REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #96 - December 2011 [spoilers]

[Andrew Perron]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:48:50 +0000 (UTC), Adrian J. McClure wrote:

> On Jan 23, 7:16 pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:

<snip>
>>      The twentieth anniversary of the Legion of Net.Heroes will be in
>> April 2012.
> 
> Which is a little over 10 years since I started writing for RACC. Boy
> do I feel old.

A little under my time writing - but I started reading back in... I think
it was 1995?

> The thesis that it's primarily the accumulation of backstory that
> drives away new readers certainly doesn't match with my own
> experience. I got into X-Men in the mid-90s, at the absolute height of
> its convoluity. For me, the vast and complex backstory didn't turn me
> off, it made me want to know more, creating another world to inhabit.
> Granted, I was never exactly a typical kid, being the child of
> academics who grew up to be a medievalist, but I wasn't the only one.

My comics history closely matches this - my highest comics-reading period
as a kid coincides with the Death of Superman, Executioner's Song, and
other deeply confusing points of continuity. (I totally had Web of
Spider-Man #100, which is the climax of a storyline, which was a sequel to
*another* storyline, and which had not one but *two* epilogues that tied in
to other events, without ever reading any of the comics it referred to.  I
just thought it was neat.)

> But at the end of the day, I don't think the inaccessibilty of
> contemporary superhero comics is primarily about the excessively
> complicated backstory.
<snip>

That paragraph is an excellent distillation of everything that's wrong with
DC right now - and, to some extent, mainstream comics as a whole.

> And the thing is, the classic LNH has always been this way even at the
> beginning. It started off with a somewhat confusing chaotic
> roleplaying cascade dogpile thing that had references to past stories
> that didn't actually exist.  In LNH20 we've also started in medias
> res, and it's had a lot of epic fantasy influence, in terms of genre
> tropes (the whole Ava.LAN storyline), but also in terms of the way the
> gradually unfolding past is a major part of the story.

*nods* Yeah, I don't think the complexity of the LNH has ever been a
hindrance to getting into it so much as not knowing what path to take.  The
Spoon of Destiny Saga will definitely be a good place to start, methinks.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, say, Adrian, want to get in on the
"Intro to the LNH" project?