Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Rereading the Legion: Archives Volume 15

"Entitlement" is a good word for it. The Legionnaires certainly acted like their fecal matter produced no unpleasant olfactory sensations.

Going just by memory, I can't think of any similar instances in the JLA or X-Men. One X-Men scene that sort of relates comes to mind: Wolverine is hunting a doe in the forest when he is interrupted by the other X-Men. Storm criticizes him for trying to kill a helpless animal, to which Logan replies that it doesn't take skill to kill; he was only trying to get close enough to the doe to touch her.

It's a wonderful sentiment, and one I took at the time to be evidence of an evolved society. (Super-heroes represented, in my teen-aged mindset, just how far society had come from barbarism. Silly, I know, but it worked for me at the time.) In truth, there are many good and decent people who hunt animals for sport as a way of life. I may not agree with their viewpoint, but it exists nonetheless. It would have been more realistic if Logan had represented that point of view.

How this relates to the above is that comics had an enormous impact on the way I thought, and I came to accept the values and ideals promoted therein as normal. The Legionnaires had "good intentions" and so that allowed them to get away with actions others would consider crimes.

In hindsight, I think the Legion writers were careless in promoting the idea that good intentions allow heroes to get away with anything.

Superheroes should represent how far we've come from barbarism. They have been, for the most part, noble, sacrificing, brave, etc. - the best of the civilizing ideals, so I wouldn't call it silly.

We don't really know what was in the mindset of the writers. Were they just dashing off these stories in a formulaic manner? Writing to their readership, who would have been teens and younger? Maybe the "good intentions" mindset appeals to young people: their good intentions might be misunderstood or condemned by adults, but for the Legion, it all works out. As a writer of YA novels, you might have more insight into that.

The question of mindset is on my mind as we head into the next issue, Space Circus, which begins with "Everybody loves a circus" - and I thought, not today, we're fed up with animal cruelty and freak shows. But that's for another week....

I don't know if I have any special insights into the "good intentions" mindset. I've read a number of YA novels, and they are all across the board in terms of the values and experiences represented. Marvel and DC, back when, represented a unified mindset of what super-heroes could be like--or at least that's how it seemed.

The most "different" heroes I knew at the time were the new X-Men and the Son of Satan. The new X-Men were different in terms of the nationalities they represented, a la Star Trek, but also because Nightcrawler and Colossus looked nothing like super-heroes I had seen before. They were too strange for my mother, who refused to buy X-Men # 98 for me. She relented by the time # 99 came out. However, she refused to buy any SoS for me after the third issue. (It's a shame, too. Daimon Hellstrom was rapidly developing into my favorite hero. Who couldn't love a super-hero who carried a flame-shooting pitchfork?)

But those, of course, were superficial differences. SoS was a hero, as were the X-Men, and they all subscribed more or less to the same notions of what heroes did or could do. (However, there's one scene which strongly implies that Wolverine kills a guard he sneaks up on. We're not shown exactly what happened, and a later writer opined that there were bunch of guards with medical bills Xavier had to pay for!). It would have been much more realistic--and challenging for the reader--if Wolvie had been shown actually killing the guard--something TV shows like Star Trek did not shy away from.

Of course, parents might have raised a fit. The comics industry had learned a lot from the '50s, and still had to conform to the Comics Code Authority. So, if there was a sameness to super-heroes in those days, and the notion that they could never be wrong, it probably stemmed from the CCA's oppressive influence.