Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Recent Legion-verse sightings in DCU proper

I'm leaning closer to Sarky here. I think, in hindsight, most of v6 is bearable, and sometimes better than that, but v7/LL2 is a washout.

Johns, I categorically hate.

If we're going to split hairs here, and the Black Witch is involved, it would have to be post-Lo3w. But it could still be pre-Levitz.

Not that I'm happy about that for about a dozen reasons.

But also, the entire team doesn't have to tag along for the mission.

The easiest way to justify the New 52 Legion comics being on Earth-2 are due to the Secret Origin mini, the fact they were acting as though they never fought or heard of the Fatal Five until that arc, and Bouncing Boy saying Superman was killed by Steppenwolf (which happened in the Earth-2 book)

If they're here for Mordru, then Black Witch being there makes tons of sense

Oh completely agreed. And an interesting choice given what happened before.

The whole retroboot was a massive continuity clustersprock from the very beginning, as it was mostly about nostalgia wanking rather than anyone actually caring about what the history of this version of the team actually was. This was obvious from the very beginning with Karate Kid and Sensor Girl on the team and nobody feeling the need to explain how that makes any sense if this team suppose to have a history resembling the preboot team.

The story of v6 flows pretty much continously from v5, which in turn flows pretty much continously from Johns's stories, but by end of v6 the stories don't fit at all with Johns's stories. Obviously Levitz gives us the E-2 explanation at the end, but there's no obvious place where the transition to E-2 took place. So you can basically pick and choose.

My suspicion is that Johns will basically leave it ambiguous but only use his stuff and ignore anything Levitz did. The next team to pick up the Legion may do something entirely different. For me, I'd be happy to ignore everything involving Earth Man joining the team, sleeping with Shady, etc. Then again, I'd also happily ignore everything that Johns did with the retroboot as well and just pick things up from the Magic Wars, for example.

Picking things up from the Magic Wars would be great! No ____ing 5 year gap this time!

I hope Johns does leave it ambiguous for whoever takes the reins, but I don't trust him! He's passive-aggressive, so he's probably going to do one last bit of nasty business just to wind up his haters (of which I am one, and I make no apologies for it.)

Wasn't that the conceit of the Superman & Legion? That it was right after Magic Wars?

It was never specified. All we were really told was that Superman hadn't seen the Legion "since before Crisis". For some reason Karate Kid is alive, and no mention is ever made of Pol Krinn. At the very least post-Crisis Legion history is going to go significantly differently since there's presumably no Pocket Universe story, which means no Conspiracy, which has pretty significant effects on how things go. I suppose this would explain why the Time Trapper is still around, though.

Okay...

Johns left it ambiguous when he brought this Legion back as to what happened and what didn't since the last time Superman saw them. Garth and Imra were still married, Gim and Yera were still married, and Jeckie was Sensor Girl, but Ayla was suddenly back with Brin, Val was alive for some reason, and Lu was still Duo Damsel. He even gave a brief mention to the Pocket Earth in Action #864 as one of the Time Trapper's tricks to fool the Legion.

I believe Johns' intent was that he was only continuing from around the issues that led into Crisis.

When Levitz came back on as writer, that annual issue with the Emerald Empress had the "game board" back-up feature that explained the timeline of events. Everything up to the end of the 1984 volume still happened. The Pocket Earth, Magic Wars, the Emerald Empress dying, Magnetic Kid dying, Mon-El seemingly dying. But then the "mystery years" happened leading into the Justice League of Earth's coup, as a catch-all hand wave for how some stuff happened. Like Zerox being restored, Mon and Val coming back, etc.

MY interpretation is the reason FYL never happened is because at some point the Legion figured out the Time Trapper lied to them about "creating" Superboy and making the Legion happen, thus morale was reinvigorated upon reaffirming their childhood friendship with Clark.

Any of the inconsistencies we saw in Legion of 3 Worlds pertaining to, like, the classic Fatal Five being part of the LSV despite Sarya being dead and Validus being Garridan could be explained as proof of the damage Darkseid and Mandrakk were inflicting on time and space (like that mysterious Aquaman who showed up in Final Crisis and then disappeared).

What I want most is for the Reboot / Earth-247 universe restored, and the Reboot Legion to make their way home

and if that doesn't happen in canon... It already has, in my headcanon!

You know I agree with this take, Ibby!

Oh yeah. I totally agree with picking up the story of the Reboot Legion up after "For No Better Reason". If you have to have a scene of them arriving home after wandering the multiverse or whatever, and use some sort of handwaving to get XS, Gates, and Kinetix in there as well, then so be it! But I don't really care.

I'm all for continuing the threeboot as well, with Sun Boy and Element Lad somehow back. And 5YL picking up like End of Era never happened. It's all awesome.

I would love to live in a world where ALL of them got continued. If DC can run five hundred different Batman books expecting people won't get confused, I don't know why this is so hard.

That seemed to be the direction they were going with Infinitus.

Before the dark times....

No Infinitus was just a hodgepodge Legion with members thrown together from different continuities. Yet another Mayfly Legion that burned out as quickly as it appeared.

Again, this is closest to my own feelings. Infinitus should have been called Ephemerus.

Yeah but it had the approach closer to right - bring the Legions together where they make sense.

I mean lets face it, the best Legion approach that has been done is the fanfic done by DrakeB here on this very board. That's really whatever comes next has to do in its own way.

On that point I definitely agree.

I'm totally open to completely new takes on the Legion that incorporate members and elements from a variety of different previous incarnations! Though that's kind of what Bendis was doing, and neither his choices of what to incorporate from different continuities nor the execution of the whole thing was to my liking.

I'm just not a fan of taking something that's supposed to be the Bronze Age Legion, trying to shoehorn it into the current DCU, as if that itself wouldn't cause tons of continuity glitches, and not even bothering to be consistent with the stories of the team that you're supposedly briging back, knowing that you'll have a bunch of fans who will get excited by the ONE TRUE LEGION being back based mostly on superficial grounds.

It's a similar kind of thing with bringing Barry Allen back while giving him a completely new tragic backstory which pretty fundamentally changes his character, but people are supposed to fanboy because it's BARRY ALLEN, OMG!

EDE, I agree with pretty much everything in your last post. I don't think Levitz nor anyone else involved with the Retroboot did a particularly good job, but at the same time, it's the closest Legion in the past 20 years to have done anything positive for me. All it would take is for the new creators and editors take a more measured and thoughtful approach to the concept of bringing back the Bronze Age Legion (although I call it the Gilded Age Legion, and consider the Bronze Age Legion to have ended with the Reflecto silliness. But that's just me.)

hear, hear! glad we are aligned



very much so. Love how Drake's team is a combined Legion, drawing characters from different versions



yeah, if DC thinks folks can keep 4 former Robins and a few former Batgirls straight, then why not a Legion too...



I know you probably don't buy into it yourself, EDE, but ONE TRUE LEGION comments always annoyed me. it's one thing to say "this is MY Legion" or "my fave Legion", but ONE TRUE LEGION tends to devalue the other equally-legitimate versions of the team.

I believe many others, like Michael Grabois and our very own Jerry, have called out offending fans on Facebook. I've done it a couple of times, too.

^^Yeah, my point was to emphasize the fact that many of the people who use the "one true Legion" type terminology also seem weirdly unconcerned with stuff like Karate Kid and Sensor Girl hanging out together or the classic Fatal Five showing up intact, and so they seem to be responding on more of a "get the good feels from something that, if you squint, kind of resembles what i read in my childhood" level than actually caring about whether any of it makes sense. You'd think that if one thought there was only one valid interpretation of the Legion, you'd actually be more concerned with the writers getting the history/continuity of the team right, but for some reason that often doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm not so concerned with chronology or continuity. A publisher HAS to mix up things to some extent every decade or so in order to keep things modern and accessible. Keeping a major storyline, like Earthwar or GDS, is important to keep in the history, but something like the space pirates or the carnival is not worth referencing as a past event.

To me, it's more important to keep the characters from across the different versions, else you have a scenario where you won't care about a particular version if your favorite isn't in the list. Let's say XS is my favorite character - Why would I care about any version of the Legion other than the reboot? They've never used her ever since. If we keep the characters, there's a chance to keep the thread of interest in future versions. The way DC has treated the Legion since 2005, I have zero reason to care for ANY version of this team.

Its the characters that are the most important thing to keep.

Exactly. That's why I was already so resistant to another reboot because of how DC seems to think the Legionnaires are interchangeable. Bendis only proved my fears were justified because he did NOT care in the slightest about characterization.

I love Ayla and Vi as a couple and I love Garth and Imra married and as parents, but I want to see those specific versions of the characters finally have their stories uninterrupted. At this point in time Ayla and Vi should've been allowed to be called girlfriends on panel and actually KISS or show any signs of real physical intimacy. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that they were cut out just as DC finally stopped being afraid of showing that kind of relationship on panel in their mainstream books?