Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Things I hope (Grife, please) are NOT part of the next boot

1. The "Eat it, Grandpa" attitude
(Real Legionnaires are respectful of their elders - especially not that I'm on the backside of the hill!)

2. Brainiac the brain bully
(Where is it written that a 12th level intellect HAS to be a complete dick?)

3. Complicated ties to the 21st century DCU
(Doesn't seem like it's going to go that way, but I can dream. I believe Legion continuity need only be internally consistant, not tied to every DC book published, ever)

4. Timber Wolf
(Let him go be Lone Wolf for a while, please)

5. Killer Vi
(Personally, I always preferred shy Vi, although she certainly should be able to take care of herself)

6. The Adult Legion
(There's a chance that when the Legion returns, it'll be the adult semi-preboot Johns version. I'd prefer a teenage group)

7. Universe conquering hive minds
(Good lord, but we've had plenty of that these last few years. I'm looking for a writer(s) who can wring drama from something that does not involve the fall of the United Planets and the reduction of Earth to a pile of rubble)

8. Snekkie
(No snake, no spoiled traitor, just our own regal highness, please.)

9. Plot danglers
(If the new writing team had a mind to, they could do 100 issues just by concluding all the unresolved plot threads out there. Let's try and craft stories that have endings as well as beginnings, please)

10. Justin Thyme
(That hack should never be allowed anywhere near another Legion script)

I agree with these, plus:

No Legionnaires gone bad ~ we've had enough already!

No Mordru/Mysa marriage, liason, mentorship, whatever.

No weakling Imra and no Imra/Garth romance. That realtionship is so done.


1

Read the name aloud.

"Dan Didio"

Green Lantern or New Gods crossovers
(They can deprotagonize anyone.)

Backwards narrative causality
(The important part of Lone Wolf's name was "Lone", not "Wolf". He didn't have the feral thing going. Making the character align with his new name was an accident of history.
No, I'm not saying I want to return Brin to Lone Wolf. Before he was Timber Wolf, he didn't really have any theme going. But start him out "feral" - we already know he becomes that.
Geoff Johns is one of the worst perpetrators of this. He writes things that make only emotional, not causal, sense. The Legion call themselves "Kid" because of their youthful optimism? Power Girl has a chest cutout because she has no sense of identity? Please.)

Writer fetishism
(Kinetix with a tail? Seriously?)

Oli-3 Queen, etc.
(1000 years is a long time. Everyone on Earth will be descended from Oliver Queen, or anyone else you care to choose. Ancestry won't mean anything.)

Again, I'm not reading replies before writing.

-- No attacks on Metropolis for about a decade! Criminals operating in the shadows, OK. But nothing else! There's a galaxy of worlds to explore! Frankly, I wouldn't care if we didn't see Metropolis for years, but I suspect that wouldn't go over too well with most fans.

-- No Shadow Lass as accessory strung over Mon-el's arm while she coos 'my love' into his ear. I want her strong, independant and a little cranky. I don't mind if they become a couple (I know they're a favorite duo of many fans), but I don't want to see the preboot dynamic repeated. At all.

-- One case of instant love at the beginning of whatever boot occurs, with other characters muddling through like the rest of us. And yes I think that post-adolescents full of hormones pumping in superbly conditioned bodies facing death together will act on their impulses. Some of whom will be gay, lesbian, bisexual and probably some categories we haven't invented yet.

Anything else is twaddle, in my opinion.

-- No nameless hordes of characters acting as a threat to the UP or LSH or anything.

-- I don't want to see a team of characters who act like they don't know each other or what they can do, powers-wise. Unless said characters are as new to the readers as they are to the team.

-- I don't want to see more of the LSH as a movement. That said, I think it might be interesting if a movement arose *around* them through no acts of their own. I don't want to see more of the snarky young vs. old dynamic, though to contradict myself, it might be fun if *a* Legionnaire felt that way. But not the team.

-- I don't want to see a corrupted Legionnaire again for a good long time. No Rokk as Time Trapper or Jan as Progenitor or Brainy going insane.

-- I don't want to see overly ambitious storylines that get curtailed before ending.

-- I don't want to see 5YL style team introductions, as in some of the team are introduced and the readers are left hanging as to who's alive, in play or turned into snakes.

-- That last? Don't do it.

-- I don't like the Johns interpretation of Chlorophyll Kid. At all. I don't want to see him in near whatever LSH becomes the one we'll see most often.

-- If Element Lad, Dream Girl, Chameleon Boy and whoever else hasn't appeared yet in LEGION OF THREE WORLDS don't swoop in at the end of that mini, I don't want to see their status go unrevealed for any length of time. If it's the Johns team that's going to be featured, I want to know what they've been up to in the first issue.

Less of Brainy as a dick. The dude has a mind seven to nine orders of magnitude more powerful than mine* (depending on what source you reference). He should be better at making friends and getting people to see things his way than I am by about a bazillion. He should be able to accurately model an entire other persons mind inside his own as a subroutine, the same way that my computer functions just fine while running a clock or an MP3 player. He wouldn't have to guess how Garth, Rokk, etc. would react to any statement he makes or action he takes, since he can contain their entire brain, a thousand times over, running in the back of his head! He should be as slick as T.A.O., the evil genius from WildCATS who could very literally talk people to death.

*Which would make him a *BILLION* times smarter than a human.

Less invasions of Earth. Less destruction of planets. Less 'upping the angst' by killing off ever-increasing numbers of panel-adjacent characters or Legionnaires family members or girlfriends/boyfriends/thingfriends. Marvel has been doing that in the X-books for years, and it just gets old. Ooh, all the Morlocks died! Ooh, all of the X-kids died! Ooh, all of the Genoshans died! Ooh, yet more faceless thousands of mutants that we don't know or care about died horribly, and for some reason the writer expects us to give a rat's ass, when we're all got numb to it years ago...

(snip) Mystery Lad:

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...One case of instant love at the beginning of whatever boot occurs, with other characters muddling through like the rest of us. And yes I think that post-adolescents full of hormones pumping in superbly conditioned bodies facing death together will act on their impulses. Some of whom will be gay, lesbian, bisexual and probably some categories we haven't invented yet...

Well, you could go a step further and say that there are probably multiple genders that we haven't heard of yet, as well. Just to make the muddle even more fun.

Also, can somebody please confirm whether or not Waid/Kitson's Ayla actually slept with the whole team, or something. Did I miss something, because the way some readers talk about her... [puzzled] I really liked Ayla in this last incarnation. Is she a terrible person for having gone out with more than one teammate, or what ?

Three words: Pietro. Maximoff. Syndrome.

Seriously, imagine being an emotional being, interacting with absolute dribbling morons all the time. Because that's your Brainy, being as he is "a *BILLION* times smarter than a human". In a lot of ways, that leaves three basic options: (1) He gets angry, (2) He's tolerant of their faults - he can't help being like unto a god to them, so, hell, might as well humour them or (3) He's a Vulcan.

It seems you favour (2) [patronising them].

I don't want Reboot Legion and all it represented.
I also don't want "youthful optimism" or any of that.
I don't want a "group of powerful teenagers" living as if the 1950s were stil a fad. The Legion became the spacial book it represents when characters were already in their 20s.
I don't want spandex. In fact, I'd get rid of those pre-teen uniforms pretty fast. I can't believe they would wear them in the 31st Century without being embarrased.

I want storytelling.
I want subdued challenging plots.
I want more politics and less fistfighting.

Which is never gonna happen again, as long as Johns is on it.

She has definitely slept with Karate Kid. She has dated Element Lad, Ultra Boy, Sun Boy and Timber Wolf; no details on how far any of those relationships went.

She's not a terrible person at all; she's probably the nicest person in the threeboot.

Well..as the old joke went - you only get the letter jacket if you make the team.

-rimshot

1. Excessive, distracting 31st century swear words. A grife here, a sprock there, fine. But not a florging plethora of them every other panel. Cute to some, distracting to me.
2. Timber Wolf as a mindless animal someone has to say "down, boy" to every issue.
3. ANY member as an "Ohmygoshyouguysaresocool" hero worshipper. If you are no more mature than that, you don't belong on the team.
4. I'll echo the Brainy as a...jerk...sentiments.
Ditto Sneckie.
5. Colossal Boy as a giant who can shrink. Leave the old formula intact.
6. Chameleon (Boy?) as portrayed in the Threeboot. To me, preboot, he was one of the smartest, most useful on covert missions, making him ideal as Espionage Squad leader.

Well, at the beginning of the 3boot, she woke up in a bed after a party, possibly after a black out episode, and didn't know if she'd had sex with the giant guy or the dog or both, who were sleeping in the bed with her.
(The Legionnaires looking on thought this was a pretty typical scene for her.)

That, and the guys usually making snide remarks about her, set the tone, I think.
And the complaints about how she was being portrayed.

Other than that, I sort of liked her.

But I think I liked her better after the 5yr gap and post boot (when she wasn't sticking her tongue out so much.)

Thanks. Sorry if we seem to be having the same conversation(s) over and over again in different blogs.

[blink]

That was at the beginning of Waid/Kitson, or the beginning of Shooter/Manupal ? I've only read the former, not the latter, and I don't remember it at all.

Superhero comics are rarely, if ever, the place to go for capital-F Feminism anyway, but Shooter often struck me twenty-odd years ago as someone who didn't really know how to write women. I guess he hasn't changed much... :rolleyes:

It's when she wakes up next to Colossal Boy's brother in Big City after the HQ gets crunched up at the end of the first Waid/Kitson Praetor Lemnos story arc, and one of the other Legionnaires (Ultra Boy?) comments about how she never knows where she is when she wakes up.

There doesn't seem to be any condemnation of it, which would make sense, if 31st century sexual mores are as different from 21st century sexual mores as 21st century mores differ from 11th century mores, but it's pretty soundly established that she gets around.

It isn't until Shooter comes on that the comment about not liking to sleep alone comes into play, and I suspect that it's Shooter being old-fashioned and needing to justify why it's okay for Ayla to have so many partners. (Since he's not exactly a polyamorous swinger, and doesn't get that most of his reading audience doesn't assign any sort of negative connotations to Ayla having more than one boyfriend in her life, since opinions on that sort of thing have changed just in his lifetime, which kind of hints that opinions might change even more radically in the next *thousand* years.)

Dan DiDio has said that DC are moving to the most 'iconic' versions of their characters. What are the iconic versions? Well look at the elseworlds novels or the Bizarro Comics/Solo etc spoofs and you get an idea what the creators think. So Hal Jordan and Barry Allen are back - and from the point of view of the Legion the iconic, version is the Adventure Comics era.

Please please no don't reset time again and start the Legion as kids yet again. Geoff Johns has created a Legion that more or less follows on from the iconic early Legion. Let's stick with that with no more reboots or silly retcons.

Though I could live with Supergirl being retconned into Legion history sometime in her future.

I don't dismiss that interpretation, but it's also possible that her reaction was simply where-the-hell-am-I, or somewhere on the spectrum between the two.

And, yes, I do remember at least one time when the male Legionnaires were kidding her about her love life, but a) they weren't being insulting about it and b) she was kidding right along with them.

Top Ten for this one:

1) Blatant ties to the mainstream DCU. Heck, I'd prefer the Legion set in its own continuity. Vertigo-ize it if necessary.

2) Instantanteous teleportation around the galaxy.

3) Retcons/reboots that fundamentally change the character, such as Thom-being-schizo, Wildfire/Red Tornado, etc., etc.

4) Too much thirty-first century slang. It's not a bad idea, but comes off as really artificial if overused.

5) Stories that would work just as well with the Justice League as they work with the Legion. In other words, Legion stories should flow out of the unique nature of the team and their setting, and shouldn't just be conventional super-hero stories with the Legion grafted into the hero spot.

6) Alien Hordes invading the U.P./Earth. Encounters with the occasional alien horde in deep space is okay, but shouldn't be overused.

7) Villains brain-washing/mind-controlling/duping/secretly manipulating the population of Earth/the U.P. so that the Legion has to go underground. This story was really well-done in the sixties, but it's gotten boring since then.

8) The Legion itself as an overly politicized entity. I don't want to see it either as a puppet of the existing government (ala the early reboot) or something trying to replace the government (ala the threeboot). It should be independent of the government, with occassional tension arising between it and the government, but that shouldn't be the main theme of the series.

9) The idea that distinctively modern social problems (such as racism or homophobia) would continue to be problems in the thirty-first century. This includes goofy analogues for racism such as anti-alien histeria. The Legion should more than anything be an opitmistic rather than dystopian future.

10) Issues that don't work as stand alone stories, but only make sense within the context of a fifteen issue arc. I'm fine with complex stories, but each individual unit should work by itself as well as part of the whole. If you are going to write things that need the rest of the arc to work, then go ahead and release the whole storyline at once as a trade, rather than individual issues that are pointless on their own.

Preach on, Eryk!

I don't believe working for a government is compatible with superheroism. However, I accept rebelliousness, and I don't believe it's possible for superheroes to be apolitical. The only superheroes I could accept not having to operate in secret are the Legion, and for me, that requires a redefinition of the nature of future society.
I can't emphasize that enough. We don't need allegory anymore.
However, I prefer invention of entirely new, futuristic social problems to utopianism.

Well, basically all you need is legalized vigilantism, which isn't that far-fetched even in today's society when private security forces and citizens groups are taking on increased powers traditionally associated with law enforcement in some areas.

EDE:

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...9) The idea that distinctively modern social problems (such as racism or homophobia) would continue to be problems in the thirty-first century. This includes goofy analogues for racism such as anti-alien hysteria. The Legion should more than anything be an optimistic rather than dystopian future...

I can't stress enough how strongly I disagree with this, no matter how many times I see it.

Reason One is purely selfish: It's hard to write an action tale without conflict, and one reason SciFi and fantasy have long been vehicles for metaphoric takes on all the "-isms" is because they're effective as a means of expressing conflict. They're an effective means of getting the audience tethered to the world the author/artist has built, no matter how otherwise off-the-wall it is.

Reason Two: I don't think that "optimism" is analagous with "Utopian" or even "Escapist." Plenty of people in difficult situations still manage to live worthwhile lives, in part at least because they are capable of maintaining a hopeful nature-- at least some of the time. Just as people often live in situations where they have what most of us would consider "everything" and yet they are still deeply unhappy and bereft of hope.

Reason Three: History is full of societies that thought they had permanently eradicated various and sundry "--isms." But those societies didn't always survive, or manage to maintain that high standard of behavior. The motion of history is not a gradual and ever-ascending arc. It's full of advancements, setbacks, immobility, false starts-- all that stuff. In another thousand years, I can't imagine why this wouldn't still be the case.

I'm sure I could think up numerous other reasons, but those are the main ones that spring to mind. Now, if you want to argue against didactic, after-school-special bad writing, I'm totally with you. But the idea that bad writing must automatically come hand in hand with exploring these kinds of issues-- Nah, I can't agree with that.