Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! How do you plan on reacting to the Fourth Boot?

Well... I intend to latch on to the slightest evidence that it may be restoring those aspects of the Legion that make it so appealing to me, become way too emotionally invested in it turning out to be good, hold on to that emotional investment way too long after the book turns out to be yet stinking crapola modern-day DC product with the rationalization that at least it's not got some of things wrong with it that the last version of the team had, before finally becoming disenchanted with the whole thing.

You know... pretty much the way I've reacted to the last five or six Legion relaunches.

I plan on taking my pants off in protest. Oh, wait...

I'm going to count how many issues until they face a big alien invasion. That's gonna maybe, you know, try to destroy the Earth. And all seems lost.

Assuming it is a fourboot...

I will buy it, read it, and review it on Legion Abstract. I will try to figure out what the interesting aspects of it are. I'll try to look for things in the art that I might miss if I didn't consciously look for them. I'll try to isolate what, if anything, the comic book adds to the half-century-plus of Legion lore that's accumulated. I'll put it back in its bag and put it on top of the cupboard with my other recent Legion comics. I'll check in here and other places online to see what other people think of it, and if they noticed anything I missed.

Because that's how I react to Legion comics.

Curl up and have a good cry? Stomp my feet in impotent mock outrage? Rail at the heavens and call a pox upon the house of Dan Didio? Furtively buy the first few issues anyway, no matter how loudly I protest that I won't?

Probably, yeah.

I might rend some clothes and gnash some teeth, too. But only if someone's watching. Being a drama queen isn't terribly fulfilling without an audience.

aw, come on, we all know we'd buy it, pretend to hate it because it doesn't match the perfect (and different for everyone) vision of what the Legion should be in our heads, slag it rotten on here, remember the good old days of the 3boot and the great times they had with Supergirl, and then think it was actually quite good when the disaster that is the 5boot comes out... which we'd also buy and secretly love.

Each time the Legion reboots, it has a harder time appealing to me, whether that is fair or not. The threeboot was especially dissapointing. *If* there was a fourthboot, I certainly have no intentions of giving the book a clean-slate. It would have things against it already, because I'd so rather DC give us the original Legion.

Except I think this time I'll be louder and more vicious in my critiques. I was too pleasant during the threeboot

PS - Eryk pretty much summed up what I consider the large fan reaction to the threeboot.

The cycle seems to be getting much smaller for me with each new continuity. It only took me about three issues of Johns's version to go from "Hey, awesome! He's brought back the classic Legion!" to "Wildfire is Red Tornado!?!? What kind of crap is this!?!?!"

Maybe I'll just sleep through it and catch the Fifth Boot.

At the rate they're going you'll only get a cat nap.

I'm going to bitch because either:


a) Matter-Eater Lad and Infectious Lass aren't in it


OR


b) Matter-Eater Lad and Infectious Lass ARE in it, only now he's an oversize disembodied mouth with fangs and she's a sentient blob of mold.

I'm going to demand more nudity, like I've done with all the other 'boots!

I would have been more vicious, but Barry Kitson is a classy guy and I didn't want to hurt his feelings.

I'll be a devoted consumer, and buy it even if I don't really like it. I'll hope that Dream Girl will be depicted as the awesome character I love, not the tacky over the hill version or the ditzy narcoleptic version or the dead version.

And I'll hope for great depictions of the rest of the characters too.

You know, the threeboot wasn't a reference to it being the third reboot, but the second reboot that produced the third version of the Legion. Or is that just how I saw it?

I wouldn't mind a fourth version... if it were actually better than any that came before. But that would require actually taking ideas from previous versions and building on them in new ways. The first reboot did this, continuing some ideas from the previous continuity (Valor, Triad). The threeboot didn't do this at all.

Only a fourboot could produce the Legion I want... and thus, it'll probably disappoint me more than anything before.

It would seem like 4B = Levitz' Legion that somehow doesn't reach Giffen's 5YL.

Frankly, I don't know how to react to that for several reasons.

1. I love what Giffen did 5YL. If Johns' LO3W paves the way for 4B, then it effectively negates that. I know, I know...it's not a popular version of the Legion that I can re-read if I love it so much but still...

2. 2B now becomes less of a 'boot & more a look at a Legion from one of the 52 universes? Is this the same for 3B?

3. I don't know what to make of the Legion coming out of the LO3W mini.

Offhand, I'll likely buy a 4B Legion...but I have to admit its more out of blind devotion & love for what the characters once were than anything else. A part of me will likely hope that I can get invested in the characters again. I guess after reading Legion for almost 3 decades the optimism I once had for this team & what they mean to me as characters has gotten progressively eroded over all these 'boots... :-(

Yeah but there's no way in hell to get 5YL out of continuity limbo... it's sad, but true. As I loved 5YL AND the original Legion, I can live with getting back at least one of them. 5YL will always stay my most cherished giant elseworld story... one of the first major stories which became an elseworld AFTER being published

Of course, I'll also buy v.6 (Is it v.6? or v.7? is anybody still counting?). Maybe I'll even like it. As long as they don't start an amagamated Legion or a totally new one, I'll probably even support it if it's not so good!

Just for the record:

I DESPISE AMALGAM LEGION. No one should EVER think about it. It makes my stomach hurls. Yes, it's that bad of an idea. So bad that Keith didn't even try amalgamating SW6 Batch with the REAL Legion (yeah, the one who came from everything that had happened before, not this arbitrary Action Legion).

Well I'll be buying it and continueing to support it, even if it is not my concept of "good", in the hopes that will become "good".
I am not a big fan of the current series. I really tried to be, after all this was my beloved Legion. However that was the problem, 3boot simply was not my legion, the legion I learned to love many years ago. And sadly, no matter what the 4boot is like, there will be a certain number of fans who will not be getting "thier" Legion. My biggest fear with this upcoming boot is that *NONE* of us get a version of a Legion we love. Of course there is always the of chance we get something new that most of us can enjoy.

C'mon, Guys. We don't know yet whether there will be a "Fourthboot" or not. Don't jump to conclusions. All we know is that there won't be a LEGION book immediately after LEGION OF 3 WORLDS ends...

I actually think there won't be a fourboot. I don't know what we'll get, but I do think we're already familiar with all the ingredients of it.

Sure, but speculation if the lifeblood of message boards, and when in doubt, start making jokes about the Legion and its fans!

The way I see it, the Fourboot already took place right under our noses. Its outcome is Johns' ersatz-original Legion you see before you. The first seed was the introduction of Starman in the relaunched JSA. It tentatively took shape in "The Lightning Saga", was green-lighted by DC the day it began advertising Johns' doppelgangers as the original Legion (est. June 2007), and has since then continued to grow by stealing more and more pieces of original Legion history, and shedding the LSaga pieces that don't fit (Wildfire as Red Tornado, Ayla being dead.). The 4boot is a fait accompli two full years in the making.

Imo, "The Legion of Three Worlds" is simply a Retconfest that tops off the Fourboot by creating some new "history" to fill in the gaps between Crisis on Infinite Earths and the Lightning Saga. At the same time it will permanently dispose of the post-Crisis and Five Years Later Legions by explaining it away as Time Trapper trickery, and exile the reboot and 3boot Legions to parallel words (assuming they survive). It's also the vehicle of Bart Allen's resurrection (as if I cared.) and most sadly of all, the very final requiem for the true pre-Crisis Legion.

I've already been reacting to the Fourboot for 18 months --

As to its future, it looks like the Fourboot Legion will continue on for a quite a while without a monthly series of its own in the role of Superman's sidekicks (kind of like a bunch of futuristic Jimmy Olsens), until someone gets another bright idea.

I'm sorry that you are seeing Johns' Legion in such a negative light, Tromium. I consider myself a diehard, hardliner, anal-retentive nostalgiac, but in LS and Action and JSA, I could feel nothing but joy in the return of something that was by any means close enough to the original to embrace it after 14 years of being handed kiddie and hippie Legions.

Normally, I find it very hard to simply enjoy something - but in this instance, it's one of the seldom cases for me when I just have fun reading without asking questions and without analyzing it to death. So at the same time that I'm sorry for you, I'm a little amazed about myself. I don't care much for the Wildfire / Red Tornado connection as well - but there are just to many positive aspects of this return-boot to become nitpicky...

The fear I'm having as that now that we're getting something back which was lost in 1994 (some say, much earlier), the fandom will be fragmented again and thus another commercial failure might be on the horizon... that would be disastrous...