Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Visionaries of Tomorrow Waid's comments on the rebooting

From here (usenet repost of comments)

[in response to "the writer has been reading LEGION for 15 years and finds it very sad to see 36 years' worth of continuity jettisoned, and while things were in bad shape, he believed there was nothing wrong a good writer couldn't fix."]

I think it's sad, too. And I've been reading Legion for TWENTY-SEVEN years. AND there is no bigger fan of the Legion ALIVE than me. But all the continuity changes and flip-flops have made the Legion's history an unsalvageable mess. Continuity wasn't "in bad shape." It was Chernobyl. This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.* If you have one, let's hear it. If not, then please don't accuse me of not being "a good enough writer" to come up with one.

[in response to "DC seems once again to be valuing winning new readers over keeping old ones, and DC should be able to do both." Some things never change, huh?]

Okay. How? Details, please. Yes, I'm making you back this claim up. I'm sorry if I sound cranky, but this wasn't an editorial fiat from DC. This drastic change was my choice, and DC chose to back me. I don't want to gain new readers as the *expense* of older ones, either. The best gambit, in my opinion as well as yours, is to appeal to both. But Legion *gets* no new readers. They haven't for *years.* Fandom in general considers Legion to be a "private club"; the reason LEGIONNAIRES tanked so horribly was because new readers were asked to follow a history that made *absolutely no sense.* The Legion's been ailing for some time, James. We're not pulling the trigger...we're pulling the plug. I'm just as sorry as you to see it go, but if we rebuild carefully enough, none of it has to be gone forever. If it's any consolation, our Golden Rule is never to alter known Legion history capriciously. Whatever changes are made must be made for a well-considered reason and must reflect the overall Legion spirit of old. That is my promise to you.

Originally posted by Mark Waid:
This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.*

Originally posted by Legion Lad:

Mark Waid seems to think that if he says something empathically, that makes it true. This isn't the only time I've seen him employ this technique. John Byrne uses it, too. It isn't so.

People didn't like the TMK Legion and wanted the "real" Legion to return. The problem with the reboot is that it gave people yet another Legion, thus not addressing their complaints. All they had to do was say that the TMK Legion was an imaginary story and voila, problem solved. They threw it out anyway, along with everything else. Wouldn't it have been better to amputate it alone instead?

Kurt B said:

One of my suggestions was that LEGION #0 retell the origin, and LEGIONNAIRES #0 be a "history book" with each page giving a montage pin-up by a different Legion artist from Swan to Sprouse re-establishing a major Legion story and what happened (and what happened differently, if anything), so the post-Zero issues could pick up with a fully-established Legion with a great deal of history, but it would be a history readers could know and refer back to. The problem was that everyone wanted to pick up the regular continuity at a different time -- the Sun-Eater story, the Great Darkness Saga, the Magic Wars, etc. -- and it was finally decided that it would just work best, if history was to be re-set (and it was _already_ broken, he said again) to explain the re-set right from the start and tell the stories in full.

Originally posted by Legion Lad:

Quote

Originally posted by Mark Waid:
[b] This revision wasn't a decision made lightly; KC Carlson and Tom McCraw and I spent literally hundreds of man-hours over the past year trying to come up with a less drastic solution to the continuity problems than simply wiping the slate clean, and we could *not find one.*

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the above quote. Three men spend hundreds of man-hours and that's the best that they can come up with? What Waid basically did was go online and confess that he's an idiot. Maybe they should have had three smarter people in charge back then. Just because they couldn't find one doesn't mean that there wasn't one to be found. They're not the three smartest men in the galaxy, and this proves it. [/b]

Originally posted by Legion Lad:
What Waid basically did was go online and confess that he's an idiot. Maybe they should have had three smarter people in charge back then.