The good people of Metropolis will always be surprised by visiting aliens, for instance, even tho their number one superhero is himself an alien. Roger Stern told a story, years ago, of the painful task of having to edit a Jack Kirby script (EDIT KIRBY!! HAND ME THAT RAZOR...!!!) in which Jack had Captain America encounter a crashed flying saucer and then, at the end, spend a few panels musing over this "first contact" with alien life. (This was NOT a flashback!)

Thing is, this is how it HAS to be done. Imagine how different the world would be if the Strange and Unusual were as commonplace as they are in comics and television series. That world would quickly become on with which the readers/viewers could not even begin to identify.

One of the issues with the Legion of Super-Heroes is that, while super-heroes abound and there's all sorts of soap operatic interconnectivity with the characters, the world in which they live is all but completely unrelatable.

The X-Men spend very little time in the "real world," yet it is always there somewhere in the background, with its various themes, promises, disappointments, and dangers waiting for the team to return to it.

The Legion's future is either unremarkable in all ways or it is only one thing, like a planet from Star Trek where the culture of the spot they beam down is the culture of the entire world. Sometimes the Legion's future is all about war with the Dominators. Or it is all about youthful repression. Or it is all about the Earth having destroyed itself.

Whatever it is, it is not a context with which the reader has any inherent connection or familiarity. It's just one more impossible thing on top of the other six they're being asked to believe before breakfast.

The New Gods has similar issues, but at least the Earth is still there to be menaced by all these cockamamie weirdos. We know the Earth. We get it. I may not see the particular appeal of Supertown, but I get it when Detroit is about to get an army of parademons dropped on top of it.

The Legion's surrounding are either all clean lines and spaceships or all rubble and small Giffen-fires smoldering on every side... Sometimes Mordru or, Heaven help us, Glorith takes over reality and things get all mideval for an issue or twelve, then back to clean lines or rubble...

It gets worse when Legionnaires are lost in time and must fight to find a way home again (this happens a LOT...) We, the reader, don't particularly care if they ever get home to that place we felt no affinity for. Heck, it's more fun watching them have to haggle over cab fare or try to figure out a parking meter. We understand those things. Why would we want to go back to where things are only all corrupt politicians (except for whichever Legionnaire's Mom or Dad happens to be President of the Earth that issue) or all plasti-domed cities... That stuff is just not interesting... The cab fare thing was at least kind of real.

Years back, I held court with friends on the topic of Professor Xavier's wheelchair. "C'mon!," I argued, "He knows Reed Richards. Hank McCoy's a super scientist in his own right. Prof. X could even phone Tony Stark if he wanted to... And yet he gets around in this backwards-tech, old-style wheelchair..."

Later, when the fans who were my age and who had obviously come to some of the same conclusions I had took over the book, there was Xavier in his golden, gleaming Shi'Ar tech single-person hovercraft, imperious... powerful... unrelatable.

And I had to admit I was wrong. From a storytelling perspective the clunky old wheelchair I found so appalling said that Prof. X was in fact injured and unable to walk. The world's most powerful mind was trapped in a body with non-functioning legs.

The 90's-era Shi'Ar hovermobile says "spacecraft" or "alien tech." Probably "heavily armed" as well. It does not convey in that same instant moment the wheelchair did what the essence of that character was.

Without those little moments, those little touchstones, to bring us back to the world in which we live, the whole messhuginah contrivance of comic storytelling comes apart.

Just as many believers here pick and choose from amongst the vast array of available religious dogma which elements sound right to them ("I believe God is Love and would never cruelly punish His children," "All dogs go to Heaven," or the always entertaining, "She respects and defends all Her living creatures...") I can picture intelligent, clear-headed denizens of our favorite fictional worlds allowing for there to be various dimensions and realms about which we know very little except that their inhabitants have powers, believe themselves to be Gods, and may have convinced our primitive ancestors of it. "I'M not buying it, of course, but some Australopithecus just out of the trees might..."

Zauriel, the Spectre, and the Phantom Stranger, whose existence literally prove aspects of Holy Scripture, could possibly even provide "proof" to those of a certain temperment that those stories were based on something, but clearly are not, in fact, true as the church would have us believe. The power of prayer or the notion that we all have angels watching over us, even eternal life after death, one might sniff, none of that is given concrete form by the presence of these characters. Therefore, we see how one could be fooled into believing in such things by drawing the wrong conclusions from those bits we DO see...

In trying to come up with an example to fit Glen's criteria above, so far the best I've been able to do is Shaggy and Scooby, who believe in the ghost every single time, are wrong, and come back next week to do it again. Of course, they do look kind of foolish doing so. I find the enormous talking dog a little scary myself... :-)

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AAUUUGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!