Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes 3 Worst Missteps in Legion History?

1. Removal of Superboy as the Legion's inspiration--The cause of most of the Legion's troubles...
2. The ridiculous Garth/Proty retcon--Still never made any sense and needlessly tarnished the ADVENTURE COMICS era...
3. Saturn Girl/Cosmic Boy drunken hook-up--Made Imra look pathetic, and Rokk a sex-crazed sleezy creep who would take advantage of a friend...

Agree/Disagree?

Yes on 1. The writer even agrees.

2 I was okay with. It kept Garth's sacrifice, and didn't get that much in the way of later appearances. It also launched a few plots such as LiveWire's personality, and links with Validus plague.

3 Barely recall that other than a firm bleh. So agree there.

I'd also add

Earth Man
DC editorial fiefdoms allowing the super-office dictates, and sending Mark Waid to fight the corner.
Jan/Erin is going to be up there.
Letting Giffen blow up the Earth

Oh, that's 4...

The animated legion of superheroes film that came out last year. Very disappointing and a big whiff. It was just a Supergirl movie that happened to have a handful of legionnaires.

I'll agree with all these for sure.



Also agree here



I actually liked the movie, but you're completely correct in your final statement.

Reboot version top 3:

1. Cub
2. Turning Kinetix into a generic Deus ex machina (or more generally, how poorly the writers treated her overall)
3. Having Imra repeatedly overstretch her powers (twice in the pre-DnA era, twice after)

I didn’t think the movie was too bad as a Supergirl movie. Just a dud as a legion movie.

Big Yes

Also agree with Earth-Man for sure

And the retcon removing Superboy, whew, that sure messed up a lot

I'd definitely agree with everything surrounding the removal of Superboy as the biggest single mistake in Legion history.

For my second choice, I'll pick not doing everything possible to keep Dave Cockrum on pencils for as long as possibile

Third, I'll pick the Five Year Gap. While I have mixed feelings on the 5YL storyline, the decision to jump in time and create a discontinuity between that series and what came before, rather than continuing immediately on from the previous series, I think was a mistake in retrospect.

Honorable mentions:

--The original decision to reboot. Even though I love the reboot era stories, there's a strong argument to be mad that the biggest challenge facing the Legion is the fragmentation caused by the various reboots, and so in retrospect it can be considered a questionable decision.

--The end of the Adventure Era with #380. Shifting the Legion from being rhe star of their own series to a backup feature was clearly an unjustified and ill-thought out maneuver, though it might be argued that it actually had beneficial results long-term as the Legion made their comeback.

--Broadly gestures at everything in the past twenty years or so.

1. Swapping LSH and Supergirl in Adventure and Action.
2. …Five Years Later…
3. The present continuity 2019 revision…

I really like Kid Quantum II, Gates and Dragonmage, so it's hard to not love the Reboot, in some ways, but I really kind of wish it was just an Earth 1, Earth 2 situation, where there could be *two* worlds with their own Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. and they'd sometimes meet up for fun adventures together, but generally just be off in their own universe, doing their own things.

Rebooting the 'main' continuity was, IMO, dumb. And just dumber with the Threeboot and Bendisboot and introduction of the original continuity *still existing* despite everything we'd been told so stridently about it never having existed all those years. Just fail upon fail upon utter lack of faith or 'stick-to-it-ive-ness' in their own plan..

At first I strongly disliked the 5YL stories because the art was so ugly, not just the people, but the shiny future looked dirty and broken and post-holocaust-ian. Then the stories turned out to be as ugly and broken and dystopian as the art, and I realized that the art was perfect for the stories, and that they were not for ME.

Yeah I think the root of the problems are the Superboy retcons. This triggered the choice (as that's what it was) of the 5YL team going into excruciating detail into the retcons, and to me THIS is what creates all the massive problems in the continuity.

IMO I think that if the TMK team had just ignored that and told stories around the Superboy change you could arguably say that they wouldn't have needed to do a reboot at all.

But they did and built the reboot Legion that lasted a decade then flushed all the new characters and kept rebooting the team like an old Windows computer.

I think 5YG has some high points for the Legion. Would it, considering how it went, have been better as a prolonged elseworlds? Yes.

You could have had a scene, at some point, with Rond, Brainy and Circadia viewing an Infinite Man from the Time Institute, as the series returned to a point during the Baxter run.

If that felt like short changing the 5YG readers, have the series end, with a special or two following their adventures, with a main series returning to a point in Baxter.

Obviously not fans of post Adventure periods, TMK were going to use the SW6 for a return to the Silver Age. But within the 5YG period. While Giffen would have stuck to his 5YG premise of heroism being brighter shining from a darker galaxy, a reboot was a possibility, to clear the decks.

So there were other pathways to having a full reboot. A lot of which came with baggage.

I guess a big mistep is DC not being able to regularly publish a profitable comic based on one of their major properties.

The ethnicity switching before the BendisBoot wasn't a good moment.

And this is an interesting thing to consider specifically about the Legion. One huge criticism has been that the Legion is a white kids club, and this was certainly true for much of its history, as was pretty much most of DC generally. So in that respect what Bendis and Sook did should have been more interesting, but certainly the writing didn't bring in the readers.

Certainly the THreeboot Star Boy is the other case in point and looking back, that almost seems like tokenism, given that he was the only PoC on the team. I wasn't as plugged in back then, but was there a huge outcry about Thom?

on the ethnicity bit, I would have liked to see more of existing characters. XS, Kid Quantum II, Dragonmage and many, many, more are all perfectly good characters who could have been rebooted onto the team.

other than that, I don't have a big issue with ethnicity switching or the like. it's not completely the same character, anyway, but a rebooted version...

By ethnicity switching, I was referring to DC releasing art with one version of the cast, only for that to be switched. It struck me as just a shallow tick box exercise.


Not in my top 3, but I remember being disappointed when Kid Quantum I just happened to be an early casualty in the Reboot. We did get his sister. But I felt that had been a missed opportunity at the time.

Ah, thanks for the clarification, Thoth - I keep forgetting about what they did there.

For the record, I could care less about all that stuff. Just give me a well written character, dammit.

Also agree with Ibby. As Ive said before, the PZH Reboot had natural growth from a diversity perspective. Half the characters were female and a decent amount were PoC or non-human (although I really do think they should have made Ferro AA in that iteration). And a black female leader! But no, I guess to DiDio everything before him needed to be purged...

I'll chime in. I think the three biggest mistakes were:

1) The Sean/Shvaughn story. What a pointless retcon, purely for the fankids-turned-official writers to shoehorn in an old fan favorite theory that Element Lad was gay into established stories that had him dating a woman. Let it go, Tom & Mary.

2) The acceleration of pre-boot element introduction into the reboot, forcing a Fatal Five story before its time. I loved how the first year+ of the reboot took its time to develop the roster and bring along some old characters in evolutionary ways (e.g., Mano, Dirk Morgna). The Superboy crossover was great. After that, there seemed to be less a vision for building the new Legion's history than "Ooh, let's re-do this story. And this one. And that one." Not to say there weren't some good stories in there, but I peg the decline phase of the reboot to that.

3) Turning Dev-Em into a mad terrorist of some sort planning to blow up the moon. Just came out of nowhere. Last time we had seen the character, he was a perfectly fine espionage agent with no hint of instability.

I am not including in the above any changes that were forced on the writers by editorial (basically, Crisis-forced Superboy/man erasure). I will also defend the Proty/Garth retcon to my last breath. It was a natural extension of the revelation before that that Eltro Gand had survived in Mon-El's mind, as the resurrection methods of both were the same. And really, Garth didn't have any real personality before his death and resurrection. None of the Legionnaires did back then, they were generically heroic and differentiated only by their powers. To say that the Garth we readers have been reading about since Adventure # 312 was really Proty's mind in Garth's body is no big deal, the fact that he acted no different than before his death was just a limitation of early 60's comic book writing.

Good list, CMK.

I'd argue about #2 a bit, in that I think the seeds were planted at the 20/30 split and it was the sudden departure of Carlson that really accelerated the decline in quality, as I enjoyed the FF story with the Chu sting element and Emerald Vi soon after that. I do know that Mark Waid certainly agrees with you.

It was still better than David Emory...

I'll agree with that, but while Who's Who was official canon, at least it never appeared in, or had any impact on, a story.

I did very much enjoy the Fatal Five/Chu story, and Emerald Vi/Mordru

1) Can't argue with the logic of that.
2) I was gone before that. I recall early preboot Legionnaires trying to build in a Fatal Five story. It wasn't at the same level as prior versions.
3) I must have seen his revised Who's Who first, and waited/ wondered. But it was a throw away Super office crossover. One where the Legion could show a S logo possibly healing a super office rift, or reinforcing who was in charge. It was much later I read all of it, and it was underwhelming. David Emory gets no points either. The Super spat, while giving us Laurel, did change Kent's back story quite a bit.

I also liked those stories quite a bit, as well as the re-make of the COMPUTO story to close out the 20/30 era. But it was the victory of that mindset that then gave us a ham-handed Dark Circle story, a not-very-entertaining Bizarro Legion story, and an absurdly introduced post-boot Wildfire. They started elevating homage over quality.

dunno if it was the mindset of paying homage itself, or other factors (e.g., changes in creative team).

they did some "new" things with some of those examples (e.g., Brainiac 4). it wasn't good, but there's probably more to it than them just being satisfied with how earlier stories did.

Turning Projectra into a snake during the Reboot.

The interesting thing there? Those all happened during the McAvennie editorship vs Carlson's run. As I understand things, the Dark Circle story was rejected earlier by Carlson, then retrofitted in to fill the gap after McAvennie was pulled in to be book editor. That doesn't excuse the other two things, though. My main thesis is that Mike shouldn't have been editor of the Legion.

This is very low on any of my lists as it didn't really fundamentally alter anything other than a Projectra/KK revised romance. Oddly, they did hint at a Sensor/Cham romance, but the writers were so hell bent on Cham/Ayla that they ignored the natural chemistry that Stern had created.

Merely thought it symptomatic of the trend of transposing red-haired comic book characters--particularly in live action--
Lana Lang
Jimmy Olsen
Wally West
Mary Jane Watson
Carrie Kelly
Just add Garth and Ayla to the list...

The first thing I always think of when I think of McAvennie is the fact that he confused Quislet and Skeets in one of his early lettercols. That itself made lose faith in him as a potential editor.

I don't remember that at all, but it always did seem to me that his head wasn't in the game for whatever reason.

The only reason he had the gig was because he was Carlson's assistant, but it was quickly evident that he was bad at his job, at least as concerns the Legion.

Destroying Jim Shooter's Evil Adventus storyline for a crossover subplot that essentially went nowhere.

1. Five Years Later. No, Im not saying it wasn't good storytelling. It was just a shark being jumped over.
2. Endless reboots, retrofits, restarts.
3. Ditching Superboy. Yes, I know, the legion has grown magnificently. But it all started on the Superboy Mythos. And when that was lost, when the patchwork make-ups were tried, as good as they were, something was lost. It just was. Legion has never, ever been the same. There was a time when it and titans outdid the League, for pete's sake. I know some folk like it better without Superpanelhog, and most times so do I, but something, the heart of the Legion, was lost.