Talk:Legion Publication History

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Breaking up this pge

Yeah, it NEEDS broken up, and thanks Gopher for starting. I think ten years (20 for the first, since the first ten are skimpy) is too long a period per page though for the page size it gives. I would suggest a basic five years, (15 for the first block), with tweaks to keep the reboots together. To whit:

¹ - What month was LSHv4 #1 published?

By the time of v4 most books were on the stands two months before their cover date, I beleive. So, it would have been released sometime in June, I presume. Rule of thumb, comes were on the stands generally three months before cover date (to help sales since the book would not be pulled from shelves by the dealer until the cover date had passed) until winter 1988/'89, when a move was made to make cover date and publication date match. That why DC comics from that season use "Holiday 1988" and "Winter 1989" cover dates while real time caught up to the cover dates. That policy did not hold long however. I don't know when DC comics gravitated back to being dated two months after release, but I'm pretty sure it had happened by 1994. Duke 15:46, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

Thoughts? - Reboot (SoM) talk page 15:02, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

I'll do my thoughts Jeopordy style, in the form of questions, since I'm not real confident about them.
First, the list now seems very hard to find to me. It could just be that I don't know how to navigate the wiki. The only way I can find to get to it is to click an era on the navigation box to the left, then click on the "era" part of "Category: Era" and then click on the "Wiki: part of "Catagory: Wiki" That doesn't seem very intuitive to me. Is there an easier way to get there? What we are now calling the "Legion Publication History" (good title, I like it) seem to me like it might be one of the primary jump on/off points, where surfers will browse stories and then click off to different issues, character, etc. as they find things that interest them. Considering that creators also live on this top page, something else I think should be easy to get to, I think this should be one of the easiest and first places users can get to. Is there a way to accomplish this? Can a link be put on the Main Page, either in the navigation box or above the continuity descriptions?
Second, if I am interpreting correctly, we are now running the entire publication history together at the top level, broken roughly into five-year increments? I'm cool with that. I'm just confused. I put the first part of the list in the Pre-Crisis catagory becasue I thought we were being very strict about dividing everything into eras. Should each five year page be marked with it's era, somehow? I'm not really pushing it, mind you, just tossing it at the wall to see if it sticks.
Thirdly, if the answer above is not, I'm wondering if dividing the wiki categories by eras is best. For example, I was going to create a Xanthu entry, but then hesitated because of what I thougt was a strict era break down. I was not sure if I should create one page with a few graphs on each era, linked to that category, or if I should create pages for Xanthu/Pre-Crisis, Xanthu/Post-Crisis, Xanthu-Glorithverse, etc. I'm still not sure. It seems to me that only the main Legionnaires will have long enough entires to warrant separate peges per continuity. The rest, even some lesser members could live on one page, assuming the bio-box on the right of each page can be used more than once. So, here's a thought I really don't expect to stick but I want to throw it out there anyway for discussion. Does it make sense to anyone to have the categories be things like Comics, Creators, Characters, Creatures, Continuities, Chronology, Legionnaires, Technology, Terminology, Geography, etc. ? Then a click on each catagory gives a similar type of thing, while the page(s) for that entry can be color coded by subheads for the difference between each era. I'm just, I donno, thinking out loud. I mean, I think of Post-Crisis and Glorithverse as timeline tweaks, rather than proper reboots. I don't know that the backstory for *most* characters/stuff changes enough to warrent entirely new categories. Duke 15:46, 10 September 2006 (PDT)
(I answered this at the same time as Duke, so some of my response may not incorporate his ideas or thoughts. Will add/correct when I am able to read his post).
OK, I know this is a radical concept, but do we NEED breaks for the various reboots? I'm OK with doing it, but we could just as easily have clean five year breaks with a sub-heading that points out the start of Pre vs Post this or that era. If I had my druthers, there would be one long page that listed everything from 1950-present, but since that has practical challenges, it obviously needs sub-pages (5 years works for me, and I like the restructuring of the page titles to use the sub-page functionality). The page names themselves become unecessarily complicated when we try to accomodate the eras. Would it be so bad to make this a straight chronological listing? Pages like Chronology/Post-Zero Hour already do a good job of showing which issues belong to each era (or they will when one exists for each era), and they could be listed as links in the introduction or even at the point when an era changes.
Also, all the issues are listed by cover date. We can find actual publication date for most issues at Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics, but what's the point? We refer to Adventure 247 as being published in April, 1958. In actuality, it probably hit the stands before April. That being the case, do we need to make a distinction for LSHv4 #1 that is different from the way all the rest of the issues are referenced?

::We could also have several categories of Publication History pages that collect issues from across many time periods and eras, such as: ::[[Legion Publication History/Reprints]] ::[[Legion Publication History/Mini-series]] ::[[Legion Publication History/Related series]] (for L.E.G.I.O.N., if we don't include it in the regular Legion publication history)

I think anything we end up using in this general format will be a useful tool, and most likely we haven't even hit upon its final look and feel. --Gopher 16:10, 10 September 2006 (PDT)
Quite probably on the last.
I don't have time or energy (it's post-1am here & I'm zonked) to reply to all these points tonight, and certainly not in detail. Basic thoughts tho, subject to change when I'm more awake, in no particular order:
  • Dates: (Something you both brought up) I would rather see actual publication dates (if the data is available, and we can use it) become the main delimination for dating, so we can say that (e.g.) Legionnaires #74 came out on the 9th of June 1999 (date from Diamond's shipping lists, which go back to late 1998), and it would be child's play to add a Publication date line to the {{issue}} box if the lack of such a line there is the problem. [And, FTR, the 1994 (August) and 2004 (October) are based on Zero Hour #0 and the TT/Legion Special's publication dates as far as I could find. Taking them by cover date would take them even closer to a round 1995 and 2005].
    As to "why tweak it to go by reboot" it's not. It's done by series, really, since having an issue #1, #0 or major change at the very bottom of a page seems counter-intuitive since the deliminations are fairly arbitary to start with and I'd rather make them a little less so. If LSHv3 #1 or whatever fall near a crack, I'd suggest moving those boundaries too so that they're at the top if they were going to be very near the bottom.
    As to "why not just use Post-ZH, etc", it's because we're going out-of-comic-context here. Again, the changes aren't to move so that they line up with the reboots, it's so they move so that the real-world issues like v4 #1, v4 #0 and v5 #1 don't get lost at the bottom of a page.
LSH v4 #1 was released on September 12, 1989 with a cover date November, 1989. We can get release dates or pretty good approximations for every issue at the "Mike's Amazing" link I mentioned above. If you add release date to the issue setup, I'll be happy to add them to backfill all the existing pages and populate any new ones. If that's what you prefer to use as determination for where a year break is, or for other usages within the site, I can go with that.
The Legion chronicles switched from Adventure to Action between 3/27/69 (Adv 380) and 4/29/69 (Act 377). The switch between Action 392 (7/30/70) to sporadic issues of Superboy beginning in 1/7/71 (#172). Superboy #258 (9/24/79) to LSH v2 #259 (10/22/79). LSH v2 313 (4/26/84) to LSH v3 1 (5/24/84). LSH v3 63 (6/20/89) to LSH v4 1 (9/12/89). LSH v4 125 (1/26/2000) to Legion Lost 1 (3/1/2000). LSH v4 #0 sold on 8/16/94, and coming between issues 61 and 62, doesn't make much sense whether its at the beginning or the end of a page. If you really want to make breaks that follow all those series changes, it looks pretty messy to me. Clean five year breaks seems easier to follow. If the first few issues of a new series start at the bottom of a page, I think most people will be able to figure out that its because its at the end of the five year period in the page name. We can place a link at the bottom of the page which leads to the next five year section, and a link at the top of each page which leads to the preceding part of the publication list. Why is an issue considered "lost" if its at the bottom of the page, especially given that these pages are all sub-sections of a larger multi-page article? If these issues were listed in an index at the back of a book, would readers have difficulty understanding the meaning of a new series starting towards the bottom of a page? I don't think so. --Gopher 21:27, 10 September 2006 (PDT)
  • Duke's last point: Literally, the first thing I established with Scott when he brought this up in the first place was that [I'll just quote myself] "Provided you split the 'boots, I'm all for it", which he responded to with "That was exactly what I wanted to do. Different entries for each boot". My main concern, of course, was the Post-Zero Hour stuff and I'm not too bothered about splitting LSH V1 ("preboot" - note the capital V. I'll always use small "v" for volume and capital V for "version" :)) for myself, but further talk - which didn't just include me - had Scott break it up as Pre-Crisis, Post-Crisis, Post-Zero Hour and Post-Infinite Crisis, ending with asking about whether "the Glorith variation"; and someone else said in the round-robin, and I quote, asked "Since most of the help file is post-Glorith crap and thus unnecessarily confusing as hell, can that be a seperate category too?", and I went with that when setting the cats up, which LL checked off.
    That's a long-winded way of saying, I'd rather keep things as deliminated as possible. Longer-term, if I find a simple way of doing, I'd like links to the other versions in the same way as "In other languages" links are done @ Wikipedia (See here for an example - it's at the bottom of the left-hand navbar.). The way these things work, I don't know if that's possible, since I didn't consider the possibility of actual namespaces (pagenames in the form [[Post-Zero Hour:Page]], just Post-ZH/Page or Page/Post-ZH) at first.
Other than sporadic mentions of L.E.G.I.O.N throughout the site, I cant think of a better way to introduce an index of those issues that in this overall list with the related page. --Gopher 21:27, 10 September 2006 (PDT)
  • Discussion of reprinted material moved to #Reprints/Miniseries/Related series
  • Categories I've added a "Categories" link between "Random page" and "Help" on the navbar that goes to the top-level category, where this sits for now. And yeah, several of the potential cats Duke mentions might well be a good idea (which, in turn, should feed into era-specific categories in the same way as Category:Images), but make sure to include explanatory text on the category pages themselves rather than just throwing them out there blank.
As I said, I may have more to say later, but I'm too tired for any more jsut now - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:49, 10 September 2006 (PDT)
There are quite a few issues running around in this conversation, and since we're already getting warning messages due to the size of the page, we may want to consider breaking a few of these out for discussion elsewhere. --Gopher 21:27, 10 September 2006 (PDT)

A couple of options

Here's another thought on how to break up this page. I would like to place one of the following at the top and bottom of each page of the publication history (links below are what would display, not the full names of the pages):

Option A
You may access any time period within the Legion Publication History by using the following links:
[[1950-1964]] | [[1965-1969]] | [[1970-1974]] | [[1975-1980]] | [[1981-1985]] | [[1986-1990]] | [[1991-1995]] | [[1996-2000]] | [[2001-2005]] | [[2006-present]]

Option B
You may access any time period within the Legion Publication History by using the following links:
[[Adventure/Action]] | [[Superboy/Superboy & LSH]] | [[LSH v2]] | [[LSH v3]] | [[LSH v4/Legionnaires]] | [[Legion/LSH v5]]

Ideally, I'd like the naming of the individual pages to match one of the two options above. If we're going to use periods of years, then it should be straight chronological periods with no accomodation for where a series starts or stops. If we're concerned about grouping the series together, then naming the pages with year designations just becomes too complicated and we should simply use the series-based names. I'm happy to go with either one, as long as the naming convention is consistent, concise and easily understood. I'm not attached to the specific wording in my second example, or even the grouping (Adventure & Action could be separate, etc). We may also find once we create the pages that one or more are still toolarge, so we need to further split them up.

One drawback to Option B is that new users may be inclined to think that each link only contains entries from that series, rather than all issues published within that time period. However, they should be able to figure it out once they look at it. For people who don't spend as much time thinking about these things as we do, I think the straight years is easier to understand, particularly if they dont know what v2 vs v3 is, that there ever was an Adventure/Action period, etc.

If anyone would like to suggest an Option C or D, be my guest. --Gopher 12:59, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

Yeah, it's a bit messy (would "late 1994", etc be better than "1994 (August)" for you?), but there's a few things. Firstly, despite what I said while half-asleep, I would rather not have cross-contamination between the reboots, but the scale of this page makes that impossible (plus, there's stuff like LSH v4 #105, the Superman/Batman arc with exposed-crotch Dawnstar, etc which are "out of period"). At the same time, this isn't paper and I would rather have the pages represent significant shifts, like Cockrum debuting and subsequently redesigning everything, v3 --> v4 (which, in publishing terms, is far more significant than the Glorithverse shift of v4 #4-6), preboot --> postboot, postboot --> crapboot. But I don't want the pages labelled "post-ZH", etc or "v4", etc because they're not going to be exclusively stories from that reboot, or from that series. They'll include Elseworlds, significant guest appearances in other series, etc. They're not going to be exclusively anything except what is deliminated by a date range of X to Y, and then only because it's not practical to have everything on a single page.
And it's already inconsistant, since the first page is 15 rather than 5 years (or 20 rather than 10). Rather than having "X years exactly and that's it" per page, I'd rather take a basis five years and tweak it to keep periods - which are smaller or larger than individual series, after all; a big chunk of LSHv2 and all of LSHv3, after all, were written by Levitz, and DnA's lengthy run overlapped between LSHv4/Lgs, Lost, Worlds and The Legion, so splitting TL off from Lost, or Levitz's run into multiple chunks when they're of a size which could logically have a page to itself seems... illogical - together. There's no ideal "Option X"; whatever you choose has compromises. I think a bit of flexibility helps to lessen them, YMMV. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 13:58, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
I agree that Years works much better than Series, since no matter what we use for the Series name, it wont include all the miscellaneous issues published during that period. I'm not stuck so much on having strict 5 year/10 year periods as I am on the naming convention being relatively simple. I like "late 1994" much better than anything with perentheses, and although I would prefer we use whole years, I can live with early/mid/late. It may be a bit perplexing to a newcomer why we are doing it that way, but hopefully they will be inclined to ask rather than rearranging data on pages without discussion.
While we can speculate where the breaks should be, we really need to get the data down on a page before we can see what is realistic. Why don't we hold the breaks the way they are currently listed, and as we get the tables built, we can discuss where the page-breaks should be. At present we have 1950-1969 built, and I believe it will make sense to include 1970 in this group, as that brings us to the end of the Action period and just prior to the first issues as backups in Superboy. I'll finish off the 1970 portion of the table, and then based upon how much data that is, we can split it into either two or three pages, whichever makes sense, breaking at even years. Once I have built the tables for the next cluster, say up through Superboy & LSH 258, we can look at how much data that is and determine how many pages it should be, where the breaks go, etc. The later periods are not as long and should not be as difficult to size up. Does that sound like an OK approach? Once we are actually creating the pages, we can argue over how to name them, although I'm guessing it will be "Legion Publication History/1989-late 1994", etc. --Gopher 15:23, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
1950-1964 comes in just under 32K (the threshold at which you will get a warning message regarding page size), 1965-1970 just under 26K. Shifting one more year to the second page pushes it over 33K, so I'm going to set up two pages with the break at 64/65. Thoughts, objections? Probably wont be able to get the next significant chunk (71-79) built out for evaluation/feedback until tomorrow. In the meanwhile, Duke, do you have another data dump for years after Pre-Crisis? Feel free to put as much in Legion Publication History as you have, and we can migrate it over to the smaller pages as we process the data. --Gopher 17:31, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

And Duke's just demonstrated WHY that warning is there, since the bottom of the page, including whatever reply he made, was cut off when he tried to reply there... - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:41, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

I make big FUBAR. SorryDuke 17:44, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

New section, same discussion

First, what I was trying to say but frigged up since Graiggopher and I we're posting simultaniously.... at least I *think* that's what happened:

From the FWIW Dept., I prefer Option A. split at roughly 5 year intervals. I think listing by years is best for a chronological list. By title we also run into what I did before with length, so we might end up with S/LSH Part 1, S/LSH Part 2, etc.
I don't think we need to bother with months or mid/later/early etc. One link can just be, for example, 1989-1994 and the next 1994-2000. Users will see what month each list begins and ends at once they slick the link. Maybe a bar in the table could designate breaks in addition to years, as in "Here begins Post-Zero Hour," "Here begins the first Levitz era," or "Here begins the time of the great and mighty Tyroc, coolest and most powerful Legionnaire, in any reality, ever." Or, you know, something like that.
Of course, the lists will be shorter once I/we/somebody breaks out the really AR stuff and the reprints. We may be able to go 10 years per page, but I doubt it.
L.E.G.I.O.N. gives me a headache. For my money, and L.E.G.I.O.N. appearance is at least AR, while issues with significant appearances by Valor, Phase, or the Durlan who may or may not have been RJ Brande belong on the main list.
I'm not sure if it's intended, but when one clicks on the first "Legion Publication History" link, it jumps to 1970. I would think the first jump would be to the beginning of the list. Is there a reason to go to 1970 first that I'm not appreciating?Duke 17:49, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

Secondly, I have a TON of post-Pre-Crisis data, I can dump it in. Most of it will lack title, plot, notes etc. My list, built with my own research and material borrowed from Michael Grabois, John Censullo, Mark Waid, Jim Drew, Jef Pekham, Dave Rash, and others, petered out around 1998/99 or so. I'm got some stuff after that, but very few AR, reprint, merchadise, minor apps and such.Duke 17:49, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

I moved around a bunch of data, and Reboot did some stuff to merge the histories, all of which was happening at the same time, so that's probably why you got some weird behavior there for a while. --Gopher 18:12, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
Doubt it - the thing ran slowly for a few minutes, but that was after I was done. I think it was just Duke's connection "blipped" or something while he was saving. Not really important tho. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 19:10, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
I like the 1989-1994/1994-2000 idea, makes the page names more uniform and will be easy to create a simple line of links for the whole thing. Also, the fuzziness gets rid of the sort of makes the Cover Date vs Release Date issue less important, although I'd still like to have release dates listed on all the issue pages. Reboot, can you go for that? --Gopher 18:12, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
Yeah, WTH. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 19:10, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
I was kind of assuming that when all is said and done, the original Legion Publication History page will go away, leaving only the smaller pages. For the time being, it makes a good place to dump all the data that we haven't formatted yet. Kind of messy right now, but it shouldn't take too long to get most of the pages up and running relatively soon. We can put the introduction on the 1950-64 page, and I'll add an "Option A-like" line of links at the top and bottom of each page (once we know what all the page names are). --Gopher 18:12, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
It won't "go away," it'll just be an introduction/disambiguation page rather than a destination in its' own right. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 19:10, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
I'm would prefer that we leave all the AR stuff in the main pages, including reprints, etc, AS WELL AS having separate AR/Reprint/etc pages. Am I in a minority of one on that? --Gopher 18:12, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
That entirely depends on, to coin a phrase, what you mean by AR. There's stuff like the Simpsons Av247alike cover, there's stuff like one-panel non-speaking cameos, there's stuff like minor guest appearances and there's spinoffs; all of which have been referred to as "AR" on this page. The latter two are certainly not AR, the first certainly is (and I wouldn't include it), and the second is up for debate both ways - it may be AR, but it may still warrant inclusion. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 19:10, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
As for L.E.G.I.O.N., I dont think any of us know what to really do with it. Its obvious that we have to include it, but how to fit it in. As you say, all of the issues that don't include Phase/Valor/Durlan are basically AR, and yet... I don't know. We'll come up with something.
It's not AR, it's a spinoff (like Wanderers, the Inferno mini, etc). It certainly warrants inclusion, it's just the specifics that are up for debate - do we have a L.E.G.I.O.N. Publication History page, do we include it here or do we have a page, and include only those that include LSH characters here? - Reboot (SoM) talk page 19:10, 11 September 2006 (PDT)
If you want to dump the rest of your data in the old Legion Publication History page, we can start hacking away at it. For now, I'm formatting 1971-79, which looks like it will be about the right amount of data for its own page, bringing us from Superboy 172 to Superboy/LSH 258 with a very nice break at December 1979. --Gopher 18:12, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

Month of publication

For what it's worth, I like what's being done off and on at one of the other pages (see 1986, for example), where the month is listed offset to the left (no bullet), followed by all of the issues published that month (in shipping order, I presume), rather than the month following the story title. This is not being consistently followed, by the way, nor is any particular style. Omnicom 21:00, 11 September 2006 (PDT)

I also like having the months broken out that way, but using Wiki sub-headers to do it looks to be somewhat problematic. Given a page that has roughly 10 years of data with 12 months each results in a Table of Contents with 132 lines in it, so the user would have to scroll down three screens to get to the real meat of the page. Perhaps we should use bolded text instead of a subheader? --Gopher 09:28, 12 September 2006 (PDT)

dcindexes.com

Don't take the publication dates @ dcindexes.com as gospel, BTW. They're based on scheduled (solicited) publication dates rather than actual dates. So if an issue is published a fortnight late (as several I've found have been), the dcindexes listing doesn't reflect it... - Reboot (SoM) talk page 02:02, 21 September 2006 (PDT)

When I first started adding the dates to the 1950-64 page, I was listing them as "approximate publication date", which is how they are listed on dcindexes. I figured its unlikely that we are going to find any other source for dates prior to 1998, and if we do, we could always simply update the page with the correct information, so I removed the "approximate" portion of the listing. I could add back in that qualifier if you like.
On the post 1998 dates, point well taken, we should definitely rely more on the Diamond site or something similar. However, even these dates, while fairly universal, are not 100% accurate. There are plenty of times in some regions when retail stores actually get stock in after the listed Diamond date, and sometimes even before. It's definitely more accurate than the scheduled dates, but still not 100% reliable. In essence, every publication date we display should probably be listed as approximate. We might want to have some explanations and disclaimers on the intro page. --Gopher 04:57, 21 September 2006 (PDT)

Reprints/Miniseries/Related series

(first part of discussion moved from above) Reprints/Miniseries/Related series - I would just include the first two in the main Publication History page, especially since you can't seperate out Lost & Worlds given how crucial they are. Related series, I throw open to the floor without comment since I have no clue how to deal with L.E.G.I.O.N..

I would include those things on the main pages as well. My suggestion was to have separate pages that single out those topics in addition to being listed on the regular pages (sorry if I didn't make that clear). If I can't afford copies of all the original early issues, but would be interested in buying less expensive reprints, a page listing just reprints would be a heck of a lot more useful than seaching through 8 or 10 different pages for everything listed as a reprint and composing my own list. If I am already familiar with the main Legion series, but want to check to make sure I know about all the mini-series, it would be handy to have a separate list rather than have to scan through all the other pages. Also, a listing of Elseworlds issues would be handy.
Reprints (if you can find this topic buried this deeply in the discussion) - I've already got a list of reprints on the web at [1], sorted based on original issue. We can incorporate this list into the main publication history based on publishing date, and also use it as the basis for Legion Publication History/Reprints based on original issue. Hopefully there's an easy way to convert HTML tables to wiki tables, if not then I'll end up just doing a lot of search/replace. Omnicom 23:24, 22 September 2006 (PDT)
I'm thinking that we need to list reprints both by original issue and by reprinted issue. Depending upon why someone would be searching for a reprint, one or the other way would more conveniently target their search. I have built samples of how these two lists would look on Legion Publication History/Reprints. The format is based heavily upon the look and feel of the other parts of the LPH.
I dont know if there is a convenient utility to convert HTML tables to wiki tables, but even if there is, there would be no way for it to know what our page names are to create links. We're pretty much going to have to build it manually, but its no more difficult than other sections of the LPH. We can certainly use your page for the info in order to create the wiki version, and in fact, is one of the two places I personally check when listing reprints on individual issue pages elsewhere in the wiki. --Gopher 08:24, 23 September 2006 (PDT)

Annuals

"Legion of Super-Heroes v2/v3/v4 Annual" or "Legion of Super-Heroes Annual v1/v2/v3"? Right now, it's down as the first, but I'm liking it less and less the more I look at it... - Reboot (SoM) talk page 16:13, 25 October 2006 (PDT)

Pedantically, it depends on whether you look at it as the Annuals for LSH v2/v3/v4, or whether you consider LSH Annual to be a separate title of its own. Overstreet puts the Annuals with their regular title (like your first example) while the GCD considers them separate titles. I categorize my own collection like Overstreet, it's the main title plus the Annuals. -- Omnicom 17:51, 25 October 2006 (PDT)
I used to look at it as "annuals for...", but a few things (like Marvel rebooting their Annuals numbering while keeping their "partner" titles numbering continuous and effectively seperating the Annuals' volume numbering from the titles volume numbering as a result) is pushing me to look at them as seperate titles.
And I just bung LSH/Legionnaires/Annuals/SF&O/etc in chronological (continuity rather than publication) order for the most part, so it goes LSH 0, Lgs 0, LSH 62, Lgs 19 etc, rather than messing around with two or more sets which are really one [the Dead Earth Annuals and One Million issues are off on their own, since they have nothing to do with anything. Inferno, given that it's bookended with feeds out of and back into specific scenes in LSHv4 but is otherwise seperate, I'm never quite sure how to treat.]. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 18:35, 25 October 2006 (PDT)
Marvel changed their Annuals numbering to reflect the year (which actually makes more sense), but this isn't Marvel. DC has been pretty consistent with their Annuals numbering, always incrementing it by 1 regardless of how many years have passed since the last one (case in point: Action Comics Annual #10; #9 was in 1997). You were right the first time, it's the Annual for the series, at least the way I look at it.
I agree with keeping everything in chronological publication order but I'm not sure what you're referring to or asking about in your second paragraph. They should go in the main LPH regardless of continuity, based on publication date. -- Omnicom 22:18, 25 October 2006 (PDT)
Actually, Marvel have gone back to numbering... and started from #1 again. So there's now one more X-Men Annual #1 than there are X-Men #1s for one. And if you think I'm treating Marvel's (or DC's) annuals as a special case, gum tree up a, I'm changing my personal records at the very least so they treat Annuals as seperate series, Ann vX rather than vX Ann (which is what the second paragraph was mostly about, since you digressed into that area). - Reboot (SoM) talk page 05:01, 26 October 2006 (PDT)
That's why the Grand Comics Database lists the year of the first issue along with the series name, rather than volume/version number, so they have things like Legion of Super-Heroes Annual (1990). But since we're not doing it that way here, I vote to keep the Annuals with the parent title and not as a separate title. Looks like Gopher (if he chimes in) would be the tie-breaker. -- Omnicom 06:33, 26 October 2006 (PDT)
I've always considered the annuals to be part of the parent series, and many references treat them that way - primarily Overstreet, but many dealer catalogs, dcindexes, etc. The first place I encountered treating them as a separate series was here (I never really used the GCD before contributing to the Wiki). I'm not opposed to treating them as such, and in fact I have already created/referenced pages using this method for the Superman v1 annuals, but it feels counter-intuitive to me. I would prefer vX Ann X. -- Gopher 06:54, 26 October 2006 (PDT)

Sidebar and main page links

I don't know about you guys, but I find this publication history section very helpful and very useful, and I refer to it quite often. You've done a great job with it. Thanks to Duke for kick-starting it. However, in order to find it, I have to go to the Recent Changes page and navigate through several links to find what I'm looking for. I'd strongly recommend putting the big LPH block at the top of the Main page (with all of the options), and a single link to the main LPH page in the sidebar somewhere. -- Omnicom 22:23, 24 January 2007 (PST)

Couldn't agree with you more - it should be easier to access the LPH from anywhere on the site. For the casual visitor, its unlikely that they would even know the LPH exists. Of anything in the wiki so far, its the most likely feature to keep people coming back and to draw them in to other pages -- if they could only find it.
If we do change the main page, I would recommend putting the LSH cartoon section nearer the top of the page, as its a "hot" topic at present. --Gopher 04:21, 25 January 2007 (PST)
Other suggestions: put each "era" as a single horizontal stripe, rather than play games with columns; create a color key so that people will recognize that colors actually mean something; and put some frequently used categories on the main page (characters, storylines, tech, etc.) to make navigation easier. -- Omnicom 06:41, 25 January 2007 (PST)
I only had a couple of minutes yesterday, so I stuck the LPH link in the sidebar, but didn't have time to respond here.
Re: "play[ing] games with columns", the page gets considerably longer if you horizontally strip it.
I'm well aware the front page is less than ideal, and if you want to show me suggestions on how you would change it, you can copy the source to a test page (since, y'know, playing with the live page probably isn't a good idea, which is why LL locked it) and show me a better one. I'll admit it hasn't been a priority for me, and as I said I know it could be better. So, give me ideas on how to implement your suggestions. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 04:50, 26 January 2007 (PST)

Now for my next suggestion... I don't recall if we'd considered this or not, but it says on the main LPH page that "A series must have two or more Legion-related issues to merit its own page. Those series with only one Legion-related issue are represented on the Specials page." That's fine and I don't have a problem with that, but why not put links to all of the titles that are/will be in the Specials page, with redirects to the Specials page? If I want to look up, for example, the issue of Hex that the Legion appeared in, I'd like the LPH Titles page to include that, then clicking on the link to Hex redirects me to the Specials page. This way someone knows that we've included that series, whereas currently they don't know if we have it or not unless they go to the Specials page. -- Omnicom 16:29, 25 January 2007 (PST)

Sounds good to me. Feel free to build some or all of that, or if you don't, I'll get to it at some point. In general, I would say the top level LPH page needs some major work now that more people will be finding it. I'd like to see a general description of, well, the Legion's publication history, briefly touching on the major series. Also a general description of how the LPH is set up, and a bit more text with the Series links to round out that section. --Gopher 19:10, 25 January 2007 (PST)

Split 1980-1989

I've just split 1980-1989 (folding the rest of 1979 into the mix, since the last three-four months of it had been on '80-'89 to balance things a bit better, and renaming the '71-79 page to 1971-1978 in the process) into three (1979-1982, 1983-1986 and 1986-1989 respectively) because, although it wasn't quite as big as the monster that 1994-2004 had become, it was still almost as big as the first three of the five splits from that (1994-1996, 1997-1998 and 1998-1999) combined.

The only thing I'm wondering about is the first split point - I took the second split @ Gopher's Post-Crisis banner - which I took at the very start of 1983. Given that LSHv2 #300 and AdvComics #500 are in March there, should I move Jan/Feb 1983 back into the '79-82 page or just leave it? - Reboot (SoM) talk page 07:44, 8 February 2007 (PST)

Unless there's a really compelling need to split a year between two pages (like for a reboot), I don't see why you'd want to leave early 1983 separated from the rest of the year.
Why was the specific cutoff point in 1986 chosen for Pre-/Post-Crisis switchover point? Is it based on the publication of Crisis #10 (which was when the multiverse rebooted)? And we should also add in Crisis #1-10 to the list.
Oh, and somehow I think I just noticed that your year banner is based on the actual date of publication rather than cover date. For the casual reader, won't they be looking for the cover date? -- Omnicom 09:22, 8 February 2007 (PST)
The Pre-Crisis/Post-Crisis "split" is actually the end of Duke's original page, which was specifically Pre-Crisis. I never did know exactly why he chose that exact point to end, simply beginning the Post-Crisis from where he left off. I'm in favor of splitting on the even year, regardless of story considerations. Its immediately apparent to any visitor why the page breaks there, and if we have to make other splits in the future we are less and less likely to find convenient story groups as the number of issues covered on each page gets reduced. --Gopher 20:05, 8 February 2007 (PST)
Technically, Post-Crisis starts when the Multiverse was rebooted and collapsed into the Universe at the end of Crisis #10, which was the January 1986 issue. So everything February cover-dated and later is Post-Crisis. (Of course, with the way the LPH is set up now, that means we have to look at the November 1985 issues to find the Feb. 1986 books....) -- Omnicom 22:14, 8 February 2007 (PST)
Actually, it didn't. There's no "clean" Post-Crisis line that fits all books, but fundamentally "Post-Crisis" starts when the continuity changes hit a character and/or they forgot the multiverse (in the latter case, except for Harbinger, Pariah, Lady Quark, Psycho Pirate and maybe one or two other characters I've forgotten). For Superman, Wonder Woman and All-Star Squadron, especially, that was some months down the line (Superman didn't become Post-Crisis until Man of Steel #1, cover date Oct 1986, Wonder Woman had a Pre-Crisis Legend of Wonder Woman mini (last issue cover-dated Aug 1986) before her Post-Crisis series (WW1 cover-dated Feb 1987) came out, All-Star-Squadron hit with #60 (c.d. Aug 1986), which changed with a scene where the ASQ, including Superman, Batman & co had a picture taken, but when the picture was looked at, Plastic Man and various others had replaced them (although Green Arrow & Speedy were accidentally left). Various other examples also exist (Batman: Year One for instance was some time after the CoIE mini ended), but I don't recall the details off the top of my head. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:48, 12 February 2007 (PST)
Re: cover dates...
In the title, "Legion Publication History". Ergo, publication dates are the primary means - and it's not as if the cover dates are hidden, every issue AFAICS has them.
In addition, cover dates are inconsistant (they can vary from pretty much on the nose to three months late), are to a certain extent capricious (many Annuals and one-shots are dated only by year; Superboy's Legion has NO cover dates of any sort, as with many prestige format issues; and there's the occasional otherwise-weird one, like Showcase '96 #12 being dated "Winter 1997" after #11 was Dec 96). How do you order these cases if you're headering by cover date? If you're headering by pub-date, this stuff isn't a concern. - Reboot (SoM) talk page 17:48, 12 February 2007 (PST)
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