America’s Boldest Legacy!
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Even before starting the episode, I love this cover. I mean, you’ve got a different Legacy, is he someone we know? I can’t tell. But the detail that really catches me is the Big Dipper on his chest. Like, there’s going to be some huge significance behind that and I can’t wait to find out what it is. 
Ah yes, hot D&D magic item discourse, that’s what we come here for. :’)
I guarantee someone actually raised their hand then and got the scare of their lives.
Okay, we need to know more about these alternate Bunkers and Absolute Zeros now! Get your questions in!
The best part of alternate Legacies is different powers. I also like that this family doesn’t have the problem of the Paul Parsons line, and I noticed before they mentioned it!
Potato corn, good lord. XD The ears have eyes, better ice up the whole rat!
If cinnamon squirrels don’t show up in Sentinel Comics…
Other countries are like, this ain’t a scene…
I can envision a scene of Wraith trying to give Paul a martial arts lesson and it just not going well for either of them.
I bet Pauline ends up being the first to adopt and bring this idea to light.
No evil lawnmower? But there’s an xtreme lawnmower in the Extremiverse…
Oh! And there the symbol comes back around, and I probably should have known that. :B
I wonder what the heck flag Adam found. c.c That was the longest cover section ever.
Really hope there’s a Boldest Legacy variant in DE.
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My flag theory was Georgia, but that isn’t quite right either - they have crosses in the corners as well as the big one.
Welp, I think this might be a contender for one of my favorite episodes. This story was awesome!
I hope we get more of this particular alternate universe. I loved the concept, and loved the alternate history that they built in the first half. And I liked the alternate take on what superheroes could do, besides the old, out-dated “crime fighter” idea. It reminds me of the take from the Wearing the Cape series, where the capes are first responders, and are more involved with stuff like floods and earthquakes than brank robberies.
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It’s not listed on Wikipedia, so I have to assume it’s an older flag or just one they don’t use as much anymore.
I wanna live with a cinnamon squirrel / I could be happy the rest of my life 
Apologies to Neil Young…
This disparate universe has Ted Lido’s® Puffed Potato-Corn Snacks™, product of Mordengrad! Find them at your local convenience store or supermarket today!
Definitely second the Definitive Edition variant!! 
Edit: the flying superhero emoji comes out totally different when posted.
This episode with its revisionist history did raise a question about how similar the Metaverse is to our universe. I’m sure they’ve addressed this in various contexts before. Maybe I’ll just write in for some clarity on the point I’m thinking of. Overall, very enjoyable! Amazing how it can still feel like something fresh and not just beating Legacy content into the ground as the flagship character.
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I admit this episode was a mix of my appreciating how uplifting it was but occasionally finding C&A’s perception of history a little bit head-tilting. (The Ireland bit in particular I was scratching my head what Joe Parsons could have done to fix that unless he has Superpowered Diplomat Charm as a superpower.)
Were they implying he prevented “The Troubles” because he somehow helped Ireland gain full independence back in the 1920s?
It is a little bit like casting Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Maybe they call him Red cause he’s Irish? 
Outright stated it, yes.
(For context why I found this odd: The reason NI got split off wasn’t due to the British army not being sufficiently driven off but due to the civilians. Namely, for a lot of complex reasons the region that is now NI was predominately Protestant inhabitants, the rest of Ireland was predominately Catholic, and the two groups adamantly didn’t want to coexist and wanted control of the resulting free island all to themselves. So splitting off NI was something that made nobody happy but was what British & Irish leaders thought was most likely to keep things at a dull roar. Hence why you’d need a diplomat to resolve this.)
There was also some stuff in the episode about Joe getting the IRA to be less violent while helping them when IIRC the IRA didn’t go off the rails in the ways the episode discussed until the 70s.
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I was able to see the big dipper = underground railroad connection but the colors being a buffalo soldier uniform were a surprise (to be fair most buffalo soldiers I have seen were black and white photos or illustrations)
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The MLK as Democrat Vice President made me double take, because I remember reading some things claiming he was part of the Republican party (mostly just word of mouth claims from family members, if I recall correctly), but I looked into it a bit more and the timeline seemed just about right. Still unsure he would run for VP, but I’m no expert on his history.
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I was legit thinking Cinnamon Girl-themed Squirrel Girl XD
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Oh, that part must’ve gotten lost in the shuffle of everything else for me. Admittedly I don’t know all the details of the Republic vs. North Ireland conflict. Maybe I need to go back and watch Patriot Games, as I’m sure that’s a completely factual historical documentary. 
The response to that in the Metaverse is what I’m curious about. Of course it’s just a single issue, but did Sentinel Comics readers in 1990 see a black president and think “That’s absurd!”? Nevermind there had been a black superhero for at least two decades prior. 
And then fast forward to November 2008, assuming the Metaverse does parallel ours that closely.
Oh, my double take had nothing to do with a black VP, it was entirely MLK and aligning to a political party.
I admit the only reason the MLK as VP thing didn’t make me double-take is because Chrononauts already did it. (Albeit Looney Labs made him Nixon’s VP instead.)
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I really liked this one! Obviously there’s a good reason that superhero comics (and, uh, all other fiction) tend to hew pretty closely to the real world - it’s less work that way - but it does tend to create the impression that the best superheroes can accomplish is supporting the status quo. Which feels kind of defeatist! So I enjoy it a lot when I get stories like this one, where a line of superheroes bring about a bunch of changes throughout history.
Also it was a pretty tiny note in the questions, but I would love to take more of a look at the political implications of supers in this world (or Universe 1) - C&A implied the distribution is fairly uniform, and that the USA having five government affiliated supers is mainly just an extension of that…so looking at the list of most populous countries as at 2022, China and India would both have about five times as many home-grown supers as the USA, and Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil would all have somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the number.
(Russia, meanwhile, would have a little less than half as many as the USA, and my home of Australia would have about 1/30th as many. We are…not very populous.)
Obviously there’s more to a country’s influence on the world than how many superheroes live there, so it makes sense that the countries in Universe 1 look a lot like they do in our own world, but as countries wander into this century and start to realise what an incredible resource they could have, things might perhaps get a little less predictable.
Anyway, it’s an interesting thought!
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A Nixon-King ticket doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m not well versed in the politics of that time. Who’s to say it matters in an alternate reality anyway? I don’t know that much about George McGovern, and I had to do a little Googling because I think I had him crossed with George Wallace (also ran for Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972). Now THAT pairing would be completely antithetical to the real-life MLK!
Honestly, I was hearing that bit & I was thinking “Oh, wow, Canada wouldn’t have many. I guess we could do a government sponsored team of heroes who were created in experiments.”
And then I realized I just made Weapon X.
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Well, yes and no. It’s not just population, because a lot of heroes are tech-created heroes, and those are likely to be spread out based on GDP. China wouldn’t have a lot of them until relatively recently, for example, although they’re probably caught up by the present day.
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