Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art, and business, of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:28] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me, as usual, is my very good friend--

[00:38] John Barber: John Barber.

[00:39] David: John Barber.

[00:40] John: I've got the hottest of hot comic book news. It just came over the wire while you were doing the introduction. Are you ready?

[00:46] David: Exciting. We're breaking something?

[00:48] John: I like this subject line a lot, direct from Lunar Distribution, one of the two remaining main, big comic book distributors. Retail advisory: Space Ghost Annual #1 Blank Covers Misprinted.

[01:03] David: There you go, John. That was a whole minute of the podcast that every listener wants their time back on. Well done.

[01:13] John: I thought it was funny, because you think, “a blank cover? What could you misprint? Did they print something? Did they put a picture of Space Ghost on it?” […] The actual reasonable thing that would happen is they printed it on the wrong cover stock.

[01:26] David: Okay. He was supposed to be invisible on that cover, John, and they made him visible. He turned visible right at the last second when the camera was taking the picture.

[01:33] John: One time, at San Diego ComiCon, I was waiting outside of a panel. I don't remember what the panel was, but next to me was Gary Owens, the original voice of Space Ghost, talking to a fan who had clearly just asked him why he wasn't the voice on Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and if Gary Owens thought that that was damaging the reputation of Space Ghost, or something, and Gary Owens is a super professional voice guy, and he was just like, “well, they just they didn't ask me,” but he said it in a Gary Owens voice, “I really enjoyed that show, but they never asked,” or something like that. I don’t know.

[02:12] David: You wouldn't have known it was Gary Owens until you heard him speak. Then you're like, “that's Space Ghost.”

[02:16] John: It's half the voices from cartoons in the 70s, I think.

[02:19] David: Oh, really? I'm not familiar with Gary Owens’ game.

[02:22] John: He was a big voice guy. I think he hosted some TV shows, as well.

[02:26] David: You are a font of interesting information, man. You and I need to hang out more. I'm glad we do these talks on Friday. I learned so much. I wish I had a memory, so I could actually retain some of it. I guess that's why we record it, so I can listen back later. John, I've got two questions for you. One, I think you're prepared for, and the other one, I don't think you're prepared for, at all, because I haven't told you what it is.

[02:51] John: Okay.

[02:52] David: Would you like to hear the question that I made-up in my head and have not shared, or do you want to hear the question that I made-up in my head and I've already shared with you previously?

[03:00] John: Let’s hear the new one, the one I don't know.

[03:02] David: All right. I think I told you, I'm making a horny superhero book. Right, John?

[03:06] John: Oh, yeah, that's right.

[03:07] David: Yeah. Bart Sears is doing all the designs. He's doing one of the stories, the first story. It's insanely good art. The art’s so good, John. [it’s] called Sugar Bomb. I think I talked about it on the show, probably a lot, at this point. So, we started our Facebook marketing campaign for the pre-launch. All the comic books that I make for my own little publishing house, we do everything through Kickstarter. I don't really do any other distribution because—I don't know—I like Kickstarter. I like the concept. That's where I want things to be. So, we only do things there. Before each campaign, we do a little pre-launch campaign, where we offer these—for $1, you can join the VIP Club and you get these cool wristbands. That was the new wristband I was showing you. You get the cool wristband with your order. You’re guaranteed special discounts and stuff. Kickstarter’s got this cool thing now where you can create a pledge level that only people you send the link to can see. So, secret pledge levels. So, if you're part of our $1 VIP Club, we're going to send you links to the secret pledge levels. So, you get special discounts and special offers, and stuff—way cooler and cheaper than what the regular campaign looks like. So, it's just a way to get people excited, and get people interested.

So, we started the Facebook marketing campaign for this pre-launch, for the VIP Club, and we launched really great—very encouraging numbers we were seeing, and then the marketing has almost fallen off a cliff since the launch. We started out really strong, really great, and then it's just dipped into nothing, which is different from what we've seen with the other campaigns, with the other books that we've done, which aren't superheroes. We see a gradual increase in the interest, in the people that are signing up, and this one started really high, and it's gone down. I'm not too worried about it. We just need to make some adjustments. These things happen in the Facebook marketing campaign, historically, with other stuff that I've done. So, it's not a fire alarm fire, or anything that I'm really worried about, but it got me thinking—finally, getting to the question—what do you think people are looking for in a superhero book in 2025 that isn't Marvel or DC?

[05:31] John: Yeah, it's funny, because you go back to the 70s or 80s, when you started to have the rise of the direct market, direct sales comic book stuff, the stuff people were doing wasn't usually superheroes. There were some, but that wasn't the regular thing, but when Image hit in the 90s, it was just like, “okay, here's the big artists, and they're going to do big superhero books,” and then there were a zillion indie superheroes. There were superheroes before then. It was Zot, or something. It was a very different take on the superheroes.

[06:00] David: Miracleman.

[06:01] John: Yeah, but it shifted back over, at a certain point, where nobody was selling movie and TV rights to superheroes that weren't Marvel or DC, with rare exception, with Kick-Ass and some of Mark Millar’s stuff being the only exception, but even that, it didn't do that well in the box office compared to how the comic did.

[06:22] David: Yeah, because I guess, speaking of Mark Millar, Wanted wasn't really a superhero book.

[06:27] John: The comic was. You're right.

[06:29] David: The comic was, but the movie wasn’t.

[06:32] John: It's tough, because the world of superheroes has gone through so much since then. There's so much superhero material out there. We just spent a whole episode talking about the Superman movie. It's not that that's been going on for nearly as long as I've been alive, Superman movies, but there’s something different, with just the sheer amount of it that we know, “this is a Superman movie that ties in with the next season of a superhero TV show that launches another Super Girl movie.”

[06:57] David: Jesus. Yeah.

[06:59] John: And also, people don't even talk about how successful, both in terms of viewers and in terms of bringing the characters to the screen, the Berlantiverse was, on all the TV shows, and that just ended. The Superman TV show just ended. As much as we might sometimes complain about a sameness on some of the superhero comics coming from big companies, there is more variety in the superhero stuff than there probably ever has been, in a lot of ways. There's a lot of different art styles, a lot of different takes on superheroes. Jeff The Shark is a different take on superheroes than you've had, at least for a very long time. It's tough to find the thing that's irreverent, or something that makes it different. I don't know, man. That's a good question. That's a stumper. Sorry […].

[07:45] David: Yeah, I wondered what your off-the-cuff opinion would be of it. When I'm building Sugar Bomb, my biggest thing was, I knew that, for me—I've always said that—I say this all the time—art is king. With fantasy or horror, or other genres that aren't superhero, I think you can get away with using art and art styles, and artists who are different, who are maybe not as skilled, or skilled in different ways, but they don't have the same level of polish and experience that you have in the superhero genre. Marvel and DC have some of the best working comic book illustrators in all the universe working for them. The only people that are close would probably be—you can make an argument for certain manga artists coming out of Japan, but that's not really superheroes. That's superhero-adjacent. So, anyway, in North America, at least, some of the best artists working in comic books are working on superhero stuff. So, the level of quality for the superhero genre is pretty high. It's hard to compete with an Alex Ross cover, as an example of what I'm talking about. So, I knew that, right out the gate, if I was going to do it, I could not use anybody but A-List level of quality artists. So, that's what I did.

So, I went out and got a guy like Bart Sears, who is a fantastic illustrator and a designer, who's been designing toys and animation, and he's designed a ton of stuff over a multi-decade career. Then I went and got guys like Juan Jose Ryp to handle interiors, and Bart Sears is handling interiors too, and some of the top Kickstarter artists available to me for some of the covers, and I feel like I did that part really well. I think the story that we've done is also differentiated, in that it's crass, it's snarky, it takes advantage of the fact that we don't have to try to be PG. We're definitely a funny R-rated bag. That's where we're leaning into, because it's the one thing that we can do that Marvel and DC can't. I can kill somebody on camera in a horrific way, in my comic. There's no one to stop me, if that's what I want to do. We're not doing that, because that's not really what I'm interested in, but we could. So, one of the things that we can get away with--

[10:08] John: But you're doing a sexy comedy, a sex comedy, or something like that, right? 

[10:13] David: Yeah, a sexy comedy. In terms of the sexy part, we're PG-13, a soft R. There's no nudity. or anything. It's just titillating.

[10:25] John: That's something Marvel and DC aren't doing.

[10:26] David: Yeah, we're definitely pushing well beyond anything Marvel or DC would find in good taste. We’re pushing beyond what most people would find in good taste.

[10:37] John: You mentioned Miracleman, and you go back to when that was coming out, that comic was doing stuff that superhero comics weren't doing. It was taking the material really seriously. It had the apocalyptic sequence that came late in the series, when Johnny Bates destroys London and kills millions of people, like if Superman went nuts, and--I don't know--they've done that a bunch in movies and TV. I mean, The Boys is obviously the answer to the question, I guess. The world doesn't need another Boys. It's got it. It nailed it. It's not like there's a market for that kind of show. There's a market that enjoys The Boys. It's tricky because I mean, I like superheroes, and even I feel more burned out of them, just out of the amount of stuff that has come out with them--movies, TV shows, endless movies, endless TV shows, video games, all at a really high level of quality, an increasingly good level of quality. I have high hopes for Fantastic Four, but I think it'd be tough to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is operating at the level that it was operating at when it was at its highest, but the Superman movie sure is, and […] keeps doing stuff where it's “this is more comic book-y than I thought we'd ever see.” The Berlanti shows were like that, too. You never thought you'd see Crisis on Infinite Earths on TV, and they did, and you never thought you'd see Brandon Ruth come back as Superman again, but they did. All that stuff.

This other thing I've thought about, in relation to Miracleman, is there's a big part of Miracleman that was a parody of superheroes, but treated seriously. It was the stuff that people would joke about, like “Superman, all he’d have to do is just do that and he'd knock somebody's head off.” So, then Johnny Bates does that. He flicks his finger and kills somebody. There's this pattern of parody-to-avantgarde superhero-to-mainstream superhero that all that stuff falls into, and I don't think there's been a real—I mean, The Boys is probably the closest thing to a big superhero parody, the way, in 1953, or whatever, Superduperman in Mad Magazine was, and I think you can trace the way Superduperman is written to the way Stan Lee narrates the Marvel Universe, where it's that same thing of, “here's the parody. We're going to do it serious.”

I don't mean this as a negative to The Boys, but it's a dead-end, because it really doesn't exactly push things the way Miracleman--by the time that Miracleman sequence had happened, Watchmen had come out--the way that Watchmen or Miracleman pushed what you could do in superhero stories, maybe a little further than what you had before that. Boy, I don't know, man. That's a good question. I don't mean that about your book. I think Sugar Bomb’s got—one look at that, and you're like, “Oh, this is not any Marvel and DC superhero thing.”

I don't know what you were saying has anything to do with the superhero-ness this stuff. It might just be the specific thing, the specific months that you're launching in, and all these other things. The dataset isn't big enough to say that.

[13:44] David: Yeah, the data set just had me thinking about, “What is the thing that an audience is looking for in superhero comics?” Because I'm largely just doing what I want to do, because it's what I think is fun and what I would like to do. That's the other stuff that I've been doing so far. I'm just going, “well, I just want to do this because I like it. So, I'm going to do it,” and thankfully, knock on wood, it's been well received, and I feel good about this one, too. I think it's along the same lines, in terms of, “this is just the thing that I want to do. I like it. It's what I want to do,” and I think other people are going to like it. I'm not worried about that. The drop in the dataset made me curious. What are other people thinking about or looking at, or wanting in their superhero stuff? What is not being served, or is being served well?

[14:31] John: One thing that probably is worth looking at, two big non-Marvel/DC successes in superheroes over last 10 years have been One-Punch Man and My Hero Academia. Sorry, I don't know why I said the word “Academia” like that.

[14:48] David: I say it like that, too.

[14:49] John: Yeah, it looks like it. I think that's--whatever. Who cares? Both of those are comedy, building on tropes that everybody knows, obviously, doing it in manga style, but Marvel, traditionally, or years ago--the one place that Marvel had trouble cracking was Japan. The movies and characters would be very successful worldwide--China, Europe, everywhere, but Japan was always hard. They don't want Robert Downey Jr. in armor. They've got 50 guys in armor that they came up with first, that they like, and I think that’s shifted a little bit, but it was one of the only places where the Marvel stuff would actually be localized, and they would do manga versions of some of the characters that you'd see, but also, there's a weird Pokémon/Marvel thing that they did--well, not literally Pokémon, but Pokémon-like thing, where the Marvel heroes would be in Pokéballs, and you weren't doing that to serve the Serbian audience, or something. That wasn't happening. There must have been some part of it where the worldwide osmosis of that turns into One-Punch Man and My Hero Academia coming out, and then that coming back to the US and becoming a big phenomenon here, as well, with readers and anime watchers.

[15:59] David: The only other one that I can think of is Invincible.

[16:02] John: Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.

[16:04] David: But Invincible wasn't really that successful, as a comic book, I don't think. I mean, I know it had a long run, which in and of itself, I think, says that it was, at least, relatively successful, but I don't remember it ever being a Top 20 book ever, despite the fact that Ryan Ottley is just one of the best superhero artists around, as far as I'm concerned, but Invincible as a TV show is wildly successful. They just approved Season 5. That's legit.

[16:32] John: Yeah, you're right. I totally forgot.

[16:33] David: And the way they portray it was just the same way that, I think, it just leaned into what Kirkman likes to do, which is just graphic horror. The violence of Invincible is the thing that--you just cannot get away with that in a Marvel or DC book, and he really leans into that.

[16:50] John: Unlike The Boys, I think that marries it to a more traditional superhero narrative, where you don't have a new creative team come on 12 issues in and shift everything. You follow Invincible’s story, and it's always Kirkman writing it, in the comic book, I mean. It's like Savage Dragon with commercial sensibilities. You're following this character’s life story, and it makes sense, in a way that Spiderman or Wolverine’s life doesn't really make sense, if you sit down and read all the comics.

[17:15] David: I've been thinking more about what I think is important, but I just wondered if there was something else out there.

[17:21] John: Individual things tend to succeed, and sometimes there's a trend around it. All the talk of the death of superhero movies has to go away a little bit when Superman comes out and does really well in its opening week, and it looks like week 2's doing well. It's easy to blame the wrong thing when things don't succeed. The media is very good at doing that. I saw a headline in an article that was talking about how “the woke controversies about Superman have not slowed its success, but they did slow Snow White’s success.” I think that's nonsense, because Snow White looked terrible. No one would ever want to see it, and it had a woke controversy on top of it, and that made the most noise. God, could you imagine watching a movie with those dwarfs? I can't even conceive of that. Who would do that to themselves? Where Superman looked charming and fun, and yeah, then it can survive some controversy. Sure, the wrong things get picked on, on that. I don't think the controversy is why Snow White failed. I think it was doomed to fail because it was a bad idea, executed terribly.

[18:32] David: Like Moulin Rouge.

[18:33] John: Oh, I like Moulin Rouge.

[18:35] David: Oh, man. I just saw the theatrical play. Great sets--gorgeous sets--the sets in Moulin Rouge are fantastic. The acting of the one that I saw, here in San Diego, the acting by all of the actors--Fantastic. Amazing. Beautiful people, singing with voices that were just angelic, at times, and everything else about the story, and the music in that damn thing is all just total poop. It was so bad. The music is so bad. I could barely sit through it. I could barely sit through it. If it wasn't for the acting and the settings, and the props, and everything, I wouldn't have stuck around, because it was--what a mess.

[19:20] John: Wow. Harsh words toward Moulin Rouge.

[19:23] David: Yeah, there's my controversial take in 2025, about something that came out in 2010. I guess, I'm just curious to know what people are really into. 2024 was a really great year for comic books. I saw something on The Comic Beat that said that overall industry sales, the gross sale receipts were higher than they've ever been. It was a record year, which is great, but on the ground, I'm not seeing that. I'm not seeing people excited about the next Marvel comic book coming out, and maybe it's because I'm getting into the weird little circles, and the Twitter and social media stuff that's always complaining. So, you just don't even hear the good stuff, and maybe people are generally excited about what's happening, and they're not getting on social media. They're too busy reading comic books, which, God bless them, but I know that, as a fan, I see some of the stuff that's coming out of Marvel, in particular, and I'm just like, “man, the quality is not there, man.” It’s not there, the way it was.

Deniz Camp, that guy's exciting me. He's probably going to be the next head guy, that lead writer at Marvel, I'm guessing, because his Ultimates run is getting better and better. The stuff he's doing over at Image is interesting, but also, really weird and quirky. That guy is on his way up, but outside of him, there's not a lot happening over there that's really exciting me. It doesn't feel like the writing talent over there is making me really excited. A friend of the show, Benjamin Percy, actually--and I'm not saying this because he’s been on the show--but actually, maybe, being the only other exception that I can think of, off the top my head, who I think is doing really rock-solid work, but he's not blowing my hair back, and neither is Deniz Camp, but I feel like Camp has it in him. I haven't seen that from too many other people.

There's some really great work coming out of DC right now, artistically speaking, in particular, and I think the stories are just fine. The Absolute Batman stuff seems to keep chugging along. I'm still very entertained by Absolute Wonder Woman. Some of the other fun little […], the Justice League stuff that Mark Waid is doing, I'm really enjoying. So, there's a lot of stuff over there, but that all feels very much of a type. It feels like a more traditional Marvel/DC superhero comic book, and I know that that can't be the only thing that people are looking for, or maybe it is. I don't know. I'm just wondering what people are getting into, and what people are still looking for.

Are you ready for my other question, John? I mentioned this on a previous podcast. We did a reminisce of Jim Shooter a few episodes back, and we spoke about him for almost the whole podcast, really. I talked about his career and gave him his flowers. Still sad that he's no longer around, but one of the things that Jim Shooter was well-known for, before he became the Marvel Editor-in-Chief, was his run on Legion of Super-Heroes, a book that he famously wrote at a very young age, and for many years. I think he took a break, at some point, and did other things for a few years, but then did he come back to Legion of Super-Heroes, as well?

[22:33] John: He wrote some other stuff later. I don't remember if he came back right then, because I think […] post-Marvel, post-all that, I think he did some Legion stuff.

[22:41] David: Oh, okay.

[22:42] John: He was in his, whatever, 50s or 60s, or something.

[22:46] David: Right. As I said in that podcast, the bloom is off the rose. Nobody talks about Legion of Super-Heroes anymore. I don't even know if there's a Legion of Super-Heroes book right now. I don't think there is. There's been various and sundry attempts to bring them back into the mainstream, and stuff, but at one point, Legion of Super-Heroes was one of the bestselling books at DC. It commanded quite a presence. There were at least five different titles running, at any given month, and you don't have that many titles, John, unless you're able to support that many titles. So, that's some significant and meaningful sales that were happening, and now there's nothing. Literally, nothing. So, the question was—John, you are a comic book writer, you've written at least a decade’s worth of comic books, you have written a lot of comics—Hundreds. You've been responsible, as an editor and as a writer, for the launch of many comic book lines, some of which have actually made some money.

[23:39] John: Yeah, some have.

[23:41] David: Some of them, moderately successful, let's say.

[23:44] John: Ones whose initials are not G-I-Joe, yeah. Some of them did okay.

[23:51] David: I’m not here to ask about GI Joe, John. I'm here to ask you about Legion of Super-Heroes. What would you do in 2025, the year of our Kirby Lord, to reboot Legion of Super-Heroes? Would you have any interest in rebooting Legion of Super-Heroes, and how would you do it?

[24:09] John: One of the things that Legion has going against it--I've never been a huge Legion guy. There are times where I've read Legion and enjoyed it. I've read the Great Darkness Saga, which is one of the big Paul Levitz/Keith Giffen key stories. That must have been amazing, reading it, because there's this twist in Issue #1 of it. Darkseid is the villain. You'll know, because he's on the cover of every copy of the book, because that's what the Legion has to fight, Darkseid, that thing of “Darkseid’s alive in the year 3000.” So, Legion of Super-Heroes is this team of superheroes in the year 3000. So, one of the problems it has is that it's completely separate from the rest of the DC Universe, and off in this science fiction realm. Another one is that it is a science fiction superhero book. That's frequently a weird combination, and Guardians of the Galaxy, I think, shifted things a lot--The movies, especially--Towards mainstreaming that idea of superheroes in space, and stuff. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies are way more Star Wars-y than they are Avengers, in the sense of how the characters present themselves. They're superhero-ish when they team up with Captain America, but it is a little weird, because it's Han Solo teaming up with Captain America, whereas the Legion of Super-Heroes is--I don't know if you noticed, “superheroes” is in their name. They're very forthright about that.

[25:28] David: Trying to hide it, John.

[25:29] John: A another problem with them, I think, and this is where I think all of the reboots of them have suffered--there are, I counted them, a gazillion characters in Legion of Super-Heroes, and they all have these super deep stories that go back decades and decades, and even when they reboot Legion of Super-Heroes, it always seems to me, as an outsider, that even though the other stories didn't take place, it's written as though you were reacting to this new version of a character against these stories that didn't take place. Sort of like when we were talking about […] the other week. That Page 20 reveal that it's the guy from the third episode of the cartoon is really meaningful, if you're into that third episode of the cartoon, but it's meaningless if you don't know what it is. I feel like there is a lot of, “oh, that's what they did with shrinking Violet? Okay.” If you really into shrinking Violet, I'm sure that was a super cool twist on the mythos, but it doesn't help a lot of the other people.

The various relaunches of them have--I mean, I think there's a very big relaunch that was the Five Years Later Legion that Keith Giffen, who was a long-time Legion creator, came in and wrote, and drew, and that's one of the places he became hardcore Keith Giffen, in my opinion. For a guy that was drawing mainstream superhero stuff, and not only that, but is the guy that they brought on to 52 to stabilize all the art, to do layouts for all of 52, because there were going to be all these different artists, Keith Giffen’s a weird artist, and that ability that he has to go from the super mainstream to the super strange with his art is there, and this is him pushing it more strange, pushing it darker, and more than half of the Legion history is post-that, by this time, and in 2025. I've actually got it sitting next to me because I've been cleaning my office, and I've got the whole run of that, that I started reading, and then fell off on, and it's really cool, but it is confusing, if you don't know the history of it.

The other big thing that has messed up my complaining about Hawkman last week is, post-Crisis DC continuity had a bunch of stuff that didn't add up. One of the key pieces being, there was no more Superboy, ever, after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Legion of Super-Heroes formed with them meeting Superboy and creating a team. So, that presented a problem, if the comic that had always been a Superboy spin-off is a spin-off of a character that never existed, and therein came into the morass of confusing continuity stuff that “no, was actually Mon-El. Mon-El was actually also a character, besides Superboy. No, he wasn't, and maybe there's a pocket universe where there was a Superboy, but then there wasn't, but then there was, and Time Trapper did the thing, and then there wasn't a thing,” and there's so much of that back and forth of all these different versions of it. So, you have all that going on. There was a reboot by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson 20 years ago, maybe, that I remember […] very good and really enjoying it, and it really leaned into the youth aspect of it, but still had a lot of the same things I'm talking about, where there's a giant organization of superheroes, and a lot of back story. Then, Bendis relaunched it a couple of years ago.

[28:43] David: I don't remember that.

[28:44] John: I have mentioned before how much I love Brian Michael Bendis's writing, and how much even when it's something I don't think is very good, it's very readable. I made it about 1/3 of an issue into that, and it might be on me, but I didn't make it very far, and I think that was the last time they really tried, in a big way, to launch Legion. All of that said, one of the first things that I started thinking about with that--what's the future like? Sometimes, the Legion come back and they take place in the present day, and there have been a lot of stories where that's happened. The first Legion story was that. They go back in time and they meet Superboy, and they go back to meet him, because he is their inspiration, but I think if you move them out of the future, you've taken away the thing that makes the Legion, the Legion. I feel like that's a dead-end. I think trying to set a Legion story in the present day, it just makes it a regular superhero comic. So, I think you need to not have that happen. One of the big, I thought, missed opportunities in pop culture stuff was in the--hang on your hats for a hot take here, guys--the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. Have you ever heard of those movies? Have you ever seen them?

[29:47] David: No. Some people swear by them, John.

[29:49] John: But there's a lot to about them, and the fact that most of Star Wars, by volume, is the Clone Wars, lends some credence to the “there's good stuff here,” but one of the things that always bothered me was when they meet Anakin Skywalker, they're going to –

[30:03] David: He's a douche?

[30:04] John: Yeah.

[30:05] David: Oh, sorry. You were going to say something else.

[30:08] John: Don't pile on that poor kid.

[30:09] David: It wasn't his fault.

[30:10] John: No. The whole setup is, he's a slave on Tatooine, and the Jedi are going to rescue him, and he's like, “we're going to get my mom, too,” and the Jedi are like, “no, we didn't win enough money to buy your mom. We just won enough to buy you.” Right there is a thing I think would be really interesting to have delved into, which is—

[30:28] David: The mommy issues?

[30:29] John: Well, no, but what if the balance in The Force that needed to get corrected was that Anakin and Obi-Wan Spartacus their way out of Tatooine, and they have a slave revolt, and they come back to the Jedi Council, and the Jedi Council is like, “this is not what we do,” and they're like, “what are you talking about? We're all about freedom and helping people. You've gone too far the other way.” So, then Anakin has this positive effect, in a way, but it swings back eventually, and he turns into Darth Vader. What I'm getting at is, the Jedis were dicks in those movies, and that could have been a plot point. I think it subsequently has been in some of the Star Wars stuff, but at that time, it could have been a real shift. So, I would maybe look at something like that going on in this future, in the year 3000. It's not necessarily a super dark future. It's not the “five years later, everything's terrible” thing, but also, I don't buy a wholly bright future, this idea that “there's a corruption, but maybe just the sedentariness of the galactic government, and all of that stuff going on, where there's stuff going on that seems unjust and seems wrong to these kids growing up in it, and then they maybe look back on these heroes from the past, and see Superman, and want to go meet the historical Superman, the way somebody now--not be super religious about it, but there's the myth of Superman in this future, and maybe he's been corrupted by the powers that be into representing things that maybe they think Superman didn't.

So, what I would do is start not having Legion of Super-Heroes be a literal The Legion, and have there being all these bylaws and organizations, and official them to it, and have it be like it was in that first story--these three or so kids, young people, steal a time machine, and go back in time, and they want to go meet the historical Superman, but maybe they overshoot by a few years and they meet the historical young Clark Kent, and show him what his future is going to be, and vice versa, and maybe The Legion coming back there creates Superboy. Clark Kent sees he’s going to be Superman, but he's not a man yet. He becomes Superboy. So, you have that “Superman still predates Superboy,” in a weird way, but in Clark Kent's chronology, he's Superboy first, even though it's because he knows he's becoming Superman in the future. I don't know if that makes any sense.

[33:00] David: Yeah, it makes sense, flipping it a little bit.

[33:02] John: Yeah, a little bit, but it makes them integral to the mythology of Superman that way, and vice versa.

[33:10] David: It’s true to the origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

[33:13] John: Yeah. So, that's the thing. I would take a back-to-the-basics approach, go back to the very beginning of that, because I do think that's one of the problems that people have when they reboot it is, they reboot, they're looking at the time that they really liked those characters, and there's a part of it where you have to go back, like to the original Ultimate line, and look at not “when was X-Men the bestselling comic?” but “when did it function in a way that you can replicate and start over?” and maybe it's when they were kids at a school. So, that's the thing that you'd make Ultimate X-Men out of, and it's the same thing here. You can go back and have these three kids and then start to grow it from there, where they meet other people and become, maybe, an underground youth movement in this future of them trying to do good, the way they're inspired by Superman. I don't know. That was really about as far as I thought about it.

[34:02] David: It was good. I like that.

[34:07] John: How about you?

[34:08] David: I had a couple of ideas, as I was thinking about it, as I brought it up. They weren't very original. One is called the Liefeld Approach, and the other one, I would call the Valentino Approach. So, the Liefeld approach would be “let's have an older Superman, still alive, and a group of teens basically gather around him.” Maybe he's a little crusty now, not necessarily a bad guy, but going through the motions, a bit of an automaton, lost the reason behind why he's doing things. He's seen, at this point, it’s the year 3000, he's seen--everyone he's ever loved has died multiple times, at this point. So, he's maybe a little crusty. So, I think they gather around Superman and bring hope back to Superman, and through that process, congealing as a group around Superman as their leader, and I think I would probably do that pretty quickly, and then I would probably very quickly kill Superman to get him out of the way, so we can have the other characters take the lead, and then the story would be them dealing with that, and who did it, and how it would happen

That would be the first, I think, big arc, and that Liefeld Version, you've got the Cable character coming in to be the teacher of the others, and I think Superman would be your POV entry character, which is great. Who wouldn't want that? As he's learning about the characters around him, the reader would be learning at the same time. One of my favorite runs of superhero comics back in the day was Jim Valentino’s run on Guardians of the Galaxy, and I thought his version of Guardians of the Galaxy is really cool. So, we're 3000 years in the future--let's just bump it up another 500/600/700/1000 years--So, it's the year 4000 instead, and you've got a new POV character. 1000 years later, the Legion, they're legend now, as well. So, that POV character is trying to find these legends to save the universe.

So, you're reintroduced to all these Legion of Super-Heroes characters one at a time. Some of them will be the same, some of it will be changed, and we'll be able to introduce new versions of some of them, as well. You don't have to worry about ingesting that whole Legion of Super-Heroes history all at once. You can make some of it mythology, some of it history, and as you're going through and finding each individual Legion of Super-Heroes, you're going to learn more about that particular version of the hero. In that version, I was thinking, how could I bring Super Boy into it, so that he's actually the one that starts the search? I couldn't quite figure that out, other than just time machine, but those are my 2 versions of off-cuff thoughts about how to how to make those happen.

[37:06] John: That's interesting, yeah.

[37:07] David: I think the big things would be a really strong point of view character. So, the reader is learning with that character who everyone is, and that gives you a really great excuse for, “it's not the first time these characters have interacted with each other, but it's first time this particular character has interacted with them, in any meaningful way.” So, you can do a lot of explaining that way, without getting too boring, and also simplifying the history down so that you can reintroduce things without force-feeding 30 years of comic book history down somebody's throat. You can do it in little chunks, and in ways that hopefully people are excited for.

[37:45] John: Yeah. Good approaches. That's interesting. A lot of ways to go about it, I guess. It's a rich world.

[37:51] David: I'm like you, John. I've tried a couple of times to get into Legion of Super-Heroes, and just recently, I started with the very first Keith Giffen issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, where he is just drawing, and I've read probably the first 10 issues of that original Keith Giffen run. I can't remember who the writer is, off the top of my head.

[38:11] John: Paul Levitz.

[38:13] David: It might have been Paul Levitz. It's fine, but there's nothing that's getting me really super excited. It's very soap opera-esque, but not the way that I like my comic book soap opera. I don't know. It's fine, but I'm not super excited to read the next issue, whereas as a counter to that, at the same time, I'm reading the original Avengers run. I'm starting to get into the 50s and 60s, and I'm really looking forward to “what are we going to do next?” and that stuff is not super great. That part of the Avengers run is not that great, but I'm into it. I'm enjoying it, and it's very comic book soap opera-esque, when you start to get into that stuff. So, I don't know. There's something about Legion that keeps pushing me out, and I don't know what it is. 

[39:02] John: Yeah, I think that's true. I think there have been a lot of fans of Legion, but I think a lot of them have aged out. I think there's just an attrition, and not a lot of stuff bringing people into it. Maybe James Gunn will make a movie of it.

[39:19] David: To fix it.

[39:20] John: Yeah.

[39:21] David: John, we haven't even gotten to the stuff that we were going to talk about, but I feel like we've already talked a lot, and I can see your energy waning.

[39:28] John: Yeah, I can feel myself getting tired. I'm sorry.

[39:30] David: I think we've done a pretty decent business. We can call it right here.

[39:33] John: All right.

[39:33] David: All right. Well, thanks, John. That was a good talk.

[39:35] John: That was fun.

[39:36] David: Quick little chat. We'll get to some meatier subjects on the next one.

[39:41] John: Meteors, like comets? That kind of thing?

[39:43] David: No, […]. Yeah, we're going to talk about planetesimals, and stuff like that. Thanks for coming to The Corner Box. It's time for us to check out. Like and subscribe, and tell a friend. Don't tell them about this episode, but tell them about the other episodes. We're really good, sometimes—just maybe not this time. We brought up Miracleman at least a couple of times in this podcast. We're cultured. So, anyway—like and subscribe. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates, and links at www.thecornerbox.club, and we’ll be back next week with more from David, and John, here at The Corner Box.