Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Making the grade

I've noticed that whenever the Legion gets rebooted--5 year gap, SW6 Legion, Superboy's Legion, post zero hour, etc.--it's always the characters that originated in the Adventure run that get brought back, time and again, while almost all of the post-Adventure Legionnaires get discarded.

For instance, in the current continuity every single one of the 27 Legionnaires who joined as of Adv. 380 has been reintroduced--although Sun Boy, Matter Eater Lad, Bouncing Boy, and Chemical King are powerless supporting cast, and Superboy and Supergirl have been replaced by Kon-El and Andromeda, due to DC policy.

Meanwhile, the only Legionnaires to join post Adventure to make a return are Wildfire, White Witch, and Invisible Kid II (and White Witch first appeared in Adventure) and only Wildfire has rejoined the team.

So, why is it that not one of the post Adventure members such as Dawnstar, Tyroc, Quislet, Tellus, Catspaw, Computo, Dragonmage, Blok, Kent Shakespeare, Celeste Rockfish, etc. have been brought back into the Legion fold?

Is it simply because the Adventure era Legionnaires have a bigger fan base, or are these later characters flawed in some way? Why don't they have the staying power that the Adventure members have?

Why bring back such admittedly weak Legionnaires as Triplicate Girl, Dream Girl, and Invisible Kid, while discarding the more powerful and versatile Blok, Impulse, and Tellus?

Is it because the various Legion creators have all been long time hard core Adventure era fans?

If the Legion gets rebooted again--God forbid--what are the odds that such newcomers as XS, Kinetix, Kid Quantum, and Gear will make the cut next time around?

thoughts? opinions? spoilers?

Spoiler, maybe. It has been confirmed by the artist (Chris Batista) that Kent Shakespeare is coming back. He's shown in the upcoming issue that features the Academy. Issue 25 I think.

Other than that, very good question. Some of those later characters (Dawnstar and Tellus) are favorites. Why wouldn't they be brought back? Is it because the current writers would prefer to leave their mark on the 'original' members to try and solidify their place in history?

Do I have any right to my sneeking suspician that there is a lot of behind the scenes wrangling over character rights?

Rules changes, ownership of some of the newer characters seems not so clear. Would publisher be concerned about using a character and having a creator say, wait, that's mine.

The most obvious reason a lot of the later preboot characters haven't appeared is that the general tendency has been to reboot characters in roughly the order they appeared preboot. I think that at least the approximate order of joining is one of the things that has become emeshed in Legion lore, and that's why it tends to play out througout other realities. It will be really interesting to see whether future versions of the Legion incorporate such characters as XS and Kinetix as early members, though.

The Adventure Era Legion members are all icons in comic book history, so it makes sense that new artists and writers would want the chance to work with them, to "contemporize" them, make them cool by today's standards.
I still don't understand why some decisions are made, though, like who's not brought back, who's killed, and why new characters are created instead of rebooting old ones. It'd be great if we were given some kind of word on that. Til then, I assume that there is a sort of creative group meeting that takes place to decide on all this.

I sure wish there was a current Dawnstar at DC.
(random, extra thought...)

I think some of it has to do with the fact that after a certain point, when a book has been around long enough you find that the people working on the books were *fans* of the book and were reading their adventures when they were much younger. It makes sense then that the older characters have sentimental appeal to these younger creators who see them as the "core" team since that's how they were introduced to the team.

I think the same holds true for most silver age teams. Look at the Avengers -- there's definitely a hierarchy there with Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Hank Pym, Wasp, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Vision as first tier Avengers, with almost the sense that anyone else is a hanger-on, or only around during the run of a particular creative team (as Triathlon actually points out).

Same with JLA -- we all know the "Big 7" are the first tier with the silver age folks like Green Arrow, Hawkman, Atom and Zatanna as the second tier.

I for one and glad that of the post Adventure characters WILDFIRE has "made the cut" (though TMK didn't think so)-- go Drake! I think it's because he became the epitome of the more modern angst ridden, doesn't play by the rules kinda hero and he's occupied that slot in the incarnations of the team that he's been on. While the other post-adventure characters are interesting in their own right, I don't think any of them ended up embodying a particular *type* of hero the way Wildfire has which might make it easier to see where he fits in the team. (that and he's damn cool!)

But Wildfire did come along late in TMK. He possessed Sun Boy's body, remember? Then they changed his name to NRG (ick) in the Legion on the Run storyline (double ick).

He came along in the series, but was it "TMK" at that point? I thougt Giffen had left by then.

Are Tellus, Quislet, and Computo really as popular or well-known as Adventure era characters? Wildfire is back because he is one of the most popular characters in Legion history. I'm not sure you can say that about any other post-Adventure members.

My brother - not a real Legion fan, but someone who has read a number of issues here and there over the years - if asked to name Legion characters would name Computo pretty quickly. He has asked me a couple of times since the reboot whether they brought her back yet or not.

Okay, its ancedotal evidence, but I thought I'd point it out.

[And its not like no one from the Legionnaires team has been brought back, but I think Dragonmage is it, and not as a member].

I guess my point was: WHY are the Adventure characters more popular than those other Johnny-come-latelys?

Is it just because they've been around longer?

Originality.

Perhaps there's a certain simplicity in the Adventure-era characters that eludes those created in more "sophisticated" times.

For example, if all we know about Lightning Lad is that he shoots lightning bolts from his fingers, that's a simple enough description to remember and sell to fans and TPTB. If we're lucky, we also get to know that he's a twin, he has an evil older brother, and he has the hots for Saturn Girl. That's all fairly easy-to-absorb, cut-and-dried story potential.

Tellus, on the other hand, isn't just a telepath, but a fish-like telepath (??) -- and we don't really need another telepath since we have Saturn Girl. So, all we're left with that makes him unique is that he's a fish-like character.

I liked Tellus -- and alien Legionnaires, in general -- but, from the standpoint of writers, editors or execs who may want to bring characters back, I can see that it might be hard to understand who would identify with him. As a "concept" he doesn't translate so easily into something you can sell to the general public (which does NOT mean he doesn't have his virtues. But then, these decisions are often made by people who think we, the readers, are too simple to grasp something complex).

I remember Roy Thomas once saying something to the effect that he felt the only Justice Society stories that "counted" were the original All-Star Comics tales, and that everything that came after (even his stories) wasn't of that stripe.

I wonder if a not dissimilar view is held by the more recent Legion writers towards the LSH. To the degree that the Adventure-era crew, no matter what changes they're put through, *are* the Legion, and the characters that came after are not on that level.

I don't think that's the case. I don't think it has to do with the quality of the characters as much as which set of characters made the first big impression on a particular creator when s/he was a fan. I think it's safe to say most of us hold the era in which we started reading the title in higher regard than most if not all the eras that came before or after just because that's the era which formed our impression of the team (and it must've been a positive one since we continued to read).

It wouldn't surprise me if a few years from now, someone who started reading the title during the Lightle/ Laroque era will be itching to reboot Quislet and Tellus and bring in Jacques and Mysa cuz they've been ignored and to them, they're more part of the "core" team than Lu, Chuck, Lyle and Ferro.

I don't know--how old are DnA? I'm thirty-two (zoinks!), so if I started reading comics when I was 12 (which I didn't but...) I would've started right as the Levitz era was beginning. And I don't want to speak for everyone, but I'm not sure that the Adventure era is held in that much more regard than the Levitz era for many Legion fans. I'm not sure that explanation holds up.

Simple characters? A possibility, but how complex is Blok? How simple is Projectra's power?

Could be. I can't remember. I know a lot of people hated the TMK era, and there were things I didn't like about it, but one of the things I did like about it was that they took a much more humanistic approach to the stories. Rather than focusing on super powers and science fiction, they focused on the human aspect of the characters. For the first time, we had an insight into what made the characters tick. Instead of 2-dimensional heroes and villains, we saw their motivations for the first time. We saw the villains' good side and the heroes' weak side. Sun Boy fell victim to his own ego and vanity. Mekt reformed, was reconciled with his family, and came out of the closet. Jan and Roxxas, formerly 2-D arch enemies, came to care about each other. Rokk defeated Mordru by having a conversation with him. Shady became a recluse, unable to overcome her grief.

Part of the more human portrayal of the characters was physical as well. Dawnstar's wings were stripped away. Mysa lost her ethereal appearance, antennae, and mystical mystique and became a down-to-earth battered wife. Garth was afflicted with a crippling disease. Rokk lost his powers. Vi lost an eye and a leg.

Instead of trying to make the Legionnaires more alien, unique, and other-worldly as previous creative teams had done, TMK brought them back down to Earth and made them identifiable to us lowly humans.

And hey, look! I actually started a thread that made it past the first page! Hoohah!

Not simple characters, but simple concepts behind the characters. Projectra's concept is that she's a princess with the ability to create illusions. They've tried to make it more complicated as time went on (e.g., Sensor Girl, Sensor), but her basic concept is simple.

As for Blok, well ... perhaps too simple is not a good thing.

[jimgallagher]
{[...] Part of the more human portrayal of the characters was physical as well. Dawnstar's wings were stripped away. Mysa lost her ethereal appearance, antennae, and mystical mystique and became a down-to-earth battered wife. Garth was afflicted with a crippling disease. Rokk lost his powers. Vi lost an eye and a leg. }

That's an astonishing catalog of effects for something that is supposedly reflective of being "more human" (I'd say "humane" is closer to the sense you're using) or "humanistic." Every one of those portrayals you mention -- and a host of others perpetrated by TMK, et al., that you didn't -- involves a mutilation, an injury, or an illness.

And that's the problem, on this next turn of an infinite discussion go-round, with those writers and artists: they clearly saw a "humanizing" being expressed through emphasizing what injured these characters, or where they fell short in inherent flaws. Not in highlighting where they chose to be heroic and succeeded in doing so.

I don't buy art that emphasizes the futility of life and of striving. I take no comfort or inspiration from that, and I don't need to have my leisure hours filled with works that emphasize the downside of "real life." I had enough of them foisted on me in college, thank you, by the lovers of nihilism and death on the faculty, and from where (once committed to the course) I usually had "no exit," in Sartre's phrase.

To say that suffering and death is what "makes them identifiable to us lowly humans" is to take away any motivation for reading these tales or following these characters in the first place.

If I wanted to dote on such emptiness, I'd buy a used paperback copy of "Waiting for Godot." Or an issue of the now authoritarian "Authority." And not -- apart from a half-dozen issues solely for reference material -- a polluted stream of its being done to the Legion.

Yes, Greybeard. We all know you hated the TMK era. You don't have to tell us yet again.

I didn't say that. What I'm saying is that the creative team took a group of super-humans and focused on the humans, rather than the super for a change. And humans are flawed--physically, emotionally, morally... No one is all good or all bad, and no one is impervious to harm.

So you didn't like it. Big deal. Let it go.

Help me out (new here). Does TMK stand for (and I'm guessing) Tom Mary Keith? I, for one, hated that era. But I know it's because I started with the Adventure era and all the sweetness and light and everyone was happy and no one (except Ferro Lad) got killed!

Sorry, got carried away.

Even though I did not like "TMK" because of the dark quality, some of the stories and storylines were good. But I will never accept the Jan and Shvaughn "Im really a boy" deal.

Rant over

I was really bugged by the whole Sun Boy deal. The way they killed him off was horrendous. I'd like Dirk Morgna to come back. He was actually one of my favorite legionaires. Although ... he doesn't seem to have much support here.

I'd forgotten about what they did to Sun Boy. That really was low. He had to suffer so much. What was the point?

I have always liked him, especially when he faces Dr.Regulus. Some great stories there.

(EEK! TMK discussion....)

Back to the original topic:

I think it also has to do with how kewl the character is. Tellus always seemed a bit less confident than he should be, and I kinda recall him often complaining about missing Mother Ocean. I could be wrong. The thing is though, I honestly can't recall any of his accomplishments.

Quislet was fun and interesting, but the only accomplishment I can recall from him was teaching Wildfire how to look different. Then he left our universe. We didn't have enough time to really get to adore Quislet. I think we could have in that R2D2 way.

Catspaw had that exotic, flirty thing going on, but again, there wasn't much that happened with her to make her stick as an all-time favorite.

Computo probably could have gone on to become a great Legionnaire, but Zero Hour happened so soon after she became a Legionnaire.

These are just a handful of preboot examples.

As for postboot, I think we're back to panel time again. Jenni and Zoe seem to have quite a fan base, but lately it seems like they've taken big steps away from the spotlight. Jazmin has stepped up front, and comes across as a prime example of a non Adventure Era Legionnaire who is very popular. Shikari seems to be well liked, too, but is constantly embroiled in the "rebooted Dawnstar" debate.

This post makes me think about Laurel Gand. Even though she was put in the Legion to take the place of Supergirl, she has always been given an interesting personality and an actual back-story. So weird that she was killed off during Legion on the Run, and has been pretty much "banished" here in post boot. I think she qualifies as a non Adventure Era character who is very popular. I guess I don't really think of the postboot version as a reboot of Supergirl, because in the current state of being, she *could* actually meet Supergirl.

Anyway, I obviously find this a very interesting topic to think about, Jim!