Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Levitz Interview on Legion Ending.

I wish the guy who gives these thoughtful interviews was the one who turned up to write the series.

http://www.comicosity.com/interview-levitz-legion/

There just seemed to be a spark missing... too bad because Johns really left the Legion in a good spot. I mean Paul could more or less pick up soon after the magic wars and while there were moments of greatness (Legion Academy) more often the stories would drag out with a blah ending. Although I'm guessing he kept having bad ideas pushed at him (Green Lantern BS )from editorial.

DC really missed the chance to start fresh with the Legion when he nu52 hit.


Id like to hear more of his unused ideas...maybe after the series wraps?

Not a whole lot to analyze in this interview, but two things stick out:

1) The Zelazny's Lord of Light reference. I've no idea about that, but if anyone's familiar with it, then it would seem a big clue as to the series' conclusion.

2) A "major" plan involving diversity that never "came to fruition". Any idea what that could have been?

Ooh, that's my favorite book of all time. I'll have to ponder that...

The end of the book was pretty open to interpretation, as the protagonist was emulating the life of a prophet / messiah type figure (Buddha, specifically), and yet explicitly wanted the people who had followed his examples to define their own path and not constantly stunt their own growth by seeking him out and asking him to answer all their questions and solve all their problems. Sort of a 'planned obsolescence messiah' situation, where he felt it would be better for humanity if they couldn't count on him to carry them (and therefore never learned to walk on their own).

I don't see that as a terribly satisfying Legion ending, as it suggests that the Legion leaves the UP to fend for themselves, perhaps deliberately sealing themselves and their foes away, protecting the universe at the cost of removing themselves from it (much like the writing out of the Justice Society, by having them go off to fight some bad-guys for ever in another dimensional Ragnarok scenario, which I may be totally making up, since I can't find a mention of it online...).



Harmonia Li, Dragonwing, Glorith, Chemical Kid (and Gravity Kid and Variable Lad, who didn't make it to the team) all added racial/gender diversity. If Mwinadji (sp?) and Otaku had been better received (my attempt at saying 'If they didn't suck...'), they also would have added ethnic diversity.

Tyroc's return, also, now that I think of it (even if he got poached away by Legion Lost).

Had the new recruits been presented ever-so-slightly differently (perhaps with Power Boy, Lamprey, etc. explicitly *wanting* to go form their own team or something, instead of getting rejected by Cosmic Boy 25 seconds before new leader Mon-El opened the doors to a bunch of people who showed up like last week and hadn't even applied for membership...), and there not been some behind-the-scenes stuff going on with Glorith and Harmonia Li making them either red herrings or otherwise difficult to trust as new Legionnaires, it's possible that Paul could have pretty strongly varied up the team, with a half dozen or so new persons of color.

No the JSA thing definitely happened.

It was in the post-Crisis Last Days of the Justice Society Special

I don't see how we could get more diverse than that. Throw in the revelation of Vi and Ayla being a couple... maybe he planned for Gravity Kid and Power Boy to join the Legion together as a gay couple? Maybe he had further plans to explore Harmonia and Glorith?

He also mentioned wanting to add more "alien" types. Maybe he has some "alien" Legionnaires in mind. Seems odd that Quislet (and Tellus, Wildfire, Gates and Dawnstar, who are all more alien-looking than the average Legionnaire and were also poached by Legion Lost) all were dropped during his run.

It was interesting that Levitz didn't take more ownership of Mon-el being selected as a Green Lantern. I figured at the time it was his way of trying to write Mon-el out of the team, kind of like he did when he mortally injured in v. 3 back in the 1980's. The Legion election messed things up, and so has again attempted to mortally wound Mon-el to write him out in the current Fatal Five story. I wonder why he wants him out of the way? To make the Legion less powerful perhaps?

I'd think Levitz was steamed when DC stripped him of most of his alien looking legionnaires (Tellus, Gates, Dawnstar and Wilfire) and shipped them off to Legion Lost. Their departure really hurt the futuristic sci-fi look of the book that he had developed over the years.

By the way, I've never really bought into Lighning Lass and Shrinkinf Violet's relationship. Ayla was really in to Timber Wolf before their breakup just before LSH #300 and so distraught when she thought he was lost. I guess she could have been bisexual at the time, but the transition was never adequately explained. To me Ayla and Vi's relationship felt forced. It would have been more believable if someone without a real dating history like Invisible Kid II had hooked up with Magnetic Kid or Polar Boy or the like to begin the relationship in a more believe able way.

I kind of agree, and yet he apparently chose to bench Quislet (another non-humanoid Legionnaire) and kill Variable Lad (one of the two Legion Academy recruits who even *wanted* to be Legionnaires, along with Gravity Kid, who also got sidelined).

Seems to me if he wanted more alien diversity, he had opportunities with Quislet and Variable Lad (and he could have made Mwindaji (sp?) and Otaku non-humanoids, if he wanted, since they seemed to be 100% his creations).

As for Ayla, I think Brin works better as a 'lone wolf' anyway, so I don't mind them breaking up, and people go from 'happily married presumably hetero' to 'gay now' all the time in the real world, so I'm not terribly put off by the Ayla / Vi relationship. Even if they were a 20th century couple, it's completely 'normal' in my experience (the last woman I dated is now with another woman, for example), and I surely hope that in 1000 years, notions of sexuality will have evolved even further.

Considering how many Legionnaires are dating or have dated outside of their *species,* I suppose that even the stodgiest traditionalists among their cultures would breathe a sigh of relief to find out that they were only dating someone of the same gender...

Dawnstar's parents, for instance, must wonder how they are ever going to have grandchildren if their daughter refuses to date any corporeal humanoids, and Shady's parents have to wonder if the proud and heroic champion bloodline of Mallor is going to be diluted (or greatly empowered!) by her dating a 1000 year 'older man' from Daxam.

I think that the whole return of the original timeline was badly handled. The whole xenophobia angle never appealed to me. The Legion was only partially re-formed. The founders were almost immediately taken out of the book (or at least Garth and Imra). Then a big chunk of the team went off into the god awful Lost book. And then, while beloved team members remained off the canvas, we were given a whole bunch of new characters who, quite frankly, sucked the life out of the book.

Going back to the original timeline had the potential of drawing back readers of the team's most popular era, but it was so botched up that it was almost as unrecognizable as many of the reboot attempts.

^ Well said!

^ Agreed!

Absolutely!

I said on some other thread recently that basically what the hell was the point in bringing back the 'original' Legion if you weren't going to utilize all of that beautiful history that made us fall in love with it in the first friggin' place!!!

Oh, it took some searching, but here was my original quote from my recent LightningLad/resurrection thread:

I think most of us agree that this Retroboot Legion isn't quite the original Legion, alright! Besides Garth and Imra and the Lost Seven, we also "lost" Jeckie, Tenzil, Gim, Mysa and Blok early on while Postboot fans lost Jenni.



This is an interesting thought. What would these parents feel if their children ended up in a homosexual relationship? I know some modern day parents whose greatest objection to that is that their genes won't be passed down. Having surrogate parents is simply not an acceptable option. So would the 31st century have found a way to let a homosexual couple produce offspring that has both their genetic material?

Here's an article on studies involving that in the present! http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jun/28/uk-government-ivf-dna-three-people

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We *should* be able to do that today, for the most part. Human males have both an X and a Y chromosome, so grab an egg, scoop out the donors X chromosome and put in an X chromosome from one of the two male partners, and fertilize it with the other partner's sperm. Boom. Child of both 'fathers,' with a 50/50 chance of being male or female.

For a pair of ladies, on the other hand, they've only got the X chromosomes, and no Y to contribute, so they'd need some future tech procedure to strip one of their X chromosomes down to a Y, if they wanted to have a male child (if they just want a girl, they can grab a donor sperm, scoop out the donor chromosome and implant the X chromosome of whichever of the ladies isn't donating the egg). Not stuff as easily done with today's technology, but certainly do-able with tech that should be available within our lifetimes, let alone by the 30th century.

Probably the only reason we don't have that sort of thing already is because the market for same-sex couples having biological children is brand spanking new (and not available in all states, let alone all countries).
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More complicated than that - IIRC, there are activated genes in the sperm that try to make the embryo grow big and strong, and there are cancelling genes activated in the ova to make the child easy to bear and birth. The upshot of this is that if you took the nuclei of two sperm and stuck them in an ova, you'd end up with an embryo that might kill the (surrogate) mother, and if you used two ova, the resulting foetus would be too small to be viable.

Possibly fixable, but more complicated than "boom". And probably not the only problem!

I think a writer trying to depict a society in which a loving relationship is based only upon love, might consider it forcing the story to explain Ayla-Brinn to Ayla-Salu. It might be more normal to explain reasons a character has had relationships with only those of the same sex?


Anyhow, we already seem to be departing from the idea that there are only two distinct sexes, with nothing between. That might be true both culturally and biologically? Perhaps by the 30th century, there might not be such a thing as homogeneity. Sexuality might be so layered and diversified, or culturally rather than biologically defined, that a "homo" sexual ( M-M or F-F ) relationship would be mostly semantics.

I guess I'd have liked to see some reaction from Timber Wolf that his girlfriend was now dating Vi. Maybe some jealousy issues for Brin to deal with or something more on the lines of Mon-el, Shady and Earth Man.

I do remember back in v3 that Brin tried hard to get close to Ayla after she returned as Lightning Lass. But perhaps Levitz didn't want to distract us from the new Vi-Ayla romance by bringing up Ayla's past. It was a bit of a missed opportunity to explore why/how Ayla fell in love with Vi, though.

I hadn't thought of it that way before. I think that would have been very much in Brin's character and an interesting story.

Like everything else in this run, the Ayla-Vi relationship was handled extremely superficially.

Does the reference apply to the story or the writer?

Maybe it means that Paul is leaving the Legion for other writers to carry on without wanting them to be forced to depend on him.

I was always under the impression that Levitz hadn't intended them as a couple in v3, and it was only fans picking up on the possibility that led to their being confirmed as such in v4. In fact, I was thinking Levitz had basically said as much in previous interviews, so it's a bit weird to see him taking credit for introducing this sort of diversity when it was really TMK's doing.

Yeah, remember an interview or comment by him stating it wasn't his intention in v3 as well. Maybe he's taking credit for reviving their relationship from v4 (which built on the unintended fan view of how they were portrayed in v3) for the current 'boot to bring it back into continuity?