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.