LNH History

This is the out-of-character history of the LNH imprints. For in-character histories, see History of Earth-20 and History of the Looniverse.

The Chaos Age

1992

• April 27: Bill Sherman signs off a rec.arts.comics post by referring to himself as Spelling Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

• April 29: Dan'l "The Ahkond of Swat" Danehy-Oakes responds by assuming the name of California Kid and declaring himself part of a new legion, born from the fires of RAC: the Legion of Net.Heroes! RAC posters love this idea and a whole long thread begins, where people choose silly names and powers.

• May 6: One Steven Librande responds to all this by declaring himself the ingenious Doctor Killfile, who will destroy the LNH with his patented Kill-o-Ray! Various RAC posters respond by RPing as their LNH characters, joining into battle against Doctor Killfile in true 27-to-one hero fashion. This is the beginning of the long RP thread that becomes the Cosmic Plot Device Caper, the first Chaotic Add-On Cascade in LNH history, and the beginnings of LNH as a storytelling universe.

• Early-to-mid-June: Due to the erratic internet access outside of universities in those early days, the CPDC threads are abandoned until the next semester.

• September 1: The Two-and-a-Half Month Gap ends with Scavenger issuing the Call to Arms. LNH storytelling revs up again, with all kinds of new authors including Drizzt, Dvandom and the chaos-creating wReam jumping in to revive the saga. Many iconic characters are created in the chaotic and contradictory post-Gap threads, including Continuity Champ, Acton Lord and Ultimate Ninja. Scav develops his storyline into 501 Blues: The Long Road to Nowhere.

• September 10: As Scav continues The Long Road to Nowhere largely independent of all the other add-on thread shenanigans, Drizzt begins writing an epic story, involving most of the LNH, which would create a coherent plot and sort out the post-Gap add-on chaos once and for all: the Cry.Sig on Infinite Net.Earths! The Cry.Sig, as the LNH's first grand cosmic battle royale story, would inspire the structure of many tales to come, and introduce a net.villain who would eventually cast a long shadow over the Omnilooniverse: the Crossover Queen.

• September 30: rec.arts.comics is removed and replaced by a number of different groups, including rec.arts.comics.misc, the new home of the LNH – but not without controversy, as some posters see the stories as inappropriate on a discussion-focused group.

• October 3: Cry.Sig finishes, as does The Long Road to Nowhere three days later. Their conclusions signal the transition of the LNH from chaotic freeform RP to serial storytelling, with posts imitating the structure of ongoing superhero comics.

The Golden Age

• Somewhere in early October: alt.comics.lnh is created, in an attempt to stem the flamewars over the LNH's presence on rec.arts.comics.misc. However, it is created without going thru the proper channels, and thus, many servers don't accept the group; while a.c.lnh became the group's new home, stories continued to be crossposted to RACM and continued to be controversial.

1993

• Dave Van Domelen begins Constellation, pulling together plot threads from his past LNH stories and RPG campagins to tell the story of a minor supervillain turned cosmic traveler who struggles to find a place in the Omnilooniverse. It establishes much of the LNH's cosmology.

• Michael Montoure creates the Patrol universe, the first Usenet comics fiction world outside the LNH, laying groundwork for the later creation of rec.arts.comics.creative. Dave Van Domelen was a significant early Patrol author (before leaving over creative differences) and crossed it over with his LNH work.

• Integrity Quest, Woody Incident and the formation of the Council of Elders

• Jeff McCoskey begins LNH Triple Play, a series which focuses on and develops the central pool of non-writer characters; it increases the sense of character depth and community in the LNH.

• Looniverse Adrift!

• The Net.Trenchcoat Brigade

• The Valentine's Ball

• Rob Rogers begins his popular, beloved and amazingly still active LNH series The Adventures of Easily-Discovered Man.

• Arthur Spitzer begins a decades-long streak of writing surreal and frequently disturbing LNH stories with JONG.

1994

• March: Before this point, new users to the Internet showed up every September as university students gained access, and were taught its customs and mores over the next year until a new wave of newbies showed up. In March 1994, AOL opened up its Internet service, and along with other means of access opening up further and further to the general public, ushered in an era where new users were constantly showing up, known as Eternal September. This includes the LNH, as new readers and writers arrive who never interacted with the original rec.arts.comics community.

• Tensions over crossposting LNH stories boil over as Mike Kelly, who'd created the founding LNHer Myk-El, takes the anti-crossposting side. wReam responds by revealing Myk-El as the long-hinted-at Legion traitor (a parody of the X-Traitor plotline in the 90s X-books) and having Ultimate Ninja kill him. Most of the "Council of Elders" approves this, but Dave Van Domelen objects, writing an issue of Constellation that retcons Myk-El's death. This all leads to the dissolution of the Council. Constellation #27 would remain a well-regarded issue even after everyone stopped caring about the Usenet drama that inspired it, which had quickly become a moot point as...

The Silver Age

• June: rec.arts.comics.creative is approved. In storytelling terms, this leads to Retcon Hour, the LNH's most sprawling and ginormous crossover to date, as wReamicus Maximus and other temporal threats take advantage of the newly recreated net.reality. The Legion traitor Contraption Man had come from the future to warn about is revealed as Contraption Man himself, the first in a long line of LNH plot resolutions that would make more sense than the Big Two comic plots they parodied. Two new series spin out of Retcon Hour, both of which end up significant:
  • Legion of Occult Heroes, by NTB writer Paul Hardy, collides the urban-fantasy-Vertigo-horror feel of the NTB with the LNH's sheer cosmic weirdness. Issue #4 ends up as one of the most influential single issues of all time, tapping the freely metafictional aspects of the LNH for intense philosophical drama.
  • Constellation is succeeded by the long-running and influential series Dvandom Force.

• The creation of RACC leads to the beginning of a whole slew of new storyworlds including Omega and ASH.

• Writer's Block Woman (and Mouse)

• Limp-Asparagus Lad begins

1995

• Misfits

• Jamas Enright begins writing for LNH with Fan.Boy.

• Crimes of the Brotherhood

• Flame Wars III, a smaller and self-contained crossover involving time travelers, which resolves Contraption Man's character arc and gives him a shot at redemption. After FW3, big "The Whole LNH" crossovers go on hiatus for a while, as the community gets big enough that it's hard to get everybody under the same umbrella.

• The Grand Tour

1996

• rec.arts.comics.creative becomes moderated by Russ Allbery.

• Fan.Boy is succeeded by the team book Alt.Riders (Though the final issues of Fan.Boy, a crossover with Misfits, would not be posted for quite a while.)

• Acton Lord becomes Kid Pocky.

The September Age

1997

• As the moderation of RACC makes the community more stable and self-sustaining, the level of newbies joining accelerates, especially those adolescents who would've been too young to participate in the early university-based era. This includes Chris Ireland, Jesse Willey, Amabel Holland and a number of her friends. RACC's existing culture cannot easily absorb them, and there is a significant amount of cultural clash.

• The clash hits its apex when Chris Ireland resurrects Sig.Lad without permission in Journey Inside a Ninja.

• Amabel Holland unleashes a flood of posts and characters not seen since the days of wReam. They were poorly received at the time, and she has evolved considerably as a writer since then and moved on to other things. However, many of these characters and concepts become surprisingly long-lived and successful, including Ultimate Mercenary, Ultimate Ninja's niece Nina (who became Ultimate Ninja II), and Teenfactor's heroine Carolyn Forge (who became Doctor Killfile II), as well as much of it forming the basis of LNH20.

• Cornelius Götz von Olenhusen comes up with the concept of RACCCafe, an absurd out-of-continuity anything-goes imprint based on Superguy's Author's Altiverse. Dave Van Domelen writes its first story post; Olenhusen follows up with a second that clarifies the rules and introduces the enduring pseudo-character of Example-Character Lad.

1998

• Beginning of Teenfactor, which would go on for a staggering 130 or so issues in a few years.

• Saviors of the Net, the first "The Whole LNH" Chaotic Add-On Cascade in (about) three years, and the harbinger of more to come. However, the Writers fall off it before finishing the story...

1999

• Rob Rogers begins the Chaotic Add-On Cascade Birth of a Villain. It starts off furiously active, but like Saviors, peters out before the storyline can finish...

• Dvandom Force and Tales of the LNH end, Panta erased from existence.

2000

• January 1: The Millennium happens. Nothing much changes, as tireless engineers had worked to prevent the Millennium Bug. Several LNH stories, such as Limp-Asparagus Lad Annual #1 and the Alt.Riders Year 2000 Special, are written to commemorate this event.

• The Team begins

• Another big cascade, Mutton Mania, launches. Unlike the last two, it not only manages to finish its story, but brings back Saviors of the Net!
  • Saviors ends up with a colorful conclusion, generally considered one of the best endings of an LNH story, and its format and content influence many stories going forward.

• Teenfactor ends in a spectacular fashion with the deaths of most of the cast.

The Dark Age

2001

• Posting slows down significantly, as Usenet begins a slow fall from relevance. Those writers who remain end up leading the direction of the LNH as a whole.

• With The Team and Alt.Riders being among the most active series of this period, the mood of the LNH becomes skewed towards horror and intense drama.

• However, Rob Rogers, still posting away, brings Birth of a Villain back from a two-year hiatus.

• Sig.ago go boom.

• September 11: the They Might Be Giants album Mink Car releases. Other world-historical events occur as well. (See Limp-Asparagus Lad #55, below.)

• Amabel Holland follows up Teenfactor with the grim and dramatic Pearly White but drops it after a few issues, concentrating on the absurd and comedic Journey Into Irrelevancy instead. This begins the slow pendulum swing back to traditional LNHian comedy.

2002

• The Continuing Misadventures of Miss Translation

• Amabel Holland begins Net.heroes on Parade, a more dramatic and horror-oriented series featuring many of the characters from Journey into Irrelevancy.

• Drew Nilium digitally jumps into fulltime LNH writing with Digital JUMP!, introducing the first of many variations of Kid Enthusiastic.

2003

• Flame Wars VI and Ultimate Mercenary

• The Team ends, Vel begins

2004

• The LNHY imprint launches

2005

• Jamie Rosen starts off Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2, beginning a gradual increase in comedy stories, Classic LNH nostalgia and stories featuring core LNH characters which lay the groundwork for events to come. The next few years would see a substantial burst in LNH activity, including many Volume 2 issues.

• Limp-Asparagus Lad #55

• Amabel Holland and Jamie Rosen form the 8FOLD imprint, which doesn't interact much with LNH but is very cool.

(ends with Adventures Beyond Comprehension #10?)

The Beige Age

[Infinite April 2007-2012]

• Infinite Leadership Crisis

• Arthur Spitzer segues the end of the ILC into Beige Countdown followed by Beige Midnight, the absurdist horror-comedy superhero epic event LNH story to end all LNH stories! (And it does! Kind of.)

• The original LNH Wiki

• The second LNH Wiki

2009

• In the midst of all the event-story upheaval, Drew Nilium comes back to RACC and starts putting out new LNH stories on an unpredictable but consistent basis, moving towards their role as one of the core writers of the post-Beige age.

2011

• 2011: East/West coast brotherhood split established, a plotline which was pretty much ignored at the time but got big later.

• Initial threads that lead to the creation of LNH20, Jeanne Morningstar returns.

2012

• Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #50, a big 20th anniversary story for the Classic LNH, is organized on the LNH Authors' Group. Though it won't be posted for two years, it manages to be a significant influence on the LNH anyway. This is partially in terms of content, with the characters featured in the story becoming part of the "core LNH" for the authors involved, but also because the main reason it takes so long is a flamewar that results in Martin Phipps leaving RACC.

• RACCCon 2012

• Beige Midnight ends.

• With Martin gone and Arthur stepping back, the overall direction of the LNH starts shifting again.

The Post-Beige Age

2013

• Flame Wars Final, unfortunately one of the many stories of the 2010s that was never finished due to Real Life pressure.

• Cover Gallery

• resurrection of the Legion of Net.Hippies

• Another LNH Title? Really? begun by Arthur Spitzer. (It would evolve into being loosely the Classic equivalent of Bite-Size Tales of the LNH.)

• Arthur posts JONG #69.

2014

• The commentary on JONG #69 leads to Just Another Multi-Writer Cascade That Will Probably Never Have an Ending.

• LNH v2 #50 is finally posted.

2015

• After a string of unfinished cascades and crossovers, Just Another Multi-Writer Cascade That Will Probably Never Have an Ending has an ending.

The Lull Age

2016

• WikiLull begins

• WikiLull is interrupted by the election

2017

• The Liminals

• The war of the East and West Coast Brotherhoods properly begins with a series of stories by Drew Nilium and Jeanne Morningstar in System Corruptors and Another LNH Title? Really?

• Oddball LNH resolved.

• The current LNH wiki

2019

• Just Another Cascade.GEKIJOBAN

• RACCCon 2019

2020

• A novel bat virus spreads across the world, and consequences ensue. Arthur posts a couple little stories commenting on the state of the world – Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths! #1 and #2.

The Sabertooth Age

• October 14th: WikiLull finally gets resolved with WikiLull EXHALE. To set this up, Drew writes a goofy, off-the-cuff story, Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths! #3, which plays with the status quo Arthur had set up months earlier.

• Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths! immediately explodes into tremendous activity, becoming a channel for the pent-up energy of quarantine, with over forty issues posted in the first month and a half.

2021

• Unlike many previous cascades that launched with a big burst of energy, after the burst fades, HHS manages to keep going a little at a time over the length of 2021.

2022

• HHS ends, with all the crazy off-the-cuff cascade ideas actually getting resolved.

The Post-Sabertooth Age

[2022-present]

In the time following HHS, the LNH is more narratively charged, powerful and queer than it's ever been. LNH has had its time, it's had the power, it's yet to have its finest hour!