Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1 (Preview & Spoilers)

Hey! Don't scoff at board games! Didn't you know you can become possessed by the devil by a ouija board? Then there's that whole Jumanji thing . . .

the orange crotch/thong is functional?
1. it's a good thing they're coloring her hair yellow nowadays
2. you've obviously never had to wear one in everyday life
3. the 'traditional colors' (and style) are Silver Age.
sigh

But, whatever you say.

^ I don't think Jim's post warranted that tone at all Candlelight.

Why does it matter to you what costumes he does or doesn't like anyway?

For what it's worth - I haven't seen Ayla's orange pants/things depicted as a 'thong' at all yet. Which issue has the offending images?

And if they're not being done as so, then how are Ayla's pants any different to Dawnstar or Wonder Woman or any of a dozen other female characters who wear bathing suit type trunks?

I'm sorry my tone was bad.
I've always thought that one of the problems with the net is that we CAN'T hear each other's tones or see each other's body language, the two of which make up over 70% of our communication.
sigh

I don't really care what jim thinks about costumes, I'm just trying to see what he'll say next.
I enjoy his comments and like teasing him a little.

I guess I'll have to ignore all comments and just talk to myself since I really don't want to offend anyone.
Even third parties.

I like Violet's new costume the way she was drawn in the Superman/Batman #75 book a few months back ... same colours but with the black leggings/leotards underneath. The mini skirt on its own looks a bit dated to me.

I agree. It is very hard to use humour or sarcasm online or in text messages. I know I've created problems in the past when something I've written hasn't been taken as intended. These days, when I'm ribbing on someone, I always try to use one of those winky or smiley face things (XS or Grinn here at Legion World) to prevent any misunderstandings.

OK. If Jim's cool with it, no harm done then. I was just trying to keep the tone of the boards civil and, looking at your post from the outside, it seemed a little harsh. I was also confused about where your criticism of Ayla's costume is coming from too, and was genuinely wondering if I'd missed some sleazy portrayals of Ayla somewhere.

I'm sure that won't be necessary.

I don't know if Jim is okay with being teased.
We've just clashed in the past.

I thought, hoped, that we'd gotten past that and could just interact.
But, maybe not.

The costume that Ayla wears doesn't bother me except that I dislike ALL of the mixed eraness of the current outfits.
I also seriously dislike the skimpy stuff.
I was too brutely honest with it but my ire wasn't directed at jim, but at the costume.

At least, that's what I intended.
I'll make sure to use XS or grin when I'm teasing.
I didn't realize what their purpose was, I'm afraid.

I thought we HAD gotten past our old clashes, but I did think your retort was pretty rude. I actually thought you'd agree with me on the ugly/sexist female costumes that I commented on. I guess you just like to argue.

And Ayla has ALWAYS worn navy and white with a yellow emblem, silver age or not, except for that ugly blue and white one she wore when she first regained her lightning powers.

THANK YOU, BLACULA!!!

I pretty much dislike or even hate all of the new uniforms except Wildfire's. Some are too 'busy' (Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, Sensor Girl). Not a fan of the 'boob window' (Sensor Girl, Dawnstar). Hate thongs and 'butt floss' (Shadow Lass, Lightning lass). Annoyed when they try a little too hard to be reminiscent of a former look and yet be 'fresh and new' (Sun Boy, Shrinking Violet, Lightning Lass, Sensor Girl and *worst offender* Brainiac 5). And some are just plain ugly (Sensor Girl, Tyroc, Earth Man). However, costumes change periodically for the Legion, so hopefully some one will read the various boards and take note of the comments and just maybe the next set of costumes will be better.

I'd be really interested to know what the initial fan reaction to Cockrum's costumes was. They're almost universally regarded as classics now, but how did they look to fans of the Adventure era? I can't say I'm a fan of the new looks either, but I don't know how much of that is my own bias toward the early '80s ere costumes and how much is the costumes actually not being good.

I was around when Cockrums costumes first appeared and a lot of fans hated them. The only one I really hated was Projectra's. IMHO, the colors clashed, it was too busy, and the neckline was too low (though Grell drew it MUCH lower). However, as Sensor Girl, she's reached new depths in clashing colors, business, and boobage.

Cham's red and purple costume clashed too, but it grew on me.

Good question. I don'tknow about anybody else, but I thought the Lighning Lad costume was a tremendous improvement over the brown/tan leggings and the cape. Then again, I also thought the Saturn Girl and Element Lad costumes made them look a bit slutty at the time. I grew to like them better as it went on. Still not feeling it for any of the current new looks except Wildfire.... and that is because it makes him look kind of slutty.

Are people seeing things that aren't there? Or am I missing something?

I've read all of the retroboot Legion's appearances and don't remember Ayla's costume being depicted as a thong anywhere. And I thought I'd have noticed that because I also hate thongs in comics.

Ayla's got one of the more 'demure' costumes on the team IMO (unless people have a problem with bare legs).

See, this is one of the problems with the Internet. One person posts a piece of misinformation based on personal bias or whatever, then someone else picks up on it and before you know it, it becomes "fact".

P.S. Blacula, if Phil Jiminez turns me down, will YOU marry me? I'll let you play with my Legion figurines.

^ You definitely know the way to a Legion fan's heart, Jim!

I would, but you'd probably start getting suspicious when, every time it rains, you'd find me with a broom sweeping up in front of those figurines.

Shouldn't that be NOT seeing things that ARE there? Because coverage is the thing in question.
Thong may be to strong a term... skimpy panty bikini bottom maybe? This is how her current look from the 'Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes' on has come across to me. Lots of buttcheak shown due to orange panty-thingy under the tunic-miniskirt-thingy. It does remind me a lot of her Adventure era Costume, only smaller panty in the curent version. Not saying it is bad for fans in general, only that I don't care for it.

Sorry, I know that I'm not part of your immediate conversation, but I'm not familiar with the Legion reference that you're (presumably) making. So which story/situation are you referencing?

Blacula is talking about the silver age story of the Composite Superman from World's Finest Comics. In it, the janitor at the Superman museum is sweeping the floor one night during a storm and lightning comes through the window and strikes the set of LSH figurines in front of him, which reflects the lightning back on him and gives him all of the Legion's powers, which he uses to transform himself into a villain who looks like half Batman/half Superman, but with green skin. He then sets out to conquer Superman, Batman, and Robin, naturally. There's a sequel to the story later on too. I'll be back in a sec with the issue numbers.

Here are the issue numbers and a picture of the scene I described.

World's Finest Comics issues No. 142 and 168

http://www.studiosanning.shawbiz.ca...finest/wf168/lightning_strikes_twice.jpg

Here's a link to a synopsis of the 1st story:

http://www.studiosanning.shawbiz.ca/superman_family/chronology/worlds_finest/wf142/index.htm


And here's a link to a synopsis of the 2nd story:

http://www.studiosanning.shawbiz.ca/superman_family/chronology/worlds_finest/wf168/index.htm

If you've never seen my figurines, click the link at the bottom of this post. You'll see that I didn't make my figurines with the arms extended as in WF comics. I modelled mine after the ones in Adv. Comics 326, 337, 350 and others, with the arms at the sides, standing at attention, so I'm afraid Blacula might be out of luck waiting for the lightning to be reflected back from mine.

I'm probably becoming delusional because of the extreme cold and extreme stress in my life today, but I'm coming around to a contrarian notion about the Legion -- that it is beloved by some (and ignored/disliked by most) precisely because it intentionally breaks the rules of the successful super-hero comic. When has the Legion ever really had GOOD costumes? Really, be honest. With the exception of some of Cockrum's designs, the Legion has almost always had costumes to turn away readers at the newsstand/comic shop. I mean, you have important male superheroes wearing costumes with pink and purple as the predominant colors, in the early 1960s. You had Saturn Girl switching from a matronly ice queen "Desk Set" outfit to an outfit that would be right at home in a porno, and then back again. You have superhero costumes without symbols or emblems, or emblems that are really kinda lame (Phantom Girl's "P" anyone?). We all loved Sun Boy's costume (and it stuck around so long, unchanged) because it was probably the only really GOOD superhero costume in the whole book! But this is why I LOVE the Legion, always have, always will. I love that Cosmic Boy, Brainiac 5, and Element Lad were wearing colors that would have labeled them as pansies, villains, or both, and that it just didn't matter what, if anything, their costumes said about their sexual preferences. I love that so many of the costumes look like they were homemade by the kids' parents or friends on some poor, backwater planet where style was an unaffordable luxury. I love that as they hit young adulthood and wrapped up their awkward adolescence, so many of them decided to flaunt it when they got it with unselfconsciously sexy outfits. And I even kinda love today that Sensor Girl, the sovereign of an entire planet, can choose to wear the single most horrible costume in the history of comics and none of her closest friends in the galaxy have the guts to tell her. I've decided, for today at least, that the Legion should embrace awful costumes as a feature, not a bug. Because if they all had super-stylish togs, they wouldn't BE the Legion, they'd be some slick, stylish, soulless Marvel book.

There might be something to that. The deliberately 'goofy' names, often ending in Girl, Lass, Boy or Kid, might also have something of that as well. A deliberate middle-finger towards the concept of growing up or taking the concept so seriously as to abandon anything *fun* about it.

I've always preferred a mix of different costume styles, with less unified elements, simply because so many of the Legionnaires are from wildly different worlds.

I would love for it to be flat-out canon that Carggites consider colors that we would never wear together, like purple and orange, to be complementary, and consider colors that we consider to 'match,' to be garish and hideous, or that everyone on Talokk VIII wears capes and bikinis, to allow their body to remain cool in the desert heat, and yet shield them from the sun as necessary. Random stuff like this, instead of a perverse wish to 'unify' the costumes (by giving everyone piping or cutting off their sleeves or giving all the girls boob-windows or even just having them all wear tights with jackets) seems more appropriate to represent that the team is made up of teens and twenty-somethings from a dozen different worlds, each with their own culture, heritage, history and sense of aesthetic style. Titanians can be all prim and proper, wearing clothing that looks like uniforms (and the pink bikini phase could be explained as Imra 'acting out'). Rimborians of certain regions might use a similar color scheme, or even share certain clothing elements, similar to how Ultra Boy and Marla Latham used to wear the same outfit.

IMO, the best way to emulate this sort of multi-cultural non-fashion-clone-Legion would be to pick costumes from different eras and artists for each Legionnaire, rather than have each new artist 're-invent the wheel.' One might stick to a classic Cockrum design, another might dress as they were introduced by Lightle, one might go for the later Giffen 'tights and jacket' look, etc.

Salic Law was used in the Germanic kingdoms to determine inheritance. Property was passed down from the father to the eldest son, or to the next closest male relative. Women could not inherit under Salic Law, which is why it was used in the French kingdom to justify Philip VI inheriting the land.

The best example is when Queen Victoria came to the throne, she inherited The United Kingdoms of Great Britain under England's Semi-Salic Laws.However, she could not inherit the Kingdom of Hanover. That went to one of her uncles.

Salic Law figures prominently in Shakespeare's Henry V -- France tries to argue that Henry can't claim the kingdom because of Salic Law barring inheritance through "the female." In the play, the arch-bishop of Canterbury does an excellent historic analysis of how both the monarchy of France and the rules of "Salic Land" had all inherited there titles through the maternal line.