Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Other Team Reboots

We talk (constantly) of all the changes that have happened to the Legion to the extent that it seems common practice for characters to be have their history retconned. I Suppose Superman is a good example of that happening (and forced the earliest retcon on the Legion).

Many comic teams have seen changes in line-ups and a bit of ret-connong (Black Canary in the JLA)but has any team been his by a full reboot like the Legion?

I can't think of anyone else that has been completely rebooted like the Legion to the extent that the history is completely different, origins, powers, costumes, membership. A white guy replaced by a black guy, a human replaced by a snake and so on.

Is the Legion unique in this?

I fear it is. Some heroes books have been rebooted like Superman and recently Spiderman (I consider the One More Day debacle a reboot and have skipped Spiderman immediately), but as far as team books go... the focus of my collection is on team books, and I can't remember any other team whose whole history and therefore, identity has been erased as a means of "streamlining" the continuity... not Titans, not the very continuity challenged JSA, not the Outsiders, those teams only changed their membership completely from time to time, but their history stayed intact.

With Marvel, there has been the Heroes Reborn Reboot in the 90s, but that one ended in all the heroes returning to the regular Marvel universe after just one year, so it was only an event to gain some money, not a complete reboot.

When Marvel took over Ultraverse in the 90s, they totally wrecked the books by changing them, but I don't remember if it was a real reboot or just a major overhaul for the worse...

Same goes for Valiant team books. They went through lots of changed due to new executice powers, but I don't know if their history was erased... I don't think so.

So the Legion, again, is something very special. A no-price I could easily let pass, but well...

The closest I can think of is the fact that the JSA has had so many retcons over the years, especially shortly after the first Crisis (the Wonder Woman/Fury/Miss America/Hippolyta confuzzlement leaps to mind), but that doesn't even come close to a reboot, let alone two, possibly three.

"Crisis on Infinite Earths" would have been a great "Elseworlds" story, but it was a bad idea to make it the real continuity.

Yeah, Hippolyta replacing Wonder Woman can be compared to Valor replacing Superboy - major retcon, but the main continuity stays largely intact, not all of history is erased.

Marvel at least does its Ultimate line to do stuff like the Reboot. So you can choose between two versions. But with the legion, we just had to swallow everything they threw at us.

Well, Doom Patrol's been severely rebooted... The original one's history ended in the Vertigo universe, and thus disappeared partly from the normal continuity...

Then when Byrne did his series, it was a brand new Doom Patrol entirely rebooted from scratch...

Which was retconned with Infinite Crisis to the one we have now, which is now again the original one with a few twists.

And I'm not counting the horrible "in-between" Doom patrol we had after the Vertigo version.

The argument could easily be made that the JLA was effectively a "rebooted" JSA in the early sixties. The main difference between this and the Legion is that the JSA hadn't been published for about a decade when the JLA debuted.

I actually think that's an important difference. Nobody complains, for example, that the latest Lone Ranger series is a reboot (there's complaints about the tone of the book, but not not about the fact that it is a reboot). But that's because it's a relaunch of a title that hadn't been published in awhile.

I'm sure I might forget a few, but here's what I can remember:


JSA

Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman completely retconned out. John Byrne later restores Wonder Woman to the JSA continuity (in a move I highly approved of) by sending Hippolyta back in time. How then to explain the Miss America 'patch-job'? Better to ignore it.


INFINTY INC

The Crisis nearly destroyed this team. 'Young All-Stars' had to be created to even attempt a fix on Lyta/Fury's history. Eventually, it was better in DC's eyes to kill off most of the members or turn them evil.


JLA

Wonder Woman retconned out as a founder, replaced with Black Canary. I believe Supoerman and Batman's founders roles were also retconned out for a time. Have all 3 of these changes been re-retconned back in?

Also, the Hawkworld/Hawkman fiasco dictated that the JLA's Hawkman and Hawkgirl were actually the golden-age versions. How then to explain the Hawkworld flashback-retcon issue that featured the 70s JLAer Hawkgirl being killed in the INVASION crossover?


TEEN TITANS

Wolfman dictated that Robin was an idiot and the Joker's Daughter/Harlequin was an old lady and then later, never existed at all (therefore retconning out Robin's idiocy). JD/Harlequin's existence was later re-retconned in by Devin Grayson and Phil Jiminez.

Bat-Girl was never Bat-Girl but Flamebird.

The destruction of the Wonder Woman-verse completely ruins one of Wolfman's greatest Wonder Girl stories and Donna Troy is *still* in recovery 25 years later.

Pariscub probably hits on the only other actual complete team reboot. Now Byrne's Doom Patrol reboot was a true, complete disaster.

EDE makes a compelling point about the 60's JLA being a reboot of the JSA.

That was an earthwoman who married a Thangarian spy, who in turn posed as the son of the GA Hawkman.

Does something like Age of Apocalypse count as a 'side-boot?' It's become canon, in that AoA characters (such as Blink) have come across into the mainstream continuity and been sort of soft-merged in.

Dr. Fate seems to get rebooted on occasion, but I'm not sure if that qualifies either.

What Alan Moore did with the Swamp Thing would likely be one of the very, very few 'reboots' of a character that totally redefined him (from dude who was killed in a chemical accident to avatar of nature) and yet actually *improved* the character.

Some of the drastic changes to Ghost Rider (from hellfire motorcyclist to chain-wielding penance-stare dude) might also qualify.

Aquaman, as well, has been through some strangeness.

Really, it seems that surprising changes (including retcons, like Ben Parker isn't really dead and the Asian ninja-chick isn't really a bodyshopped Betsy Braddock, but actually a mindswitched assassin), are more common than not, in the comic book genre.

The Legion just has the bad luck of being one of the few entire *teams* to be radically rebooted multiple times, and the lack of connection to other titles doesn't, IMO, help matters.

Constantly rebooting Wonder Woman, for instance, calls into question her relationships with various other DC universe characters, like Superman and the League, while the Legion can be utterly rebooted with minimal impact on cross-over potential, since, except for Superboy/girl, there aren't a whole lot of cross-overs.

Actually, the whole Valiant universe was rebooted sometime in the late 90s. It didn't help it to survive.

There were some solo "soft boots" in the very early 70's as I recall. Wonder Woman had a martial arts Guru and a bell bottomed pantsuit while Supergirl had vaccillating powers and a go-go girl outfit complete with thigh high boots. I think this was about the time that Green Lantern and Green Arrow were traveling around in an old pick-up truck, Robin started growing up and Clark was "promoted" to become an evening News anchor.

They may even have appeared in the Justice League during that period in their "new" costumes and "upgraded" personas but I wouldn't try to sell that as any kind of reboot of the JLA. It was more an attempt by DC to get a bit Marvel-like with some of their flagship titles.

You might consider that The Teen Titans even quit super heroing and became some kind of action team for some uber secret rich guy after a tragic accident. Turning a title in an absolutely different diresction was probably as close to a reboot as DC came at the time
Heroes with deep emotional problems. How Marvelous.

Now I'm not speaking about a specific year mind you just a brief era where DC tried some wierd changes to some of their characters and books. Not much of it worked well and they all soon returned to colorful costumes and dashing derring do. I do so wish they'd remember that early failure and quit screwing around with titles that way.

It is true though that a few of the changes stuck. Some of them I'm not particularly fond of like G'nark and Lilith but Green Arrow as a cynical crumudgeon works pretty well for me. Which I suppose undercuts my whole argument.
Oh well.

There is a difference between rebooting and taking characters in a different direction. None of the changes you cite, Yellow Kid, erased previous continuity. (I'm not sure exactly what the definition of "soft booting" is.)

I do recall, though, that Wonder Woman's back story had different variations. In one version, she was Wonder Girl as a teen, and there was even a Wonder Tot. But these stories were similar to the Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. stories running in World's Finest--a proto-Elseworlds series of stories.

Didn't WildCATS reboot at least once? I have a vague notion that one of their relaunches involved starting from stratch with essentially the same characters, but rejiggered into a new origin and closing off the previous series.

Teenage Tony Stark in Iron Man was a big enough mess to seem like a full-on reboot in the 90's. And they way they swept it under the rug was too (not that I'm complaining).

"Softboot" is a Glorithverse-type change - lots of retcons, some fundamental, but the spine of the previous continuity is at least nominally intact.

And, yeah, lots and lots of examples here which... aren't reboots in any way.

Supergirl actually was rebooted at some point in the pre-Crisis universe. She'd aged into her 20s, been through college, got a job... and then they de-aged her and forgot about years of stories.

the supergirl deage thing was a huge mistake...
how does a famous Soap Actress not be recognized by any of her peers in college when that's among the highest viewing audience outside of housewives?


and i think they along the way somewhere said that had to be grad school. thought making her 19 again was nuts...

Point taken. None of those changes changed the histories of those characters at all. It made for different situations, sub plots and supporting characters but the protagonists were always the same people they had been before..with the same history and the same origin.