Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion-related October 2010 Solicitations and Images ... SPOILERS

From the original boot, many of the female Legionnaires were from Earth colonies, inclucing Winath/Ayla, Starhaven/Dawnstar, Titan/Imra, Cargg/Lu, and possibly Imsk/Salu.
In dotREBELS, Starhaven is no longer a 'colony' but the people DO come from Earth.

Naltor and Orando were some how related to Zerox/Sorcerers Planet/Gem World, if I remember correctly but not really 'colonies' of Earth.

Bgtzl/Tinya is connected to Earth through the Buffer Zone and the people might have been originally from Earth or maybe even visa versa, nothing is stated except in the old dotLEGION story, that I remember anyway.

Kathoon/Lydda is unclear to me, but I think it was a colony in the original boot.

The girls that are truly humanoid, with no Earth connections of any kind in the Legion up to this point are Krypton/Kara and Talok VIII/Shady. Durla/Yera is the most alien since she's not humanoid.

We haven't seen Celeste, Kono, Sassa or Drura in the Legion yet.

Gigi and Shaugvhn are Earther's, right?

Sorry if I missed someone(s) from the original or retroboots.

I'm not sure about the accuracy of your entire list but Gigi and Shvaughn are indeed from Earth.

Being on an Earth colony is not the same as being born on Earth. I wonder why there are so few Earth-born female Legionairres?

There's also Computo and Catspaw.

IMO, the roundabout answer to the question of why so many Legion femmes aren't from Earth is that it's so that the writers didn't have to bother to write up origin stories for them.

Imra, Lu, Tinya, Kara, Violet and Nura's 'origin story' never needs to be drawn or mentioned, since everyone on their respective homeworlds has their powers. Dirk got locked in a reactor by Dr. Regulus. Mon got trapped in the Zone for 1000 years. Jo got swallowed by a whale. A meteor nearly landed on Gim, and the whacky guy decided to huff it!

But we won't see the action-packed 'origin story' of Luornu, because it would require drawing her mom's hoo-hoo. Plop, plop, plop. Cue wail in triplicate. End origin.

Lightning Lass becomes the first Legionnaire to have an origin more complicated than 'born that way, I did nothing for these powers, there's nothing at all special about me,' and Shadow Lass becomes the first female Legionairre to have her own (mostly) unique origin story.

It's not until the Reboot, with Zoe Saugin, that we see a female Legionnaire who *did something* to gain super-powers. (Although, Comet Queen, from the classic continuity has a similar active, instead of reactive, origin story.)

And, unsurprisingly, both of those examples, of women actively gaining powers, like old Invisible Lyle brewing up that serum, are portrayed as *unwise* women, avaricious in the one case, impetuous and flighty in the other, suggesting that it's okay for Lyle or Val to better themselves by providing their own 'origin stories,' but there's got to be something wrong with a woman who empowers herself.

None of this, IMO, is deliberate. I don't think any of the Legion writers I've read interviews from had any sort of 'keep the woman down' agenda, but it's a product of a deeply-entrenched mindset.

Boys want to read stories about boys, and the comics were written by and for boys. The boys get the exciting origin stories. The girls just happen to have super-powers, and exist to be their girlfriends, having to be paired off relatively quickly, while male characters (like Sun Boy, Invisible Lyle or Chameleon Boy) can remain solo operators for extended periods.

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Set wrote:

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...It's not until the Reboot, with Zoe Saugin, that we see a female Legionnaire who *did something* to gain super-powers. (Although, Comet Queen, from the classic continuity has a similar active, instead of reactive, origin story.)

No offense to all the Reboot fans, but the White Witch was there first.

BTW, there's no reason why it has to be an either-or proposition. Violet, for instance, has long been canonically able to shrink to a much smaller size than most of her people. Nothing wrong with hereditary strength + application and study; apart from the fact that it requires more thought put into it than oh, a satellite hit me and now I've got powers!

The same applies with the relationship thing. I wouldn't mind more single, unattached characters. But I also wouldn't mind more stories where characters with an SO could go out and do stuff with friends. This is especially true of female characters, who get few enough friendships with each other in any medium out there.

For what it's worth, I'd say that some of "hereditary" powers types have some of the most interesting origin stories, by the time you factor in the elaborate explanations of why you would have a planet filled with people with that ability.

Certainly the Imskians developing their shrinking ability to deal with periodic shrinking of their planet is as interesting as "invented an invisibility serum" or "almost got hit by a falling meteor".

Yes, but they, the Imskians, didn't develop their powers of shrinking by studying.
They used bioengineering/chemical engineering to accomplish that feat.
Unless DC just uses the metagene like it's a wish maker.

If it's metagenes exclusively, then the colonies changes make them the same, essentially, as EM, don't they?

(I was trying to only include Legionnaires who were in the Legion during this particular boot, EDE. I should have added the 2 C's to the 'not in the Legion yet' list.)

Just to be clear, I was responding to Set's theory that the reason there are no femmes on Earth is so that they could give them easy, boring "hereditary power" origins.

I used neither the word 'easy,' nor 'boring,' in the theorem, but yes, that is within spitting distance of where I was going.

Sun Boy's origin comes with it's own super-villain that can show up later as a recurring character / nemesis, Dr. Regulus. Someone *tried to murder him* in his origin story.

Dream Girl was born. That's her complete origin story.

I think my argument, that the writers of the day put more thought, more effort and more creativity into the origin stories of the male characters than they did to the origin stories of the female characters, is fair.

The first male Legionnaire whose origin wasn't 'born this way' was Lightning Lad.

The first female Legionnaire whose origin story wasn't 'born this way' was Lightning *Lass,* whose origin story was, 'See Garth.'

Yes, much later, it became interesting to come up with explanation for *why* there's an entire planet full of people who can triplicate, or an entire universe full of 'phantom people' adjacent to earth-space, but I'm not prepared to credit the original creators in the 1960s for the ideas that Mark Waid had about Bgtzl and Cargg in 2004.

I'd say Phantom Girl's origin, which basically amounts to "Hey, let's have a girl who instantiates the old sci-fi trope of phantom people from the 4th dimension" is basically on the same level as "Hey, let's have a kid who turns invisible because he swallowed a serum like the Invisible Man" or "Hey, let's have a guy who's name Jo Nah and gets powers after being swallowed by a beast like Jonah".

While the explanation for how Dream Girl got her powers may be that they were hereditary, the fact that she gets a whole issue devoted to her introduction and then a fairly elaborate story about how she actually permanently joins the team gives her a far more interesting "origin" than, say, Colossal Boy, whose "fallen meteorite" origin is briefly mentioned in a text page and not depicted on panel for, like, twenty years (I believe it was very briefly shown in Secrets, and then Levitz devoted a whole issue to it).

Really, the only origin stories that get particularly elaborated at all in the Silver Age are the Ranzzes, Bouncing Boy, and Sun Boy. Unless you count Proty II, since the story of the Antareans gets repeated about four or five times in the Silver Age.

Plus, there's nothing stopping an Earth-born Legionnaire from having a "born that way" origin. In fact, one of them does: Ferro Lad. They could very easily have simply said, "Hey, Triplicate Girl's from Earth, but she's a mutant with three bodies." Instead they actually went for the slightly more interesting "The three suns of Cargg imbue its inhabitants with the ability to triplicate", which invites elaboration on why that could possibly be so. Of course, we never really get much of an explanation in regards to Luornu, but that's mostly because a) she's written out in the early bronze age and b) the fact that she's been reduced to "Duo Damsel" (which disconnected her from her origin).

I see all three of those origins as radically different.

Lyle's origin is deliberate, and tells us something about him. He's a genius. He grants himself super-powers through the application of that genius. He's a self-made superhero.

Tinya's origin is passive. It happened to her, and while there's apparently an entire universe full of phantom people out there, it's years before we see any of them.

Jo's origin is the worst of the lot. It's not only completely ripped off of some old story, he's a totally passive recipient of the process by which he gains his powers, and his powers themselves are 'like Superboy, but way more limited.'

Tinya's origin blows Jo away, in that she's not a victim of the process by which she gained her powers, and her powers are at least original to the Legion, and not a watered-down cut-and-paste of some other Legionnaire.

Her powers, on the other hand, show a complete lack of thought. She's described as moving through a 4th spatial dimension which us 3D sorts can't access, and yet she's shown walking through walls, and people. If she was moving *around* these walls and people, via a 4th dimension that 3D people could not access, she would physically disappear from view to a 3D person while 'going around' the 3D item. Her power would look like phasing, it would look like very short-range teleportation, or, depending on how the visual effect would be perceived by 3D sensory appartus, *might* appear to be some sort of Shrinking power, that allows her to step towards a person, shrink *into* them, and then step out the other side, expanding in a split second to her full size.

Either would work, for the 'fourth dimension' aspect, but she's instead just your bargain basement intangible girl, depicted as having powers no different than Kitty Pryde (and even, in some instances, apparently being able to disrupt stuff she 'phases' through, in complete contradition to how her powers are defined).

Waid botched it even further, defining her power as the ability to physically be either 'here' or 'there' (on Bgtzl), while perceiving both places simultaneously. And then he, completely contrary to that description, shows her phasing all over the place, despite the fact that Bgtzl is shown as a world full of walls and people and vehicles, and if she just arbitrarily phased, she'd have a 50/50 chance of slamming into a Bgtzln wall! There would be *thousands* of places where there would be a wall (or tree, or mountain) in both Bgtzl *and* Earth, and she would be unable to phase, because 'the way would be blocked' no matter which universe she shunted her mass into.

Under this definition, there would also be vast expanses of settled territory on Bgtzl that would block her ability to phase. She'd be walking intangibly through a room in the HQ, and suddenly have to turn tangible, because, in Bgtzl, there was a cafeteria there, blocking her path, creating the surreal image of Phantom Girl constantly having to 'un-phase' to avoid traffic or whatever in Bgtzl, because her quarters in the Legion HQ just happen to be an emergency vehicle landing pad on Bgtzl...

So yeah, there's a ton of potential for 'Phantom World' to be used creatively, but, really, we see more of Dr. Zaxton Regulus, don't we?

And does that just prove my point? That no matter how incredibly much raw potential there is in the existence of Bgtzl, the writers seem more interested in bringing back Mekt Ranzz for another fight?

She probably gained the power of disruption because of X-Men fans (and former creative staff?) writing the books and various TV series. I would like to point out that Kitty Pryde is considered one of the most powerful X-Men, so there's alot of potential for Tinya's powerset.

I think this is absurd. If you pick at any Silver Age character deeply enough you'll find something to criticize. Since every character has such a thing, this makes it possible to pick the particular criticisms that happened to have appeared first on female characters, ignore the ones that happen to have appeared first on male characters, and point to that as evidence that the early Legion mistreated its females.

And you know, Dream Girl's initial story tells you she's a genius just like Lyle, even though it isn't an origin in the sense of describing how she got powers.