I believe its also SLG's highest ranked comic (Tron maybe a 2nd). What does anyone else think?

DK2

Maybe Xanatos is trying to get pardons from the Clinton admistration for himself and Fox, to clear those pesky convictions from their record. Bill was handing out pardons like Cuban cigars near the end of his term.

Crazy to think that Disney can't keep up with the breakneck pace of reviewing a submittal from SLG on the average of once every four months. What happens if Issue #3 doesn't come out in March? We keep waiting. :P

121 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]
"You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" - The Joker

PHIL> Well, to quote a very wise man.

"What ever happens, happens."

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I don't want to sound pessimistic, but... If issue #3 is in prepress at the printer but they haven't got final approval yet, what happens if Disney asks for a change? I don't know much about printing, but it seems to me that even the smallest tweak to the art at this point would mean a lot of wasted work and some starting over, thus a delay.
Phil - [p1anderson at go dot com]

they haven't gotten approval yet? *rolls eyes*
If it's final art, why do they need approval

Purplegoldfish - [skydragonn at aol dot com]
"Whoa, Tiny, you mean there's more than one of you?" "My name is not Tiny! I am Goliath!" - Elisa and Tiny

Suspense in storytelling seems to be a relatively new concept, in any case. In the Iliad, Homer has Zeus give away the ending a couple of times (that Hector will kill Patroclus and Achilles will return to the war to avenge his friend and kill Hector). In Sir Thoma Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", Merlin gives away a lot of things (that Lancelot and Guinevere will fall in love and that their affair will mean big trouble for Arthur, that Mordred will slay Arthur and bring his kingdom crashing down, that Merlin himself will get imprisoned for life by Nimue). At the very beginning of "Romeo and Juliet", Shakespeare has a Prologue that tells us that Romeo and Juliet are going to end up committing suicide.
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Hmmm... Xanatos at the White House. Hopefully, he'll decline if the president offers him a cigar. ( ;
Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"My son is not a Communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a Communist, but he is not a porn star!" -Abraham Simpson

GXB - ty for the info on the release date of the comic.
dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Matt: And I think this has been mentioned earlier, but hey, its the journey that makes itinteresting, despite the fact that we know certain events.

(Just remembered that that line came from the whole Demona 2198 topic -- sorry for the initial vagueness, I just woke up).

I don't mind the teasers so much -- gets me salivating and dreaming and wondering what's going to happen, just like any obsessive fan ends up doing, I imagine.

Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

Again, the nature of the beast. Comics are almost always solicited at least three months in advance.

I knew that Spider-Man would be switching sides and hunted down by supervillains on the governments payroll in the fifth issue of Civil War months before the issue hit the stands. I'm used to this sort of thing.

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

That may be... but, I just find myself missing the thrill of the unknown of turning on Gargoyles and seeing a title appear that I've never seen before. I guess we won't get that with the comic book...

Ya know, besides the delays (which I think I'm being reasonably patient about), the worst thing about all this waiting while finished or nearly finished comics back up is that these teasers are basically getting to us way before we even have earlier books. So, now we know the rough plot of Issue 5, and we have yet to even read 3 and 4. That kinda takes a lot of the fun away. I think I could learn to live with the teasers as long as they were not too far in advance. I mean, will we ever catch up?

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

MATT> That's the nature of the beast. Every comic book on the market throws out teasers like that.
Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

Argh, I'm not sure I'm too fond of these teasers, they are giving away a lot...
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

At least they aren't ignoring us and are actually letting us know it shouldn't be that long.

Hey, we've waited this long for new stories, I'm willing to wait (but seriously, only a little longer -- I'm no immortal that can just IGNORE Time :P )

Oh, and any word from that guy from Newsarama? I sent an email but I've gotten no response . . . .

Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

I asked SLG about this yesterday and received this e-mail.

"We don't have the release date yet. When we do, I will update the release date page on the website. It's done and in prepress at the printer, but unfortunately we have not gotten approval on the final art yet.

--
Jennifer de Guzman
Editor-in-Chief
SLG Publishing
www.slgcomic.com "

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

I noticed the backlog at Ask Greg is down to 111 questions. Congrats. Is the submit button going to be reactivated when the next issue of the comic is going to be released? Not that it will happen, but if the backlog gets down to less than 20 before the next issue of the comic comes out, will the submit button be reactivated?

GXB - <solication for comic #5> Wow. Sounds like a good Thailog plot, have a contigency plan for dealing with an initial defeat so you can get the element of surprise later on.

I wonder if the final version of issue #3 has been approved by Disney and also how long before the final version of issue #4 gets sent to Disney.

dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

comics: hmm interesting. Looks like goliath's in trouble. I wonder if delilah tricks goliath into a trap on thailog's orders during the double date. That's my theory anyway. I also theorize that the clash in the clan has to do with the brooklyn/broadway/angela triangle.
anyway, can't wait to get my hands on these comics. I'm starting to get worried that there will be another delay for #3, seeing as how it is almost march.

garg beaks: The theory of the beak being fleshy makes sense for gargoyles like brooklyn. But griff's beak looks like a rigid bird beak to me. And brooklyn has fangs, but griff doesn't, which is an abnormality since he seems to be the only one without teeth.

Purplegoldfish - [skydragonn at aol dot com]
"Whoa, Tiny, you mean there's more than one of you?" "My name is not Tiny! I am Goliath!" - Elisa and Tiny

New comic book day. The big event is the final issue of "Civil War", which I read, and enjoyed. BUT, I bring you something else that's on-topic here. The solicitation for GARGOYLES #5

GARGOYLES #5
by Greg Weisman & Karine Charlebois
The "Clan-Building" storyline continues in chapter five: "Bash." Goliath is down for the count, surrounded by Thailog and the clones. Can the other gargoyles reach him in time? Whose side will Delilah choose? Who else will learn the gargoyles' secrets? And what exactly is David Xanatos up to at the White House?
24pgs, FC................................$3.50

Greg Bishansky - [<---- The 11th Annual Gathering of the Gargoyles]
"February is Black History Month. Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police officers call me 'sir'." - Stephen Colbert

Wow 13 of you visited my site just from that one post. Forget Google, I can just make money by making fun of you guys.

Siren: Your stupidity is the reason I stopped coming here. No one said I was still monitoring what you guys said in here. The deal was I would disappear and just come back every two months to find out if the comic was out. Just tell me if the comic's out again so we can leave each other alone for another two months. The alternative is we bitch each other out again, which you weren't too fond of last time.

Arlo
Gargoyles need not apply

I'll bet they meet online, lol. Gay.com.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Antiyonder > Heh no, not at all, so do we. Hence the insult by association.

BabylonShabby > Anyway, sorry I kind of jumped on you about slash. I guess it is a pet peeve of mine.
Greg hasn't told us who or even *what* Lex's mate will be, but he has revealed that he has plans for who he is and how they meet.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Vaevictis Asmadi and Harvester of Eyes: I hope you don't have anything against autistic folks. I happen to have autism myself.
Antiyonder - [antiyonder at yahoo dot com]

I once did a drawing of a child of Una and Leo. Imagine Leo, but he had Una's coloring and pointed horse ears instead of rounded lion ones and he had Una's horn. You would think that the purple/pink/white skin tones and the blond hair would make the gargoyle look too feminine, but honestly, he turned out really cool, really neat looking, if I do say so myself. I particularly liked the blond mane.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

It also makes horned lions and horned griffins a possibility. Interestingly enough, the ancient Greeks often depicted griffins with a single, strait horn on their forehead, exactly like a unicorn. In the Gargoyles Universe, I hardly think this is a coincidence.

I also doubt that London gargoyles have fur. Their appearance is similar to heraldic animals, but they're still gargoyles. On the other hand, their wings are covered with feather-like structures, so maybe their skin is also covered with something. I think I'll ask Greg about their body hair/fur when the queue opens next. Or eventually.

I've compiled a list of what European heraldic animals have a garg-beast like appearance, but beyond that I can't speculate. We don't know enough about garg-beast variation.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Vaevictus: And that's exactly why I don't have to pretend to feel sorry for him.
Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"Must I get a witness for all this misery? There's no need to, brothers. Everybody can see... that it's one more time in the ghetto." -The only band that really matters.

London Gargoyles> I'm very much of the opinion that the London Clan isn't furred besides the usual head hair and such, though Leo and Griff both had tufts of hair on the end of their tails, which is certainly unusual. As for what London Gargoyles look like, Greg has said that there isn't much beyond what we've seen, but even that opens up several combinations:

-Winged Horse (Pegasus)
-Winged Unicorn
-Winged Lion
-Griffon
-Hippogriff

I've also suspected that there may be Eagle/Hawk and Bear-like London gargoyles considering these are also Heraldic animals and are not too different from what we've seen so far.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Harvester> I assumed they were furred, too, but when I read the reference to Leo having brown "skin coloring" in his Wiki entry, it got me wondering--they also don't appear to have the scruffy protrusions used to indicate fur on animated characters, like the upgraded Wolf and the Mutates.

Save for their tails and the hair on their heads, I can picture the London gargs having leathery skin; it somehow fits with my view of them being a combination of common gargoyle traits into a form that just happens to resemble a certain animal, since no other gargoyles that we've seen are completely furred. It doesn't mean that there aren't any, though.

Has anyone ever wondered what the gargoyle beasts from the London clan would look like? I'd imagine it wouldn't be as simple as them just being virtual copies of real animals.

Incisivis - [incisivis at hotmail dot com]
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream" -- Shirley Jackson

Trivia note: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, site of Demona's theft of Titania's Mirror, was founded 135 years ago today, on February 20, 1872.
Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Now Harvester, there's no reason to assume he's autistic. I mean, you're insulting yourself by association ;)
Vaevictis Asmadi

*face turns red because he forgot to credit his signature quote to the Clash*
Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]

Matt and Siren: Just pretend he's not here, and he'll find something else to distract himself. Twelve-year old autistic kids are easily distracted.

Spacebabie: I actually came up with an argument on how Demona might be bi (at least in my mind), just not with a human... at least not for a couple centuries.

Incisivis: I always thought that Leo and Una had fur, it was just short and not noticable, like the pelts of lions and horses usually are. But you never know.

Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"Must I get a witness for all this misery? There's no need to, brothers. Everybody can see... that it's one more time in the ghetto." -

Vaevictis> Okay, I phrased that badly. Obviously I know that birds have nostrils. :P

What I meant was that I presume Brooklyn's got a fleshy beak since it's attached to a humanlike "nose" that's of that texture (as he uses it to sniff at Elisa in their first meeting). Now, there's no real animal structure equivalent to that (beak w/ "nose"), but I think it's reasonable to think that both parts are of a similar texture.

From there, I was assuming that all non-London gargoyles with beaks and snouts also had fleshy ones, and that Griff might, too, despite having a different nose structure than Brookyln does--drawing on other designs.

Incisivis - [incisivis at hotmail dot com]
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream" -- Shirley Jackson

Anonymous writes...

10. Dose a gargoyle egg have a soft shell like a snakes egg when it is layed or dose in have a hard shell.

Greg responds...

10. Gargoyle eggs have soft shells when they are laid during a night ritual, but they turn hard at sunrise and stay hard for ten years -- night and day.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

So, the eggs being leathery and soft when laid and hard after their first sunrise is already "canon-in-training". I also recall Greg saying that despite the white with purple-ish spots appearence of eggs night and day, the shells are actually composed of the same organic stone-like substance gargoyles become during the day. When the eggs hatch, the hatchlings apparently burst out of these stone shells the same way adults do daily.

Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Birds have nostrils, too. Brooklyn's nostrils don't tell us anything about how hard his beak is.
Vaevictis Asmadi

Interesting topics today. Hm.

I tend to think that gargoyle beaks and snouts are fleshy or cartiliginous: Brooklyn especially, since he has a humanlike "nose" attached to his. Griff I could accept with a fleshy beak, too, since the London Gargoyles seem to just happen to have bodies that imitate other animals but are fundamentally gargoyleish (Leo and Una don't appear to have furred bodies), and there are other gargs whose beaks have separate nostrils (I'm thinking of the little turquoise gargoyle from Demona's Clan).

I've always thought that the gargoyle eggs were drawn a little too large to look like they could be carried and laid, but this debate is interesting anyway. :D Damned if I know what to say, though I'd support the idea of soft-shelled eggs that harden post-laying.

Slash, well...being in contact with general fandom for about seven years has bred in me the idea that indifference is the right way to go. Things just turn too ugly if you disagree with others about pairings and who "should" be paired.

For myself, I have no problem with fanfic writers having characters getting noncanonically frisky. Changing or firmly establishing the character's sexuality I also don't mind, because there are no characters whose appeal to me depends on their sexuality, and I don't consider one's sexual preference a vital part of their personality.

Some pairings, like those between characters who have been shown to despise each other in canon or rarely interact, I disagree with or think, "Huh? Them?". Pairings that break up solid canon romances I also dislike. But there's so much controversy here that I'd rather just keep my mouth shut. It's not worth fighting about anyway, since I feel that pairings I dislike aren't "wrong".

Fence-sitting? Yeah. But who needs the hassle? One thing I will rant against though, is when some fanfic pairing (gay or straight) has my favourite character as spineless wimps. This happens a lot to my favourite male anime characters, and it annoys the hell out of me. But that's not a dynamic inherent to slash (or, er, yaoi in this case) or whatever.

Incisivis - [incisivis at hotmail dot com]
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream" -- Shirley Jackson

Sorry, I should say, most slash seems to involve totally changing who the character is.
Vaevictis Asmadi

I find Slash very disturbing, mainly because most slash involves changing a character's orientation from what the writer obviously made it, or pairing characters that would not touch each other over their dead bodies.
Vaevictis Asmadi

Vaevictis I think Babylon Shabby knows they are not canonicly gay, but they just enjoy the pairing.

I myself have a few slash parings I enjoy. (Jack Sparrow/James Norrington, Angel/Spike) Some like the idea of Brooklyn/Lexington even though Brooklyn is supposed to be straight, and besides why can't characters be bisexual? They exist to.

Spacebabie - [spacebabie at hotmail dot com]
"You smell funny."~Jack Sparrow

BabylonShabby: Um... Frodo and Sam aren't gay. Did you read the part where Sam gets married and has kids?
Why can't two males simply be *friends* without everybody assuming they're gay?


Eggs: Kiwis are kind of plump and fat, though, whereas gargoyles aren't. Being soft and leathery at laying-time helps, but I still imagine the egg squeezing into an oblong shape as it comes out.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Geeez, not Arlo again...
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Arlo, since your so much smarter then us, why don't you know? I mean, we are just so stupid compared to your intelligence (and maturity). *rolls eyes*
Siren - [Click my name for Gargoyles' Femme Fatales Music Video!]

Before considering it a terrific feat of nature that a gargoyle can lay a watermelon sized egg, I would suggest going to an encyclopedia and reading about a bird called the kiwi. The female kiwi lays an egg that's about 2/3 its own body size. The male kiwi... I would guess he goes into hiding for the delivery.

122 days left until The Gathering 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

Patrick - [<-- The Gathering 2007]
"I guess she was a bad egg after all." - Willy Wonka, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"

Asatira: That would make the most sense. I guess it rounds itself out a bit before the sun comes up.
Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"I may be ugly and hate-filled, but... what was that third thing you said?" -Moe the bartender.

BabylonSabby > No-one knows who Lex's partner will be, Greg hasn't introduced him into the series yet.

*Eyes Arlo* If you have been monitoring the Comment Room you would probably know the answer to that.

Chameleongirl
Chameleon may change her spots, but she refuses to do plaid

Alright, which one of you insignificant simpletons can tell me whether issue 3 of the Gargoyles comic is out, or if it's been delayed again?
Arlo
Gargoyles need not apply

Recently been watching the Jungle Book and was wondering, the late Ed Gilbert voiced the Captain Of The Guard also voiced Baloo on Tale Spin. Now, obivously The Captain would play a major part in The Dark Ages Spinoff and maybe some flashbacks in Gargoyles. Now out of curiousity, if Gargoyles were to return to air or Dark Ages got a shot, would John Goodman (third voice of Baloo) be right for the part?
Antiyonder - [antiyonder at yahoo dot com]

I remember reading somewhere that talked about everything on this egg laying stuff and i mean like everything. If I can just remember where, I would mention it.

Also, it's nice to see that Shara finally chose an avatar :)

Warcrafter - [grafixfangamer1 at sbcglobal dot net]
Humans are such easy prey for a gargoyle!........oh, and my new gamertag on xbox live for 360 is Avalon123

I'm so happy that Lexington's going to be gay now. ^^ But I'm wondering...who's he going to be paired with? I need something to fangirl over, is why I'm asking. I've fawned over Aziraphale/Crowley, Frodo/Sam, Lestat/Louis and tons of others. I need something new to day dream about. ^^; Plus I think Lexington's too cute to be all by himself forever and ever. He needs someone to cuddle with.
BabylonSabby - [nibblet_nightlife17 at yahoo dot com]
Don't you even THINK about agitatin' my dots!

Egg-laying: I've pretty much thought that while the egg was still being formed within the female, it was pretty flexible. Somehow it changed with the mother for the stone sleep, yet did not become hard-shelled until it was laid. I did find where Greg has answered this in the archive (at the 2004 Gathering it looks like), that they are laid with flexible shells (think crocodilian eggs and turtle eggs) and then harden with the first sunrise. So delivering an egg may not be that much different than giving live birth. Only you don't have to worry about things like heads and shoulders getting in the way.
Asatira

Harvester of Eyes>You would be surprised how wide that thing gets when one has a baby ;P Maybe they had Gargoyles trained to do C-sections? *LOL*

Although that egg yeah that thing is all hard and such not like a baby that would be hell. *shutters*

Shara

Shara: Well, while we're on the subject, I'm wondering by how many centimeters the female anatomy needs to widen. Given the waist size on some females, delivering that egg looks like it would be murder. Of course, having a Y Chromosome, I'm really not one to talk anyway.
Harvester of Eyes - [Minstrel75 at gmail dot com]
"Children on the cold sea swell, not fishers of men. Going to chase away the last herring, come empty home again." -Ian Anderson

It probably depends a lot on what the gargates evolved from. Placental mammal males have a single penis. Marsupials (and I think also monotremes) have two uteri each and consequently, forked penises. Most reptiles have no penis at all, and those that do have only a structure that vaguely resembles a mammal penis, without being homologous to it.

Gargates, being egg-layers, cannot have evolved from marsupials or placentals. The only options I can think of are that they evolved from sauropsid reptiles (lizards, dinosaurs, crocodilians, thecodonts, pterosaurs, or rhynchosaurs), from mammal-like reptiles (pelycosaurs, therapsids, dicynodonts, or gorgonopisds), from monotremes (egg-laying mamals), or from anapsid reptiles. In any of these possibilities, their genitals are most likely not anything like human genitals, and since they lay eggs I'm quite certain that they, like other egg-laying animals, have a cloaca instead of separate urinary and genital openings.

Vaevictis Asmadi

So im about to turn into a wierd fan.

Ive seen so many pictures fans have drawn of gargoyles with out *cough* their loin cloths on. My perverted question is

Dogs and cats etc the (censored)/male anatomy is diffrent. If animal male anatomy is diffrent, Could it be diffrent on a gargoyle? It all does the same thing but each beast/animal has a diffrent look to that part of the anatomy. Being a veternarian tech I just found that question curious as I thought about it more.

Yeah yeah I know im a pervert but I like being a pervert ;-P

Shara

Remember Aladar from Disney's Dinosaur? He was an iguanadon. Technically, iguanadons had hard beaks, but the animators had a hard time giving expression to his face with it, so they put lips over the beak and it actually looked very good. So I wonder if that is similar to gargoyle beaks. But the layer over the harder beak is thinner and harder to see. Where it blends in more to his beak. And as hatchlings, their actual beak is almost as soft as their lips... I dunno, just a theory I am trying to throw out there.
Siren - [Click my name for Gargoyles' Femme Fatales Music Video!]

Yes, on the show Brooklyn's beak is not rigid. But that could be simply typical Disney animation, which also causes ducks and other birds to move their beaks like lips, not to mention using their flight feathers like fingers.
I'm not sure that all non-standard parts on a gargoyle head have to be cartilage. I'm sure that it is within biological possibility for the bone to be developed differently by different expression of genes. The difference between human and chimpanzee skulls is due entirely to how much various skull genes are expressed, not any difference in the sequence of the genes themselves.

And Matt -- that is a weird dream.

Vaevictis Asmadi

Hatchlings> It wouldn't surprise me if their beaks were mostly formed when hatched. Watch Brook or Griff say things like the word "you" and you will see that their beaks are not as solid as, say, an eagle's beak. The beaks themselves are probably mostly cartilage and flesh, not bone or hard material. This would explain how beaked gargoyles are able to talk (and we've clearly seen the beaks flex into different lip shapes when talking). It also explains how a beaked gargoyle is able to breast-feed. Lastly, now that I think of it, it makes some sense that gargoyles have a similiar skull structure and all unique features (beaks, horns, etc.) are made of cartilage. So maybe Brooklyn's skull is very similiar to Goliath's skull, but Brooklyn has added cartilage giving him a beak and larger horns.
Matt - [St Louis, Missouri, USA]
"Just dreaming... old dreams..." -Hudson "Long Way to Morning"

Todd - As much as I love the Garg and HP universes, I am GLAD that those two storylines didn't mix.
Phoenician - [theoneandonlyphoenician at yahoo dot com]
The Suspense is Terrible . . . I Hope it Lasts -- Willy Wonka

Purplegoldfish> All I have to say to answer that question is owch!!!! ;-P
Shara

Just for the fun of it, an alternate ending to "The Gathering Part Two" that we should be glad was never made:

Oberon comes striding into the nursery, ordering Fox to hand over her son to him. Fox replies grimly "Over my dead body." Oberon shouts, "As you wish!", and zaps her into a pile of dust. He then walks over to the cradle, bends over it, and touches Alex, ready to pick him up to carry him off to Avalon - but then cries out in pain the moment that he touches the baby, and disintegrates. At the same time, a scar shaped like a lightning bolt appears on Alex's forehead.

Todd Jensen
Gargoyles - did for monstrous-looking statues what "Watership Down" did for rabbits!

Q: How do hedgehogs have sex?
A: ...very carefully



My line of thought on the beak-matter is similar to wingless':
I guess that Gargoyles' beaks are softer than a bird's beak in general. Because they don't have lips, they couldn't speak very well if the beaks would be 100% hard and stiff and so probably the beaks of hatchlings are yet softer still.
Anyway though... I guess a Gargoyle mother breastfeeding a hatchling with a beak surely does have to be able to endure some pain.

L#2

Purplegoldfish: just a thought, Maybe hatchlings aren't born with beaks right away. It could be they're soft and blunt like the shells supposidly are when they are first laid - then as the hatchlings grow, the beaks grow in to be longer & sharper.

Heh, Just my twisted way of thinking of things.

Wingless

hmm...dead

So here's a question:
How exactly do gargoyles with beaks (like brooklyn, and especially like Griff) breastfeed as hatchlings?

Think about that one ;) I sure as heck don't know the answer

Purplegoldfish - [skydragonn at aol dot com]
"Whoa, Tiny, you mean there's more than one of you?" "My name is not Tiny! I am Goliath!" - Elisa and Tiny

Cool. Spiner and Frakes at Dragon*Con. All the more reason to go.
Asatira

And away we go on with the show!
Vinnie - [tpeano29 at hotmail dot com]
Remember the old Gargoyles comics!

**Bounds in after Chameleongirl**

TENTH!

Kythera of Anevern - [kythera (at) gmail dot com]
I do not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.

sorry,meant like a schoolgirl wooing Frakes and Spiner. ;)
Starlioness

oh 9th, for the heck of it..
*tries to think of Siren giggling like a school at Dragoncon* that's my Gargoyles Dream :p

Starlioness

8th, if having to re-type my data didn't knock me back a rung or two :D
Chameleongirl
Chameleon may change her spots, but she refuses to do plaid

I refuse to contribute to any current discussions!

In other words,
Seventh!

Makhasu - [aknellthatsummonsthee at yahoo dot com]

6th!!! For a change...
Battle Beast - [Canada]
That is all I will say.

5th!
Leo

4th in the name of perfect squares
dph_of_rules
Whatever happenned to simplicity?

Can't sell something you don't have :P I rent it out now and then, have to check my records to see who has it now. I think Britney Spears, hence her stupidity lately ;)

(Disclaimer: I do NOT claim this as slot #4)

Siren - [Click my name for Gargoyles' Femme Fatales Music Video!]

3rd, and Siren, it's never a good idea to sell you soul. It's always regrettable in the future, but I know you just made a joke...................right?
Warcrafter - [grafixfangamer1 at sbcglobal dot net]
Humans are such easy prey for a gargoyle!........oh, and my new gamertag on xbox live for 360 is Avalon123

ARGH! Sorry.....3rd post....last one....


BRENT SPINER AKA PUCK will be at DragonCon too!!! :D

That's it, I'm going, even if I have to sell my soul.

Siren - [Click my name for Gargoyles' Femme Fatales Music Video!]

First! First time in a long time ^_^
Wingless