Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Does the Legion get more than it's fair share of comic book Deaths?

I don't really read a lot of non-Legion titles but I don't recall any deaths in the other new 52 books that I've read.

Well, they killed off Damian Wayne recently, but that was a "huge" event...or something. And I think they pretended to kill off Catwoman there for an issue or two.

Seriously though, I think Legion deaths are turning into a dime a dozen because the series has been rebooted so many times. I guess writers tend to think that it doesn't really matter if you kill off Star Boy because there are umpteen other Star Boys wandering around the Multiverse to write about later? I dunno.

I forgot about Damian Wayne.

I put together a little list once with the help of other posters on this board, the upshot of which is:

Members of the Legion in the current continuity who have never died in any continuity (excluding Universal Armageddons)

Matter-Eater Lad (Tenzil Kem)

Invisible Kid II (Jacques Foccart)
Night Girl (Lydda Jath)
Quislet (¥□Δ)

Chemical Kid (Hadru Jamik)
Comet Queen (Grava)
Command Kid (Jeem Rehtu)
Dragonwing (Marya Pai)
Glorith (Glorith)
Harmonia (Harmonia Li)

"False Pretenses Lad" (Jan Jor)
Lightning Lord (Mekt Ranzz)
Saturn Queen (Eve Aries)

When Matter-Eater Lad dies, everybody dies.

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=765103&page=1

Oh, that Tenzil. Must be that Miracle Machine energy.

Poor Sun Boy does seem to die in pretty much every incarnation. Except the cartoon, and there he never even had a speaking part. It doesn't seem fair.

Dirk Morgna at least didn't die Postboot, but then he wasn't even a Legionnaire.

Garth Ranzz is another unlucky one. He died Preboot AND Postboot!

Sun Boy is pulling ahead, thanks to this latest death, but Colossal Boy and Element Lad seemed to be the previous winners of the all-you-can-die contest.

(At least in the case of deaths that didn't get reversed. Garth might be the winner of the deaths-that-got-reversed lottery.)

For the most long-lasting deaths in a single continuity, probably Luornu (who has managed to lose three of her original three, thanks to Computu, the Time Trapper and some rats in Infinite Crisis of Suck, and then yet another of her duplicates recently to the Persuader) and Karate Kid.

Wow, that pretty much says it all about Infinite Crisis, doesn't it? Triplicate Girl dies heroically to Computo, one of the Legion's deadliest enemies, and again to the Time Trapper, another of the Legion's deadliest enemies, and, in Infinite Crisis, to, some rats. Not an Anti-Monitor. Not Vandal Savage. Not Lex Luthor. Just some rats.

The Legion's history with death, as compared to other DC titles, seems to be that death is taken pretty darn seriously, or reserved for events of significance or foes with some gravitas to them. It's when Legionnaires get drawn into other events, like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Legion of Three Worlds, written by people who aren't generally Legion writers, that people start dying in a single panel, quite possibly never to be mentioned again. (As with Kid Psycho, Karate Kid, Luornu or Threeboot Sun Boy and Threeboot Element Lad)

Death is cheap in the mainstream DCU. Anything that brings the Legion into contact with the mainstream DCU risks them being used like fodder, like Teen Titans or New X-Men or Alpha Flight, appearing only to be killed off so that the bad-guy can look like a real threat to the 'real heroes' without actually risking those 'real heroes.'

It could be far worse. I heard a rumor around the time Legion of Three Worlds was being announced that Prime would kill various members of the three Legions until there was only one each of Saturn Girl, Ultra Boy, etc. and then a new Legion would remain composed of 'the most interesting' members from all three continuities.

You know...I don't necessarily think that sounds too bad. It's ridiculous to have had Prime do it, but the idea isn't bad at all. I've been saying repeatedly (everywhere anyone will let me harp on it) that I think the next time the Legion returns should be with ALL the incarnations at their disposal. If the Legion is going to be a mess of continuity, than take it by the reins and RUN WITH IT.

I'd rather they just exist in their own multiverses, like the JLA and JSA used to, pre-Crisis.

I have favorite versions of each character, and most of them are classic continuity (but not all!), so I'd hate to see some sort of massive slaughterfest pare them down to one team. I'd also hate to see them all smooshed together into fused / amalgam versions of themselves, since many of them are *very* distinct from each other (the Projectras and the Dream Girls, for instance), and I wouldn't want to see them lose their distinctive characters.

Even the Legionnaires I like least are *somebody's* favorites, and I wouldn't want to deny my fellow Legion fans their favorite characters.

There's also the question of how all of the Legion relationships would change. If classic Mon-El and Reboot Umbra are chosen, what comes of their relationship? Reboot Garth and Threeboot Imra? Do their kids cease to exist, or are they stuck with a mommy they've never met and a daddy they've never met (and who have never met each other, for that matter!). Too messy. I'd rather the Threeboot, for example, continue to exist, even if I never see it again, than have some weird situation where Threeboot Star Boy is hanging around with Reboot Dreamer, with neither of them having ever had any sort of relationship, or some sort of weird amalgam Legion where Star Boy is 1/3rd black and Jeckie is 1/3rd snake-person and Shikari/Dawnstar is an unspeakable mess.

See, that's kind of what I like the idea of. True, I do think that killing beloved favorites isn't the best idea, but I can't help but feel that the very questions of how these different multiversal characters would react with each other is worth exploring. Hence why I think that actually having a plan for bringing all these characters together would make it work well. Surely one of the Brainy's can figure out how to do it!

Ugh. That is lame writing; they couldn't be bothered putting in the effort to think of reasons for one of each to join an all-new team?

Although I would prefer that the memberships of each version stay intact, it would also be interesting to see an amalgamated team for a little while. But they'd better keep the "unique" Legionnaires (e.g. Gates, Night Girl, Dawnstar, Kinetix) alive!



Completely agree. Even the deaths of Mentalla and the first Kid Quantum had repercussions and were handled well, for example.

I remember people here and elsewhere getting all worked up about that rumour before Lo3W and then pre-judging the story because of it. That annoyed me because a) IMO that story was better than most people give it credit for; and b) that idea was so patently ridiculous I don't know why anyone ever took it seriously.

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As for DC teams that have had too many visits from the Grim Reaper, I can't think of any that could top the Teen Titans (though I'm not sure what's happened to them in the DCFU.).

The Teen Titans and the New X-Men have numbers that are artificially inflated by the sheer number of characters they throw at the wall to see if any stuck, such as all those teams full of X-students that were introduced for a year, then depowered, put on a bus and blown up, or that years worth of Titans who where only Titans 'off-panel' during a year we didn't see, and then got punched to death by Prime or cut in half by Deathstroke's Terror Titans or whatever.

Sure, 'Titans' like Molecule and Pantha and Bushido get killed, but really, calling those 'Titans deaths' would be like calling the murder of Crystal Kid, Xera of Manna-5 and Dev-Em 'Legion deaths,' since they really weren't Titans for long, if ever, and didn't really leave much of a mark on Titans history. (Which doesn't make them expendable or anything, just serves to highlight how meaningless their deaths were, since they were barely relevant to the story anyway and just kind of showed up to get killed.)

For deaths of characters that weren't just made to die in huge passels, Alpha Flight has taken some serious hits. Mac Hudson, Sasquatch, Snowbird and Marrina, for instance, have died at least once individually, and then died again as part of some lame 'ubervillain you've never heard of kills them all to show off his bad-ass-i-tude' events.

The New Warriors also became bad luck bears, in that way, as did the 'Detroit League,' IIRC. (Didn't Gypsy, Steel *and* Vibe get bumped off soonish after their run flopped?)

Any time a group's original creators seem 'done' with them, new writers seem to feel a need to bump a few off, as with the Runaways and the Young Avengers.

^ I don't disagree about Bushido or Molecule (when did he die by the way?) but Pantha was definitely a lot more prominent than you remember. She was a heavily featured part of the team for 41 issues (#74 - 114). That's a lot more face-time than many characters we consider 'true' Legionnaires - Chemical King, Dragonmage, Kid Quantum, Ferro Lad, Catspaw, etc.

Re: JLA Detroit - just Vibe and Steel died off at the end of that run. But that was a very small team so %-wise, that was a heavy hit.

Gypsy was still alive and well as of Flashpoint, and I echo the comment on Pantha. She also formed a "family unit" with Red Star and Baby Wildebeest, so there's quite a bit of history there.

From Titans Tower, poor Molecule was killed needlessly in Terror Titans 1 to try and show what a bad-ass the new Persuader was. Which is stupid, as the bad guys were sent there to CAPTURE the heroes, not kill them!

http://www.titanstower.com/molecule/

[snip]



Exactly. There are/were good elements in all versions of the Legion. Yeah, even this last one, though they were never really allowed to grow and thrive as they should have.

The other thing that occurs to me: What does it say about DC Editorial's faith in its own properties when they subject those properties to trashing and half-baked mashups. Creators and the people who supposedly watch over them should lead by example. They can't expect us dumb, benighted savages to obsessively care about the integrity of these characters and universes after constantly making it clear that they don't care at all.

Hell, I'm more mindful of the plants in my yard (even the ones that don't grow up all nice, perfect and harmonious in groups like in magazines or on HDTV) than DC is of the various Legion incarnations. I'll never pull out and discard a plant until I'm positive that it's dead beyond any salvaging.

I had a similar idea for where the Legion would go after Lo3W.

In my version, it would have been revealed that once upon a time there existed one "true" continuity (now lost, due to the events of COIE, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, etc) -- and in that continuity there existed a Legion of Super-Heroes. This assemblage of teen heroes was so expansive and so powerful that they ultimately proved to be the most direct threat to the Time Trapper's rule over all of time, so he decided to use his powers to create or co-opt alternate timelines and "splinter" the team across a number of these parallel realities (all of the various ones we've seen in print at least, and possibly others) which otherwise had no Legion of their own.

While each of these splintered Legions would feature analogues of most of the "core" membership, they also included individual members who were seemingly unique to each timeline/universe, and featured some key absences in each version as well.

In this way, the Time Trapper ensured that though any one Legion might be a force to be reckoned with, and might even defeat him temporarily or cause him setbacks with his lesser plans, none would be so powerful as to stop him permanently. As a byproduct of this splintering, the Time Trapper himself was split into a myriad of alternate versions, though the Trapper manipulated things so that each version of himself was somehow aware of their existence as part of a greater whole, a sort of cross-time hive mind.

The one fly in the ointment for the Trapper's plan was Superman, who represented an anomaly to the Time Trapper, a "wild card" he could never fully eliminate, though he tried time and time again, becoming obsessed with finding a way to destroy Kal-El or keep him from interacting with the Legion. So it was that when the Time Trapper brought Superboy-Prime (who was, perhaps ironically, destined to be one of the many alternate Trappers) to the 31st century as a pawn against the Legion, he failed to foresee that Prime would do what none of the Legions had done before -- destroy him. The Trapper's (temporary?) death, coupled with the presence of Legionnaires drawn from across all realities, unleashed a torrent of temporal energy that washed over the 31st century, wiping each of the splinter Legions from existence...

...and when the temporal wave passed, there stood one Legion of Super-Heroes, comprised of every hero who had ever been a member of the team in any published continuity, as well as a number of new characters never seen before. These Legionnaires would be drawn from one reality or another, but would have no difficulty interacting with each other because, as far as they knew, things had always been this way. To them, there was only one history -- their own. And now, though it seemed like their greatest enemy was no more, they knew there would always be other threats and challenges to face, new adventures to engage in, new stories to tell...

Long Live The Legion!

^ That sounds like a wonderful compromise. If that came to us, I'd hope the Legionnaires would start out as teens.

Would be awesome to see Gates debating with Wildfire, or Tyroc hanging out with Kid Quantum II, or Theena shopping with Monstress.

That's nice. I quite liked seeing the likes of Gates in the Levitz Legion and that's as decent an explanation of the combining of the timelines. Of course, this time line could just be a close parallel to a combinations of two or more others across the multiverse, but you also bring up the Trapper facets, which is a nice touch.