Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes 15 years later - Rereading the Reboot...

... does it get any better?

I just started rereading the thing. The question I was wondering about most was: How would I like it 15 years later, without all the emotional baggage from back then when I was devastated about the erasure of 35 years of Legion Lore?

Would I be able to find some enjoyment in it now that I know that it was just a ten year long version of the Legion which was rebooted again?

Well, I read the first five issues today and have to say that it was really okay. It did not make me cringe like it did in 1994, I was no longer furious about the introduction of new characters in the second issue or about the first villain not being Lucifer Seven. I actually had fun reading it, though of course the story is far from perfect. It's like watching a college teen comedy in the future...

What I liked: Cameos by SciFi greats like Spock, Data or Eccentrica Gollumbits, RJ Brandes role (which was totally lacking in the Threeboot), Imra and Garth.

What I still don't like: The new codenames (Live Wire... urgh...), XS' haircut, Tangleweb... and the artwork is not exactly my cup of tea, though I've seen much worse over at Titans.

What really struck me was how quick the writers tried to reestablish classic parts of Legion Lore. After erasing the whole of the old continuity, they rushed to introduce a larger team - within three issues, we were up to ten members - and they had the first dead Legionnaire on their first mission! Of course, a hardly introduced dead Kid Quantum could not attract the same fascination as the dead Legionnaires of old managed to do. It's simply a matter of time - you can't force a legend, it has to slowly build...

Apart from that certain rushed feeling - definitely a contrast to nowadays decompressed writing - and the fact that I thought it was rather strange that the Legion was sent on a first mission without any training and without the teammates even knowing each other - I am getting the feeling that time has healed many wounds I suffered in 1994, and that I will be having much more simple fun in 2009...

I felt much the same way about the reboot when I started reading it in 1998--four years into it and after I had quit reading the previous version. Enough time had elapsed that I was able to appreciate the new stories for what they were and the many positive additions they added to the Legion . . . additions such as Gates, XS, and the Legion draft (which provided an entirely plausible way of boosting the ranks so quickly).

The writing kept the story moving forward in unexpected yet familiar ways while adding new dimensions to personalities of the Legionnaires. (I loved Gim as the Sci Cop hardass and Lyle as the more than competent spy.) There were some missteps along the way but the overall story up to and including the Chu sting was exciting and fresh.

I started a slow rereading of the reboot a few months ago. I'm up to 1999 and the issue where some villains try to vivisect Sensor and Gear is introduced. I'm enjoying reading the issues again because I generally enjoy Legion comics of any era. My overall assessment hasn't hasn't changed, though. Early reboot remains one of my least favorite Legion eras. There are some good story concepts early on. The White Triangle storyline holds my interest.

The changes in code names doesn't bother me. The art of Moy and Moder just isn't my cup of tea. It's not a vision of the Legion that I relate to. I liked Gates the first time around and still enjoy him. Zoe is a good addition. XS, I don't like simply because I think speedsters are overused.

There were some huge missteps that strike me just as wrong today. These include: obnoxious Brainy, Emerald Vi, Sensor the Snake, Lori Morning, Andromeda as a nun, Saturn Girl always losing control of her powers, and the addition of Thunder.

I remember feeling that Kolins was an improvement over Moder the first time around. I still feel that way, and I'm appreciating Kolins even more with the rereading.


I

I can't believe it's been 15 years since Legionnaires #0. It seems like just yesterday that my eleven-year-old self read that comic and became a lifelong Legion fan.

It was. We've secretly been aging you faster than normal and implanting you with false memories. It's really only 1995.

You're our guinea pig to explore the real ramifications for Y2K, which, unlike the programming you've been exposed to, is a very real threat indeed.

Everyone you know (or think you know) are in on the conspiracy.

So it was about 13 years since I dropped Legion deliberately for the first time. And I still don't feel like reading it.

My rereads of this era usually drag, until the DNA stuff kicks in and Coipel remains one of my favorite comic artists.

The early story arcs and art just never caught my attention while paradoxically, many of the Legion characters were more interesting to me than before.

Those "missteps" Jerry describe mostly go for me also.

I always looked forward to an espionage squad story.

It's certainly no 5YL, that's for sure old pal. I just got the first Reboot trade for cheap and decided to give it a try again, with all those emotions cooled down - and a nearly-classic Legion returning in L3W. The stories are simple, the characters are mostly one-dimensional - but it's definitely more fun to read now than in 1994, I can assure you. Quick entertainment for my lunch breaks at work.

Just read the next two issues today. Oh my, I'm still feeling embarrassed about the "Work Force" - what a lousy teamname, especially considering that Marvel had launched the "Force Works" title only a year ago... and what was it with Lee Moder not being able to do the full page count after being on the book for only two issues?

Anyway, I'm trying not to find too many mistakes and simply to have some fun. Let#s see how long I manage to do so :rolleyes:

I remember I was in University and still pretty bitter about the whole 5YG thing, having abandoned it pretty early on. I read the occasional issue a guy across the hall got in earlier years (cutting off Dawnstar's wings? Blowing up Earth? WTF?), but had pretty much sworn off Legion.

Then in third year I saw LSH #0 on the spinner rack at the convenience store and picked it up out of curiosity. I thought it was pretty cool. It wasn't Levitz, but it was light years ahead of what came after him. I called my LCS in my home town and had it added to my list. Every few months when I'd get my care package shipped, I'd have a new stack of LSH and L* to go through.

The first few years were great, then it had definite ups and downs (with the Dark Circle being a definite "down"). I think I liked Peyer more than Stern overall, but it was a fun run. Didn't like DnA much at first, then actively disliked them by the end. Still think the team could have been salvaged instead of another reboot, but it was a pretty big chore to read by the end.

So now I'm done with the first trade, I remember again which were the elements that bothered me most. Work Force. Planet Hell. Names like those made the whole book look incredibly cheap.

The contrast between the adult oriented 5YL (til Giffen left) - which I liked a lot - and the kid oriented Reboot was large enough as it was, details like those made me suffer in 1994 and I still don't like them today. I also thought that the artwork got worse when Moy got a new inker every issue.

I liked the "love at first sight" moment between Jo and Tinya. I always felt those two belonged together and their romance was essential to the Legion. Invisible Kids role was also well-written. I really thought that his superpower was used in a decent way, considering how Lee and Kirby struggled to portray the Invisible Woman in the beginning of Fantastic Four (just reading the first Omnibus).

The one thing I still have to say is: I don't like XS. Her codename, her haircut, her power, her costume - this character will never do anything for me, even though they tried so hard to make her likeable with her innate shyness...

XS was one of my favorites of the new characters. Obviously, I'm a better human being that you.

One of the fun things about these "boot" threads is seeing how different parts of each boot appeal to others and trying to figure why. Example in this book, I didn't much care for the beginning but DNA is one of my favorite runs and rouge is polar opposite. Makes me wonder what about our personal make-ups might result in this difference.

Maybe he's my secret enemy and I should have him watched? lol

I've never quite figured out why I like so many of these characters yet so few of the actual storylines. One of these days I'm going to take a course or two on "writing" to try and grasp the things writers do to try and grab the readers' attention.

Yes, you are obviously blessed
:rolleyes:

But like you, I also thought that the DNA part of the Reboot was its highlight. So in this point, we are agreeing again. Now go figure...

As a Legion collector since the Adventure days, I found it impossible to like or even accept the personalities and quirks of the reboot (or threeboot versions). Every time a reboot Legionnaire did something out of character with the pre boot version, my reaction was no way. This comes from 'knowing' these characters for 30+ years.

XS, Gates, Monstress, KQ etc were diffferent and new so I was prepared to accept them and in the cases of XS and Gates especially, I came to really like them. I hated the name XS though - hardly interlac is it?

I shared your pain, Silver Age Lad. However, I think I was more willing to accept the reboot because the TMK/5YL era had been so badly gutted by the revision of the Legion's history as well as by Giffen's hard-to-decipher story telling that I had already given up the Legion for dead. Although I later came to accept many aspects of 5YL (particularly the older versions of the Legionnaires), that era was my "no way" period.

The reboot, on the other hand, offered something fresh and new. There was never a point where I thought that the Legionnaires were acting out of character because, for all intents and purposes, they were new characters. I also thought that most of the new personalities augmented their preboot personalities without blatantly contradicting them. Cosmic Boy, for example, was a much more assertive leader in the reboot than he ever was in the preboot. But then we didn't see much of his preboot leadership, so we don't know how he behaved when we weren't looking.

I had greater trouble accepting Live Wire as an irresponsible hothead, although this personality had been grafted onto Garth during the SW6/Legionnaires period, also predating the reboot. Still, some very good stories were done with hotheaded Garth; it was believable, for example, that President Chu would replace him with his far more level-headed sister, Spark. I truly felt for Garth, who, despite all of his efforts, lacked the maturity to truly control his powers (as vividly demonstrated in his battle with Ultra Boy).

Also, Garth's eventual maturation into the hero who sacrificed himself to stop the Omniphage became the single greatest character arc of the reboot and, perhaps, of any Legion boot.

On another topic, I agree that XS's name, costume, and powers were hardly inspired, yet Jenni also became one of my favorite newbies. A team saturated with super-confident Legionnaires desperately needed someone who feared she wouldn't measure up, who had a girlish crush on Cos, etc. I think Jenni represented the average teenaged reader more than any other Legionnaire before or since.

The fact that that this "average" teenager was of mixed race also spoke volumes for how far society has come since the Silver Age. In some ways, I see Jenni as the Uhura of the Legion: No one made a big deal out of her race, but her very existence as a character was a big deal in and of itself.

It was crap. There was no WILDFIRE!

No, I liked it for the most part until the books spilt - then it was less good.

Then they brought WILDFIRE in and the book *rocked!!*

@He who wanders

The question that came up in my head was how a rather shy teenage Magnoball champion who was dumb enough to be cheated by his greedy manager suddenly became such a perfect, strong-opinioned leader. That sudden change came out of the blue. One issue, he's the little boy, the next book, he totally knows every right decision during their first mission - much better than the Science Police experienced Colossal Boy. Now where did that come from... ?

I'd have to go back and re-read the issues to see if I pick up on the discrepancy you identify, CK. You could be right, however . . .

I find it plausible that someone may be highly proficient in one area and not so good in another. A real-life example of that is the Beatles, who were unparallelled in crafting hit songs, yet they utterly failed in managing their own business affairs.

In Cos's case, he may have possessed a natural talent in leading others his own age and even in assessing what needed to be done on missions (a skill honed, no doubt, by his sports training). But he may have been a bad judge of character when it came to adults, particularly those who were supposed to look out for his interests. Like many teenagers, he probably trusted his manager implicitly and lacked the experience to recognize when he was being cheated. (Of course, this is also true of most adults. To extend the music analogy, rock history is full of talented musicians who were ripped off by their managers.)

I'd like to think that the experience taught Cos a lesson and that he became a more shrewd judge of character as a result. Was this transformation too sudden? I don't know; wasn't a training period at least hinted at before they went up against Tangleweb? I seem to recall that some time elapsed between their rescue of Brande and that first mission.

For me, the reboot never worked simply because it meant bad storytelling and dumbed down storylines. My appreciation of Legion was its highest during TMK, so it was like being on Watchmen and suddenly it all being substituted for Youngblood or something like that. True: the last days of McCraw era were just as awful, but it was (again) more about the dumbing down than the concept of the book. I was 20-something by then, saw the evolution of the book and the characters, so a book for 14-ys-old was not at all what I wanted.
Rebooting the Legion was just the easiest, more unthoughtful way to get the book back in track and, as I've always thought, the worst one - because it didn't solve the main problem: writing was bad, characters became 2nd rate copies that would be forever compared to the "original" ones and eventually it would all fall down.
Threeboot was less traumatic because Waid and Shooter were much better than Peyer and DnA and at this point in time, there was no compromise at all to the franchise's past.
And Johns' LSH is simply nothing so far, just a bunch of colorful characters with the same name as that team I used to like.

(snip)



I've managed to apply some variations of this idea while watching the cartoons and/or reading Threeboot (or parts thereof). It helps a lot in terms of dialing down the initial fanboygirl shock of, "Hey! That's not how you're supposed to write so-and-so!"

There's a fairly large gap between Legionnaires #0 (where Lu & Tinya join) and LSH #62 (where the first set of draftees arrive), as I recall. Weeks, anyway.

Thanks, Reboot. A few weeks is plenty of time for Cos to have learned his lesson and to even have taken some leadership courses.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Beatles analogy applies to Cos. For most of their career, The Beatles were managed by Brian Epstein, who did not rip them off although he may have made some questionably competent business deals. But after Epstein died, the Beatles sought to control their own financial empire. They launched Apple Records, which fell into disarray, and Apple Boutique, which closed its doors after six months. (Most of the merchandise was given away.) Facing financial ruin in a comparatively short period of time, they turned to savvy lawyer Allen Klein, who did rip them off (and later served time for doing so). Other friends, aquaintances, and hangers-on also took advantage of the Beatles' generosity and naiveté.

The Beatles were in their mid to late 20s by this time; Cos was supposed to be 14. Not only was he a lot younger, but he, like the Beatles, came from a working class background. Cos's family was struggling financially, as I recall, so he had a double reason, in addition to his youth, to trust the manager: he desperately needed a ticket out of poverty. (In this respect, Cos's situation is analogous to that of The Three Stooges. Also coming from working class backgrounds, the Stooges signed away their rights to future royalties from their film shorts in exchange for the guarantee of lifetime employment--a deal that sounded pretty good at the time. Yet it meant that they got nothing twenty years later when the studio sold the their film shorts to the new medium of television. Nor did the guarantee of lifetime employment prove as binding as they had thought.)

In regards to Cos, one area in which I think the reboot excelled was in portraying the early Legionnaires as teenagers with realistic foibles. Cos, as a teenaged sports hero getting ripped off by his manager, was thoroughly realistic.

As for him proving to be a better leader than Sci Cop Gim, it is interesting to note how their situations paralleled each other. Gim became a celebrity after gaining his powers and was promoted quickly through the ranks--far quicker than he should have been. Like Cos, he lacked real experience, albeit in a very different way. Gim simply did not make an effective field leader. (He was better off as the hard-ass drill sergeant of the team.)

I know there are a lot of people that are tired of XS but I thought she was a natural for the team. I also thought Mark Waid's use of her as the primary character for his first issue was a stroke of brilliance. One thing it did for us was to say immediately that this was NOT the Legion we'd known before and another was to show that the Legion would definitely continue to have some sort of DC Universe connection.
-yes, lots of debate about that too-

You're making me want to dig out the Reboot and read through it too.

The way I see Cos is that he is a leader in the sense that he is brilliant at motivating others and figuring out how to analyze a particular situation and use the skills of others to maximum advantage.

He is not a leader in the sense of someone who constucts an original vision or is necessarily really great at assessing and shaping the "big picture". He actually needs someone else (his manager, Brande, etc.) to set general goals for him.

This conception of Cos is heavily influenced by the Bierbaum's description of his characterization, incidentally. But I think the reboot version fits in fairly well with it as well.

There was a lot of material in the reboot. It had a pretty light tone but dealt with a wide range of issues - prejudice, the environment, government corruption, consumerism, lots of coming of age and sentient relationship problems. However, while there may have been too much focus recently on galaxy-destroying menaces, I think the reboot went too far the other way, addressing our current problems in the context of some future United Planets.

Its primary failing for me was how contemporary it was. The cities, landscapes, infrastructure all mirrored those of our current western industrialized nations, with a few futuristic tweaks. A while back, I was looking at how Winath was portrayed in different eras, and in the reboot it was 1990s American farmland, with spaceships. They even had cowboy hats, line-dancing and a shopping mall opening.

It was certainly a brighter future than we had in 5YL, but for me it was a step backwards. When DnA took over, the Legion really felt like the future. When Waid and Kitson took over, we had a recognizable, but very different society. There were allusions to contemporary social alienation, but something had happened to people; this was not our time. I didn't get that feeling from the reboot Legion.

Well, as I was devastated to learn that Legion Lore had been erased, being shoved down my throat AGAIN that this was NOT the Legion we'd known was EXACTLY what I did NOT need back then...


But anyway I don't want to rekindle the old Flamewar here. I totally feel with Ricardo and his "dumbed down" argument, all I'm trying to do here is rereading it 15 years later without all the bad feelings.

And I read the next four issues today, and I have to say that it was again a pleasant work break diversion. The stories certainly were one-dimensional - Tangleweb AGAIN! - but fun, especially the tryout issue with Violet, Laurel and Kinetix joining. Also, the White Triangle storyline started here, the only Reboot storyline before DnA that I can remember at all. There are inconsistencies that I have to roll my eyes over - how come Triad suddenly has three flight rings? - but overall the story is moving along in an entertaining way.

So if not compared with 5YL, which for me was also the Legion Watchmen, the Reboot gathered some momentum after the first Trade Paperback. I also am having more fun reading about those teenagers now than I had in 1994, when I was just about the same age the 5YL Legion was and felt robbed of some companions who had aged along with me.

But as I am now working with troubled teenagers on a daily basis, I still don't think that Cosmic Boys metamorphosis into a born leader was very realistic. Your arguments certainly all are valid, but I guess it's a little bit much to assume about a fictional characters. The teenagers I know are also sometimes shy or headstrong, but they don't change that quickly (if at all). Especially those good at sports