Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Legion of Super-heroes 47 ~~ SPOILERS ~~

LO3W #3 is set January 14 -- if you're lucky. DC keeps pushing it back.

In the meantime folks can entertain themselves counting the number of heroes and villains in LO3W created from scratch by Jim Shooter (some two dozen, not counting duplicate characters). Geoff Johns would have nothing to reboot, retcon, revamp and reimagine if its weren't for the enduring work of JS and the other bona fide greats of the Silver and Bronze ages of the Legion. Imo, it's a shame so many readers can't (or care not to) differentiate between true creativity, which can produce uncomfortable and even painful results at times, and the comfortable medicocrity that comes of mere adaptation and mimicry.

Jim Shooter = the Simon Cowell of comics. There are people who say that Cowell should be nicer and more supportive of the applicants on American Idol, but really, would he be helping them if he was? Both industries don't care who you are or how you feel - all that matters is the finished product. People who can't understand that need to leave the womb.

Francis took the advice in the spirit in which it was intended, which is to his credit. It shows that he's a pro. I know a lot of people tend to personalize the comic book experience, but it's not personal - it's a business, and he knows that. So does Shooter. If your feelings are going to be hurt every time someone isn't complimentary about your work, you're not going to last long.

I don't know if that was directed at me or not, but I think you're over generalising (and out of line to boot). I can certainly appreciate Shooter's legacy and am thankful for all he brought to the the Legion during his early run. That doesn't mean he gets a pass from me for writing garbage in the here and now.

Similarly I'm not an unabashed Johns fan (and actively dislike a lot of his stuff), but won't deny I find Lo3W, imperfect though it may be, a heckuva a lot more engaging than the current LSH.

That said, I may knock the current run of the LSH, but I don't call down readers who like it or call into question their ability to appreciate the artistry of any given work. You'd do well to do the same.

As the above line is the only one that seemed to be in any way directed at you, as it's the only one that in any way referenced anything that you had said in your previous post, I'm not sure if the comment that DC keeps 'pushing back' Lo3W 3 counts as 'out of line.'

I get the protective feeling when something that you like is decried by someone else, but unless you are secretly Geoff Johns, I don't think that Tromium's other commentary was meant as a personal attack against you.

[If you *are* secretly Geoff Johns, they yeah, he totally dissed you. Kick his ass. And bring back Terra!]

By describing Shooter's run as "garbage" you are calling down *his* fans and impugning their taste and judgment. I don't appreciate being told I'm out of line when you clearly crossed that line first.

And no, the second paragraph wasn't directed at you specifically, but at everyone who's "glad" the Legion is on the verge of complete collapse. The implosion of the Shooter run and the end of the monthly series is a blow to the entire franchise that injures every other version of the Legion, including the Johnsboot. It'll be years, if ever, before the editorial damage inflicted by Didio and company is repaired. What's there to be "glad" about?
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P.S. Set, for the record, I'm a she. I go back 45 years with the Legion and I never thought I'd be reading it on its 50th anniversary. Now I'm sorry I'm here to see the travesty made of it. If Johns or Didio were here, I wouldn't hestitate to offer my opinion of them. Respectfully of course

Wow!
(deep breath)

Shooter has really always been extremely visual in his approach to storytelling ~ he was doing layouts for his artists to follow when he was 14 and according to Francis, he's STILL doing them.

So,I don't think he ment to injure fjm in the interview.

Regardless of his story approaches and team interacts though, he still did a pretty poor job of writing the Legion this time around.
imo
But, I love the Legion and I probably couldn't ever just walk away from them.
(Although I've had a hard time actually reading about them for quite awhile now, which is likely the reason why I'm so confused about what's going on lately!)
sigh

Well, after reading everyone's negative reactions on this thread before reading this issue, I was prepared for the worst and as a result, I was pleasantly surprised. The fill in artist didn't rock me but he wasn't as bad as the last fill in.

Dream Girl and Projectra are 2 of my favorite Legionnaires, so I'm not happy either. Just glad I'm not as disgusted as most of the rest of you seem to be.

I didn't think the Shooter interview was as scandalous as a lot of others did either. I think it was more complimentary to Francis than not. Either way, I've never been all that interested in discussing the creators and the behind the scenes stuff at DC. Just give me good art and good stories and I'll be happy. Give me crap and I'll be unhappy. The end.

We have "she's" on here?

I always thought it was a bunch of guys with some of them pretending to be girls or aliens.

suddenly I'm feeling kind of geeky.

Her world, her parents, her money (heh) were all torn to bits, her body is metabolizing and out of desperation, she took a drug from some stranger in a mirror.

I don't see the malice part much of a stretch?

I'd call it a pretty impressive character. The metabolism certainly could lead to a more "Sensor Girl" type character. In charge of an invading off-axis, time displaced army she didn't even know she had could put her into the Phoenix power category IMO.

The positive as I see them are that the characters without "issues" don't really get front panel and she doesn't have a tail.

I'd be willing to see how this played out.

Remember how this Projectra joined this LSH? Before Orando was destroyed, and before she received her hereditary power, she was, for months, essentially a joke having a nasty fraudulent prank played upon her and her throne.

To some degree, this Legion is but reaping the oats it sowed.

Generously phrased but I'd also agree with Shooter and I think I can say this without...insult? to you because I think your small panels and pacing are some of the best ever. I am a Manipul "convert." Wasn't sure what to make of this new fangled styled, didn't think it could be used to convey emotion and in my 45 years with legion you honestly have become one of my favorite legion artists, with Coipel, Giffin and Lightle. I can stare looking at background details, posing and facial expression (particularly Cham) for hours, seriously.

I love to turn a page and see that knockout full pager but so many, particularly Geoff Johns books, overuse it for my tastes. I'd much rather buy a poster and a comic book than a comic book full of mini-posters.

Which brings me to a wish. Why do we not have more posters, none for Legion and why do we never have a "silent" issue? I would think that would be something a writer and an artist would want to take on if only for the challenge. An issue of Legion without dialogue, the entire story told in picture. I really would like to have seen what Shooter, Manipul and Livesay could have come up with.

Best of luck to you. I'll be looking for your future assignments.

ps: I have absolutely no artistic abilities and my windows don't even have curtains so take anything I say about what a great artist you are with a grain of salt.

I can't speak for other girls, but I come here because I heard there are some guys running around with no pants on.

Two things in this issue not mentioned amidst all the furor.

Atom Girl and Colossal Boy are playing a game in the rec room. Last time we saw Salu she was going after the sci-cop who beat her up on Rimbor. I guess it's just as well that subplot is aborted.

Saturn Girl's 5-minute "fling" with Ultra Boy seems to be common knowledge. What, did she confess to everyone in the Legion?

I don't blame Projectra for being pissed at the LSH. They basically ignored the fact that the Terror firma goons wiped out her race and let them go unpunished. Heck, Sun Boy even joined them. How is she supposed to feel when her own team treats her like that? Of course I prefer to think of it as terrible writing on Waid's part, rather than how our heroes would have really acted if anyone else had been in charge.

Where is Sun Boy by the way? We haven't seen him in months and he's not on the monitor board. I hope Projectra gives him a good smackdown before this is all over.

oh come on, the legion is not on the verge of collapse! they ended the series early, but it was going to END ANYWAY, remember?! shooter was not going to be on this book forever, he was slated for 16 issues. 16. would you have freaked out when another writer came on after shooter?!!

we've know about LO3W for a long time, that it's going to do something big with the legion, it's getting overhauled! the result might not be something you like but come on, who cares! at least find out what it'll be before you think it sucks. it might be whatever perfect dream you have in your head of what the legion should be. shooter's legion was an overhaul itself, right? so you can't just be anti-overhaul in general or you should have freaked out when shooter took over the book. i at least was entertained and happy for the first few issues of his run and by a few aspects.


didn't sun boy take off to lead the wanderers? isn't he technically not on the legion or am i totally forgetting stuff?

for the record, manapul's response to shooter's comments? professional. shooter publicly saying the covers and art weren't up to snuff and partially blaming the art?........

let me tell you how a cover gets made. thumbnails are made, everyone stares at the thumbnails, rough drafts are made, everyone stares at those, things are reworked and fixed. it's not like the penciller just makes a cover and then they're stuck with it. there's feedback and suggestions from the writer and editor. acting like a victim of your art team is bizarre to say the least.

you know why? because YES, giving crits to your artist is not only ok but PART OF THE JOB. This is what the writer is SUPPOSED to do to a large extent. my complaint is NOT that he has criticisms for his team. do not misunderstand me.

it is part of the job when you're making a comic that it be a collaborative effort. your artist is not an art machine that just makes whatever you tell them with no creative input (unless you're on a team where it's mutually understood that it's going to work like that). furthermore, there is a time and place for your criticisms and direction and that is DURING THE PROCESS OF MAKING THE COMIC.

you say your piece then, you get input from the editor, you get input from the artists. you WORK TOGETHER. at the BEGINNING you go "ok this is what this book is going to be like", you work out creative differences BEFOREHAND. you do not, after you've been fired, decide that now you will give and interview and bad mouth the other people working on the book and blame them for the book's demise. there is a very big difference between calling someone up and going "work on this, this and this" and publicly calling out people on your team.

i think we all know this book was not selling badly, shooter pointed this out himself in the interview. he'll suggest that the book ended early because of him and yet in the same breath say "well if only the covers were better and the colors were better".

REALLY??

because with the exceptions of two issues, this one and one other, i have seen VERY VERY VERY few complaints about the art. and actually NONE about the covers if you look through the threads on this very board. i think, overwhelmingly, love or hate for the book, any VERY strong EMOTIONAL feeling, has come directly from the writing, don't you think? therefore, if the book is canceled early, i'm not going to think it was the muddy colors on issue 324.

furthermore, writing that's so fast (yet....still so SLOW?!) I get whiplash? it's just not in style. some people might prefer it, and i can see the appeal with the rising cost of comics, but to many readers it comes off as unrealistic and old fashioned. the influence of cinema and the "unfolding text" of the tv show as created an expectancy for that style in the modern reader. comics are an amazingly fertile ground for this sort of unfolding text dynamic because it's literally made for people trained to look for self-reference at ever turn ("that hairbrush from this issue came from that other issue!" "ohh, this character must be thinking about all those other times that guy came to his planet" etc). even some aspects of this issue, i might have been a lot more receptive to if it was paced more slowly. the numbers weren't bad, but MAYBE a more modern style would have made them even better.

GIANT POST.

He took off to lead Terror Firma, but during the Dominator War they were captured by the Dominators and freed during the Legion's invasion of the Dominator homeworld. Sun Boy was offered membership in the Legion again (twice, I think, once in a Waid issue and once in a Bedard issue), and I think he accepted, and there was also some talk of Terror Firma also joining the Legion. It seems nuts to many of us that we're pretending that Terror Firma are okay guys now, but the (weak) justification for it is that Elysion is the guy who did all the really psycho destructive stuff and the others aren't like that.

Thank you, Matthew!

So I've read it now, and gosh, that was a choppy rushed-feeling issue. I have no idea if I would have thought so if I didn't already know that it was two issues crammed into one, but anywho, it sure felt disjointed to me.

Quite a few characters seemed out-of-character. Dream Girl, even as a fragment existing inside of Brainy, was acting pretty strange, calling Brainy 'my love' all melodramatically, which just felt off, given her previously ascerbic portrayal (snarking to Dream Boy about thinking that 'those pants were a good idea' for instance).

I was never totally in love with the idea of Dreamy existing inside of Brainy. (Dream Girl as a literal 'dream girl?' Awesome idea, but she should have been able to bounce around in everybody's dreams, not just Brainy's and Dream Boys! And the last thing Brainy really needed was something else going on in his head. He's already got enough going on, as a character, for that matter.)

The notion that Brainiac Five has thuggish aspects of his personality crawling around is, IMO, a step backwards. I'm fine with Brainy occasionally being manipulative, or short-tempered, or even nucking futs, but the personification of the thugs didn't fit. My vision of Brainy's mind comes from the Universo Project, where Saturn Girl claimed that she could only project herself in as a stream of energy, as his mind saw itself as a gigantic computer. I think it would have been *far* more in keeping with the nature of Brainy's mind for his 'darker aspects' to be more like malignant computer codes, insectile 'viruses' and subroutines that slither around. They could be just as menacing, but not look like Rimborian street-thugs, which is just about the *last* thing I'd expect to see in Brainy's mind...

And the part where Brainy ejects a portion of his psyche and it becomes a corporeal being? That's just ludicrous. So now Brainy can *create people by thinking about them?* No. Just, hell no. Again, if it was some sort of malignant psychic 'computer virus' and it escaped across communications lines to begin causing problems in the real world by infecting nearby machinery and hiding itself from antivirus type programs with Coluan sneakiness, that would be, at least, plausible, since we know that there is machinery around that is receptive to thoughts (Flight Rings, for one), and that a 'hostile Coluan thought-entity' could then theoretically hop (or be thrown) out of the Coluan's brain and start wreaking havoc on machinery around them. But an actual corporeal being, formed out of a Coluan's 'bad temper' or whatever? That's silly. And, again, as with the Dream Girl-on-his-mind subplot, I think Brainy is the *last* Legion character who needs an even more powerful mind. He didn't need to have a Precognitive in his brain, and he sure as hell doesn't need the ability to crap out living entities from his brain to attack people who bug him!

Gah.

I've been a huge fan of a lot of the stuff that Shooter has added in this latest run, how he has turned around and revitalized some of Waids ideas and made me love the Legion again, after I had almost lost hope. But I got nothin' for this issue. It was not a good issue, IMO.

And not having Francis' art sure didn't help. Those first two issues (38ish?) of the Shooter/Manapul run are the best-drawn Legion I've seen since Steve Lightle was drawing the team (also, IIRC, around 38ish, of the Baxter era...). I wish we could always have such beautiful art.

And I wish both Francis and Jim (and Livesay, etc!) luck in their future endeavors. Whether I agree or not with every single thing they've said, done or thought in their lives is irrelevant. They both poured a lot into this book, and I appreciate them for it.

Frances and Jim...try not to take the books demise personally...it's par for the course for the Post Crisis Legions...there is a long and illustrious list of otherwise successful creators that have failed to sell DC's vision of the Post Crisis Legion or appease the fan base.

Mark Waid(X2)
Barry Kitson
Keith Giffen
Gail Simone
Dan Jurgens
Roger Stern
Oliver Copiel
Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning

Pretty good company to be in when you think about it...

The problem is too many people believe the retcon history...


There is only one successful version of the Legion, it died in 1986 at the hands of John Byrne and DC Editorial Policy....it's testament to just how special that book was that it's successor has managed to run for 20 something years on nothing but fumes and the ghostly memory of what it once was.


Take a bow for one of the best attempts at selling the Post Crisis Legion concept. Yes the wheels came off at the end, but the wheels always come off sooner or later.

It's not becuase of the stories, it's not because of the art...it's because of the concept, and everyone from Jim Shooter to Mark Waid knows it deep down inside.


Geoff Johns most assuredly knows it, which is why he has said he won't write a Legion title without Superman being a part of it.


The failure of the Post Crisis Legions always ends up with the creators being thrown under the bus...their stories weren't good enough, the art wasn't good enough etc, even though these guys have track records of success miles long anywhere and everywhere else...because you see really, it's the concept that's not good enough. It's a totally generic concept when stripped down to the retconned ideal.


Thanks for trying...I enjoyed part of the Shooter Manapul run immensely, but eventually the lack of an anchor prooved to be an insurmountable obstacle in an ultra competitive comics environment, as it always does. Not your fault...


Your run will be remembered...it will no doubt be someone's favorite.

By and large, I agree but a large part of Levitz's run did not feature Superboy/girl and yet was remarkably successful. The problem has not been just the Kal-El link but also the lack of respect for the Legion's history. And by that I don't just mean recognition of the stories but also the characterisation and whole ethos of the Legion and their 30/31st Century universe.

The old adage if it ain't broke certaintly applied to the Legion. Unfortunately after four fixes it still isn't as good as when it wasn't broke.

Geoff Johns realises the importance Kal-El has to the Legion's history and has brought that vital dynamic back but the Legion don't need to be a Superman back-up team in fact I would suggest that such an approach would really be the death knell for the team.That's not to say that cross-overs shouldn't happen or even be welcomed, just that the characters need the space to develop without the big S.

Onslaught. (Or was Onslaught physical at all? Don't remember, don't care about the X-Men anymore.)
That's exactly what I thought. He's a rare comic book SF character with a super-powerful mind but no psionic abilities.

I only paged through the book, but MY GOD, was the art horrible or what?!

Leonardi's layouts weren't bad, but that's what the finished art looked liked -- quickly sketched layouts to be pencilled and inked later. Just horrible.

If the book wasn't on my pull list, I would have put it back on the shelf.

The first cover was great, and a couple that followed were good. But some were boring to downright bad.

Manapul did a good job, but not the kinda job that's going to pull in a big audience. I agree that he'll be great some day, but I'm tired of DC putting people on the Legion that aren't already great. Legion isn't a place where newbie artists get a chance to develop their skills -- then leave for another book (or company) when they blossom.

Interesting.

I thought the stories all moved too slowly -- and that was one of my biggest problems with this run, but I was putting all the blame on the writing. Hmmm..

Regarding Jim's critique of FJM though, I think he was being critical, but being constructive. I appreciate a guy who tells it like it is. He did offer praise, but there is no doubt that there is room for improvement, and I've long said that there is great potential in Manapul's art. There was a lot of nice stuff in his run, but there was also a lot of stuff that just didn't do much for me.

Hear, hear!
I've been so tired of the 'Legion newbie thing' for so long ~ but then again, Kitson was just on the book and he's one of my all time favorites and a perfect storyteller, imo, but what the stories had to say just didn't work most of the time, either!

Oh well.

I have to say that I was totally confused with this issue. The whole Dream Girl/Brainy getting engaged thing just felt, to me, "off" somehow. I guess I was hoping that they would just bring Nura back for good finally and move on. As for what's really going on, I think it boils down to Brainy feeling guilt at allowing Dream Girl to die in the line of duty way back when and then failing in his attempt to resurrect her physical body shortly there after. So it's a given that he would start to see her in his dreams. It's his guilt peeking through! His attempts to "woo" her in the dream realm is just his guilty conscience trying to compensate for her death and his inability to solve this sad trauma. He IS supposed to be a genius after all, right??
Guys,this just proves he is human after all.

I will sincerely miss this series after issue #50. Jim, Francis et al did a fine job during their run, as did those before them in this recent incarnation of the Legion. I have to trust and remain hopeful that the powers that be will honour the anniversary of this great group of future heroes and reward all our past joys and frustrations with a kick-ass hot new series in 2009.
I, for one, will remain faithful.
LONG LIVE THE LEGION!