Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes The Best Moments of the Levitz Legion

Oh, yeah, I agree with that much, it was realistic, and it didn't make me like him any less. I just think Levitz and Giffen deliberately shat on him, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it started after Giffen came back.

The Starfinger storyline was another I enjoyed a lot.

Not that I know of, but then there was the Subs as a comedy act.

Like HWW, I too felt that Brek's prison term was due to his idealism (possibly naively so) putting him most at odds with the new regime on Earth and a colder, more selfish galaxy.

I think he idolised the Legion so much, he couldn't quite adapt to realising that it too had changed by the time he got into it.

From the Legionnaires perspective, electing him as leader was perhaps an attempt to rekindle some of the feelings they had when they were younger. Only to find the differences too great when faced with it as a leader day to day.

Exactly.

I think most of the Legionnaires got lampooned at some point. Subs as comedy was really only a couple special issues and those were IMO, really well done.


As far as the years and years of them not being valued, I think that was the point of being a sub. That's not generally going to be as valued as first team, so I can't think of a reason I would object. Without an underdog, there are no underdog stories and I really like those.

IMO, the Subs were more humanly rendered than the actual Legion members. I generally like those rereads.

I think the comedic issues featuring the Subs were much less damaging than the ones in which they were treated as just completely incompetent. E.g. Tales #316 when Stone Boy basically panics in a stressful situation. Even Earthwar when they basically just show up to get overwhelmed.

For me, the members of the Subs would go into the "best" column of everything pre-Levitz too.


Like many on many planets who had powers and aspirations, the players that eventually became the Subs hadn't made the cut. We saw quite a few in that boat become bitter villains, their motivations were out of whack for a team like Legion.

What was so great about the Subs, they hadn't given up. They didn't have the richest man to finance them, no one to mentor or train them .. They banded together and became friends and a team. Not an instantaneous process. We didn't just get an end product, we saw development. In that way, I think early Subs were handled much better than early Legion, with a lot less screen time. We even on occasion saw them best Legion.

LaRocque was my favourite too at the time. It was sad to find him on Facebook and discover he's a bit of an angry right-wing reactionary. Another exercise in trying to separate the art from the artist.

Count me in as a fan of LaRocque's art.

I don't generally care if someone is "right-wing" or "left-wing," they both got their people I'd find them judgmental or hateful because really, who isn't? Artists and writers have been getting muse out of their hate, time immemorial, sometime well disguised.


If I like the story, I like the story. I don't go out of my way to learn a comic book writer or artist's political or social views though I suppose it would make their work a different read that I might enjoy more, or less. Maybe something to explore.

Or another reason to tread carefully on Facebook.

Besides, Levitz made horribly sexist comments a few years ago, which is why I now wonder how much of his better portrayals of female characters had to do with Karen Berger and Jenette Kahn, yet I still enjoy his stories.

I think he spent so much time building up the Legion as something so much grander than the ragtag band of screw-ups and rejects with no real funding or constitution or whatever, that when he finally made the team, having essentially rejected and walked away from his best friends in the process, only to discover that they were as fractious and imperfect as his own team, it kind of broke him.

I kind of identified with that, having grown up on a farm, in a town where most of my peers had as their life goal 'inherit my dad's farm,' went to college a thousand plus miles away, and expected to be surrounded by people like me, who loved learning and had fought to get away from mediocrity, only to discover that the student population of college was the same sort of motley collection of cliques and jocks and preppies and stoners that I thought I'd escaped from.

Brek built the Legion up to be everything he saw as lacking in his own group, and rejected / disbanded them to join 'the big leagues,' and only belatedly realized that he'd sold both his Sub friends, and his own leadership of them, terribly short in the process, since the Legion wasn't explicitly better or more professional, it was just *first* and got first pick of people with the best powers.

The disillusionment must have been bitter indeed, considering how he stepped over his friends to get there.

Unless I'm there to hear things within a context, I have a healthy amount of scepticism for nearly every side.

Seeing tides of rabid "outraged" band wagon jumpers since social media really took off has done little to change that.

Thanks for sharing your personal experience, Set. I always find it illuminating when a fan does that.

I generally find accusations better supplied with details but to take your comment on face value, I think you make a point that the medium, like any, languished without diversity of input. But am I being fair?


Sometimes I can find it difficult to prioritize how culture develops. I find chicken and egg where another might have a confident opinion of what begat what.

One way I can look at it, comics were for so long written for kids by a fairly narrow scope of males and so the presumption could be they were .... words failing... "perpetualizing" the status quo? Not the word I'm hunting for.


On the other hand, this was a business in which women as you point out, were permitted rightful opportunity to rise to the top, something that's still a work in progress in much of industry. How sexualized could the atmosphere have possibly been for that to occur?


The stories those males were producing obviously reached and sparked the imaginations of some young female audience, even though when reading those old stories, they are perked with traditional role model stereotypes.

How is that explained? I guess I see it as a proper matching.

If the early stories had been TOO progressive, they probably would have turned off that young female audience, an audience growing up in something more traditional. Sometimes things are better nudged that pummeled, particularly when dealing with the more non-rebelling pre and early teen.


If Berger and Kahn get credit for the good bits, don't they also take heat for those parts you didn't like past #46? What role might they have had there?

For me, I think I went a bit further into the run before it went over the "bad" threshold, past 50, though I don't recall not liking "Magic Wars."

This thread should provide a better answer than I think I could on my own:

https://www.legionworld.net/forums/u...rry+mr+levitz&Search=true#Post473503

Another well-put analysis of Polar Boy, Set.

Sounds like he's describing a history as he saw it, not something that he felt was as it should have been or should be.

Not sure if we're reading the same thing and interpreting it differently or if I missed something in the reading. It's late and my eyes aren't staying open.


Thanks for the link. I'll give it a look tomorrow too.

Thanks for posting the link to this old thread. I had forgotten about it.

I think Set (again!) cut to the chase when he wrote:



Extending this further, where DC may be failing with the Legion is that they are trying too hard to appeal to what they think Legion fans like. They have forgotten how to tell good stories, period.

While I agree 100% with Set's sentiments in that post, I don't know if it holds up in practice. From what I've seen, the (current) books that have the largest and fastest growing female readership are books that explicitly target young female readers in the 15-22 age range (i.e. Ms. Marvel, the revamped Batgirl, etc.). Maybe it's a generational thing, but that's just what I've observed.

Re: the link to the thread, you're welcome, He Who and BB. It's even more relevant today than it was 5 years ago, IMO. And I agree 100% with He Who that DC's recent iterations of the Legion are full of second-guessing and pandering. To quote Rocky the (gender-ambiguous) Flying Squirrel, that trick never works.

And I think both Set and Stalgie are on-target in different ways. Contriving a comic designed to appeal to a demographic is always counter-productive, but I also think Stalgie's absolutely right that it's a generational thing -- we're finally seeing comic books explicitly for fangirls, often written and/or drawn and/or edited by grown-up fangirls...and, as with the fanboy explosions of generations past, in the long run this could either go very well or quite badly. Time will tell.

I've lost count over the years, number of times critiquing a run, opining "just have a story you want to tell and tell it best you can."


There's a caveat though. We get writers that have a story they want to tell, that's not obviously not specific to Legion or the personalities and they cram it in because they got the gig. We just as a fan group totally panned a Bate's effort for doing that very thing yet we do see people on the boards accepting of that cramming method if the writer is a fan favorite.


Writing comics can be a no-win situation. I'd admit that and I see it form reading some of the critiques posted in message boards.


I don't KNOW what Levitz' motivations were for that last run and why should I presume? I can't say it was pandering, bad ideas (okay, I can go with that) or poor execution of good ideas. I just know I didn't like it.

Well, I might as well weigh in here...

One of the problems of writing for comic books these days (or for TV, for that matter) is that the writers are often tasked with making a choice; writing according to the demographics of the market that you want to have instead of the market that you currently have.

Frequently, demographics can be a negative tool from the point of view of the creator. Say that Mr. Jones is the writer for Legion Deluxe and is writing in such a way that the fanboys absolutely love it. However, the fanboys aren't buying the advertiser's goods (whatever they might be). So, Mr. Jones is told to write according to the audience that the Powers That Be want to have who will buy the sponsor's goods rather than toward the audience who are actually reading and enjoying the title, even if the current viewing audience is strong and healthy.

As idiotic as this may sound, its all too prevalent these days, especially in a company that has morphed from 'DC Comics' into the larger 'DC Entertainment'.

Think I'm joking? Ask the producers of the cartoon Teen Titans show from a couple of years back as to why the show was pulled even though it had good ratings. The answer, as they were told, is that 'girls don't buy toys'. Yes, because the marketplace for the action figures weren't what the sponsors wanted them to be, the show was still pulled. Sure, you can (justifiably or not) argue that, whoever sold the show to the wrong sponsors should be shot - maybe so but it doesn't happen that way very often.

This isn't the first time that this sort of logic has happened. I can still recall when the producers of the TV show 'Forever Knight' (a gloomy, atmospheric vampire-cop show filmed in Canada) were told to make the show more Baywatch-like, simply because the show had to reflect the monetary direction of the sponsors rather than the actual audience watching the show.

FYI, the show tanked after that.

So, as long as we're casting blame, lets not forget to give credit where its due: in a crazy business like showbiz (and, yes, DC Entertainment is very thoroughly in that groove), you can either play to the audience that you've got or reformat for the audience that you want. It's rare (these days) that you'll get both at the same time.

Thanks again for the link.

You'd be welcome to walk me through what you found "sexist" about his statement. I didn't see it.

Possibly are you referring to giving the Wonder Women, S-Girl... books to a woman only on the basis that she's a woman? I would certainly see that as a decision based upon sex. But Levitz neither made that decision nor shows any support for the reasoning behind it, politely referring to it as an "experiment" to test a theory.


What I saw in the Levitz quotes were statements of fact and supposition on how those led to the current state of things but I saw no opinion whether that state was good or bad nor do I see where he was asked for one.