Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion Youboot

So, let's suppose DC is interested in publishing the Legion again. And, since we're supposing, let's further suppose TPTB at DC have reached out and asked you to submit a proposal. What's your pitch?

I would move the Legion away from an emphasis on super heroes to more of a sci-fi emphasis with the Legion serving as protectors of the galaxy, but not based on Earth. I'd expand the universe and drop most of the past villains (except Dark Circle, Dominators and Khunds) and create new villains/foes coming from other worlds in the galaxy.

My dream team would consist of:

Dawnstar
Gates
Tellus
Timber Wolf
Chameleon Boy
Dream Girl
Ultra Boy
Brainiac 5
Tyroc
Duplicate Damsel
Shrinking Violet
and either Lightning Lad or Cosmic Boy

I think this would make a nice ensemble of characters and powers.

I would either re-establish them as a REAL Legion, let them incorporate the Subs, Wannderers, Heroes of Lallor etc, give them Legion World and turn it into more a universe-building series rather than straight-up super heroics...OR...

Let's give the 31st century a rest for a while and have a book set in the 41st or the 51st century...that way DC can have its 'JLA of the future' without having to throw the Legion under a bus to get it and it gives the creative team freedom to come up with all kinds of crazy ideas without having to do the obligatory Fatal Five/LSV stories...

My proposal: Eight hundred years have passed since the fall of the United Planets. The wars of the the 31st century heroes and villains did nothing to advance the universe and ended in catastrophe. A Dark Age fell upon the galaxy as opportunists carved kingdoms out of the remains of the United Planets. This will be a coming of age story about a young man who unites these kingdoms into a mighty force.

Dev-Em - Agent of I.C.I.C

Following on from the Tales of the Legion story have Dev-Em and Gigi tracking down the Dark Circle.

He's the super strong, super suave secret agent and she's the beautiful and brilliant brains behind the team (sort of like Inspector Gadget and Penny. Only better).

Give it a futuristic but retro feel and tell proper hardcore spy stories. Despite all his powers the mysterious and constantly changing Dark Circle are the perfect villain for him as you never know where they will strike next or who is an agent. It could be him!

Also pay whatever it takes to get Steranko to draw the covers for at least the first storyline.

Return it to its roots as a Superman title. Have 20-something Kal-El as a full-time member. I'd prefer the original continuity but I'd be open to a reboot started in media res - with the Legion already established and some classic stories as background. With Superman as the lead, DC should be able to justify top talent, and with Superman fans and Legion fans buying it, I think it could sell in the 30,000-40,000 range.

My own idea would be to pick up from the original story in Adventure Comics 247. Note that no extra-solar planets are mentioned in that tale, so my hook would be that this version of the Legion is still, 1,000 years from now, hampered by the physical impossibility of faster-than-light travel. Humanity has spread out to inhabit all 247 planets, dwarf planets, moons, artificial worlds and large Oort Cloud objects of the solar system, but that's it. In that way, the overarching theme of the book would be an allegory for today's world, in which we've spread to every conceivable corner of the planet and have begun to turn back on ourselves in conflicts over resources and religions.

In this system, each planet has its own HEROES (Hazardous Environment Rescue Operations and Emergency Services), organizations akin to today's firefighter/EMT units. Like the Explorer groups attached to modern fire departments, each HEROES group also has a junior training detail. The genius of R. J. Brande, who made his fortune creating the planets Lallor and Xanthu, which, with the planet-sized space ships Weber World and Sherman Station share the orbit once occupied by the asteroid belt, was to bring representatives of several Explorer groups into a single group to demonstrate to the various United Planets how young people of disparate backgrounds can work together for the benefit of all.

The formation of The Young HEROES would still be precipitated by the Brande Incident, but, following from Adventure 247, there would be changes, i.e. Cosmic Boy takes a serum to enhance his powers and, acclimated to the methane atmosphere of Titan occasionally wears a breathing helmet, particularly when under stress, Saturn Girl, from a city the floats in the clouds of the gas giant, was taught telepathy by scientists, and Lightning Boy has to clap his hands to create a spark.

Because of the size of the group, and the fact that each member has some ability uncommon across the entire solar system, the media will have taken to calling them the Legion of Super-HEROES, disparagingly at first, when it's presumed Brande's big idea is fated to implode, but then with increasing respect.

I would pick up the stories about four or five years after the Brande Incident, hinting at a rich backstory including a deadly Legion Civil War. After all, that's how I was introduced to the Legion, way back in S/LSH #218, with fascinating, complete stories in every issue complimented by a tapestry of traditions to unweave.

I'd want Steve Rude as my artist to give the stories a groovy, retro feel. Given the limits placed on the usual sci-fi tropes, I'd want Rude to depict my Legion much like it appeared in its debut appearance - the world of 2958 as imagined from 1958. Without saying so explicitly, I'd also set my stories in the future of the pre-Crisis Earth-2, with the team inspired by Power Girl, rather than Superboy, and a few nods to JSA members.

The Legion's fundamental problem is a Broken Base. Most of those couldn't help but fragment things more - especially PoFo's. It isn't a bad idea for a "Golden Age" Legion, but you couldn't sell it as The Legion or base too hard around something from half-a-century ago. Ditto jumping a hundred or a thousand years further forward - you need to have a solid core of "actual" Legion characters to make that work.

Honestly, I'm not sure there's a simple way to reconcile things. Well, let me rephrase that - I'm sure there's no way to reconcile the base as a whole, too many people want different things. Things are also screwed in that the more you tie things to the 21st century for sales reasons, the more vulnerable you are to things happening there that knock your footing out. In another thread, people are mentioning Guardians of the Galaxy - but they were so screwed up by Michael Gallagher's awful run that got their 90s book cancelled that the real GotG have never been seen again. DnA's version - which have been damn near Rebooted by Bendis - was formed from a motley collection of Adam Warlock supporting characters (Gamora, Drax and Warlock himself) and the almost-entirely random crew of obscura Giffen put together for the Star-Lord mini. Oh, and one alternate version of Vance Astro for flavour. It quite literally had and has as much connection with the "real" GotG as L.E.G.I.O.N. had with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

With that necessary preface, I think the only way is to move forward and do another 5YL-type event. Pick up a decade-odd later, but after a decade of *peace* rather than 5YL's descent into dystopia. Keep the backstory vague - play it like it could be the future of the preboot, postboot, retroboot, etc, referring only vaguely to the past - the focus is forward, not back. The surviving "original" Legionnaires from a decade or so ago (who include ones from various continuities, even the joining order can be vague) have gone their separate ways - some continue as the elder statesmen of an expanded (hundreds-strong) Legion, based on Legion World; some have gone into politics - President Krinn's administration is in its second year - and some have quit public life altogether and are a mixture of businesspeople, researchers, working joes, hermits and celebrities-for-celebrity's-sake.

[And at the end of the first issue, of course, things get turned upside down, but that's kind of necessary to have a plot!]

Would it work? I dunno, I have doubts, but continuing straightforwardly from Johns' retroboot - modified by the major revisions the "New 52" made to continuity - has been proven to have failed at this point, and actual reboots are contraindicated because they've happened too often. And "Superman and the Legion" isn't an option because you're building your series on the pile of sand that's Superman's oh-so-fluid history.

I say you start in media res, and have something exciting happening and have them do heroic things. Introduce characters on the fly and fill in the history gaps as you go (but fill them in eventually). I thought the Morrison/Fisch Legion from the Age of Universo was pretty great. Yes you had elements of other boots (Sensor and Umbra), and there were all sorts of questions, but it felt like the Legion: Sacrifice, heroics, ACTION, and fun concepts.

EDIT to add: That, said my own personal preference would be so exclusionary to all but hardcore fans, it would be a tough sell, but I'd have ALL the Legions available for action via a relatively core group at Vanishing Point who monitor threats across time and the multiverse. They would choose team members per mission out of various timeframes/realities (based on where history is fluid enough to spare them) and then start mixing and matching.

Reboot's post is not too far from what I think needs to be done, except I think you're in trouble if you leave the continuity too vague. That's been one of the big problems with the Johnsboot, that no one seems to have decided what's really in continuity and what isn't, so it seems to have changed depending on who is writing it. Someone needs to sit down and come up with a Legion continuity bible, and say things like, "Hey, the Magic Wars happened, and it happened before Monstress joined", or else you're eventually going to end up with a mess. The goal should be to incorporate as many events/characters from various versions into it as one can, and still keep it coherent.

But the basic idea of the series should be to move the focus forward, focusing on a "next generation", with the older characters popping up in more of a support/background role, or in flashbacks that play a vital role to the story (I'm thinking a bit like Hypernaturals). Then let them have fun adventures in space, time, and other dimensions, and I'm happy.

The reason why I say leave the continuity vague is twofold. Firstly, I don't think any series can reasonably plan to last more than twelve issues nowadays [And you should have planned breakpoints at six and nine just in case], so you spend the pages only on stuff that absolutely needs to be there for the sake of the present story. And secondly, that's more than half the reason I said jump forward - how often do you, in your life, refer to day-to-day events from a decade ago? It's all just one big canopy, bar the occasional emergent tree (in the Legion's case, I suppose that would be the founding, marriages and deaths - and every character who's died should be dead, no matter how).

I'd say begin with an All-Star Superman style single page - save industrialist, get started, make friends, things grow. And after that... the past is pretty much gone, save for one-line "President Krinn was one of the Legion's founders"-type references. What does character X joining a couple of months before character Y matter when that's between 11 years, 4 months ago and 11 years, 6 months ago?

[And remember that between the timeframe compression - the DCnU Legion was founded "five years ago" relative to the book's "present", same as the Justice League - and the copious present-day changes, the DCnU Legion can't even be the same as the Johnsboot Legion: even "Lightning Saga" and "...New Krypton" didn't happen! Hence why Superman shouldn't be in the book, and time-travel to the present should be banned. And that's before you consider changes to the DCnU timeline from the Stormwatch wipeout!]

Well, if you're not going to refer to past Legion stories, then what's the difference between this and doing another wholesale reboot? Why should fans of any past versions have any emotional investment in your version?

It just seems to me if you're going to use elements from past versions of the Legion, you need some idea of the history that goes with them. If you visit the Kwai galaxy, then some sort of reference to Legion Lost is likely to come up. And then the writers better have some actual idea of which members were involved in that story.

This thread is making my head spin.

Seriously, I appreciate all the wonderful ideas offered, but they only go to show how no version of the Legion will appease everyone. Should the continuity be thrown out? Should it be preserved? Should it be vague or clearly defined? And this is only one issue that does nothing to address where the series should go, who should be in it, and how do you keep it going past issue 12 or 23?

Here's a suggestion: Those of you who have offered your own ideas about the Legion . . . why not take those ideas and create something new with them? A new fanfic, perhaps, or a new creative work with different names, different characters, different settings? It's a lot of work to write, draw, edit, and publish your own comic (or novel or what not), but no more so than creating and defending your ideas of what you would do with the Legion. And it would be more creatively satisfying to do your own thing than to wait for DC to "get it right."

Maybe what's holding the Legion back is us.

Well, I thought it was fairly obvious that I was trying to do "the future of the postboot Legion, just cloaked in some plausible deniability since that's probably not who they'd 'officially' be." Too subtle?

Obviously, if by some random chance I was given the Legion book and told to do absolutely what I wanted with it, I'd pick up directly from The Legion #33 or #38. But the topic of the thread is what you'd do if you were asked to pitch some drastic revamp, and I think jumping forward a significant amount without utterly moving the book to a point that the Legionnaires we know are mostly either dead or so aged as to all be retired from superheroics is the best option.


Why would you need to, unless it was directly relevant to the story at hand? Do you think every time a US President meets his Chinese counterpart, Nixon going to China comes up?

If you go to involve the Kwai, all that matters are who they are, what they do, and the CURRENT state of their relations with the UP and/or Legion. If a decade has passed since Legion Lost, y'know, *all* the team will be very familiar with the Kwai, and the Kwai Matriarch will be familiar with the leaders of the Legion in general rather than just KQ2, Imra, Cham, B5, etc. The Legion has a reputation for continuity overload, keeping these things to the bare essentials is, well, essential whatever tack you take. More specific information is either for private editorial use, or for a Who's Who-type Handbook.


I wouldn't rewrite what I was saying to deLegion it - it's all about the Legion. [Actually, I do have a concept that started off as a Legion fanfic, but was tenuous enough that I dumped the Legion connections and started rewriting it. If I ever, ever get it finished, I'll post the Amazon link here ]

Maybe, but try having a discussion about Iraq without "Bush invaded it 10 years ago" coming up. History is usually pretty important for understanding the current state of affairs.




But I don't think the Legion having a lot of history has ever really been a problem. The problem has been that the history has been constantly screwed with, and that it's been made increasingly confusing by the constant retcons and reboots over the past twenty-five years or so. I think the Legion's history should be treated as a strength rather than just ignored.

I don't know that I would necessarily want this to *replace* a more traditional Legion, but I LOVE this idea!! I would love to see this explored as a story/series!

And now for something completely different...



Glorith: We could get them all back. All of them. The whole Legion. Ferro Lad. Invisible Kid. Even Double-Header. The Draegonmage, Catspaw, Monstress.

Brainiac 5: Who… ?

Glorith: It’s been done before. True, not on this scale, but… Do you remember the Earth story of Orpheus?

Brainiac 5: Myth. A fantasy! What… ?

Phntom Girl: Orpheus? Sorry, I’m not up on my Earth myths…

Glorith: On Bgztl, it’s the legend of Vado and Vernna.

Phantom Girl: The musician who went to… but that’s crazy!

Brainiac 5: Glorith, no. This is a fantasy. Forget it. This is madness...

Glorith: This is the Sorcerer’s World, Querl! Nothing is impossible! We will need new names, of course, to disguise ourselves from... the others. Brainy, you will be Horatio.

Brainiac 5: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth…” Point taken, Glorith.

Glorith: Tinya, you will be Eurydice. And I will call myself Morning-Glory. We will need a psychpomp to accompany us… if this was a millennium ago, we could contact Deadman or the Phantom Stranger. But for a quest this big… perhaps we could summon Death herself.

Phantom Girl: What!? Death!?

Brainiac 5: Herself?

Glorith: We will need to perform the Rite of AshekEnte…

And with that, Brainiac 5, Phantom Girl and Glorith begin the strangest Legion adventure yet. From the Sorcerer’s World to the Magic Museum, then into the Green, through Faeryland, past the Realm of the Endless, and ultimately to Heaven and Hell.

A twelve-issue limited series.

And it is no exaggeration: the Legion will be forever changed.

(I would say co-written by Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, but that's going a bit too far, don't you think?)

Either way, take what you love about the Legion (the futuristic setting? teen superheroes? the optimistic future? people from different cultures working together? action? adventure? silly Silver Age stuff? ) and do something new with it.

Actually, thinking about this (not the project I mentioned, the Legion), one thing that strikes me... how much have Legion stories ever been dependent on this being THE FUTURE, as opposed to the sort of stories you could tell with minor tweaks in a present-day book?

Look at the DCnU. In 2007 there were no superheroes, and relatively few superpowered. In 2013 there are loads. At that trend, how many superpowered will there be ten generations away, let alone ten CENTURIES down the road?

If I was genuinely going to reboot the Legion (which, bearing in mind what I said above, would need AT LEAST three years of no Legion stories at all), I think that would have to be the starting point. In 3013, there are next-to-no examples of plain humanity left, replaced almost entirely by super-humanity - which has ostensibly "joined Superman in the sun" (literally in some cases - Meboot Sun Boy could be from a super-human strain who have moved into the sun). Most are born with active superpowers, virtually everyone else is treated to activate their powers soon after birth. The few leftovers are a combination of religious holdouts, luddites and those whose family history suggest their "powers" are more likely to be disabling than helpful (powers tending to run in families, hence why the likes of the Ranzzes end up with the same powers). Karate Kid would be one of these last, and he'd probably be my POV character to start with. Probably start with the Legion as a genuine "club", which develops into a "proper" super-team as time goes by and they realise that just because they're not "special" like the 21st century superheroes were doesn't mean they shouldn't follow their instincts - what makes them Super isn't their powers, it's their drive to help. No "Brande Incident".

Those worlds who started as human colonies and all have the same powers, like Braal, Titan, etc would be brought into this - Braal would be a colony founded by a single extended family; Titan would be a transportation colony (like Australia once was) from an anti-telepathy 26th century where all telepaths were deported from the planet (officially, the prejudice is over, but of course they still have to wear their Saturn badges, so...), and so on.

^ I like those ideas. I always felt the LSH policy of not allowing people without super-powers to be silly. If they truly were inspired by the 21st century, they would have had to have known about non-powered heroes like Batman and Green Arrow. Since these heroes relied a lot on gadgets, there would be artifacts confirming their existence.

My New 52 or 104.

Knowing of those heroes' existence and being inspired by them does not mean the Legion would have to follow the JLA's policy of admitting non-powered heroes.

In the JLA's time, heroes with actual super-powers were still pretty rare, and the JLA's membership was confined to natives or residents of earth. Things were quite different in the Legion's time, when entire populations of worlds could read minds or triplicate. Restrictions on who could join (such as having a unique super-power) made more sense for the Legion.

I don't remember the rationale for excluding members who had no super-power (though gadgets were disallowed because they might fail in battle). One might suppose that allowing someone without a power to join the Legion would be like admitting a non-athlete into a professional sports team. Such a player would not only have little to contribute on the field but might actually be a hindrance to talented and skilled players.

I think the real problem with the reboots, retcons, etc. isn't so much that Legion continuity is convoluted (which it is), it's that too much time has been spent in-story trying to reconcile discrepancies or revisiting old stories with a twist. In my opinion that's where 5YL went off the rails - trying to explain how certain older stories fit in to the post-Mordruboot state of affairs. If anything isolates an intellectual property to a core fan-base and alienates new readers, it's that kind of navel-gazing. My sense is that EDE and Reboot are essentially talking about the same thing, "Pick a continuity and a starting point (understand it yourself so as to keep it clear) and tell new stories that only reference continuity when it's pertinent."

What I would do?
1) No rebooting.
2) Get a good writer.
3) Get a good artist.
4) No editorial interference.

No navel-gazing *is* a good recommendation, but I don't feel that navel-gazing was a flaw in *this* version.

The tricky part is that the problems with this series are completely different than the problems with some other versions. This version was actually pretty good as far as getting the right balance between referencing the past and not dwelling on it. It was bad for some of the same reasons that any other comic can be bad--which, for the Legion, is an unusual reason to be bad.

I'd also stay with the familiar characters (adding the Academy members was stupid). They lasted for a reason.

Imagine it's 1980, Legion is being written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Jimmy Janes, and you want to improve sales. What do you do? The answer isn't to reboot it or to do any of the things that are considered fixes nowadays. The answer also isn't to say "hey, we tried referencing the past in the Reflecto Saga and that flopped miserably, let's make Legion all-new!" (Reflecto Saga was also a case of editorial interference, which is why he was revealed to be Superboy at the end.)