LNH: Classic LNH Adventures #226: LNH vII #51, 52, and some add-ons

[Jeanne Morningstar]

Sigh. Looking at this post, I'm catapulted right back to one of the most 
difficult times in my life. I got back into LNH after a series of big 
life events that completely demolished my sense of self. I had just 
finished my master's thesis--this was around the time the movie of 
Breaking Dawn came out, so I compared the experience to giving birth to 
a vampire baby. (In retrospect that was one of those big hmm, maybe not 
so cis in retrospect moments.) I'd also just had a huge traumatic 
breakup of an intensely emotional and confusing semi-romantic 
friendship. We were both intensely spiritual people and a lot of our 
relationship was built around talking about Christian spirituality, so 
this was the first domino that led to me effectively leaving the 
Catholic Church and becoming queer and trans.

The whole incident with You Know Who was another domino. I definitely 
reacted extremely at the time, but it's pretty clear now why I did. Back 
then, I didn't think the homophobia was something that affected me 
personally, I was just angry because of the sense of injustice. And this 
was ultimately the last straw that led to me leaving the Catholic 
Church, because I didn't want to be on the same side as the bullies.

There was a long, painful period where I hadn't really figured out who I 
was and what I was doing, and this led to my writing falling off for a 
while. I had really invested a lot in LNH, using that to recover from 
everything I'd been through coming into 2012, so having that collapse 
under me was hard.

I knew I had to build something to replace the things that hadn't worked 
out, so I tried a lot of ideas that didn't work. The Jenny Everywhere 
story that's hinted at here is one of them. I had the vague idea that 
Jenny Everywhere in the LNH universe had been a hero in the Victorian 
period and she'd been their inspiration, their equivalent to Superboy. 
This was a potentially neat idea but, once I had it, I had no idea what 
to do with it and dropped the whole thing.

I didn't write a lot in 2013 apart from the unfinished Looniverse Y #13. 
By then, though, I'd started posting on tumblr and gotten back into 
Marvel Comics in a major way, through series like the KSD Captain Marvel 
and Fraction/Aja Hawkeye, and getting to know other queer people. All 
this helped me figure out new ways of writing and being, and in 2014 I'd 
help synthesize a new take on the LNH based on that in my parts of Just 
Another Cascade.

But that's a story for another post.

For now, I'll just say that even with everything that's going on in 
2021, I'm much better off now than I was then.

Jeanne Morningstar