Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! legion 48 spoilers

Kind of a harsh assessment, since Waid is the one that killed her in the first place, and it is Shooter who is actually working towards resolving the stuff he left behind (Projectra's reaction to her world's demise, which happened in Waid's first year, Dream Girls death, Sun Boy's leavetaking, etc.).

Since Waid was the one who left Dream Girl, Projectra, Sun Boy, etc. hanging unresolved for years in the first place, I'm not sure he's the best choice to ride in and save the day from his own lack of follow-through...

If Waid had wanted Dreamy back in material form, he could have just had Brainy's scheme to do just that work in the first place, all those issues ago. He clearly had some reason for her to remain in her 'dream' state, but we'll probably never know what it was.

We'll probably never know what happened to the youth of Naltor, that were all prophecied to die, either, as that subplot got abandoned as well.

We'll probably never know what was up with Ultra Boy losing control of his ultra-energies, since that subplot also got abandoned.

Dream Boy? Abandoned. The Daxamite genocide? Abandoned. Invisible Kid's stalkery obsessive love-shrine to Supergirl? Abandoned.

Waid began a lot of sentences, but finished very few of them. Even the things he did 'resolve,' such as the Terror Firma / Praetor Lemnos story, ended on a whimper ("Oh, we were misled, we didn't realize that when we blew up all those planets that people were getting hurt! We give up! Call off the climactic final battle."). Likewise the Dominator story, involving a cast of thousands, ended on an anticlimax. ("Send the 1000 Wanderers away, we beat the Dominators without them, making their entire freaking appearance in this book a huge blithering waste of time. Call off the climactic final battle, again...")

Waid's run left me wondering some things, that possibly most of all. Why were they no longer worried about that future? Then, somewhere, I read a review of those issues and realized I'd been reading them wrong. I'd been assuming a pre-1977 worldview - that the future Dream Girl saw could not be changed. I didn't realize what easily occurred to readers approaching the series without those preconceptions. They realized that that future had been undone.

Jim, my post was a very(I hope it was anyway) polite response to veryvery. I agree with your thoughts on the repitition of superpowers. I will say that i liked reading the old adventure stories that had starboy with them, but i think that when they took them away and all he had was his "gravity" powers, they missed the boat on the ramifications of that power.

It seems to be being used much better in JSA right now, and that just shows how much potential each character has.

The best explanation i can give is sort of like Piers Anthony's explanation of the difference in levels of power in the original Xanth book. One person might be a powerful lightning caster, but a true "magician" would be the one that incorporated lighting in his total control and mastery of the weather. Thats what i always felt was missing with the legion.

I remember the cos story after the great darkness saga. He suddenly started using Magnetic attraction/repulsion in new and interesting ways. Good stuff.

So, while i think that Sizzle lass has a lot of potential, her almost "mechanical" reliance on other to generate her own power is the great limiting factor. (and by mechanical, i mean the need of an artificial charge, rather than an internal charge, not that she needs machines, lol.)

Kind of a harsh assessment, since Waid is the one that killed her in the first place, and it is Shooter who is actually working towards resolving the stuff he left behind (Projectra's reaction to her world's demise, which happened in Waid's first year, Dream Girls death, Sun Boy's leavetaking, etc.).

Set, I guess it boils down to a matter of personal preference when praising or berating a writer.
I personally think that Waid was on the right track for the most part and handled this newest Legion better than Shooter. I trust that the "sentences" he started would be concluded as his long-term vision saw fit. He was never given that chance though, so like you said we will never know for sure.
One thing is for certain (if we can believe what's written in these fan generated threads) and that is that Waid's version of Dream Girl was by far the most clever version in all her previous published history. I think Mark had huge plans for her even though those plans meant first "killing" her first. Compare that to what Shooter did with Nura when he was then given the chance to revisit her situation.

It's really all about our own personal taste in writers.

Random observation about this last issue. It was neat to see that when Sun Boy appeared (in a new costume that was the best Manapul design I've seen yet, and the best Sun Boy costume I've seen yet!), exactly four Legionnaires stood up and looked enthused (while Projectra was visibly striking the desk in outrage!);

Colossal Boy, Star Boy, Light Lass and Phantom Girl. These four, throughout the last ten issues or so, seem to consistently be the *nicest* and *friendliest* Legionnaires.

Of all the Legionnaires, no matter how cool they are, or wise, or powerful, or whatever, it really seems like these four would be the best friends to have.

I completely agree about Waidboot Dreamy. But he had *two years* to resolve some of the stuff he presented in his first year, and almost all of it sat fallow.

Like I said, he began some good sentences, but he seemed to have a problem structuring the stories in such a way as to finish those sentences in a timely fashion.

Shooter has had one year, and he's already done more to wrap up the Projectra, Sun Boy and Dream Girl plotlines *that Waid started* than Waid did in the two years they meandered around (since all three of them started in the war against Praetor Lemnos and Terror Firma, in the first third of Waid's run).

Do I necessarily *like* the way Shooter is wrapping them up? Not always, but at least it didn't take Shooter two years to even remember that Sun Boy existed.

I don't consider it a preference / bias thing, because I very much like what Waid did with Dream Girl, more so than I like what Shooter has done with her since. But Waid's pacing was *glacial,* and I'm not convinced that he would have gotten around to resolving the Invisible Kid crush on Supergirl subplot or exploring the relationship between Brainiac Five and his Imskian *worshippers* if he had a 1000 issue run, to pick some examples out of a hat.

What has seemed to work best in plot and pacing in the last 25 years that I have been reading is a kind of three tiered subplot setup.

1st tier- plot points are resolved in the main storyline, which can be one to four issues generally (discounting the odious "deconstruction" term).

2nd tier- plot points that are stretched to over three or four storylines, generally running between four to six issues in predominantly 1-2 issue storylines.

3rd tier- subplots that are designed to be over-arching but generally don't last for more than a years time.

If you take too long with a subplot, people tend to get tired of it and move on. If you rush a simple subplot, people feel dissatisfied with the product.

There have been basically three modern masters of this as i see it. Chris Claremont during his X-men in the Byrne era (but after that he tended to meander). Paul Levitz during his second, stellar run on Legion, and Wolfman/Perez on New Teen Titans.

They got the pacing just right, closed things off nicely while telling the story and moving old subplots along, and introducing new ones that didn't hang out there like ticks on a dog.

I think i remember Levitz talking about some structure he used for that. It moved characters into the forefront and others onto a backburner, while using everyone in a full cycle.

I read someone here mentioning that the main problem with Waid's run (as opposed to - IMHO - the blast that Shooter/Manapul's has been) is that his A-type plots* were always concluded with a thud, usually in a very unclever way. As Kitson mentioned somewhere else in these forums, Dream Girl would continue to be a sub-plot for a long time because that seemed to tie the entire 5-year-plan run to the book. However, DC's continuous meanderings and Waid's problems with the meat of the book killed the plan.
I really don't see a problem with complex, long storytelling (read The Boys for a good balance of main plots and a continuously long background plot that is far from complete). My fanboy love for TMK is a proof of that. But, as someone better than me said before, Waid didn't do well with Lemnos and the Wanderers, and did it even worse with his Eat It, Gramps! premise.


*A-type plots as mentioned by Levitz in his DC Guide to Writing...

ahhh didn't someone say waid said that he was planning on bringing her back?! ughh... (DIG THROUGH THREADS). i need super speed reading powers.

aha! from the losh #47 thread.

hmmm i never thought of waid's pacing as slow, but i read his stuff in trade and it seemed very fast in those. and usually a fast trade means a slow individual issue set.

it's been a VERY long time since i've looked so in depth at a comic as i am with losh. frantically reading it, then rereading it, then reading what other people think about it. sometimes i wonder if comics should be read the way we're reading them. i wonder if i'm ruining for myself, maybe i wouldn't have been so pleased wiht waid books if i wasn't reading them in a fat stack of trades.

AND THEN I VIOLENTLY VEERED OFF TOPIC.

but as for what ricardo is saying about a-plots and b-plots. i'm not usually interested in the "big" story, the giant evil of the week that they're fighting. i'm way more into the relationships and general background noise that tends to go on or the way the big bad affects small things. i'm way more interested in shooter having cham being adorable in the background than the other stuff going on. and waid seemed to give a lot of that interaction, ex: a whole issue devoted to dates. i would have minded shooter doing a couple issues without punches being thrown.

My problem with Waid, besides the epic stories that just ended abruptly without a lot of satisfaction is that he relegated character development to particular issues and seemed to ignore it most of the rest of the time. And even when he did the "character development" issues, the characters came across as shallow and rather unrealistic. Shooter manages to balance the action with the character development, tossing in some humor along the way, and his characters overall seem much more like "real" people.

The master of that balance was Wolfman/Perez in New Teen Titans. They did a few completely character-driven issues (the letter from Kid Flash, Donna Troy's wedding, etc.), but they understood that they could not do one of those a year and do nothing in between. In between those issues, they had plenty of action and intrigue, but they also delved into the personalities of the characters and made them very three dimensional. Shooter hasn't done that with this Legion, but his characters seem far more realized than Waid's archetypes, even after several years.

I'm not sure if this is the case, but it seems to me that Shooter has reverted several of the characters personalities to pre-Waid (and even pre-Crisis) versions.

As a result, it's as if thirty years of pre-existing characterization has sort of backfilled into characters like Waidboot Saturn Girl, who was kind of an enigma.

I can't say if Waid did a poor job with characterization, but I can say that tiny details of Shooters characterization (such as the votes during this last issue, which more than one person has already mentioned could serve as fodder for hours of picking over) agree with me more than some of the details of Waid's characterization (the most jarring of which, for me, was the big inter-team 'fight' where Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Sun Boy and Colossal Boy ganged up on Ultra Boy, Shadow Lass and Karate Kid, because it was later presented as some sort of 'followers of Brainy vs. followers of Cos' thing, which it really wasn't).

I continue to believe that Waid did an amazing job with characterization. Very subtle, though, and easily missed; it took me over two years to figure out just what he was up to with Chameleon (which I've posted about on here a lot). He didn't make every Legionnaire sing for me, but his portrayals of Chameleon, Cosmic Boy, Invisible Kid, Light Lass, Dream Girl, and Supergirl are the best in all the years of Legion comics.

I agree Matt.
I never said Waid was my all-time favorite Legion writer but the guy had some good ideas which he fleshed out gradually during his run. He also had some stinky ones too ("eat it grandpa" ideology, in-house political civil bickering à la the two seperate Brainy and Cosmic Boy camps), but as a whole I prefer his approach to Shooter's writing thus far which really, for me, is quite bland and a huge disappointment. But we are talking about the WaK 3boot version only in my case.
And if some of my opinions about Shooter seem harsh to some ... well never let it be said that I am not a passionate reader.
Superboy and the Legion Of Superheroes was the very first comic I read in the early 70's (and among the first English stories I read as a newly-landed immigrant child). The early Shooter stories which I then picked up after falling in love with this cool super-team were, and still are, among my all-time favorites.

also we gotta remember that Nura had a thing for Starboy...so where has that all gone now that she's suddenly wants to marry Brainy?

yeah i... don't get that either. as much as i LOVE them together... she pretty blatantly said she didn't love him already @_@

I finally got my copy of this issue. Try-out issues are a grand tradition and I'm glad nothing glaringly terrible happened to any of my favorite characters. It's a bit sad that I needed to state that.

However, the current big plot is moving along, which is good. I felt like Lightning Lad the first time I read all that stuff Brainy was telling him. Also, Jecky's plot is moving along. It's weird knowing that there will be a wrap-up in just 2 more issues.

The art was very good, as was the coloring except for the mistake on the Sizzle Lass page.

I do want to address the "revealing costumes" subject. Yes, Lydda's buxom beauty was objectified in this issue. No doubt about it. But Manapul did keep it tasteful. I'm gonna blame veryvery for this, but did anyone else notice the coloring that emphasized the packages of Ultra Boy and Sun Boy?
Especially the intro shot of Sun Boy. They may as well have placed a big golden sun symbol right there.

I suppose Shooter and Manapul are going for a Sexy Legion to go down in history. (No "go down" jokes!)

Gah! What am I typing?

Anyway, somehow I'm looking forward to the end of this story. I do actually wish it didn't mean the end of the Legion. I'm still uncertain how I feel about the other stuff going on.

Oh, I forgot to mention how something terrible did happen to Lafong, which is too bad. I thought I liked her, but I guess I forgot that she was involved in taking away Jecky's rights. I didn't realize she was so anti-Legion until they stated it in this story.

I can't remember who it was who suggested why Shooter's doing this. He's writing the Legion he wanted to write decades ago and didn't have the chance to.

A while back there was quite a bit of discussion about how different the characters were. I suggested perhaps Mr. Shooter's intention was to eventually have them become the character's we were use to, essentially growing into the original personalities we had way back when. Of coarse I don't recall what I said word for word and I suppose its possible someone else came up with the same idea as I. Though I don't think I offered a reason why. I do believe when Shooter first took on the project he stated he intended to return it to much of what it originally was. After reading the issues though, I'm not seeing that myself.

And check out Colossal Boy's package in the panel where he's calling M'rissey Business Boy or whatever. Egad! Gigantic Gim indeed. Can't blame it on the colorist either.

yowza! I see what you mean. However (as a keen observer of these things lol), the shape is *all* wrong - I suspect there's a pair of socks down there for 'Colossal' boy!

Other possibilities:
You could say it's the inker's fault. If not, does that mean M'rissey in the same panel has no separate buttocks? What about Ultra Boy where he has just crunched Night Girl against the wall and LL is calling him off? Look at that odd blue shape below the "L" of his belt. For that matter, Gim is just bigger all over. Look at him beside Brainy on top of page 12 (I believe). He's the "Ah-nuld" of the Legion.
Or, it could be the sheen on the special super-duper tear-resistant fabrics the Legion wears.
Or not.

[/qb][/QUOTE]A while back there was quite a bit of discussion about how different the characters were. I suggested perhaps Mr. Shooter's intention was to eventually have them become the character's we were use to, essentially growing into the original personalities we had way back when. Of coarse I don't recall what I said word for word and I suppose its possible someone else came up with the same idea as I. Though I don't think I offered a reason why. I do believe when Shooter first took on the project he stated he intended to return it to much of what it originally was. After reading the issues though, I'm not seeing that myself. [/QB][/QUOTE]

Really? Shooter was(is) trying to revert the Legionnaires back to they way they used to be? If so I don't get it either. Honestly I grew up with all these characters so if something "familiar" did creep into Shooter's writing in the way a specific Legionnaire spoke or acted then Id be the first to organize the first ever Jim Shooter parade, but unfortunately this is far from the case. The groundwork was already laid by another writer, so why change this premise so close to the ending of the series? The Waid/Kitson Legion was drastically new to begin with, so why not leave things alone and strive to enhance this new entity, thus truly leaving your own trademark as a writer, instead of infusing it with your own personal choice (the alleged reversion to past personalities from the Legion glory days). Gimme a break! This is probably why so many of us are left scratching our heads everytime a new issue comes out.
Who is this Princess Projectra anyway? Not anybody I'm familiar with. The Jeckie I know would have demanded action be taken and would have probably rallied to take the fight straight to the Wanderers/Terra Firma/Whatever for quick resolution in the name of galactic justice, not left things to fester in her mind while she slowly goes mad. Come on!
Oh and this whole new Dream Girl as an engaged-to-Brainy, powerless blind person? Yeah, I'm all warm and fuzzy now remembering how similar she was to that in Golden and/or Silver Age versions ...... not!
What a mess.

Heh, I didn't want to mention it, but yeah, it looked like he was smuggling Chameleon Boy around in his pants...

On the other hand, when he's on, he's on. Night Girl looked amazing in that first picture (where the four potentials were just standing there) and very dynamic in her action scene where she's face-planting Ultra Boy into a wall (and breaking her heel).

And Sun Boy has never looked better, IMO.

Yeah, the shape is a bit odd. If he weren't from Earth I'd suspect his alien penis was different from ours.

And Sun Boy never looked more hung either. Hey! He's from Earth too! Is Francis trying to tell us that Earth males are superior to aliens? If Earth Girls are Easy, I guess Earth Guys know why.

Do you think everyone will be using Enzyte Male Enhancement like Smilin' Bob in the future?

The whole NG costume falling apart thing didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I get that Shooter wanted to make the point that the LSH has costume made of superior materials but it seems to me that NG costume came apart too easily. It was as if she had never used her powers before and didn’t realize that her costume would break so easily. I mean as soon as she went into action the heel of her boot broke. Surely, things happen at the wrong time. But this was a job interview and it would seem to me that you would want to wear your best stuff. I remember going to an interview many years ago and as soon as I reached out to shake the interviewers hand my jacket I was wearing ripped at the shoulder. I learned from that to wear things to interviews that actually fit. Perhaps I’m somewhat protective of NG, I’ve been crushing on her statuesque self for years. Love the new costume design, those garters are a very sexy look . She deserves better treatment than to be the butt of a poorly executed joke.

Also, Sizzle’s comment about feeling “flat” didn’t ring true to me. Is that something that a woman would actually say out loud?

Yet and still, I am enjoying Shooter’s run all in all. I’ll be sad to see him leave in two issues and that the cartoon book has ended already though it had a big clue as to how they are going to explain all of the different versions of the LSH running around. I half way expect to see Elijah Snow hanging around. BTW, has there been any word on who will be writing Adventure?