Episode 217 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Disparation Vol 1 #13

America’s Boldest Legacy!

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Even before starting the episode, I love this cover. I mean, you’ve got a different Legacy, is he someone we know? I can’t tell. But the detail that really catches me is the Big Dipper on his chest. Like, there’s going to be some huge significance behind that and I can’t wait to find out what it is.

Ah yes, hot D&D magic item discourse, that’s what we come here for. :’)

I guarantee someone actually raised their hand then and got the scare of their lives.

Okay, we need to know more about these alternate Bunkers and Absolute Zeros now! Get your questions in!

The best part of alternate Legacies is different powers. I also like that this family doesn’t have the problem of the Paul Parsons line, and I noticed before they mentioned it!

Potato corn, good lord. XD The ears have eyes, better ice up the whole rat!

If cinnamon squirrels don’t show up in Sentinel Comics…

Other countries are like, this ain’t a scene…

I can envision a scene of Wraith trying to give Paul a martial arts lesson and it just not going well for either of them.

I bet Pauline ends up being the first to adopt and bring this idea to light.

No evil lawnmower? But there’s an xtreme lawnmower in the Extremiverse…

Oh! And there the symbol comes back around, and I probably should have known that. :B

I wonder what the heck flag Adam found. c.c That was the longest cover section ever.

Really hope there’s a Boldest Legacy variant in DE.

My flag theory was Georgia, but that isn’t quite right either - they have crosses in the corners as well as the big one.

Welp, I think this might be a contender for one of my favorite episodes. This story was awesome!

I hope we get more of this particular alternate universe. I loved the concept, and loved the alternate history that they built in the first half. And I liked the alternate take on what superheroes could do, besides the old, out-dated “crime fighter” idea. It reminds me of the take from the Wearing the Cape series, where the capes are first responders, and are more involved with stuff like floods and earthquakes than brank robberies.

I actually found it!

It’s not listed on Wikipedia, so I have to assume it’s an older flag or just one they don’t use as much anymore.

I wanna live with a cinnamon squirrel / I could be happy the rest of my life
Apologies to Neil Young…

This disparate universe has Ted Lido’s® Puffed Potato-Corn Snacks™, product of Mordengrad! Find them at your local convenience store or supermarket today!

Definitely second the Definitive Edition variant!!
Edit: the flying superhero emoji comes out totally different when posted.

This episode with its revisionist history did raise a question about how similar the Metaverse is to our universe. I’m sure they’ve addressed this in various contexts before. Maybe I’ll just write in for some clarity on the point I’m thinking of. Overall, very enjoyable! Amazing how it can still feel like something fresh and not just beating Legacy content into the ground as the flagship character.

I admit this episode was a mix of my appreciating how uplifting it was but occasionally finding C&A’s perception of history a little bit head-tilting. (The Ireland bit in particular I was scratching my head what Joe Parsons could have done to fix that unless he has Superpowered Diplomat Charm as a superpower.)

Were they implying he prevented “The Troubles” because he somehow helped Ireland gain full independence back in the 1920s?

It is a little bit like casting Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Maybe they call him Red cause he’s Irish?

Outright stated it, yes.

(For context why I found this odd: The reason NI got split off wasn’t due to the British army not being sufficiently driven off but due to the civilians. Namely, for a lot of complex reasons the region that is now NI was predominately Protestant inhabitants, the rest of Ireland was predominately Catholic, and the two groups adamantly didn’t want to coexist and wanted control of the resulting free island all to themselves. So splitting off NI was something that made nobody happy but was what British & Irish leaders thought was most likely to keep things at a dull roar. Hence why you’d need a diplomat to resolve this.)

There was also some stuff in the episode about Joe getting the IRA to be less violent while helping them when IIRC the IRA didn’t go off the rails in the ways the episode discussed until the 70s.

I was able to see the big dipper = underground railroad connection but the colors being a buffalo soldier uniform were a surprise (to be fair most buffalo soldiers I have seen were black and white photos or illustrations)

The MLK as Democrat Vice President made me double take, because I remember reading some things claiming he was part of the Republican party (mostly just word of mouth claims from family members, if I recall correctly), but I looked into it a bit more and the timeline seemed just about right. Still unsure he would run for VP, but I’m no expert on his history.

I was legit thinking Cinnamon Girl-themed Squirrel Girl XD

Oh, that part must’ve gotten lost in the shuffle of everything else for me. Admittedly I don’t know all the details of the Republic vs. North Ireland conflict. Maybe I need to go back and watch Patriot Games, as I’m sure that’s a completely factual historical documentary.

The response to that in the Metaverse is what I’m curious about. Of course it’s just a single issue, but did Sentinel Comics readers in 1990 see a black president and think “That’s absurd!”? Nevermind there had been a black superhero for at least two decades prior. And then fast forward to November 2008, assuming the Metaverse does parallel ours that closely.

Oh, my double take had nothing to do with a black VP, it was entirely MLK and aligning to a political party.

I admit the only reason the MLK as VP thing didn’t make me double-take is because Chrononauts already did it. (Albeit Looney Labs made him Nixon’s VP instead.)

I really liked this one! Obviously there’s a good reason that superhero comics (and, uh, all other fiction) tend to hew pretty closely to the real world - it’s less work that way - but it does tend to create the impression that the best superheroes can accomplish is supporting the status quo. Which feels kind of defeatist! So I enjoy it a lot when I get stories like this one, where a line of superheroes bring about a bunch of changes throughout history.

Also it was a pretty tiny note in the questions, but I would love to take more of a look at the political implications of supers in this world (or Universe 1) - C&A implied the distribution is fairly uniform, and that the USA having five government affiliated supers is mainly just an extension of that…so looking at the list of most populous countries as at 2022, China and India would both have about five times as many home-grown supers as the USA, and Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil would all have somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the number.
(Russia, meanwhile, would have a little less than half as many as the USA, and my home of Australia would have about 1/30th as many. We are…not very populous.)
Obviously there’s more to a country’s influence on the world than how many superheroes live there, so it makes sense that the countries in Universe 1 look a lot like they do in our own world, but as countries wander into this century and start to realise what an incredible resource they could have, things might perhaps get a little less predictable.
Anyway, it’s an interesting thought!

A Nixon-King ticket doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m not well versed in the politics of that time. Who’s to say it matters in an alternate reality anyway? I don’t know that much about George McGovern, and I had to do a little Googling because I think I had him crossed with George Wallace (also ran for Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972). Now THAT pairing would be completely antithetical to the real-life MLK!

Honestly, I was hearing that bit & I was thinking “Oh, wow, Canada wouldn’t have many. I guess we could do a government sponsored team of heroes who were created in experiments.”

And then I realized I just made Weapon X.

Well, yes and no. It’s not just population, because a lot of heroes are tech-created heroes, and those are likely to be spread out based on GDP. China wouldn’t have a lot of them until relatively recently, for example, although they’re probably caught up by the present day.

This is why my head canon for the Cauldron stuff is “this is all the international heroes that show up in various countries licensed Sentinels lines”, a la the MarvelUK stuff in the 70’s/80’s.

General aside that the idea of MLK being a Republican or VP to a Republican in and of itself is not entirely as weird as it sounds, because the parties used to be a bit flipped and more mixed politically compared to how they are now and it was Nixon’s Southern Strategy that is what solidly shuffled the Democrats and Republicans into how they are now.

“Flipped” doesn’t fully convey the nuance of it all, but that is exactly why I was questioning the choice to make him a Democrat VP. In case people didn’t know, there was strong support for segregation in the Democratic party up into the 60’s. Which is why it would make more sense for him to be a Democrat VP in 72, but I still don’t see that happening.

Having MLK run for president or VP for either party just doesn’t make sense to me, but it is definitely something that would happen in a comic book! Especially since the issue was released during a stint of Republican presidents.

Yeah, there’s a lot of nuance. But I can imagine a scenario where an MLK that survives his assassination attempt gets recruited by McGovern or someone else, as Nixon’s Southern Strategy starts to really pick up steam. I can see the VP role being offered to King as a way to cement some kind of anti-war coalition.

Also, on this subject, I appreciate how C&A point out just how old (or rather, how young) King would be in the time of the comics. The point of how recent some of this stuff was is something that is hard to get across for many born after the late 70s, but before the rise of the internet and the sharing of stories it enabled (myself included, late GenX, here).

Yeah, I admit I was a little influenced by how a popular disingenuous argument from shall we say certain elements is “Lincoln and the Republicans were the ones who ended slavery” and having to constantly point out that’s because the parties were differently aligned back then.

A more accurate way I should have put it is that the matter of racism was still often heavily aligned along Union/Confederate lines regardless of party and that’s why Nixon’s strategy worked to begin with was realigning the matter more strongly along party lines.

Along similar lines, a popular way to blow people’s minds IRL is to point out the fact that Anne Frank and MLK were actually born in the same year.

And Harriet Tubman died in 1913. Look up her last portrait, if you want a good example of a “I don’t have time to deal with this ***” look.

On a lighter note, a mind blowing comparison is also the Nintendo company (1889) predates the publication of Dracula (1897) and Sherlock Holmes (1892).

I had a hard time swallowing King as president specifically in 1984, which in our world Reagan won with nearly 98% of the electoral vote. Also the Cold War was a strong force driving voting back then, and King was known to be sympathetic to socialism (though anti-communism).

Maybe the point was that King was just that insanely popular, but I feel like we missed some geopolitical stuff that made this plausible.

Considering what we’ve lived through in the past few years, I’m willing to accept the idea that history could go in any direction given any slight nudge, no further evidence required. @_@

I have a lot of faith that our history can go in one direction given a slight nudge, but it isn’t that one.

The way I look at it is that’s something a comic book company would do. It doesn’t make sense, but considering it came out in 1990, when George H. W. Bush was President after both of Reagan’s terms, it’s likely a comic book company would make a story about a history far different from our own, ignoring the facts you mentioned.

So, I wanted to note something, outside of the alt-history rabbit hole that, while fun, is note entirely game relevant. Anyone notice the enumeration of powers? Lot of stuff that’s VERY close to the original Legacy. Except that regeneration bit. Almost like… a Variant that, instead of the Galvanize power, would have some kind of self-heal…

Plus, TBH, nothing happening right now is the result of a slight nudge, it’s all been literal decades of brewing. There are various unexpected things that caused a lot of them to arrive quicker and more bundled than expected, but all of them were a bubble waiting to pop at some point.

I mean, that’s history all over, right? We look back and see these tipping points - assassinations, great leaders, famous inventors - but I feel like a lot of the time what’s really behind events is just the thoughts and feelings of thousands of people whose names we’ll never know, and the tipping point is a convenient thing that we can pin it on. People’s choices definitely matter, both historically and in the present, but if we’re being strictly realistic it’s hard to suggest that just one person, even one superhero, could change things to that huge of an extent.
On the other hand, if superheroes didn’t change things, there’d be no story in the first place, so I guess I’m willing to give it a pass there!

Out of all the Disparation stories we’ve gotten so far, this is the one I most want a follow up on. The Baron Blade plot was fine; showing how this Legacy is more proactive and inspires the people to make change, but now that this alt-history is established we could have a longer main plot with even more interesting character and historical deviations.

I imagine based on the stinger it would be about Legacy gathering his own Freedom Five, and there’s a lot of potential there. Dawn and Chairman feel like good villains for a setting like this. It would be cool to see more direct results of the historical changes, like an independent Ireland somehow resulting in the new version of a hero or villain.

I really hope we see this again once they start taking Disparation questions again.

I feel like there’s something you can do with Shrieker/Glamour, since iirc she’s Irish. Not sure what though

The other idea I had was having Wraith be a descendant of someone who fought alongside Joe Parsons III in the Irish Civil War, since there’s a fun story there about legacy (pun semi-intended).

I would honestly prefer they just quietly forget the Irish bit ever was said as to put it very very delicately I don’t think C&A actually understand what is/was actually going on there. (The fact that Fanatic is already an amazingly problematic example of what passes for a “Catholic hero” in Sentinels makes me further not really interested in this.)

If they do continue this I’d rather it stay centered in the black American experience (which they did put in the effort to educate themselves on) and explore more of how getting rid of Nixon and Reagan in favor of an anti-Vietnam War advocate and a civil rights advocate would have changed our landscape.

I finally caught up on this episode, and like many of you, I really enjoyed this reimagining of Legacy! As I get older, I find I appreciate the idea of a hero doing the right thing despite institutional inertia, biases, and historical behaviors more and more.

Which reminds me, I’m still eager to hear the Termi-Nation story expanded!

I always presumed that the Immovable Rod stays in a position that is relative to the core of the world, so the rod rotates and revolves as the planet does. You don’t need to be a flat+Oerther.