Such Is The Stuff of Legends

Today is the one hundred fifty-first anniversary of the Civil War battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American history ... so far, at least. It's also my nephew Mathew's (Allan and Lesa's eldest son) seventeenth birthday, and I'm sure the two events are not connected! Ha. I took a few minutes to type out the rough outline of what I wanted to post yesterday on my home computer and then mailed it to myself so when I next get to my email in the morning I can see where I want to go with this. It helps with Martha by a quarter at nine at work and the kids in school and me in the house.

I must get to Grand Slam again. Saturday afternoon I was out walking on Main Street with Sarah since Jeffrey was at his classmate Jackson's birthday party at Planet Pizza (in return for spending time with Jeffrey strolling Dakota Square Mall when Sarah was at her friend Addy's birthday party at Splashdown that morning). While Jeffrey was laser tagging away at this awesome Star Wars-themed birthday party (and I thought I was a fan), Sarah and I took in Gideon's Trumpet, Cookies For You, and made our last stop which Sarah, love her to life, had to get me out of there buying one thing.

That's what the title refers to, the first issue of the DC Comics limited series Legends. I already had issues three through six as well as some of the interconnecting issues relating to the plot, essentially Darkseid the lord of Apokolips spearheading an attempt to ruin the Earth by smearing its heroes (Superman, Batman, etc.) through his own minions and encouraging others to do so. This came out the year after DC's Crisis On Infinite Earths, that comics company's fifty-year housecleaning – and it's quite a big house. But I digress.

My mandate from Darkseid was clear: “Destroy the man's legend,” he said to me, “and the man himself will become irrelevant.” I wonder.

If you get to read this series, it's a great one. If you can get hold of the twenty or so interconnecting titles to Legends' main storyline, that's great too but it's not a requirement. Bringing Captain Marvel (“Shazam!”) into the main DC Universe, our government without then-President Reagan's (yes, our fortieth president makes several cameos in the series, though he does get led into signing that executive order banning all superhero activity) knowledge recruiting a team of supervillains to deal with what the Justice League couldn't, and a showdown at the Lincoln Memorial! What more could you want?

For it seems to me now that a hero's legend is, in essence, the lengthened shadow of the man himself – and that shadows cannot die so long as there remain great men to cast them.

said by Desaad in The Warlord #115, cover date March 1987

But let's get into what I and we did this weekend, continuing from paragraph one. You know about the birthday parties. Friday night after work I took the kids to grab some dinner at McDonald's and brought there to the Heritage Park to see Wreck-It Ralph outdoors. There were about three hundred fifty people there and of course not everyone was watching the movie (or could hear it, I'd think), but it was a lot of fun! When I first saw “Fix It Felix Jr.”, the game that Wreck-It Ralph's a character in, I wondered where I'd seen it before too! Q*bert, Pac Man, and the original RASTER GRAPHICS! Yowza.

Saturday morning before the birthday parties the kids came to Breakfast With The Boys with me; they didn't fight it too much as I was bringing them to their parties. They and the ten men there at church besides me enjoyed French toast and scrambled eggs, and afterward while my kids went into our playroom/nursery I went into Bible study with four other men of two of the parables in Luke 15, the lost sheep and the lost coin. (The third one's the lost son, perhaps better known to us as the prodigal son.) Read those and find that both the man and the woman rejoiced when they found what was lost!

I need to be reminded of that, a lot. And stories can be our best teachers, recalling to our minds the most basic truths of our culture, asking us what we believe. According to the Wikipedia article on Legends, the story is based on the Old Testament book of Job, with the Phantom Stranger I presume in the role of the LORD, Darkseid as Satan the tempter, and the heroes in one way or another as the title character. (I'm also reading Job chapter by chapter now, so that struck me.) And I also finished another book a few days ago that helped me look at some legends I'd grown up with a different way …

“... And why? Simply because it is unexpected. Father-in-law or not, you are a fool, Cepheus, a pitiful fool, and if by word or deed you seek to prevent me from taking your daughter, you will be a dead fool. I do not ask your leave, I am announcing my intention. Say good-by to your parents, Andromeda.”
what Perseus says in the next book (see below)

Heroes & Monsters of Greek Myth by Bernard and Dorothy Evslin and Ned Hoopes (ISBN 0590434403) originally appeared in 1967, and the accompanying header illustrations as well as the dialogue show it! Groovy, in the way that How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie reads jazzy, it being originally published in 1936. One can read it so well, and you learn every time how much of our wordage comes down from the legends and we don't even realize it. (Factoid: our word cloth comes from the name of the first Fate who spun the thread of human life.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to make an attempt at something legendary myself.

David