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

Fox owns the movie rights to the X-Men, and associated stuff like 'mutant' 'adamantium' and Magneto. (Which is why the Captain America movie had to say that Cap's shield was vibranium and not mention adamantium at all.)

Joss intends to use the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in Avengers 2, but can't mention them being related to Magneto, or that they are mutants, and it's been speculated that he's going to have them be Inhumans instead. Soon after that, it was announced that Marvel was planning a new 'Inhumanity' event that pretty much reprises all the old mutant hysteria from pre-Decimation, as tons of people are randomly terrigenized and turn into Inhumans. If the 'cart is pulling the horse' (movie franchises influencing comic book events), it seems likely that Inhumanity is Marvel's attempt at taking the signature mutant rights / prejudice storylines of the last three decades and strapping them onto the Inhumans (which they *can* make movies about).

I'm sure they aren't going to stop putting out X-Men comics any time soon, but they've hugely 'decimated' their numbers, and are re-assigning one of their core themes to a non-mutant group, in light of Fox keeping a death grip on those movie rights they sold off when they were bankrupt.

Uh... adamantium *debuted* in Avengers, in the second Ultron story (since then, Ultron's virtually always been made of the stuff). That was just streamlining*

Basically, anything exclusive (or nearly so) to the X-Men at the time the contracts were signed is Fox's alone. Anything which genuinely straddles multiple franchises - like the Witch & Quicksilver, who were longtime Avengers despite debuting in X-Men - can be used for either.

*Well, streamlining and the fact that current comics continuity, since Busiek threw a snit in the 90s about the 80s Handbook being "wrong", is that there's no adamantium in Cap's shield, since the stuff was an attempt to recreate the material of the shield.

Crikey. Oh, the maze of big business an the laws that protect them...

Honestly though, I doubt most people would mind if there were some discrepancies between the movie universe and the comics one. If the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver do show up as Inhumans in the movie, I won't mind AS LONG AS they don't retcon their histories in the comic books.

Related article from Newsarama. Hugh Jackman would like to see Marvel, Fox and Sony cooperate. It makes too much damned sense!

I'd love to see a Paul Levitz interview if he was no longer employed by DC.

Speaking of the X-Men, I don't really think it does between Fox & Marvel - the X-Men have always been a slightly ill-fit, conceptually, with the likes of the Avengers and F4. And if they're really trying to refit the Inhumans into ersatz mutants for the MCU, that's a big mistake.

[Marvel & Sony re: Spider-Man, or even Marvel & Fox re: F4, are different stories.]

The Inhumans and the mutants really shouldnt be the same concept. The mutants have to live with "normal" humans and all the issues that come with that; the INhumans live apart and don't care as much whether humans accept them.

Re Avengers vs. X-Men vs. F4, it does seem a bit odd how you can have members from all these teams who all look like normal humans, and all have fantastic powers, yet the members of the F4 and to some extent the Avengers are much more widely accepted than the X-Men are. Of course, Avengers and F4 are much more high-profile and have better press, and the Avengers have had their share of struggles with the public, but still they are being treated much better, in general. So yes, in concept they are quite different.

It's a lot scarier to think that there's a naturally-occurring population of people not like you that will supplant you as the dominant species on Earth than to take note of some isolated individuals to whom accidents happened.

That's what bothers me about the Marvel Universe. Some brand new character shows up with super powers, the public somehow automatically knows if they're a mutant or not and only attacks them if they are a mutant.

I know right, it's like they all have a big M tattooed on their face, which only, like, three of them actually do.

Tying back to the main topic, both DC and Marvel seem to be trying to tighten up and tie together overarching themes or connective threads in their shared universes, for ease of putting up on the big screen, where the real money's at, and stuff that doesn't fit so neatly into the marketing departments 'easily digestible plan' seems more likely to be either changed to fit (like Cyborg being tied into Apokaliptan tech or Beast Boy being a Ravager) or set aside for now (like the pre-existing 30th century).

If anything, the future setting and all of the 'inspired by Superman' elements are probably *less* problematic to DC marketing than the 'bright optimistic future.' Both recent Batman and the Man of Steel film have been grim and ponderously serious. Bright colors and hopeful messages seem to be downplayed. Everything has to be darker and more serious. (The less serious, and less successful, Green Lantern movie, might be pointed to by some tie-wearing moron as 'proof' that fans prefer darker stuff and 'don't like' more hopeful or heroic messages, in the same way that Avi Arad boneheadedly said that 'fans don't like movies about strong women' because terribleverybadnogood Elektra and Catwoman movies bombed...)

The last decades, we've seen plenty of bleak and grim Legion stories, and they all seem to share one thing in common in the end. The Legion runs they headlined died.

Maybe the sort of fanbase that titles like the Legion attracted back in the day isn't quite as nihilistic or cynical as the '90s Image explosion left creative directors at DC and Marvel thinking that *all* comics fans were, and the attempt to attract that audience only led to pushing away their original audience, while simultaneously not attracting enough fans of gore and despair, who have far, far less complicated fare available to them. (The Legion perhaps requiring a bit more investment to fully embrace, since there's so much of it, and so many of the characters have survived across multiple decades, unlike, say, the first issue of Stormwatch, where 20% of the team might die in the first issue, with nobody ever learning anything about them other than their codenames, Ion and Lancer.)

I know it's been said before, but if kids can memorize 649+ Pokemon and if Game of Thrones fans can follow dozens of characters over two seasons (or is it three now?), why can't comics fans follow a team of 20 heroes? We don't need to know all their origins and homeworlds and family members to enjoy the stories. I wish those decision-makers would give fans more credit.



Like what Malvolio said, how would the public know (besides via press releases and interviews)? If I were a normal citizen I'd just be like, oh hey here's someone with awesome weird powers, aaah!

It's interesting that not only mutants, but even some mutant-friendly humans (such as Moira McTaggart), have embraced the idea that mutants are 'homo sapiens superior,' an entirely different species.

If that classification were accepted by the world in generel, they'd no more have civil rights or even *human* rights than a chimpanzee.

Seems like a huge potential mistake, to identify as not-human, when all rights of citizenship, most laws, etc. apply to humans, not other species that happen to share the planet with them.

Also, how would people afraid of mutants react to the existence of avowed sorcerers (the Bible says nothing about mutants, but is pretty darn clear on sorcerers and witches!) or even self-proclaimed pagan gods like Thor or Hercules (who have been demonstrated to exist in great numbers and have vast powers) or other species sharing the world (Inhumans, Moloids, Deviants, Eternals, etc.) as well as a plethora of aliens (Skrulls, Kree), artificially intelligent machines (Vision, Machine Man, Jocasta, Ultron) running about and, of course, technology like Pyms (which, in the case of Ultron, has led to the massacre of a European nation-state), or Starks (seen assassinating a US Senator on life TV, and having killed one foreign hero during the Armor Wars, in which he flew around to various other countries and attacked heroes, some of whom were fellow Avengers!).

There is a metric buttload of questionable stuff going on in the Marvel universe. Mutants, particularly when there's *supposed* to have been less than a 100 of them in the world for almost a decade, seem like last years issue.

A complication of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, etc. all living in the same continuity is that reactions to the various teams can come across as inconsistent. The Hulk has well-funded military task forces after his green butt. Spider-Man has been practically a fugitive from the law, and pilloried in the press, since day one. The Fantastic Four, associated with invasions from the negative zone (thanks Reed!), Galactus visiting Manhattan five times in two decades, Skrull battling Gladiator in mid-town, etc. *are celebrities.* Go figure.

When the writers do address it, they do so in a freakish manner, like having Emma Frost reading Carol Danvers the riot act for standing around and doing nothing while mutants were being killed in droves by government-built killer robots and various hate groups, when it wasn't Carol Danvers fault the Avengers and Fantastic Four never got all up in the mutant hate storyline, since it was the X-Men writers who decided to keep that all in house. Kind of lame for the writers who created this inconsistency to then write scenes blaming the characters for them (just as it was kind of lame for Carol to show up and chew out the Avengers for letting go off with her magical time-travelling rape-baby-lover, which wasn't the Avengers fault, it was gobsmackingly bad writing).

DC has it worse, IMO. Every time Gotham has gotten blown up or *abandoned and walled off by the government*, etc. and the Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, etc. who could have been there in less than a second and solved everything *didn't* ever bother to show up, that's a problem not with those characters being colossal dicks, or with Batman being a dim-bulb who forgot that he has a Justice League teleporter / communicator in his pocket, it's a problem with the street-level themes of the Bat-books and various titles set in Gotham or Bludhaven are 100% incompatible with the themes and tones of Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern or the Flash. They *should* probably exist in different worlds. Earth - Justice League and Earth - Batfolk / Birds of Prey.

The tones and themes of these sub-settings of the DCU are just crazy bad fits for each other.

Unfortunately, it looks like everything is going to be made to fit, to share the same universe and tone and theme and feel, rather than just assume that what happens in Gotham, stays in Gotham, and that Metropolis is, effectively, a completely different continuity.

Is this how we long-time Legion fans feel about the new target demographic for DC?

News Flash - no one posting on this board is part of DC Entertainment's key demographic unless you're posting while in the theater and watching Man of Steel or Batman at the time of writing.

Doesn't matter if you buy one copy of Legion or 500, DCE just isn't interested in us or our opinions.

Exactly. DC just seems interested in numbers, numbers, numbers - if they appeal to the "mass market" of people who know nothing about comics other than what is on the big creen, so be it.

You make a lot of good points, Set.

Examples of good (IMO) writing: using the Spear of Destiny;s evil influence to explain why the JSA and All-Star Squadron didn't simply end World War II.

The Batman: No Man's Land event helped explain why other heroes didn't intervene. The government, for some ridiculous reaosn, declares Gotham a No Man's Land after an earthquake. Superman enters but realizes he can't restore law and order that quickly, while it is revealed the JLA help out by preventing additional villains from entering Gotham.