At least according to Superboy #207. Cary Bates must have forgotten that Garth and Ayla looked similar enough that she could plausibly disguise herself as him.
Is this the worst continuity error in any Legion story?
Posted by MLLASH's back on :
It's definitely WAY WAY up there!
Back in the very early days, the LSH adventures were said to be taking place in the 21st century!
Posted by jimgallagher on :
When Supergirl first met the Legion they said they were the children of the ones Superboy knew.
Posted by jimgallagher on :
Also in Superboy 207, Mekt was shown to have white hair from birth, when we saw the issue where it turned from red to white (in Superboy 172 I think.)
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
Bates played fast and loose with Legion continuity. In Superboy # 200, for example, he has Dr. Lars Hanscom show up as Starfinger when in fact the not-so-good doctor didn't have powers before. In Adventure # 335-336, Hanscom brainwashed Lightning Lad into becoming Starfinger, and reprogrammed the latter's robot arm to generate various powers.
When a fan pointed out this discrepancy on the letters page of Superboy # 202, Bates answered that, since Lightning Lad no longer had an artificial arm and the element of surprise over Starfinger's identity was lost, he (Bates) simply decided to have Hanscom take over the Starfinger identity.
Bates, I think, was fully aware of Legion continuity, but he chose to ignore it when it hindered the purposes of whatever story he was telling. I can only guess that he made Garth and Mekt twins because he wanted to establish (in only a few flashback panels) a close relationship between them, which magnifies Garth's anger over Mekt turning evil. (Such a close relationship is absent from other versions in which Mekt is older.)
So, yeah, it's an egregious violation of continuity, but probably done on purpose.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
Anyone happen to know when the "twins are the norm for Winathians" idea was first introduced?
Posted by jimgallagher on :
I think the Garth/Mekt twinship was just a rehash of the old good twin/evil twin cliche.
I think it was also Bates who gave Dr. Regulus sun powers in Superboy 191. Also pretty cliched. Sun Boy has sun powers so he has to have an arch enemy with sun powers, just like Garth and Mekt. Why can't somebody have an arch enemy with completely different powers?
Posted by jimgallagher on :
quote:Originally posted by Eryk Davis Ester: Anyone happen to know when the "twins are the norm for Winathians" idea was first introduced?
I think it was when Ayla left the Legion after GDS wasn't it?
Posted by jimgallagher on :
Bates also changed Chemical King's powers in Superboy 195.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
quote:Originally posted by jimgallagher:
quote:Originally posted by Eryk Davis Ester: Anyone happen to know when the "twins are the norm for Winathians" idea was first introduced?
I think it was when Ayla left the Legion after GDS wasn't it?
That late? I knew it was post-Adventure, but I would've guessed earlier than that. You may well be right, though.
Posted by Sir Tim Drake on :
quote:Originally posted by jimgallagher: I think the Garth/Mekt twinship was just a rehash of the old good twin/evil twin cliche.
I think it was also Bates who gave Dr. Regulus sun powers in Superboy 191. Also pretty cliched. Sun Boy has sun powers so he has to have an arch enemy with sun powers, just like Garth and Mekt. Why can't somebody have an arch enemy with completely different powers?
Well, I guess there's Micro Lad... oh wait.
Posted by KryptonKid on :
Shadow Lass has Lady Memory. Shadow Lass *does* have the power to remember things, just not in a super way. I suppose Lady Memory casts a shadow, as well, but I digress.
Posted by Set on :
quote:Originally posted by jimgallagher: I think it was also Bates who gave Dr. Regulus sun powers in Superboy 191. Also pretty cliched. Sun Boy has sun powers so he has to have an arch enemy with sun powers, just like Garth and Mekt. Why can't somebody have an arch enemy with completely different powers?
Fire powers are very common in the future.
We've got Sun Boy, Dr. Regulus, Beauty Blaze, Sun Emperor, Flare, Sun Girl, Inferno, Kynda, Sun Killer, etc.
Then there are the mysterious similarities.
How likely is it that there would be two *completely unrelated* characters with the power to 'emit paralyzing radiation,' like Modulos and Radiation Roy?
How likely is it that the Legion universe would have two similarly costumed blue-eyed blonde men with the power to turn into a beam of light, like the Taurus Gang member Quanto, and the Super-Assassin Lazon?
Man, I just noticed that one of my favorite sites for researching old Legion foes is down! Hope it's just a temporary thing!
It's really difficult to come up with original super-powers, or even to use super-powers in interesting, novel ways.
Jim is correct that Bates altered Chem's powers and was probably using the "good twin/bad twin" motif, but are those necessarily bad things? (Actually, in Chem's case, it probably was bad. There was no good reason for changing his powers, as doing so added nothing to the story in # 195.)
One thing Bates attempted to do, I think, was to focus on the story he was telling at the moment and not let it get bogged down with extraneous back story information. He could have included a caption or flashback indicating how Regulus and Hanscom got their powers, but doing so might have distracted from what was important in the story (e.g., Regulus's attempt to trick Sun Boy and Hanscom's kidnapping of one of Duo Damsel's selves). Besides, they're villains . . . they're inventive and secretive about what's going on when we don't see them.
Bates was also aware, probably, that a large part of his audience (including me) was discovering the Legion for the first time in those days. He may have chosen not to risk driving new fans away with extraneous details.
Should he have given Regulus different powers? Perhaps . . . but I think the real crux of the story is his enmity toward Sun Boy. Regulus's powers don't matter that much.
Sir Tim also makes a good point about Micro Lad, but that character has to be viewed in the context of the story in which he debuted. S/LSH # 212 featured a group of Legion applicants who were rejected because their powers were similar to those of existing Legionnaires. Similar powers was the whole point of the story.
(And wonderful things were done with Micro Lad via later writers, who wove in the Imskian political/terrorist angle. So, again, similarity of powers is only one aspect of the character.)
It's admittedly difficult for me to view Bates' work objectively since he was the writer of the Legion during my formative days as a fan, and those stories remain close to my heart. Still, having written stories myself, I can sympathize with some of the choices he made, whether I agree with them or not.
Posted by Set on :
quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: It's really difficult to come up with original super-powers, or even to use super-powers in interesting, novel ways.
Oh, I totally disagree, on both counts. Pick up any super-hero role-playing game and there are literally *dozens* of powers that haven't seen much play, and a few that you have to go digging into one-shot appearances in Indy comics to find used on panel. You can find ten powers not currently used in the Legion on the first page of most super-hero RPGs. Heck, you can find a half-dozen options just among *psychic* powers, and that's a tiny sub-set of super-powers.
As for creative uses of old powers, it sometimes seems like writers go out of their way to avoid doing that.
Shrinking Violet, for instance could do a hundred different things to mess up a person from within their body, from disorienting them via splashing around in their inner ear, to blocking nerve signals by expanding to the size of a pea in their spinal cord, leaving them temporarily paralyzed.
And what does she do, in nine fights out of ten? Turn off her shrinking powers so that she can kick someone in the face.
That's the most clever thing Salu can think of doing with her powers, turn them off?
Hop over to wikipedia and you can assemble a three page list of ways that Chemical King (or Kid) could wipe someone out.
Lightning Lad has been *said* to be able to not just generate electricity, but also to manipulate it. He *should* be able to turn off someone's nervous system, or jerk them around like a puppet by causing their muscles to seize up and move at his command. And what's his *only* tactic in combat? Chucking lightning at peeps, which any fool with a blaster can do. Is he the fool, or the writers who never bother to have him do anything other than shoot his invisible blaster?
Even Geoff Johns, who, IMO, is more derivative than creative, came up with Sun Boy shooting red solar radiation at Superboy Prime, and Shadow Lass using her light-nullifying powers to 'black out' the stored solar energy in his cells.
Posted by cleome45 on :
quote:Originally posted by Sir Tim Drake: At least according to Superboy #207. Cary Bates must have forgotten that Garth and Ayla looked similar enough that she could plausibly disguise herself as him.
Is this the worst continuity error in any Legion story?
Ironically, in the Legion cartoon, Ayla was "time-lost" and transformed into pure lightning when the boys got their powers. When B5 and Shrinking Violet restored her real form in Season Two, Ayla was the same age as she'd been at the time of the accident-- ten years before.
So Garth and Mekt were much closer to being twins than either was to being Ayla's twin. Maybe this was a nod to the original story. (And it also ends up being a sideways nod to the 5YG storyline where Ayla was de-aged by Glorith.)
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
quote:Originally posted by Set:
quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: It's really difficult to come up with original super-powers, or even to use super-powers in interesting, novel ways.
Oh, I totally disagree, on both counts.
You make a lot of good points, Set, and you are right: If writers put some thought into it, they could come up with more creative powers and creative uses for old powers.
However, I think it's worth noting that writing any kind of story is different from creating characters for a role-playing game. Players usually don't have to contend with plot, character development, dramatic tension, and dialogue . . . not to mention comics-specific concerns such asfan expectations and (these days) endless crossovers and attention to previous continuity.
All of which is to say that Bates (and perhaps other writers) probably operate on a different hierarchy of concerns than most fans do, with originality in super-powers ranking fairly low.
Of course, there are writers who can tell a good story *and* use powers in inventive ways. Silver Age writers such as Hamilton, Siegel, and Shooter used to be able to do that. However, in those days the Legion was more of a science fiction series that featured super-heroes rather than a super-hero series that happened to be set in the future, as it became from the '70s onward. The expectations of writers were a bit different.
Posted by Set on :
quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: However, I think it's worth noting that writing any kind of story is different from creating characters for a role-playing game. Players usually don't have to contend with plot, character development, dramatic tension, and dialogue . . . not to mention comics-specific concerns such asfan expectations and (these days) endless crossovers and attention to previous continuity.
Very true. Having run said super-hero games, the need to entertain only the half-dozen or so people in the room, and not try to service the many and varying interests of thousands of fans of a team book, make it, in one respect, much easier. On the other hand, the ability of the 'characters' of the story to do things that completely surprise you, the 'storyteller,' can also make it a bit of a challenge, as well.
Comic teams never seem to care about balance between team members. Superman and Batman end up working together, as the writer artificially handicaps Superman (who is somewhere between ten and a hundred times smarter than Batman, and thinks millions of times faster), so that Batman doesn't look like a chump. Glass-cannon characters like Cyclops, who packs a hell of a punch but has the same defensive abilities of Bob, who lives next door, stand alongside people who pack a similar punch *and* are nigh-indestructible, like Colossus, and, for some idiotic reasons, all the bad-guys shoot at Colossus, who they can't hurt, so that we can get cool images of stuff bouncing off of him, while Cyclops stands there in all his not-even-a-little-bit-bulletproof glory, being ignored.
In a game, that's not an option. Everyone is supposed to get a chance to shine, and exist on a level playing field.
quote: All of which is to say that Bates (and perhaps other writers) probably operate on a different hierarchy of concerns than most fans do, with originality in super-powers ranking fairly low.
Very true, and some powers, like flame powers and lightning powers are super flashy and dynamic and exciting to see in action, while a group of villains who use the same powers to cause people they look at to suffer heatstroke or dampen the electrical impulses in their brains to make them pass out sounds visually dull.
Plus, in the absence of thought bubbles or those little text boxes describing what's going on, it's easier for the writer to have the heroes only do things that are able to be 'described' visually on the page, like chuck fire and lightning at people. Anything that would require a sentence worth of description is probably no longer considered acceptable.
quote: However, in those days the Legion was more of a science fiction series that featured super-heroes rather than a super-hero series that happened to be set in the future, as it became from the '70s onward. The expectations of writers were a bit different.
Something that Ed Hamilton tribute thread has brought back to me is how much I miss the sci-fi gonzo stuff. I've noticed, more and more, that I'm using older and older stuff in my own fanfiction, like the demon of Taboo Island that possessed Command Kid in my recent Glorith fic, or whatnot. There were some amazingly creative ideas in the old days, and these days, it seems like 'Oh look, it's the Dominators, again! Hey, let's mention Darkseid, or the Time Trapper!' is the standard repetitive fare we get.
Posted by Evolution Has Failed on :
If you are looking for glaring continuity errors re: legionnaires' powers, one of the historically worst is the "question" of what effect red sun rays have on Mon-el.
Adventure #319 has its entire resolution predicated on the premise that Mon-el, unlike Superboy, does NOT lose his powers under a red sun.
Since then, as we all know, the opposite has been true. I'm not sure if this was just an error at the time, or if they hadn't yet established that it was the other way around.
I'm also not quite sure when they first did declare that Mon-el DOES lose powers under a Red Sun... I know they did in the C-55 tabloid (the LL/SG wedding one), and if that was the first time since Adv #319 (though I doubt it), that (or could be considered a continuity error over Adv #319, actually. In fact, whenever they first did declare the current reality may have been a continuity error due to congtradicting Adv #319, unless the latter itself violated a previous claim to the contrary.
I'm sure someone on here is enough of an expert to know when it was first stated that Mon-el DOES lose powers under a Red Sun? (Unfortunately, I don't myself have time to dig my collection out of the closet and read through enough issues to be sure of this...)
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
Mon-El also did not lose his powers under a red sun in Adventure # 333.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
Isn't it established at one point that the lead serum allows Mon to keep his powers under a red sun?
Posted by Set on :
quote:Originally posted by Eryk Davis Ester: Isn't it established at one point that the lead serum allows Mon to keep his powers under a red sun?
Yeah, I remember that being said explicitly at some point, and I remember thinking 'that's awfully convenient!' Posted by Evolution Has Failed on :
Yeah, you guys are right, I had forgotten about that (the lead serum supposedly being the reason he was unaffected by the red sun).
However, I think that was a retroactive explanation of an inconsistency ...
... and certainly doesn't seem consistent with Adv. #319. I happen to have an extra chewed-up copy of that issue that's not buried in the closet with the rest of my collection, so this is an exact quote, by Mon-el, from that issue:
"The red sun-rays made Superboy lose his powers, but they won't affect me! Only lead ever affected me, and it doesn't now because of the antidote I drank!"
So that certainly doesn't sound consistent with the later explanation that the serum causes his invulnerability to red sun rays.
Regardless, even if the serum did make him unaffected by red sun rays, that effect was later taken away.
Like I said, off the top of my head, I definitely remember him losing his powers due to red sun rays in the C-55 SS/LL wedding tabloid (written by Levitz, I think), and certainly I don't recall any mention of him NOT losing power under a red sun (due to serum or otherwise) since the Adventure era.
Posted by razsolo on :
After the Conspiracy storyline when the Time Trapper had injured him to the brink of death....wasn't it stated then that the reason Daxamite surgeons couldn't do anything to help him was because his own invulnerability protected him from any surgical procedures even under a red sun? (I may be remembering wrong, granted this is like 20 years ago now)
Posted by jimgallagher on :
quote:Originally posted by Evolution Has Failed: "The red sun-rays made Superboy lose his powers, but they won't affect me! Only lead ever affected me, and it doesn't now because of the antidote I drank!"
Hmm. If this were true, then wouldn't he have already had his powers when he landed on Krypton right before it exploded? Maybe he didn't know that the antidote also protected him from a red sun?
I think he talks about his serum in the JO story and in Lament for a Legionnaire. Let me look it up.
Posted by jimgallagher on :
No mention of his serum protecting him from red sun rays in either of those stories, but I'm sure I've read that somewhere.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
It would definitely seriously mess up the origin story if he naturally had powers under a red sun.
Posted by jimgallagher on :
I just remembered: In Action 379, Mon-El states that his serum protects him from lead and red sun rays. Seems like there was an editor's note to that effect in an earlier story though.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
All this boils down to is that writers can be lazy in doing research, or they interpret or ignore past stories.
Post-Silver Age writers were not alone in this. While perusing Adventure-era stories a few months ago, I was struck by the details Hamilton and Siegel made up as they went along. "Important" planets, races, and technology were invented to solve a particular story problem and never mentioned again. (The Concentrator, "the most powerful weapon in the universe," from Adv. 321 is one example.)
Details such as Mon's immunity to the red sun also seemed to change to meet story needs.
I don't have Adv. 319 handy, but I vividly remember Adv. 333, which I mentioned above. In the story, Superboy has no powers because he and the Legionnaires are visiting earth during the distant past, in which our sun was red. The story calls for him to stop a bomb from destroying a city, so he does -- or rather Mon-El does, wearing Superboy's costume.
It's a powerful moment: A Kryptonian hero saves Krypton's enemies from a bomb launched by Kryptonians -- and only Mon-El could have pulled it off. He has the same powers as Superboy and resembles Superboy from a distance.
And, of course, this couldn't happen if Mon, too, had lost his powers under a red sun.
So, Hamilton may have ignored that detail (or maybe later writers ignored the idea that Mon retains his powers under a red sun), but the story would have been weakened had the writer taken the time to explain this apparent inconsistency or come up with some other contrived explanation. (Let's face it: Mon's timely arrival is contrived enough.)
As fans, we want every detail to be consistent in our fictional heroes' lives, but writers have to serve the needs of the story they are telling. And, really, who can keep all those details straight for 20-plus Legionnaires over decades of stories?
Posted by jimgallagher on :
I agree, HWW, but the Garth/Mekt as twins thing was a pretty huge blunder.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
Looks like the idea that the serum gives him powers under a red sun originates with the Origins and Powers of the Legionnaires feature.
Posted by Sir Tim Drake on :
I finally got around to reading the story from Superboy #207. I thought it was pretty lousy, and it wouldn't have been any worse if not for the continuity error. The impact of the story, to the extent that it had any impact, would have been in no way lessened if Cary had depicted Mekt as Garth's older brother instead of his twin brother.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
I agree that it was a poor choice to make Mekt and Garth twins.
The worst part for me was that the short backup story in # 207 is nothing but a preview for # 208, featuring the LSV. The former story leads us to believe there's going to be some huge confrontation between Garth and Mekt, but instead Garth flies in, blasts Mekt with one lightning bolt, and that's it. Garth isn't even a major player in the story. All of the emotional drama set up in # 207 leads to nothing.
Posted by Evolution Has Failed on :
I agree that #207 is more egregious in that, if you knew enough to know they were siblings, you should have made sure you had the twin pairing right, and also that was the 1970's, by then comics had gone past just stories for kids, and the writer's should have known better about being careful.
On the other hand, as Sir Tim Drake points out, that particular detail wasn't germane to the story...
unlike Adv #333, even more so than #319, having the entire outcome depend on Mon-el's lack of vulnerability to red sun rays.
I note the link the "Origins and Power of the Legion" dates that to Adv #316... I wonder if they didn't slip that in because #319 was already written?
Or perhaps that really was by design, and the 'goof' was really that this plot point was subsequently dropped by being ignored (unless someone can recall a mention of it after Action #379? An obvious explanation would be that as he built immunity to the serum, that particular effect wore off ... but I don't recall seeing that anywhere...)
Here's another one, though really an omission, not a goof:
Does anybody remember Superboy#206? that was the one where a clone of Ferro Lad re-appears, then blows up after I think 24 (or 48) hours.
Now move to V4, the TMK book, and the SW6 batch of clones.
given that SB#206 was so close in time to Action #379 (that's the Eltro Gand story, no? which the Bierbaum's drew on heavily), I still can't understand why, not even ONCE, did any character raise even the slightest concern that gee, the last time they had clones of Legionnaires, they blew up after 24 hours?
I was actually expecting that to be a big plot point (dark as the tone was then, I was half expecting them to all blow up at once, actually), but nothing, SB#206 was just ignored.
Posted by jimgallagher on :
The SW6 Legionnaires were not clones. They were the original Legionnaires snatched out of time by the Timetrapper.
Posted by jimgallagher on :
A more egregious error in Superboy 206 is that Superboy acts all shocked and mystified when the "dead" legionnaires show up and his narration indicates that he has no idea where they came from. Then at the end, it turns out he knew they were clones all along and was testing them for the Legion. It seems pretty heartless for the Legion to have been creating clones, letting them think they were the originals, knowing they were going to blow up and die all over again. Then they just act like, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."
Posted by jimgallagher on :
Action 384 was the Eltro story. Action 379 was the Sunburst story.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
quote:Originally posted by jimgallagher: It seems pretty heartless for the Legion to have been creating clones, letting them think they were the originals, knowing they were going to blow up and die all over again. Then they just act like, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."
Yeah, it was heartless manipulation of us fans, too.
Posted by Evolution Has Failed on :
Okay, errors by me all over the place...
But didn't the SW6 Legionnaires (or the primary ones), unless I'm way off, originally THINK/ASSUME that the SW6 batch were clones, while it was only later revealed that they were instead pulled out by TT?
IF not (and I'm not ruling this out), then I think I feel a neuro-degenerative disorder coming on.
IF so, I'm not saying it was an ommission they didn't blow up, only that no one appeared to even be concerned about it.
AS for the other comments on #206, I agree ... given all the focus on bio-ethics in the last decades, yeah, that one is in retrospect pretty reprehensible. However, at the time, that type of thing had gone largely un-debated in public forum.
Definitely a good example of comics being a useful historical benchmark for sociological evolution (so of course would old newspapers, but who keeps those?!? )
Posted by jimgallagher on :
Yes, I think that the original assumption was that the SW6 batch were clones.
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
That was at least one possibility that was discussed.
Presumably, however, if they were clones they would've been Dominion-created clones, while it is specifically the Legion's attempts to clone that result in explosion. We know that other groups, most notably the Dark Circle, have successful cloning tech. I'm not sure if the Dominion is ever shown using clones before this, but certainly it would fit in with their overall interest in biotech.
Though given the number of lab-grown humanoids (not necessarily clones) that we see in the Silver Age, it may be better to look at #206 as another Bates-era anomaly that doesn't fit in very well with the overall continuity and simply ignore it.
Posted by Sir Tim Drake on :
As another evidence of Cary's poor memory and/or carelessness, in Flash #292 he states the Mirror Master's name as Joe Scudder instead of Sam Scudder. (Which is odd since an alliterative name should be *easy* to remember -- that's why Stan Lee used so many of them.) Cary had a habit of getting villains' real names wrong, according to this thread:
I have a much earlier issue of The Flash (don't remember the issue number off hand --in the 220s, I think), in which Mirror Master's name is also given as Joe and The Top's name is given as Roscoe Neyle (instead of Roscoe Dillon). Some clever editor eventually decided their full names were Samuel Joseph (or Joseph Samuel, I think) Scudder and Roscoe Neyle Dillon.
Posted by Sir Tim Drake on :
quote:Originally posted by He Who Wanders: I have a much earlier issue of The Flash (don't remember the issue number off hand --in the 220s, I think), in which Mirror Master's name is also given as Joe and The Top's name is given as Roscoe Neyle (instead of Roscoe Dillon). Some clever editor eventually decided their full names were Samuel Joseph (or Joseph Samuel, I think) Scudder and Roscoe Neyle Dillon.
That reminds me of this scene from Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters:
quote:"What's his name?" said Vitoller.
"Tom," said Granny, hardly hesitating.
"John," said Nanny. The two witches exchanged glances. Granny won.
"Tom John," she said firmly, and swept out.
Posted by Malvolio on :
Stan Lee has often said that even with the alliterative names, he had trouble from time to time remembering the full names of characters he himself had created.
Posted by He Who Wanders on :
^Yeah. The reason why Robert Bruce Banner has three names is allegedly because Lee accidentally referred to him as "Bob Banner" in an issue of FF.
Posted by Sir Tim Drake on :
quote:Originally posted by jimgallagher: A more egregious error in Superboy 206 is that Superboy acts all shocked and mystified when the "dead" legionnaires show up and his narration indicates that he has no idea where they came from. Then at the end, it turns out he knew they were clones all along and was testing them for the Legion. It seems pretty heartless for the Legion to have been creating clones, letting them think they were the originals, knowing they were going to blow up and die all over again. Then they just act like, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."
I just read that story, and good Lord, that was the most horrible thing ever. Brainy was creating these clones that thought they were the originals, but only had a two-day life-span before thy exploded. And apparently neither he, nor anyone else in the story, nor Cary Bates, saw anything wrong with this.
Posted by Shining Son on :
Clones last longer than that in the 21st century DCU. After a millennium, you'd think the Legion would be at least as advanced as Cadmus.
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