Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes SUPERMAN Secret Origin: Totally tits or the pits?

Well the Supergirl part is totally out. What Brainy said about his motivations in using time travel in LOSH vol. 3 #16 was entirely about meeting Supergirl and so for Brainy to moan about them using the bubble to go back to find clark is out of character if the first instance is in. Its not that which is the problem. It also throws out Secrets of the Legion of Super-heroes which showed the time bubble as a gift by RJ Brande and that their first trip was shown in Action Comics 283. Thinking about it, isn't 247 out anyway? That first meeting is totally different. I'm so confused. Was it so hard just to pick up where they left off after 'who is sensor girl?'

The problem is that Johns seems to want on the one hand to trade on the emotional resonance of this being the "original" Legion continuity back, but then keeps introducing themes that seem completely out of sync with the pre-Crisis stories.

This is what I've been saying all along.

That's fine, but it's not going to bring in any new readers or open the series to the next generation of comic readers, I think.

The alternative would be to do what the X-Men did with their new team ~ the first team moves on and mostly all newbies show up.
I seem to remember only Charles and maybe Scott staying to mentor the new kids.

Hey, if it were up to me we'd be reading the Adventures of Graym and Ivy by now. It's the obsession with re-writing the past that annoys me.

I can totally agree with that point but if they've decided to reintroduce Superman, how should they do it?
Would you like to see direct reprints?

How do they make it mesh with his different history ~ Supes didn't have a SuperBOY persona in this Superman era?

But as I've said other places here, I HATE the Waid 3boot Legion anti government/older generation base in the 31st century.
I also dislike the anti alien twist.
ugh

But from what I've seen in the past, Johns likes to take what the current fans least want and incorporate that into his stories.

He did that with Amethyst and Power Girl, why not the Legion?

What I was hoping would happen is that when they brought back the multiple Earths, they'd bring back an Earth that was basically pre-Crisis Earth-1, with an Earth-1 Superman, and the "original" Legion would be associated with that.

If they want to insert a Legion into the current Superman reboot, that's fine for what it's worth. But feel free to go whole hog and make it clear that it's a new continuity, and quit trying to trade upon our emotional connection to the pre-Crisis version of the team.

Johns seems to have established Brainiac 5 as grumpy but accessible, not haughty/distant or just another guy on the team. This seems closest to his personality in the early Baxter era, before his trial.

It was great to see Imra throwing her legs around!

I hope they keep the xenophobia theme on a really low simmer in the background. It figures that in any community, from village to galaxy, there would be groups who hate and target outsiders, however defined. If Johns is just showing that the state-sanctioned xenophobia of Lo3W had deep roots, fine, but I wouldn't want the Legion to be continually encountering this.

There was some xenophobia in the original series, Cham and Elwinda come to mind since I just read that story, but it was minor and in their case, even in another universe.

Orando wasn't very friendly either but I don't remember anyone running around shouting about their fear and hatred of aliens.

Things were pretty ETish.

The reboot brought in the White Trangle and Daxamites destroying Jan's homeworld and the Legion being a group of young people because young people are less biased (yeah, right.)

3boot was more anti-generational, really but the Kryptonian's were shown as insular.

Of all of the things I would have liked to keep of the reboot, xenophobia ISN'T one of them.
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Pretty much where I was going with my Legion Legacies storyline, where I wrote out the parents in the first act.

But mostly it was just an excuse to make up new heroes based off of the funky combinations of current Legionnaires powers.

There was prejudice against Durlans in the original version, but it was based on their powers rather than just being aliens.

The SW6 team faced anti-alien protesters after the destruction of the Earth.

But for the most part it the overall environment was one which was very accepting of diverse lifeforms.

Even in the reboot the xenophobic elements were a minority, and it's hard to believe that they could ever have converted the majority of Earthlings to their cause.

The main difference btwn Lex & Brainy is that Lex is a sociopath.
I mean, they're both geniuses, the're both social misfits but Brainy actually cares about his friends; about the welfare of others. Whereas Lex couldn't care less about anyone besides himself, which is aptly demonstrated when he has to be reminded about how his father's death will effect his sister. Even then, his line of concern was shown as being simply lip service.

my issue with the book asshole brainy is still around.....brainy beacame an asshole after alot stuff happend.

i miss when Brainy the jerk only came out when he was too busy to worry about how people thought about him. Brainiac 5 motivations when he joined the legion was to make up for all the bad brainiac had done. to show super man he was nothing like brainiac. remember when he apologized like every other page for being related to the villain? remember when he tried to make people feel better when they were down? remember when he was willing to quit the team so no one else had too? remember when he was the master mind behind a lot of the legion pranks (or at lest in on them)

not to menchin that brainy was almost yelling at Superman first time the met. the old brainy would have never done that Superman opinion meant to much to him, even if they had never met before.

it just ticks me off that they are so committed to 'brainiac 5 the jerk' that it makes it hard for me to see
a)why he would want to be on the team surrounded by people who clearly upset him.
b)why they would someone around who is in a bad mood constantly--at this point the legion should be full of smart legionnaires like lyle, Saturn girl they wouldn't need super smart guy
c)why he wouldn't just go about life as an inventor/ scientist/ doctor

one of my biggest issues is that Brainiac 5 didn't get in to legion for his brain, Querl got in cause he braved a meteor shower, risked his life to save another applicant- brainy got in for his courage not his brain. they made it sound like he got in cause he is smart

also i didn't like Garth's smart ass comment about the test score. assuming they have screwed with the continuity more.. and karate kid is in he doesn't have a 'power' and to me the comment kind of came off a nasty behind your back gossip..i could have been reading into it to much but, i like it when the legion makes fun of a person's power to there face. ya know playful, teasing such as 'thanks sun boy i dont know what we would have done with out you here to be the nightlight'

and im not trying to nit pick but why was garth the only one in his original costume??? i hated the cape always have and i don't get why they keep redrawing him in it if the let the others two slide with the more iconic clothing we are used too why not just put Garth in the cape-less costume.

i dont like how they did lex, clark and lex were once friends. i hate how they just make him the same pyshco just with hair.

And it doesn't make any sense. I'm nowhere near Brainiac 5, but I know from experience that when talking with people who aren't 'keeping up' berating them or belittling them is only going to make the conversation take longer and be even more onerous.

Brainy is smart enough that he should entertain himself by doing work in his head during meetings, and running a little subroutine that predicts what everyone is going to say, occasionally adjusting it when the topic goes completely orthagonal.

I want to see the Brainy who sat in his lab, expressing *zero* concern (or interest) in the 'Trial of Brainiac Five' orchestrated by Polar Boy after the death of the Infinite Man and the Time Trapper. At the end, Imra comes to tell him the score, and he just brushes it off and tells *her* the score, as he'd already predicted it, and considered it meaningless (and then she corrects him by pointing out that Quislet voted differently than he thought, which he finds *intriguing* because the little spud surprised him, nothing more).

That's the Brainy I like, the one who is just flat-out above the bickering, and blithely and unconcernedly does what he does, while everyone else freaks out around him.

This interpretation of Brainy is woefully ineffecient at communication. Sloppy, overwrought and dramatic. It's just not Brainy, to me.

Very disappointed with it, thinking about not reading the Superman books anymore.

First off, Byrne may have erred in doing away with most of the Superman mythology when he rebooted it in the 80s, but one thing he was absolutely right to do was to make Clark Kent NOT act like a total milksop. He was still a "boy scout," but he wasn't a stumbling buffoon. I'm a big proponent of bringing back that "mythology," despite the fact that I rather liked Byrne's interpretation of Krypton, but going back to the whole Clark Kent as shy, geeky outcast...no thank you. I also never warmed to the idea that Superman was the real person and Clark was the mask he wore to be among humans. While Johns doesn't seem to be going in that direction, he is playing up the whole "you look like one of them, but you are not one of them" angle too much for my taste. As far as I'm concerned, if Superman isn't one of us, he's close enough for government work. If you get into your early teens thinking you're human and with nobody around you having any clue that you're not human, you are pretty damn close enough to being human, close enough to tell Jor-el's holographic ghost to go piss up a rope with his "you are not one of them" crap. Superman's one of us. Period. I could understand the J'onn J'onzz-esque fits of exisential malaise if he was a Martian who didn't look like a human and had grown up as a martian. But again, he looks human, he acts human, he's nailing a hot human wife, that's good enough for me.

My worst fear is that the recent crap that went down over in Spider-Man's book is going to eventually embolden DC to find a way to undo the marriage to Lois Lane. I have never subscribed to the notion that being married in any way detracts from either Superman or Spider-Man as characters, so I certainly think that anyone who insists that it does to the point of being some sort of objective necessity that it be done away with is on crack and/or has his head stuck up his or her @$$. So far Lois Lane is still Mrs. Clark Kent (although how the re-wussified Clark Kent was able to get her to go out with him is kind of a mystery). The moment that changes I'm definitely not reading the books anymore.

Oh, yeah, as far as the Legion's appearance was concerned, I'm not pleased with that, either. As soon as I saw that the xenophobia angle is now apparently being retroactively shoe-horned into the Legion's mythos I let out an audible groan. The Legion was one of the few sci-fi milieus in any medium that depicted the future as basically a decent place, where a lot of the horse-shit that human society has to put up with now has been figured out and worked through. One of the reasons I think the various reboots of the Legion franchise over the last 20 years have failed to stick around is that this aspect of the Legion's universe was overlooked or disregarded. Both Giffen and Waid turned in some very good stories in their respective tenures, but overall both failed because one of the fundamental (in my opinion, anyway) building blocks of the whole Legion mythos was missing. There were lots of other reasons each failed, but that's a big part of it. I'll be curious to see how this new reboot (because it is a reboot, no matter how you parse it) fares, even with Levitz at the helm. I won't be reading it (I never wavered in my loyalty to the book despite 20 years of DC doing everything they possibly could to screw it up and then screw it up worse. My loyalty's just been abused too much for me to get on board with anything they try now, or take them at their word that they're going to get it right), but I'll be curious to see how it does.

I'm sorry if I sound negative. There isn't any negativity towards anyone involved in the Secret Origin project on my part. I just don't like their interpretation. Their vision of Superman is clearly not one I think I'm going to be able to get into. I'm saddened by that, but I'm not outraged. No matter what you do, there's always somebody who isn't going to like it, and I guess this time I'm that guy...

Eh. Didn't care for it. I am tired of John's usage of the original 3. Also the comment Garth made about Mordu and the Time Trapper...ouch.

I'd thought they would like to stick as close as possible to the original story. I don't think it was on purpose...it was sloppy.

I thought, considering what could have happened, things turned out OK!

I'd agree that the xenophobia is really unnecessary. If Johns keeps this up the LSH could become quite annoyingly preachy. Hopefully Levitz will get rid of this!

And it's a shame Brainy is depicted as being such an arsehole. Unfortunately it's an easy (and lazy) way of defining 'characters' in the Legion. Like Lightning Lad is suddenly a big jerk, Duo Damsel is a lovelorn groupie etc.

Vril Dox was a hit character 20 years ago and it seems that every Coluan since has been written in the same way.

As I've said before, I think John's is pretty heavy-handed in his approach to many things. That being said, I'm not so against Legionnaires having at least somewhat defined personalities. Early Legion characters were pretty interchangeable, I mean if you weren't able to identify them by costume and the constant use of their code-names, you really couldn't tell the difference between Element Lad, chameleon Boy or Phantom Girl. It really wasn't until Giffen really that we got much of actual characterization and it's been pretty mutable since then in it's many incarnations. And while Waid had some major issues when it came to overall plot, we got a pretty good sense of most of the character's personalities. Mostly, I'm just saying it could be and has been worse.

I can't say I've never cared for the bright-shiny squeaky clean future. If everything's is perfect, why do we need a Legion at all? To rescue the occasional cosmicat from a tree? *yawn*. My guess is the xenophobia plot element exists to make something about the stories somewhat topical. Again, I think John's approach is overly heavy-handed but fear of the foreign or new is pretty prevalent in today's society and in the DCU reality, (implausibly humanoid)aliens are already everywhere and it's possible that 1000 years in the future they could be in danger of overrunning humans and those humans could harbor some resentment. It's something we can relate to in the "race"(a horribly misguided term). It's been 144 years since slavery was abolished in the US but there is still widespread racism. I'm just saying I don't think it's a bad plot element in and of itself, it doesn't however, have to be the only one.

Somebody said they would like to have been seeing stories about the successors of the Legion by now, I can't help but agree for the most part. I'd also like to see a lot more attention paid to real science and the laws of physics but obviously, most of us on this board know we're going to just have to settle with being thrown the occasional bone.

Trading one yawn for another? Everything about human nature is "topical." The xenophobia is just stereotypical, lazy just due to the nature of the team, is how I saw it when Waid did it. My worry is that as you mentioned, it will be as heavy handed as that because it seemed to become raisin d^etre..

A stroy arc or two, sure. A single villain(s) sure. More than that, excuse my snoring.

To stop the Khundish cyborg champions from assassinating the new UP Presidential candidates. To stop the Dark Circle from destabilizing the universe in pursuit of power and opportunity. To stop Darkseid from mind-jobbing a planet of several hundred thousand Supermen and using them to heat vision planets into giant busts of his head. To stop the Dominators from doing whatever it is the Dominators are doing this week. To stop the Legion of Super-Villains from kidnapping Orando and holding it's population hostage to lure the heroes to a fatal confrontation. To stop the Controllers from making more Sun-Eaters and using them to blow up the planetary systems of people they don't like.

*None of which* required the Legion future to turn into an X-Men race-metaphor preach-a-thon about the heroes protecting a world that hates and fears them.

The xenophobia angle *is* the equivalent of 'rescue the cosmicat from the tree,' and is what makes *me* go 'yawn,' because it's been done, and done, and done to death. The Legion has never needed that sort of formulaic laziness to craft compelling stories of action and adventure in a bright future.

If I want a lame X-Men ripoff, I'll go read a lame X-Men ripoff. Lord knows Marvel puts out enough of them...

Besides, even in Legion continuity, it's not even close to new or interesting. Every 10 years, Universo shows up and turns the Earth against the Legion, to the point where some long-term fans grown and say, 'Oh god, not this story *again!*' when they play with that idea. So it's not just tired and played-out in the sense of comic-book storytelling in general, it's tired and played-out in the specific sense of a Legion story.

*If* it were to work, it would have to be Earth against those UP worlds already established to be not-human, like Colu or Durla, not Winath or Titan, which have been described as Earth colonies before (and, really, what's the odds that Titan *isn't* a colony? The average temperature is negative -180 celsius or so (-292 fahrenheit), not counting wind-chill, and it's made of frozen methane, with no oxygen and 14% the gravity of Earth. Hardly the environment one would expect hot Swedish women to evolve in...). Johns just threw the Legion history out the window to make this cheap X-Men knock-off race-metaphor storyline.

What I don't understand is why the Legion stays on Earth at all if they're not wanted there.

Find another world as a base.

Make their own planet, use a huge space station, find an abandoned ring world, for goodness sake.

If I were a team of multispecies super beings with alien money backing us, I wouldn't stay to fight the bigots.

As for Brainy, he wasn't a Vril Dox wanna be in the reboot.
That happened in the 3boot and that's because Waid and Kitson were involved and somehow, that's their take on someone being 'smart', don't ask me why.

There really only needs to be one Vril in DC mythos, though, thank-you very much!

And lastly, where did you guys read Secrets 2?
My store, I'd say dealer but that sounds wrong, hasn't gotten it in yet!!!!!!!!!!
What a disapointment!

eloquently put Set. My thoughts exactly. Why wouldn't the Legion just say stuff it and move to a friendly world in these circumstances? Answer because Johns wants an Earth based Legion (unlike Giffen for example whose logic was much more sound on that issue).

If the Legion are going to stay on Earth the people of Easrth have to want them and all this xenophobic metaphor has to be blown away.

Or retconned into yet another Universo plot (or other plot) to 'explain' why the people who have been a part of the United Planets for ages (and helped found it in the first place!) are suddenly anti-alien. It doesn't fit the nature of the setting for Earth to become anti-alien *and for the United Planets Headquarters to still be on Earth!*

That's like having OPEC decide to have all their meetings in Israel. Ludicrous.

Not everyone on Earth has to be xenophobic. You might notice that it's implied this whole xenophobia thing didn't reach its peak until Earth-Man and the JLE appeared.

Clearly the reason the Legion is on Earth is because that's the place they're most needed! Since their reason for existing is to teach people how to live in peace and love and harmony and to co-operate with all species, then where better to station themselves on the planet that most needs to learn that lesson. That way the people of Earth can see them as a symbol of interplanetary co-operation, just as Superman came to Earth to teach them a similar lesson a thousand years before!