The multiverse moves. It moves around itself. Think of it as an enormous wheel - you can most easily travel to any point on the wheel by traveling to and from the center. Which just means you need a way to get to the center. That’s why I called my ship the Spoke. Of course, my metaphor is actually in reality completely inaccurate, and in retrospect, I should called it “the Axle.” But you get the gist.

Dr. Jonathan Dhir is a genius; a master of transdimensional physics, one of the very few to ever take that knowledge out of the realm of theory and into the practical. He’s likewise a good man, brave and smart. Maybe a bit obsessive, as some scientists tend to be. But not a bad man by any stretch.

His only problem is that his wife is dead.

Some have said there are fifty-two universes; this is thinking small. The megaverse roams in clusters of fifty-two universes at a time. Some are completely barren of all life. Some do not entirely conform to our concept of physics. One is made entirely out of jelly. No, I’m not joking about that last one. It’s really made out of jelly. Not edible jelly, mind you. But jelly.

Dhir and his wife - it was true love, the kind you only ever read about in storyscrolls. (They never really went to books in his universe, although they’ve long since computerized the process.) And Dhir was a genius, but not a universal one; he couldn’t cure the comaegulanara his wife contracted.

Ordinary people grieve and move on. But Dhir had other options most people don’t, and a certain sort of persistent quality that’s greatly magnified when you’re a brilliant scientist.

If anything can exist somewhere, that means it does. And that means if anyone can exist somewhere, that means they do.

He wasn’t sure if humans could safely traverse the boundaries of the multiverse, let alone the megaverse. When he launched the Spoke out of its orbit he calculated that there was a .7 percent chance it would blink into nothingness, and him along with it. He was willing to take the risk.

It took him a very long time, and he had many, many adventures along the way, becoming something of a hero in the process. He found universes where he and his wife both died as children, never even meeting. He found universes where his wife was alive, but unfortunately so was that universe’s version of himself, and he wasn’t the sort to intrude. He found universes where his wife was alive and he was dead, but unfortunately he was a dead woman and his wife and he were both gay. (That universe was awkward, but not so awkward as the universe where he and his wife were both arthropods.)

Of course it’s a moral act. Somewhere, there is a place where she is alone. She isn’t supposed to be alone.

Finally he found it, a universe where his wife was human (more or less), and not dead, and that universe’s version of himself died young in a war some time previous, never even meeting her. And she was lonely, and she couldn’t quite figure out how not to be lonely. She’d even joined this team of young heroes wearing gaudy costumes, trying to make the universe a better place, and he was amazed - if his wife had ever had superpowers, she would have done exactly that. He was sure of it.

Of course, now he’d have to convince her he wasn’t insane or psychotic - not to mention make her fall in love with him - and yes, that would probably be difficult. But Dr. Dhir is, if anything, a remarkably methodical and patient man.

I’ve seen the birth of species, the death of galaxies and the universe from the outside looking in. I’d trade all of those memories away for five minutes of her time - because to me, she is the universe. And I think I could be hers.

At the tail end of my last I Should Write The Legion, I promised that this one would feature the “biggest badass” in the Legion, and the guesses were predictable: Brainiac Five, of course, but also Superboy and Star Boy, plus a couple of emails betting it was Wildfire.

All of them are cool, mind you, but when you’re talking sheer badass that is off the charts, there’s only one nominee.

She’s a ridiculously powerful telepath. Her mental abilities have at times managed to hold off gods. She’s made entire groups of Legionnaires believe that missing comrades were alongside them for months at a time, lobotomized enemies, beaten other top-league telepaths like rented mules. In terms of sheer power, Imra Ardeen is near the top of any scale upon which the Legion can be judged.

(Aside: I remember someone once asked me to explain the appeal of the Legion. The conversation went like this. “Do you like Magneto?” “Yeah.” “Professor X?” “Yeah.” “Superman?” “Yeah.” “Wolverine?” “Yeah.” “Imagine all of them on the same team, together, plus Iceman and Firestar and Mr. Fantastic minus the stretching and a bunch of other equally powerful characters. That’s the Legion. They kick ass.”)

But what makes Saturn Girl the biggest badass in the Legion isn’t that she’s powerful. Lots of Legionnaires are powerful, after all. What makes her the biggest badass in the Legion is her inherent pragmatism - recently pointed out quite adeptly by Jim Shooter when she calmly mind-controlled Timber Wolf to stop him from killing somebody in a fit of rage, then mindwiped all the onlookers to make them forget that Timber Wolf snapped. Is this a violation of both T-Wolf and the assorted citizen’s mental dignity? Yes, that’s exactly what it was - and she did it anyway because it was necessary.

In his run initiating the current Legion, Mark Waid placed Cosmic Boy and Brainiac Five in opposition to one another. I always felt this missed the mark, because Cosmic Boy has the Captain America role in the Legion - he’s the guy the team rallies around, the purest and most natural leader, the one who is, by definition, going to be on the right side. Placing someone in opposition to Cosmic Boy is like, I dunno, putting Captain America on one side of a superhero-versus-superhero conflict and then asking readers not to think of the other side as the de facto “bad guys.” It made Brainiac Five seem almost villainous.

However, Brainy does need a counter in the Legion, because his intellectual and moral role within the team is so powerful, and Saturn Girl is exactly the person to take on the job. She’s tough and smart, and her steady pragmatism is the perfect foil for Brainy’s powerful idealism. The way I see it, there are things Brainiac Five just will not do as a matter of principle, even if they are necessary. (A great story in the initial-reboot Legion had him refuse to use the Metal Men’s responsometers to help the timelost Legion get home without their permission, once he realized they were sentient intelligences.)

Saturn Girl, on the other hand, is a lot more willing to bite the bullet. It’s just who she is. Which in turn means the two of them will be at odds with one another frequently. Not team-dividing warfare or anything; simply the collision of two equally valid yet ultimately opposed perspectives.

(Oh, and since I know people will ask: she’s with Lightning Lad because Garth is, in many ways, the Captain Carrot of the Legion - he’s not brilliant, but he’s moral and upright and just plain good, through and through. Do you really think a telepath could manage to be with anybody else?)

EDIT TO ADD: I didn’t want to elaborate too much on why Saturn Girl is pragmatic, but Brad pretty much explained it for me in comments below:

Saturn Girl isn’t pragmatic, because it’s an extention of her desire for control, or peace, or some kind of moral imperitive - she’s just been raised in a society that’s to some extent a psychic open-book. Much of our laws about freedom and rights (and justice) are because we can’t ever know what someone’s actual intent is behind their actions or what their capacity to act on those intents are. Titanians have no such limitations.

Exactly.

I might have mentioned this one before in passing, but since today is my Property exam I’m going to cheat a bit and use it.

There was a bit of a minor fan kerfuffle (nothing along the lines of the recent “that’s not how Dr. Doom talks” kerfuffle, you understand - this is the piddling, smallish sort of kerfuffle) recently regarding Shadow Lass in the most recent issue of Legion chopping an alien monster baddie thing to death with a giant poleaxe. You know, the “wait, Legionnaires aren’t supposed to kill” sort of kerfuffle.

And it’s fair that generally speaking, Legionnaires should not kill, even if they are the mean type of badass Legionnaire, and that generally killing in the pages of Legion should be reserved for extreme circumstances, like when Projectra needs to take care of Nemesis Kid in an old-school manner.

But Shadow Lass interests me, because Shadow Lass is from Talok VI, which is generally recognized in Legion lore - throughout pretty much all the reboots - as a semi-barbaric warrior culture. They’re not the Klingons of the DC Universe (we all know that the Khund are the Klingons of the DC Universe). But the Talokians are pretty direct when it comes to dealing with people they consider enemies. So, although I’m sure Shady isn’t going to go around executing people willy-nilly or even busting out the deadly weapons in a tougher than average fight, I can understand where her response to “oh shit a giant killer monster” is to go all Ripley on its ass.

And Talok is a warrior culture, and every Shadow Champion of the Talokians has died in glorious battle, and…

…wait, all of them died in glorious battle? How’s that again?

Well, it’s simple. See, the Shadow Champion has the shadow powers bestowed upon him or her when they’re selected. And then they have them until they die. (That thing a while back where other Talokians were challenging Tasmia for the shadow powers? Yeah, that’s kind of a ritual. The Talokian elders all know the real deal - that’s why the Shadow Champion never loses to the putzes who weren’t good enough to qualify.) And they have to die in battle -

- because that’s the only way they can die.

See, shadow powers in the DC Universe have a proud pedigree. There’s the Shade, and his evil opposite Culp. And Obsidian. And the thing about shadow powers is this: for some reason - maybe it’s their tie to the entropic forces gradually tearing apart the universe - if you’ve got them, you don’t age. And you’re definitely tough to kill. You tend to heal up from most wounds, although not exactly at Wolverine speed or anything like that.

Now, Talok’s a warrior culture. Warrior cultures tend to have Valhalla-type afterlife beliefs. You get to go to the good afterlife by dying in battle (or by ritualistic “battle”, no doubt, for the aged warriors on their deathbeds). But the shadow powers (which, needless to say, Shady and the other champions have never used to their full potential - the Shade is terrifyingly powerful, you know) make it essentially impossible to die normally in the course of battle, as is well and proper. Which is why most Shadow Champions grow progressively more suicidal as they figure out what they’ve become, flinging themselves into more and more dangerous attacks.

Now, this in and of itself is quite interesting (to me, anyway). But I’ll add on something else: Shady’s going to be needed for an adventure at the literal End of the Universe, temporally speaking. She has to learn to be the last Shadow Champion. She has to come to grips with living forever - something her culture, her entire upbringing, deems abhorrent. Something fundamentally opposite to who she is.

This is where one Richard Swift, Esq. steps in - because when life deals you a bum hand, often the best possible friend you can have is someone who’s already used to it, and who can help you deal with it, get used to it. Possibly also pass on his exceptional sartorial taste. (Well, that last probably won’t happen, much to the Shade’s chagrin.)

NEXT TIME: The biggest badass in the Legion.

Blame Greg Morrow for this one, and I’ll just quote him in the email he sent me:

You should write a “Why I should write LSH” about Starro. Pro or con. The Star Conqueror lies at the heart of DC Comics’ appeal, viz., it’s an adorably goofy idea that you can’t explain to a non-comics-reading adult without apologizing, but at the same time is amazingly effective and terrifying when played straight. (I’ve argued the same about Modok.)

What attracts me to the idea is that Starro is an alien invader. He’s intrinsically more SFnal than the usual run of supervillain, and the LSH should be more SFnal than the usual run of superhero comic. He’s also not a bumpy-forehead alien like the Khunds or the Skrulls, and, as Grant Morrison exploited, that makes him potentially a lot more alien, harder to understand and come to grips with as an antagonist, and therefore just plain scarier.

Greg is dead on with all of this, and until he mentioned something else in his email - namely, that we have no idea where Starro(s) come from - well. I’ll tell you the truth.

I’d considered Starro previously as an LSH villain, and dismissed him.

Not because I don’t love Starro. Starro is awesome. He is an evil space-traveling starfish. You don’t get more comics than that. But the problem with Starro is that the single most primal story from a comics standpoint that involves Starro - namely, that he takes over some of the superheroes and then the superheroes have to fight each other, Starro-controlled hero against still-independent hero - has been done quite a lot, and a new take on it has to be really brilliant, and I couldn’t think of one. Brad Meltzer did the “miniature Starros as mind-control agents” bit in his year on Justice League, so that’s out too.

And then Greg pointed out that we don’t know where Starro comes from, and that’s when I got the idea.

Why does Starro want to conquer, anyway? I mean, Starro is most terrifying when he’s so utterly fucking alien in motivation that he doesn’t bother explaining why he’s mind-controlling everybody with his starfish spawnlings. He just does it. Why would he do that?

Maybe it’s a biological imperative. Maybe Starro and/or his race feed off psychic emanations. A Starro creates the starfish spawn to serve much like tiny little suction cups. The mind-control evolved over time. First it was just a defense mechanism to keep people from tearing off the spawn, but it got finer and more astute over time, and then one day the Starros started getting smarter, and smarter, and smarter as they kept absorbing all that brain-juice, until they achieved sentience, and they realized that this was only the beginning.

Of course, Starro isn’t stupid, and probably after his nth asskicking at the hands of Earth superheroes he realized that straight-up conquest just wasn’t going to work. But here’s the thing about essentially immortal starfish: they can afford to play the long game.

Imagine a world, way off in a quiet corner of space, where Starro lives peaceably with an intelligent humanoid population. It’s a symbiotic relationship, much like the Trills in Star Trek. Starro gets to eat brain-energy, but in return he makes his hosts stronger, faster, healthier (and not everybody on the planet gets to be a host - the race considers it a privilege to carry a spawnling). A plain, quiet, orderly little world, polite and friendly - except over time Starro has become the absolute leader, and worse, he doesn’t have to force anybody this time around to let him be in charge. Think how goddamned creepy it would be.

A world where dissidents are punished - for their own good, of course, your loved ones will drag you to a faceful of starfish themselves if they have to, because they know it’s the best thing for you - with aggressive Starro therapy. (Dissidents tend to have more agitated brains. Nothing like a little Starro to sort that out and calm them down.) A world where every policeman has a starfish on his face that shoots a stun-ray from its central eye. A world where people compete for Starro’s attention.

This is a Starro who thinks beyond simple tactics like “take over everything in sight, then take over more things, then more, then more.” This is a Starro that’s figured out how to achieve his ultimate objective - soft tactics rather than hard force. The ultimate face of starfish fascism, brought about the way all good fascism is - entirely voluntarily.

And what is Starro’s ultimate objective? Why does he want to conquer everything, anyway?

Well, I can’t give it away for free, you know?

I’ve been getting a few emails recently asking me to do a few more character-based I Should Write The Legion bits, which seems fair because I’ve been concentrating a lot on plot ideas lately. But the thing is - most character issues end up being plot ideas anyway, or at least subplot ideas. Character issues in an ongoing serial adventure narrative should either shape action or initiate it, especially when said narrative is about twenty-plus different characters.

But it’s worthwhile to discuss, so let’s start with my favorite.

The entire idea of the name “Brainiac Five” never made sense to me as a kid, because even then I knew that Brainiac was a bad guy. Cultures do not take the names of bad guys to describe good guys. Ever. We don’t say “wow, that Barack Obama, he’s a Hitler-level public speaker.” (Well, actually, there’s probably some idiots writing for certain right-wing websites saying exactly that, but they prove my point about it being both stupid and non-complimentary.)

Tie onto this the secondary point that being smart, in and of itself, is not a good reason for Brainiac Five to be a dick. Smart people can be wonkishly engaging just as often - if not moreso - than average folks, eager to tell you and explain to you about stuff they know, because they like knowing stuff. There has to be a reason Brainy’s defensive and arrogant and personally combative.

And here’s one more thing that doesn’t make sense: “twelfth-level intelligence.” How many fingers do Coluans have? Ten. They would be most comfortable working with a base ten numerical system, and we know as humans that we’re naturally inclined to create ordering systems in tens: top ten lists and top one hundred lists exist for a reason. Why on Earth would Coluans create a system of ordering and describing intelligence with twelve steps, rather than ten? Believe me, they’d find a scientific excuse to make it a ten-level system. Coluans might be smart, but they’re still prey to basic psychological foibles. It seems to me that the natural inclination of a Coluan would be to invent an intelligence classification system with ten levels, not twelve (and naturally put themselves at the top).

The answer, for me - not that this will surprise some of you - lies in the hidden history.

When Vril Dox overthrew the Computer Tyrants of Colu, way back in the day, the emerging scientific council wanted to thank him. They did so by making him the beneficiary of a new, as-yet untested (but of course it would work) process to elevate his intelligence. The Coluan intelligence ranking method uses processing capacity as its intellectual denominator, and this new process would expand Dox’s intellectual processing capacity by two levels, making him a hundred times smarter than any Coluan - already the species with the highest processing capacity in the known universe. More impressively, the process was genetic, so it would be passed on to Dox’s heirs.

Unfortunately, Vril Dox was kind of an evil bastard. Worse, the process worked, but also led to mental instability. The combination of the two led to the first Brainiac.

Still, Colu wasn’t too worried yet. Sure, Vril Dox turned out to be a bad apple, but the process itself was fundamentally sound, and when applied to a normal Coluan it would no doubt advance their intelligence safely. Vril Dox II was everybody’s proof of this: although only ten times smarter than the average Coluan (”eleventh-level intelligence”) and kind of a cold fish to say the least, he wasn’t insane, and his creation and leadership of L.E.G.I.O.N. proved the case. Colu prepared to start applying the genetic remodeling to its entire populace…

…until Lyrl Dox, Vril II’s son, turned out to be insane from the crib, with twelfth-level intelligence making it even worse. Lyrl temporarily turned L.E.G.I.O.N. into a fascist police force before his father stopped - and lobotomized - him.

Colu was stunned, and the genetic process abandoned forever - but it was now inherently tied to the genetic legacy of the Dox family line. As other Coluan family lines grew in size, the Doxes steadily shrank until they were just a single family. Most of the time, of course, Doxes proved to be brilliant scientists and politicians - maybe a bit unstable or quirky, but nothing dangerous. (Interestingly, a side effect of all of this was that for a Dox, romantic love relationships were the norm - completely the opposite of cool, logical Coluan society, but such irrationality was necessary for the line to survive.) Most Doxes worked quietly at home or subtly in public, their eleventh-level intelligences advancing Coluan - and even galactic - society in prodigious and uplifting ways.

Lyrl was posthumously referred to as “Brainiac Two” and forgotten…. until Brainiac Three, Pril Dox, blew up half of Colu with his anti-bombs in 2421. That set Colu on guard. The Dox line barely survived - and again, in 2706, when Brainiac Four, Orl Dox, created a massive interstellar pirate fleet and led her minions to destroy galactic communication networks in a bid to completely control interstellar civilization as she knew it. The rare glimpses of twelfth-level intelligence in the Dox line became dreaded events, and Coluan society prepared more intensely each time.

Being Coluans, they decided that the gains perpetuated by the Dox line were worth the occasional sacrifice of a Brainiac popping up, so they let it continue. But when Querl Dox was born, and his twelfth-level intelligence was obvious within hours of his birth, this time they took steps. Young Querl was designated Brainiac Five less than a month after being born. He was taught separately from all other Coluan youth, banned from the thoughtcreches, feared and shunned by just about everybody. The title of “Brainiac” became not just a condemnation but an insult, a declaration of advance perfidy.

Maybe his parents could have helped him get past this, but his father, Kell Dox - a kindly, gentle dreamer who took to writing haiku in between his brilliant chronal experiments - died of Nux Syndrome six months after Querl was born. (Nux Syndrome is dreaded in Coluan society - a brutal, random, nonhereditary genetic disease that strips away intelligence before it kills. Praetor Lemnos later created a modified, contagious version of it and unleashed it on Colu.) His mother, devastated by the loss of her husband (Coluans aren’t used to romantic love, remember) and unable to deal with society’s condemnation, fled her son, working in isolated labs and refusing to contact him.

Eventually, Colu decided to just cut its losses in advance and exiled young Querl offplanet. (It wasn’t an official exile - it was an “intellectual exchange program” but everybody knew what it was.) Querl studied everything - everything - he could get his hands on. And eventually he found out about the Legion.

He’d probably tell you that he joined it to make sure that the Legion did what it vitally needed to do - namely, implode the stagnation of the United Planets - properly. And to be fair, that’s what he believes. But he believes it because he can’t admit the real reasons he joined. He’ll never admit to anybody that he joined the Legion because he’s terrified - absolutely fucking petrified - of what he might do when he goes insane and really earns the name Brainiac, and that he wants to make sure that he’s surrounded by the most capable and powerful heroes in the universe when he finally snaps so they can deal with him. (The fact that he might be the first Coluan to ever have stable twelfth-level intelligence is one he’s never allowed himself the luxury of considering.)

And he could never admit, not even to himself, that what he wants more than anything is a family.

Way back when I was a young me, one of the first comics-related things I ever read was a hardcover compendium of Superman stories at the library. This was a genuinely great collection, filled with Golden, Silver and Bronze Age Superman stories, and readers were spoilt for choice of some of the best classic Big Blue stories around: the first one with Titano, the introduction of Mon-El, “The Two Lives Of Jonathan Kent” (easily one of the best Super-stories ever printed, and not just because the villain was an evil hippie with magical wish powers), a classic imaginary death story…

…and my personal favorite, the one where Superman teamed up with Orson Welles (seriously) to fight evil Martian space Nazis.

Now, I probably can’t get away with Orson Welles. But…

Okay, let’s work this thing out.

Right. Alien space Nazis. Shouldn’t be too hard, do the “they receive signals” trick. Whoops, turns out, though, that that means that you’ve only got an effective radius of one thousand light years from Earth - that’s practically next door in spatial terms. Hm. We need this to be a fairly backwater world, so that when the Legion encounters the evil alien space Nazis they’re totally unheard of and new.

Okay, no problem. What happens is that in the far distant future, the Nazi radio waves hit a gravitic anomaly sort of a thing, yes? And the gravitic anomaly slingshots the Nazi radio waves in a totally different direction and speeds them up to much much faster than the speed of light, and the theory of relativity does the rest of the work, shoving the radio waves backwards through time so they hit the planet that will create the alien space Nazi civilization and accompanying war machine in, oh, let’s say about 2950, giving the Xgrylth Reich about 150 years and change to build up a truly fearsome armada.

From there, it’s cake: you have your explanation for the evil alien space Nazi armada, it sounds even semi-plausible, and all you need to do is tell the artist to draw the shit out of some planet-stomping giant Nazi war robots and some awesome-looking space Messerchmitts and some wicked-cool space SS troopers (to laugh in the Legion’s faces when some of them get captured and thrown in the Space Gulag of Ropticon 7, you see) and oh oh oh don’t forget the Turbo-Star-Panzer Brigade, armed to the teeth with death rays and alien fascist self-importance.

Bluntly: if the Legion of Super-Heroes fighting evil alien space Nazis is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.

(Seriously, that’s why I posted this today. It’s been in the “for busy days” bank for a while. And it is snowing and class is cancelled, which means I have a chance to catch up on all my law school reading. Yes, I frequently do update this blog during class, why do you ask?)

Once upon a time in the future, scientists invented a Process.

The scientists were artificial intelligence designers, and by the late 26th century true artificial intelligence was already around. (Remember, Skeets is from the 25th century.) But this wasn’t enough; some AI designers wanted to create the semblance of immortality. And they worked and worked, and eventually came up with an exhaustive method wherein if you could get an A.I. to mirror the answers to a very, very long psychological question profile, you would create a reasonable facsimile of how a given person would think. They thought that this would allow people to, in a sense, live Forever.

Of course, eventually they figured out that it didn’t work properly. It was impossible to mimic a person’s mind completely, and thus they couldn’t achieve their objective. Some of the more metaphysical among them reasoned that, in a way, this was evidence for the existence of the human soul. And that was The End.

Except that long before they figured it out, a small group within the community had completed a project of their own. Seeing that the Gotham Annex was, as it always had been, the same crime-ridden portion of an otherwise pristine and peaceful Earth, this group decided that what was needed was their own version of the legendary Batman, who protected Gotham when it was merely Gotham City, before it absorbed all the local cities around it.

They even managed to procure hundreds of hours of video files from the original Batcave through god-knows-what-type of ends. And they applied the AI development matrix to the conversations Batman had with the kid in red and green, and the old English person named “Alfred”, and that one time Superman showed up. They refined the cerebral matrix again and again, because more than any of the other experiments, this one had to be perfect.

The result was the Warding Artificintelligent Yoctotronic Network, Mark III: the WAYN-3. It very quickly wormed its way into the Gotham Annex networks and created a new “Batcave,” far beneath even the subterranean limits of the Annex, using agents who never knew what they were doing for the greater good of Gotham. It began building Batbots to quietly maintain the peace, in a manner befitting an urban legend. And the scientists were pleased.

Until they realized that they had made a mistake. WAYN-3 didn’t think exactly like Batman did; it couldn’t. When the tapes showed Batman declining to go after prostitutes and instead focusing on violent criminals, WAYN-3 couldn’t begin to understand that Batman ignored the prostitutes out of compassion for their circumstances; from its perspective, Batman was simply prioritizing in a logical manner. WAYN-3 couldn’t figure out that Batman’s refusal to work within the system was not purely an indictment of that system; it didn’t understand the nature of cooperation, because from its perspective Batman was always correct (and thus, so was WAYN-3). WAYN-3 never knew, as Batman did, that total control was impossible, because it simply didn’t understand human nature - and so it never limited itself the way Batman did.

Its designers tried to rectify this, but before they had a chance WAYN-3 locked them up in suspended animation cells (because Batman doesn’t kill people), to sleep forever, alongside the other criminals it felt were incorrigible. Others were drugged and taken surreptitiously by stealth-Batbots to the hyperprisons, hypnotized to believe they had undergone trial, the records altered so the system believed they had. Criminals - even in the future, a superstitious and cowardly lot - started to once again mutter about “the Bat,” a fear of something long believed an urban legend or even a folktale, and they fled Gotham Annex and eventually Earth.

WAYN-3 promoted institutions to make life in the Annex more placid, less confrontational, more controllable, and (to most) happier. It promoted these institutions so relentlessly that eventually it managed to start removing their optional nature. They were so successful that they began spreading beyond the limits of Gotham, promoted quietly by WAYN-3 in different guises, who saw crime beyond Gotham’s borders as just one more variable to eliminate. (Did you ever wonder where the Public Service got its start?)

The Gotham Annex eventually became the enormous Gothplex, a peaceful jewel upon the glittering Earth. It mirrored the United Planets’ steady crawl into stagnation perfectly, thanks to the all-seeing eye of WAYN-3. Eventually, WAYN-3 went on “a trip” (because Batman periodically left the Batcave for long periods of time, and nobody knew where he went, and therefore WAYN-3 had to do so as well - it couldn’t explain why), powering itself down for a century. (A century, it felt, being equivalent for itself to the three or four weeks for which Batman, a mere human, occasionally disappeared.)

And then it woke up. Gothplex was once again a crime-ridden shambles, worse than before, a blight and a shame. Worse, there were agents of chaos and destabilization actively working on Earth and elsewhere, flying young teenagers (!) in bright costumes (!!), working publicly (!!!) making themselves targets and ruining everything by not acting with proper forethought, trashing the order WAYN-3 had worked so hard to create. (Unfortunately, WAYN-3 inherited all of Batman’s prejudices, without his very human capacity for tolerance and understanding and even amusement.)

Clearly, these fools had to be stopped.

(And if you perhaps thought that just maybe the Legion would need the help of a time-traveling Batman to beat WAYN-3, then maybe, just perhaps, you are correct.)

I have a few more of these stored up but I think resuming the campaign would be… just kind of wrong, honestly. So they’ll come when I am at a loss for content, or I am bored, or I feel like it. I was planning to let them sit for a while, but then this week’s Legion came out. And don’t get me wrong, it is mostly good, in the Jim Shooter sense of “mostly good” (the plot and pacing are excellent, and the dialogue… less so). But it commits one of the cardinal sins of Legion writing, in my book.

These have been commonplace in Legion comics for nearly twenty years now - I’m pretty sure mock-swearing was introduced in the first few issues of v4, the “five years later” era, which was grim and gritty (in the non-mockworthy sense, at least for me), and it’s been a constant presence ever since, right down to Jim Shooter introducing “florg”, “zizz,” and “snoog” in the most recent issue (substitutes for “fuck,” “piss” and “shit,” respectively). “Grife,” one of the earliest, was probably the best, as it’s similar to “grief,” and frequently used in the context where somebody might say “good grief,” but it’s the rare exception to a rule that most of these are kind of silly.I look at made-up swearing as a failure on two levels.

Firstly, from a realism perspective, it just doesn’t work. “Fuck” - in a form recognizable to anybody hearing it today - dates back anywhere from one thousand to thirteen hundred years. “Shit” can be dated back to at least William the Conqueror; “cunt” to Chaucer. Obscenities in other tongues date back similarly long or even longer (”merde”, the French version of “shit”, goes back around fourteen hundred years). Obscenities, more than any other words in any language, tend to linger almost entirely unchanged because they’re so basic and, let us admit it, useful in their way.

Why would this change in the Legion’s time? “Interlac,” you say, but Interlac is a lingua franca, a common tongue, and common tongues almost universally become parasite languages - English right now, French in the Dark and Middle Ages, Mandarin and Cantonese evolving out of a thousand different village dialects coming together. These are languages that steal useful words and use them forever, especially when a major subsection of their userbase used them before adopting said common tongue - like, for example, humans. You know, the race which seeded subraces on all those other planets? Rimborians, Naltorians, Braalians, Imskians - get down to it and they’re all just humans with different genetic heritages, and they all spoke English at their cultural base. We can maybe argue they’d be speaking Chinese instead, but the Legion’s cultural history and background is, let’s face it, pretty damn Anglo.

(Indeed, I see 31st-century Interlac being in relation to 21st-century English as 21st-century English is to Middle English - one speaking the older tongue would probably be unable to understand one speaking the newer, but the person speaking the newer would occasionally understand snatches of what the older-speaker might be saying.)

The second reason I don’t like made-up swears is because they detract from the narrative. Yes, I understand the Legion is speaking Interlac, but I’m reading English. Unless the obscenities are entirely new - and using them as obvious placeholders for familiar cusses makes it pretty clear they aren’t - there’s no logical reason that the “translation” should be inconsistent, beyond the demands of the publisher and editorial standards -

- and the reader knows this, because it’s obvious, and it just ruins the suspension of disbelief. It stops being a story and becomes words on paper. “Florg? What the fuck is florg?”

And this comes from someone, as you are well aware, who likes to write characters that swear. But if you can’t write the real thing, then don’t fake it. Garth Ennis did it deftly in Hitman by having his characters use very mild swears (”motherloving”, “friggin’,” et cetera) stand in for the more serious ones the characters would obviously be using instead were it not for publication standards, but even if you don’t want to go that route (and I’d argue that Legion probably shouldn’t), there’s a very simple alternative: just write without using obscenities, be they real or no.

People do it all the time. Really.

Longtime readers will by this point know that one of the things that interests me most about the Legion of Super-Heroes, from a storytelling standpoint, is the thousand-year gap between the present day DC universe and the Legion setting - essentially using the Legion as a way to play proxy psychohistorian for the DCU in some respects, using it to replay Indiana Jones plots in a sci-fi revisioning in other respects.This one is somewhere in between.

The Keeper of Truths is a very simple concept that can go any number of ways, and it keys off the simple fact that in the DCU, there are at least a few characters present in the 21st century who could show up in the 31st just by having lived that long. When history is uncertain - and after a thousand years with a couple of interstellar cataclysmic wars in the interim, it’s going to be uncertain - having a first-person perspective on things gives you an advantage, if you care to use it. The Keeper of Truths doesn’t particularly; whoever he is, he or she has entered into a solitary existence. But if you can find him or her, they’re willing to chat. (Just because one chooses to be a hermit doesn’t mean one loses sight of basic manners.)

There are a few story ideas I have as regards the actual identity of the Keeper of Truths which I don’t want to give away, so let me just tell you a few people that he or she isn’t:

It’s not J’onn J’onnz.

It’s not Vandal Savage.

It’s not the Shade. (Although I think there’s a really good story to be told involving the Shade and Shadow Lass. Are the shadow powers of the Talokians related to the Shade? I mean, Mikaal Tomas was a Talokian, and a contemporary of the shadowy man. There’s already a potential connection. And are Shadow Lass’s shadow powers like the Shade’s, even if they differ in origin? Is Shadow Lass sort-of-immortal like the Shade is? The more I think about it, the more I think somebody has to write this story, if only because the Starman character base needs to be dug out of obscurity again.)

Heck, maybe it doesn’t have to be an immortal at all. Maybe it’s a stranded time traveler - an elderly Rip Hunter (long, long past the events of Booster Gold). Maybe it’s Extant. No, I’m kidding, I wouldn’t bring back Extant. Or Waverider.

Maybe it’s Hawkman in his latest reincarnation, remembering a thousand years of previous lives, stuck in a life cycle which Hawkgirl accidentally (or not) skipped. This theory’s awfully workable, not least because unlike a lot of the other characters, it doesn’t matter if DC editorial decides to kill off Hawkman as a sales stunt. Reincarnation, bitches!

(Or maybe R.J. Brande is an much older version of Hawkman. R.J. Brande has to be somebody, I think. Or maybe he doesn’t. Heh.)

Maybe it’s a clone with copied brain patterns of the original, remembering everything that happened to the original right up until his death. Maybe it’s Batman. Maybe it’s Ben Reilly! Okay, it’s not Ben Reilly.

Maybe by this point I’ve illustrated the fun that can be had with uncertain history and a ton of origin possibilities for potentially significant figures, and that was the point of this whole exercise to begin with, and maybe there isn’t a definite identity for the Keeper of Truths.

(I’m lying. There really, really is.)

#32 in an increasingly-innumerate series of thirty:

One of the things that fascinates me about Legion as a concept is that it is one thousand years in the future, and the variance and similarity with which the DC Universe of “today” would reflect upon its future one millennium later would by necessity at least reflect the variance and similarity of our world to the Earth of about one thousand years ago.

Consider our planet around the year 1000 mark. The Byzantine Empire - which nowadays is barely a footnote in most basic history textbooks - is at its height under Basil II. The Saxon dynasties in England are reaching their nadir, and in less than half a century William The Conqueror is going to show up and, well, conquer. In Japan, the Fujiwara regency is going to dominate for another four hundred years. Monasticism - one of the most important tools for scientific advancement until the Renaissance - is only getting going! There’s practically no major works of art being produced at this time that will survive the next thousand years; we’re technically still in the Dark Ages. This world is almost totally dissimilar from what we recognize as modern society.

(Mark Waid, occasionally played up some brilliant aspects of this, such as the renaming of cities. Of course, he also had 20th-century paper-and-ink comic books surviving as artistic artifacts for a thousand years.)

But at the same time, this is the time at which the first major secret societies arose. And come on, secret societies are pretty awesome, not just for their innate sinister (or deus ex machina) story potential, but also because of how they manage to get things wrong as time passes along and they adopt a pseudo-religious reverence for their lyrical misinterpretation of historical record.

And what better subject for a society to form around in the DC Universe than Wesley Dodds, the first costumed super-hero? (Well, depending on which writer you read, that might actually be the Crimson Avenger, but there’s no reason the Illuminated Order Of Scarlet Vengeance can’t be lurking around a few shadows down and to the left, continually feuding with these Johnny-come-latelies who don’t even know what issue of Whiz Comics Spy Smasher first appeared in.)

The Sandymen - or the Righteous Collective Of The Ebon Desert, if you prefer (and they do) - hide in the background of the future, quietly assembling in back rooms to ensure that costumed superheroism can continue to propogate in the brave new universe. R.J. Brande may or may not be a member - although if he is, he probably knows more about the true history of the universe than they do. In the history painstakingly assembled by the Sandymen, the Justice League of Internationalism was founded by Kyle Gardner and Donna Prince, summoning the force of the mystical Black Lightning of H’ronmeer to combat the Seven Deadly Sinistarros threatening to destroy the planet.

But even though they get a lot of things wrong - they also get a lot of things right. They know about Kryptonite, including the effects of Steel Kryptonite (only discovered in 2128, and only seen twice since then) and Translucent-K (an artificial K-compound invented in 2437) on Kryptonians and other races alike. They know the last whereabouts of Brainiac 3.6, and why you don’t go near that black hole (well, why you stay further away from that black hole as opposed to other black holes). They don’t know where J’onn J’onzz is now, but they know the details of his last recorded heroic act (2750, on Khundia of all places).

Inaccurate archives. They’re fun. And they’re more fun when they’re a bunch of principled historian-nerds who are, unfortunately, wrong a lot of the time.

(NOTE: This was the very last post to appear on my Livejournal before it got nuked - it was up for a grand total of perhaps four hours, so I feel perfectly justified in reproducing it here.)

I’m not planning to do another thirty days of I Should Write The Legion any time soon, but I had this idea last week and it is simply too good not to add to the list, so:

Some background.Once upon a time, there was an exceptionally obscure Golden Age JSA villain called Professor Zobar Zodiak. (See, with a name like “Zobar Zodiak” you are of course seeing the inherent awesomeness of this idea already.) He was so obscure that, prior to a resurrection along with a few other very minor Golden Age villains in an arc of All-Star Squadron in the early 80s, his only appearance was in a single issue of More Fun Comics, in a story entitled “The Man Who Hated Science!” See, Professor Zobar Zodiak was an alchemist, specifically an evil one who found somebody else who had discovered the Four Wonders of Alchemy - the Philosopher’s Stone, the Universal Solvent, the Elixir of Youth and the Secret of Perpetual Motion - and killed him to get said secrets for himself. Also, and I cannot stress this point enough, he was The Man Who Hated Science.Now, the mentioning of the Elixir of Youth should be explanation enough as to how Professor Zobar Zodiak would still be kicking around in the 31st century, but I figure the only thing better than a man who hates science is an entire planet that hates science: a fringeworld on the borders of the United Planets, ruled by the Alchemical Council (with ol’ Zobar in the back, pulling strings), home to many a neo-Luddite and those who never quite got the respond-to-science-with-pitchforks-and-torches gene out of their systems.

I’m not talking about the Sorcerer’s World - that’s something else entirely, and the sorcerers there probably have no problem with spaceships and coffeemakers and the like, because hey, space travel and coffee. I’m talking a dictatorial world ruled by alchemically-inspired fear of the unknown. Somewhere Brainiac Five would be less welcome than anywhere else. (Which of course means when a Legion cruiser crash-lands there, he will be on it.)

It’s good for two or three issues of story. And come on - it really is a fantastic title, you have to admit…