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.)

Way back in the day, there was American Seeds.

And now…

Click on image to enlarge

This is probably going to be the last one of these I have time to do for a while; law school is already starting to ramp back up the intensity metre.

But I’m rather happy with it, and if “One More Day” was just too static and boring to mock, at least “Brand New Day” isn’t, despite thus far having a near-total lack of Peter Parker actually being Spider-Man, and despite Steve McNiven apparent belief that Peter really, really likes running his hands through his hair. (I don’t know what it is about Steve McNiven’s art that prompts me to do these things.)

Not included: the three pages introducing Mister Negative, both because I felt they impeded the remixed narrative and because I don’t want to condemn the creation of potentially interesting new villains.

continue reading "It Was Either This Or Interpretive Dance"

Countdown: Arena manages to quite possibly be the silliest and most pointless tie-in to Countdown yet, which in and of itself is impressive. Given that the plot essentially boils down to “hey, remember when you were a kid and you made your action figures fight each other? It’s like that!”, parodying it was a tough assignment.

But, hey. I’m game.

EDIT TO ADD: Yes, I know the plot is stupid. Again: this is a story where different characters beat each other up for absolutely no worthwhile reason and that’s genuinely the entire story in toto. And I know I didn’t change that much, because I simply couldn’t manage it. It is quite simply the worst comic published in years. (”One More Day” at least had a little style in its execution despite being a piece of shit.) I know some of you are disappointed, but – there’s only so much I can do, because Arena is, simply, what little children think writing comics is like. “And then Batman hits Superman in the face! And then Superman punches him with a garbage truck!” Et cetera.

continue reading "It’s Like You’re Six Years Old Again Except Not As Much Fun"

Sims demanded, and thus do I provide.

People kept emailing me asking me when I was going to do another comic parody, and my answer was always the same. “When the time is right, grasshopper.”

World War Hulk? No. Firstly, it was actually good; secondly, it doesn’t have a lot of clunky expository dialogue and adding it would just be clumsy. Amazons Attack? Closer, but again, not nearly enough dialogue, and although it was profoundly stupid it wasn’t stupid in the right sort of ambitious way, but instead stupid in the way that, say, Larry The Cable Guy is stupid. Countdown? Well, it’s certainly a bad comic, but nothing really happens in any given issue; I can’t just write twenty-two pages of dicking around because DC has already done that for me. Any given issue of Wolverine: Origins? I considered it, but really. Wolverine isn’t that much fun for me to write. (It’s why I went with the “bub snikt snikt bub” joke in the first place.)

It seemed hopeless. But then DC went and did me a favour by publishing a comic both arrogantly ambitious and flagrantly ill-thought out. They published Death Of The New Gods, and I was thankful.

Thumbnails behind the cut, of course.

continue reading "It’s All Been Done Before (But So What?)"