Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Re-Reading the Legion: Conjure reads the reboot!

Whole-heartedly agree. I remember reading it at an aunt's house when I was a wee lad of 11. Didn't stop searching for a copy of my own until many, many years later (when I think Cobie snagged one for me!) It was such an epic, dramatic story!



Sadly, yes. I think the problem started after her first time-trip, myself. She was fairly well-developed early on (her heroic arc where she gains self-confidence and becomes a "mature" hero). She was absent for almost a year, real-time, after the Dark Circle as well... And most of her latter appearances touched on her various man-crushes (Cos, Lar, Dyrk...)

I don't specifically recall when Jenni's ties to the Flash Legacy were first revealed. Her first appearance(s) with the Legion has little mention of these connections.

I like Postboot Lyle. Yeah, he may be given too much solo credit for some ideas and plans, but I like that Brainy isn't the only 'smart' guy in the room. Lyle has some sort of passion for his work, a passion that is sometimes lacking in Brainy's world of cold calculations.

Reading of James' death, it is surprising they showed Tanglweb dropping his broken body. What's even more shocking is that they showed his dead body for more than one panel, leaving little doubt that he was actually dead. I appreciate that Mr. Waid.

Then his body was delivered to the 'Metropolis Necrological Institute'........yeaaahhhhh, would not want to work there.

I'm fairly sure it was her origin story in LSH Annual #6 (they're certainly brought up there. I haven't checked all the issues in-between yet to make sure it wasn't mentioned in passing beforehand).

Word on the solo credit. Lyle always did have a flair of showmanship about him.

I remember other distinctions between them. Brainy remarked early on that he (and other Coluans) preferred pure theory, while Lyle focused on practical applications of research. And Brainy snarked later on that even his accidents produced better results than Lyle's best-laid plans. It was also mentioned once that Lyle was more creative.

My favorite bit about Lyle is that he's a self-made hero. Like Karate Kid, on a team full of people born with special powers, or having received them through some sort of accident (Garth, Gim) or experiment / whatever conducted by someone else (Brin, Dirk) upon them, Lyle is pretty rare in that he's the prime mover of his own origin story. Like Kinetix, much later, he actively sought power, and granted it to himself, rather than having it thrust upon him by an external agency.

It makes him feel more actively heroic, than the passive 'recipient' nature of various other Legionnaires, who didn't all necessarily choose this life (although many indeed did, coming from worlds full of people with their same powers who very much did not choose to become super-heroes!).

Which turned out to be Querl's own fault...

*GASP* I thought i'd read everything that there was of the Reboot, but I MISSED THIS. I must go find a copy! And oh look...Imra is still controlling Rokk like a puppet at this point. NIFTY. I can't wait to read it.

It's the end of a two-parter - Showcase '96 #11-12 are what the rest of the team were heading off to get involved in at the start of LSH #87, when Apparition disappearing means she & Ultra Boy don't join them. Once both incidents are sorted, they then appear in Superman+Legion and Impulse #21 before LSH #88.

[This is, incidentally, BEFORE the incident with Dr. Psycho that left Rokk in a coma, which led in turn to Imra puppeteering him!]

Okay, next up is a section of Legionnaires that I know isn't really ZH Reboot, but that I decided to read anyway.

Legionnaires #1-18

Okay, firstly, I really love Chris Sprouse's art. I love it. I always have. For whatever reason his work looks polished to me. Professional. His facial expressions look RIGHT. I guess his art pushes all the right buttons for me.

I think that's pretty much all the good I have to say about these issues...

Because I absolutely could not STAND them. Maybe I'm coming at it from the wrong direction, but I have never had such a negative reaction to any other group of Legionnaires. My god, the characterizations were awful. What was with making all the girl characters so stereotypical and annoying? What's with making everything anyone says trite and forced? They all seemed SO two-dimensional.

And what's with making Sun Boy SUCH AN ASSHOLE? I mean, I knew that Dyrk could be a bit of an ass, but this went ABOVE AND BEYOND. He went from cocky playboy to ABSOLUTE JERK. He wasn't even likable!

The storylines themselves were...okay. But I was so put off by the way everyone was written that I couldn't enjoy them. Brainy was so WEIRD in these issues. Garth was so angry and whiny. I just didn't enjoy it.

Am I missing something here? If you read these as they were coming out, what did you THINK of them? I think the only characters I enjoyed were Tenzil and Lyle, though even Lyle seemed a little...off. Since when do the other Legionnaires MAKE FUN of him?! It seemed so WEIRD.

I have to agree with you on these ones. But when these were coming out I was about 10 and I absolutely loved it. Idk really remember why.

I do remember thinking that the some of the ideas like teens in the future and what not protecting people was cool.

I think this was their attempt at angst and giving "edge" to these silver age characters, as i think that was when they were supposed to be bulled from.

But this legion did help make way for the Reboot, which was slightly based on this version of these characters.

A lot of this was forced re-characterisation after the slate of retcons TMK rolled in. Garth here was the so-called "REAL" Garth right? And we knew that Sun Boy would eventually grow up to be the guy that sold out humanity, so he had to be rotten at some fundamental level, right? All things 5YL made this a hard sell. Of course, others here are big fans of the time period, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Oooohhh, was that why these characters were so odd? The characterization just seemed so OFF. I figured there had to be some reasoning for it. Though, you'd think since these Legionnaires knew their 5YL counterparts, that the future would technically already be altered by their knowing.

TIME PARADOX.

Hey Reboot, thanks for posting that page from From Showcase '96 #12. I love that someone bothered to explain the millennium of stagnation (which at this point may be my most well known pet peeve of DC/Legion lore). Of course that only explains it for Colu, not the Khunds and Dominators, but still it's something.


For people who read the fine print: Hey this is my 900th post!

For the Dominators, the 5YL explanation from LSH Annual #2 still held, since Valor still seeded the worlds.

Thanks again! Though in this case, if the explanation is there in what you posted, I'm not grasping it. Perhaps I didn't back then either (assuming I was still reading by the issue involved.)

In a sentence? "Valor and his crew exiled the brains of the Dominion and trashed all their data."

Ah, I was reading that as taking just their genetic research, but if it applied to their spaceships and such, bringing them down to 20th century Earth tech level, then that's a very good explanation.

Not as good as avoiding bringing all those 30th century civilizations into the 20th centuries stories in the first place, but you can't have everything.

So that accounts for the Coluans and the Dominators. I assume the Daxamites started their famous Xenophilia upon discovering their vulnerability to lead.

So that leaves the Khunds. I'll bet if there ever was a rationalization someone here knows it!

Are the Khunds still being used in 21st century stories?

CORRECTION: xenophobia.

And why did I capitalize it anyway?

if Khunds are as much Klingon riffs as they appear, then they might have the same excuse Klingons have (at least in some interpretations), that they stole / inherited their technology from another race (that they killed) and don't really understand much more than how to keep it working.

(Same deal with the Horde aliens from the Strikeforce Morituri comic, or even the Earth savages seizing the Vulcan ship in the Mirror Universe episode of Enterprise. It's not a rare theme...)

Combined with a built-in contempt for scientists, researchers, scholars, etc. (anything *not* a warrior, leaving all of their technical jobs to a despised and resentful underclass of folk that couldn't cut it as warriors), I could see such a group not really advancing much.

But, even if *I* can come up with excuses for why the Khunds, Dominators, Daxamites, Durlans, etc. haven't advanced technologically in 1000 years (while Earth, in a tenth that time, went from steam engines to people on the moon), I still think that using 30th century aliens in Invasion! was a terrible idea, in a DCU that, thanks to the Green Lantern Corps, the Omega Men, Rann, Thanagar and dozens of random alien invaders that have appeared in the pages of Superman over the decades, is already *crawling* with cool *contemporary* alien races.

Oh that's right, the Durlans too.

Your point speaks to it being unnecessary, which is also true, and makes the choice to do so even worse. But having to justify 5 races stagnating for a millennium is just bad storytelling and universe-building.

And you've just reminded me, where was the whole GL corps when one little world was being invaded by at least 5 others?

On vacation, same as all of Earth's other protectors that could have dealt with five alien spacefleets.

I mean, really, is anything going to really threaten a planet protected by people like the Specter, Dream or the Swamp Thing?

"Uh, sir, all the Dominator ships, which, I just now realized, are made out of plants, turned into giant carnivorous space flowers and ate the Khund ships..."

"The Daxamites just fell asleep, and we don't want to bug them, so we've just cordoned off the craters where they landed. The leader's leg is twitching. I think he's dreaming about chasing something..."

"Oh, and there's some pasty dude in green underwear and a cloak out there, and he's sixteen thousand feet tall and throwing space ships out of the solar system with his bare hands..."

"Batman is reported to have said, 'I'm gonna go beat me up some muggers. Call me when it's over.'"

Well I never said my pet peeve was the only problem with Invasion!

Heh.

About the only thing I really liked from Invasion! (other than the newspaper they printed up, which I still have somewhere) was the lingering plot seed about Durlan technology left behind being used to explain other metahumans or criminal with weird alien technology for a decade or so.

And the Durlans, already established as xenophobic and averse to developing technology further (after their six-minute war) would have been the one 30th century race I wouldn't have minded being shown in the 20th century, since they already had a backstory of having been technologically stagnant since well before the 20th century.

Gosh. I'd love to see a Dominator plot foiled by Chlorophyll Kid, who uses his powers to make all of their equipment / ships / etc. grow wildly out of control...

Great idea, neglected Sub saves all! But his powers must not have been strong enough, even when he had gained more mastery during 5YL, he only had a bit part in fighting the Dominator occupation. It could be that the Dominators had some overlay of non-plant technology to resist their potentially deadly adversary!

Why planets didn't seem to advance much in 1000 years, and why Earth's own future technology seemed quite recognizable to us, has sometimes been explained by devastating wars which destroyed a lot of technology and, conveniently, historical documents.

I'm inclined to go with the "bad story idea" scenario and leave it at that.

Actually I will add something. The very first company-wide crossover event (Marvel's Secret Wars) was nothing more than a marketing gimmick designed to sell toys. Every company-wide crossover event since then has been all about "hey, crossover events make lots of money so let's do another one." You'll note that these were purely economic decisions, not creative ones. Need I say more?