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!

The Legionnaires: Toyman

Toyman, aka Winn Schott, aka Winslow Schott Jr., aka Computer Lad, of 21st-century Earth. Created by a bunch of TV writers drawing upon various pre-existing Toyman characters created by lots of people.

This whole time there's been a character missing from my All Time Legion Roster page, and nobody's complained to me about it! Here's a character who joined the Legion five years ago, our time, and it's taken me this long to recognize it, and never a word from any of you on the subject. I give you one job.

Winn is a character from the Supergirl tv show. I watched the first few seasons of it, but eventually I just kind of fell away from the Arrowverse altogether. So I may not know all the things I know about this guy.

At the start he was a guy who worked with Supergirl's secret identity, Kara Danvers, at a big media corporation. He was sort of their IT expert, and he had an unreciprocated crush on Kara, which sometimes led him to engage in some crummy behaviour. Combine this with his backstory as the son of the supervillain Toyman, and you'll understand if I say that I was leery about what kinds of storylines he'd eventually get involved in. But it didn't happen: what happened instead was that he eventually did a kind of exchange-student thing with Brainiac 5, where Brainy hung out in the present day for a while and Winn went to the future and joined the Legion.

We don't have, I think, a whole lot of detail on what Winn did as a Legionnaire, but his qualifications were that he was just really good with technology. And... I dunno what I think of that. This 21st-century guy is better, a lot better, at using 31st-century technology than 31st-century people? That sounds like some nonsense to me. But a) I do think that people's raw smarts don't increase over a thousand years, and b) he is the Toyman's son. So... sure? Still seems like a dumb idea to me, but I think we can all agree that there'd be a lot fewer Legionnaires on the historical list if "seems like a dumb idea" was disqualifying.

One detail: apparently Winn marries Ayla Ranzz while in the future, and they have a daughter. I don't think Ayla is treated well in these televisual adaptations. But whatever, the show's called Supergirl; this is all details.

(Probably should also note that there's a long and occasionally proud tradition of the Legion interacting with the descendants of Superman villains, and sometimes even making them Legionnaires. Brainiac 5 of course, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.)

Anyway, welcome to the blog, Winn. You earned it. You got into the Legion of Super-Heroes, and, as Sherwood Kiraly would say, that's a lot harder than getting into the phone book.

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.