Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Final Crisis # 6 Preview (spoilers)

Tromium gets this exactly right (as usual). And what's pathetic is that Morrison could have written pretty much the exact same scene with all the exposition but acknowledge that this wasn't new to Superman. You could even vaguely allude to the machine's self-reconstruction after the Omega story--self-assembling Bismollian poop! Now THAT's a high concept worthy of Grant Morrison! You could tweak Supes's dialogue so that he is concerned about ever trying to use the MM again after it's catastrophic missuse before. And that would have been that. Still an amazing scene, Supes surprised not by the idea of the MM but it's continued existence and the fact that B5 would ever try and use it again, even to save the multiverse. But they didn't do that. And this undermines ANY notion that the Johnsboot Legion IS the original Legion with the original continuity. We already knew that 5YL was probably out. Now, we have Dark Circle debut and the Omega saga probably out, too. Oh, and don't forget about the Devil's Dozen out too, thanks to Johns's revised Star Boy/Star Man origin in JSA. Really, as far as we know, the only original Legion stories that still happened are the death and resurrection of Lightning Lad, the death of one of Triplicate Girl's selves, the death of Karate Kid, and the expulsion of Star Boy for manslaughter.

Now, don't get me wrong. I was MORE happy to see that awesome Brainiac 5/Miracle Machine scene than UNHAPPY that the original continuity was jettisoned. It's an awesome scene, the kind of scene that we have been lacking in Legion books, the kind that really exploits both Legion lore and the gee-whiz qualities of a future interstellar superteam. And one of the things I have liked most about the Johnsboot stories is that they capture that spirit of the Legion, even if DnA or Waid or Shooter had more interesting scifi plot ideas. But, for hardcore fans wanting the Johnsboot to be the original Legion no exceptions, it has been clear for awhile that they are buying a pig in a poke. Appreciate it for what it is, a great new Legion strongly infused with the spirit of the original, and not for what you hope it to be, a strict constructionist continuation of all Legion continuity through 1986.

That's what I plan to do. This is a fourth boot.

As you say dc, all Morrison had to do was acknowledge the Miracle Machine's past with the Legion and then have Brainy explain that the only way to cure Matter-Eater Lad's insanity was to have Tenzil use it's power to recreate the machine and put all (or most) of it's power back into it or something. And knowing its potential for disaster, he kept that a secret until now. Blah, Blah, Blah.

Page 2, Panel 1 - change:
Superman: I already know all of this.

Page 2, Panel 2 - change:
Superman: Matter-Eater Lad was forced to destroy it to stop Omega.
Brainiac 5: True. But, in order to cure him of the resultant insanity by consuming the machine, I had him use it's power to recreate it.

Page 2, Panel 3 - change:
Brainiac 5: I sealed the new machine for all time in a block of Inertron.
Until now, only Tenzil and I knew of its existence.
You are the only person I trust to even look at it.

Page 3, Panel 1 - change:
Superman: Great Krypton. It's bigger than before.
Brainiac 5: It functions just like its predecessor. What did the Controllers call it? Geh-Jedollah-the Absolute. There's no translation that really makes sense. We called it the Miracle Machine.

It really wasn't that hard to keep the old stories intact. Why WON'T they do it?

You can make as many excuses for DC and their writers as you want. It still doesn't explain why they refuse to create around the established stories rather than reboot those stories out of existence every chance they get. It's lazy and pathetic. It diminishes my enthusiasm with each new story I read.

I don't have an inherent problem with a new "in the spirit" version. However, John has been freely referencing old stories with no detail other than the notion that Legion fans know the stories they originally came from, and eventually, using some and ignoring others is going to catch up and contradict one another. Do we really need extra inconsistency?

Say what you will about the TMK era, they kept the inconsistencies VERY limited, given the reboots they were forced to work with.

Pretty much what I thought when I saw that Karate Kid was alive and read that Wildfire was somehow also Red Tornado back in 'Action Legion.'

'Cause *that's* what the franchise needed to succeed, *another* freaking version!

We could just save the heartache and reboot at the beginning of every issue. Issue 35, a standard Legion team in Silver Age costumes are fighting Darkseid. Issue 36, everybody's costumes are different, Sun Boy's a girl named Inferno and Shady is a Talokkian bat-person with vampiric traits. Issue 37 is all about the children of the original Legion, led by Graym Ranzz.

Just give up on the idea of continuity whatsoever since reading what has come before and respecting the property you've been hired to work on is too unreasonable an expectation for a DC employee.

As long time Legion readers have come to experience in the past decade (or longer), anymore anytime a new "star' writer takes on the legion scripting chores, it's going to be a reboot. Plain and simple.
Just as Nightcrawler points out succinctly, original story elements Could be adhered to and written into new stories (i.e. - continuity), but it is the latest fad and style of current writers to pluck basic tidbits from the past, only to distort or rewrite or sometimes just ignore the particulars of the original, thus a twist on the original story (i.e - Artistic License). As a continuity buff I consider it frustrating and a little lazy on the writing/editorial end.

I guess that's why I still miss Paul Levitz, because he respected and added to the foundation of the Legion, instead of trying to rewrite it. It's also why I wish Jim Shooter would have picked up the title from late 80's, and not the latest Waid reboot version. He could have added even more to that foundation, but most of his latest stuff will probably be discarded. Ah well...

we already got ubermenstruum in "superman beyond", i don't think final crisis needed also a miraclepoop

anyway, i really don't see what's the matter with that scene. i think having brainiac 5 show the miracle machine to superman as it was the first time superman saw it was just the easiest way to throw that piece into the story.
i really don't wanna believe you really expected morrison to actually refer to a story that's more than 30 years old and that DC never reprinted. it would have sounded too obscure, and i believe that DC wants his events to be as new reader friendly as possible (i don't think they succeeded in that with final crisis, at least not at all, but that's a subject for another topic).

and, anyway, why could brainiac 5 have wanted to rebuild a machine so dangerous it has to be sealed into a block on inertron? and if superman already knew about a miracle machine, why didn't he already asked the legion to use it against darkseid?

sometimes for the sake of not screwing up with the story you're putting out right now, you have to step over an old story or two. that's always happened in comics, i don't want to be naive about that.

if you want to consider this legion as a fourth reboot, fine. but even if DC never rebooted the legion, i think we would have seen a lot of "mistakes" like this one from final crisis. we did with other comic book franchises, didn't we? still, nobody talks about "fake x-men" or "fake superman" or "fake whatever". we know that a few glitches from now and then are a part of the game, and that's that.
personally, i'm just happy to have a silver age-ish legion back. i hated WaK's legion from the deepest of my soul, with all that "eat it grandpa" crap and stuff. i couldn't stand it even when it was written by my personal idol jim shooter.

Why build atomic bombs? Just in case...

Did you read my post? I wrote dialogue that kept both the old stories and this new one intact. According to your logic - Why should anyone even bring back a plot device like the Miracle Machine that's 30 years old? Matter-Eater Lad was cured post-Darksied and curing Tenzil would have been a good reason to recreate a dangerous machine, especially if you wanted it kept a secret.

i get your point, but atom bombs can't "completely alter reality". we're talking of a god-like level of destruction here. i don't think someone as smart as brainiac 5 would have agreed to (re)create something like that. 12th-level intelligence can't just mean to know a lot of stuff
at best, i could believe that someone else, maybe from earthgov, had the miracle machine rebuilt by a third part, and that brainiac 5 stole that machine in a solo adventure, to avoid further risks. see? i already found another way to justify that scene from final crisis

yeah, i did and when i said that morrison couldn't clearly refer to that old legion story even if he wanted to, i was actually answering to your post. to me, your dialogue couldn't work for two main reasons:
1) because it was too obscure to new readers ("tenzil who?"), and
2) whenever you add something to a story, especially one so "dry" as final crisis, it has to really add something to the story as a whole (you know, cause of all that cechov's "nail" thing). it has to be a part of a "circle" you have to "close" later on. so, for example, "tenzil" and "omega", once brought in the game, should have had to come back again later in the story.

sorry but i never said that. i said that it wouldn't have been ok to refer to a specific story that was not part of the final crisis painting from the beginning. i mean, in final crisis DC did did refer to some obscure silver age stories, but they reprinted them and, btw, it was not necessary to read them. instead, if i was a new reader and i read your dialogue, i would have thought that i was missing something that i should have not.
recycle old ideas is good. but you have to present them to readers like they were new, if you don't want to alienate newbies.


(i edited my post to correct a few typos. sorry if my english is bad, i hope my words are clear to you all!)

From reading the posts here I gather the objection is only that Supes didn't aleady know about it. Thinking that having Supes already knowing about it would open the can of worms, "well why didn't he already come to try and use it," well that can is opened anyhow now that a whole bunch of new readers know about this machine.

Morrison can't just write, "oh here's the deus ex machina of al DEM's" without explaining it's background and why it hasn't been used in every major DC summer crossover.

Smart thing to do, IMO, Brainy opens the can, Supes says "no," it's too dangerous here's why, ya da ya da, we move on OR, they never bring it up in the first place and then only this board is wondering why Supes never thought to use it and we could blame ME Lad in another scathing and irreverent thread.

Don't you see how a lot of fans are just making excuse for bad writing?

Brainiac 5 who? If I were only reading this series then I have no clue as to who this green guy is.

Superman says "First I'm dragged to some Hyperworld where parallel worlds are bleeding together. Then here to the 31st Century." Now if the editor was awake at the wheel - this would have been an opportunity to "*" the reader into the other series that these adventures probably happened in. Since they can't bother to do that, why should we care?

Controller who? If I'm as stupid as I'm led to believe because I can't fathom the fact that there might have been stories told before this one, then how am I to figure out what a Controller is? Or are they going to pop in at the end to save the day? Or for that matter, why should I care about a Miracle Machine? Why is it such a big deal? For all I know Morrison pulled it out of his ass. Instead let's explain it's history and significance. Let's establish it's big enough to recreate itself after it was destroyed.

Maybe you want dumbed down meaninglessness in your series but I kind of like continuity and that writers take a moment to educate an audience that just cause they were born yesterday doesn't mean that the day before that was insignificant.

Set makes it clear just how ridiculous it is to start all over each time you write a new story and how frustrating it is for a reader. You don't have to recap every moment of a story.

You act like I added a few pages in to explain that the Legion got the machine because they stopped a rogue Controller from using a Sun-Eater to destroy the Earth and that the Legion used it the first time to thwart an invasion by the Dark Circle and create a new headquarters and that both Molecular Master and Ben Pares tried to steal it and...on and on. I explained why it was still around (for those who may have read a prior story or two) and why Superman didn't know of it. Pretty simple and inclusive of what went before. Not dismissive of the Miracle Machine's established history as the actual dialogue is.

If you're going to re-established something from the past then own it. Take the ball and run with it. Otherwise, just create something new.

I don't think this should be blamed all onto Morrison. This is probably Johns' contribution Final Crisis and to the Legion blotched retcon he has created.
This is the only excuse for L3W being part of FC, after all. And it's all Johns' to blame.

I'm totally with Nightcrawler on this one, and he did indeed demonstrate that the past continuity could have been respected, in no more 'confusing' a manner than what was already presented.

The writers can't be given a pass for not bothering to get stuff right because they'll 'confuse the readers' when they've gone and introduced the Miracle Machine and Brainiac Five and the Legion Headquarters and Controllers.

If the writer can't be bothered to get it right, why bother to introduce the Miracle Machine or Brainiac 5 or Controllers at all. How hard would it be for Superman to grab one of the dozen other uber-artifacts floating around the DC universe to use as their Deus Ex Machina, instead of the Miracle Machine, or, hey, use that big old brain and invent a whole new one!

If the 'confused reader' can be expected to know who the Controllers are, or what inertron is then I don't think they are going to be stricken with a crippling inability to process the narrative by the word 'Tenzil' or even a throwaway line from Brainiac like, 'We tried to destroy it once, but I no longer believe that is possible, so we sealed it away.'

Yeah, I tried reading it aloud, and unless you want to do it at a speed faster than the Gilmore Girls speak, it takes way more. At a semi-harried, yet conversation like pace, it takes a good 1:30 to 2 min.

As for the other things, I am really torn. Many of us longtime readers seem to be hoping outloud for a return to the past, or pre-Crisis or the Silver Age, or whatever you want to call it.

Actually, all a lot of us want is ONE Legion. Yes, it would be good if it sort of resembled the pre-Crisis Legion, but it doesn't have to be exact. Yes, it would be good if we could avoid the "eat it Grandpa" junk-I really hated that.
Yes, it would be good if blah,blah,blah.

Just give us one Legion, and stick with it for a long time. We just want an end to the confusion of all the boots, that's all.

Oh, by the way, it's never gonna happen.

Maybe we'll get lucky and later in the issue Superman makes a comment like "didn't we destroy this once?" or some such.

Doubt it, but anything's possible.

It's strange, because, as Gary demonstrated, it would have been easy to keep the continuity. Also, Grant Morrison has always struck me as the writer who has such a grasp of past comics minutiae that we need annotations to read many of his stories.

So, yeah, maybe we'll get some explanation later... or maybe it's just another time line divergence.

Nightcrawler has hit the nail smack on. Whether it be the Miracle Machine in Final Crisis, Starman's suit in JSA, or the introduction of Kid Quantum by TMK (plus renaming Triplicate Girl as Triad which was the all time most pointless retcon just to prove that the past HAD changed) it is bad writing, lazy writing and bad editorship that allows it.

All the little retcons that Johns and Morrison have thrown in could have been avoided. As could most of the grating changes inflicted by TMK. Let's be honest both the Waid reboots were just lazy vehicles - we've dug a hole so let's just forget everything and start again.

Basically DC have said time and time again "we know you Legion fans are loyal and care about continuity but SCREW YOU! Our writers are far too important to care about anything as trivial as the people who buy the books"

if you're calling me a "fan" just because i don't agree with you on this one, sorry but you're wrong. i mean, there's nothing wrong in being a fan of something, but it looks to me like you say it like being a "fan" equals to being "partisan". sorry, but if you really meant so, it's not fair. and, btw, i'm not even liking final crisis so far!

are you saying that mentioning a character that's not on the scene is the same think of having a character talk and be himself there in front of you on the actual comic page?
you don't need to know who brainiac 5 is, if you read those pages from the FC preview you already know it. he's a friend of superman's. he's very smart. he lives in the future. that data is all there in the dialogue, please go and read it again. you don't need to know anithing more than that to understand what's happening.

yeah, why do you care? it's them that are losing possible readers for "superman beyond". anyway, i don't think that the scene loses clearness without that "*". to be honest, final crisis is being told from the beginning in a very fragmentary way, just like every scene is a glimpse from a real tv show or something. personally i don't like this choice, i think it makes the story look less epic, but that's just my own opinion.

i never said that you -reader- are "as stupid as I'm led to believe because I can't fathom the fact that there might have been stories told before this one". i don't undestand why you're so angry. please, calm down.
what i said, and i'm sorry if i wasn't clear enough the first time, is that a story has to be able to stand on his own legs. you can't give your average reader the impression that to understand the book he is holding into his hands he should have been reading comics for 30 years. that sort of things are what scares people away from mainstream comic books.
a dialogue like the one you wrote down would have been gratuitously self-referential. and i'm sure that the author wanted this story to be as new reader friendly as possible. i'm sure he wanted readers to feel like they were looking at the birth of something.

you're right when you say that from these pages it looks like the controllers and the miracle machine could have been created by morrison... and i believe that that's what makes that scene from final crisis work.
why should a reader of final crisis care about older stories about the miracle machine? even if those were masterworks, they just don't fit into final crisis. they're something else.
just imagine what if morrison had all his characters in final crisis talk like you wanted superman and brainy to do in that scene... the story would have never went on! it would have bin a mess, a sort of "dcu crib", cause final crisis has, like, a ton of many elements from silver age stories in every page! it's not demeaning for those old stories not be mentioned. this is just that final crisis is another story, with his own rhythm.

to guide readers into a world of fiction as huge as the DCU is and not make that world look impenetrable is not easy. i believe that an author able to do that is a GREAT one, not "poor" as you are obviously free to think. and, i repeat, i say that as a reader that isn't liking final crisis at all, overall... i really can't wait until this saga is over, so the DCU can go on. i'm sick of it. but you have to give credit where credit is due, man.

First let me say I love continuity and really like when a writer bends over backwards and really make sit work (Ostrander was great at this IMHO), but just because this is a massive retcon to previous continuity it does not equate to a fourth "boot". I think in the world of Legion fandom, we've become accustomed to the reboot concept that we're applying the term a little too quickly.

This doesn't happen in other series when large (and annoying to some) retcons happen. We don't say the JSA has been rebooted when Johns changes the way some things unfolded vs. the original Golden Age stories (for that matter All-Star Squadron was a massive retcon of JSA lore, but not a reboot). Similar with JLA (Wonder woman was a founder, no she wasn't, wait... yes she was), or Titans (Duella Dent, Titans: Year One). I daresay Levitz even tweaked LSH things somewhat as he went (Luck Lords involvement In LL's life, White Witches origin).

Just because the history of the Miracle Machine has been altered, doesn't mean we aren't still telling stories about the same group of Legionnaires. Messing with continuity isn't the same as whole scale recreating of the universe and characters ala the reboots.

(And just to add fuel to the fire, if you were a strict Continuity constructionist your head would explode due to the times in early appearances the Legion moved from the 30th century to the 21st, and were their own kids).

No it's not necessarily a reboot but it is sloppy writing. The Wonder Woman founder thing was fousted on the writers just like no Superboy in the Legion so that is understandable from a writing perspective (if not from the readers).

But retconning ie changing things just because a writer can't or won't tie into what has gone before is just lazy and sloppy. The whole Elseworlds concept was developed for out of continuity writing. Inside continuity should be just that.

BTW adding backstory in the way that Levitz did so well during his run is not the same as retconning.

I don't disagree, SAL, I'm just trying to point out that while this is may be an annoying and unnecessary mucking of established history it is not a catastrophic reworking of the Legion into a completely different version.

On the other hand it doesn't bother me a bit. If this is what Morrison wants to do to tell the story he wants to tell, then I say giddyup. Telling good stories is his job, and continuity is a servant, not a master.

Which would be a valid point if Morrison was a good storyteller, but that's a subjective judgement, not an absolute fact, which Morrison himself, a fan of chaos theory, would be the first to agree with. What little I've read from him has rarely impressed me, and, IMO, his absolute best work is on 'nobody' characters like Kid Eternity that he has plucked from obscurity, or his own inventions (like Marvel Boy). Even then, his stories don't 'play well' with whatever universe he's supposed to be writing for (Marvel Boy didn't feel very 'Marvel' at all, being set in a very dystopian view of the 616 universe...).

When working on established characters with a pre-existing backstory and continuity, he seems unwilling to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' or respect what has come before, and goes off in his own direction.

I know he's horribly popular and lots of people want to have his chaos magician babies (along with other creators I consider horribly overrated, like Mark Millar), but he's not one of the creators I expect good stuff from.

If Kurt Busiek or George Perez changed something, they've earned a bank of trust from their previous respectful treatments of subjects like the Avengers or Teen Titans, and I'd be willing to accept some changes made *to improve the story.* But this is Grant Morrison, who is already (in)famous for changing things *for the heck of it.*

I mean, he's not Chuck Austen or anything, but, IMO, there is a *huge* difference between being a fan of a creator and just blindly accepting that whatever they do is awesome, sight unseen, and being a fan of a team or character.

If I were a huge Grant Morrison fan, I'd be all excited to see how he's going to change things and if he's going to pull a 'Scott and Emma' and have Lightning Lad shack up with the Emerald Empress.

But I'm a Legion of Super-Heroes fan, so instead I get to look forward to him randomly changing stuff to suit his own dystopian sensibilities, and then walk away, as he pretty much always does, leaving other writers who actually care about the Legion of Super-Heroes to clean up whatever he's changed.

The more things change, the more it fractures the fanbase, as this thread proves. Every change must be weighed against the very real damage it does to the profitibility and accessibility of the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise. Is the gain of this change something that will breath new life and energy into the title? Or is it yet another straw piled upon a camel that's been groaning under the weight of pointless and unecessary retcons for two decades now?

Will this change help bring the Legion of Super-Heroes back into the light (much as the changes Alan Moore made to the Swamp Thing character did), or is it just another shovelfull of dirt on it's coffin (like pretty much every attempt to retcon Hawkman or Aquaman has turned out to be)?

I wish I could see that the current editorial direction at DC showed such care for their own financial properties, but I'm not seeing that at all. I'm seeing just the opposite. Big event after big event, instead of continuity, because the investors want big sales NOW, not stable continued *guaranteed money* for years. They want the books to look good at the end of this quarter, and they seem willing to slash and burn every property in their stable to get those magic numbers, even if it alienates their long-term audience and guarantees that they are now trapped in an endless cycle of spectacle and 'big crossover events,' since they no longer can maintain a fanbase with more than a 3 second attention span, having appealed directly to the casual readers who just want to see Superboy Prime or Black Adam or Doctor Light rape and / or murder a bunch of people in some sensationalistic exploitive orgy of gore, instead of just telling a good self-contained story that respects such archaic dead literary concepts as continuity, characterization and setting.

True, but it is an absolute fact that it is his job to tell good stories, whether he does it or not.
[Shrug.] Right now the Legion's in a state of flux, so I don't see this particular change making a whit of difference. Drop in the bucket. Maybe I'll change my mind once the dust has settled, but there are quite a few cards to be turned over between now and then.