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 was never that fond of the Tornado Twins, I guess, because I had read their first story (ADVENTURE # 373) long after it was widely known that they were Barry Allen's descendents. The entire story is built around the mystery of who they are and why they are doing seemingly despicable things. (It's a classic practical joke-type story, in the manner of the Legion's own first appearance.) Once you know going into the story that they are the Flash's descendents, it takes the wind out of the story's sails.

I don't have an opinion about their sacrifice in either TMK or the reboot. In the first case, they had been forgotten for so long that it was almost like throwing out the baby's clipped toenail with the bathwater. In the second case, their deaths were nothing more than back story for XS.

Apart from the Flash tie-in, is there any other reason why some find the Allens appealing?

I doubt if they would be all that appealing without the Flash tie-in, Huey. Maybe, like I said before, there's a subconscious link in fans' minds based on both the Legion and Flash representing time travel for DC that contributes. I dunno.

I'd say they never really appeared enough to have any real following, per se, but the Legion hasn't really thrown in all that many characters with the bloodlines of the contemporary universe. The only really major ones were the Twins and Laurel Kent (I don't really think Ollie Queen's descendant counts as "major"). If the Legion writers had done that to death, I think there would have been more of a fan backlash over the Legion possibly becoming more of a legacy-type book. This would have really derailed the whole concept. Certainly, one of the Legion's biggest keys to their success has been it's more self-contained nature, so that kind of approach would've really undermined it.

But these appearances have always been few and far between, so we fans tend to react in a positive manner. And it certainly doesn't hurt that Barry Allen is one of the most beloved comics characters of all time, his stories having helped define DC's Silver Age and his death (until recently) having been one of those very few that stuck.

Personally, I'd never want the Legion to become a showcase for DCU descendants, but a few winks here and there haven't hurt.

I read it sometime ago, so bear with me on the lack of details. But basically, I was very moved by the way they sacrificed during that storyline, in a way a real Flash would sacrifice. The story itself, being told as a newscast (I think) made it even more touching, in its "alienating" approach. One of the great moments of TMK's exhilarating run. I also liked the idea to see Iris coming upfront out of the shadows of Barry Allen (a plot that was forgotten once Keith left the book, apparently).
And I simply liked the concept of twin brothers and how they had to be sent to the 30th Century in order to survive. It made them more special, I guess.
XS was - to me - exactly the opposite: she was a Kid Kid Flash. Nothing else. Same concept, same idea behind (a Legacy character). I mean, Impulse was also a Kid Kid Flash. And the Reboot was so bad I don't even recall the Twins existed under that regime. Lucky me, I guess.

I'd heard of the Twins long before I'd ever seen them in print. In order of my seeing them, they were in "Who Shot Laurel Kent?" their execution in TMK, the XS origin, and finally the Adventure.

I think whatever appeal they had was as an accent, a hint, a subtle tie to Flash/DC mythis; their best use was their execution under TMK. I also found TMK's use of Iris masterful; she worked as a full-fledged but off-camera character that also was a nice subtle tie-in.

I appreciate XS far more than the Twins themselves; I think they made more impacts dead than alive, whether TMK, with Impulse or XS. Kind of like Barry himself seems more mythic after he'd been killed off.

XS was a natural fit; an actual legacy character who worked, fit in, and was a great character in her own right; the flash tie-in was just a bit of icing.

The only other legacy character I can think of working well is Laurel Kent (pre-crisis), but even then she made a better wanna-be than she would have been a Legionnaire, bringing nothing new to the team.

They were twin brother and sister, by the way, Ricardo.

Certainly, the murder of the Tornado Twins added another level of tragedy to the TMK epic. It showed there were other heroes out there making sacrifices to win back Earth, other than just the Legionnaires. And the extra tragedy that these two were Barry's legacy made it almost unbearable (we didn't know they had kids, yet). A very moving part of the whole tapestry.

I wonder, though, when exactly was it made clear that the Twins were Barry's children, as opposed to his descendants? I'm pretty sure they were presented more as descendants in their first appearance. Was their appearance in TMK the confirmation? Maybe that last issue of the Flash? Anyone know?

The last issue of The Flash did not touch on the Tornado Twins' existence, as I recall.

The issue (# 350) did end with Barry Allen--having been convicted of murder and having changed his face (a long, convoluted story)--going to live with Iris in the 30th century. That must be where the idea came from that Don and Dawn were his children, not his great-great-etc.-grandchildren. They were simply referred to as his descendents before that.

I don't remember Iris's role in TMK. In what issues did she appear or was referenced? In what issue was the Tornado Twins' death revealed? I'll have to re-read those issues to see if time gives me a different perspective on their role therein.

It is on LSH v4 # 17, the back-up story (pages 20-24). I just skimmed through it. Just beautiful.
Kind of like Sue Digby's death in Identity Crisis... NOT.

Thanks, Ricardo. Number 17, unfortunately, is one of the few TMK's I still don't have.

Good to know there is still something to look forward to.

Iris was Delvin's boss in TMK, right?

I don't recall if she was his boss, but she was definitely a reporter for the same newsmedia. But I guess you are right, it sounds right to me.

Sounds right to me, as well, Ricardo, though I don't have perfect recall on it. Damn--TMK was just loaded with rewarding Easter Eggs, wasn't it?

Post-Zero Hour, it really seemed that Mark Waid adapted the scenario of what happened to the Twins and Iris during TMK in his Flash run. The main difference, IIRC, is that the Twins died like a few years before the Legion was founded. Iris then returned to the present with her grandson, the rescued Impulse, in order to enlist her nephew's aid in helping Bart with his condition.

Does anyone remember what threat the Twins died fighting during this revised timeline? Their Wikipedia entry refers to the TMK death with no reference to a post-ZH version, but it had to have changed when that continuity was wiped out, right?

As I recall, they were executed by President Thawne (Chu's predecessor).

Not only in that area: skimming through some lettercols (I think it was on #35 or something, I found a feverish defense of TMK by none other than David S. Goyer!

She was actually referred to numerous times over at least several issues (teens and 20s,. don't recall her in the 30s) but never actually appeared in person. Some of theback-up features, if I recall right, do refer to her as DP editor, and yes, she was ID'd several times as Devlin's boss.

This was basically skimmed over in XS' story in LSH Annual #6. They were approached by someone who knew the "family secret" to be a hero by freeing people from a clandestine Dominator experiment on Earth.

But they were "inexperienced at the hero thing...they were both brutally killed."

Interesting that DC thought it was necessary to reboot the Legion after TMK supposedly ruined it, but a story element from it was essentially kept intact (albeit with a little retconning) to give some speedsters a little backstory. Other characters got a new lease on life with the reboot--why not the Tornado twins?

Looks to me like Bart Allen was introduced around the same time (1994) as the reboot, so Waid didn't HAVE to keep that element intact if he didn't want to. Wikipedia says the Reboot era began in October, and Bart had been introduced in June. With Waid involved in both comics, he obviously knew the reboot was coming. I'd rather Waid have given them another fate under the circumstances.

Bart was actually sort-of mentioned in the Twins' obit back in v4 #17(or thereabouts) and Don's infant son Barry.

Winema Wazzo was also (first?) mentioned during TMK (#2) altohugh she never got an on-stage appearance until Reboot.

Waid, for better or worse, did what he did presumably to (try to) build the best story possible under the circumstances. Ultimately, that is a better route to go than being a boring slave to continuity, but of course the best option is to craft the very best stories while drawing as much upon backstory as possible.

Basically, he tried to keep the present-day story going through Zero Hour, as most titles did.

Why is it that I would say "continuity be hanged as long as you give me good stories" for just about any other book EXCEPT for LSH?

I don't know. It's not my attitude. I'm a 'continuity be handed as long as you give me good stories' guy. I mean, I like continuity; I like trying to figure stuff out about it... but to me, continuity is an outcome, not an ingredient, of good stories.

I suppose continuity is mattering less and less to the Legion these days, when every few years it seems we're in for another version of our favorite characters. The question is: at what point will we cease to care anymore?

In a larger sense, though, this elastic interpretation of continuity has been more and more characteristic of DC as a whole since Crisis on Infinite Earths and just seems to be getting worse and worse in recent years.

I believe that it's possible to tell great stories with a looser grip on continuity, but when stories are being contradicted or retconned out constantly for apparently no reason, it becomes a problem. The point of a serial is that we're reading a continuing story in which the character or characters build up a history. The past informs the present, and the present will inform the stories to come.

Soap operas tend to stop mentioning characters who've been offscreen for a while, but they normally don't come out and say they never existed. And for them, it's largely necessitated by the comings and goings of their actors and whether or not they want to recast other people in the roles. Comics don't have that problem, but they do it anyway.

Comics' more understandable dilemmas are those usually caused by the fact that their characters don't age. So they adapt a sliding timeline that changes some details, such as a character now being too young to have served in Vietnam.

What is a harder sell is when the company decides to change a character to make it more commercially viable. Even harder is when they decide to eliminate or retrocatively alter certain stories because they realize they were either bad choices or inconsistent with a newer, more successful take.

And now DC is making those changes pretty much on a yearly basis. Continuity can be loose to an extent in a serial, but if it's tampered with too much, you risk alienating the people who've kept you in business in the first place. Marvel has made some changes here and there, but nothing anywhere near as extreme as what DC seems to be doing on whims.

DC had better get its act together. And soon.

I've already passed that point.

Although I've always been a champion of characters aging, I think the dilemma goes deeper than that. DC doesn't want its characters to GROW. Growing means that they may evolve into different characters after a time. It means that characters may undergo changes that make them no longer commercially viable or attractive to a very young audience. It may mean telling stories with greater significance than Villain X wants to rule the world.

DC and Marvel characters seem to be locked into a perpetual cycle of repeating the same type of events, fighting the same villains, and undergoing the same temporary changes--because that's what sells, apparently. Real growth would have lasting repercussions that may make the characters different than they were. This is a bad idea, according to some marketing theories.

As for continuity? Again, this would mean acknowledging that a character's history really happened and that it had major consequences for the character or the world. In fictional universes where nothing really changes, it's much easier to reboot that history in a cataclysmic event than to deal with all those nasty repercussions.

What continuity really does is create limits. A character is bound by what happened in his or her past. This, I think, is a good thing as every fictional story needs boundaries, and continuity has always served to bridge the gap between the unreality of the heroes' worlds and our own (where the past really does inform the present, etc.). But if characters aren't meant to change, then continuity becomes a mere device that can be discarded as easily as a new costume or a doomed love interest.

Yeah, I know the Legion has lost a lot of fans already thru all these years of upheaval. I surprise myself often that I'm still with them! When did you finally give up, Huey?

It's definitely a vicious cycle in comics, one we've already debated some on this very thread. I guess what it boils down to is that comics are a multi-media business. If their characters' success were limited to what comes out in print, then they would probably evolve more naturally.

But in comics there's always the potential for a cartoon. Or a TV series. Or a movie. And some of these spin-offs are outrageously successful. Just look at the box office some of the more successful films have brought in, particularly in recent years. I've read that comic book movies are like the new westerns in our culture. Westerns were the big box office draw for a long time.

So from a comics company's point of view, it has to keep its product recognizable and marketable, even if it's something lower profile like the Legion, because the opportunity may some day present itself to cash in on a property if it's perceived as well-defined and marketable. For the Legion it paid off recently with a two-year run on an animated series. And with comics movies having become a staple at the cinema, who knows how deeply the studios may dig to find the next comic book box office champ?

I think that has had a bigger effect than we can imagine as to why the Big Two have been rebooting and un-changing their properties so much in the past decade or so. Unfortunately, for the fans who've invested our time and money reading their adventures in their purest original form...well, we get the shaft.

I stepped away from the Legion in 2004, when the threeboot began. I'd passed the point of caring about the Legionnaires as teenagers or about teenagers rebelling against unreasonable adults, which is where the story seemed to be heading. (Some have suggested this was only a small part of Waid's story line; I wasn't interested in spending $3.50 a month to find out.)

I've taken extended hiatuses from following the Legion's adventures before. I've found it gives me a fresh perspective on them.