Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Dying: To be a Legionnaire (comic & TV spoilers)

Recently some Legionnaires have been taking serious hits. Not counting the actual cancellation of the animated series itself, we've had Karate Kid, Una, and in the final animated episode [from the upcoming attractions], Colossal Boy (digitized) and possibly Superman and other Legionnaires getting offed.

By my unofficial count, here is a listing of Legionnaires who have died on panel in action the most numerous times. This list doesn't include Elseworlds or alternate dimensions (LSH#300 or Mordruverse) stories, but does include the various Legion versions and the animated series. Feel free to correct my mistakes!

1) Colossal Boy - 4 times
2) Karate Kid - 3 times
3) Lightning Lad, Phantom Girl, Invisible Kid, Ferro Lad, Chameleon Boy - 2 times
4) Ultra Boy, Saturn Girl, Brainiac 5, Light Lass, Bouncing Boy, Element Lad, Triplicate Girl, Mon-El, Sun Boy, Shrinking Violet, Cosmic Boy, Chemical King, Blok, Princess Projectra, Monstress - 1 time

** Special recognition goes to Triplicate Girl, who along with being killed once, has had an individual body of hers killed on 3 other separate occasions.

Shame on me to exclude Superboy and Supergirl, one time each.

Anyone remember when death actually kind of meant something in the Legion?

Like that time Lightning Lad died fighting Zaryan the Conqueror!

KQ, you missed Magnetic Kid (Pol).

In TMK, we also had Sun Boy and Laurel Gand die, (at a minimum; I don't count End of an Era as real deaths) and also one or two of the Khund Legionniares (Firefist was onem, I think. I never remember all their names).

Also, the "off-camera" yYL deaths, including the "other" Reflecto.

I think we need to plan on a lot more Legion deaths in the next few years. "The Legion of Three Worlds" leaves me suspicious that TPTB are looking at so many Legionnaires as potential fodder. DC has probably used up its quota of Teen Titans for the time being, so they are looking to the Legion to fill the void.

Kent, I knew I would miss some. Thanks for the back-up.

The biggest offending issue has been Adventure #310 where Mask Man wiped out almost the entire Legion. Superboy was able to defeat him and reverse the effects (Lightning Lad had died previous, so he was not involved).

Still, that issue aside, compiling this list amazed me how often Legionnaire deaths have occurred. That, and the recent travesties in Countdumb are reasons for concern. If our "heroes" become splatter dupes instead of innovative escape artists, who is going to care in the end?

I read the original Adventure issues as they came out. When Ferro Lad died, it didn't feel the same way it did when Lightning Lad had died. Then they did The Ghost of Ferro Lad... and Mr. Nolan was still dead.

And he didn't come back. (At least, for another 15 or so years, when clones of him, Lyle and Condo made an appearance).

It was the first on-screen death I'd encountered. It was intense, it was heroic. It meant something.

Wow! It's always nice to have someone whose been around that long join up!

When I first encountered the Legion in the early 80s, there were three (and one-third) dead Legionnaires, and it seemed like they'd been dead for ages. You die, you get a statue, you're remembered, but you don't come back.

Sure, there were exceptions, like Lightning Lad or when Ultra Boy was believed to be dead, but there were certainly those Legionnaires who were just dead, Jim, and that was all there was to it.

These days between a) death being a commonplace; b) coming back to life being commonplace; and c) rebooting to bring in new versions of dead characters, it's pretty much impossible for me to take the deaths of characters seriously.

You know I always wanted to do a real study on death in the Legion. Since Legion was/is its own corner of the DCU the only Legionnaire you couldn't kill were Superboy and Supergirl (until DC mandated it, but then it happened in other books).

I mean, with Teen Titans you know Robin or Nightwing aren't going to die, Wonder girl or Donna will come back, Superboy wasn't going to die in Titans, etc. because they all tie into larger properties or other titles.

But with Legion, when a Legionnaire dies that's it (for the most part).

So from what I know, the Legion gets one cop-out death in the begining (Lightning Lad, Apparition, Dream Girl) and then we have some real deaths (Ferro Lad, Lyle, Condo, Karate Kid, Leviathan, Monstross, Element Lad *but note the resurected Lightning Lad*).

So is there a formula? Should more Legionnaires die? Is death too premature in the reboots (as fans seem to think Gim's death p-zh was a waste and no one seems happy about Dream Girl not having a body..)

I dunno, what are your thougths on death and the Legion?

The dying of heroes, and even the moral degradation of some others, has been done to the point of overuse in comics in the past two decades. When you get to a point where a major character has to die every year, and one is even eaten by rats, the shark has been jumped. What's next? Lobo bar-b-quing a hero on a spit for breakfast?

I always thought of heroes as extraordinary people performing extraordinary feats. This includes escaping certain-death situations rather than succumbing to them. The better writers and illustrators can make these scenarios much more interesting to read than a splatter scene.

The resurrection of countless heroes from the dead has turned the value of life (in the comic world) to a joke and farce and devoid of any real meaning. For this to change, there should be a moratorium on these Crisis type events that promote this sort of bunk. I'm sure Jack Kirby is rolling in his grave over the travesty of his Fourth World characters.

One thing that's important to me is that when a Legionnaire dies, they should die accomplishing something that would not have been accomplished without their death. And what they accomplish should be a big deal. So Ferro Lad dies because that's the only way to deliver the bomb to destroy the Sun-Eater and save the whole freakin' solar system, not to mention the rest of the galaxy.

I don't think Legionnaires should die just because they put themselves in dangerous situations. That's one of things that bugged me about Dream Girl's death in the current series. Sure she dies because she puts herself in danger trying to help the crowd outside Legion HQ, but I'd suggest that while her death may have been heroic, it wasn't super-heroic.

Well said, with all the talk about Prime coming into the Legion I'm worried about a blood bath, which seems very unLegiony. When was the last time you saw a (cpmpentant) JLA get massacured? I don't think Legionnaires should die just to meet the body count, it should really be an inspiring, there was no other way, type of death.

I was absolutely blown away when, shortly after Supergirl died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a lead plate was removed from her bust in LSH HQ, revealing her date of her death. I didn't know why that particular moment had been chosen to remove the lead plate, but it was moving.

It was a little confusing as well, since she always had been dead prior to the founding of the Legion.

For that matter, how did they know Kara would never travel past that particular point in the 30th Century?

English doesn't have tenses for time-travel...