LNH: Ultimate Mercenary: The Special Edition: introduction

[Adrian J. McClure]

It's strange to think that for a long time, from about 2006 until the very end of 2011, I had completely forgotten that the Legion of Net.Heroes. existed.

It's also strange to think that the LNH has been around for two whole decades. That's forever in internet years. Heck, the LNH is older than the widespread use of the World Wide Web itself. It's a creation of the first age of Usenet, before the "Eternal September" when it was flooded by newbies, and before it mostly died away.

It even began several years before I was reading superhero comics. My first contact with comics came with the X-Men action figures, back when I was nine or ten or so.

Not long afterwards, my grandmother sent me an actual X-Men comic, a facsimile reprint of X-Men #1 with all the inexplicable old ads. Before long I was sucked into the world of comics, buying reprints of classic Silver Age stories alongside terrible but energetic Dark Age garbage. It became a defining obsession for me. I have Asperger's syndrome, so single-minded obsessions are characteristic of us. For a lot of us it's trains, for some reason. For me it was loudspeakers, until I got into fairy tales, which began a long love affair with writing that continues to this day.

I think I first came across the LNH through K. Michael Wilcox's page, back when I was first getting into Doctor Who. I didn't get hugely involved until I came across the archives while looking for anime fanfic and found the LNH archive right next door to the rec.arts.anime.creative archive on eyrie.org. I was overjoyed to discover this whole new large, vibrant and ridiculous superhero world. Of course, the sheer complexity and depth of it was pretty intimidating even to me, so I didn't start off writing LNH stories. I started off trying to create my own world. I drew up a ton of background and worldbuilding, but only ever came out with one issue. I also had an idea for an LNH series, but I can't even remember what it was anymore. I only remember I wanted to use one interesting minor character for the supporting cast who I felt called to me--Ultimate Mercenary.

One of the great things about superhero universes is that every character, however seemingly obscure and ridiculous, potentially has a story. A superhero comic universe is not an ordered world where there is a clear heirarchy of what characters matter and what don't, it is a messy patchwork of countless stories weaving together. The central characters can shift and change over time--Wolverine was a nobody when he was first introduced and didn't take off until John Byrne started drawing him, while Captain America and the rest of the core Avengers had diminsiehd into almost nothing in the 90s when I'd started writing comics only to come back again thanks to the movies this decade. I've always had a lot of love for the losers, the no-hopers, the characters who fell between the cracks. These were characters, not trapped by whatever editorial agenda ruled at the time, who I could imagine having lives and aventures beyond the page. And of course a lot of the most interesting and vital work in superhero comics came from creators taking marginal characters and using them to explore their own individual visions in the context of wider worlds, like Moore's Swamp Thing or Morrison's Animal Man.

Whatever my original plans were, I completely forgot about them. It wasn't until another year that, wanting to do something with the character I'd reserved (even though most people had probably forgotten by then), I started the original Ultimate Mercenary limited series, which was mainly just meant to be a prelude to the "good stuff" that I'd write later, something where I'd throw out a bunch of characters and ideas which I'd then developed properly later on. Thus, I jumped in with little to no idea of where I was actually going.

Lance Parkin said that writing for the Eighth Doctor novels (which influenced UM a lot) was interesting in the same way that trying to land a jet whose engines exploded in midair was interesting. The experience of writing original Ultimate Mercenary miniseries was very similar. The result is a mess and there's no two ways about it. There are a lot of things I regret about this series now, and a lot that I would do differently today. Probably the biggest problem I had writing it was my difficulty dealing with the big cosmic metaplot, which I basically threw in on a whim. I had really no idea where I was going--or rather, I had too many ideas for where I was going. The actual plan changed from issue to issue. This--as well as the fact that I was working on a lot of other things at the same time for other fora--was why the gap between each issue got progressively longer and longer. Eventually I got sick of trying to figure out where I was going and the series ended before it really began. Over the course of seven increasingly long issues and almost ten years, it never even got to present-day Earth.

Still, people liked this series. Or at least Tom Russell, UM's creator, who was overjoyed that someone had managed to salvage something halfway decent out of his adolescent mind vomit. Andrew Perron enjoyed it too, and he wrote a cameo for UM's future self into an issue of Just Imagine. That's two more readers than enjoyed most of the incoherent, half-finished stories I wrote before this last year.

I was a college freshman when I started Ultimate Mercenary. Nowadays I'm a grad student TA and actually teaching people at the same age and stage of development I was at when I started writing UM. Reading it today, as inevitably frustrating an experience it is to read over one's past work, I found it rewarding too. The big picture didn't really work out, and I had to do a lot of work to make it make some sort of sense, but there are a lot of good details and character moments scattered throughout. I've grown enormously as a writer over the course of the years, and these characters have been with me through a lot of it. I hope I'll be able to do them justice and finish this part of their story properly this time.

What really works about this series, as Tom Russell pointed out, is UM's character. He's someone who's spent his entire trying to live up to an incredibly difficult role, and very insecure and conscious of his own image. He's not really sure who he actually is underneath his mask yet. He's driven by very mixed motives, partly good--he genuinely wants to be a hero--and partly not as good--he wants to be famous and respected. He can be annoying to the people around him, but has moments of genuine kindness as well. That's a lot of range for what started as a cheap knockoff character.

When I was looking through my brainstorming for abandoned stories to see if there was anything worth picking up again, I remembered how much I'd enjoyed writing the LNH, and UM's character in particular. I was lucky enough to come onboard just as LNH20 was in the planning stages, and I wound up bringing UM into LNH20. In Just Imagine I'll deal with how he got there, and also wrap up some of the loose ends from this series.  Right now, though, I'm feeling stalled again so I thought it would be time to take a look at where I'm coming from. I'll be reposting these issues, complete with commentary tracks explaining some of the more esoteric references and questionable creative decisions, as well as the roads not taken and how my ideas of what was going on changed from issue to issue. Let’s begin.