Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! To those who prefer prior versions of the Legion...

...what things from the current reality would you keep in a new reincarnation?

Me, personally? I'd keep:

1) Karate Kid's costume, Asian physical appearance, and wisdom;

2) Star Boys Afro-Terran physical appearance and unassuming personality;

3) Light Lass' costume;

4) Theena;

5) Transmatter technology;

6) Super expensive flight-rings;

7) the Legion as the centre of a social movement;

8) Invisible Kid's youth and outsider status;

9) Competing groups/movements like Terror Firma and the (New) Wanderers; and

10) Brainy and Dreamy's verbal fencing and underlying latent attraction.

I'd keep:
-- Starboy's appearance
-- The bigger age range between team members
-- Colossal Boy from a race of giants
-- the goats

The SCA concept as central to the Legion.

Theena.

Triplicate Girl's having far more than three bodies.

The Goats.

I'd keep the revision to make Dreamy a serious butt-kicker. (Assuming that a new version would have her alive again.) The whole notion of 'pre-cops' absolutely rocked. I secretely wish for 'fleecehead' to be revealed as one of the precops (the one whose wife left him, and found himself wanting to get off Naltor for a bit)...

I'd keep Theena. She rocks.

The sex. I kinda like the characters having established history with each other. I can't go to a large gathering of friends without half of them having slept with (or been married to...) the other half at some point in the last decade, and I kinda think it's only get a lot more like that in the future. While I love Alan Davis' smiling teens from Superboy's Legion, the Legion I grew up with consists of a bunch of people who have moved past that and into young adulthood, with marriages and break-ups and all that jazz.

The diminished focus on Earth being invaded / blown up / blighted / etc. Yeah, it's happened now with the Dominators, but it's been almost three years, and I can live with that sort of thing in moderation, in service to a good long-term storyline. Back when Earth was being smacked about every six months, it got a bit anti-climactic. WaK happily avoided that sort of artificial dramatic escalation.

Invisible Lyle. Invisible Jacques never did it for me.

While I'm not tickled about Orando being blowed up, I am *extremely* happy to see Jeckie with arms, breasts, hair and legs and 100% less scales.

The big thing I'd keep is the 'core' characters. Waid didn't feel the need to pummel us with his own new special creations, but instead regaled us with our old friends (even if some of them looked a little different than last time we saw them). Instead of new characters like Gates, Monstress, Thunder, Kinetix, XS, Gear, Shikari, Kid Quantum, Catspaw, Andromeda, etc. we get Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, 'Micro Lad,' 'Atom Girl,' Star Boy, Dream Girl, etc. *They* are the Legion. New characters can come later, when they've *earned* a right to be there, but not at the expense of old favorites like Mon-El, darn it!

I can second that. From all those crappy new characters they desperately tried to shoehorn in after Zero Hour (XS??? Kinetix???), the only one who really worked for me was Shikari, and she came on board years after the reboot and was a modern new interpretation of Dawnstar.

I really believe that any new version should rely on the old characters, and I go further: I think they should cherish some of the old Legion Lore, especially the given relationships between Garth / Imra and Tinya / Jo. Those people belong together in any contiunuity and the current writers have strayed much to far away from these love affairs. Brainy and Dreamy??? Please??? Where did that come from?

Maybe I'm a romantic, but somehow I belive that true love never dies, and so they should be together in every parallel dimension. Especially Tinya and Jo after what they had to go through....

What about XS and Kinetix's introduction seemed "desperate" to you? (do Gates, Magno, Monstress and Kid Quantum also fall into that category?) Sometimes I feel writers feel obligated to "shoe horn" in older Legion concepts to appeal to older fans despite the fact that they're supposedly trying to do something new.

The names
The costumes
The Wanderers (White Witch should join the Legion)
Theena (a bit one-dimensional but she grew on me. Pun not intended!)
Lemnos (finally an original and interesting villain!!)
The Legion as an agent of social change (among more sci-fi oriented plots, without the brattiness)
Transmatter thechnology and other far future sc-fi elements.
The consistently good art!! Especially the individualised depictions of the Legionnaires.

I'd keep as little as I could possibly get away with. If we're going to have multiple versions of the Legion, I want them to be as distinct from each other as possible... because I want them all to be, somehow or other, in continuity.

I agree with Matthew E. There is not much in this experiment that worked well in my opinion.

I liked the characterization of Brainy, Dreamy, and Shadow Lass.

"Atom Girl", "Micro Lad", Saturn Girl and Triplicate Girl, and Invisible Kid to some extent now need to be fixed.

The Legion vs. adults and public service is best forgotten.

I can't help feel that in almost three years this Legion reboot version never really got started.

Well, then, you don't agree with me, because I think a lot of stuff about this version worked well. But if DC's going to use that stuff, they may as well use it in this version, and let whatever comes later have its own stuff that works.

Theena, half the costumes, the rings, and the other groups like Terror Firma, Wanderers, etc.

That's it.

If you prefer a prior version, why talk about a new reincarnation? I'm not trying to be mean but I honestly don't understand the logic.

If you want a prior version to come back, then it's in everyone's best interests to keep changes to an absolute minimum or you defeat the whole purpose of bringing it back. Black Star Boy, Theena and the New Wanderers on the same team as pre-Crisis Legionnaires wouldn't be the prior Legion -- it'd be a new hodgepodge reboot that would probably just make people mad.

If you want a new reincarnation, we have already have it. It'd be so much simpler to make the current Legion more like the first Legion than vice versa -- and it wouldn't require a reboot.

So, my question is the reverse of yours: what things about the first Legion would you like brought into the current Legion?

(Btw, I grew up with the first Legion but I can't say I prefer them. I roll with the times.)

I thought it was quite desperate to shoehorn new characters in after so few issues in the new continuity. Readers were in shock after the annihilation of 30 years of Legion Lore, and the writers seemingly felt that they had to do something new for no other reason than doing something new. The XS character was the lamest Legionnaire ever, considering the fact that a speedster is not only difficult to write and boring to begin with, but also that if you would write the character corectly, it would be an unbeatable force which would make all the other heroes obsolete. Marv Wolfman once said that he had major problems getting Kid Flash into his New Teen Titans stories because of the difficulty to explain why problems were not simply solved by Kid Flashs speed.

I really thought the new characters were a very inept attempt to be different. Later on, a new character could somehow be explained because the continuities had drifted so far apart. But to squeeze XS in right after the beginning was a real lame move.

Certainly characters like Gear or Monstress later on were a further sign of total emptiness in the character developers' brain...

Gotta admit, I liked Shikari (being a reservation brat, the various sad attempts at Native Americans in the comics just make me cringe, so turning Dawnstar into a bug worked for me, since she was as authentically 'native american' as Shikari as she had been in her buckskins of space).

I liked Kid Quantum II a lot. It was *past* time for a Legion femme to have a buttkicking power, and her time manipulations definitely counted, when the writers seemed to have the slightest clue what her powers were, anyway. Other times, her hands glowed and random crap happened. It was like Chemical King all over again...

Monstress was, IMO, lame. Gear was a copy of what they were already turning Brainy into anyway, a half-cyborg cyberpath with a computer brain. XS didn't affect me one way or another. Since Ultra Boy and Mon-El (and whichever member of the House of El shows up to attract non-Legion fans) all have super-speed as just one of their many other powers, a dedicated speedster doesn't bug me. Kinetix was a much more interesting *character* than her power-set would indicate. I appreciated that, but then she apparently grew a tail. But hey, she could have turned into a snake, so call it an upside... I read little or nothing of Gates appearances, but he seemed interesting as a character, and non-humanoid Legionnaires have always been a hankering of mine. It's not like the writers have to worry about a special effects budget, so there's no real need for every single 'alien' to be a human with different colored skin or a bump on their forehead.

It would probably make sense to keep all of these new characters in their own continuity, now that we've got the whole multiverse thang going on again. The primary reason I skipped the whole five year later / legion on the run / blight / earth blows up, again arc was because of all of these ancillary characters taking up space that felt empty of the recognizable Legionnaires. Sure, they were 'Legionnaires' in this book, but they weren't the Legionnaires I would have bought the book to see, whom I hadn't seen since the Baxter days. I'm a big fan of change, but happening over time. Karate Kid's death was an organic change. Tellus, Sensor, etc. joining the Legion was an organic change. Sensor turning into a snake, and a half-dozen people I'd never heard of suddenly having been Legionnaires didn't feel organic, it just felt like, 'oh, we're gonna call this book Legion to trick the fans of that book to buy this one.'

The only real exposure I had to them was in Teen Titan crossovers, inevitably filled with a half-dozen or more strange people I didn't recognize, and making me wonder why Brainy was a kid and Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl didn't have kids and who this 'Jarth' person was and why Violet had Colossal Boys powers, and Gim was apparently dead...

And I still liked Shikari and Kid Quantum II enough to want to see more of them, so I'm like the world's biggest hypocrite, I guess.

It's kind of ironic that the threeboot is so much closer to the Legion I remember (Great Darkness / Universo Project / LSV war-era), despite re-imagining so much.

I understand what you're saying, and, yes, I'd love to see the classic Levitz/Giffen Legion return if I had my druthers, but realistically, I also recognize that the next reboot (if there ever is one) will likely have elements from all incarnations in some way. In my mind, the trick then is to get all of the best elements into the mix.

Besides, I have to admit that even if "my" Legion were to somehow magically (and implausibly) return, I'd still probably want the elements that I enjoyed from other boots--especially characters like XS, Kinitex, Monstress, Gates, Thunder, et. al.--to soon be reintroduced. Clearly, I have no problem with a cast so large that you need a score-card to keep track of the plot. I guess the trick, then, would be to reintroduce out-of-continuity characters that wouldn't feel un-natural or forced.

Anyway, I realize that my hopes are unrealistic, so I do strive to make the best out of each new reboot and get behind them. Having said that, however, the current version doesn't always work for me over all, even if my first post in this thread does concede that there are some new elements that i find to be of real value in this version of the Legion.

And, no, I didn't think for a minute that you were being mean; I like genuine and respectful debate, so please, keep the discussion going by all means.

I would keep the code names, I know some people think they sound dated, but if these kids really are inspired by heroes of the past they are going to have Boy/Girl/Lad/Lass names, either that or call them Captain *Adjective*, both these types of naming are staples of comics and when I was a kid (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this) and I came up with a character it always was *such and such* girl or something along those lines.

Flight Rings as expensive and all purpose thingys, this would allow a writer to reintroduce old characters (like the Xs and Gates and Bouncing Boy) without having to have them on the actual team until the writer actually knows how they want to do them (example: Timber Wolf, he joins the team and all he's done so far is steal one thing for Brainy), plus the Flight Rings having so much built in stuff adds to the futuristic feel.

The Witty Dialogue, I have a lot of complaints about the current Legion, but some of Waid's dialogue has completly made me fall in love with some of the characters and I think this book had a lot of great one-liners.

Dreamy as someone who can kick butt (but bring her back alive fully first)

The 'fixes' from previous Legions--I love the fact that certain characters have been 'brought' back to life, its nice to have the characters back without a bad resurection story. Also, Princess Projectra as a human again falls under this.

Cos'look--the poor guy always had lousy costums, I mean, pink and purple, he got the short end of the costume stick. So I really like this one. Also, I like his hair (although it should be black) but I wish his personality had more of the fun loving attitude that his hair suggests.

Nura's homeworld (blanking on the name) I thought that was a cool design for a planet, Colu having that shield and everyone shrinking themselves to fit, and Kandor being out of the bottle but socially confined like they are, that was cool.

I almost want to say Phantom Girl being the only one from her dimension who can live in ours. Part of me really likes the idea and what it could mean yet part of me misses the Tinya and her Mom as politician dynamic...

Mon-El being back

I definitely prefer a "prior" version of the Legion, the one of the 70s and 80s (before 5YL)but I wouldn't like a Legion that's static and "stuck" 20-30 years ago.
The Legion must evolve, as it evolved from the more childish 60s version (which I love of course) to the "older" Legion of the 70s and 80s.
There are elements in newer Legion versions which are good, modern, reflecting trends in comic book storytelling, sci-fi storytelling, technology adnvances, world situations etc.
I don't think those elements should be thrown out the window in favor of a "historical" version suspended in time.
In other words, I liked the "spirit" of that "older" Legion, its premise, its world-view and its cutting-edge aesthetics, and I want these in a "new Legion" too.
Not a return to the past, a return to the future!

Yeah, that's a big part of it for me. I was there when Garth and Imra married, and when 'nose-grabber lad' was born, and when Karate Kid gave his life, and Shadow Lass hacked off a finger. I may not have loved every single thing ever, but it was a growing tale. Nobody remained static. Shrinking Violet 'outgrew' her meek persona after the assault by Micro Lad and replacement by Yera, chopped her hair and became a badass. Timber Wolf and Light Lass never got back together. Star Boy and Dream Girl had drama aplenty, breaking up, re-connecting, etc.

The most painful part about these reboots is that these kids I grew up with aren't just dying off or retiring, which I could stand, they are just gone and replaced by eternal teenagers who bear little or no resemblance to them. That's fine for an Elseworlds like Superboy's Legion, but as the only Legion game in town, it's hard to connect, since these shiny new characters insist on calling themselves the names of people I already know, people who they manifestly are NOT. I could love them as new characters, but since they keep calling themselves by the names of old characters, I'm stuck forever judging them for NOT being the people they claim to be. Calling ADD Garth 'Lightning Lad' just makes it harder for me to like him, because he's *not* Garth Ranzz, he's a new character, and I'm never going to be able to accept and appreciate him as such, because the jerk keeps calling himself Lightning Lad.

I want to grab mute Saturn Girl and shake her and tell her to stop pretending to be Imra Ardeen. She's just some mute telepathic chick who shares the same name, but none of the personality.

Well a way to keep the Legion "young" while still have the "old" characters would be new members.

Imagine after Magic Wars if a young XS and Gates would've joined? Dragonmage to replace the White Witch who certainly needed some time off after Magic Wars, etc.

Yeah, it seems what with all the re-boots, three-boots, re-imagings, re-this, re-that the Legion can't grow, can't evolve anymore.
New members would be fine. I was thinking today how long it's been since the introduction of a new member who stayed on in more than one version of the Legion. It used to be that a new member would shift the entire power base of the Legion, he/she would open up new possibilities and he/she/it would be *there* after the current writer left the book. A new member or a death was a big and important event.
Today it seems the new creative teams want to do away with their predecessors' new characters.
Sometimes that's good, other times that's bad, imho.