Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The SW6 and Reboot Legions...

Well, it shouldn't be any secret that two of my favorite periods in Legion history are the SW6 team and the Reboot era for the first year or so. Anyway, in many ways the Reboot team was modelled on the SW6 team, particularly in terms of costumes and codenames, but to a certain extent personalities as well.

So I thought an interesting thread might be comparing/constrasting these two distinct versions of the Legion.

One of the big weaknesses of the Reboot team, as far as I'm concerned, was the lack of a Sun Boy/Inferno. Dirk was an important part of the dynamic of the SW6 team, and I think his presence was definitely missed in the Reboot team.

That's something I'm slightly curious about - how did the initial postboot roster (by which I really mean the first settled roster, after Brainiac 5 finally arrives) get chosen? The founders were presumably a given, but after that - did some of the ones who got left out go specifically because of the "one member per planet" conceit? After all, they were stretching things by calling Gim a Martian, and Jenni's Aarokian heritage always played a distant second fiddle to her Earthling ancestors. She was even born on Earth.

while I tend to agree about Dirk's importance, it doesn't hurt to give characters a breather now and again. I can see the Reboot approach, making people expect that Dirk was about to join, then faking us out... but then he got lost in the shuffle, other than that elementals story.

That would account for Dirk's ommission at the outset.

Story-wise, one can easily attribute it to politics, the worlds that Chu could leverage, or worlds who might be looking for extra prestige/bragging rights.

Initially, the membership order was pretty close to what it was in the preboot.

So you had the founders, then Lu and Tinya joined slight after, the Cham, Lyle, and Gim join as a group with newbies Jenni and James added to that group. Following original history, Brainy should've joined alongside Laurel (the Kara analogue), but instead we have a kind of delayed joining of Brainy, then Ayla inserted in the membership as well, and then Laurel joins alongside Vi (and Zoe). Following the original roster, Vi should've been grouped with Chuck and Dirk as joining at the same time.

I suppose you can attribute both Chuck and Dirk's absence to the "Only one person from Earth" rule, though I think it was probably a mistake in retrospect. Would it have made that much difference in they made Dirk from Ganymede or somewhere in the same way the made Gim from Mars?

One thing that stands out to me about both the SW6 and Reboot eras is how the respective creators seemed to go to great lengths to "reinvent the wheel" by changing or discarding key characters.

In SW6, for example, they almost immediately killed off three Legionnaires (Cham, Karate Kid, and Princess Projectra, IIRC; I wasn't reading the book then). These characters were later substituted with Computo, Catspaw, and others.

The Reboot era did essentially the same thing by preserving most of the Adventure-era characters, discaring a few (including Sun Boy), and introducing several new ones (Gates, XS, Kinetix, etc.).

Since the Reboot era lasted longer than SW6, there was greater opportunity to bring back virtually all of the Adventure-era characters in one way or another, and most did rejoin the Legion (though Dirk remained notably absent).

But, in a nutshell, I think both eras represented an attempt to update the Legion for a younger audience while preserving (and struggling to do so, I might add) characters that were always essential to the Legion.

This is another example of "reinventing the wheel" as the Reboot creators made a point of specifying that Tinya joined before Lu. (Preboot, Lu joined first.)

I think the conceit of having one character per world join was a red herring, since, as you note, Dirk could easily have been from another world. Probably, his sun-based powers were deemed unnecessary in a team that already included Lightning Lad/Lightning Lass, who could throw around destructive energy blasts.

Yes, I believe that was the case. Later on in the reboot, we would get dramatic changes in characters i.e. Sneckie, and a new origin for Jacques. But early on, they kept the characters pretty close to their original versions. What changes there were read to be as natural evolutions, as if they were not additions, but aspects that were always there that we would have read about before, if only Silver Age stories had been less plot driven and focused more on characterization.

Simply put, I don't think the creators understood early on that they could make such wholesale changes as giving a character a different home planet. Gim being from Mars was not really new. Levitz had established that during his run, IIRC.

Thus, with Lyle alreay chosen as Earth's pick (I think to make up for his untimely death) Dirk and Chuck were left on the sidelines. Chuck, like Tenzil, also fell afoul of the "No Silly Powers" rule.

I do believe that there were plans to bring Dirk in eventually. Didn't he get introduced as a civilian early on? However, I think Emeral Vi killed that.

As we know, the internet as a an unknown animal at the time, and I think it surprised DC to find that fans were gathering online to not only discuss comics, but also to guess enture plotlines before they happened. The Emerald Vi story came about only because fans had figured out Zoe's fate.

I think keeping Dirk out of the Legion became the creators' way of saying, "Hey fans, don't think you know what's going to happen. We can still surprise you and, what's more, we will, so nyah."

No. While Gim had gotten his powers while vacationing on Mars, his being from Mars was a new thing. He was born in Israel in the preboot, as I recall.

Still, it wasn't a huge change.

You know... it suddenly occurred to me that the whole debate over members with "weaker powers" in the second Tangleweb story is kind of the reboot version of Chuck proving his worth to the team, just with Lyle kind of taking Chuck's role. It even occurs at roughly the same point in history.

On the "one member per planet" rule, I always saw it as taking the place of the old "diversity of powers" clause, and thus giving a much more reasonable explanation of why the Legion didn't just recruit fifteen Daxamites (or whatever) to join the team. I remember being really bothered that they didn't make more interesting use of it, such as allowing one the Heroes of Lallor or other supporting preboot characters to make on the team because of it. Or, for that matter, having someone like Chuck join because his dad is Vice-Chancellor of Antares or something seems to me like a perfect plot they could've done in the reboot.

I agree. That's one of the things that has always bugged me about the Legion. Here we have a society with the technology to traverse light years. Surely, they'd be able to terraform and colonize all 95-some-odd planets and moons of our solar system. And yet, through much of Legion history, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Earth and Titan are the only habitable spots circling Sol.

I thought Levitz changed it from vacationing to from in one of those "My Pal Gigi" flashbacks Maybe I misremember.

Also, while we know Gim was Jewish, was it ever specifically said that he was born in Israel?

I'm pretty sure he's stated to be from Israel in either Secrets of the Legion or Who's Who in the Legion.

I think what Levitz added was that he was enrolled in the SP Academy on Mars (along with GiGi), and it was during a vacation from that that he got his powers, but I think he was still from Earth. It's been along time since I've read it, however.

Just to note, Star Boy was originally suppposed to join before Laurel/Vi/Kinetix, but that's when he had his crash. He was basically KQ's replacement right away. (most of you probably remember that).

Dirk's absence also weighed heavily on me too, and was something I disliked very much. After the Chu sting, he should have joined up right away at the end with the rest of those missing/not joined yet: Element Lad, Ultra Boy, M'Onel, XS, etc. His exclusions always rubbed me the wrong way, albeit very minorly. It certainly felt more like a slight as time passed and a few things in the Reboot became unforgivable (Sneckie, Wildfire's origin).

One thing I liked about both of these was the openness to new blood. I *like* the fact that XS, Gates and Kinetix all join early on in the reboot. It was only a little later when they were adding new characters that seemed to not fit well (Monstress with her annoying personality and redundant powers, for example) that it became apparent that certain people were being left out (Dirk, Nura at the time). I like Dragonmage and Computo (really only liking Catspaw when we use her in threads on LW ), but I liked the reboot new Legionnaires a bit better.

SW6 also paved the way for the awesomeness of Luornu and Lyle in the reboot, which IMO gave us the best ever versions of both characters. Because of SW6, I actually see the preboot Lu and preboot Lyle as essentially the same characters as the reboot--we just never got to see it only the Legionnaires comic.

One thing I wasn't crazy about in SW6 was the New Earth setting.

I agree about New Earth.

As far as new blood goes, I actually would've like to have seen the Reboot team add Dragonmage, Computo, and Catspaw as well as their own creations.

Oh, the Bierbaums gutted Lyle right off the bat in either the 1st issue of Legionnaires or the issue of the Legion that came right before it. "I'm not really a leader type." I still get mad about that all these years later. Them and their Cosmic Boy fetish.

Adventure Lyle will pop you in the jaw if you put a toe out of line. He will turn your Most Dangerous Game fixation around on you in a hurry. And he still had time to hang out with his parents. Reboot Lyle the spy was good, but he was lacking the two-fisted panache of Adventure Lyle.

I think Lyle is the character most changed in the Reboot from his SW6 version. Honestly, the SW6 version made the threeboot version look like a stud.

When it comes to SW6 vs reboot for me. I'd like to think that XS and Kinetix are probably the best in the bunch. As stated earlier the SW6 legion with a few additions and subtractions are the reboot legion. Tweaking here and there and visits from the Time Trapper could have ( and should have) made them the best legion ever. Also the SW6 Ferro so pwned the 20th centuray Ferro..Tho' he got "beter" later on. Also am I the only one who wanted to see Tenzil show up in the reboot legion as ME lad before they got retcon punched away again?

No kidding! If the Reboot had carried over any personality traits of the SW6 Legion, it should've been Ferro. (heck, even Mordru-verse Ferro was tons better!)

Poor reboot Ferro was, indeed, really, really lame. Initially I felt kind of bad for disliking him, but let's face it, the whinging just got tiresome.

On the other hand, it did make the "You lick it!" "No, you lick it!" "...hey Ferro, c'mere." bit during the Bizarro Legion story very funny, so at least there's that.