User:Mgrabois

The Golden Age

I started reading comics at age 8, my first issue was a Superman story cover dated 6/75. My first Legion story was Superboy 212, cover dated 10/75, the issue where they fought the Super-Rejects and Matter-Eater Lad left. I don't know why I got hooked on that series, but I had to have each issue. I always gravitated towards DC books rather than Marvel ones. I started getting back issues to find out about their history and managed to keep straight all of the Legionnaires code names, home planets, and secret identities. By the time Levitz and Giffen had come along, I was hard core. I had made my own Legion cruiser out of spare model parts, I had my own Mission Monitor Board, and while I was indexing my collection (for another project) I stopped to track how many appearances (cover and interior) each character had gotten. I spent some of that time trying to identify every one of the characters on the Giffen/Mahlstedt poster on my own - little did I know that organized fandom was already circulating a copy of the answer key!

The Silver Age

I discovered organized Legion fandom (sort of) while looking through old letters pages. There were a few references to some fan clubs, and I tried to join Klordny as a charter member and the Legion Outpost, but that one had just put out its last issue. Throughout the 80's and early 90's I had to console myself to discussing the Legion with some friends. Around 1994 I got my first computer and discovered the world of CompuServe's Comics and Animation Forum just as the countdown to Zero Hour was happening. Wow! All these people just like me, and I could talk my heart's content about comics and the Legion. A number of creators were in that forum too, from Mark Waid to Kurt Busiek to Jeff Moy. I made a number of online friends that became real-world friends that would meet up in Las Vegas for a weekend or in San Diego for the convention. At one convention, several of us involved with primarily online fandom met up with those involved primarily in paper-copy fandom when we were invited to join an Interlac dinner (which as far as anyone can tell was the first time those two groups mixed).

By 1995 I had discovered the internet and became involved with the usenet newsgroups (the rec.arts.comics.* stuff, aka "RAC"). I had taken my Legion checklists and put them online, the beginning of the Anal Retentive Checklists and got help from other fans. I joined a couple of mailing lists (the biggest at the time was called LSH-L). At the time, the web was still pretty new and there were no message boards like there are today, so it was pretty much email and usenet. I went to San Diego and hung out with my Compuserve and RAC friends, and a convention is much more fun when you have like-minded people to hang with. Somewhere in here I had started the Legion of Super-Resources web page too, which was your basic one-stop shopping place to go for all your Legion needs, whether you needed to find fonts, fanfic, original art, essays, etc., and I started my Anal Retentive Legion Reprint Checklist, and compiled a list of all the non-comics merchandise (books, posters, action figures, cups, etc.) into the Anal Retentive Legion Merchandise Checklist. Then I had to put all my stuff on one page so I could easily find it all, so I created my Bits of Legionnaire Business web page.

By around 2001 or so, I had started getting burned out on usenet, and curtailed my activities online for a year or two. By the time I got back to really looking at it again, Legion (and comics) fandom both exploded, but there were far more places to go for discussion and there was too much to read. DC had created their message boards, which then fractured into many boards all over the place, and there was no single place to go for the whole story. For a while my Resources page was the most-referenced Legion link, but I eventually stopped updating it (apparently in October 2001).

The Bronze Age

I never went back to the Resources page because by now there are other, more up-to-date link collections, and I saw no need to reinvent the wheel (or reinvent my page to have the same links). About a year ago I started getting into reading blogs. Many of those who wrote on usenet were now blogging, and so in November 2005 I saw that there wasn't a Legion blog. There was this place and the Clubhouse, and the Legion Abstract, but they didn't have what I was looking for in a blog (as my original tagline said, "current news, previews, reviews, interviews, and retroviews"), so I created the Legion Omnicom. I happened to be at the right place in the right time to get involved with reporting on the new animated show, which seems to be about half my content right now, and the other half is scouring the web so I can point out the best of what everyone else is saying. Oh, and the third half is being an old fogey with reposting stuff from my 10 years of archives.

Then Scott invited me over here, and the rest is future history.