Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes August 2021 is a Bustt

I think that's part of it, although both the late v4 LSH and Legionnaires titles both operated in the 90s pretty decently together pre-reboot, and then very cohesively in the post-boot when the creative teams worked in sync as Ibby mentioned. In fact, the retroboot Legion under Levitz worked across both LSH and Adventure or Action at the time (Can't remember specifically).

So they've worked across multiple titles before, so there are some other challenges to deal with as well, probably around marketing, but at the end of the day I think its about having a creative staff that can write and draw a team effectively just like you're saying, and an editorial staff that's willing to market them. If any one aspect is lacking, the book will fail.

Thank you Spellbinder, you couldn't have said it more perfectly! It's like you read my mind, honestly!

The whole Legion floating off into the void arm in arm was just bleak for me. 'Oh, trillions of people just died, all our families, our entire home worlds, and la la, we are just going to float off, so it's a happy ending, at least until someone in this interstellar void of nothing gets hungry or something and then we all die of starvation in this empty nothing...' Ugh. Such a downer of an ending.


I'm still pissy about Myg. The golden skinned Asian youth, younger than the rest of the team, that Lightle introduced and later joined the Subs, suddenly shows up as a white dude with grey hairs in his beard, clearer older than the rest of the Legion, and occasionally mispelling his name 'Mygg' and then gets killed by ****ing Radiation Roy, a guy whose super-power is to shoot 'paralyzing beams?' Whatever.

I did like the notion of Rond Vidar getting to become a Legionnaire, even if it lasted for like, *one page* before he got killed off by Superbrat.

And wow, did I have the characterizations of so many of them. Saturn Queen, in particular, from the stone cold manipulative ice-queen of the Superman/Batman series, to this gleepy-eyed Superboy Prime-worshipping fangirl. Ugh.

I reiterate my belief that much of Levitz' juggling ability back in the day is probably attributable to Berger's skills and good taste as an editor. You look at the difference between the best of it and the constant misfires (some probably forced on him- like being yoked from Day One to that kidney stone of a GL movie) during the last go-round with the Legion series and it seems obvious. At least to me.

I think the only reason that Johns thought this was OK was because the Reboot did actually drive many long timers from the books. And then they "killed" Apparition off, which caused another even bigger drop. So I wonder if this was a way of nodding to the older fans.

Or, it was probably just horrible writing.


Cause Johns wants to be "edgy"


Like I mentioned above, I think it has to be a synergy of the writers and the editors (and the art, of course) for this to be a success. I think you're spot on about Levitz and Berger, and I think that same synergy was on display at the beginning of the reboot and threeboot.

The one good thing about Lo3W was that it established that all Legions continuities exist simultaneously and separate of each other.

But then DC proceeded to do nothing with this premise. I'm a Retroboot apologist, but seriously they introduced this concept but all that happens is we follow one single Legion with Gates and Jenni occasionally popping up.

It's wasted potential.

^^I agree completely.

As far as the whiting out of the Legion continuity in the Titans/Legion Special, that was prior to Infinite Crisis restoring a multiverse, so I guess the official policy was still that only one continuity could exist at a time. What's weird is actually that the reboot Legionnaires themselves weren't whited out, which suggests that there was some sort of plan for using them that never came to fruition. Since Waid doesn't seem to have had any plan for them, one wonders if Johns already had something in mind along the lines of Legion of Three Worlds even at the transition from the reboot to the threeboot (which connects to other discussions about how early the retroboot was planned). And, of course it's super-annoying that there universe wasn't restored in Lo3W. I always like to just pretend it was.

1000% agreed. Johns threw a bone out to the reboot fans saying they'd be the "new Wanderers" then proceeded to completely abandon the concept.

Gates was used pretty well during the initial stages of the retroboot. Jenni, to my knowledge, was only used ONCE. Such a waste.

I pretend most of what happened in Lo3W didn't.

I vaguely remember that last scene of Shikari getting separated from the others and 'falling' into the Threeboot era to launch it, but then, pfft, nothing in the Threeboot at all. No mention of her. So it was like a connective thread that the new team just sort of shoved under the carpet and ignored...

Which was one of my beefs with the Threeboot. I already had more Lightning Lads, Cosmic Boys, Saturn Girls and Brainiac Fives than I strictly wanted, after the Reboot. I did not want a third version of any of them, as much as more development of the unique Legionnaires like Tyroc and Tellus and Kid Quantum II and Dragonmage.

And now Bendis has started at the bottom of the hill once again, trying to carry on his back 25 different versions of those characters I've known since the seventies, and not giving me anything interesting about the *new* characters like Monster Boy or Gold Lantern whom I might have actually given a chance.

But no, he had to throw out everything that came before and try to replace it with his own fresh takes, rather than build on what had come before, because (in his head) he's so much better than Levitz and Shooter and Conway and Bates and Bridwell and Binder and all the rest. Instead of adding another brick to the edifice, he attempted to replace it with his own structure. The nature of this 'hired guns working on IP they don't own' seems to encourage this sort of thinking. A big name writer doesn't value the contributions of those who have come before, because it's not their names he's seeing, it's just 'company IP' and it'll be company IP after he leaves, so why bother painting in the lines, when he can reinvent the wheel and try to make it all his own? (And maybe argue for royalties / creator credits later if 'his versions' ever show up again in some other media, which would never happen if he didn't make Tinya purple with a halo-portal, since any future appearances of a Phantom Girl who is purple with a halo-portal will clearly be 'his' Tinya...)

+1, Set. Every new "Boot" is a chance to shine the limelight on "newer" Legionnaires.

Gates was used well in t he Retroboot, though of course they ignored him coming from a different reality, basically. No big gripes there. XS just disappeared. Bah!


Yeah, big UGGGGHHHH there. Especially because there was that one panel in Infinite Crisis 6, of Shikari finding the Legion IN their home reality. So like... they were there. Their world was there. Was it editorial mandate that Johns ignore that, and take off from the Reboot Legion's end? Ugh, super big ugh for me.


Almost forgot about Myg... I think I put him out of my mind, because I didn't recognize him as Myg. There was like, almost nothing of the Myg I knew, you know?

As for Rond, only saving grace was that he went down in a blaze of glory. Also not happy about him dying though.

this bothered me so much, that I wrote a whole fic about it lol. *shameless plug*. But seriously, it really helped me move on from the horrible ending and limbo visited upon the Legion I grew up with...

LOL, all strong points Set!

Oh and if I never ever see Tinya purple with a halo-portal in a comic book again I would be ok with that.
I prefer the original any day of the week.

This is exactly right.

To my understanding, writers and artists at DC, and probably elsewhere, are incentivized by creating new characters. If the new characters drive sales or, best case, create a spin off book, the writer gets paid more.

My gripe as pertains to Gates is that he did not immediately go seek out the Vyrgans of this new universe he found himself in, and the writer didn't use that to their advantage to write some space opera about it. Are the Vyrgans of classic continuity UP members? (Boring, if so, gimme drama!) Are they currently an oppressed world currently in unfriendly space, or otherwise in need of heroes but perhaps unknown to the UP/Legion? (Like the Hyrkraians were being exploited by the Gil-Dishpan, but nobody else even knew they existed down in their methane seas.) It would be great to have Gates, almost by accident, discover his race being oppressed, lead the Legion to free them, and then, his race being a monoculture, them gratefully join the UP, but reject *him* personally, as he's not 'of their hive,' and he's left with only the Legion to call home. (Sad.) Or that could be a good place to hand the character off for a bit, if the writer doesn't want to use Gates. ("My people have been through so much, I have to stay and help them!") It doesn't even have to be a traditional Legion 'enemy' race like the Dominators or Khunds. Perhaps the Vyrgan system, in this universe, is in Zazyl territory, and the seemingly benign Zazyl queens are discovered to have been using pheremones to exploit neighboring worlds, like Vyrga? So many opportunities!

As for XS, so many classic Legion tales have involved flight, sometimes even in deep space. Not a lot of running surfaces... I'm not at all opposed to her, or a speedster in general, but I'd really want a writer to address how her powers work when she can't run, and is 'stuck' travelling at flight ring speed, the same as everyone else (using her super-speed to chuck tiny things really fast, as an effective attack, for instance), rather than just whip up some cheap cheat that allows her to run in space on a 'speed force platform' or something... I want creativity, and limits to be worked around intelligently, not by crapping out a new power that makes it meaningless.

It was such a weird decision to have Gates and XS stay behind anyway, I can't really blame Levitz for not wanting to use either of them...though I do wish at the very least he'd given XS a more graceful exit than just doing some weird-ass cutaway scene to her making a mosaic that didn't lead to anything from memory (actually on second thoughts, was it a harbinger of that stupid blue baby the Legion of Supervillains were involved with? Whatever it was, it was dumb and Jenni never appeared again in that whole run so it was dumb AND pointless)

But really, it makes no sense at all that Gates and XS would be totally chill with just sending off the rest of their own team into an unknown destiny and decide to stay in a completely foreign universe with strangers they met five minutes ago. Even with XS realising she was from that universe, so what? It'd be like me giving up my life and everyone in it to go live in the country town I was born in and where I only lived till I was 2 years old...why would someone feel that kind of connection with a place they don't even have any conscious memory of? That whole thing just felt like more of DC's weird obsession with genetics being the sole determining factor of who a character is that they had going for a while. Of course XS feels more of a connection with this place than she does with the group of friends who repeatedly risk their lives for one another, she was born there and that instantly overrides anything else. Stoopid

All good points - also in the Annual where Ayla and Vi get captured on Orando, I kept thinking Gates may reference the prior battles with the Emerald Eye with which he was associated (the Emerald Vi story should have made him concerned that the retro Vi may have some challenges, and the last encounter before the Blight was foisted onto the Legion).

Also, didn't Gates get sent back to the modern time (again) in the retro Legion Lost? Ugh. That's some real originality there.


I didn't have too much of a problem with the flight thing, as inevitably the Legion is on the ground at some point, on a planet or in a ship. One thing that is interesting is that the reboot writers never (at least in the PMS run) developed her more than running fast - the Flash can do a bunch of other cool things, so it would have been nice to see her develop those (not sure if they ever did in the DnA run).


Yep. And shortsighted. They went and used the XS 'brand' for the Flash TV show, but anyone who was interested in the character could only find old issues to read about her instead of having her in the pages of the Flash book OR a Legion title.

re XS and flight. LSH 69 had a pivotal scene for her, where she uses Chameleon as bait to keep the Composite Durlan distracted while the Legion regroups. XS decides to stop running and fly, sacrificing speed for maneuvarability, and to lure the Durlan away from bystanders (they nearly mowed down a bunch of kids while running).

But I also struggle to think of a moment where she does other super-speed tricks, like moving her arms fast to create a tornado... stuff like that. I don't think she's featured in any space battles, for example...

pretty sure DNA didn't do much with her other than running fast. She did combine her powers with Star Boy's to create gravity-twisters...

re Gates and XS staying behind. Yeah. Gates - "I want to give a more non-humanoid perspective to this Legion!" Um... no. I always thought a better reason would have been, he was just tired of hopping from reality to reality but didn't want to admit it... they didn't even have him saying a proper goodbye to best friend Brainy...

Looking back, Jenni should have taken Bart's offer and left with him to be with her family in the 21st century. As much as I love her on the Legion, I think getting her with the Flashfam proper would have been great.

supragirl, I agree so much with your statement. If they weren't going to use her in a Legion capacity, they should have put her with Team Flash in some way.

Now they're stuck and can't use her cause of their continuity shackles, but who knows with these "Infinite Frontiers" or whatever they're doing now.

That could be a fun thing, to develop her as a Legionnaire, and have her show up in one of those fights against Khund cruisers or whatever, flinging coins at attack ships at a fraction of light-speed, while attempting to use just her Flight Ring's speed and her own reactions and agility to stay out of weapons fire long enough to reach the actual cruiser and phase through the hull. And then, seconds later, the cruiser goes dark, because she's run around with her Flash speed inside the ship and disarmed everyone and shut everything off. "Oh good, Jenni finally reached the cruiser, that thing was killing us!"


I actually read that one, and even though I usually can just roll with the terrible 'science' in comic books, the idea that she was running so fast that it somehow warped gravity into tornadoes was just, special.


Part of me wanting there to be classic continuity Vyrga for him to rescue from Khunds or Dominators or GilDishpan or Zazyl or Spider Guild or whatever is that Gates is so much more fun when he's got oppression to rail against and some injustice to be outraged about.

Focusing g-twisters, something something something

Righteously indignant Gates is indeed the best, as that kind of Gates also has Unintentionally Sarcastic Gates rolled in!

Yeah, that would have been way better than what we got!