News: Patreon

Happy New Year, all.

I've started a Patreon; it's at this link. There's already a short story there for subscribers, just to entice everybody to jump aboard.

If you've ever wondered how you can support this blog, you now have an answer. All the crucial Legion-related content that I write will still be posted here, but I wouldn't put it past myself to have the occasional non-crucial Legion article up on the Patreon, pour encourager les autres. Similarly, I'll still have most of my other stuff at matthewe.com, but I didn't create the Patreon page not to use it, if you see what I mean.

Obviously you're all wiping relieved sweat from your brows at the realization that my opinions will now be easier to encounter and broadcast. I understand. 

Anyway, it's an experiment. Let me know what's working for you and what isn't, or, really, anything that's on your mind about the relevant topics. More to come!

New Book Review

 I reviewed Jean M. Twenge's Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future at my other site; please check it out if you are of a mind to.

Hey, wouldn't it be great if I wrote something about the Legion of Super-Heroes one of these days? It'll come.

Listen to Me

 Sorry for not posting more. I don't mean to not post stuff here. But it's just so easy.

Anyway, I recently appeared on the Legion of Substitute Podcasters: Tomorrow's Heroes Today podcast, discussing issue #9 of the Threeboot. Give it a listen if you're of a mind to. This may not be the best link for it, but any podcatcher you use ought to be able to set you right if it doesn't work for you.

Take care!

Book Review: The Fourth Turning Is Here (Neil Howe)

 I reviewed Neil Howe's new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, which is about generational cycles, history, and the kind of nonsense we're all currently trying to survive here, on my other website. Give it a look!

Time Beacons: My Time Travel Nexus Articles

In 2019-2020 I wrote a series of articles for the Time Travel Nexus website. I didn't stop so much as the website stopped updating; their newest article was posted in early 2021 and I haven't heard from them at all. The website's mission was to highlight fictional depictions of time travel, so my articles, in turn, looked at Legion of Super-Heroes stories from the perspective of what we could learn about time travel as shown in those comics. I called the series "Time Beacons", for partially obvious reasons. Might I continue writing them and posting them here? The last article is a satisfying stopping point, but certainly there's more material out there that I had been planning to cover! No promises, but I might come back to it a little bit.

Anyway, I wrote a total of ten articles for TTN, and I'm proud of them, and if you'd care to check them out yourself, this is them:

Time Beacons 1: The Legion of Super-Heroes (Adventure #247)

Time Beacons 2: The Fatal Five / The Doomed Legionnaire (Adventure #352-353)

Time Beacons 3: The Adult Legion / The War of the Legions (Adventure #354-355)

Time Beacons 4: Mordru the Merciless / The Devil's Jury (Adventure #369-370)

Time Beacons 5: The Hero Who Hated the Legion (S&LSH #216)

Time Beacons 6: We Can't Escape the Trap in Time (S&LSH #223)

Time Beacons 7: The Infinite Man Who Conquered the Legion  (S&LSH #233)

Time Beacons 8: The Great Darkness (LSHv2 #290-294)

Time Beacons 9: The Origin of the Universe File (LSHv2 #295)

Time Beacons 10: The Future Is Forever (LSHv2 #300)

Enjoy! And don't forget I'm also writing a fantasy story on my other site. It's going well!

A New Thing I'm Doing

 Before I wrote Legion Abstract, I wrote a superhero novel in blog form. It was fun. Now I'm doing something similar, a fantasy novel in blog form, and I'm posting it on my other site, first instalment here. I invite you all to check it out. I hope you like it, I hope you spread the word. Thanks very much!

Some Sad News

 Those of you who've been reading here for a while will know that occasionally I have the honour of guesting on the Legion of Substitute Podcasters podcast. And the weeks I don't guest there, I listen to them. One of the hosts of this podcasts is a man named Darren Nowell, who I never met in real life, but who always struck me as an excellent kind of person.

Anyway, I saw on Twitter today that Darren died yesterday, and it's terrible. I was always glad to hear his voice every week, and now we won't. Goodbye, Darren; I'll miss you.

If I Cannot Bring You Comfort

 It is the Christmas season, for those who observe, which signals the end of the year as measured by the Gregorian calendar, and as such it is time for us to take stock of our time which is ending, and our time which is about to begin. We can start with the Legion of Super-Heroes (remember the Legion? It's a blog about the Legion) and then move on to other matters.

We already knew that 2022 would see the Legion appear in... a miniseries? an arc?... called Justice League vs the Legion of Super-Heroes, which will, apparently, be about both Gold Lantern and the Great Darkness. I'm not super nuts about the only Legion series being a limited run like this, but it's more than we've got now, and, at least, it's part of Brian Michael Bendis's vision for the team.

Speaking of Bendis, in his newsletter (click here for the whole thing) he announced that he's working on developing an animated Legion of Super-Heroes series for HBO Max. The series will be aimed at grownups and will feature his fourboot Legion. Some points:

- this is, of course, very positive news

- the odds that this TV show actually gets made are not great. Not because of any failing of Bendis's or the Legion's or HBO Max's. Just basically because most TV shows don't make it to air

- the previous LSH TV show, the two-season cartoon on Fox Kids, was a respectable success, and its influence on its young viewers will someday be of tangible benefit to the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise; this TV show, if it makes it, could do similarly

- the process of taking comic-book stories and turning them into TV is likely to accentuate Bendis's strengths as a Legion writer and mitigate his weaknesses

- I've long been of the opinion that any successful translation of the Legion to TV must be animated, not live-action, so I think they've made the right decision here

My big takeaway from both of these impending Legion stories is that the LSH does have a future, and I'm aware that that sounds like a joke but in this case it isn't, and that I hope we can all be around to see it.

And while we're all on that... I hope you can all be vaccinated up to your maximum available amount of protection, and can keep yourselves safe from the coronavirus in all the other ways. Ironically--which is the word we use when we don't want to say "ridiculously"--the coronavirus is the least, and most tractable, of the major problems facing the world in general and us in particular. It's no coincidence that all of these problems--I'll list "climate change" and "fascism" as the big two, but there are more--are exacerbated by being denied, promoted, defended, and/or sponsored by a loose but cooperative network of groups and entities whose interest is not in the future but in making the present as bad as possible.

I hope, in 2022, that we (I am definitely including myself in this hope) can do all we can to be part of the solutions and not part of the problems, and that we're wise enough to choose the right ways to do that.

I haven't been writing much on Legion Abstract recently. This is partly because there haven't been any Legion comics to write about. Maybe I'll chip in another article or two here or there. Certainly I'll review JLAvLSH when it comes out. I don't believe in permanent goodbyes on the internet, and this isn't even a temporary one, but if you need to see it in print: I'll never close down this blog as long as I'm alive (although it may sometimes be less active than other times). I have, however, started writing a couple of other projects, and I'll tell you more about them if and when they become something.

And I'll end this post with this, which strikes me as also to be appropriate for an end-of-the-year summary.

Over the last couple of years, I've started coming out to my friends and family and other people as agender. This isn't exactly a new thing. No need to share the specific details, but all my life I've had a very distant relationship with masculinity, and recently I've come to understand that it's because masculinity wasn't actually a thing that was for me at all.

Why am I telling you this? You don't really need to know it, and I don't really need you to know it. It doesn't make a difference to my Legion opinions that I'm neither dude nor chick. But I do have a couple of reasons.

First, I've always understood that the value of coming out is in its effect on other people: first, people who haven't come out themselves can see more people they can identify with and become comfortable with the idea that people like them belong in the world, which they do. Second, people hostile to LGBTQ+ people will increasingly get the (accurate) sense that they are outnumbered, and will be more likely to change their opinions or at least shut up about them if they don't change them. Both of which are worthwhile goals.

Plus... I'm white, and male-passing, and in a sense I've not been subject to transphobia my whole life. See, "agender" is a subcategory of "trans" in this sense: I was assigned the gender of "male" at birth, and have now said that that is not my gender. That's trans. It's true that the word "trans" has connotations that don't really resonate with my experience, but that's neither here nor there. So I don't reject the label.

But while I can look back on the considerable amount of bullying that I experienced much earlier in my life and say that, in retrospect, it was partly based on being a precocious agender kid, I didn't know that at the time. They called me "gay" (and other related terms), sure, but as far as I knew, they were just wrong about that. (Also, being gay and being agender are not at all the same thing, but that's a nuance that would have been lost on these kids.) So in my mind, I wasn't being picked on because of something that I was that wasn't hurting them, and therefore I didn't beat myself up for being it, and so was spared one specific kind of damage. In retrospect, they were clearly picking up on something about me, but since I had no idea, there's a level on which it doesn't count.

But there are any number of trans people out there for whom that's not true. They've had to deal with a lot of static while knowing what it was the whole time. So what I'm intending here is to stand with them.

(FAQ: Are you changing your pronouns? Nah; I've had about fifty years of getting used to he/him. But if you want to refer to me as she/her or they/them, that's okay too. I'd a lot rather be called "she" than "Matt".)

There's still a lot I don't know about this topic. There's still a lot I don't understand about myself. I'm no expert. (And a lot of the answers one finds boil down to, "it's different for everybody! You get to decide for yourself!" Great. Thanks. I'm sure that's right. But it's no help.) Having said that, if anyone is coping with something similar and thinks it would help to kick it around with me, please let me know; I'm happy to do what I can.

So my last thought here is, let's all be ourselves in 2022. And let's all get to work. Tired as we all are, there's a lot that needs to be done. The truth is somewhere here.

Here You Go

I used to have Legion-of-Super-Heroes-related links on the sidebar here. Maybe I'll put 'em back someday.

If I do, I'll include Legion of Super-Heroes: The Complete Guides, which has the mission of being a complete guide to all Legion-related publications and memorabilia. It's pretty complete. You can, if that's of use to you, go check it out.

Legion of Super-Heroes #11 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About: The Legionnaires on their various missions all are dealing with some kind of escalation: the group on Krypton get taken out by some kind of blind dragon in conjunction with Rogol Zaar. On Xanthu, Doctor Fate gets... destroyed? On Rimbor, Ultra Boy accepts leadership of the planet. On Earth, the remaining Legionnaires are called into action and head out to Krypton, where they are immediately defeated. A group on Daxam runs into Mordru, who attacks, steals Cosmic Boy, turns Rose to Thorn, and teleports Blok into deep space. Superboy arrives on Krypton and confronts Rogol Zaar.

Review: This series is still being spread too thin. There are... five different groups? And they all do get some advancement, and there's some consolidation of the storylines. But the point of sending smaller groups out on missions is so that you can temporarily limit the number of characters involved and focus on individual characters more, and to give them longer turns in the spotlight. That didn't really happen here.

Still, it is an improvement over the whole Legion staying in one big group the entire time, which is what we had before. One might expect Bendis to have more proficiency with superhero-team comics, but... is there another group that's really like the Legion, with their dozens and dozens of characters? I don't think writing the Avengers prepares you for it. (Although... it's not like Paul Levitz (who clearly did have not just proficiency but mastery) kept his technique a secret.)

I'm glad to see that we're picking up on a couple of threads from LSH: Millennium, namely Superman's cape and Rose herself. Let's not take our eye off the ball here: I'm convinced that whatever Rose's deal is is the key to understanding everything Bendis is trying to do in this series.

So here's a question. How many stories are we dealing with here? It isn't just one. I think the main event is Superboy vs. Rogol Zaar, but the other stuff isn't related. It's just other stuff the Legion is also dealing with. This is not a problem; it's actually the kind of thing Levitz would do all the time. But I wonder how many of these other threads are going to get folded into the Krypton one. "None," I think, is an appropriate answer.

I have no idea what to expect from next issue. Bring it on! Should be a good read! Of some kind!

Notes:

- so what the flip is the deal with Karate Kid's word balloon on page 3?

- look at Mon-El's page-one monologue. Bottom of the first column of word balloons, top of the second. The word "more" appears 4 times in 22 words. To me this is a failure of editing

- couple of times at the end of the issue where Brainiac 5 changes his mind very quickly in a short time. Uncharacteristic. Editing again?

- losing interest in Rimborian politics. And I didn't have much to begin with

- I think the practice of naming stuff in comics after comics creators has reached the point of cliche and they should stop doing it

- notice Invisible Kid on page 20?

Art: 82 panels/23 pages = 3.6 panels/page. 1 splash page, 7 double-paged spreads of 1 or more panels.

You know what I'm curious about? I'm curious about what Dream Girl is supposed to look like. Is she sandy or golden or luminous or cloudy or starry or what? She's basically all one colour and that would make it easy for artists and colourists to take shortcuts and make her look simple and uninteresting (not that simple = uninteresting!), and so far Sook and the others have managed to avoid that (see pages 12-13 of this issue). I remember she looked particularly good in her introduction in the Trial issue artfest (although I can't think of who the artist is off the top of my head). But I still don't feel like I understand what effect the artists are trying to elicit in her portrayals.

Membership Notes: We get some names for our mysterious Legionnaires! There's X-Ray Girl, Entropy Kid, and Radius Lad. I get this from a reddit thread here; technically this is all apocrypha but I'm going with it.

Couple of Links

 I appeared on the Legion of Substitute Podcasters podcast this week, talking about LSH v4 #37; that's the Star Boy/baseball issue that I previously discussed here. I managed to say not exactly the same things about the comic book in the two places, so I can't guarantee that your time spent reading or listening will be a complete waste of time.

In addition, my latest Time Beacons article is up at Time Travel Nexus. It's about LSH v2 #300, a very important Legion issue, and I'm pleased with how it came out. Check it out if you're of a mind to.

Reminders

In case it's of interest to anyone, I guested with The Legion of Substitute Podcasters this week, discussing Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #35, an issue near and dear to my heart. (Earlier this year, I was on this episode, covering issue #29 of that series.) Check it out if you're of a mind to.< /br> < /br> Also, a reminder that I also write basically regularly about time travel and the Legion, in the Time Beacons series of columns at Time Travel Nexus. (It should be easy to predict which issue I'm currently putting together an article about.) Visit Time Travel Nexus for all your time-travel-fiction-commentary-related needs.

As Long as It Really Is a New Year

As we head into 2017, there's still no regular Legion of Super-Heroes comic being published. The 31st century has never seemed so far away.

2016 was a tough year. It wasn't any kind of entity that was at war with us, or anything; it was just an arbitrary period of time during which a lot of strange and regrettable things happened. A lot of famous people died, but then, a lot of famous people die every year. It was a little unusual that so many of the famous people who died in 2016 were particularly beloved, but I suspect that that was well within the boundaries of ordinary randomness.

Here's some stuff about 2016, other than celebrity deaths, that historians are advised to consider when summing up the year. Not in order:

- natural disasters, including a huge forest fire in northern Alberta
- Brexit
- attempted coup and subsequent crackdown in Turkey
- US election
- ongoing war and humanitarian disaster in Syria
- Ghostbusters
- Pokemon GO
- the Rio Olympics
- the Kardashian robbery
- the Ottawa sinkhole
- continued violence by police
- clowns
- Stranger Things
- terrorist attacks
- the Oregon militia standoff
- the High Park capybaras
- Harambe
- the triple tragedy in Orlando: Christina Grimmie, Pulse, and the alligator attack
- Beyonce's Lemonade
- Cubs win the World Series
- bathroom bills

Whether a given superhero comic is or isn't being published is pretty small potatoes. Then again, we're going to need some kind of roadmap to the future.

Important, If True

A Legion movie, maybe?

I mean, they'd probably mess it up. But how much would that matter?

Could Have Sworn

So as part of next spring's "Convergence" event, apparently DC is going to have a two-issue miniseries called Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, featuring what I've seen described as "the pre-Crisis Legion".

Well, good!

If there's one thing we, as Legion fans, need, it's another Legion comic that tries to recapture the glories of the past! It just hasn't been tried often enough! Keep at it, DC, 1983 is bound to come around again if you wish hard enough!

I mean, I believe, I may be wrong about this but I believe, I could have sworn, that DC has actually published some good Legion comics since the 1980s. Comics with characters and stories worth revisiting, assuming for the sake of argument that we wanted to revisit old characters and stories in the first place.

Furthermore, I could have sworn that, in the Legion of Super-Heroes, DC had a mechanism by which they could explore the future. Let's have a comic like that. Because 1983? Wasn't that great. I was there. I don't need to go back.

Strange Visitors from Another Millennium

In his blog, Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep!, snell takes on the subject of the Legion's upcoming appearance in Justice League United. Go read it and come back here.

He's right, of course.

But, you know... Well, for one thing, it's nothing we haven't seen before. The Geoff-Johns-written Legion episode of Smallville had much the same premise. And that turned out to be not so bad. So I don't like it much either, but it's not necessarily a dealbreaker. Let's see how Lemire handles it.

However, it does bring up a point that I don't think we've addressed before--it only just occurred to me!--and I think it's worth keeping in mind whenever we think about the Legion and their comics. It's this: the Legion comes from the future, and that makes them different from us in some ways.

We can break Legion stories down into two categories. The largest category, and the one we're used to, is the one where we are meant to identify with the Legionnaires. They are our protagonists and POV characters, and we have empathy for whatever they're feeling. Jim Shooter and Paul Levitz were the big pioneers in establishing and perfecting this kind of Legion story; they made the Legionnaires more relatable to us.

The other kind of Legion story is the ones where we aren't meant to identify with the Legion. They're strangers! From the future! Who knows what they're up to? What secrets are they hiding, and why are they doing all these weird things? The very first Legion stories were of this kind: Superboy or Supergirl or Lois or Jimmy meets some exotic costumed teenagers who lead them through a bizarre adventure without telling them the whole story (at least until later). The aforementioned Smallville episode was of this kind. The "Lightning Saga", which returned the originalish Legion to DC continuity, was of this kind. And it looks like this upcoming Justice League United story will be of this kind.

(I wonder if we've struck one of the reasons why the threeboot Legion had a hard time connecting with some fans: Waid's characterizations of them made many of the Legionnaires strikingly different from regular modern humans, and also his superheroism-as-a-political/social-movement premise isn't anything we're used to. So this takes us away from the Shooter-Levitz model of getting us to identify with the Legionnaires.)

So I'm with snell: the Legion is miscast as supervillains. But I would also say that they're well-cast as antagonists, even if that's not the kind of Legion story I prefer or you prefer, because it's so easy for them to play the part of "the other".

--

While we're on the subject, what about this week's Justice League United Annual in which Dawnstar seems to be a future member of the League? Goes along with that straight-to-video thing where Karate Kid and Dawnstar... what do they, become junior Leaguers or something? I don't know.

Anyway, I don't really care for it. And it has nothing to do with the choice of Dawnstar as the character to do this with; if you have to pick a Legionnaire to steal for use in a more popular team, Dawny's probably an excellent choice. I just don't want the Legion stripped down for parts, that's all. I didn't like Star Boy showing up in JSA either.

(Obviously Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, and Mon-El, as present-day characters, are exceptions to this.)

Though They May Not Be Johann Sebastian Bach

I've got a post brewing on a very large topic of huge interest to Legion fans, but while I put that together, I'd like to direct your attention to a new(ish) site, The Legion of Super-Bloggers. Their efforts strike me as quite ambitious and are therefore all the more admirable, and I suggest you go check 'em out and give 'em a spin. They're in summarize mode at the moment, so we'll see what kind of game they've got once that's behind them.

I Am Interviewed

I'll put together some kind of full post in a little while, but in the meantime, you can head over to A Trout in the Milk where Plok interviews me on the subject of superhero fiction. You know, if you want to.

Mark Waid

The more time passes, the more impressed I get with Mark Waid's comic books.

He keeps coming out with stuff I like. The first thing of his I read was Legion of Super-Heroes volume 5, of course, an interpretation of the Legion that I quite enjoyed. 52 was good. His run on The Incredibles was good. Haven't finished Irredeemable and Incorruptible yet, but they're both good. I'm not going to read Daredevil because, you know, because, but it's supposed to be good too, and I'm sure I'd enjoy it.

And now do you hear what Waid's got in the pipeline? A Rocketeer miniseries and a "Steed & Mrs. Peel" series. There's obviously no way I can pass either of those up. Other thing that he's doing is this website, Thrillbent, where he and John Rogers and I guess some other people are Trying Stuff in the area of webcomics. It is an admirable pursuit and the first few installments have been very worthwhile and I recommend it to you*.

* I always like it when people Try Stuff.

Boycott Avengers Opening Weekend

You'd best believe I'm going to have more to say about this in the next couple of days, but in the meantime, how's about you consider not going to see The Avengers this weekend? Just a suggestion, of course, but if you're curious about why I would ask such a thing, here are some links to articles about it: link link link