Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! LSH 44 spoilers

:rolleyes:

Yes, I rang. I knew you wouldn't disappoint. You make good points. I don't agree with all of them 100%, but I think the story would have been better without some of these elements, and having them all in one issue created a pile on effect that disturbed me.

count me in as one who believes this issue to be a real stinker...pee=yew!

And yes, I also felt uncomfortable with the Ayla scene. It seemed inappropriate for a female teenager to be depicted this way and read by a predominantly male readership. It doesn't help any that she was picked on, the legionnaire who seems to be the one who doesn't like to sleep alone. It would've been more interesting to see the scene played out differently with Shadow Lass. I could've seen a black out blast coming from her eyes the moment the creep even started to come near her with his paws.

I sincerely hope this was one-note downer. I want to forget I ever bought it, let alone read it.

I agree with the discomfort of the threatened rapes. I kept wondering if there was some sort of power-damping effect of the cables. I am really sick of "florg" this and that. Every recent writer in memory has tried it (from "Bloody Nass" to the present, and it has just felt needless and fake. Funny how the long-term writers of old didn't need that as so obvious a crutch.
Everything did feel a bit...ok a LOT... rushed in the wrap-up.
I have been sick of the government doing whatever they will to the Legion, and did feel good that this Col. Pismo got his comeuppance. The problem I had with it was that it looked like it was given by someone who looks like a 12 year-old kid, and that Brainy was so accepting of it. I guess I need to re-read some issues.

I'll agree with PofoBo that this issue seems to have been a result of the recent "Shooter's gone wait a minnit no he isn't but he might be" semi-brouhaha. I'll agree it likely was finished in-house. Shooter had really cooled on the future-lingo speak recently and here it's usage goes through the roof, as if this issue's dialogue was based on Shooter's first issue back as writer.

The Ayla scene was supposed to make us feel uncomfortable and it worked.

As a fan of DC's YOUNG HEROES IN LOVE and Marvel's X-FORCE which later became X-STATIX, I had no problem with the cartoonier art used with such adult themes. Those 2 series also used cartoony and pop-art against all manner of adult themes. I liked the... contrast, I guess you would call it.

Now that I've read others' comments, it's now perfectly obvious that Jo has some ultra-pheremones going on. I'll echo 'Binger's sentiment that it should also affect males. THAT would be interesting.

M'Rissey might be my new favorite LSH character.

All in all, I enjoyed that this issue wrapped so much up.

Oh, and a shout-out to Superboy's backstory re: the names Shooter selected for the villains... I love that kinda stuff...

After a read and re-read of #44, I echo Nightcrawler's sentiments. I thought the issue was colorful, had a lot of action, spotlighted Light Lass and Atom Girl effectively, and wrapped up a few running plot threads very nicely. I enjoyed the issue.

I understand and agree with some of the complaints about the portrayal of women in the issue, but, taking a step back, there is a context to the storyline. First, the Ikkonns (sp?) are basically low-life pirates, and pirates tend to rape and plunder as an occupation. The situation where the Ikkonns were going to savage their prisoners was not only believable, but to be expected under the circumstances.

This issue resolved three types of menaces the Legion had been facing - an overwhelming military force (SPs), a subversive bureaucratic threat (UP) and an anti-social animalistic attack (Ikkonns). I think the story documented well the different aspects of evil Legionnaires have to face on a regular basis, some of which is not very pleasant at all. In regard to Light Lass, her discomfort in the hostage predicament and her resolve when freed was very powerful, showing she's no "light weight".

Right.

I certainly hope that is the case.

I'd wondered if that was so when Imra seemed to be overly aware of him, but I was afraid that I was over-reacting to the criticism of the portrayal of Imra in that issue and 'looking for an out' to explain it away.

It might be interesting if it ties into his problems controlling his powers, such as the time he saw a pretty girl on a billboard and went all flash vision-y.

It also makes him something more than a 'poor man's Superboy,' if he can channel his ultra-energies into other things, such as his charisma, or, perhaps, to the horror of Brainiac Five, his intellect...

It certainly did, but at least in my case that uncomfortable feeling was most prominently caused by the fact that Shooter’s given free reign to write scenes like this one, or the book as a whole, and I doubt that was one of the intended effects.

If there is a context, I want writers NOT TO CREATE THIS CONTEXT, again and again and again.

According to the “context” line of reasoning I could have the whole Legion wiped out by His Lordship MegaEvil McÜberboss, because, hey, I’d write that guy as so powerful he could do total wipeouts like that thrice before breakfast, and then say, “what do you expect to happen when the Legion encounters an enemy like that?”

I don’t really think that I should apply as a writer for the Legion with this concept just now, though. Just because there is a high chance that a certain scenario would turn out a certain way, that scenario doesn’t have an inbuilt guarantee to be good entertainment.

If you still think I’m just not willing to acknowledge the simplest chains of cause and effect – here: pirates are bad and therefore tend to do really bad things – then consider this:

Evil Girlfriend is ostensibly as much a pillage-and-rape-happy pirate as every other member of her group. But well, it turns out that she doesn’t really want to rape any of the Legion guys - she’s, after all, only wishing to sustain the luuuurve of Big Boss. That’s cause, you know, because all women secretly wish for luuuurve in their tender little hearts, no matter if they’re - on the outside - pillage-and-rape-happy pirates or not.

And how lucky that is for the Legion guys! It’s astonishing how in comics the male gender's always so preferentially treated by fate, whereas women in comics as a whole seem to have broken at least three mirrors during their daily morning routine. You know, bad karma and all that.

One could almost infer that male comic readers are spared any rape threats towards those characters they probably tend to identify with most – which are not necessarily the ones they like most, but those they’re most alike to.

Perish the thought.

Should you still think that this threatened rape scenario is realistic, because, well, in reality much more women get raped than men, then I can only say one thing:

Yes, this is realistic, but I read comics to enjoy myself, and not to continuously be reminded that I, as a woman, am in danger of being raped.

You can’t really compare these rape threats all that well to the other dangers that comics superheroes face on a daily basis. Yes, there’s death and dismemberment lurking around every corner, but

a) is there a high chance for me, as a woman, to get beaten/maimed because some supervillain wants to stop/kill me? No, there’s not, because I’m not a superhero and don’t get in these kinds of situations where I’m trying to stop Dr. Evil from blowing up the universe. This is not a realistic danger to me. Could I get raped? Much more likely.

and

b) these cheap “ooooh, I’m gonna rape you” scares are endlessly repeated in comics, and – as in this case – often written in an at least semi-titillating way. Think that instead of these, the newest Legion issue had a scenario devoted to the bad guys ruminating how they’re going castrate Timber Wolf, how exactly they’re going to assure that he won’t be able to fight back , have them start trying to undress him, and have him cry a bit while you’re at it, why don’t you? Have that going on for five pages. Then imagine similar scenes in a lot of the comics you read. Yup, they’re delivering a veritable castrate-o-rama all week long. Next week it’s Lyle’s turn. What I’m trying to get at with this example is that generally, “non-rape-damage” during the fighting of evil is differently presented: it’s not always the same harm that gets done, it doesn’t pop up again and again, and it isn’t addressed in such loving, creepy length. In this issue here, Timber Wolf gets away with a punch to the face.


As for Kid Quislet saying that Light Lass shows that she’s no light weight later on, and that this fact is somehow redeeming what has come before - I’ve already addressed why I don’t think so in my last post.

So, uh, how do I end this epic novel I’ve written here? Oh yeah, space pirates. Let’s see them do some moer plundering instead of having them make all those unwanted sexual advances. I’m totally down with the plundering.

i'd even be down with the rape aspect if, like insomniac girl stated, the guys were getting creepy threats that lasted for pages and pages. actually, no that would annoyed me too given shooter's past with such scenarios but... yeah. this issue was horrible.

i remember thinking "man, if he gets nura and querl together, maybe i can survive this" but how much was i not expecting creepy rape-tastic issue?! rape is not something that should be treated lightly, like, in real life ayla might need some down time at the very least after that and it would probably resonate through out hte story. if shooter was a good writer. except he's not and this is the cheap, tawdry, base sort of thing that just exemplifies the sexist and bad writer

Insomniac, what you are ververy are saying doesn't really make much sense to me, nor do I think ya'll are being fair by atrributing a character commiting a criminal act as some kind of personal view of the writer.


Shooter is showing a woman on the verge of getting raped and so he is sexist?

30 years ago he showed Bruce Banner on the verge of getting raped..was that also sexism?

Oh wait, that was Shooter being a homophobe.

If Shooter shows someone on the verge of getting murdered does that mean he endorses murder?

If he shows theft does that mean he endorses theft?

Rape is a heinous crime...so is murder, and Supervillains attempt to do it all the time.

Should we remove all attempts at heinous crimes from comics books...what then is the point of having superheroes in them?


Shooter is being mischaracterized...he intentionally writes stuff that is shocking so that it will stick in your mind...he doesn't want you to like his villains or consider thier crimes to be acceptable...he wants you to consider them criminals...and not find them admirable.


And he modeled the Ikonns after a corporate raider or a modern pirate, who essentially cares nothing for his fellow man and he had them commit acts pirates did commit. They did commit rape.

I wonder if ya'll would be saying the same things about these stories if you didn't know Shooter was writing them and were more focused on the story than Shooter's undeserved reputation as a sexist/homophobe/promurdertheftdomesticviolence.


You aren't supposed to like the bad guys, you are supposed to think ill of them...and Shooter has shown men on the verge of being raped before...and it was much more graphic than anything in this comic. Just because the writer writes something doesn't mean he himself advocates it. It's one thing if you don't like his writing..but ya'll are sticking undeserved lablels on him by directly attributing acts of his characters to his own personal beliefs. And that is very much a double standard, as comic writers show bad guys doing bad things all the time...and I don't hear them getting the same labels.

Ya'll don't like Shooter or his writing, I get it. There is absolutely nothing anyone can do or say to change that...but the criticism ya'll are directing his way is inaccurate. There is nothing to prove he is any kind of sexist or homophobe...and there's certainly nothing in history as a Legion creator to justify the claim that he is a bad writer.

Jim Shooter created:

Princess Projectra
Karate Kid
Nemesisi Kid
Ferro Lad
The Khunds
The Dominators
The Controllers
The Dark Circle
The Fatal Five
The Emeral Empress and the Emerald Eye of Erkon
Validus
The Persuader
Starfinger
Universo
Dr. Regulus
Shadow Lass
Laurel Kent
Rond Vidar
The Sun Eater
Grimbor
Charma
Pulsar Stargrave
The Wanderers
Esper Lass
Calorie Queen
The Tornado Twins

Or basically about 50-60% of the foundation of the Legion.


The Legion, even the reboots wouldn't remotely be the same book without Jim Shooter.

He created just about every major villain in Legion history...that was his greatest strength. And I think he proved he definitely has a talent for doing it that few comics creators in history can match. And you could say he still has that talent in spades...because you are going to remember the villains in this story. And you are going to remember this story.

Jim Shooter is at the absolute minimum, the third most important creator in the history of the Legion...hardly any Legion stories in the past 20 years would have been possible without Jim Shooter's contribution to this book. And just about every creator to ever work on this title, is a huge fan of Jim Shooter's Legion work...including Mark Waid, the guy who created the last two versions of the Legion. In fact he's probably the biggest Shooter fan of them all.


You will never like him...but that doesn't mean he's a sexist or a bad writer. I'd be willing to bet that somehwere in that impressive list of his creations, is a reason you like the Legion.

Thanks...and just because you appreciate it, here's one more for you:

Velmar = Marvel

To the moderators: I did come back to delete my previous post but we are unable to do so. Definetely not my normal behavior and for that I apologize.

Okay, lets everyone back off a bit here.

Superboy, I think we all know that you are a big Shooter fan. We all also understand that he has had a huge role in the creative history of the Legion. But that doesn't mean that every time someone is critical of the man's current writing we need to hear about everything he has ever done in the past. We get it.

The topic at hand is Shooter's writing now. I know I've been critical of his current tenure, but I have also tried to be fair about it, and I enjoyed most of issue 43. And on a re-read of 44, I found more things to like about it than previously. But overall, it was still not that great from a writing perspective. You can pick from the womens' issues in the story (which I can completely see veryvery's & Insomiac Girls's POV here) or the pirates or the "future curse words" or whatever (all of which I found to be cliche and/or cheesily written).

I don't know Jim Shooter, so I don't claim to know his personal attitudes towards women. But what I have read in this current issue was just a sub-par story with shoddy illustration.

And that is really all there is to it. You don't need to defend Jim Shooter's honor.

Y'know, given the Ikonns red skin and mythological-ish names, I was really expecting a new Tyr to show up. I'm kind of disappointed that he didn't.

I think my biggest problem with the bound-up Ayla scenario was how long it seemed to go on.

Notice how some of the mostly male Ikonns are pawing at each other, too? Refreshing probably isn't the right word to use here, but it's worth noting.

I wonder how long the UP kids were held before the LSH got there? And what they endured?

It isn't clear- would such actions have occured similarly if the Peril Men had beaten the Ikonns? The implication is probably that it would, but we don't really know.

Even though this issue veered into squirm-inducing territory, I hope Ikilles and company appear again. With a touch more characterization.

'Cause the LSH *really* needs some new recurring foes. Who was the last non-Adventure created villain that showed up more than once or twice? Tangleweb?

Hordes of Namelessness don't count.

As for me, I really would. I came into Shooter's start on the threeboot with not much knowledge about him - I hadn't knowingly read any of his stories before, and about the only thing I was aware of was him being one of the main Legion creators - and I had, admittedly, read his interview with the hypersexualised description of the Legionnaires, and wondered why on earth anyone would write something like that.

So, with the Garth-Imra-relationship, I did apply the interview to it, but I don’t really feel I’m reaching when I point out that in both the interview and the comic, she’s characterised as super-controlled and super-competent, but really loves to be “treated like a lady”, i.e. let her boyfriend/man be the boss.

Whether that’s a clichéd gender stereotype or not obviously is debatable – I say yes, lotsa people around here say no.

I didn’t know back then that that infamous “Cos slaps Ayla” scene which is making its way around here once in a while was written by Shooter, but I sure found it gender-coded and tasteless anyway. (I don’t know how the story went on after that – if there were any consequences for Cos, because that would possibly make only Cos sexist and not the story itself.)

What I’m trying to say is that I got annoyed about Shooter’s characterisation because of Shooter’s characterisation and not because I’ve followed his long career, deemed him a horrible human being/writer/whatever and am now taking the chance to grind an axe with him.

I admit your point that he’s willing to spread the unpleasantness around to both genders – I’m not familiar with the Hulk issue, so I won’t comment on what I haven’t read, but I see that there’s a guy being threatened with rape. I’ve also now found one panel in the Legion issue where there’s a female Ikonn in on the threatening action.

That doesn’t take away from the gratuitousness of the whole thing. Considering the Ikonns scene, Shooter’s writing about rape is to subtlety what his „Hey, fellow pirate, that object I saw lying just right there is suddenly gone! It's almost as if an invisible person had moved it!” is to foreshadowing.

And that’s were writing can get sexist, even in cases when the writer isn’t intending to be sexist – which is the vast , vast majority of cases, I’d imagine. I certainly can’t imagine anyone at DC running around foaming at the mouth screaming: “Hateful women! Must mistreat them in art and writing!” I most definitely do not think that of Shooter, either.

You were asking “Is it sexist if a guy gets threatened with rape?” Not if you can count the cases in which such a scenario crops up in fiction and find that this plot is used exceedingly rare. Now it would become a sexist stereotype if it cropped up en masse and became a continuously repeating pattern that was constantly happening to one gender because of that person belonging to this gender.

For the combination “women” and “rape”, we’re at this stage in popular media - we’ve been at this stage a long time, already, and that’s why I don’t need to see any women threatened with rape anymore. For that matter, I don’t want to see any men threatened with it, either, especially if it’s written with sledge-hammer-sensitivity.

As for “Well, what do you expect from space pirates? They’re evil! Rape shows how evil they are!” – I’ve already addressed that quite extensively before.

I, as well, do not see why Shooter’s admittedly numerous and defining contributions to the Legion should forbid anyone to look critically at his writing.

Thank you for editing, Blacula.

Phantom Girl - without addressing any of the personal insults you felt you needed to dish out:

If it is apparently iron-clad logic to you - and why wouldn't it, after all, you suggested it to me - that I should simply stop reading Jim Shooter's run if I'm that offended by it, then I don't see why you shouldn't find it just as logical if I applied the same tactic to you.

Therefore: no one forces you to read my posts, and if you find them so offensive, please stop reading them.

I regret that I'm making reading this board such a chore for you, but I bet there's some kind of killfile implementation to block me. I guess we'll both be the happier for it.

The "women in peril" bit is way overdone, perhaps as someone mentioned, because it makes us "uncomfortable," unfortunately more uncomfortable than "men in peril."

Few people even now are not guilty (in my experience) of reacting moreso when it is a female, child or even puppy dog in peril than when it is a man, particularly a white man, in peril.

Writers have to push these buttons in order to be affective, don't they? One of the goals is to extract some type of emotion from the reader. Shooter did that.

Writers can also be effective by proferring a controversial subject in order to create "buzz," public discussion about the story. Shooter did that.

Writers can try and effect change by subtly promoting ideas. Most of us have stories from when we were young reading even comics, in which out personal values were effected, generally to the more open viewpoint of the value and skills inherent in diversity.

If Shooter had this last goal in mind, I think he missed the mark. That Ayla was put into a position that particularly strikes our inculcated buttons, fine I suppose. But ultimately, she didn't pull her own bacon out of the fire. Her anger at being released aside, she was still the "woman in distress." I think that's the part that makes the scene a step "backwards."

One thing I do object to, is the mods continuing to permit this open bashing of Shooter, a bashing that has even extended to other posters on the board. This has not been permitted in the past by the Mods, as I recall I even got in a bit of a tussle when I simply offered a different opinion than a popular writer. I never went so far as to make personal attacks, a much worse "offense."

Hello? Mods? Double Standard?

I think this is an awesome idea.

On the one hand, having been sexually abused, just about every depiction of rape I've seen in media pretty much fails to be 'worth it' from a storytelling sense, *for me.*

If I were to pick one example of, to my eyes, a *mature* presentation of sexual abuse, it would be from Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, where his girlfriend Abby is revealed to have been a sex offender when she was younger. It kind of turned my head, since I liked the character, and I was left wondering if I could still feel comfortable liking the character knowing what she'd done.

In the end, it, and I realize this sounds whacky, prompted me to think about my own childhood, which I'd somehow managed to never do, just obliviously sailing through life without any sort of potentially scary self-reflection. Turns out it wasn't traumatic to relive in my mind (actually kind of revelatory, as I recalled being a passive-aggressive little jerk after the fact, driving that person out of my life), and I ended up with a strange sense of pity for my abuser, since that person was obviously an unhappy and damaged individual, and I wondered if *they* had recovered as evenly as I had...

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if there will *ever* be a time or place for a thoughtful or meaningful presentation of that subject matter, since every single author / artist / director whatever who attempts to do so has to somehow atone for the 10,000 others that came before them and 'got it wrong.'

Rape ain't goin' away, unfortunately.

And it's too often used in media as a code for 'really bad guy' (such as the transformation of Dr. Light from a fairly standard wannabe evil mastermind to a serial rapist) or, worse, as some sort of life-changing event to turn a character into a different person (such as Red Sonja getting raped and then getting superpowers / a new sense of self-confidence out of the deal, which kind of mirrors what happened to Shrinking Violet, to bring this around to Legion-specific matters, when the Imskian seperatists captured her, even if no sexual violence was implied, the 'girly girl' suddenly 'mans up' because she's victimized, which is creepy).

And then there's the worst of the worst, IMO, shows like Oz, Saw or Hostel (or softer 'torture porn,' like 24, which are even more insidious, as they make *heroes* of the abusers!) that pander to the urge to dominate or victimize others, and make the person who is dominating / abusing other look 'tough' or 'decisive' or 'right-thinking' or something lame like that.

The irony is that it no longer really reflects the audience of the sci-fi/fantasy/comic book genres. We live in a generation that has grown up with heroes named Lt. Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner and Aeryn Sun and Jadzia Dax and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena and Kim Possible, while 'damsels in distress' that get knocked out and need to be saved have names like Ron Weasley and Xander Harris and John Conner and Tom Paris.

This is hardly the John Wayne audience.

And the movies that *do* have the menfolk in peril, and women saving their asses, are often even more effective, because it's newer and fresher than the tired old 'woman tied to the train-tracks' cliche (which was modified from the original story, where a woman rescued a *man* tied to the train tracks, making it an early example of a retcon as well!).

Is there a single John Rambo or Conan quip that's as memorable and powerful a moment as Ripley showing up in the forklift and shouting to the Alien queen, 'Get away from her, you bitch!'?

If any Legion writer, Shooter included, thinks that fans of this genre aren't *LONG PAST* ready for women being heroes and not victims, then they need to be put out to pasture, because some of the generation that grew up with Ripley and Sarah Conner *have grandchildren already.*

The times aren't 'a-changing.' They changed decades ago. Some people just seem to have been left behind...