Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes What can be done to save the Legion?

Yeesh, Eryk, can I borrow some of your Cosmic King space-stash? I still have a couple of DC comics I have to read... *shudder*

I haven't got the greatest connection to the internet right now at home so haven't read through this thread so apologies if I'm just repeating what has been said before:

As much as I like Paul's take on the Legionnaires and the slow burn approach to the soap opera elements I'm sad to say the book needs a new writer to bring in fresh crazy sci-fi elements. there's a whole galaxy there waiting to be written! The only writer I know of who would have the marketing clout to do that would be Grant Morrison though I know he isn't always reliable. I just don't read enough comics these days (in fact Legion is the only one I've followed with any regularity for a few years now) so there are bound to be up-and-coming writers who could really blow our, and all the potential new readers minds with some space wacky stories.

If nothing else give it to me! I would love to write the comic for a year. Well I could wish anyway

The franchise needs another twelve part Lost story to reintroduce the gang to the wider audience - the original Lost of course in the second Galaxy, in case you wondered.

I'd not like to see another five years later (as much as the first few years of that were brilliant IMO) or re-bot - I would just give up if that happened again.

A decent regular artist who met deadlines would be great too.

As unpopular as may be to us hardcore fans initially I believe the book needs a cross-over with Superman to get the sales up. Just for two issues maybe but something to get the book into the bigger arena.

This, actually, is why the first 5-10 issues of the Waid/Kitson run are some of my favorite LSH work since the early 5YL stories. Waid's inventive vision of the future just made me feel the way I'd felt reading Levitz's stories from the '80s. It seemed to me to represent an "other" world, something beyond our current conception of the universe. Where that run failed, ultimately, was in not having an actual compelling story to tell. Or, at least, not one that long-time fans or new readers could connect to.

My feeling is that the book needs that kind of significant break from the past. Many will decry such a call for a new "reboot", but I think that the book needs to be stripped back down to basics, shorn of its history, and launched with a new vision.

I personally have been moving in the direction that HWW described, at least as far as super-hero books go. Despite their recent success at the box office, I think that super-heroes are a moribund concept. As soon as the '80s and '90s made us try to take them seriously, the doom of the genre was made inevitable. Super-heroes are an inherently ridiculous concept and taking them seriously leads to ever more spectacular suspensions of disbelief. (The Legion always had something of an out in this regard in terms of the future setting, in which a group of brave individuals were welcome to use their abilities for the good of society. The Legion, through much of its history, has operated with an official government sanction that few other groups or heroes can claim.)

Despite the presence of the word "super-heroes" in the name of the group, I think that any future iteration of the concept would be most successful as a more high-concept science-fiction comic. In all honesty, the only thing I'm committed to seeing a writer keep is the basic framework of a group of brave young adventurers with diverse super-normal abilities banding together for the good of society. It needs a writer who can imagine a future that's inspiringly fantastic and who can also write compelling, character-driven stories in that setting. So who can do that?

Grant Morrison is the first name that comes into my head. He's been the most consistently innovative comic-book writer this side of Alan Moore in the last 20 years. If Morrison were interested in settling in to write the Legion for the next ten years, I'd be buying it.

Brian K. Vaughn has demonstrated in Saga an ability to create characters, settings, and stories that are at once totally alien, yet totally relatable. It would be interesting to see what kind of stories he could tell in the LSH framework.

If the book stayed in a more super-heroic vein, Matt Fraction's work on his recent Defender's series showed a strong writer creating imaginative stories while maintaining something of a sense of humor or whimsy about the whole genre concept.

Along the same lines (and I can already hear the cries of bloody murder for even suggesting this), Mark Waid's work on Daredevil has been solidly entertaining, recalling the four-color adventures of yesteryear, while still rooting the character in the world of today. Fine. Yes, I'm a Waid partisan and I know that absolutely no one else in the whole world (probably including Waid himself) wants to see him anywhere near a Legion book ever, ever again.

Brian Azzarello's reskinning of the Wonder Woman mythos has been one of the real success stories of the New 52 for me. If he could apply that kind of imagination to a future setting, we'd really be in business.

There may be other, lesser-known writers who could pull it off. However, if it's going to work, it really needs a big name to pull in a built-in, non-LSH fanbase.

To wrap up, a quick overview of a couple of writers whom I think are wrong for the LSH:

Geoff Johns: for all his star power, he doesn't have the inventiveness to really carry the Legion forward. Conceptually, he's often mired in the past and devoted to revitalizing the comics of his youth, usually by adding a few new trappings (new ring corps!) or tweaking the old ones (the GL Corps is like the space marines now, not space cops!). He also seems to specialize in event stories: big, world-shaking set pieces that don't actually have much of a narrative arc. Yawn.

Darwyn Cooke: let me be plain-Darwyn Cooke is one of my favorite comics writer/artists working today. When I met him at the 2008 SD con, I told him that New Frontier had reminded me why I love comics. However, it's more accurate to say that it reminded me why I got into comics and that's not really what keeps me there. Cooke is, far more that Johns, explicitly a nostalgic writer. If we wanted a Legion book in the style of the early Adventure stories, Cooke would be our guy, but that's not what will make the Legion successful again.

I'm not so sure that the concept of super-heroes is stagnant, though Marvel's and DC's comic book versions seem to be.

You raise an interesting question, though, as to what a super-hero actually is and why the concept is still relevant to us today (not to mention extremely popular). I think the recent Batman and Avengers movies did a brilliant of job of showing why super-heroes still matter. There are forces of evil in the world: frightening, ugly, cruel people. Heroes of any stripe are meant to show us that "good" (however we define that term) can prevail. Super-heroes, with their iconic costumes, their super-human powers, and their masked identities, represent that side of us that still wants to make a difference, that believes we can do better, and that knows there is more to us than the person who goes to work, pays bills, and zones out in front of the tube.

The Batman films showed how a super-hero story can be effective: there was a beginning, middle, and end. The door is still open for Bruce Wayne to come back and don the cape and cowl again, but he doesn't have to. He's passed on the mantel, so to speak, to a younger, fresher hero. Bruce is, finally, happy--a state very few heroes are allowed to achieve . . . and with good reason. If the hero becomes happy, the story is over and no one will buy the next issue.

This, of course, is how the publishing industry works and has always worked: get people coming back for more. This is the archaic mindset, I think, that most publishers, certainly Marvel and DC, operate under these days.

Filmmakers, by contrast, are limited by a different set of realities: actors age, price themselves out of a project, or otherwise move on. The brilliance of the Avengers films (including the Iron Man, Cap, and Thor films) is that they've allowed for the actors to age while keeping the franchise moving forward, even though it takes years for each film to be made and released. Soon or later, though, Downey's going to want to put aside that iron helmet.

(When that happens, we may or may not see a new Avengers franchise, just as we're seeing new Spider-Man and Superman franchises. But those of us who were satisfied with the original franchises can feel free to ignore the new ones and not feel we're missing much. This is the power of telling real stories, not ongoing "arcs" that never end.)

Comics, however, exist in a never-neverland where heroes never age (or they age backwards) and nothing ever truly changes. They don't tell stories; they have events. This is what is stagnating to me, not the concept of super-heroes, per se.

You also raise an interesting point that the perhaps the Legion should be called something other than "Super-Heroes." I think this is a good point and one worth exploring, though Abnett and Lanning's version tried this approach by truncating the title of the series to THE LEGION. That title itself, I think, was not enough: The Legion of what? But perhaps the term Legion of Super-Heroes is itself antiquated and interfering with the more appealing science fiction aspects of the series. I have no idea what the series could be called instead, and I don't want to see it totally divorced from its super-hero identity, but I would like to see the Legion "progress" in some manner.

What occurs to me from the above discussion is that the concept of super-heroes will never be irrelevant, so long as there are young people (and older people with youthful idealism left in their bones) willing to embrace the concepts of 'good guys' and 'heroes.'

The last decades have seen both DC and Marvel headlined by jaded writers like Millar or Bendis who *loathe* the very concept of super-heroes and have done everything in their power to 'deconstruct' the genre and tear down the notion that someone can be a hero or have good intentions.

The audience hasn't 'moved past superheroes,' IMO, it's been deliberately weaned of the concept, through events like the rape and murder of Sue Dibney or characters like the (explicity named as such in the text) 'jack-booted thug' Ultimate Cap, who doesn't only 'not like bullies,' but actually is one.

And yet, the Captain America movie didn't flop, and full-throatedly endorsed the idea of a 'heroic' Steve Rogers, not shying away from the 'embarassing' or 'naive' or 'Silver Age' patriotism and nobility and idealism of the character. There's still an audience for super-heroes, I think, despite Millar and Bendis' best endeavors to wean us off of them and into a more grim and gritty and 'realistic' view of super-powered thugs beating each other up for morally dubious reasons.

Well said, Set.

One of my favorite scenes in the Avengers film is where Cap barks orders to the police chief. The chief initially questions, "Who are you to be giving me orders?" But after Cap defeats an alien whatsis, the chief falls into line, repeating Cap's exact orders into his shoulder phone. And Cap doesn't even look back to gloat.

That scene, to me, encapsulates all that is good, noble, and heroic about super-heroes. They are characters who know what to do and are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do it. Most of us worry about how "doing the right thing" will affect our jobs, our relationships, our popularity with our friends, or, as in the chief's case, our sense of self importance. And sometimes we're conflicted between different ideas of what's right. Super-heroes may make things a little too stark (pun not intended) by dividing the world into heroes and villains, but having a sense of moral clarity helps cut through every other consideration, including ego and fear.

Great posts by Set and HWW on embracing the nature of heroism in superhero stories and also allowing true progress and change in the stories.

"For there will always be a need for heroes..." Heroic idealism is just that powerful a concept.

Why does a franchise like the X-Men keeps going, seemingly without the Legion's problems? It's a book I read sporadically, but it seems that characters age, have their powers removed or changed in the course of big events, members come and go, switch sides, some die, some come back to life, some time travel. It's all more complex, over the course of its history, than the Legion, IMO; there have been good runs and bad runs, but has it stopped publishing at any point or been threatened by cancellation? Are X fans as grumpy or dissatisfied as Legion fans?

I really have to wonder what a company like Image would do with the Legion. It would be fascinating to speak with some of their editors and creators about the Legion concept - but that's probably never going to happen, not even to theorize.

Two or three things make the X Men a more successful and more palatable franchise.

For one, they're set in modern times -- putting characters in unfamiliar settings puts a wall between the reader and the characters, makes it harder to connect. Even before all the continuity connectivity and tie ins and crossovers, the alien future setting is going to alienate some fans of the more grounded.

For another, the Legion is inherently optimistic, a utopian ideal. Meanwhile, the X-Men fight a world that fears and hates them, riddled with racism and oppression. It's an inherently angsty set up, and people really respond to that. The Legion was born of Superman in tone, and modern america just doesn't connect to that kind of hopeful optimism; it feels childish (I wrote about that here http://heshouldreallyknowbetter.blogspot.com/2012/10/superman-dying-for-our-sins.html)

Furthermore, the X-Men line has simply been better managed to stay popular. Post-Levitz, the Legion became experimental and boutique, and then pretty bland and generally neglected. Post-Claremont, the X-Men became an artistically driven franchise on the 'cutting edge' of the 90s Image-style artist that really captured the Zeitgeist of the time. I wouldn't wish 90s X-men quality stories on the Legion - there is no doubt that no X Men run has been as good as 5 Years Later Legion save Grant Morrison's run and maybe some of the Bill S. New Mutants stuff - but that was a line that knew what to do and how to squeeze the most out of its readers, and how to attract people (and it wasn't with 'accessibility').

Finally, reboots have fractured the Legion fanbase. With the X-Men, yes, the continuity itself is arguably just as confusing, but there is a consistent-ish narrative. One can 'believe' that all the things you loved about a character or a continuity are still there. As a Legion fan, when the original Legion was gone, at least some people decided to cut out, in it more for the affection with what had happened than the affection for the concept. This, presumably, happened again and again. As comics are a pretty niche market, growing smaller in terms of new readers by the year, those lost just weren't replaced by those gained.



Image, as a company, doesn't have editors really. They don't do anything -- that's the point of Image. The creative team hires their own editors, if they have them; Image just publishes the book.

Having a creator with a strong creative vision work on the title would be amazing, but I really don't think editors interfere so much with people writing Legion stories. It feels to me that the problem is Levitz more than anyone. He's too much a fan.

Love your blog, Desaad.

The above is an excellent analysis of why X-Men remains so popular and the Legion doesn't. I was also touched by your Superman post, in which you say he represents faith and other ideals which are, unfortunately, now considered "hokey."

In another post, you nailed it on the head when you said the Legion represents "THE FUTURE" and the problem with Geoff Johns' version (and Levitz's, too, I think) is that it's too focused on the past.

One of the most unfortunate developments in popular culture over the last few decades is that belief in a better future seems naive or "childish." This belief has been replaced by some combination of cynicism for the present and wistful nostalgia for the past, as if the only recourse left to us (or to certain comics creators) is somehow recapturing the thrill of that first comic we read.

I think you're being incredibly naive if you don't think that the Legion has suffered from editorial interference for at least the past twenty-five years or so. Going back at least to the editorially-mandated "eliminate all reference to Superboy" at the beginning of the 5YL, to the editorially mandated "add Superboy into the series" towards the end of DnA's run, to Giffen's recent leaving after two issues because of conflicts with editorial, there's just too many examples of problems created by editorial fiat not to attribute at least part of the Legion's problems to it.

Of course, one of the reasons the Legion prospered early on was Weisinger's strong guidance, so "editorial interference" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I think there are specific periods in which editorial takes a heavy hand, absolutely, but it doesn't require the kind of day to day coordination and shoehorning that a lot of other books do. I don't believe that the problem with levitz's Legion is that someone is interfering editorially - I'm pretty sure the problem is with Levitz. Now, granted, certain things happened that DID hurt Levitz, Flashpoint essentially truncating his previous mega arc, but that's more structural rather than content based.

Yes, the first Crisis necessitated all kinds of re-writes, especially once Levitz left and took whatever protection his tenure with the company might have afforded him with him. And then again in Zero Hour.

But the biggest concern of someone like Waid was not that they forced story directions on him, but that they didn't do enough to promote or communicate with him -- he was off in his own little world doing his thing, and no one told him the greater goings on.

I think that is more typical of the hands off nature of a Legion of Super-Heroes book. There aren't many opportunities for crossover, not many logical options for impact reverberations.

What do I know though.

Thanks, sir.



I agree. It says something about us as a society - how self conscious we are, how utterly afraid of disappointment, how joyless we insist on making life.

It's a sickness that I hope we grow out of.

It's actually this utopian vs. angst comparison that made me a Legion fan rather than an Xmen fan. I always found the X-men's angst off-putting. I had enough of it in my own life. When I read comics, I wanted to see a shiny, positive future. It's a big part of what attracted me to the Legion.

This is a nice summary of the point I was trying to make in my earlier post. In the '80s, the book depicted a future that seemed, technologically over the horizon. The challenge to today's Legion writer is to imagine what's over the horizon from a world where we all have a tiny touch-screen computer in our pockets. The current book isn't doing that and hasn't in years.

But I don't think that's a common response, you know? I see what you're saying and I appreciate it and feel the same way, largely, but I think it takes a little bit of innocence OR maturity to see things that way; many of us are caught somewhere in between.




Well, I'd argue that it's less a challenge and more a privilege, really. I mean, for me, that's a huge source of JOY.

And it doesn't just extend to technology, although that's a big part of it. It's endless entertainment to imagine what society might look like at that point, how worlds might develop, be colonized by humanity; wouldn't corporations be at the forefront? The Lexor system, the Googleplex world-sequence, the W8yne Technarcy...wouldn't some be colonized in the name of religion? Frontier worlds in which the Hindu Gods are REAL, their mantles taken up by early colonizers keeping their great-great-great grand children in a pre-printing press age, planets with names like "Hajj", and "Bismillah", and "Akhirah" and "New Medina". In the name of now vestigial, forgotten nations? Worlds where Portuguese, or Spanish, or Mandarin are still the Vernacular Language (though instruction in Intergalac is, of course, compulsory and indeed necessary to succeed in the intergalactic stage).

But yeah, tech is fun to imagine, too, and some of it is going to be universal and very commercial (say, "Deathless", a technology which uses the technological footprint left by a lost loved one to reconstruct his/her/it's personality, marries it to an AI, then uploads the synthesis package into a robotic replica), and some of it is going to be born of the society from which it comes and be very proprietary, especially weaponry (the Imskians making tailored gene plagues, working the very genome with microscopic hands; the Coluans building bullets with BRAINS, adapting to by the pico-second to changes in situation...even their bullets are smart, they'll say; Braalian weapons turning the very magnetic fields of planets against their inhabitants, cutting communication with iron-particulate bombs; etc).

I don't think anyone looking at this as a 'challenge' should be writing the Legion -- it shoudl be one of their great joys.

Bring back the real Legion, with Everything that went into the making of it intact. Superboy, Superman as a kid. Not Con El, not pocket earth...not mon-el as replacement...

The real, unvarnished deal.

My thoughts exactly. Unless DC gets behind it and gives it a huge creative and promotional push like Marvel's giving Guardians of the Galaxy, the Legion has no chance to be viable for any sustainable length of time.

DC is clearly moving towards a point where only JLA/Batman/Superman-related titles have a shot at succeeding. The Legion doesn't fit that profile, and if DC changes it so that it does, it probably won't resemble the franchise we've loved all this time.

Just let it rest a while. Better yet, retire it if the alternative is mediocrity and endless reboots.

Yeah. I'm that fed up.

There was a time when Marvel seemed to be floundering the same way, where only a third-tier all-but-forgotten character like Blade could be successfully franchised out into a movie.

DC seems to be going the other direction, spending all of their capital on a few big pushes (mostly Batman and Superman, which Green Lantern pretty much getting greenlit on the strength of Geoff Johns love of the character alone). This approach seems more 'all or nothing,' as a big splashy perceived failure (such as some considered Superman Returns) dampens the chance that a DC property with lesser name recognition than Superrman ever gets greenlit.

A failure by someone like Blade (or Guardians of the Galaxy) harms none of the other Marvel properties. Even a lackluster performance by a Wolverine movie (such as Origins) or an X-Men movie (X3) or a Fantastic Four movie (FF2) doesn't stop the Marvel machine.

If DC had instead tossed out some lower profile Blue Beetle / Booster Gold movie or a Birds of Prey movie, rather than focus every single egg in their basket on the success of Superman or Batman blockbusters, then I think the comic book medium would follow suit, and have more room for non Superman / Batman centric titles.

As it is, the Legion is relatively lucky, compared to other corners of the DCU (such as the Fourth World, or the Vertigo properties), since, for better or worse, the Legion has always lived or died by it's connection to Superman. Every time we see some iteration of the Legion showing up in Action or in a Superman book, it's just keeping this little section of the DCU alive.

As long as the Man of Steel movie doesn't prove as ponderous and blood-less as Superman Returns, and as long as the Legion still shows up every few years in some manner in the pages of Superman-related comics, there's still life in the old girl.

Here's the thing, though: Wolverine, X-Men and Fantastic Four are all Fox properties, movie-wise - along with Sony's Spider-Man - and have absolutely nothing to do with "the Marvel machine". They were all licensed out - along with the Ang Lee Hulk, Daredevil and Punisher, which have since reverted along with a bunch of movies that never got made like Iron Fist and Mort the Dead teenager - well over a decade ago, when the market for superhero movies was unproven and a post-bankruptcy Marvel *needed* quick cash - Marvel got a pretty bad deal in retrospect out of all of them, with little cash or control.

Marvel more-or-less bet the farm (in the form of mortgaging the rights to their own characters) in putting together Marvel Studios to do movies they would actually make money out of if they succeeded. And when Iron Man did gangbusters and Incredible Hulk did okay, they succeeded, which put them on-track to Avengers and the $4bn Disney buyout.

DC Entertainment don't have that sort of pressure, either from the licencing-out-for-quick cash front or betting-the-farm on a big loan front. Indeed, they CAN'T licence things out. And, yeah, I think the flop of Green Lantern scared them - the problem with that was Geoff Johns though. They should strip everything back there - no more Rainbow Lanterns - and run with John Stewart rather than Hal Jordan.

John Stewart over Hal Jordan... for the JL toon connection?

long time fan, read from 7 yr old in 1961 until 1970, then came back in early 80s.

So, my Legion is the orginal.

I have found this thread interesting but sad.

When I first started to collect comics back in the 80's a long time collector told me "buy them for nostalgia", not for value.

I have read and collected all since, (and collected all back, except a couple) and love them all. However nothing feels like my original, not the best of DNA or Waid. Although I cringe at the Action Superboy backups, until Grell came on board.

Paladin mentioned that DC runs off Batman/Superman and JLA. It is what saved DC in the 50's. Legion then was as much a 50's sci-fi comic, (ala Space Ranger, captain Comic,) as it was superhero.

Lots of costumes and no secret identities or masks. It is amazing it made it out of the 60's, and if not for Shooter, it would have probably gone the way of Space Knights, and Adam Strange.

Problem with all today's comics is that to survive they need the old fans to keep buying, and new fans picking the title up for the first time.

With the Big Three young fans are weened on Saturday morning cartoons and reruns of old movies. The big three have a long future, and maybe the New 52 was more about them than anything else.

That together with the lack of depth in writers spread over too many titles, is an unfixable problem

So, now that the current run is ending, I wonder how many of our thoughts and concepts from this thread will show up in a future iteration of the LSH.

At a guess, I'd say 'none', but one can always be hopeful, and I keep trying to get the word out; I've put together a lot of the disparate thoughts I expressed here (and on the 'essence' thread) into a blog post for perhaps wider access and expression.

http://heshouldreallyknowbetter.blogspot.com/2013/05/so-they-cancelled-legion.html

If anyone from DC is reading -- I've got about 50 pages of villain revamps, new heroes and villains, plot lines, character directions, and cultures/set pieces/tech...you can have them all for free! Just hit me up.

I know it will never happen, but it would be a hoot if all Legion fans out there would go out there and buy the last four issues (whether you like the current run or not) and up the sales figures from 16,000 to 20,000 to 25,000+. I know most of you guys hate Levitz and the current Legion series, but it you ever want DC to bring the Legion back as a reboot or whatever, you need to show the powers that be that there is a fan base for this title in the future.