Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Lardy's Roundtable: How forgettable or unforgettable was SLSH/LSH between Earthwar and Levitz II/Giffen?

I feel your pain, Lardy. I haven't followed the Legion since the threeboot began in 2004, except for a couple of issues of the threeboot and the pages of L3W posted online. My absence has partly been due to economic reasons, but also because I realize that DC, as a commercial company, will follow whatever trends it thinks will sell its products to its target audience (which, as I said in a previous post, appears to be 12- to 13-year-olds, not geezers like me and near-geezers like you. )

This does not mean I've given up on the Legion, per se. I continue to enjoy discussing the old stories, as we're doing here. In fact, I find new meaning in them through being able to share views with you and other fans, some of whom have widely different opinions. It's interesting to read what other fans value in Legion stories.

But I don't recognize the Legion I loved in either of the current versions. This may change in the future (as it did when I started reading the reboot in 1998, after a four-year absence), but I find that in the meantime I'm a lot less angrier and frustrated if I let sleeping monsters lie.

Me, too. I actually grew to love the reboot Legion in its own way. Alas, nothing lasts forever.

So in regards to the other candidates, pre-Vol. 3 #37, that could be precedents for reboots of the Legion:

How was what came after Adv. 247 "vastly different"? Costume changes? One slight name change? No bubble on Cos's head? I don't really see it. I've read many times that the story was written as a one-off and the creators didn't expect the fan response it got.

Whether intended or not, though, I look at 247 as Legion's pilot episode, the way pilots are made for TV in hopes that the network will like what they see enough to pick it up as a series. Often the original pilot filmed differs greatly from the version that finally ends up airing, some roles are recast, scenes reshot, new scenes added. When DC realized it might have something with this concept and eventually brought it backed, some things were tweaked. But overall, that said, I'd say very little of significance was tweaked from what we saw in 247, certainly not so much that we might need to see it rewritten and redrawn.

No reboot there, IMO.

I strongly disagree there, EDE. The Adult Legion story was fantastic, true, but no series that has had many, many different writers should be constricted by one of their predecessor's (albeit one of the best predecessors) ideas on what its future direction should hold. Yes, successors like Levitz and Roy Thomas were clearly in awe of the story and wanted to honor it by following up on the deaths and some of the personal developments foretold in it which lent the story validity beyond what Shooter had already followed up on during his run. But that still didn't mean that future was written in stone. If that were the case, every similar story in other series (like X-Men's "Days of Future Past" which actually involved interaction with the present-day characters, unlike the AL) would also have to be bound by them if some of the events hinted in them came to pass.

LSH 300 broke the chain, yes, but anything set in a future like AL was should be considered a possible future, especially if the series isn't guided by one hand from start to finish.

Comparing it to the Superboy thing just seems incredible to me. LSH #37-38 essentially devalued a beloved character that was the lynchpin of its established history. The story said he wasn't never who we thought he was, that he was, in fact, a pawn of the Legion's greatest enemy. For thirty damn years worth of stories, the Legion had interacted with and were inspired into being by a doppleganger?

Whether this could have made sense in the storyline or not is irrelevant--WE, the fans, knew it was a lie! WE KNEW DAMN WELL that Superboy wasn't from a Pocket Universe all that time! HE WAS THE REAL STEEL DEAL...until DC decided he wasn't anymore.

To me, that's a far, far cry from what was essentially a "What If?" story being discredited because a character prophesied to die lived instead.

(And, Eryk, please don't take the above as any kind of personal attack on you or your views. I just went with my raw, gut reaction to the comparison. )

Well, there was also a difference in how the Legionnaires' powers were depicted. Lightning Boy had to clap his hands in order to shoot lightning. Cosmic Boy had "magnetic eyes of super-power" which he got from drinking a serum. (No mention was made that all of his people had the same powers.)

An apt comparison, but it still makes it hard to reconcile the original version with later continuity.

To add to the incongruity, subsequent stories contained flashbacks to the Legion's first encounter with Superboy (such as SUPERBOY # 204)by showing the Legionnaires wearing their established Silver Age costumes, not the ones in ADV. 247. You would think they would have good memories of what they wore on that historic occasion.

I'm not asserting, by the way, that there was a reboot after ADV. 247. I was just responding to the poster Superboy's argument, which seems to suggest that everything from ADV. 247 through the PU was a unified, consistent timeline. It was not.

Wow, I got picked by these topics... Bear with me now...

Neither. I've always seen COIE primarily as a way of DC Comics incorporate its other company purchases (Shazam, Charlton etc). It was business, pure and simple - they wanted to put their characters in a single "chronology/universe". I've never bought the "it was difficult to follow" crap. Sales of DC were quite better than in early 80s. More marketing therefore, rather than "last stand".
Why? Well, as someone mentioned, not every character was "rebooted" or "retconned". In fact, some were rebooted way long AFTER Crisis (LSH, for instance, was never rebooted, which created the whole retcon issues). Others were taken out of continuity altogether (Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol).

Well, that depends. Byrne decidedly gave his own spin on what Superman was about, even giving a different explanation for his powers (solar battery). I lost Superman books for the last few years and I can say now that I don't have the slightest clue on what Busiek and Johns did to the character, except that it seems he has become the 30s hero again, and all his lore seems to be returning. Johns is clearly a Silver Age fanatic, since every single character he touches seems to be "returning" to their pre-Crisis ID. He did this to GL (very well, in my opinion), Superman (still waiting to see), LSH (not so much so far), JSA (nicely done also) and Booster Gold (writing him better than Jurgens ever did, but not as interesting as Keith - in spite of all the props Johns is inserting in the current run to JLI.
All-Star Superman is great, however, reminding me of Alan Moore's portrait in the 80s. But this is the kind of book that sounds more like Elseworlds and should be more constant at DC.

For me, she is still the same character, but screwed around by whoever was writing/editing her at the time. See also: Hawkman, Green Arrow, Aquaman. By the way, I like Truman's Hawkman and Grell's Green Arrow more than their pre-Crisis counterparts.

For the reasons above, yes, it would be inconsistent.

There are certain examples of that kind of thing in other media--whether it be Klingons not originally having bumpy foreheads, countless examples of recasting characters in certain series like how 'Face' wasn't originally portrayed by Dirk Benedict in the first actual aired episodes of "The A-Team" or the subtle and not-so-subtle changes made to the cast, overall tone and mythology of Buffy the Vampire Slayer between the feature film and the TV series--but I'd say they're all pretty cosmetic changes that enhanced the respective properties, rather than mutilated them.

Same goes for Legion, especially as they'd only had the one appearance portrayed that way. I'd say their are very, very few Legion fans, if any, who were hurt by that minor tweak compared to those hurt by what was done to Superboy and his legacy.

This was probably done to avoid confusing fans who weren't around for Adv. 247 and to avoid having to explain the discrepancies like Trek fans eventually forced producers of that franchise to explain the Klingon thing.

Maybe not, but it was pretty close. That and the tale where Supergirl joined and that LSH was explained as the originals' descendants (now that was a wtf moment I had reading the Archives! ) being the only real blips beforehand...and pretty minor ones, at that.

I wll pick just some parts of this massive text!

From the point of view of time and maybe fanboy-ism, yes. But from the point of view of business, I think DC made a HUGE mistake when they decided LSH should become a "friendlier" book. Like taking Batman and doing it like in the 60s because he had such a wider appeal back then. And this happened basically AFTER TMK's run (before that, most of the continuity problems were fandom based only and the book was never close to being cancelled). I remember that DC wanted two things:

1) Make LSH a kind of X-franchise (lots of characters? Lots of kids? You bet! Just like X-Men!);

2) Got the book back into what they thought (wrongly, IMHO) was the backbone of LSH: superpowered happy-go-lucky teenagers. LSH was the best-selling book at DC in the 80s, when they were hardly such teenagers anymore.

3) Get rid of things that actually mattered and sustained the book for so long: Legion lore, real time chronology, character development, reflection of its times. The whole Legion on the Run affair was so atrocious (hey, let's dress spandex again!) that DC FINALLY managed to put the book to the brink of cancelation.

IMHO, LSH as a superpowered teenage book with lots of spandex and funny names was possible in the 50s/60s. Nowadays, the very same concept is not as compelling or even novel anymore. 90% of what comes now is based on that. What should be still novel is a book with characters with real-time maturity. Adult sci-fi heroics anyone?

I never liked the ZH LSH because it was... just another teenage superpowered book. Sex, politics, history... All gone.
On the other hand, Zero Hour was about "putting DC's chronology back in place" and "restoring" the difficulties of time travel. Can anyone believe that? Awful as a plot, badly written (Captain Atom as villain? Puh-leez!) and chronology even more messed up than before (even more so than COIE!).

Wait a minute: wasn't Johns ALSO involved in this reboot? After all, he was behind Titans at that time, wasn't he? So, Johns is also to blame on that! And if you all noticed, the threeboot is actually the one closer to the original LSH concept as possible without including Superman. Johns just had to wait longer to get his wishes...

1) Shooter should continue to be the writer. He KNOWS how to pace a story and develop characters like none of most current top writers (who seemed to be stuck in "a shock per issue" to actually intrigue us anymore).

2) Oh, you know DC (or anyone) can't promise that!

But my guess is that whatever happened to LSH after Crisis will be considered Elseworld/Parallel Universe/Earth 86 or whatever. And the Time Trapper will be the main responsible for all these time anomalies (and - bingo - that's where Glorithverse/ Pocket Universe / 1,000,000 will reappear - after all, George Pérez said he will draw as many LSH as possible - not just the 3 worlds mentioned...). In the end, Johns will have his Superboy and the LSH back at the point he wanted. I just doubt that the other concepts (those mentioned above) will come along.

Excellent. I wholeheartedly agree with you, except that I don't think DC likes to reboot the LSH other than it is forced to do so in order to... recreate an event for LSH and see if it sticks. LSH worked best doing almost the opposite of what is the current view on comics (slow pacing, lots of characters, real time, adult characters, difficult lore, 'isolated' Universe)! In fact, in most public forums, the proponents of Kid Legion are way more vocals than us [us as in 'not giving a damn about teen books']. I've yet to see an interview questioning if DC didn't make a huge mistake by changing LSH's whole concept.

Nightcrawler just gave you the succinct version...but basically he's exactly right. As for the juicy tell all details, if you'll allow me...


I hope Ricardo reads this too.

I'm going to give you this story directly from the mouths of Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum, and Mark Waid...as told in the Legion companion.

Disclaimer: I'd like to give both you and Ricardo a warning that this is going to be a far cry from what you think lead to the creation of your beloved 5YG Legion. I'm not saying you shouldn't like it BTW, and I'm also not saying it wasn't good. But I am saying it was produced in an environment where there was little or no communication between the Legion team and DC brass, with the Legion team basically being kept in the dark, and their hands were tied creatively at basically every turn. Under the cirumstances what they produced was very good, the fact that he even attempted it is pretty amazing, but the cirumstances that lead to the mass confusion were impossible to avoid when looking back in hindsight.

The funniest thing is that while you guys loved the dystopian future, the highlight for me was the Matter Eater Lad stuff, that was funniest stuff in Legion History, yet it came out of the darkest era. I'm not real big on killing characters, I think it will ultimately hurt more than it helps, and great writer doesn't need to kill characters to tell a memorable story.


But there's absolutely no doubt that this isn't the Legion that TMK intended on writing when they first took on the assigment and DC dicated the terms of that Legion tyranically...or should I say DC allowed the Superman creative team to do so.


I don't think Giffen, Waid or the Bierbaum's have the complete and total picture, but if you listen to all their separate interivews together, you get a pretty clear picture.

If you throw in the comments by John Byrne from his forum where says he basically told DC he was destroying the Legion in his Superman revamp and they seemingly weren't paying attention, and Paul Levitz interview in the TLC about the Pocket Universe stuff...the picture becomes perfectly clear.

Ultimately DC flat out didn't care about the Legion or it's fans. They took them for granted 100%, and they also underestimated their tenacity...which was kind of stupid on their part looking back on the history of the Legion and the role their extremely organized and devout fans have played in shaping and saving the team.

But yeah...we and the Legion, we're the redheaded stepchild of DC and it's fans, and really we always have been.


And away we go:

Mark Waid

TLC: When you look back at your time editing the Legion what are you now most proud of?

MW: Not going to prison for murder. What a suicide assignment that book was. Jesus. I was told by management to let Keith Giffen go nuts, to let him have his head because after all, he'd given us the Justice League and had a well deserved track record of success. And I trusted Keith to entertain me and entertain the readers and whatever vision he had, I just stepped back and let him run with it for better or worse. It was darker, denser and far more complex than what I would have preferred, and poor Tom and Mary Bierbaum, the scripters, paid the price because I was always nitpicking them to death and putting the burden on them for clarity, but at the end of the day, I felt good that Keith Giffen had a vision that was going places. And then the Superman Ripple Effect Hit. Already the Legion continuity had been plauged by revisions in mainstream DC continuity. We'd been told that we could no longer make reference to Rond Vidar as a Green Lantern: we'd been told, thanks to Hawkworld rebooting Hawkman, that Thanagarians could no longer be in continuity( is this why Dawnstar was completely unrecognizable? - sboy). There were other instances of similar madness but what killed us, killed any momentum, and killed any chance Legion Vol. 4 had for a linear narrative that might have actually brought new readers in, was the Superman Ripple Effect. Because of interoffice politics and machinations that make no sense to me to this day, it was decided that not only was there no Superboy, but we weren't even allowed to reference the him at all. We were not allowed to make reference to the Pocket Universe that he came from, and we were ordered to rewrite Legion history to eliminate his presence from it altogether. Even Mon-El could not longer be called "Mon-El", we were told because the "El" name "belonged exclusively to Superman"
The disastrous long term effect this had on the Legion is still felt to this day. The roots for the entire series were umdermined, and from that point on, every story any editorial or creative team engineered as a "fix" just made things worse and more complicated.

TLC: Was it easier when Keith was no longer plotting the book, or was it past that point by then?

MW: I was long gone by that time. I was out of DC Editorial after issue 5 of the relaunch and so I watched the rest of the tide of destruction clinging to the nearest sandbar in the distance.

End.

Waid places a lot of blame on DC editorial...but he also seems to indicate that as far as he knew, Giffen was responsible for a good deal of it.

You will see a similar theme in the Bierbaum's interview.

However once you read Giffen's interview and what he was intending, a different picture emerges. It becomes pretty clear that Giffen was the guy more on the inside than Waid or the Bierbaum's(which shouldn't have been the case with the Waid's editorship in a pro environment) but he was getting editorial edicts that undermined everything he was intending to do as well.


But first...Tom and Mary...

Tom and Mary Bierbaum

TLC: When did you start to feel the support of DC Slip away?

TB: It was a very ongoing situation. I think from day one, there were people who were not very pleased with the approach. Within just a couple of issues there were speciffic objections or continuity conflicts that were arising that were creating difficulties with other books. SO there really was a negativity and a controversy from day pretty much from the get go. I don't think it got necessarily better or worse. Really, after 5 issues, it was basically the way it was going to be, and what happened after that was that it played out it's course. Keith told the story for as long as he continued to want to be on the book, and when it got to the point that there were other things he was more interested in doing, he moved on. From that point on I think the book was going to go in the direction other people at DC wanted it to go in. DC remained behind the book supported it for as long as Keith was on it and the company was willing to give him the chance to do what he wanted to do.

TLC: What, exactly what said about Superboy?

TB : I don't that I want to get into a whole lot of details, other than to say there was a decision made at some point that we should not be using indentifiable elements of the Superman Universe. Because of various continuity issues, the decision was made that we shouldn't be using elements of the Superman mythos in our book, and that put us into a position to say, "Should we just move on and tell stories with no mention of Superboy at all?". We had a lot of different storylines in mind that involved Superboy as an important element of the Legion's history. So probably one of the more interesting decisions we made, and certainly one which many people can second guess, was that we would take Superboy out of the Legion so we could tell historic stories without the existence of Superboy there.

TLC: You were given credit with co-plotting along with Keigth Giffen and sometimes Al Gordon. If you were to break that down into percentages who would you say did what percentage?

TB: It was absolutely Keith's book. People need to keep in mind that he the credit, and if you're upset with what he did, he probably gets the blame. He was certainly the person whose vision was being realized.


End.

So again, they seem to think Giffen was basically getting what he wanted, in fact they even seem to think it was the decision of the Legion creative team to remove Superboy from the Legion's history. Not surprising given that was their first major assignment with a publisher. They were definitely dead last in the lines of communication being so new to the business.


And at last Mr. Giffen, so far, he appears to be the villian, at least partially...and this is where the picture of what happened becomes pretty clear, not to mention the horrible creative environment, and editorial meddling, obstructing and outright sabotage under which the 5YG was produced. You also get the picture that had Giffen been allowed to do what he wanted...he would have left the Legion in better shape than he got it(aside from the Superman stuff).

Keith Giffen

TLC:How shortly after you relaunched the Legion did you start to feel that DC wasn't supporting it, or that the support which you had for it was slipping away?

KG: I forget what provoked the confrontation, but there was a confrontation with the Superman group. I've often wondered, "Did I have anything to do with that?" cause I seem to remember walking in and finding out we could no longer use ANY SUPERMAN MYTHOS retroactively. And I thought, "What does that mean?, 'retroactively'? Does that mean I've got a group here that's been influenced by a character who I'm not allowed to acknolwledge?". And that was why the HourGlass issue came about. [LSH V4 #5 - ED ]. But it was that early that everything started falling apart.

snippets from the rest of this quote:

KG: We tried to salvage everything that was humanly possible in that book. There were times when I thought, "why am I bothering?" I'm over here, I'm trying really hard to respect the book, and I'm just getting nailed for it. But that's part and parcel of the business.

TLC: Didn't DC want you to start completely over from scratch at one point?

KG: Yes, at one point I was taken out to lunch and they said, "Why don't you just get rid of everything? It's too complicated." But that would have meant not only saying to the Legion Fans, "Oh by the way, the last thirty years? [laughs] F*CK you, It would also have meant doing what I brought the book 5 years ahead to avoid doing(dismantling Levitz Legion), and I couldn't do it. I remember saying, "absolutely not, " and that was the beginning of the end there.

TLC: On a scale of one to ten, how close did you get to telling the story you wanted to tell?

KG: Five. I got about halfway there.


TLC: So what would we have seen had you stayed?

KG: Had I stayed and not been interfered with, the SW^ batch would be discovered to be the real Legion. THe conspiracy theory was true. They were taken and stuffed aside somewhere-- put in statis. My guys-- the guys I'd been playing with-- were clones. THe war to free Earth would have been much bigger and more spectacular and had real moments of tragedy. Then, when Earth was freed, the kids would inherit Earth and the United Plantes and whatever team was gonna continue with the Legion of Superheroes would move it slowly back to that good future. My guys, what was left of them, would wander off to another solar system where they would become the last bastion of law and order before they uknown and the would call themselves The Omega Men and we'd revive that team.


End.

There was another segment where Giffen also talks about how he quit the book several times(the notorious fill in issues).

As you can see, Waid thought Giffen basically was getting to do what he wanted, the Bierbaum's thought he was happily getting to do what he wanted.


Yet according to Giffen DC was pressuring him for a complete and total reboot from the get go, and the wheels were falling off as early as the Mon-El revamp, and his rememberance of the Superman issue is flat out called a confrontation.

All of them cite the Superman Team as the main problem. All of them cite issue #5 as the point where the wheels came off.

It was not their decision to reboot that continuity.


Ironic...I remember Mark Waid confronting John Byrne about similar changes to Superman at a con one times.


The other interesting thing is that they couldn't use the Pocket Universe...after all, after John Byrne eliminated Superboy, and Supergirl died in Crisis, John Byrne and Mike Carlin went right into that same Universe themselves to create their Supergirl.


What do John Byrne and Mike Carlin both have in common? They both hate Jim Shooter...what was Shooter's greatest legacy in the DC Uni? His Legion. And um...John Byrne freely admits he hates the Legion.


You don't think Carlin is that small? He's allegedly the guy that killed Shooter's last Legion story.


You know it's funny...Mike Carlin's status has recently been on the upswing at DC again...after he bailed out Countdown..in fact I belive he's now editing Trinity the new weekly...think that has anything to do with Shooter's recent rumored issues?

Mike Carlin needs to be fired from DC, he needed to be fired decades ago for his lack of professionalism...in particular his relations with the Legion creative teams.


In a nutshell...everything done with the Legion has been a result of people that don't know the Legion, don't like the Legion, or don't care about the Legion, being allowed to trample all over it.

The creators? They've just been the guys DC put the bullseyes on.


Geoff Johns should be cheered by all Legion fans as he's a guy with Byrne type creative pull...and he wants to fix the Legion, not ruin it. No other creator with his kind of pull has been on the Legion, perhaps ever....hopefully he'll be able to pull off a lasting fix.


As for his propensity for killing characters...he's going to have to work really hard to top Paul Levitz kill total on the book.

I can certainly sympathize with your perspective there, Ricardo. Like I said, the reason it worked for me originally was because it felt like the same book as Legionnaires (featuring SW6) had been pre-ZH with that same basic take I enjoyed. Yes, it hurt a lot to lose all that history, but I guess I'd already warmed up to SW6 as a kind of primer for what was to come with the reboot. I didn't love every minute of it, but it was already familiar to me for that reason.

Quote

Wait a minute: wasn't Johns ALSO involved in this reboot? After all, he was behind Titans at that time, wasn't he? So, Johns is also to blame on that! And if you all noticed, the threeboot is actually the one closer to the original LSH concept as possible without including Superman. Johns just had to wait longer to get his wishes...

Johns wrote the Titans/Legion special that served as a finale of sorts for the reboot (and which featured a short preview by Waid & Kitson of the new series), but the whole "reimagining", as 3Boot was referred to, was borne of Waid's and Kitson's imaginations from all reports, not from Johns or any other influence.

I do want Shooter to be involved long-term, but barring that, as I fear, I'd at least like to see his story arc finished.

We'll see, my fear is that DC will only mess it up even moreso with L3W. It seems likely they'll either eliminate all but one version or sloppily try to amalgamate them all into one. I'd personally rather see the disparate versions all have a chance to continue on and hence have the opportunity to be revisited. I'm not optomistic...

I highly reccomend that book by the way...it's full off all sorts of interesting details...

Curt Swan? Absolutely hated drawing the Legion. So much so that he threatened to retire if DC tried to put him back on the book after Byrne took over Superman.


Al Plastino? The artistic co-creator of the Legion? Doesn't even remember creating them. Didn't even recognize them when he was shown them(his version). He actually had to examine the work to make sure it was his own, and he still didn't remmember creating them.


I guess my dream of getting Al(who's still alive and working) to do a 50th anniverisary Legion Painting of ALL the Legionaires from every version is out of the question


Yeap...we've always been the redheaded stepchild.

Superboy, you have a way with words, my friend! I enjoy the passion behind them, and you certainly fueled the direction this topic has taken the last few days with how I reacted to your posts in the Shooter thread.

You're right--enough is enough! And I certainly hope your faith in Geoff Johns is well-placed. He's a giant in the industry at the moment, and he has a pretty good track record with his "fixes"...so let's knock on wood, cross our fingers, rub our rabbit's feet, etc. because he may represent the Legion's last chance if Shooter's out of the picture.

This is exactly the same story I knew. So this is hardly a surprise for me. And I know from another interview that Keith also intended that his issues #13 featured the return of Superboy/Superman to the book. Actually, that would be the plot for the first year.

So, to my knowledge:

1) Keith had creative freedom to do whatever he wanted, except tell the story he intended to in the first place (meaning = his story was being cut short and having to be developed sometimes on the go);

2) He respected Legion history by refusing to boot it. Kudos to him.

3) He didn't change his storyline but had to adapt it to "fix" DC's editorial mishaps. More kudos to Giffen, because he told a goddamn great saga in spite of it all.

4) T&M didn't quite get/like what Keith was doing (that's the sense I get from the Companion interview). Moreover, since they were the nitpicking "chronology buffs", they were more pressed than Giff' on that. Since their solo run on LSH was to say the least disastrous, we know who was right.

5) Byrne and Carlin were ultimately responsible for complicating things around for the LSH. But the great V4 run was Keith's mostly solo doing.

I don't see how these interviews might change what I felt about TMK's run. If you are talking about retcons/reboots, I still stick to my opinion. Which is worthless, if you come to think of it...

The amalgam version would be (IMHO) the ultimate disaster. Timelines would be further complicated, the "Power Girl/Hawkman" syndrome forever inprinted... No, it's better to stick to one version and have the other ones as Earth-2 type of stories.

Knowing a bit of Johns' style, I don't doubt he might pull an adult LSH version as a sort-of JSA to the Shooter's LSH....

[/b]

For one thing, it's not just Shooter's one story that's at issue here. The Adult Legion appeared a number of times in the Silver Age. And their appearance weren't just a "What if?" or "Imaginary" story or something like that. They were a part of the Silver Age DC continuity.

Sure, the existence and revealed details about the adult Legion constrained writers. This fact went back to the death and resurrection of Lightning Lad, a storyline which was driven in part by the fact that we "knew" that the Adult Lightning Man was married to Saturn Woman.

But here's another title/property that was equally as constrained by the character's revealed future history: Superboy. Complaining about the constraints that were imposed on the Legion by its need to conform to the Adult Legion stories is exactly like complaining about Superboy's stories lacking drama because we all "knew" the fates of the characters: that Ma and Pa Kent would eventually die and Clark would move to Metropolis, etc.

There's no essential difference in kind between revealing that the teen Legion whose adventure we'd been reading wouldn't grow up to be the adult Legion whose stories we read in the 60s and revealing that the teen Superboy whose adventures we'd been reading wouldn't grow up to be the Adult Superman of the mainstream DCU.



"Set in the future" is an ambiguous term when it comes to the Legion, however. The AL stories were "set in the present" from the perspective of Superman's experiences being the "present DCU". In fact, most classic LSH stories are "set in the past" in one sense, because they are revealing the past adventures of Superman when he was a boy.

I think a lot of people forget this about the classic Legion, that a significant part of what made it unique is that it was actually two-steps removed from the "mainstream DCU". Not only was it a thousand years in the future, but it's primary connection to the past was to a character who was fifteen years off from the rest of the DCU. Only All-Star Squadron, which was both on another Earth and forty years in the past had a similar advantage of two-step isolation from the rest of the DCU, and both were pretty much destroyed by Crisis and its insistence on a tightly "integrated" universe.

If it were up to me... I think they should've just declared that the whole Legion exists in a "Pocket Universe" after Crisis, and just cut all ties with the post-Crisis DCU. That wasn't an option given the over-arching philosophy of the company at the time, however.

But what you are pointing to is mostly just a difference in scope between the two events. And I agree about that. But I think you are greatly minimizing the extent to which the Adult Legion stories were taken as gospel by Legion fans as well as creators. Read the v3 letter columns, and note the fact that even well after LSH #300 fans are writing in suggesting Levitz go ahead and kill Shadow Lass... after all they KNEW DAMN WELL that she was eventually going to buy it.

Roughly speaking, I'd distinguish the following types of continuity changes (leaving aside disputes about what they should be named):

Type 1: Unrevealed events from the past are revealed, that are nonetheless consistent with everything that has happened thus far. Ex: ordinary flashbacks.

Type 2: Unrevealed events from the past are revealed, that are mostly consistent with everything that has happened previously, but give a radically different spin on a particular character or events. Ex: R.J. Brande being revealed to be a Durlan.

Type 3: Moving timeline stuff. So events that happened in Korea now happen in Vietnam or the Gulf War or whatever, but with a minimum of change in the actual events.

Type 4: New stories feature elements that contradict some established fact that has not been referenced in quite some time. These were quite common during the Goldern/Silver/Bronze Age. Ex: Lois Lane having a niece who stops appearing in stories, and then ten years later her only sister turns up single and childless.

Type 5: Established facts about a characters "future" are changed, while their "past" is left intact. Ex: Superboy not growing up to be Superman, the Legion not growing up to be the "Adult Legion".

Type 6: Deliberate changes to significant events of a character's past. Major stories happened, but not in exactly the way they actually happened as published. Ex: 5YL Legion, Post-Crisis JLA, etc.

Type 7: The entirety of a characters history is wiped away, beginning everything afresh. A complete reboot. Ex: Byrne Superman; Reboot and Threeboot Legions.

Thanks for your long posting, Superboy. It's been some time that i read the Companion. Some things in its coherences were new to me, but the question that stays unanswered is...

WHY?

Why did TPTB suddenly change their politics? Why was it such a big problem if there was a Superboy - or an EL - mentioned in the Legion? There seems to be no reason behind this decision, as the Legion never threatened to attack Supermans flagship status...

Considering all these facts, it still is quite remarkable that 5YL was - and still is - such a good read. I don't want to start about what it might have been without all this silly ruckus. Though I still think that the Legion Clone idea would have been the ultimate neckbreaker, and that's the only thing I'm happy about - when Giffen left, he took his clone idea with him... Spiderman Clone debacle anyone?

Well, basically, we got another debacle instead...

Superman sales had totally tanked in the 80s... besides recruiting Byrne and relaunching Supes sans Superboy, the S books also had complete sprockwads of editors who threw their weight around solely because they could.

For DC, restoring Supes to predominance trumped other concerns; "continuity" was even more of a carpet-to-be-pulled out from under anyone than it is today.

Brilliant, Eryk! That clarifies a lot of things.

Well said, Superboy.

One of the central aspects of the pre-Crisis Superman was that he was a character anyone could identify with, particularly most comics fans who, because comics were regarded as the literature of children and simpletons, had to hide their hobby or defend it against much more powerful adversaries (e.g., schoolyard bullies).

So, you have the pre-Crisis Superman, who hides who he really is and pretends to be a powerless weakling just so he can interact with normal humans and have a semblence of normal relationships. He further has to hide his true identity in order to protect his friends from his enemies. This was analogous to the way many comics fans felt--or kids in general who weren't necessarily jocks or popular. Superman gave them a reason to believe that they, too, possessed a secret identity with special gifts that had yet to be recognized.

But if Clark Kent is a jock, then he has no reason to be Superman, IMO. I don't know if kids of that era could identify with him, but I would think he would send them the wrong message: Unless you're already popular and a winner, forget it!

Another compelling aspect of the pre-Crisis Superman was that, despite all of his power, he couldn't save the people he loved most. This instilled in him humility and humanity, traits that were seemed missing from the Byrne Superman.

Sure, but it's still an inconsistency that's not easy to resolve.

I'd question whether or not anyone was actually "hurt" by any of the changes the Legion has gone through. We may not like the changes; we may get angry and frustrated with some of them, but if it goes beyond that, we have only ourselves to blame for taking it too seriously.

Also, whether or not anyone was hurt by a change is irrelevant to the fact that a change actually occurred. Since Eryk is convincingly arguing that the PU Superboy retcon was of the same type of change as the Adult Legion retcon, I think the same logic applies here: The LSH, as depicted in ADV. 247, is fundamentally different than the LSH depicted later in the Silver Age. The fact that this change affected only one story (albeit the Legion's first story!) or that no one seems to mind does not make it any less of a change.

This, however, does not make it a reboot (a Type 7 change, in Eryk's parlance), but more of a Type 6 change.

I'm sure that it was. But a discrepancy is still a discrepancy.

That period was too far in the past for me to remember who TPTB were at time, but just who was
it that kept saying yes to everything the Superman team wanted (they also pulled Superman out of the JLA retroactively) and no to the Legion team. I know Jeanette Kahn was still the big cheese back then and Paul Levitz was just starting to climb the corporate ladder at DC. Can anyone name names? Just who were the decision makers? Who took Giffen out to lunch and told him he should reboot the Legion?

Maybe that's where Giffen got the inspiration for the Rokk's dinner with Mordru...

Don't know who but at that time Karen Berger was just moving to start Vertigo, Mark Waid was to be the new LSH editor, Paul Levitz had just quit all his writing assignments to become just VP and Mike Carlin was ultimately handling (and having TPTB) all Superman decisions.
I'd vote for Mark Waid on that idea (he was involved in both reboots and also on Legionnaires a few years before the first reboot).

I'm sorry--I remembered it wrong, Eryk. But even googling it, every link I sampled goes back to Shooter's two-parter, so I assumed that was the only "Adult Legion" story. But I showed my non-encyclopedic knowledge of Legion history by forgetting the context of the earliest appearances of the adult LSV and the adult LSH counterparts.

Am I correct, at least, in that the teenage versions never met their adult LSH or adult LSV counterparts? That would in essence give writers an "out" particularly back in the days of the multiverse, if they wanted, by explainingg the adults Superman met may not have been from the same Earth. However, that could open up another slimy can of worms, so I won't go too far down that path.

In any case I doubt that pointing out these were essentially Superman stories would dissuade you from further debate. However, many sources that I've skimmed before this posting refer to the appearance with Tarik the Mute and the school as the first canonical appearance of the LSV. That implies that the early appearances you refer to are 'not' considered canonical.

And the most pivotal Adult Legion story, the one written by Shooter, was self-contained without time travel or interaction with Superman like the others. Obviously, that story contained the bulk of the glimpses into the future (other than the Garth/Imra marriage possibly being referenced in the prior stories?), so it could be argued it wasn't necessarily canonical and more like a "What If?" scenario (albeit one seemingly validated by 'coming true' in subsequent stories).



I'd have to respectfully disagree. The drama of Superboy was pretty nonexistent for obvious reasons. But in Legion's case there were only a handful of stories about their adult adventures...very, very few by comparison. Superman's adventures were being chronicled in numerous titles every month: Action, Superman, JLA, World's Finest, various guest appearances--can the adult Legion and the few glimpses we got really compare to new adult Superman adventures of approximately 100 or more original pages a month, hugely outnumbering the pages of original Superboy material?

The difference is that Superman was more important than Superboy in DC's publishing plan and the teen Legion was certainly even more important than the occasional story featuring them as adults. The adult version certainly never got a feature to expand and more greatly define their lore. Superboy's adventures at least did merit features.

In a real way, though, the LSH was a way for Superboy to make his mark as being a significant period in Superman's life. Sure, Superman interacted with the teen and adult LSH to an extent, but the LSH was still a part of Superboy lore primarily and a part of Superman's secondarily and by extension. For such a constrained character, Superboy still had Ma and Pa, Lana Lang, Pete Ross, Krypto, the underground tunnel and, of course, the LSH pretty much all his own.

But at the same time they were the same character. Superman remembered his adventures with the LSH. And if Superboy was in the Pocket Universe, then so was Superman. But when Superboy was killed---well, yeah, it's a mess. The Pocket Universe "reveal" just plain didn't make sense.

I don't think invalidating the Adult Legion stories hurt nearly as much or made fans feel that kind of violation. Yeah, there were certainly some hardcores whose feathers were ruffled, I'm sure. But unless I'm just living in the Phantom Zone, I can't see that there's any real comparison.

Oh, there's definitely a big difference in scope, but there's no "just" about it. Scope in this argument is everything when you're comparing heaps and heaps of continuity to just a handful of stories. If you really think about my arguments above, there's simply no comparison!

I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, but here goes: let's say I'm listing the great loves of Batman's life, and I really want to just hit it out of the park with a big punch. Who do you mention? Who has really had the big impact in fans' memories? Probably Catwoman, Talia al Ghul and maybe Silver St. Cloud.

You could argue that Shondra Kinsolving and Vesper Fairchild should be there too because of their involvement in two impact storylines. But who ever mentions those two anymore, really? Some people reading this thread might have to Google them to either jog their memories or to learn who they were in the first place. Much less so the others (though Silver may be more obscure than I'm thinking).

If you take out Vesper or Shondra, would many fans really care? Silver? Many more would care, I think. Selina or Tali? FuhGEDaboudit!

Scope or impact is everything. The importance of Superboy in Legion history and the fact that he was Superman, to me, is much, much, much larger than the importance of those Adult Legion tales. You acknowledge this yourself. Value, scope, impact...are everything. Obviously, there are many different roadmaps to individual Legion fans, but I'd wager the Superboy issue would be greatly more important to the majority of them than the canonicity of the AL stories.

How many fans left after LSH 300? Probably not too many (if any at all). After v3 #38? Probably a lot. After Valor replaced him? Probably even more. After Zero Hour? Hmmm....

Again, scope is everything, EDE, and taking Superboy out put us on a downward spiral, whether we realized it at the time or not. Big difference between that and pissing off some purists after #300.



Nothing to disagree with there. But unless DC decides to just lose the whole 'LSH is the future of the DCU' concept, it'll never happen. They just don't get that that has never been a big part of the property's appeal. It's always been set apart, and the brass should just let it be its own thing as another timeline if need be.