Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Garth and Mekt are twins, and Ayla is their younger sister

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?

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!

When Supergirl first met the Legion they said they were the children of the ones Superboy knew.

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.)

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.

Anyone happen to know when the "twins are the norm for Winathians" idea was first introduced?

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?

I think it was when Ayla left the Legion after GDS wasn't it?

Bates also changed Chemical King's powers in Superboy 195.

That late? I knew it was post-Adventure, but I would've guessed earlier than that. You may well be right, though.

Well, I guess there's Micro Lad... oh wait.

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.

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!

http://www.studiosanning.shawbiz.ca/legion_of_super-heroes/rogues_gallery/

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Something else else 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.

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...)

Mon-El also did not lose his powers under a red sun in Adventure # 333.

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!'

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.

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)

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.