Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Mon-El in Superman - SPOILERS

Spock?

I don't know that I'd agree with that comparison. Most certainly I'm not sure in what way you mean it.

Is this shaping up to be "Superboy and the Legion" or "Clone-boy and the Legion?" Maybe that's the difference as to why he was able to use the "S" word, if they've won the right to use "Superboy" to refer to some character other than Superman as a superpowered boy. Maybe they could hyphenate it, Super-boy, lol."

I don't recall Superboy and the Legion being the most popular version but it was one of MY most popular versions. Clone-boy, not so much.

BEWARE it could be reformed Prime & the Legion

I guess the way they kind of both seemed to be perplexed by human behavior, or in Spock's case emotions. Tellus didn't feel like he had to control his emotions or anything but he was generally subdued and analytical in a very Spockian way IMO.


Won't be clone boy IMO as they've already tried that one right before the 3boot. They even stuck him in the Superman suit proper when they tried it. Plus based on comments by Johns he wants Superman in it. There's no substitute for Superman and what he adds to the book in terms of making it more inviting to new readers IMO.

As for Superboy, the Siegels own the right to the name, and him appearing in the blue and red costume with an S shield. If you notice even in the most recent issue of LO3W they don't call Smallville the home of Superboy, they put a hyphen in Super-boy, and Prime doesn't have an S-shield on the costume underneath the armor, nor is his costume truly the traditional Superman blue but rather a dark enough shade of blue to where it could easily be called black.


It's definitely the best selling and not just over a short period. For about 19 years or so they held the top spot a great deal of that spent as the best selling team in comics. I made a post a while back about the sixties and seventies Legion. The sixties Legion was the best selling superteam every year of it's publication and there is pretty much conclusive evidence the Bronze Age Superboy and the Legion remained DC's best selling team book. I haven't seen any numbers yet that show one of the Marvel Teams outselling them prior to the Legion being spun off as a solo book.


Other than a very brief period of the first Levitz run(the worst selling era of Superboy and the Legion) being outsold very barely by the Levitz Giffen era(which actually did feature Superboy pretty regularly), the best selling version of the Legion solo, no version of the Legion as a solo feature has out ever sold any version of Superboy and the Legion based on all known sales data.

I don't know if that version is the most popular with Legion Fans but it's definitely the most popular with comic book fans.

Here's a chart courtesy of Michael Grabois and the Legion Ominicom to prove just how true that statement is:





Once you see the figures laid out like that it is stunning just how obvious the evidence is...and you realize there is absolutely no way DC didn't understand what they were doing to the Legion.

In particular if you look at the crash of 1987 when the PU Superboy story was written, to me that looks like the greatest PCT drop in the history of the team...and it's pretty obvious the Legion has never recovered from that Byrne retcon. Not for longer than a few months at time, and not without relaunches, and teases, and clones of Adventure era Legionnaires.

And unlike every other drop in the early history fo the team which coincided with a drop in the comics reading audience...

Comics were exploding in 1986 and 87 what with the Dark Knight and Watchmen and Superman relaunch. The audience was increasing in those years, yet the Legion suffered what is probably it's greatest PCT plunge in readers.....a closed club it was.


Makes it pretty apparent that it's been more than just cluelessness that lead to the past 20 years of losing what made the book work for so many, for so long...it's been deliberate on DC's part. There is no way they don't know what those numbers mean. They knew it as far back as the seventies if they were tracking sales..and Mort knew it in the sixties.

No Superman = closed club
Superman = open club

IMO, Paul Levitz being the VP of circulation dating back to the 70's knows this better than anyone and that's probably the reason he used both Superboy and Supergirl in his second run until DC no longer let him.

Now that I think about it, I think the peaks of both the sixties and eighties were when both Kal and Kara were active in the Legion. That's definitely true of the eighties(the Levitz Giffen run) and I think the sixties as well.


On final bit of trivia...I think there is a definitely a POV on the part of some Legion Fans that Supes represents this nostalgic innocent era of the Legion, the newstand era, a bygone era.

But did you guys know, the first comic ever solicted entirely throuch comic book shops by either DC or Marvel in the Direct Market was a Superboy Special in 1980, and the Legion was the first or second team to become a direct market property.

So Supes ushered in that modern comic future right along with the Legion, and Smallville has been on the air for 8 soon to be 9 years, making it the longest running Superhero show in TV history, and that's in 2009, not 1959.

I think(hope knock on wood) that Didio, no matter what he is doing elsewhere, is finally re-instating the Legion to it's rightful place as one of the most important teams in comics history, if not the most important since it outsold every team book up until the New X-Men arrived on the scene, and is the oldest team other than the JSA and the Seven Soliders of Victory.


LLTL.

I do think that's a possiblity...that might be the one way they could pull it off without getting the rights to the name.

That would definitely quell some of the criticisms by fans that don't like Supes in the Legion...about the fact you know he won't die, or he's too boring...but it really wouldn't be the same.

I can see DC doing that, I can see them trying ot turn Mon into him....but I just don't get the impression Johns wants to go in that direction unless he has to.

But no matter what...Didio(or anyone from DC for that matter) just saying Superboy and the Legion like that is extrenmly rare, even though they've had the rights to call Prime Superboy Prime for over a year now.

I don't mind Superboy in the Legion if he's like how Levitz or others wrote him, you know, just as another Legionnaire. and I certainly see how he can draw in more fans and help be the readers POV into the 31st century.

i just don't want all Legion stories to change to Superman stories guest starring the Legion. As much as I enjoyed the Action comics arc, I enjoyed it as a SUPERMAN story that had the Legion in it. But as a Legion story it pretty much reeked.

Now Lo3W is shaping up much better as a Legion story and not a Superman story, so we'll see how it goes from here.

But I do hope that DC restores Superman's past to the Legion and doesn't try to put Prime or Kon in Clark's place (I love Kon, but he doesn't have the history with these characters that Clark so why include him in the group, just reboot again).

I also hope they don't reboot again. But if Superman/boy is viewed as just another member of the team and not the center of the universe or someone who in order to look good the Legion must look bad than this could shape up to be a very very good time for the Legion.

i'm glad that chart was created, since the simple logic of "people know who superboy is, they don't know who the legion is" doesn't seem to convince people. *seduced by massive data collection* *swoon*

now add geoff johns + manapul art, we're going to see the legion so, SO much more popular!

Yeap definitely more than just a little evidence there. I mean everyone has their favorite version of course, but I hold the lack of sales directly responsible for all the reboots. And since even some the people who joined during the reboots have been rebooted a couple of times now. I think that's probably one thing that just about all Legion Fans agree on, the rebooting every 5 years or so needs to stop.


What's really ironic is that the Legion didn't need to be rebooted in the first place, it was one of DC's top sellers and direct market pioneers when it got rebooted because the rest of the DC Uni got rebooted. So they still need to come up with something to keep that from happening again....it's not that hard to do though, they just need to use a little imagination.

Not so much, obvious that is. Data has to be normalized before anything can be considered "obvious." All that graph shows clearly, is the general trend in comic book sales and I'd doubt it shows that DC "knew what they were doing" to Legion. No doubt there are other things hidden in there, but as is I wouldn't say any of them are "obvious."


For example, being top team book in a time when there were relatively few teams also isn't really an indication that popularity was do to Superboy so much as familiarity. Could be that it was the idea of a young team that was attractive (not out of line with the postings of many older members of this board) moreso than the inclusion of Superboy.

I know for myself, as much as I enjoyed Superboy,my interest in LSH was peaked by a "normal" guy like Karate Kid beating Superboy, someone I could identify with as a kid versus someone I couldn't.

I would be interested in that brief peaking though. I would be willing to bet, with or without normalization, that you could trace many on this board to that peak.

Have to look up the story lines for those months.

A couple of points about Tellus, if veryvery doesn't know them already ~

He was created by Steve Lightle, the artist working with Levitz then.

Steve has said on his site, that originally Tellus' back 'bumps' were supposed to change color with his moods, as another form of communication.

Pretty neat!

It was too complicated though for the colorist during the stories.

The other point I wanted to share is that during the years when Lar Gand was called Valor, the Seeder of Worlds, we were shown that the Dominators had changed humans through DNA experimentation.

We saw the results, with many Legionnaires ancesters shown.
We also saw a giant tank, filled with gas and a person that looked a lot like Tellus.

I made a thread that has some of the sales ranks...but I don't know how to find it.

After the Byrne retcon and Crisis...their rank literally plunged totally independent of the comic buying audience, for the first time ever.

I can tell you certain details though...in the Silver Age they were the top selling team, outselling the JLA every year they were published...and the JLA had a far more familiar cast, including Superman at times, and Batman.

I don't think the popularity of the Legion was totally due to Superboy...I think it was an odd dynamic that was created by both the Legion and Superboy. And my own personal opinion is that the time travel was a huge part of the appeal. I mean you had a series based in two non-contemporary eras..the recent idyllic past and the big fantastic future.

I also think that removing Superman from the Legion hurt Superman...coincidence or not Superman fell from his top spot in the industry right around the time they removed him from the Legion on a regular basis.


Two teams that were built around young characters were the Teen Titans the X-Men...and the Legion stomped them both for decades. And particularly in the case of the Teen Titans...you could say they had more familiarity going for them....so it's not just familiarity.

Superman brings that to the title...but he doesn't necessarily make the title itself familiar...but he does sort of break the ice for the casual reader making an unfamiliar world a little less alien.

I don't think the purpose of Superman in the Legion is to serve as the character people identify with at a personal level...he does bring familiarity, but he also bring a bigger feel to the stories. Any story he is in, even if it's just a cameo, becomes a bigger story just because of the fact that Superman is in it, he just sort of brings an epic feel to the stories. There's also this dynamic of this ancient legendary hero of the past being in this far flung future that further sets the stories apart from typical Superhero fare.

This is all just my opinion of course..but I just know that Superboy was never really an absolute essential for me...until he wasn't there, then something changed.

And BTW, KK is one of my favorite Legionaires for that same reasons you stated.

But I do think Supes is a character most people are aware of and generally they are aware of a great deal of history. For instance in the sixties they did a survey and he was the most recognizable figure, literary or real in the world....


I am curious as to which peak you are talking about, the Silver Age peak was the era of Jerry Siegel and Edmund Hamilton...It's difficult to pin down just which one of them should get the most credit. Siegel wrote most of the very early stories of the Legion in the Adventure run then Hamilton came on, but Siegel never completely left until around the time Shooter came on. Hamilton was the guy writing probably the best Sci-Fi stories, but Siegel was the guy creating the best characters and doing a lot of tweaks to make the Legion really unique.

And that brings up another point...Jerry Siegel is generally not considered to be a great writer so much as a guy who created a great character, but the evidence is that he was a great Superman writer since the peaks of Superman's popularity in the 40's and 60's, his peaks of popularity period were both when Siegel was the main Superman writer. At one point in the sixties the titles written by Siegel in the top 10 comics would have put Geoff Johns and Brian Bendis, combined, to shame.'

In any case...beyond all doubt he was a great creator of characters, including most of the Legionaires...a good deal of them added during that sixties peak.

I hold that the source of the Legion's problems is that it wasn't rebooted in 1986 along with Superman. The fact that they tried to continue the continuity through the Crisis gave fans the impression that Legion continuity could - and should - survive anything. The reboot came too late. It would probably have been better received if it came in 1986 than 1994.

I thought it was Zymyr who breathed methane, not Tellus. Isn't he a water breather?

As I recall, the ocean of Hyrakius had methane mixed in.

jim ~ this is aof site with a huge article on Tellus.
A few pages of comic shown in the article reveal Tellus NOT enjoying Pol splashing water on him.
The article also shows scenes from his home planet.
He's definitely not a water breather.

He loved the 'waters' of the Phantom Zone, though.

Tellus and Zymyr are from the same planet IIRC...and they both breathe methane. The Gil D'shpan are sort of the oppressors of Tellus' people on their planet.

Wow. Where'd you read that?

IIRC I read it in this obscure comic I read called the Legion of Superheroes.

Hey! I do the sarcasm round here. I meant what issue.

LOL ok. To tell you the truth I recalled most of most of that from that hero history you posted ...although upon re-reading it it appears that the Gil's were not native to Tellus' planet.

The part about Zymyr being a methane breather dates back to an old Levitz lettercol when he mentioned he was about to debut some methane breathers in response to a fan questioning the fact that every known alien species in the Legionverse seems to breathe oxygen and how unlikely that would actually be(he seemed to be overlooking Mano)...

I'll have to go out to the garage and do some digging to find that lettercol.

Kay. Thanks.

No problem and sorry about the sarcasm. I acutally did think you were being sarcastic when you asked that question

No, really? ;p

Yes, both races in question were methane breathers. However, I don't think that the GilDishpan were looked upon as oppressors, but rather, as uplifters or sponsors.

I'd have to pull out my long boxes, but I think it was around the time of the Universo story. One of the away teams heads to Hyrakius, and Tellus gives them a history lesson, mentioning the first outside race they had contact with were the GilDishpan. I seem to recall some sinister intent on the GilDishpan's part, but maybe I'm mixing that up with the Universo takeover.