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.
  • 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.
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)
  • 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)
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