Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities new krypton!!!

have you guys been reading this?!! there's a definitely a legion tie-in since we're seeing the beginnings of the science police.

in Superman #682 <span class="spoiler_containter"><span class="spoiler_wording">Click Here For A Spoiler</span><span class="spoiler_text">the bad guys the kryptonians capture are dumped into the phantom zone, and we see mon-el for like, two panels.</span></span>

i am really liking this series! Every issue seems really well written and i'm excited everytime a new one comes out!

It also seems that Braal, Winath and Tharr are now tied into Brainiac's "city in a bottle" fixation as well. I saw a page from the new "Action" issue that mentioned them as planets only existing in bottle form.

Started slow for me, but enjoyed the last four issues. Little treats in each one. Some artists I like and some I wonder how they got a supes book. None I like as much as fjm.

Seriously risks, "jumping the shark." Have to handle well a reasonable disposition for that many powered opinions.

This has got to be the most ridiculous throwaway line I've ever heard and more crappy, unnecessary revisionism. Why couldn't those planets be populated within a thousand years? Why do they have to exist already?

Cosmic Boy even met his Earth human predecessor in the 20th century in his mini-series after the Crisis.

I'm so sick of DC's bad writing and editorial staffs.

I guess the point of views have all been squed!
All of those planets were started by the Dominion and Valor, post Crisis.

If he's not going to do that and Superboy is returning as the Legion's inspiration, TPTB have to come up with something to explain everything.

And I missed the Cos mini but it's probably a few reboots back, isn't it?

Anyway,
I feel bad for you NC.

And silly ole DC!
What dweebs they are.

Its had some good moments so far, keeping me interested in what they're doing, but some of it I don't like. The Kandorians killing those cops and Supergirl's mother being aware of it and even supporting it is a pretty moment. There will have to be serious retribution for that IMO, so Supergirl's Mom better be ready for a bad end at this story, or I won't feel satisfied.

I do like Supergirl's role thus far.

Generally, I dislike stories involving thousands of aliens on Earth or something similar because I've seen it 1,000 times before, and that's hurting things here.

I missed the reference Matlock mentioned and Nighty commented on--and now I wish I was never made aware of it

Yeah. I didn't like that explanation either. Seriously, what was wrong with the thought that Earth people within a thousand years colonize a planet, discovery a need to create specialized abilities and then bio-engineer those abilities and allow a few generations to hone them? Why does it all have to happen in the present and all at once?

And don't get me started on the Persuader!

Especially when you consider that about 35% of all science-fiction stories in the history of comic books in some way or form spring forward from this notion.

Oh! And the preview is here -

EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW: Superman fights for New Krypton in Geoff John’s ACTION COMICS!

Here's the page in question -

Very disappointing. Tharr and Braal have both been mentioned as human-settled worlds where the inhabitants developed their powers to survive the dangers of those worlds. Winath, I have no idea, but I've always thought of it as another earth-human settled colony world.

Titan, in the 20th century is a hunk of ice with a H'saan Nataal base on it, last I heard. I wonder how long it's going to be before it's retconned into having 'always been' inhabited by alien telepaths who look like exactly like Swedish swimsuit models...

Lame. And the idea of Superman resettling 'New Krypton' on Earth is such a colossally stupid move that I find it hard to believe he would have done it. Every page I see of this just reinforces what an obviously terrible idea it was, and makes Superman look like a chump, because every conversation I've seen is them explaining how they are going to just keep doing whatever the hell they want to anyway, humanity be damned.

It's not like the Kryptonians have any need for an atmosphere, or any of that jazz. He could have settled them on Mars, or Ganymede, or in some other system entirely. Heck, they could probably pick the city up and move it themselves...

I assume that the revision is just more proof (not that we need it) that whatever the Legion is going to be will be whatever Johns wants it to be. I guess this nearly had to be done to fit in with the Action story that implied that the Legion Founders are all "aliens" instead of inhabitants of Earth colonies. I am not endorsing the idea, just pointing out that we're still in for more irritating changes to the "original" Legion. Bah!

Funny that all the planets that were mentioned in the new issue were ones that had a Legion connection. It would have been a little less glaring if they'd thrown in some random made up planet, wouldn't it?

Isn't Ultraa supposed to be from the future?

Also, bah! Why is G.I. Robot always lumped in with the Creature Commandos! He's his own franchise! Okay, so I'm *really* nitpicking...but such is my right as the most legendary poster on Legion World!

But yeah Matt, I agree, if some more 'new' planets were thrown in, that would help things. Everyone tackling the Legion mythos, or even Superman's science-fiction related mythos should develop a new planet and leave their mark.

Woods' art is very nice. OTOH, if I never saw another superheroine with a Spears midsection, it would be too bleeping soon.

[sulk]

Kara needs her 70's outfit again.

She needs anything that would leave her navel to my imagination at this point. I'm not proud.

Either that, or we need a decade of male heroes running around with exposed navels in order to re-balance the multiverse. [snerk]

After the Bat-cod and the Bat-nipples, I'm sure that exposed Bat-midriff would have been in the next movie by Joel Schumacher...

See ? That's why you shouldn't ask for a Legion movie. The way things are going, they'll get Schumacher out of mothballs to direct it.

I'd rather it be Roger Corman. At least that way, less money would be wasted.

I agree.
(Love the art, hate the bellybutton.)

I also agree that Superman settling Kandor on Earth was pretty snarky.

For one thing, we know that Kandor ends up on that red sun planet where they're all afraid of not being in a bottled city.
At least that's the way it is now in the Legion continuity.
I guess it's going to change though.


Unfortunately, I rather prefer Brainiac as the source of new worlds (or not really the source, just the bottler) to the Dominators or even just a thousand years of fate.

And the story doesn't really say, yet, that any of these world's people have super powers.

Maybe they are placed on new worlds by the Kandorians, that would certainly be great mission for them,I think, certainly better than killing our whales and policemen.

I always thought that Valor doing it by himself was pretty silly.

The Kandorians might seed planets over the next thousand years, help the settlers gain powers to tame the worlds they get dumped on and then retire on that new Krypton world we saw.

That's pretty close to the original storyline, anyway.
Sort of.

uhh...wow i'm super surprised by the vehemence against the planets being alien. hahaha that seems so specific! i was completely unaware that braal et al were considered colonies... well there was that valor-seeding thing, is that what we're referring to? what other planets were previously considered colonies? most/all of them?

well i personally don't see a problem with those planets being....alien planets.

personally, i like it better because then it's more about diversity, it seems less of a metaphor for tolerance and acceptance if the "aliens" are just us separated by a few hundred years. and then you can have weirder cultural things.

i... prefer the latter. but you know, either concept offers interesting stuff to write about... but i just find the latter as more fertile ground. also apparently... new ground?! wow, i'm totally surprised!!

Wouldn't aliens look...alien? I doubt that evolution will always create anglo-saxons on every planet. (I'd rather read a story about how Kryptonians, etc. are descended through a time warp or something from Earth!)

Humans are diverse on Earth not because Europeans or North Americans popped out of the Earth whole. Poof! There's a human! They migrated from a central point in Africa and evolved different characteristics.

If Braal, Winath, and Tharr were shown exisiting in the 20th/21st century from the start, I'd have to accept it. But, they are from the 30th/31st centuries. It demonstrates a lack of creativity and common sense to have them be populated by Valor, Kandorians, Brainiacs, or whomever the hack writing team want to say it was this week.

Star Trek says that most, if not all, of our Galaxy's worlds were seeded by a single 'first-born' species over a billion years ago.
That worked for me.

And in Earth's history, a thousand years isn't all that big a deal.

The last HUNDRED has been pretty different, tech speaking, but the people are still in waring tribes, raiding and stealing, raping and stealing.

So I don't know how logical it would be to think Earth colonizes everywhere and produces super-beings.

Comics are comics, afterall.

I actively dislike the idea of the Legion being a "metaphor for tolerance and acceptance" even more than I dislike turning the Earth colonies into not being Earth colonies. And I pretty seriously dislike the latter.

Part of the reason I really like the idea of most Legion homeworlds being Earth colonies is that it really establishes the Legion as part of Superman's legacy. The fact that in the future the human race has expanded beyond its original world represents the fact that Superman's influence has allowed his adopted world to progress in a way that his birthworld never did.

re: NC- well i think the character design problem is a subject of its own. that's a problem of the legion being an old ass book. the first black person we got was tyroc, remember? if the legion was something new and fresh today (not a reboot, i mean actually a brand new series with no history to it), i have no doubt that the aliens would actually look diverse in their ethnicities, cultures, and designs. it's the sad fact that we should consider ourselves lucky that we got cham but again, if legion had been made later... think about L.E.G.I.O.N. and how diverse those characters were.

i'm fine with humanoids on other planets, for me it's the CULTURE that must be different. i know some people get hung up on science, or want an explanation like the Star Trek one but taht sort of this is always secondary to me, i guess. i try to see it from the writer's perspective. it's VERY common in sci-fi/fantasy/what have you to make the characters very OUTWARDLY similar. why? because then when the characters differ, it's even more surprising.

a very common example... wait, let me put my nerd hat on. ok, i'm ready.

ok there was this king and he asked this one people (People A) who burned their dead, 'how much money would it take to get you to eat your dead' and they said there was no amount of money that was enough! and then he asked another people, (People B) whose burial ritual was to eat their dead, how much money it'd take to get them to burn their dead. and they also replied that no amount of money was enough.

now imagine that situation is between a group of earthlings and a group of creatures that have really sharp teeth and claws and look like the dudes from Aliens. or even imagine they look like tribbles.

now imagine that they both look human! because indeed, this story is from herodotus and reportedly people A are the greeks while people B are a tribe from India if I recall correctly. it's a little bit freakier if People B look just like us, right?

so. sometimes, people are purposefully human-like. to make it freakier. it also helps people relate to the characters. even with L.E.G.I.O.N. and certain legion characters, people are simply LESS LIKELY to relate to characters that look stranger than what they're used to (Sneckie, anyone?). (which is a common basis for prejudicial behavior in the real world)

hell, i know people that cannot fathom or watch certain anime because their heads cannot get over the fact that what is being represented doesn't fit what they understand to be a person, and they find it difficult to relate.

i can understand the need for a science-reason, and yeah, i wish they'd clean up the gap between our time and legion time, but for me that's a always a secondary thing for me. hahaha my reply to these things is usually "IF IT WORKS I DON'T CARE" hahaha sorry ;_;

re: EDE - well i don't think those concepts are mutually exclusive. johns' point of view which was laid out pretty bluntly in LO3W is that superman was an inspiration for the UNITY and acceptance and tolerance of different planets, of teamwork. i think that's a better legacy than tech improvement, which they do HAVE in pretty much every version of the legion. i don't think any version ever classified the earth as backwater. in every version, the earth is the center of the UP, yes? that's superman's legacy.

i think superman symbolizing tolerance is just a touch more laudable than encouraging colonization and tech. furthermore, i think the legion standing for something laudable on its own is far more important than whether or not superman was bffs with them, hahaha.

the legion is made up of a bunch of people from different planets and with different powers and different cultures. their strength is their ability to work together! their amazing teamwork!

LONG POST IS LONG

Love the Dominators. They have a distinct look, a complete social context based upon environment and their biologically based culture and xenophobia I thought made a great base for the colonization stories. They were the Yuuzhan Vong before the Yuuzhan Vong were.

Not fond of the "Valor" tag line but did like the whole Invasion storyline and it's aftermath including the seeding. I'd have been fine if it had somehow been Mon-El, adding to the mythos of that character though I don't know how that could have been pulled off either pre or post Bob Cobb.

I just tend to think that all these attempts to try to import contemporary social issues into the 31st century tend to come off as heavy-handed and goofy. The idea that the Legion is some sort of Barney-and-Friends-esque group in which "Hey, I've got an antennae and you've got green skin and she's got six livers but we can all be friends!", and that they need to serve as an example to a population of Earthlings that are about two steps away from grabbing pitchforks and torches and burning the nearest alien just strikes me as completely wrong-headed. It was silly when they introduced Tyroc, and more recent variations of the same theme haven't been any more plausible.

I much preferred Paul Levitz's take on the Legion's time, which is that even a mildly optimistic view of what things will be like a thousand years in the future would be one in which racism (and speciesism, for that matter) is simply a non-issue. "I have a dream..." and all that. I tend to think that it will be pretty much a non-issue within the real world within, say 200 years at most, even without a Superman.

Superman's entire origin story (at least traditionally, since who knows what it will be about once Didio and Johns finish with it) is about a planet whose people are destroyed because they refuse to take the steps necessary to save themselves. They refuse to engage in space exploration. They refuse to listen to the warning of Jor-El when he tells them their planet is doomed. The idea that in the future humans will have gained both the technology and wisdom to live in harmony with their environment, as well as to spread themselves out to other worlds, where, through the use of science, they are able to modify themselves to deal with harsh environmental conditions such as the metal-monsters of Braal or the poisionous organic matter of Bismoll, just strikes me as much more in line with the basic themes of what the Superman story is all about.