Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes rereading L.E.G.I.O.N.

I'm gonna re-read the whole series. I started last night with issues 1 through 3.

Good stuff. Grant's script is witty and engaging and Giffen's plots keep one thing happening right after the other.

We learn what a master manipulator Dox is. We see the origin of Pulsar Stargrave. And just when there's no more reason for the 6 lead characters (Dox, the Durlan, Stealth, Strata, Garryn and Lyrissa) to stay together anymore... enter: LOBO!

Groovy Kevin Maguire covers and nice Barry Kitson art, although I'm not 100% sure DeCarlo was a good match for him on the inks.

Looking forward to diving into issue # 4 later!

The wonderful Ms. Cramer just sent me L.E.G.I.O.N. 1-70!

I blew through 1 to 25 last night, then decided to hold off until I could pick up Adv/Superman Annual #2, which led into dot-L Annual #1. Guess what I ran out and tracked down this morning...


Awaiting your continuing reviews, Lashie...

You know, something that kinda bugged me was how, they did such a GREAT job finally clearing up and revealing the true origin of Pulsar Stargrave... and thanks to the rampant chaos in the "regular" Legion book, NOTHING ever came of it.


You know, the whole time Barry Kitson was doing L.E.G.I.O.N., I kept thinking he really SHOULD have been doing the "real" book instead of the spin-off. His style would have managed to tell the story of Earth gone TO HELL under The Dominators with a lot more style-- and CLARITY-- than ANYBODY who worked on the regular book at the time managed. (At least, I think so!)

Feetal's gizz! Cramey's an angel! But we knew that already. We need to do something nice for her for the holidays.


I did finish re-reading this series (and R.E.B.E.L.S.) awhile back, but Stealth's reviews of the series came along and were very engaging, so I didn't continue mine.

dot-Legion pretty much rocks throughout; especially entertaining is finding out just how deadly the LSH's Bouncing Boy could be, if he wanted (keep reading, Povvins!). I also loved the Emerald Beks.

dot-Rebels reads much better the second time and straight on through.

Let's send her a bunch of comic books.

I hear she's missing L.E.G.I.O.N. #1-70.

Well, I know where to find a full set if I want to read it again.

And there's Stealth's summary/commentary for quick recall.

L.E.G.I.O.N. was a pretty unique series. I wish they'd do more of that "what's going on in the rest of the galaxy" type of book - or fill in the gaps between our time and the 31st century. Rann/Thanagar War did show the off-Earth part of the DCU, but I didn't find it that compelling a story.

Glad to hear you guys enjoyed reading L.E.G.I.O.N. again - I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the book.
I think you'll find our take on LSH will have more than a little of the flavor the '.' book had... the groundwork is in place....

I've only ever read the Jo 2-parter and the 007 annual. I just can't think of it as "real" Legion.

I really liked L.E.G.I.O.N.; I still have a soft spot for a lot of the characters that appeared in the book. Didn't like R.E.B.E.L.S. as much (think I have a negative letter printed in the lettercol there as well! lol)

They're both on my re-read list to eventually get to, though...

All the L.E.G.I.O.N. talk got me seeking out this thread... and Barry's post above gave me this thought...

fans of WaK's LSH run really WOULD enjoy dot-LEGION. Me, I liked the in-fighting and scheming much better on characters who were NOT the LSH-proper, hence my dissatisfaction with the bulk of the WaK run (and conversely, my enjoyment of dot-LEGION).

Plus Geffen and Grant's dot-LEGION plots were wicked kewl... I think Waid did a few good issues too.

A seriously overlooked run of comics. I'm more excited for dot-LEGION's return now, remembering how much I enjoyed them. Heh... every issue, you wondered who on the team was going to try to kill who on the team next.

I was really excited to see Kitson's name on LSH EXACTLY because of his amazing job on dot-Legion.
And that's why I was so disappointed when it wasn't anything remotely similar in terms of "hanging" on characters. True: Kitson's art is still great. But Waid never understood that his concept was flawed from the beginning. Shooter deserves an Oscar for saving it.

Yah, 100%

Unfortunately, when they started following the same sort of relationships with this newboot, all I could think of was the dotLEGION stories and I was bored.

Hi Guys
Thanks again for the kind words about L.E.G.I.O.N. and my work in general.

I think one of the big differences between the run on dot-Legion and the WaK LSH was the amount of freedom we had with dot-legion. We were pretty much allowed to do whatever we wanted with the characters which gave us license to take a lot more risks and push things further than we were able on LSH itself.
We would have liked to push the character side of things a lot more in LSH but there were a lot of considerations outside the book itself - characters appearing elsewhere etc - that we didn't have to contend with with dot-legion. Even when Lobo got his own book we pretty much ploughed our own independent furrow with him in dot-legion - the same wasn't really possible with Supergirl in LSH, with crossovers and continuity so important in the industry in modern times it meant we couldn't follow our own muse with quite the abandon we had on dot-legion.. or else some pretty radical plots would have been followed up
I will always be so grateful for the time I was working on dot-legion, it was a pretty unique (if that term makes any sense at all) experience and it means a great deal to me that folks still look back on the series with such affection!

Thank YOU for the great work on L.E.G.I.O.N., Barry. And those were indeed other times: you stayed almost 5 years on it! And that was the norm back then!

It's interesting to find out the recent LSH was "creatively constraint" - I thought the Supergirl stunt was your own, not editorial.
Can you give us a hint on what would have happened to LSH in case you were able to follow the original idea, now that threeboot is over?

Hi Ricardo
Five years was our original plan!

The inclusion of Supergirl was our choice, but we understood that our's was to be THE Supergirl in the DCU and we could do with her as we liked....as is often the way with comics things didn't quite work out that way. It is one of the reasons that our Supergirl was so different from the one in her own title, but Mark is probably the best person to ask about this topic.

Our original plan was to have Brainiac spend much of his time attempting to return her to the 20th century, but in our LSH/DCU he would have discovered that retrogressive time travel wasn't possible - you could go back to a timeline after you left it, but never back to the same future you had visited each return to the past would set up an alternate future and that was how we would have encountered alternate legions including Dawnstar, Tyroc etc with some characters crossing between alternate 'nows' but never able to change them. Of course all of this was postulated before DC decided to bring back time travel, have another infinite crisis etc.

It was also tied into how we would explain the LSH being based on DC comics as someone travelling back told the past of the LSH which then instead of creating the LSH exactly as was created a new timeline with our LSH in it. Theoretically we may have met the original LSH and exchanged a member or two - but it would have been a one off climactic event and probably envisioned as the end of our run on the book. Leaving the next team with their pick of the best of both to set up their stories with.

Probably Dream Girl's ultimate fate and/or death would have played into these quantum possiblities too - as whether she was alive or dead being a kind of existential Shrodinger's Cat if that makes any sense at all...which is unlikely as I'm the person typing it.

I think/hope it won't be doing any harm to tell what we might have done - as I don't think post Final Crisis etc it could be done now...and if it does spin out anything like the above it will be purely a matter of coincidence as I don't recall any of us ever telling anyone outside the team what our plans were.

Phew! Hope that answers a few questions and isn't too confusing to boot.

That makes sense.

And here I had suspected that you guys just hadn't thought that part out well enough.

Thanks for clearing it up.

Sure puts a spoke in the wheels of everybody who thought that this Legion is in the future of Earth-Prime...

Wow, much different from what the book was about, I guess. So, once again, Legion seemed to suffer from editorial decisions off the bat that toyed with time travel.
I can see it would be a much headier game then it actually became - and thus why sometimes it seemed that the book was sort of going through the motions (the fill-in artists didn't help much to show unity). I'd love to have seen TMK's Legion back in the game, in fact - and this idea would actually be much better than the 52 worlds DC has established so far.
I think it was a clever idea and one I would have loved to see through the end of the run. But the "eat-it-gramps" premise still doesn't convince me. We never saw a good reason for that and why this involved heroics, I guess.

By the way, when are you doing L.E.G.I.O.N. back again with Grant and Giffen?

Thanks a lot for everything, Barry. It's a pity I can't deal with Marvel at all recently (except for Milligan & Allred's X-Factor, that is).

Well it may turn out to be now...but it just wasn't where we thought we were going

No worries about reading which ever books you like - I'll just hope I can tempt you back to reading something I work on someday in the future!

Nah, DC will get the sort-of original team back and screw it up sometime in the near future... It's a routine by now.

Well, I am actually getting Empire TP now...

cheers

Let me know how you get on with Empire

Isn't it time for you and Mark to do another Empire story arc? It ends in an extremely interesting place, almost like the TPB is a prologue for your "real" story.

I would love to see another Empire story. One of the most unexpected panels I ever came across in comics was when the two ladies "go shopping" ... <span class="spoiler_containter"><span class="spoiler_wording">Click Here For A Spoiler</span><span class="spoiler_text">for a male sex slave</span></span>. I got a good laugh out of the surprise.

Barry Kitson is a class act. It's great to see you still here even after your run ended.

What are the chances DC can lure you onboard with Bedard as co-writer and penciller of the all-new all-now dot-Legion? I think that's just what it needs, what would push it over the edge and get folks REALLY excited!