Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion stories that haven't been done to death...

I smell a "mirrorverse" story.

(I suppose those really have been done to death all over, though.)

Hee-hee... the title of this thread and a potential LSH murder mystery makes me giggle.

Love 'Murder on the Nova Express'... would you rather read a story with the Legionnaires as suspects or detectives?

If the former, the cast could be pretty large. Esp if a sub-division (the Universo Four or the Espionage Squad) are the ones doing the detecting. If the latter, the number of investigating Legionnaires should be small.

The two would make for vastly different kinds of stories. I can see benefits in both.

I guess I'd prefer the scenario with a few Legionnaires either called in to investigate, or happening to be on board for some reason or other. I love the idea of 'the Universo Four', but I'd like to remind the board that Element Lad has acted as a pretty decent detective in at least one story. Jan, Brainy and Shrinking Violet would make a pretty terrific small cast.

Maybe an established LSH villain or two would be on board?

The idea of a bunch of Legionnaires as suspects is pretty intriguing too. Maybe a 'locked HQ' mystery that doesn't involve murder, but some other crime which wouldn't require the culprit to become a villain and face expulsion from the team.

HAHA!


Tonight on the Legion of Super-Heroes ... They have to clear ... THEMSELVES! *dun dun dunnnnn*

I think to make it most interesting, you'd have to have at least a couple of Legionnaires as suspects (if it's a multi-parter, at least one issue should end on the cliffhanger of the evidence pointing to one of the Legionnaires), though I'd want a variety of characters as suspects. The murderer should actually turn out to be someone who matters, rather than just Joe Martian who happens to be traveling on the spaceship.

Big yes to lots of these ideas!

Love Mystery Lad's suggestions of follow-ups to Adventure stories (even if just mentioning these worlds and creatures and races, and letting us know that they still exist). Also of developing relationships / friendships that affect the larger story and aren't (like Thom and Dirk's one-time friendship) going to be abandoned for the shiny new thing.

I totally agree with Invisible Brainiac about more downtime. An issue dedicated to a 'day in the life' could be a great way to focus on the ginormous and compelling 31st century background, as well as flesh out some characterization beats. (The Simonson drawn issue, IMO, fell down in that they felt it necessary to show *every* Legionnaire, leaving room for nothing more than cameos, really.)

All four of Harbinger's ideas appeal to me. I've already written about Myar, the Alchemy Planet, so that's a silver age concept I'd love to see explored. Invisible Jacques either needs to be developed, or sidelined. He's a waste of space, currently. More on Lallor and the Wanderers, of course, would be great, or even more on the Subs or the old-school Academy students. It's been a long time since the days when those others would be called in to deal with a crisis. (Where were the Subs during the Takron-Galtos breakout, anyway? The Legion used to occasionally call up the reserves and Substitutes for big stuff like that...)

We've seen a little bit of the investigative / Legionnaire j'accuse! stuff over the last decades (Jo on Rimbor, framed for the murder of An Ryd, Threeboot Cham investigating the 'locked room murder' of the police prisoner and catching Jeyra Entin, etc.) but, well-written, there's always room for more of that!

A murder mystery in which Chameleon Boy turns out to be the corpse (because they faked the death of someone who was about to be assassinated, to flush out the real assassin!) could be funky!

Or how about the Legionnaires taking part in a murder mystery game (and make them all act in character too), and they don't even know that a real murder has already occurred!

And we can have all those forgotten Adventure era characters be suspects/game participants as a nice way to bring them back.

Wow, this thread is mind-blowing. Love how we're building on each other's ideas. WE should write the Legion!

<span style="font-size: 11px;">(I was actually writing a fanfic that attempted to bring the Espionage Squad into the antimated-verse, sans Brainiac 5. But I haven't been able to work on it in, oh, a dog's years now. )</span>

But that would be awesome! Animated Phantom Girl, Triplicate Girl and Shrinking Violet are among my favorite versions of all three characters ever!

In my version Violet leads ES, because she's older and has been on the team longer than Cham.

(I really hated how Season 2 shunted most of the female characters aside, but Animated Violet was great. It just sucked that she never got to actually interact with any other female characters. )

Yeah, I remember fans here thought that the lack of female characters might have been because young male viewers wanted more cool guys. There was even a contest on Bits to pick a "strong" female Legionnaire to join the show so she could be front and center with the guys.

I liked all the animated females - and and :infectiouslassa: included. Really wish there had been more!

I've always thought that Nemesis Kid was a severely underutilized villain in general. A mystical ability to adapt whatever power is needed to defeat a particular opponent sounds like such a cool ability, but he always came off as pretty much a wuss in most of his appearances.

I do wish some of his later appearances had shown him as a good enough tactician to use it to the fullest. They always got around it by having multiple Legionnaires (or multiple Lournus) attack simultaneously. A little divide and conquer would have allowed Nemesis Kid to fight back pretty well.

At the other extreme, there's Karate Kid #1, where he's basically written with a Duplicate Boy-esque ability to do whatever he can think of, which I don't think is how his power should work, either.

The way I see it, whenever he's confronted with a particular opponent, his ability scans that opponent and gifts him with whatever is needed to defeat the opponent. For example, when faced with Mordru, he might develop earth-manipulation abilities, though he wouldn't necessarily understand why that particular power is useful against Mordru.

It might be interesting if a Legionnaire (or someone else) had to make use of a version of his potion (one that works only one time or something) in order to defeat a particular villain.

Because there weren't enough cool guys in S1? [bangs head on desk] So damn tired of the "one-girl rule" in pop culture. And the heavy hand of Marketing, which I suspect was the main culprit here.

Yet you have other children's shows like Last Airbender that had much more parity between the genders and were hugely successful. The argument that a show can't succeed without being male-dominated all the time sounds more like adults indulging their own prejudices while hiding behind the kids.

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There was even a contest on Bits to pick a "strong" female Legionnaire to join the show so she could be front and center with the guys.

I think a character like Monstress or XS would have been cool, but then again I saw nothing wrong with the girls they already used from the start. Mostly they just needed some more time in the front-- together!

<strong> </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I liked all the animated females -

Sadly, prominently-featured female characters (emphasis on the plural) are in no imminent danger of being done to death.

Criminal Minds is another show that has a good mix between the sexes. Creators really need to understand that female characters are NOT interchangeable!

There's some 'rule' that I don't remember the name of (the Bechtel rule?) that one reviewer uses to judge whether a show is just including a woman to satisfy a quota (or as eye-candy for the male viewers), instead of writing women as actual characters.

1) There are two women with speaking lines.

2) At some point, they have a conversation with each other.

3) Their conversation is *not* about one of the male characters.

It seems like a lot movies, in particular, only have 'room' for one woman, and even if there is another woman with a speaking role, they never meet (or only meet for an obligatory 'chick-fight').

I've never consciously thought about that during my own writing of the Legion, but the Legion ladies, despite being attractively drawn and occasionally scantily clad, have been portrayed as much more than just 'eye candy for the male readers' over the decades.

Set:

What makes it sadder is that both JLA/JLU and Titans Go!, while not perfect, were way ahead of the Legion cartoons in terms of passing The Bechdel Test.

I think my favorite ep from S1 is "Child's Play", because wow! We got a whole couple of sentences in which Phantom, Saturn and Trip were discussing battle strategy with each other. (Plus, the whole plot was that a self-absorbed boy child had to learn that he wasn't really the center of the universe. After Phantom Girl found a legal loophole that kept Earth from going to war with Sorcerer's World.)


(Oh, and in case I never mentioned it, I think Laser Ape should totally have made it into S3.)

Actually, this brings to mind ... a vision ...


"Picture it ... The Silver Age ... Battle of the Sexes story"

... where the boys take off half cocked (with one female LSH member) to tackle a case ... meanwhile the girls back at the HQ are solving the case ... and the girls have to take reluctant turns being the *token* female on the boys squad.(mostly just to make sure they don't mess things up too badly)

Sun Boy, Live Wire, and Ultra Boy won't even realize that Shrinking Violet was with them during one panel and Triplicate Girl was on their team in the next panel.

The girls use the Planetary chance machine to choose who has to go with the boys at any given moment.

It strikes Vi twice in a row. and she pouts!

Smart boys like Brainy, Element Lad, Cham, and Invisible Kid are not part of this story.

Ok well maybe for the last panel where everyone laughs about the hijinks!

And that it's ridiculous to expect one woman in fiction to stand for all women everywhere. I think that's the real problem that dogs poor Wonder Woman. If the "Trinity" were a Quartet (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Hawkgirl or Black Canary) there wouldn't constantly be one female character having to carry all of "Womanhood" by herself.

[snip]

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...Smart boys like Brainy, Element Lad, Cham, and Invisible Kid are not part of this story.

They're out selling candy planet-to-planet to help keep the lights on at HQ. RJ made some really bad investments that decade and... well...

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Ok well maybe for the last panel where everyone laughs about the hijinks!

You're going to write this story, yes?

When the "boy" team starts to get suspicious ... Saturn Girl and Phantom Girl quickly do one or several of these four to throw them off.

and subsequently and obligatory:
4) *CAT* FIGHT!

The boys dismiss their suspicions and chalk the confusion up to "Girls sure are crazy!"

Cat fights are soooo... last century. The fight should have them literally throwing cats at one another a la' the Cat Lady on The Simpsons.

And then Interplanetary PETA shows up... [cue ominous music]

Ooh, cat fights with real cats! Yes!

<blink><span style="font-size: 22px;"><font face="futura">Planetary Cat Machine!</font f></span></blink>

(This thread is going to be locked for excessive silliness, isn't it?)

Holy S*#$

... THAT IS AMAZING ....




I was going to suggest mud wrestling ....

bikinis on cats, covered in mud ... spun around and thrown at female Legionnaires?