Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Popular Character You Never Really Cared About

I liked Monstress, too, but I also think Matthew's interpretation of DC's motives is probably accurate. Comics are a pop culture medium that attempts to appeal to a young or adolescent audience. As such, sexiness is played up and relatively non-sexy (or non-standardly sexy) body types are relegated to the sidelines, if not ignored.

It's a shame, really. Monstress had become an endearing character: a young woman who was (to some) ugly, but didn't know she was ugly. She put me in the mind of Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas, a 300-pound woman who was nevertheless flirty, sexy, and very popular as a singer (and who, like Monstress, died too young).

I never could understand some fans' vehement rejection of Monstress. To me, she had the same type of appeal as Bouncing Boy -- a kid who wasn't supposed to be popular, but who nevertheless succeded by wits, personality, and perseverence. Sadly, DC must have listened to the vocal faction that disdains such characters.

It may have been the vocal faction He Who Wanders but it's also possible it was the trend of any new creative team to scratch almost everything the previous team introduced. It didn't used to be like this. Dawnstar or Wildfire, for example, weren't discarded or killed.

Cosmic Boy.

He's like a two inch oil well drill bit....BORING!

I mean, when I came along, it was the cockrum/grell era with him wearing the boostia (sp?), and really the only guy that can carry that off is Frank N. Furter.

Plus, there is his persoanlity: calm, even-keeled, get the job done and then go have a sitdown. The only time i ever saw him be really intersting was when he grabbed the terrorists that smoked his parents, and he wimped out on that.

Sorry, thats my story and i'm stickin' to it.

HHW and Matthew, I've got to say: Monstress was hella-lame. She was part She-Hulk rip-off in powers with an air of taking Blok's place, combined with one of the most annoying personatities in Legion history (passing even Comet Queen). "Sweetie" and "dear" and etc...it all served to highlight for me what I was hating so much about the post Emerald Vee Reboot Legion until DnA arrived. I never got the 'not popular' bit because she seemed to be very popular among the Legionnaires in the stories during that time.

But it all was the feelings of fandom during the era. Many of us felt robbed, hurt and betrayed by DC and Monstress and Sensor-snake became sterling examples of what we hated. We forged dreadful alliances, we became blood-thirsty, and we demanded Dan and Andy kill her. It was a glorious time for Legion fandom (I'm in a five minute break in watching '300').

There's plenty of routes to use a non-sexy female that would work (again, I point to Strata). But making her act like your grandmother, giving her look the feel of a slight rip-off of another hero, and her presence on the team power & look wise far too close to a former Legionnaire that had been mercilessly killed and wiped out of continuity (re: Blok, much like Shakiri did with Dawny) certainly didn't endear her to me...

There are very few characters without derivative powers or antecedents of some kind. Gates, for example, was a bug, similar to a bug-like character in Micronauts. He also had the ability to teleport, which is a staple ability in science fiction and super-heroes.

It's a matter of personal preference what's annoying and what isn't. Again, refering to Gates, his crusty personality and Marxist leanings annoyed some fans, but endeared him to others. I suggest that it was such off-beat personalities that made both Gates and Monstress unique.

The real problem here is, how do writers create characters who are unique yet become fan-favorites? One way, perhaps, is to have them bond with other existing characters. Gates bonded with Brainy (first they couldn't stand each other; later, they became friends). Monstress bonded with Element Lad. Yet perhaps fans who saw Jan having different romantic interests (gay or straight) objected to this.

Either way, creating a popular off-beat character is a crapshoot.

There were a lot of problems with that era, including a general lack of direction. It's unfortunate that Candi came (in your mind) to represent the worst aspects of that era. Perhaps if she'd joined the Legion at a different time, you'd have a different view of her.

What I meant was that she and Chuck are the type of kids who generally are not popular in real life, being large, overweight, or just not "attractive". The enlightened Legionnaires certainly saw past these differences.

Just out of curiosity, how many "non-sexy" female Legionnaires are there in the three-boot? The "Lightning Saga" Legion? Or, to expand it further, how many currently published comics series from Marvel or DC feature as a major character a female super-hero who doesn't look like she stepped out of a Victoria's Secret catalogue?

For all I know, there may be some, but, based on the last sampling of Marvel and DC titles I read, one would need a microscope to find them.

Everyone knows Cobie notoriously hates non-sexy female characters, going back to DC's pioneering first stocky super-heroine... Ma Hunkel!

Bah! I only do that to get other LWers mad because of the hate they showed Alfred that time . I say if Alfred dies, I demand everyone suffer by Ma dying too. And well, Pov made a pretty funny JSA scan.

HHW, you might be right that perhaps if Monstress had been introduced in another era I would have felt differently. Often, that is the case no matter how I try to look at it. Plus, I hate the ditzy Jan of the reboot too, so her bond with him did little to help in that area (as opposed to the Gates/Brainy example you use, which I loved).

One non-sexy character I loved was Gert in Runaways, but she's currently dead. I heartily agree with you and Matthew that non-sexy female characters have much less of a chance in comics and other media. But with all the reasons I listed why I didn't like Monstress, which I know were duplicated among many other Legion fans, that's just one more major thing working against her. In the same token, but to a much lesser degree, you won't find many 'non-sexy' male character in comics, especially leads. Even in the Legion you can count them all on possibly one hand (Gates, Tellus, Chuck, Quislet if Quislet even had a sex). That's a shame, but a part of a highly visual medium that I'm not sure will be changing anytime soon.

I guess at the end of the day we really differ on our opinions on Monstress. But man...every panel she showed up in until Lost #2 annoyed the hell out of me

Besides the obvious (Cosmic Boy, reboot asshat version), my least liked character would be a tie between XS and KQII. Both useless, XS because she was a speedster and I just plain don't like 'em. KQII because she was introduced when Condo could have been used instead had the writers at the time had enough forethought for Legion history.

Besides KQII basically became a female Rokk by the end of the last boot. And the two of them as a couple was just sick and wrong.

Ditto whut he said.

The Cosmic Boy hate always bemuses me.

As for Monstress-- anyone remember her very first appearance when the Uncanny Amazers debuted? She seemed like a completely different character than the one that joined the LSH.

I remember wondering about that.

I didn't like the way she anointed herself a Legionnaire-- especially when there were characters more deserving of membership who were in the battle that led to her joining. (Kid Quantum-- back when her powers made sense.)

I liked the mother hen personality-- it redeemed her Hulk rip-offness, and the humdrum nature of her powers. She *never* would've gotten in back in the 'one, *unique* super-power days of the team.

Sensor-- I liked the bit about her being nonhumanoid and very, very curious about humans. There was never much made of that. No denying that the bait-and-switch nature of her debut, complete with an illusory image of classic Jeckie did little to create a positive first impression of Jeka.

Yeah, Cosmic Boy has been almost a different person in the 3boot.
Rokk should be with Lydda so his relationship with KQ was "wrong", but "sick"?

I can second the Rokk with Lydda feelings. Ironically, one of the things that bothered me most about the Reboot and even more about the Threeboot was that the relationships were kind of "mixed up" alltogether. In my personal view, Tinya belongs with Jo, Garth with Imra and Rokk with Lydda. The first one is the tragic Legion story (with Tinya dying on Jo twice in two seperate realities - I could very much appreciate this fact), the second one the "highschool love", the third one to me was always a very realistic relationship (especially what TMK made of it in 5YL).

Heck, they even had children together!

So just mixing them up in a new order seems downright wrong to me... but this is getting off topic

As for the reboot characters, I did dislike Kid Quantum less then XS or Monstress. The writers tried hard to make her character work and succeeded as far as that was possible in a Coco reality. Monstress on the other hand was simply ridiculous in my eyesand I really failed to see anything positive in the addition of her character.

Which would explain their relationship, I suppose, since Rokk has been portrayed as loving no one so much as himself in the last decade or so...

I love Lydda *and* I like Jasmin, so I'm unable to choose sides on this one.

i liked Sensor ...what i didnt like was her being pricess projectra in the reboot reality.

I never cared for Superboy in the Legion, now Supergirl on the other hand was awesome.

Which Superboy are you talking about,Kal-El or Kon-El,I never really cared about conner in the Legion but it was always nice to see Kal-El after he resigned from the group and showed up every so often ,after all he was the inspiration for the Legion for thirty years,and as for Kara she did not apear much in my era but I'd rather she came to stay in the 30th century than to have died in the Crisis, I really liked how she got under Brainy's skin and it would have been nice to see their relationship progress.

Shikari. Bleargh. Me lovey Dawnstar.

DnA did a great job of redeeming Monstress but after years of disliking her it wasn't enough to make me any less pleased when they killed her.

I think my reasons for the dislike are much like Cobie's.

- I'm one of those who prefer unique/interestingly powered members on this team so to give up a spot to one who had no other power to offer other than she could hit stuff seemed like a total waste IMO.
- Completely hypocritically contradicting my previous point I was also a big fan of Blok. (I would somewhat justify this by saying that at least Blok had a unique visual.) And while I don't think Monstress' presence precluded Blok's as much as Shikari's did Dawnstar's, it didn't help.
- She got off to a bad start with me by joining the team at a time when I thought the writers should have been tightening the membership and focusing on the ones they did have, rather than adding half a dozen new ones at the expense of characterisation not only for most of them but a lot of the long-term members too.
- Her biggest sin in my eyes was that hideously saccharin personality she had. All those "dears" and "sweeties" and "honeys" and her sudden transformation into everyone's best friend was like acid in my eyes.
- Also, she, more than any other character, typified the "Archie" Legion (which I consider to really begin at the Team 20/Team 30 split in LSH and after the Mordru storyline in L*) and I hated the "Archie" Legion.

I'm not sure why I just spent 10 minutes writing all that though because I never considered Monstress to be that popular of a member among fandom and therefore probably isn't that relevant for this thread.

For truly fan-popular characters that I have never liked (as much as I can dislike a Legion character) no one beats the outrageously over-exposed and very boringly-powered Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5 in my eyes.

Why is Brainiac 5 so popular with girls?

That is kinda sad though Zoe's strength and assertiveness (we should totally start a thread with that name) made her interesting

Speaking only for myself (though I'm sure a lot of other girls would concur,) I like him because he doesn't try to hide his intelligence. In the real world, there's too many guys who are embarassed to be smart, so they pretend that they're dumb. Turn off! The real world needs more Brainiac 5s.

Man, I loved Kinetix when she first appeared. I was about fourteen or so and I liked her enough where she competed with my beloved Tinya as my favorite female Legionnaire.

I loved Gates too. It was so cool that they brought him back because the fans actually demanded it. He was like the "People's Legionnaire".

I don't think I Have ever made any secret of my dislike of Saturn Girl (I disliked Scarlet Witch in the Avengers for the same reason). When I was young and just starting on the Legion, we would see all these Legionnaires in a big group spread and then they would leave on a mission (Space-Circus anyone?). The Legionnaires who stayed were always pretty much the same and Saturn Girl seemed to be the worst offender.

I wanted to learn more about Projectra and Dream Girl, but was instead stuck with the pink bikini ice queen.

OK, I must confess. Dawnstar. Oh, let me count the ways I disliked her.

1) First and foremost, I think, when you are a white, male Northeastern urbanite, you have to try REAL hard to write authentic characters from minority groups you have little/no experience with personally. It's made doubly hard when the minority group in question was portrayed SO badly for so long in all mainstream media. I'm not arguing that a white male CAN'T or SHOULDN'T write such a character successfully (see Tony Hillerman), but I WOULD argue that Levitz (and he was really the only writer for Dawnstar) didn't seem to put much effort into an authentic characterization. So, you get a haughty, arrogant, aloof, chip-on-her-shoulder stereotype, all of which might have been acceptable if there had been some real Native American behaviors/expressions/gestures/motivations/values behind it, some connection to an actual tribe with actual traditions. But there wasn't. Contrast this with, oh, Englehart's and Leialoha's "Coyote."

2) WINGS. DON'T. WORK. IN. SPACE. WINGS. NEED. ATMOSPHERE. SPACE. IS. A. VACUUM. This REALLY bothered my 10-year old science geek self.

3) The fringe. Was she an Amerind, or party-hardy refugee from Park City?

4) The power. It was a little too abstract and way too omnipotent. As long as you had Dawnstar, no evil-doer could hide from the Legion. Game over. Move on. Nothing to see here. At the same time, what's she gonna do in a fight? Block Mano's line of sight with her almighty fringe? Give Persuader a mouth full of vacuum-defying feathers? Get real.

5) The way Levitz wrote the Dawny/Wildfire relationship/friendship/thing made her look like a total jerk. This is colored by the fact that, at the same time, I was in the process of being dumped by the first love of my life, in part because I wasn't a member of the right ethnic group. My prejudiced frame of reference notwithstanding, she seemed to do nothing but hurt Wildfire. Granted, he deserved a little hurt, but at some point even he warranted more pity, consideration and genuine affection than Dawny ever seemed to bestow upon him.

I think she was a Village Person.

Her and Dazzler, both. Glam club material.