Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Auditions vs Academy: pros and cons

I was surprised to discover that the Shooter era on Adventure Comics has no auditions after his first story: the process is instead replaced by the Legion Academy for a relatively long time.
Obviously the audition was popular enough to be brought back in future runs, but this got me thinking... is this a tradition worth keeping, and if so with what changes?

I think we can all agree that the audition style of the Hamilton era doesn't work anymore: you show up to demonstrate your power, and if you pass the Legion lets you join with full access to their HQ with no questions asked? Even in the Silver Age this was monumentally stupid.
So it makes sense to replace it with a full training program, separating the best of the best from the Ron-Karrs of the galaxy.
And since it's seemingly introduced soon after Nemesis Kid was the latest villain to infiltrate the team with an audition, there was even an in-story justification for the change.

Especially after the Legion has reached the status of a galactically recognized institution, scrapping the audition process entirely would be the most realistic option.
Unfortunately that leaves no place for things like the Subs and Arms-Fall-Off-Boy, and that's just plain wrong! :-)

The Legion Academy is a great concept, but it has a few fundamental flaws. Unless you're going to dedicate a full book to it, we only get a few glimpses here and there. And once you put a potential recruit there, what's going to happen? It's either:
A) the character stays at the Academy for a while and then eventually graduates to the Legion, making his stay at the Academy far less interesting
B) the character is stuck at the Academy for years
Option A means we rarely see the character while he's at the Academy. Option B means he's stuck there until he's forgotten or killed off.

I think the best compromise would be to keep the audition as the first step, then replace the Academy with something else... perhaps a secondary team working as the "not ready for prime time" team. Marvel did this sort of thing with Alpha Flight: it was the main team, but the ones who were not ready went to Beta or Gamma Flight. You can still call it Legion Academy or the Substitute Heroes for brand recognition, but it's a fully formed team instead of a "school for superheroes" kind of thing.
The process would be like this:
Step 1) the classic audition. You can still have Color Kid be rejected, but if you're good you go to step 2
Step 2) the screening process. The Academy puts this behind the scenes before we see the character, but that doesn't let you do the "joins under false pretense" story... which, while admittedly done to death, can still be interesting. This step is where the Dynamo Boys and Command Kids get discovered, but if the character is clever enough a Nemesis Kid can still pass the test. If during the audtion or the screening you show a flaw that can be corrected, for example you're bad at teamwork or you need more training on how to use your power, you join the secondary team.
Step 3) if you pass the screening process, you join the Legion. Perhaps with an initial phase as a "Legionnaire on trial" for a couple of missions.

What do you think? How much of the audition process can be saved? Does the Academy really work if we rarely see it?

From a practical point of view, The Legion Academy IMO works better if it's a training ground where ultimate placement does NOT always have to be in the Legion. As seen in the Retroboot, and also in Harbinger's and my and razsolo's fanfics. Graduates can move to the Science Police, private security, etc. so it can be more of a training ground to allow super powered high potential sentients to use their powers safety and effectively... but they can realize they are not meant to be heroes and move elsewhere.

I think auditions still have a place as well. there could be some experienced heroes who are ready for full membership, while others who have potential but not quite there yet can be diverted to the Academy. and... if there are some psychotic powered ones, they can be flagged to the SPs as potential trouble makers. always thought the Retroboot missed that - The Earth League (or whatever their name was), Saturn Girl psych-scanned them, and they were rejected for failing that. but nothing was done and they ended up going into villainy... not saying they should have preemptively been incarcerated, but at least a way to keep tabs on them ...

The academy makes the most sense but the try outs are a tradition that I enjoy when they pop up. I suppose a more realistic approach would be if an applicant was accepted in a try out it would be conditional on their performance in the academy. If I remember correctly members like the White Witch and second Invisible Kid had to do some classes in the Academy after becoming members so maybe that was already in place.

This is really good idea. It's a "real world" solution.

It's fun to watch the Legion evolve from a club of super-heroes into an organization with galactic responsibilities. Under the club setup, open auditions made some sense. They were like rock band auditions. A bunch of people show up and jam with the band, and whoever's still standing gets the gig. Of course, that can lead to problems down the road if the new recruit is a brilliant musician but impossible to work with. The Legion seems to have experienced something similar. When a run of people like Command Kid, Dynamo Boy, and Nemesis Kid infiltrated the team in short order, it was time to revise their recruitment process.

I agree that the Academy wasn't well utilized. It was always there in the background, and this led to several characters remaining in the Academy for several years--eternal students, as it were. In the Levitz era, some characters such as Shadow Kid and Laurel Kent were shown to leave for whatever reason. I liked this setup. It acknowledged that not every cadet could become a Legionnaire or necessarily even wanted to, but they had a lot to learn about their powers and teamwork.

In my wishy-washy fashion, I like both auditions and the Academy, and think there's a place for both. Auditions, IMO, are for semi-established 'local' heroes from various UP worlds, and the Academy is a Legion-sponsored training place for first responders and law enforcers and independent heroes that may or may not have eventual Legion membership as an end-goal (or just want the best training and prestige that comes with it to bring back to their own worlds and careers).

I think most readers would agree that v3 #14 is one of the best Legion issues ever, and I think it gives a pretty good model of how to do things. Periodic tryouts/auditions, but with the understanding that attendance at the Legion Academy may give applicants an advantage in the process, but that it's neither necessary nor sufficient for being admitted.

I do think the Academy is one of the many Legion concepts that really should be explored in more depth. How does one get admitted? What exactly does one learn there? Is it just practice using their powers (which is mostly what we see) or is there more of a traditional academic component to it as well? If there latter, it might make sense to see it as an outgrowth of the fact that the Adventure Era Legionnaires were expected to continue their education while being Legion members (which is something we did see nearly enough of either, but was mentioned on occasion).

The thing is that an Academy-type setup is manifestly the only sensible thing from an in-continuity POV, and equally manifestly inconvenient for the writers in several ways.

From an in-continuity POV, the moment the Legion goes beyond a hangout club for kids who happen to have (from a terran POV) "super-powers" and into actual super-heroing, the adults in the room should get wary of allowing just anyone the kids like onto the team. This goes treble as soon as they start getting actual governmental recognition - at that point, it stops being "the adults get wary" and "Earthgov/the UP says no." Imagine if cops held open auditions one day, and the next day whoever "won" was handed a gun & a badge and sent out to break up fist-fights. Having an enforced period in the Academy professionalises the team.

Problem from the writers' POV is that... it professionalises the team. Half the point of the Academy should be to filter out the manifestly unsuitable (running from "panics and start blasting anyone in sight" through "shoots first and asks questions later" and ending up in "secret super-villains"), and the other half should be to make sure everyone's fully trained and able to hit the ground running (and, given the small size of the team, there's probably a low-single figure number of spots a year, so you only pick the MOST promising candidates, not EVERY promising candidate). Which is good from a procedural POV, but if you want to write a Legion's Got Talent issue, you probably WANT to end up with someone not entirely suitable.

It also limits the ability of writers to come in and add someone to the team. Even if candidates only spend a year at the Academy... that probably translates to c. 50 issues of Comic Book Time, unless you start doing big timeskips. And the flipside is that you end up with characters stuck there, like Comics_Archeology mentioned. (The X-Men have also suffered similarly with characters from ostensible training groups - New Mutants/Gen X/etc - unable to ever permanently make it into the core X-Men.)

While I get what you're saying about the Academy making more sense with the professionalization of the Legion, you also have to take into consideration that there are a lot of other established heroes (planetary champions, members of other super-groups, etc.) that aren't members of the Legion. If one of the Heroes of Lallor, for example, decides they want to join the Legion, I'm not sure it makes sense to tell them that they first have to spend a certain amount of time in the Academy before they're even allowed to audition for the team.

It's definitely the case that writers didn't really feel like being limited by the concept of the Academy, however. It's pretty telling when you look at the Legionnaires with Academy backgrounds. Timber Wolf and Chemical King are introducing as graduating from the Academy in the story in which they join (though Timber Wolf had been introduced earlier, nothing about his academy membership was ever mentioned before). Dawnstar's tenure at the Academy was introduced after she was already a member. Pol Krinn and Tellus were shown as Academy members shortly before joining, so it seems likely their membership was already planned out (especially in Tellus's case).

It wasn't really until the retroboot until you get characters who were introduced primarily as Academy students that end up joining the main team, and that was largely because of the editorial interference taking off a sizeable chunk of the Legion and cancelling Levitz's Academy spinoff, so that he folded those characters into the main book, which had the result of elevating the "new class" over a large number of long-term students.