[in response to "the writer has been reading LEGION for 15 years and finds it very sad to see 36 years' worth of continuity jettisoned, and while things were in bad shape, he believed there was nothing wrong a good writer couldn't fix."]
I think it's sad, too. And I've been reading Legion for TWENTY-SEVEN years. AND there is no bigger fan of the Legion ALIVE than me. But all the continuity changes and flip-flops have made the Legion's history an unsalvageable mess. Continuity wasn't "in bad shape." It was Chernobyl. This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.* If you have one, let's hear it. If not, then please don't accuse me of not being "a good enough writer" to come up with one.
[in response to "DC seems once again to be valuing winning new readers over keeping old ones, and DC should be able to do both." Some things never change, huh?]
Okay. How? Details, please. Yes, I'm making you back this claim up. I'm sorry if I sound cranky, but this wasn't an editorial fiat from DC. This drastic change was my choice, and DC chose to back me. I don't want to gain new readers as the *expense* of older ones, either. The best gambit, in my opinion as well as yours, is to appeal to both. But Legion *gets* no new readers. They haven't for *years.* Fandom in general considers Legion to be a "private club"; the reason LEGIONNAIRES tanked so horribly was because new readers were asked to follow a history that made *absolutely no sense.* The Legion's been ailing for some time, James. We're not pulling the trigger...we're pulling the plug. I'm just as sorry as you to see it go, but if we rebuild carefully enough, none of it has to be gone forever. If it's any consolation, our Golden Rule is never to alter known Legion history capriciously. Whatever changes are made must be made for a well-considered reason and must reflect the overall Legion spirit of old. That is my promise to you.
I've been looking for this again for over a year now, and finally refound it...
Posted by Somebody on :
Thanks for that SoM (I reposted this over @ Comicboards. Hope you don't mind).
Sounds like he'd have to have had a HUGE change of mind to deboot in the here & now...
Posted by Director Lad on :
I think that it's also worth noting for posterity that Waid says here that the decision to reboot was his, and not the Powers that Be at DC.
Posted by Legion Lad on :
This just goes to prove that the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.
Mark Waid seems to think that if he says something empathically, that makes it true. This isn't the only time I've seen him employ this technique. John Byrne uses it, too. It isn't so.
People didn't like the TMK Legion and wanted the "real" Legion to return. The problem with the reboot is that it gave people yet another Legion, thus not addressing their complaints. All they had to do was say that the TMK Legion was an imaginary story and voila, problem solved. They threw it out anyway, along with everything else. Wouldn't it have been better to amputate it alone instead?
The reason why the Legion stopped drawing in new readers was because it was removed from the newsstands (along with the Titans) in the mid-eighties, and an entire generation entered the industry not knowing that it existed. This is before the days when the comic book store dominated the market. Kids could still pick up X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Justice League (which was then DC's best-seller, whether you liked the comedy or not), but the Legion was nowhere to be found. It's taken the Titans this long to recover from that boneheaded move, and the Legion still hasn't recovered.
Honestly, the publishing history of the Legion is a series of missteps by people who just don't understand the economics of the industry.
Posted by Legion Lad on :
quote:Originally posted by Mark Waid: This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.*
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the above quote. Three men spend hundreds of man-hours and that's the best that they can come up with? What Waid basically did was go online and confess that he's an idiot. Maybe they should have had three smarter people in charge back then. Just because they couldn't find one doesn't mean that there wasn't one to be found. They're not the three smartest men in the galaxy, and this proves it.
Posted by Rusty Shackleford on :
quote:Originally posted by Legion Lad: Mark Waid seems to think that if he says something empathically, that makes it true. This isn't the only time I've seen him employ this technique. John Byrne uses it, too. It isn't so.
People didn't like the TMK Legion and wanted the "real" Legion to return. The problem with the reboot is that it gave people yet another Legion, thus not addressing their complaints. All they had to do was say that the TMK Legion was an imaginary story and voila, problem solved. They threw it out anyway, along with everything else. Wouldn't it have been better to amputate it alone instead?
IOW, go back to the end of the Magic Wars?
Sounds simple, but there's still problems. Particularly the Superman issue. It's possible the "don't use Superman at all" order would have been still in place, so they'd have to retroactively deal with the Valor stuff, which was strongly identified with the stories that they would try to say were "imaginary."
Or they could go back to the Pocket Universe concept for Superboy, which for some folks wasn't any more pleasing than TMK.
And creatively, that would put writers into a bind of using the characters pre-TMK but not developing them in ways that were used in TMK.
Posted by Sanity or Madness? on :
Plus, Busiek says in the same post, you'll note (it was an interview with Busiek with some comments by Waid worked in - Busiek was in on it to, writing as he did the Valor issues of End of an Era):
quote:Kurt B said:
One of my suggestions was that LEGION #0 retell the origin, and LEGIONNAIRES #0 be a "history book" with each page giving a montage pin-up by a different Legion artist from Swan to Sprouse re-establishing a major Legion story and what happened (and what happened differently, if anything), so the post-Zero issues could pick up with a fully-established Legion with a great deal of history, but it would be a history readers could know and refer back to. The problem was that everyone wanted to pick up the regular continuity at a different time -- the Sun-Eater story, the Great Darkness Saga, the Magic Wars, etc. -- and it was finally decided that it would just work best, if history was to be re-set (and it was _already_ broken, he said again) to explain the re-set right from the start and tell the stories in full.
They DID consider it, and rejected it.
Posted by Mr. Kayak on :
quote:Originally posted by Legion Lad:
quote:Originally posted by Mark Waid: This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.*
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the above quote. Three men spend hundreds of man-hours and that's the best that they can come up with? What Waid basically did was go online and confess that he's an idiot. Maybe they should have had three smarter people in charge back then. Just because they couldn't find one doesn't mean that there wasn't one to be found. They're not the three smartest men in the galaxy, and this proves it.
i agree that they could have found a better solution for legion's continuity problems, but i think that the main error was another. did we really need excuses to explain the continuity problems that emerged at the end of crisis? couldn't we just enjoy the new legion stories and all?
if we think about it, if DC had only waited a few years instead of rebooting the whole series, every problem could have been explained by using the hypertime... and today, we could have had both the superboy's legion and the valor's legion.
the problem with comics is that sometimes the people around them forgets that their main business should be telling good and enterteining stories, and not to stuck themselves into futile and auto-referential matters.
[ May 11, 2004, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Kayak ]
Posted by Rusty Shackleford on :
quote:Originally posted by Legion Lad: What Waid basically did was go online and confess that he's an idiot. Maybe they should have had three smarter people in charge back then.
Well it's not much better to go online and call someone an idiot over all this.
Un-Legionnaire-like, at least.
Posted by DrakeB3003 on :
I don't think the reboot was a horrible idea. After all, think about what the Legion was at that point -- a small ragtag bunch on the run with weird costumes, new names and in some cases altered age ranges (Brainy and Mysa). The earth was destroyed, the Superman office had cut off Legion history at the knees and there were a bunch of clones running around (or wait, maybe they were the originals and the older guys were clones?!?!). Picking a point in the past to "restart" from would've been a hassle at the time too because of the "no Superboy" policy. It might've been possible to do it smoothly, but it would've been really confusing to those not steeped in Legionlore (even moreso than a simple five year gap, imo).
Posted by Sanity or Madness? on :
Drake - "SIMPLE" 5YG?!
And I agree that Legion Lad is over the line here. Bearing in mind the rest of what Drake said, plus the simple fact that an answer isn't necessarily a solution - the latter has to be rigourously tested and proven to work, the former can be a guess, or something thrown out half-cocked - I agree with Waid. The reboot was the best available solution.
But calling someone an "idiot" just because their solution wasn't one you liked is uncalled for.
Posted by Reboot on :
Just to compare then to now.
Can anyone honestly claim continuity was "Chernobyl" this time round?
[ September 13, 2004, 07:51 PM: Message edited by: Reboot ]
Posted by Eryk Davis Ester on :
Hmmm... horribly radiation-burned wasteland in the aftermath of Chernobyl is a good analogy for the recently departed Legion!
[ September 13, 2004, 08:22 PM: Message edited by: Eryk Davis Ester ]
Posted by Ultra Cyborg on :
Reebot, the current Legion didn't seem to have any major continuity problems. I don't see why they couldn't just pick up where it left off personally.
![[Bump]](graemlins/bump.gif)
Just to compare then to now.