Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Spaceopoly Kill This Thread IX: The 24-Hour Version (Fifth Time)

I know I've said it before, but I don't see the point in wasting any loyalty on DC. A person's time and money ought to go to somebody who's willing to earn it. If they're not willing to do that, forget 'em.

I don't see the point in my caring about DC's long-term health more than the people at DC actually do. The comics-verse seems to mean little to them these days beyond being a place where they can keep an iron grip on copyrights and grow future blockbuster film fodder. Fine. If that's what they want, I'll just be somewhere faaaaaaar away, reading and paying for books I actually enjoy that are written and drawn by people I actually respect.

I think for me the loyalty hasn't so much been to DC itself as it has been to the characters. For many years, I considered my loyalty to DC's second-string characters. My teams were, of course, the Legion and the JSA and their affiliated groups. My solo heroes were Flash, Green Lantern (who was second string back then), Hawkman, Dr. Fate and the Spectre.

If I give up on DC, the only comics I would read would not be in the super-hero genre at all. I'll read the Archies I pick up for my mom, as I said earlier, and some of the others that come up by Kaboom, such as their Peanuts series.

No way out but through though.

The only way to support characters without supporting the people who own them is via fanart and fanfiction. At least when it comes to money. Time is another story, she said as if she'd never written or drawn anything fan-ish.

The last comic I really cared about was/is Stuff of Legend, which isn't superheroes but definitely has heroic elements. I haven't been able to keep up on that one over the last year either, though.

My first attempts at writing anything were fan fiction. When I was eight, I wrote and drew a comic book story involving my sisters, me, and the Wonder Twins.

Tiny Team Rockhopper!

I can so picture this drawn by Art Baltazar!

One problem I had with those characters was I wasn't exactly sure how to spell "Jayna". I think the first story featured "Jaina".

Hey, I had to look up Art Baltazar's name to make sure I didn't misspell it.

It wasn't till I got my hands on a copy of Super Friends #12 that summer that I learned the correct spelling of Jayna's name. Back in the dark ages of the late 1970s, stores were inconsistent in which comics they carried.

When I was 7, I still had a hard time figuring out who was who in comics. I thought Dr. Light in her black costume and Dr. Light in her yellow costume were two different people (partly because they acted so differently!). I also thought Guy Gardner with a green lantern ring was from a different reality as Guy Gardner with Sinestro's ring.

I've been slowly phasing out DCFU over the past year. When Legion and Dial H were announced as being cancelled, those two were my final holdouts. Of those two, only Dial H was really worth buying. LSH was just out of loyalty, the only book I would do that for. So this week was it for me for the DC characters I grew up for as it was the final LSH (Dial H having concluded earlier this month).

I'll never say "never", but it would take a real sea change for me to return. I do still buy things from the Vertigo line and am overall very satisfied with those titles. But I feel that's a whole different animal.

As for Marvel, which I also grew up on, I'm down to four books: Hawkeye, Daredevil, Young Avengers and Superior Spider-man. Those four are holding steady. It helps that they are all pretty insular, meaning you don't have to buy five crossovers every other month to understand the story.

Otherwise, it's a wealth of great books from Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite and a handful of others.

To be completely honest, though, I've been slowly drifting away from Big Two superheroes long before the DCFU came along.

I was thinking of re-re-rereading Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison just so I could write a review of it. The problem is that once I start reading it I'll need to keep going until the end. Which doesn't work when I have a yard to till, food to cook, a job to go to, etc.



Short review from cleome: Box Office Poison is a rockin' graphic novel. It's teeming with comics meta and tons of terrific art and amazing characters. It's absolutely the book I'd hand to anyone who never cared for superheroes and who can't understand why anyone over the age of twelve ever would care.

Everyone needs to read if they haven't done so yet. So there.

P.S. - The same review would apply to Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville. I didn't even find out until a couple of years ago that most fans know Horrocks because he wrote some Batman stories some time after the graphic novel was completed.

I got my hands on a copy of local Philippine comic book mini-series The Mythology Class, about a group of college students gathered together by time-traveling heroes straight out of legend to capture mystical creatures loose in the modern day. I'd been looking for it for years ever since I browsed through, but failed to buy, a copy in a bookstore.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the idea of time travel. One of my favorite shows was Voyagers!, the story of a man and a boy who traveled through time to make sure history went the right way. Sadly, it lasted only one season (1982-3). The show's star, Jon-Erik Hexum, was quite the hunk and to a thirteen-year-old gay boy was just a dream come true. Tragically, he died in 1984 after he accidentally shot himself on the set of his next series, Cover Up.

My favorite series involving time travel was Quantum Leap. The time travel was always secondary to the great ability to essentially tell a new story every week. Very humanistic sci-fi.

One that could have been great was a show that was cancelled before it had a whole season, Journeyman. This show was on about 6 years or so ago and had a premise similar to a movie I like (based on a book) that was released a couple years ago and people might be more familiar with called The Time Traveler's Wife. Similar to that film, Journeyman featured a family man who time-travelled uncontrollably and had to somehow maintain a normal life while correcting some wrinkles in time.

In a way Journeyman is basically Quantum Leap meets The Time Traveler's Wife. The latter may have had an influence since it was published as a book in 2003, six years before the film adaptation was released. I sure wish Journeyman would have found an audience. But that's true of many promising shows cut down before they really had a chance.

Quantum Leap was a favorite of mine also. It had great stories and great acting. It managed to introduce new characters every week that viewers could care about. I also had quite the crush on Scott Bakula.

I read that as Scott Blacula, for some reason

The penguin and the vampire bat!

I always did have a fondness for vampires.

Not into vampires... not into zombies... I feel so out of it.

I liked vampires before it was cool. My favorite Saturday morning cartoon when I was eleven was a rather obscure show called Drak Pack. It actually displaced Super Friends for my top spot.

I haven't seen "Drak Pack" since watching reruns in the late 80s, but I remember it quite fondly. I remember the first few episodes had a great mix of fun and frights, but the later episodes toned down the frights a bit. Still one of the best Saturday morning cartoons of its time. I especially liked the villainess Vampira, who was voiced by Julie McWhirter, who was a really talented voice-over actress but who, sadly, ended her career after marrying...Rick "Disco Duck" Dees.

I recall a fondness for The Count from Sesame Street. Oh, and I thought Storm vs. Dracula in the pre-indecipherable days of The X-Men was pretty cool. That's about it.

I don't like Storm vs. Dracula, because in that story Claremont killed off Rachel Van Helsing, my favorite character from the "Tomb of Dracula" comic.

It's comics. I'm surprised she wasn't back three weeks/months/years later.

This was the early 80s, before death in comics turned into a revolving door.

Actually, it's all Kurt Busiek's fault, because he's the one who came up with the idea of how to bring back Jean Grey.

I remember that was around the same time that they pretended to kill Kazar, changing the name of his book for a single issue.

I guess deaths that are meant to be fake-outs from the start are a category unto themselves. Well, kind of.