Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes #3 - SPOILERS

Carggg with 3 "G"s seemed kinda appropriate. Agree fully with the dismal quality of the other two 5YG plotlines and would have added Sean/Shvaugh too.
Levitz himself has been guilty of altering established Legion related names and places (i.e. Vengar to Venegar, Malor to Mallor, and Zoon to Zuun) but would hardly be accused of being disrespectful the to Legion mythos.

I have to say that I am extremely puzzeled by your attitude given your thread here . Your comparison to Batman falls like the house of cards that it is. This situation is NOTHING like what has happened in that series. It has been 3 years since the Legion was brought back and purposely advertised as the 'Original' Legion. When numerous contradictions to this being true were pointed out the official word from DC and all envolved was 'Wait and see'. Well, I have waited for 3 years now and not only have a very few of the original questions been answered, but there are an ever-growing pile of new questions added with every issue that even contradict the recent past. My patience is exausted. The writing (not by Levitz alone, but Johns and the writer/s of R.E.B.E.L.S.) has been sloppy and self serving. Not one of them could be bothered to do the tiniest bit of research into what they were writing and none of them cared. Each of them has written what they want to further their own goals, pet storylines and favorite characters. Not one seems to give a damn about Legion that was, is or will be. It is all about what they want to do in the story now and if it doesn't fit with continuity (past or current)...who cares? The closest comparison I can make is to 'Aeon Flux' ... except that Aeon Flux was both stylish and entertaining and the current Legion is neither.

Nowhere in that thread do I claim that the contradictions mean that it's not the original Legion, or that we shouldn't assume things are the same as the original Legion.

We all know there are contradictions. But in modern comic book writing, one writer will often contradict the previous writer. That just means it's bad writing--it doesn't mean that it's a different continuity.

We all know this. There has been a lot of bad writing on the Legion. (Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to tie Dream Girl to the Dreaming?) That doesn't mean it's a different continuity, it means it's the same continuity with bad writing.

And almost none of this is due to Paul, anyway. He's tried to fix some of the problems caused by other writers (notice how fast he reversed that Lanoth stuff?) and the only places he really messed up badly are the Durlan story (which still depended on another writer as well) and Brainiac 5's characterization.

The Lanothian thing makee the fact that there are planets full of life so close to Earth make more sense,

Wasn't the rule about multiple powers thrown out when Lightning Lass regained her powers? And the Legionnaires had no problem ignoring that law when a Kryptonian or Daxamite wanted to join the team. Cosmic Boy could have been in a situation similar to Cyclops', in which drastic means were taken in order to survive.

Johns was making a statement that some people can't be redeemed, which is sadly the truth.

Brin and Ayla broke up prior to the COIE, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have found eachoter again. Blok and Mysa were very close too.

Not when you're talking about 1000 years of Earth colonization of the solar system and beyond.

Whoa! Easy fellas!

Anyhow, circling back to the Time Trapper/Conspiracy question of whether it's still in continuity made me want to bring up again a post I made a couple of pages ago that was buried amid other back-and-forths:

I mean, it's a bit of a brain-warper, but I can still see the story happening more or less exactly as it did with the Time Trapper making the Legion believe it was their Superboy that died. Presumably, some time after Magic Wars (no reason to assume that didn't happen), they learned the truth. Perhaps this was just prior to (or even during "off camera") the Lightning Saga appearance. The Trapper's manipulations could even explain anomalies like the involvement of Karate Kid and Una in Countdown.

See? It doesn't take all that imagination when you've got a nemesis with the power of the Trapper. Maybe it's a little too deus ex machina for the tastes of some fans, but there's certainly plenty of precedent for him doing that kind of thing in Legion history.

The only quibble I'd have with this is that all of the consequences of that fight have ceased to exist, as has the reason it happened in the first place. Shady still has her finger. Lu still had a second duplicate (and no force field belt). Brainy was never nearly voted off the team and then quit anyway. 'Superboy' never died.

One *could* go through some convoluted permutations to preserve this story, but the easier solution is that whenever the 'cutoff' happened, it was before this experience.

Other evidence as to when the 'cutoff' happened is that Sarya is still alive. That was a powerful story, where Sensor 'freed' her from the Eye, but if she's back, my first notion is that this story didn't happen. I'm willing to accept that this powerful moment is no longer in continuity, if only because I'm a total fan of Sarya.

Since I know bupkiss about these 'Magic Wars,' which apparently happened after I dropped out of fandom (indeed, the death of Sarya is one of the last Legion comics from that era I remember), what, if any, changes did that storyline bring about?

Are some of the Magic Wars changes visible in the current team?

The whole 'Dawnstar gets possessed and hacks off her wings' thing was also after my time. Was this part of the Magic Wars, or before, or after it? 'Cause it looks like this is also not in continuity.

Those are plausibly mistakes. Carggg was a deliberate retcon.

But still minor. It's not like COIE, or Death of Superman or Earth as a Xenophobe planet for 10 centuries (10 CENTURIES!!!) retcon.

As for Magic Wars, I really don't see how the current team can be remotely the one at the end of Magic Wars. The team was GONE at that moment. Even if they had eventually off-scene reconciled, they would have been older, not younger (they are mid-twenties currently).

The first statement was meant to refute your assertion that only those things related to the death of Superboy didn't happen. I just don't understand what you are basing that assertion on. I never said I considered this a new timeline - reboots and alternate timelines are different things to me. Yes, it is very possible to tell untold stories that don't contradict stories that have already been told. I never said that it wasn't. The origin presented in the Action story line, Secret Origins, and the last three issues of Adventure all contained some contradictions, however.

Again, it hasn't been stated clearly anywhere that the Time Trapper story didn't happen. It was a powerful story. One of my favorites of Levitz original run. I hope some version of it remains in the current continuity. Given the nature of the villain, there are lots of ways that it can still be included. I never cited that story as evidence that this a reboot. My feelings on that have more to do with the awkward attempts to match a pre-crisis Legion to a post crisis (post Infinite Crisis) Superman. The changes necessary to make it work are just too big to be considered "retcons". I find it hard to accept it as anything other than a reboot, regardless of whether or not the Time Trapper story happened. Yeah, I buy into odd belief systems at times. This isn't an example of one of those times. It may be a disagreement on the definition of the word reboot, but I hardly think my views on this are any more or less odd than yours.

I'm not asking Paul Levitz to fix holes in anyone else's continuity. I blame Johns for more of the inconsistencies than Levitz. There is much about the current series and its relationship to other versions of the team that is unclear. There are things that are not clear about how this team fits into the larger DC Universe. I'm simply asserting my belief that fans seeking clarity on those points shouldn't be muzzled. This kind of attention to detail has always been a strength of Legion fandom, not a weakness. Most of us want to see the new series succeed. Otherwise we wouldn't be bothering to try to make sense of it.

I LOVED the writer connecting Nura to the Dreaming!
Scrumpious possiblilities with that!
Yum!
The DCU of the 21st century isn't any closer to the colonization of other planets in their solar system than we are in our universe!
Much less colonization outside their star system.

And what changes have there been on Earth in the human genome pool since 1010 AD?
Name one.
Even in the DCU, not much has changed.

Technology has, yes, but biology hasn't.
{Some of our cultures have gotten taller, for example, but that's more environmental (food supply) than biological.)

And a thousand years is nothing in biological terms, even if you take into consideration the metagene.

But adding a race of nonhumanoid telepaths to a human colony on Titan suddenly makes the possibilities open up, imo, and now the changes make sense.
It's not out of continuity either.
The Lanothians just weren't mentioned before.

That's one of the wonderful things about the Legion. You can add anything you want to them because of it's the future. Time is allowed to pass there. The characters can get older because they aren't necessarily trapped by the same rigid timekeeping as the DCU of the present.

Sun Boy didn't start out a decaying corpse in the TMK era, ya know.
That happened midway, after his death/murder/suicide, and Wildfire inhabited the corpse.

And Proty's gentle spirit inhabiting Garth made sense, explaining his breakdowns in his later years and knowing how the machine actually worked helped to explain why Lar was so emotionally weak after the Eltro story.

The most obvious Magic Wars change that springs to my mind is that Magnetic Kid sacrificed himself. It would be nice to know if this actually happened or not. Obviously, the other four members that joined the Legion alongside him are still members so that kind of leads to him having joined, but then again who knows? Maybe there's a new continuity now where Polar Boy, Tellus, Quislet and Sensor Girl joined with no fifth member. Maybe Night Girl or Chameleon Girl was the fifth member. Maybe Infectious Lass was the fifth member. We don't really know.

There's also this (from Chaim Mattis Keller's awesome Legion helpfile): The results of the Magic Wars were far-reaching. The breakdown of science led to mass escapes from the prison world, Labyrinth, many people found themselves magically changed or enhanced (and during the Magic Wars had fought against those who were trying to restore science; in this sense it might have been considered a true "war"), such as the mercenary Grinn, many planets' economies collapsed, precipitating a massive depression within the United Planets, and Tharn became the new Sorcerers' World.

Has the Sorcerors' World in the current continuity been specifically referred to as Zerox? I can't remember. That might be something to look for as well?

As I said in that thread on this subject:
"they have been clammoring for the return of the 'original' Legion. And, that Legion is the sum of it's history ... Good, Bad or indifferent ... Change enough of it and it is nolonger the thing people have been clammoring for, but merely another derivitive substitute. Different people will have different levels of tolerance for changes to the history but the more changes DC/Levitz makes, the more likely that that tolerance point will be reached or exceeded for more fans ..... 'the death of a thousand cuts'."
I stand by that. For whatever reasons DC and it's various writers have, their writing... good, bad, indifferent and selfish is changing the history of Legion and making it something diffferent, something other than the original. If it were something good then that would be fine, but it isn't even that.

by that rigidity, Adv 247 was the only appearance ever of the "original," unaltered Legion.

It's post five year gap, so it's not in continuity.

What are you talking about? They're the same age now as they were during V3.

I suggest you re-read my post and actually pay attention to it this time. The phrase "sum of it's history" in particular. Even I am not so rigid that I don't allow for organic changes over time to a 'throw-away' concept that suddenly developed a fan base and was further developed. Growing, developing and making slow changes to an idea in the past as opposed to claiming something is the 'original' while making needless and confusing changes out of laziness are 2 completely different situations.

That's a bit too harsh. I'm starting to understand your status note.

Anyway, that being said. I agree with your premise. One off stories like Adv. #247 or Cary Bates mis-managements of the 70's among others are usually written off by the following writers and fandom. We'll probably write off most of the nonsensical crap since Lightning Saga as well.

That hardly excuses continuing the trend or not actively lessening it by picking up a Who's Who or some previous written stories which I think is what most people are complaining about.

I am looking at this through the eyes of a history major. There are many things in history that people think are true but have been proven otherwise (like Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake"). People are biased towards their causes. The Legion has so many members and POV that it is entirely possible that their records vary greatly. They were also teenagers so it's possible some records got destroyed out of carelessness or jealousness.

And maybe some missions were like that episode of Star Trek where Sisko erases everything about a secret mission.

me, too, RA. Rather than see Legion lore as an all-encompassing 'grand narrative' that explains everything I prefer it as a collection of different storytellers providing their own interpretations, bouncing off each other's prior ideas/works.