Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The New Legion of Super-Heroes, thus far...SPOILERS! - UPDATED AGAIN (1/19)

Gary, these are sprocktastic!!!

I'm surprised you've debuted them early but perhaps you are "jonesing" for new Legion as much as I am.

Thank you for making this site so much fun!

Sprocktastic is putting it lightly. I can't wait!

I cant wait for this, when exactly is it comic to stores.

You the man!

You're going to hate the answer as much as we do (probably). #1 is listed as being in the shops on Dec. 29th and then #2 is listed for Jan. 26th.
That's at least an eternity away and possibly longer.
>sigh<

you are so great, man

Man i frickin just ...LUVE THESE!

CAN'T WAIT to try my hand at rendering the Waid/Kitson LOSH within the Bruce Timm JLU Animated style way, aye!

AA

Wow, thanks!

I still haven't made it to the store to pick up the TT/Legion book with the preview. So, I really appreciate the opportunity to read the preview and judget it for myself. Having read this I have a much clearer understanding of where Waid and Kitson are going, and generally approve enthusiastically.

I am delighted by the sociocultural underpinnings of the book so prominently on display in the preview. Waid's 31st century appears to be an entertaining exaggeration from current American society, where children are more regimented, programmed and protected than ever before. Waid's 31st century is an absurd extension of the present day, where kids are hustled from play dates to music lessons to soccer games to test preparation to homework, and so on. There is no down time, no time to goof off, no time to chart your own course in life.

Demographers are finding that, as a result, people now in their 20s are more likely to be conformist and group-oriented along a number of dimensions, rather than individualistic and success-oriented as their parents and grandparents were. (To be fair, demographers also find that young adults are MUCH better at multi-tasking, balancing work and personal lives, and get their information increasingly from non-traditional media.)

Waid's vision also reflects the over-protectiveness of today's parents. As the father of a 2-year old, I KNOW what I am talking about. Car seats, stair gates, cabinet locks, toilet locks, stove knob locks, oven locks, tub spout guards, bicycle helmets, water filters, blood-lead screening -- the list goes on and on of ways we make kids safer that were almost unheard of 20 years ago. The overwhelming marketing message of today's baby-industrial complex is "Safety 1st -- 2nd and 3rd, and then more Safety!" Until you register for baby shower gifts, you have NO idea how dangerous the world is, man! The result is that children are MUCH safer (accidental injury and death among children have plummeted). However, because we have become so much more successful at protecting our children, it is that much harder to accept that we cannot protect them from everything. 9/11 and its aftermath have reinforced that cognitive dissonance by introducing a whole new category of threats we hadn't taken seriously before -- How can I keep my family safe from weaponized inhaled anthrax?!?!?

What does all this have to do with a Legion comic? Well, it makes clear how Waid is explaining the reason for the Legion. Why, in a technological utopia, would a bunch of super-powered kids think that they can or should save the world? Waid's answer is that they are doing it to give personal meaning and individuality to a safe but overly-regimented existence. Also, The answer to the question of "Why the Legion" has to be grounded in some sort of generational conflict. Otherwise, the Legion would have a normally distributed age range from 18 to 85. Waid's giving the Legionnaires a compelling new reason to put on the flight ring, and grounding that reason in the foibles and phobias of contemporary society.

One interesting implication of Waid's approach is that the Legion could very legitimately be viewed as terrorists by mainstream society. This is the connection, I believe, that Gail Simone alluded to between "For No Better Reason" and the new book. Gail's terrorists were so desperate to point out society's dependence on technology they were willing to destroy the society in order to "save" it. How far will the Waid/Kitson Legionnaires go to offer young people a non-conformist, unregimented purpose in life? Will they have a code of ethics -- a Constitution, perhaps? -- to prevent them from crossing the line? Is the Legion about being free to be who you are, or forcing everyone else to be free, whether they want to be or not? I hope Waid and Kitson confront questions like this in the series. I also hope Waid and Kitson deal with the "why are they super-powered?" question. I suspect the answer is that, in the 31st century, almost everyone COULD be super-powered, but most people choose NOT to be, because it is just too dangerous and embarrassing.

I have no idea whether this new approach, grounded in an allegory of our own society, will make the book a hit or a flop. I HOPE young people read it and find some resonance with their own lives. As a boomer parent, the approach sure resonates with me! Most importantly, the previews conclusively contradict, for me, the conclusion by some posters that this is just another Archie-world reboot, no better or worse than the Zero Hour Legion. This is most interesting, complex and thoughtful background that the Legion has had since the TMK era. And, I suspect that, in contrast to TMK, the new era is going to be more reliably fun and less frequently dystopian and depressing. The few preview pages we have seen already make the new Legion more interesting than the Zero Hour reboot EVER was, even at it's best. If Waid and Kitson have put as much effort into the individual characters as they have into the world they inhabit, this is going to be an AWESOME book.

Oh, in conclusion, I can't forget to mention that Barry's art just absolutely rocks!

I've opened up the brain spiggot and the crap just keeps poring out!

Another implication of the Legion's new sociocultural milieu (aren't we fancy!) is the impact that a character like Mon-El could have on that society. One of the best aspects of the Zero Hour reboot, and one of the greatest unfulfilled disappointments, was M'Onel's status as a messianic figure in galactic history. While DnA gave us hints of the personal impact of messiah status on Lar and his relatioship with Triad, they never took the opportunity to really tell that story.

The Waid/Kitson 31st century treats the heroes of the past as mythical, the way we view Achilles and Odysseus. So, imagine the uproar of a the arrival in that world of a flesh-and-blood, all-too-real super-hero from the ancient past. Imagine the impact on the Legion, and on the society they are rebelling against.

Another fascinating implication of the Legion's new world is, what happens if the Legion really meets the mythical heroes of the past -- Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Again, DnA played around with this, but I think the impact on WnK Legion is MUCH greater. These kids have turned their backs on the values and mores of galactic society in hopes of recapturing the heroic ideal of a bygone time. How will the "reality" of the 21st century heroes match up with the ideal the Legionnaires have created for themselves? This could be a real dynamite story, and a landmark event in the development of this Legion (in contrast to the 1st reboot's team 21 arc, which seemed to have an "elites annoyed to be trapped with the barbarians" vibe about it -- Spark always complaining about us primitives eating meat).

Sorry for the long posts. As you can tell, I am really excited that this Legion could really realize its potential.

hey Gary !!!

those ICONs are so great !!! and thanks for posting all the pages, so far ....

when issue #1 comes out, it will be the perfect Christmas present !!!

Matthew.

doublechinner, that's pretty interesting. You've certainly thought about this a lot.

Gary - now you've got me excited!

i thought DOUBLECHINNER's post was really good, too !!!

Matthew.

wow Doublechinner...that's deep and it makes total sense! You rock man, I hope Barry or Mark have a chance to read this cuz I think you hit it right on the mark.

Thanks for the kind words.

I think about everything too much -- this is just a representative sample of my neurological hyperactivity.

But, having come back to reading the Legion with Worlds (I missed Lost, Rifts, Damned, and much of the stuff before), I felt that even at their best, DnA, and the folks who proceeded them in the 1990s, were missing some important kernel about the Legion.

When I started seeing Barry's art and hearing Waid's (often inflammatory) statements about their new version, I remembered that what the Legion had, from its inception until sometime in the 1980s, was a powerful connection to the evolving youth culture in America. The idea of a "teenager" didn't even exist until about 1950 -- you just graduated (or stopped) high school, turned into an adult, got married and started working to support your family. Superboy, and then the Legion, were comic book acknowledgements of the distinctive new youth culture of rock and roll, hamburger stands, and cars. As the youth culture came into more obvious opposition to mainstream society in the 1960s and 1970s, the Legion reflected that societal change with sexier costumes and more provocative storylines. As good as Levitz's Legion was, at some point in the 1980s it got a little dull, precisely because the Legion was now too powerful, too legit, too much a part of the United Planets establishment. In this sense, the 1994 reboot made things worse by making the Legion an integral part of the founding of the UP.

I applaud Mark and Barry's efforts to get back to the fundamentals of the Legion. A team of teenage superheroes has to either be 1) a "kiddie table" for sidekicks, 2) a training ground for adult superheroes or 3) a reaction/protest/alternative to adult society. Teen Titans and X-Men have been successful with options 1 and 2 (and in the case of the X-Men, option 3). The only real option for the Legion has been 3, and Mark and Barry seem to have seized on that.

Hurray! Back to the old code names. Now I don't have to translate names as I read anymore.

But I want Cham orange and antennaed, dammit.

I liked the "who can keep them straight with so many?" line by the SP cop

Actually, I never had problems keeping them straight. I remember people complaining that TMK didn't use code names. I had memorized them all by that time, which wasn't that hard since Levitz frequently used character first names. Or maybe I'm just a geek.

I must break rank here and say as wonderful as that preview looked (thanks for posting)...it feels to me that Waid and Kitson have come up with a pretty great sci fi/superhero premise, but it feels tacked onto the Legion.

Where's RJ? Where's the seeding of the worlds, etc. It's a bit like Batman without Alfred. Which makes me wonder if this shouldn't have been an elseworlds.

They are REALLY beating the point home about the 'bratty' kids. But I prefer the Legion when the kids were smarter than the adults. I think the first year of reboot, filled with rich characterisation (XS' crushes, Andromeda's racism, Lyle and Brainy's rivalry) dealt more with the Legion dealing with eachother.

I don't want to know about Invisible Dad, Light Mum, Shadow Grandpa.

I want to get to know these characters...and maybe that says something about me too. Legion is one of the few Superhero comics I still collect.

Thanks for your wonderful, thoughtful posts, doublechinner! They made my day!

Hey reservations, Waid has already said that when the 1st issue comes out the LSH has already been established for awhile. Other comments in interviews and in other threads by Barry also talk about the relationships between the Legionnaires. Someone here compared it to being like being in class of 20 people all durning school. There are cliques and some people who are closer then others.

So all the things you have asked are bound to be explained later on. So lets cool our jets and not jump to conclusions here.