The secret origin of Living Legends!
I have made no secret of my interest in playing with public domain characters to form a foundation for the Quadrant Universe. This was a purposeful choice on my part, but it vastly predates the era of convenient Wikia sites for such characters. When I first started to develop Living Legends it was all from a very cool book called the Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes by Jeff Rovin. Published in the early eighties, it attempted to be a comprehensive list of every superhero created up until that point. It also featured dozens of public domain figures I started to cobble together into a story idea.
From that the Living Legends concept was born, as eighteen of those characters are lost in time only to resurface seventy years after their disappearance. The foundation predated comic projects like Project: Superpowers and The Twelve by a few years, even if my final released volume came far later.
Old Soldiers was supposed to serve as the first novel of a trilogy. It stands on its own but leaves plot threads dangling for future installments for that reason. But as I set out to work on the second volume of the series, I quickly realized at the time I wasn't quite ready to bring it to life just yet. It was a complicated concept to begin with, and I found that I wasn't able to pull together the disparate threads as well as I would like for the ongoing series.
That makes it one of several projects I hope to finish over the next two to three years. I have any number of works set to expand the Quadrant Universe as a whole, and the next two Living Legends volumes are a significant part of that.
Don't let their delay though make you avoid reading the second book in the ongoing Quadrant Universe saga though. Living Legends: Old Soldiers introduces a plethora of new characters, many of which will eventually surface in other corners of the universe. And I don't want anyone to miss the origins of Lady Foulplay or The Coward, or the dark secrets of The Dart and Ace. There's a ton of adventure waiting ahead in these pages!
