Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! People who find the legion too complicated are STUPID!

I was able to jump right into the legion when I was just a kid. Getting aquainted with twenty new characters? That was all part of the fun: nearly every issue heralded a character I'd never seen before!

Nowdays, the comic book community seems obsessed with the idea that the Legion is far too complicated. The issue has been raised in just about every single legion article, interview and review of the last couple of years and non-legion fans seem afraid to pick up the title because of this "problem".

Well, I say that people who find the legion too complicated are STUPID! If I could get into the legion as a kid, intelligent adults should be able to as well!

I happen to agree, Shadow Kid. In fact, when I started the Legion, the storyline beginning (GDS) featured almost everyone from Legion history ever! I wasn't lost and confused. I just gave it time until I figured out who they all were. Some characters I never really knew about until Who's Who and WWitL - which shows what valuable assets those books can be when dealing with many years worth of history.

In any case, I remember a common complaint about the TMK era was that people didn't know who characters were because they weren't using code names. I never had a single problem on that front.

I loved the TMK era

I dove right in to the Legion mythos as a wee li'l nerd myself, and never had any problems. I never had any trouble wrapping my mind around the notion of Mulitple Earths either, but DC thought that was too complicated too.

The "too complicated" balderdash is just an excuse, I think.

I'm pretty sure the "too complicated" was more for the writers than the readers. I don't know anyone who had a problem with multiple Earths. One of my earliest comics was a JLofA issue that featured a JLA/JSA crossover. I just took it all in - including seeing multiple versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern - and rolled with it. There was also a strange Robin and I think the story mentioned that the Huntress was Batman's daughter. Everything I needed to know was right there! The more confusing part was when they encountered strange beings like Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace, and some others from the past. I had no idea who they were!

I have to admit that even at the most complicated, Legion strikes me as easier to get than, say, X-men. Now that's some convoluted stuff.

Hee! Shadow Kid, I like that you're challenging people! I'm with you!

I was very confused by who was who and who could do what, etc when I first picked up Legion comics, but it was fun to figure it all out...

Also, nowadays, it's really easy to just get on a website somewhere and look up faq's. It's easier now than ever to "get" the Legion.

I liked figuring out the other heroes too. That's probably what made me go out and try to find old issues as a kid.

But as for today's comics, I think it's time they stepped into the 21st century for literary technology. DC Universe encyclopedias might be ok for company sales but they should really think about setting up added value on the DC websites like what that fan did for the Flash (take a look at www.hyperborea.org/flash ) or make a Legion Wikipedia. I noticed quite a few errors in the encyclopedia, so it seemed to lose its appeal to me. Oddly enough, there is a basic description of LSH in wikipedia.org.

Online content would be a good alternate venue to bring fans into the world of LSH/Legion/Legionaires.


P.S. Do not click on the Flash website unless you have a good 2-3 hours to kill. If you are somewhat interested in the series, you will be engrossed with large amounts of reading material. You have been warned!

Ferro has it exactly right -- the complexity thing is a problem for writers and artists as much as the readers. Curt Swan was reported to despise drawing the Legion because of the number of characters. The Legion has relied heavily on long-time fans (Shooter, Levitz, Bierbaums, Waid) to write the series, rather than any eminent authors of the day. Ironic that some of the best talents in comics and science fiction were the Legion's founding fathers.

One of the best legacies Waid and Kitson could leave is making the Legion cool for comics creators, so that when they depart an equally talented team WANTS to take over.

I think the "complexity" thing is a negative meme (like "Kerry is unreliable') that even Legion supporters unconsciously by into and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Starbucks' idea is a great one, and I hope Mark and Barry are listening. The Internet is the
Slurpee cup of a new generation!

Bah! Complicated and large means more fun! People who can't get into it are stupid!

You tell 'em, Cobie! I like to figure stuff out, and the Legion (and its large supporting and extended cast) was lots of fun to unravel!

I never got the 'too complicated' tag hung on the Legion, the X-Men (that was more contradictory confusion), or, most important of all, the Crisis. I was an average intelligence kid, and I was able to keep everyting pretty straight and understand what followed what in continuity. Of course, it was a cheaper hobby then too- it's rare I even see quarter books at cons anymore, making me even more glad I bought my LSH back issues when I did.

If only the Legion could reach the pot-head college kid audience...it would sell billions!

Yeah, but what kind of serious degrading of the Legion would it take for that to happen? I assume you're not talking about people who smoke pot on occasion and instead the ones who seem to exude it from their skin.

YES! TESTIFY, SISTER!


I started reading Superboy and the Legion as a 7 year old. I had no problem figuring it out with a few issues. WELL WRITTEN and WELL DRAWN comics will sell and be understood by the readers.

And for the record, the X-People are WAY more confusing and convoluted.

I resemble that remark ...or at least i did till i choose to be a starving artist, but i digress. There wouldn't be any degrading of the Legion nessesary at all.....just give us cool art and good story, we'll be happy.

I've said it before, but when I started reading the Legion in 1989 during the TMK era, there were no costumes, no code names, and oodles of continuity. It took me a long time to get completely up to speed, but that was the fun of it. I had a ball referencing the poster in #12 trying to figure out who Reep or Jo or Celeste were, then putting it together with their old code names.

No offense, deddy, it's just that I've seen some of the people who buy blunts everyday. They don't seem capable of any sort of abstract thinking. In contrast, I know others who smoke pot on a semi-frequent basis (but who use rolling paper) and don't act so messed up.

My wife has a REAL hard time with anything that uses "Made-Up" names. She can handle Superman and Spiderman because they take place in the present day and the characters hav more or normal (but too alliterative) names.

In contrast, she goes nuts with things like Lord of the Rings, because there are so many characters and they all have funny names. (She has finally learned Frodo, although she twitters every time she says it, and Gandalf, because he looks like my step-father!)

I always assumed any comics reader was good at keeping track of lots imaginary facts, but perhaps some readers have difficulty, like my wife, with the panoply of unfamiliar fantastical details in the Legion?

I can appreciate the frustration behind the thread's premise ... but couldn't the title become a little off-putting to newcomers? Some are trying to overcome the past difficulties they've had with this huge cast, and deserve to be encouraged. And we're sure to get a lot more of 'em in a few weeks.

I'm a little with Grey here on the title of this thread...

My own personal experience:

I started collecting the Legion in 1998. I didn't have any trouble keeping up with what was going on. Not only that, but I've since gone back and collected and read everything from No. 259 on as well as most of the HC Archives.

The only confusing era was the Five Year Leap stuff. That being said, I don't think that people who don't want to collect the Legion because it is too complicated are stupid, per se. I think it has more to do with not wanting to put forth the effort it takes to become acquainted with everyone/everything. Further, I'm not saying they're exclusively lazy either, maybe the word I'm looking for is IMPATIENT. Because that's really what it takes to enter Legion Fandom these days.

There was time when I might have agreed that the Legion was more confusing than other comics. I don't believe one can honestly say that anymore.

Superman's continuity has been messed around with so much that I no longer know if he's from Krypton or not, much less when he arrived on Earth, when he became a hero, how many times he's died and come back, if he's married or not, if he has a cousin named Kara that died in the Crisis or that just arrived on Earth, is he blue or red and just how many heroes with "S"s are there anyway (Super man, Super Boy, Steel, Eradicator, Supergirl...) .


Oh let's just skip the Els and try someone else...can someone explain Hawkman & Hawkgirl (Hawk Woman?) to me?...or Dr Fate?...or Green Lantern (or is he the Spector - no, he was but, now he's GL again!)

Does DC stand for Detective Comics or Definitely Crazy?

Is the Marvel Universe any saner? (Let's just not go there shall we?)

My point is that all of these long running comics have been complicated by a long string of "creators" that couldn't leave well enough alone. Instead of continuing to tell the story (stories) that naturally flowed, they had to come up with something new or completely different that said "Hey! Look at my impact on this icon!"

So why should the Legion be any different? And how is it fair to label them "too confusing" for new readers? I've been reading comics since the mid 60s and I've spent the past 25-30 years confused aout comics BUT NEVER ABOUT THE LEGION!

The ONLY time I ever found the LSH confusing was the Giffbaum era. For the first year-and-a-half, except for the "fill-ins" done by others, I couldn't tell what was going on AT ALL. I blame this on sloppy writing and even more sloppy "artwork".

If you have to go back and re-read something, or several issues of something, to understand it AT ALL, the people doing it aren't very good at what they do.

Actually, there was one other period where confusion set it. It was that time in between when Roger Stern (and his uncredited wife) came on the book and when the editor announced he was firing the entire creative team. There were months on end where I had trouble following what was going on in the stories-- from PANEL TO PANEL! I guess when you have 3 writers working on a book at the same time and nobody's quite in sync with anybody else that can happen.

I noticed that as soon as the mass firing was announced, the last several MONTHS before the new team arrived, the storytelling suddenly IMPROVED drastically. By the time Abnett & Lanning arrived, the book had gotten back on track-- just too late for their predecessors!

I started reading (off & on back then) the Legion back in 1980. Figuring out who was who was probably what got me hooked in the first place. I was already a long time Avengers fan, so I was used to reading a title with a big cast. It wasn't complicated at all. I figured out the cast pretty quickly. I do remember that every time I thought I figured things out, another character from the past would appear. It was just endless with the Legion, and that's what I liked most about these teens, who were about my age at the time. The guys were cool, the women were beautiful and the story lines were excellent!