Talk:Action Comics v1 864

Here's a good case study for the multiple-era revamp discussion

Just created a shell for Action Comics #864. In this story, Lightning Saga Garth is visiting Superman in the Fortress of Solitude in the 21st century. Batman shows up and in the course of the conversation mentions that he has met three different versions of the Legion. They are:

1. Justice League of America v1 #147-148. This is a Pre-Crisis story in which the Legion came to the 21st century to team up with the Earth-1 Justice League and the Earth-2 Justice Society. The editor footnotes the specific issue. Presumably this is the Lightning Saga Legion, which just had a very similar history to the events of JLA 147-148. However, since the editor footnotes it, it implies that the Pre-Crisis and Lightning Saga versions are the same or shared the same timeline until the Crisis. There are enough differences between the Pre-Crisis and Lightning Saga early days (such as the first meeting of Mon-El and Kal-El) that we know these are not exactly the same
2. The Post-Zero Hour Legion during the events of Final Night. OK, so these are Lightning Saga versions (Earth 247) that apparently participated in events very similar to Final Night. We could also take the approach that this is actually the original Zero Hour Legion, who because of Time Travel or Trapper interference, wound up in the Lightning Saga univrse. The editor footnotes the Final Night series.
3. The Threeboot Legion during the events of Brave and Bold v3 #1-6. Once again, the editor footnotes the specific issues. There have been enough cross-overs between the Lightning Saga universe and the Threeboot Legion (in R.E.B.E.L.S. and Adventure Comics) that it's not too much of a stretch to say that the Threeboot always existed in the same timeline as Lightning Saga, just in different universes.

Action #864 came out just days before DC Universe #0, so it's obviously setting up Johns's Three Worlds concept for that series. While I can buy that the three different versions are all Lightning Saga dopplegangers of the original Legionnaires in the stories, how to do the character links could definitel be sticky. I have currently linked them to the Post-Zero Hour and Post-Infinite Crisis versions. There are links to three different versions of Brainy, two of Imra and two of Rokk. I'd be interested in suggestions for the best way to label/form these links.

I've been avoiding it, but we do need to go through the era-revamp process as discussed before. I think this issue is a good case study for how we handle the structure.

I think I threw this idea out a long time ago, but I'll revisit it. Why not use one character page for multiple-version Legionnaires? A single Saturn Girl page could have a separate section for every version of that character, listed chronologically as the various eras ocurred. Links could still be made to a given section if desired. This would dramatically simplify building the wiki and I think it would be much clearer to less-frequent or new readers who are confused by the whole thing. I picked up the Essenial Superman Encyclopedia the other day, and this is how they handle characters with multiple versions. Anyone confused by the different versions can read through the entire entry and see how everything relates. Even if we adopt the "families" approach (e.g. Pre-Crisis and Lightning Saga belonging to the same family), there is no reason why there couldn't be one page to handle multiple family versions of a character.

I'm certainly open to creating the families versions as discussed before, but would like to hear thoughts on this again. I have a suspicion that one roadblock people may have to contributing to the wiki is that they can't figure out which page they want to add to. I have avoided working on the character pages myself because the thought creating five or six different versions of pages for each of a few dozen different Legionnares, making sure that each one is linked to the correct pages and only includes the data for that version is just mentally exhausting. When I envision a "finished" version of the wiki, I like the concept of being able to find all information on Brainiac 5 in one place, rather having to comb through 5 or 6 different pages. I also means that we dont have to revisit and restructure the pages every few years when DC decides to shake thing up again.

So, any thoughts?

--Gopher 22:47, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

On the footnotes - it isn't particularly uncommon (or at least wasn't, before footnotes themselves became rare) for issues to be cited even if the events were retconned significantly (e.g., the post-Crisis retroactive removal of Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman from the JLA and the early joining of Black Canary & extended service of the Martian Manhunter to compensate altered a huge chunk of JLoA v1 issues even before you considered further retcons) unless there was a single alternative version to cite. I don't think that carries a huge amount of weight.

As for your major point - I don't think blocking every version of a character into a single article would be particularly useful. A generalist encyclopedia does that sort of thing mostly out of (a) lack of space [i.e., print books] or (b) a desire to downplay the importance of the subject [i.e. Wikipedia]. If we're a web-based Legion encylopedia, neither of those apply. The "families" approach is a compromise between relative simplicity - it solves the problem you came up against of which page to link to here - i.e., we'd just link to the Reboot page for the postboot Saturn Girl/etc cameos, which would include the Final Night story in its place in the Post-Zero section and probably a note in the E-247 section on the FB to it - and the need to give each individual version the weight it deserves in a Legion context.

And, yes, we really do need to get the era-revamp started. I've been putting off adding to the Wiki because it's been ages since I actually read (or even reread) any LSH stuff, and the thought of dragging it all out again to be able to reference is slightly daunting. If you want to add stuff and don't want to have to be utterly certain about which pages to link to/etc, though, I'll go through and do the links/etc. I feel more able to be an editor than a writer at the moment, and what we really need are a bunch of writers. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:26, 9 January 2011 (UTC)