posted
It was twenty years ago today that I first logged onto the Net. To think about that makes it truly amazing to me -- for once, putting that overworked word to perfect use -- to contemplate what the Internet has done to change, stir up, and benefit our lives.
Back on a cold day in 1983, it was the massive "gated" CompuServe community, as well as the Chicago Bulletin Board System of Ward Christensen, inventor of the fabled "Xmodem" -- the first means of Net file transfer and error checking. And it was all at 300 bits per second, on a boxy Novation D-Cat modem sitting under my Western Electric phone. No Web, JPEGs, streaming audio, or IMs!
More toward the present, and seven modems later, it's heartening to have found so many generous, kind, intelligent, fascinating people to make Net friendships and contacts. I'm sure I've met fewer than one in 20 Net correspondents in person. That doesn't make the other 19 any less treasured -- the friends, the foes, the informative.
I wanted to post and share one of the more visual and resonant portions of what has knit this together for me. Yes, it's also a shameless bit of vanity.
As a net.persona, I've ended up making far more out of being "Greybird" than was ever included in the Legion books. Paul Levitz wrote no more than a half-dozen lines in "Who's Who in the LSH" 1 (1988) describing my beloved Dawnstar's winged younger brothers. Nobody depicted them in the published books.
It was a pleasant shock to realize how many talented people had done so, though, when I did some recent reckoning and reworking of files.
Net.friends and other artists had, since I re-entered Legion fandom five years ago, ended up creating at least twelve depictions of Greybird. I hadn't known this until I filed them all together.
This pteraphile -- who couldn't draw a single feather if his life hung in the balance -- encountered a dozen examples of a talented artist depicting "him." A character not just signifying a tiny niche-in-a-niche comics interest, but also having no more "official" published existence than a scrap of well-buried descriptive text. Now, I ask you, just how remarkable is all that?!
My being around to obsess over all things and characters Starhaven-ish was certainly part of it, as only one of these works was created before I swamped Legion forums with my musings.
I am profoundly grateful and appreciative. For friendship, for the grist of debate and dispute, for often unsung fan talent, for the spontaneously ordered human miracle of the Net ... and for so many works showing the winged fella I'd have liked to be, in my mind's eye.
The least I could do would be to name and thank those artists with a display of small scans of what they created. They were made first of all for stoking their own talents and not "for me," when it gets to essentials -- but nonetheless they were also stoking my inner life.
(The scans below don't link to larger versions, but if any of 'em interest you, I'll gladly send a full-sized copy along. Send me an IM or e-mail.)
Thank you also to all denizens of LegionWorld.net for putting up with and being so kind to this wing-beset fellow, now less, I hope, of a fractured spirit. And even with his being far too wordy, here and elsewhere!
[ September 22, 2005, 01:51 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Christian, a regular in the LegionFiction Yahoo! Group and in many other fan forums, created a Christmas card two years ago for Legion fans. It showed four gender-reversed Legion heroines amidst the tinsel. (I'll send that along in LW.net later this month.)
He later said to me that he wasn't necessarily imagining that a gender-swapped Dawnstar would turn into one of her brothers, but he was delighted that it seemed to work out that way!
Last Spring, Christian created a Greybird original and colored it. He'd been experimenting for some time with hairstyles (Dean, take note!) and wanted to give me a lion's mane. Never had that much on my head, but how could I say no? Even if it got in the way of flying? {g}
[ September 22, 2005, 02:04 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Saber Girl, a charming and talented member of my Pteraphiles Group, had read the first running vignette-or-chapter of my still far-from-finished tales of the winged couple Windrider and Silverbird.
She titled the sketch inspired by that piece "Silverbird returns to Earth," but wanted me to know that it was also meant as a personal reflection. I can't deny it, as I did put many of my own dreams and wishes into those stories.
[ September 22, 2005, 02:07 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Our own Poverty Lad made a truly colorful and adept set of portraits of LMBP-member-inspired Legionnaires this past Summer. They were taken two at a time, though, in the spirit of Amalgam Comics! In this one, Pov melded yours truly with Timber Wolf. Well, I always liked having Brin in the family ... in a fan-fiction "interview," I even had him marrying my sister.
[ September 22, 2005, 02:12 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Last year, Yellow Kid (now recently arrived at LW.net) created anime-ish depictions of many LMBPers by combining and modifying art available elsewhere. Most were done in the Bruce Timm style from the animated "Justice League."
In Spring 2001, YK had generated portraits of LMBPers with the faboo HeroMachine software. I was amazed when he described what it could do. That was my first inkling of a source of real pleasure. (On this one, I tweaked my skin color. We're light-coppery on Starhaven.)
It was so captivating that I ended up rendering and tweaking HM Version 1 portraits of my siblings and myself last year. Yes, if you didn't know by now, I do really like that mid-rise which Mike Grell designed for Rokk Krinn. And stop that snickering! It works in a climate-controlled civilization, dangnab it {g}
[ September 22, 2005, 02:18 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Here are portraits of me with each of my siblings.
Our retired leader Crujectra, a.k.a. Newcru, creates highly skillful faces in his sketches, including in this quite unexpected sketch of Dawny and me exulting on a mountain crag. I recall him being dissatisfied with my wings, but I can assure him that I wasn't!
(SatyQ of LegionPics, a.k.a. Jerry Loomis, colored this portrait and added the lightning storm in the background.)
The larger group is of characters in Legion fanfic stories written, and here illustrated, by Ben Weiss, for many years a regular in the rec.arts.comics.dc.lsh newsgroup. (He and I ran a Usenet Legion fan-fiction contest together, but since then, I've lost track of him.)
In this alternate take from mid-TMK onwards, siblings, sons, and daughters of Legionnaires join other high-powered folk of their own age to start a new, brash teenaged challenge to the established Legion 30somethings. This quite diverse group -- and, yes, that's a Dominator in the front row -- included my brother Greatfire, spreading his white pinions in the back, as well as me. Only three stories resulted from this premise, but they were fascinating.
[ September 22, 2005, 02:23 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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Dean Lee created the wholly remarkable (and wholly hand-busting!) multiple portrait of the original LMBP members, displayed on the first page of the Outpost site. I was over on the right side. Not that much detail with such a huge membership, but he did manage to make me quite buff.
SketchLad built on this with a solo portrait, in computer-colored pen and ink, a few weeks later. I am, and remain, in that lovely archaic phrase, most beholden to him for it!
[ September 22, 2005, 02:26 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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And finally ... Our LMBP friend Freekinos did the kinetic and exciting original sketches of many LMBPers. Many months later, Loser Lad (currently with a computer out of commission) did them up in burnished colors. He even shaded each feather with careful gradients!
That kind of attention to detail merits more than one raised cyber-beer, gladly hoisted for each of the other artists, as well.
[ September 22, 2005, 02:29 AM: Message edited by: Greybird ]
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
It's hard to believe that the internet has been around for so long! Congrats on your anniversary GBird, ands thanks for sharing the pictures.
-------------------- "Tempus Fugitive" the final part of the Adventures of Dream Boy series, set in the Three-Boot Universe. Read it only in the Bits o' Legionnaire Business Forum.
From: here, more often than not | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
20 years ago I was entering my Senior year in high school in a small Nevada town. We didn't even have a computer class let alone computers or 'internet access'. The closest I came was a year later while working on the town's weekly newspaper when one of our succession of owners got us access to the Associated Press from a computer he brought into the office.
Man, we've all come a long way.
Congratulations Steve and thanks for posting the pics. I think there is even a couple I hadn't seen before so those were a real treat.
posted
Wow, in August of '84, I'd just graduated from high school, and went down to California to hang out with friends for a month. I think we had a typewriter in my house. It wasn't even electric. We had Atari, though...
Hyperpath: Email this page to someone!
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