From: morrow@fnalo.fnal.gov (St. Elmo's Fire)
Subject: Re: Legion of Super-Heroes... (VERY LONG)
Organization: Man in Motion
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 22:50:52 GMT
X-Posted-From: fnalo.fnal.gov
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

Vote:
	Hey!  This is getting fun!
or
	Hey!  There's Froth (tm) all over my screen!

:-)

jordan@castor (USENET's Chuck) writes the single > stuff:
> morrow@fnalo.fnal.gov (Nearer My Elmo to Thee) writes the double >> stuff if
I leave any in:

> you (Elmo) and I have had a similar argument on the Comics-L mailing
> list a few months back.  

	Right, I remember that one now...lemme upload that argument from
my wetware....

> Your arguments were mostly that the new LSH, writing
> and art, was too confusing for a team book.  

	Right; I said something like a team book required clear, easy-to-follow
art and clear easy-to-follow exposition, simply because of the increased
demands on the reader of the larger cast.  In most cases, the art part can be
handled by distinctive uniforms, something the new LSH hasn't particularly
used.

> I said I thought it showed some
> depth of writing and wasn't unnecessarily confusing, that they were trying to
> tell a big story and really do something with the characters and present
> realistic dialog.  It would be confusing until we were able to figure out
> what they were trying to do with the story.
> 
>>but I do not recall seeing any pro-LSH posts which get specific.
> 
> The biggest thing I like about the LSH is the scripting.  I listed two
> whole passages, one from the new series and one from a Levitz issue, that 
> showed the big difference.  In the "LSH v4" the characters actually talk
> like people, in what real conversations might sound like in these situations.
> In the older LSH, and in most superhero comic books I've read, the characters
> talk in exposition.  Especially in team books.  I don't have my comics with
> me, but an example would be something like "I didn't know that you, Lightning
> Lad, were actually my brother until the strange accident that gave us both
> our mysterious powers."  (Of course that's not a direct quote, but you get
> the idea.)

	Well, I counter with the argument (lifted from Irwin Blacker's _The
Elements of Screenwriting_) that real people's dialog is unintelligible if
simply transcribed.  Characters have the extra burden of being without
antecedents, if you will; they have to provide backstory, and explicate the
current story.  Blacker's book has a nice long section on exposition.  He
writes for movies, and comics have it easier, most obviously because they have
the caption as an option; still, the concept of exposition is universal.
	I will agree that, say, the Adventure run of LSH is characterized by
extraordinarily stilted dialog; it is hardly unique in its era in that respect.
Pulps and mass market books were also very badly written; it took time for
authors to learn the techniques print demanded.  Books became recognizably
readable for the modern audience about, oh, the 40s (I'm talking SF and
mystery, mostly).  In comics, the streamlining of exposition didn't become
standard until the 70s or so.  I would say that Levitz's dialog (in the 80s)
only rarely clunked as hard as the pseudoquote you give above.
	The Bierbaums are reasonably good scripters with some bad habits of
leaving important information unsaid.  Not information that would reveal the
plot--information that enables comprehension of the story.  For instance, in
probably 32 or 33, there was a sequence involving three women in one of the
seemingly endless sewers under Metropolis.  It lasted probably four pages.  One
of the women was named on the first page.  One was named on the third page. 
One was not ever named.  I call this bad.
	To semiquote Don Thompson:  "Some of us do read other things in the
month between issues and don't remember who's doing what to whom."  

> 	Real people don't mention each other's names in every sentence,
> especially if we come into the middle of a conversation.  And they don't
> always explain what they mean and give the history of a statement.  Of course
> that makes the story a bit more confusing, but it also makes it a lot more
> authentic to me than the old Legion.
> 
	I have a lot of demands on my time.  I therefore am willing to trade a
certain amount of verisimilitude in dialog for a certain degree of
ease-of-comprehension in story.  Your mileage may vary.

>>	5.  The Bierbaums make continual reference to previously established
>>bits of the LSH universe.
> 
> And they play around with it.  I thought this was one of the things you
> DIDN'T like about the book. 

	Well, I don't like it when they CHANGE the previously established bits. 
But I'm pleased to see Ambassador Relnic get continued use, and I'm moderately
impressed at their remembering King Jonn.  And the "walking money" visual
reference in one of the ME-Lad stories was a fun reminder of the silliness of
the 60s.

> my reasons I like the new series:
> 1) The whole retcon with the Time-Trapper.  
> 	I just wish they'd gotten weirder with it.  As I've mentioned before,
> I was hoping that Kent Shakespeare was a completely new character who had
> just popped into continuity during the retcon.  

	That would have been akin to, say, Star Trek suddenly announcing that,
oh yeah, Spock has an older brother we've just never mentioned before.  No,
wait a minute, they did that one :-)
	I think there are some very strong parallels between Star Trek and LSH.
For some people, continuity is a very big selling point, and ignoring it
infuriates us.  Bumping STTNG ahead 75 years was a good move, because it meant
that they could do their own continuity.  I would have had very little problem
with LSH v4 (re: continuity) if it had been a century further along, and about 
a wholly different set of characters.  Instead, it seems that way too much time
has been spend on telling the old readers, "Oh, you're just remembering it all
wrong, it really happened -this- way.  No, don't show us that old comics book. 
It's not the real story."

> 2) The dialog/scripting.
> My favorite example is the scene in which Sun Boy is in some
> kind of rejeuventation tank for his "accident."  Someone asks if his injuries
> are painful and the doctor says something to the effect of "I only hope for
> his sake that he's unconscious."  And then we see a single panel of his eye,
> staring wide open.  Wow.  This stands out in my mind as one ofthe best scenes
> I've read in comics, and it also was great as a kind of subtle comeuppance
> to the character.  

 	Well, it was a nice bit, and I appreciated it.  But what I noticed is
that Sun Boy got horribly burned in #19, hallucinated in #29 +/- 1, died in
#35.  That's a very long time on a comic book scale, and very little except 
angst happened in that period (wrt Sun Boy, that is).  What was the purpose
to his survival?  What role did it have in the story?  In other words, what 
plot points or character development hinged on his survivor?  Not a lot.  One
of the Subs revealed a distaste for euthanasia.  I don't think it was worth it,
when so many other characters are crying out for page space.
	IMHO, of course.
	And, yes, in case you wondered, I also thought exactly the same thing
about the survival of the first Chippie from Brat Pack #1, only to die in a
grotesque splash in #3.  His survival affected nothing that I could see.

> Another sign of the depth of the storytelling here is that
> Sun Boy isn't your typical one-dimensional good-guy-turned-bad villain along
> the lines of Alan Moore's Johnny Bates in the MiracleMan series.  

	Well, the Johnny of Book One is quite different from the Johnny of Book
Three.  JB1 is about the seduction of power; JB3 is about blowing things up.
	Incidentally, Sun Boy's characterization as a chauvinist womanizer was
entirely established by Paul Levitz.  His problems with power date back to a
very early Adventure.

> There's a
> whole flashback issue that gives us an idea of how Sun Boy got to be the way
> he is now, after the five-year gap, and his death in a recent issue was also
> very sympathetic and moving, IMO.

	Well, I didn't read his death (I thought someone ripped out his spinal
cord?).
	A problem I had with the flashback episode was that it was entirely
hallucinatory--in other words, the writers don't have to be consistent with it.
I think that encourages laziness in writers.  I also tend to dislike dream
sequences for the same reason :-)

> 	Another scene is the assassination of the President of Earth.  They'd
> been building up to it for a while, and then we get a big, dramatic payoff.
> Another extremely well-written scene.

	But it was such a moronic thing for the Dominators to do!  It may have
been dramatic (and we could argue about that) but it was a major mistake for
the villains.  From my .sig file:

	"There is no heroism in vanquishing a weakling or a fool."
	--Irwin R. Blacker                                        

> 3) The way they're willing to screw around with the characters.  Not all of
> the changes have been good, I will agree with you on that.  But the characters
> are definitely CHANGING.  

	I would tend to argue that they are CHANGED, not that they are
CHANGING.  There has been lots of change, but precious little changing, IMHO.

> Other comics, like Superman, and Batman, and the
> previous Legion series, have all been victim to the Gilligan's Island syndrome.
> Each issue isn't really part of a bigger story; no matter what happens in an
> issue, it will be resolved or undone by the end of that issue, or that four-
> issue storyline, which will put things right back the way they were at the
> beginning.  

	Well, characters grew and changed in the Legion under Levitz, too.
Vi went butch.  Sun Boy became a womanizer.  Thom and Nura broke up (I need
to double-check that, as someone quoted numbers that would have put it before
Atmos, and I don't remember it that way).  
	There's a problem with changing characters so drastically, too.  To
quote Don Thompson again, "Every character is -someone's- favorite."
Wildfire was the most popular character in the LSH for much of the 70s and 
early 80s.  How many people have the writers POed by not even mentioning him
until the Sun Boy flashback, and then not following up with an explanation of
Black Dawn?
	Finally, I can cite Blacker again:  In movies, the protagonist must
change, or the movie fails.  The supporting cast is mostly static.  However, 
in TV writing, which is serial in nature, it is the protagonist who is static,
while the supporting cast typically receives the development.  Why this happens
should be obvious:  It is the protagonist who has the lion's share of the
audience's loyalty, and changing him risks alienating the audience without
guaranteeing replacement by a different section of the possible audience.

	I suppose my point here is that the changes are too radical for my
tastes, and boy, isn't that a strong argument :-)
	Of course, it is the strongest possible argument as far as -I- am
concerned.

[On criticizing pseudo-science]
> This is a story, after all, and there are a lot 
> of things you have to just take on faith. 

	I trust you recall my arguments on that from the COMICS-L discussion?
Fine, we'll agree to disagree on this topic.

>>	Such as blowing away Blok with precious little buildup, ceremony, or
>>followup.  Used to be whacking a Legionnaire was a big production.  Now it's
>>commonplace.  But that's a cheap shot.
> 
> I think they handled Blok's death very well.  They devoted an entire issue
> to it, showing his thoughts as he passed on to the afterlife, etc.  

	But those thoughts didn't make much sense.  And where was Death? :-)
No, I get it!  Death looks like Strata to Blok's people!  Quick!  To the
Annotations, Bibliography Boy!

	I thought the sequence where Blok was blown up was disjointed and
confusing for no apparent reason.  Blok, also, was very static.  He died not as
a hero (which he was to many people), but as a statue.
	All I can say about the followup to the death was that it wasn't
traditionally Legion.
	And, I might add, Blok's death also indicates Gilligan's Island
Syndrome in effect in LSH v4:  Nothing changed as a result of his death, except
that he's dead.  (It would have been nice to see Mysa's reaction developed over
time, but then it would be nice to see Mysa.)

> Blok's death was simple and fairly moving; he was a gentle hero who
> went on to a better place, from the looks of things, and we got to see what
> a crazed killer Roxxas was.  Again, if you look at a comic like the Batman,
> we're just supposed to see that the Joker is a homicidal maniac and take that
> on faith.  We're sure he's life-threatening, even though he hasn't actually
> done anything (except in big one-time media events where he kills a temp Robin
> or injures a long-out-of-commission Batgirl.)  

	Check out "The Joker's Five Way Revenge", or the Englehart stories in
Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told.  Or the Archive editions.  The Joker whacks
lots of people.  He -is- a homicidal maniac, because he kills.  A lot.  Take a
look at his body count in Justice League International Annual 2.
	Roxxas, to me, comes off as a second-rate imitation of the Joker in his
v4 incarnation.
	Now, I will digress and mention that in his pre-v4 appearances, he was
a -genocidal- maniac.  Frankly, I find Hitler to be much more evil than David
Berkowitz, and I find the Adv-Roxxas to be much more evil than the v4-Roxxas.

> If you can't give
> me a lot more examples of characters changed drastically for seemingly no
> reason, especially if it's just an example of the new writers' different
> take on a character, I'll have to stick by my claim.

	Well, how about Nura?  Her characterization was exquisitely detailed in
v2 and v3, and is -fundamentally different- in v4.  I have argued elsewhere why
this change could not have taken place.
	However, my complaint is more that we aren't shown the change, just the
results of change.  Nura received no development that explains how she went
from Dream Girl to Bloated Bimbo.
	There are characters who have undergone little change between v3 and
v4--Rokk, Jo, Garth, Imra, etc, etc.
	There are characters who have undergone great change between v3 and
v4--Mekt, Nura, "Sean", etc. (Dirk, to a certain extent).  Some of those have
been extremely arbitrary, some have been reasonable developments.
	There is just one character I can think of who has undergone change
-during- v4:  Mysa (and it was pretty abruptly accomplished, IMHO).  Well,
maybe Circe, but then her character wasn't firmly established before the
change I have in mind, so it could be character revelation instead of
development.
	And that's what I mean when I complain about this.  The writers
(particularly the Bierbaums, I think) are pretty good at characterization, but
bad at development.  Couple this with a taste for arbitrary changes, and they
activate my Frothing-at-the-Mouth powers.

>>	I disagree with your assessment of Levitz.  He was IMPO terrific at
>>character -development-, and pretty good at telling adventure stories on the
>>side.  Easy to follow != shallow, as well; check the Pre-Joycean Fellowship
>>manifesto.  CBG has had a nice think-piece or two about the difference between
>>complex and complicated, and how both are different from obscure.  IMPO, LSH v4
>>is far more obscure than it is complex, although I will grant that they're not
>>doing a -simple- plot.
> 
> I don't agree.  Very often Easy to follow == shallow.  

	I agree, but easy to follow does not directly imply shallow.  Sandman
is easy to follow, but is anything but shallow.  Steven Brust's _To Reign in
Hell_ and _Brokedown Palace_ are easy to follow, but hardly shallow.

> I'll check out the
> storyline you mentioned (issue numbers?)

	May have mislead you--the Pre-Joycean Fellowship is a group of writers
who believe that literary significance does not imply obscurity, that works of
literary significance can also work as stories.  Neil Gaiman and the Scribblies
(a Minneapolis SF writers' group) are members.  They claim that James Joyce's
works started the current establishment belief that obscure = good by
definition.

> but of the 30 or so Levitz issues
> I've read, all of them have taken the easy way out and I haven't felt that
> the characters were anything but one-dimensional.  All the characterization
> is terribly blatant, simplistic, and unbelievable.  Like I said, the stories
> aren't offensive by any means, they're just dull.  Even the adventure stories.
> I can get more specific if you like.

	Evidently our mileage varies.  I like the familiar, you like the weird
and unusual.  No use arguing this point.

> 	I'd also like to read the CBG article you mentioned;  I do think that
> the way you tell a story has a lot to do with its depth and how much it
> affects the reader.  

	I think the article was by one of the second-tier writers--maybe the
guy who collaborated with Mark Verheiden on Stalkers?
	Anyway, his definitions went something as follows:

	Complicated:  Lots of little bits.
	Complex:  Iceberg bits--the depth is there if you look.
	Obscure:  Missing bits.

	I would call LSH v4 obscure and complicated, but not complex.
I would call Sandman and Watchman complex, but not complicated.  I would call
Zelazny's first Amber series complicated, but not complex, and obscure in
a very few places.
	For me, complex is generally good, but not necessary; complicated
interesting, but not necessary; and obscure boring or infuriating.

> My favorite example of this is the Twin Peaks TV series.
> Basically, the story wasn't all that complicated or original: 
[...]
> But, the style of storytelling in Twin Peaks -- bizarre, mysterious,
> over-dramatic and over-obfuscated in places -- 

	I would call Twin Peaks, from what I know of it, and from the above
definitions, complicated and obscure, but not particularly complex.

> Your
> earlier complaints specifically said that Giffen's art and the lack
> of exposition were too complicated for a team comic book.  I think that it's
> not, you just have to follow the story a little more closely and commit more
> time to it, and it's necessary to be a little bit confusing if you're trying
> to do as much as they are with the book and still maintain their style of
> writing.

	Well, I don't think it's -ever- necessary to be confusing.  Concealing
information is fine, but don't hit the reader over the head with it.  On any
given day, I will tell you that the mysteries of "Black Dawn" and "Who
is Bounty" are either a colossal game of "We know something you don't know" or
examples of just how out of control the book is.

> (By the way, I don't consider most of Sandman to be as complex and involved as
> what the Bierbaums/Giffen are trying to do with LSH, but I also don't think
> that's what Gaiman is trying to do with Sandman.) 

	See above for my take on the difference between LSH and Sandman.  LSH
has a lot more going on, but Sandman has a lot more beneath the surface--in
part due to the fact that Gaiman is deliberately using the series as a take on
storytelling itself.

> My big point here was that they're playing up the fact that they
> are NOT trying to continue the old Legion.  

	Yeah, well, I think they bloody well should.  But that's probably
obvious :-)
	Don't use the Legion if you aren't going to tell Legion stories. 
Create something new.
	(I use the same argument for Hawkworld, which I also consider an
abomination.)

> These characters have changed
> dramatically.  From Salu's logs we see that she seems extremely shallow at
> first, but even the "old" Legion character begins to develop depth and
> sincerity.

	Well, I would say that the diary entries are doing a reasonable job of
establishing this new Salu's character.  Is she consistent with the previous
incarnation?  Well, the source stories for the character would be the Adventure
series, which didn't have characterization, so no joy there.  Most of the
characterization she ever had occured following a fundamental trauma, so isn't
terribly relevant.
	Like I said before, they're setting up a beauty of a character
development problem.

> Levitz might have done this to some degree (although I would guess that it 
> was probably Giffen's influence; the ones that Giffen co-plotted were far
> superior to the ones that Levitz wrote alone) 

	Oh, please.  Magic Wars is better than the Universo Project?  LSV (LSH
v3 1-5) an improvement on Great Darkness (while both were L/G plotted, the
former is heavily G and the latter heavily L IMHO)?
	We gonna disagree about this point, no doubt.

> but there's no comparison to
> the current series.  You can have the best intentions as far as showing a
> realistic change in your characters, but if you do so while still putting
> them in the same old soap-opera (your words) situations, they're going to
> cancel each other out.  I'll re-read my older issues tonight...

	Characters is revealed, and changes occur, in crisis.  If you want to
develop the characters' relationships, you have to have relational crises. 
Relational crises are soap opera.
	And, of course, I would call, for example, the Rokk-Vi Venado Bay
confrontation, soap opera in the extreme.

>>	The "look and feel" changes I meant above was 1. the preponderance of
>>death 2. the overload of new characters at the expense of old 3. the wholesale
>>change of LSH past (prime example: the shoehorning of Kid Quantum).  The
>>character development isn't so bad (except for Nura :-)
> 
> Once again, this is NOT your father's Legion of Super-Heroes.

	Then don't call it the Legion.

> I really like
> most of the new characters they've introduced, and I don't feel that they're
> necessarily ignoring all of the older characters.  This is fiction, after all;
> some characters just aren't important to the story right now.  

	Under Levitz, characters did in fact disappear and reappear and
intervals of six months or so.  The difference is that those characters who
weren't appearing weren't involved in subplots.
	The v4 writers seem to have given -every- character a critical subplot,
and -of course- they're having trouble giving everyone air time.

> They've done
> away with the group meetings and the roll call at the beginning of each issue;
> you're supposed to be able to figure these out on your own.  

	Screw the damn roll call.  I don't want Adventure back.  I want v2 and
v3.  There is no Legion without a structure, and v4 has no internal structure.

> The new series'
> equivalent has been more novel ideas like entries in the MacCauleycoms, or

	Oldstyle LSH had text pages, too, particularly the $.50 giants of the
S/LSH period.  LSH v2 and v3 was noted for "Encyclopedia Galactica" entries. 
The Omnicoms are hardly novel.

> And, I would
> much rather them tell the story they want to tell, with a few characters, than
> try to artificially include each of the old characters in a story just to
> satisfy all their fans.

	A -few- characters?  They've got them oozing out of their ears in the
Terra Mosaic, and -none- of the key players are on the bloody v4 Legion of
Super-Heroes poster.

> 	Also, I don't know what you mean by preponderance of death.  I can't
> name any death in the series that I thought was just gratuitous change for
> the sake of change.  Maybe you could suggest one?

	Blok.  That guy Sade put out an airlock.  The three clone Legionnaires.
Sun Boy.  Circadia Senius.  That's what I came up with in thirty seconds.

> 	I'm willing to put continuity with previous series on the back burner
> as long as the stories are interesting and they're FAIRLY consistent with the
> universe that they've set up for themselves.

	I'm not.  Period.

> One of the complaints you made in another response was that they've used
> three years to tell a simple Aliens-invading-Earth story.  I STRONGLY disagree
> with this.  The only reason you can call that "simple" was that in the past,
> most comic writers have chosen to tell an Alien-Invasion story with just one
> or two issues.  But this is a BIG DEAL!  These aliens haven't just invaded
> the Earth, they've spent a thousand years secretly taking over the earth!

	No, they've spent five years secretly taking over the Earth.  Plus,
they're morons, so how did they succeed in the first place?

> They've slowly infiltrated the government, over a course of time withdrawing
> earth from the United Planets and changing the minds of high figures in the
> Earth's government to bend to their will.  Their influence extends all over
> the galaxy.  

	All of which ends the instant their role is revealed.  That's what
helps keep the story simple.

> There's an elaborate resistance force against the aliens, as well
> as the formerly-disbanded super-hero team that tries to stop the aliens.  In
> the meantime, there's a lot of infighting, conspiracy, spy stories, fooling
> around with history, etc.  The Bierbaums/Giffen didn't just tell this story --
> they told the HELL out of it!  (I stole that from a .sig.) 
> The war in LSH has been a real epic, with major events happening to all of
> the characters involved.  They're not interested in giving you a typical
> run-of-the-mill team book; they're trying to tell a big story.  Often it
> gets away from them, but they've done an overall good job, IMO.  

	They seem to have cleaned up a great deal of the story in just three
issues or so; can't have been that complicated :-)
	My overwhelming memory of Terra Mosaic is -endless- pages of people
doing -nothing- in the -endless- sewers beneath Metropolis.
	Your mileage may vary.
-- 
"The first atomic bomb was also built in New Mexico and is very slowly being   
restored to its original condition by workers with tweezers and extremely good 
eyesight."--Dave Barry                                                         
  
elmo (morrow@physics.rice.edu,morrow@fnal.fnal.gov)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc