posted
Lousy concept. It sets up the "Argument From What We Know About These Characters, But Which We're Not Gonna Tell You, At Least Not Yet, Or Not Until You Buy Our Expensive RPG Sourcebook." Wordy fallacy, but still a fallacy.
Serial storytelling that ends up needing expensive outside decoding sources has a host of flaws, from pretense to incoherence. The most we should have is an "Our Story So Far" page, as the CrossGen titles do. Or a set-the-stage blurb, as the Legion stories once did.
Did the three parts of "The Lord of the Rings" need a glossary? Methinks not, Tolkien's language creating notwithstanding.
As for any warning about what TMK were up to, all that I recall seeing is the last paragraph in the last item in the last letterpage of the last Baxter issue. No Legion issues for three months? Jumping five years ahead? Say WHAT?
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I like the concept - but don't remember my reaction when it was announced. Legion was on a back-burner for me at that point in time.
It's a good device for telling a whole lot of story in a little time or a few issues. You fast forward five years, the characters have new lives, histories - all of which can be recounted in a few words, a text piece, references - readers don't need all the details, they can fill those in themselves.
It made/makes for very dense, multi-layered story-telling, which I like. Some of the characters may be fast-forwarded long lines we would not have expected - this can be a shock, it can grate or disappoint, or also be a very pleasant surprise. It's more dynamic, in my opinion, than the gradual character development that you would have gotten if all five years had been recounted in sequence. Shakes things up.
It could be used for a series gone stale or one that had become too complicated to continue. It's a far preferable approach to the Zero Hour wipe-out. Did the creators or editors give any explanation at the time in interviews or in the comic itself? Was it just an experiment or did they feel the book had bogged down?
posted
Well, there was that "Revolution" thing over in the X-books (or some of them, anyway) a few years back.
That was a six-month jump. One of the teenagers in Generation X, Synch, was killed during the gap and I can't remember if they ever got around to giving a straight account of his death (rather than various people crying about missing him).
This was right around the time the first X-men movie came out, if I do recall. And didn't Claremont come back (and Ellis sign on for X-Force) then? Sounds a bit like deck-clearing....
Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
It made something old (not bad) new again for a long time reader. The reader only had to wait three short months to visit friends they hadn't seen in five years. References to happenings during "the gap" drew my interest and those happenings have been muse for much fan fic.
This time jump also gave the writers some freedom from continuity to invent and they took advantage. In the first couple issue we met some of the all-time favorite supporting characters in Loomis and Kono.
Now my perspective related above is obtained from re-reading beginning to end the 45 years worth or work on a couple occasions. My first exposure to the gap was more confusing as it was Spring 91 and I was in the one to two month process of re-collecting a childhood book I thought long gone. I had some Adventure, some early Levitz, then these show up.
On the plus side, this way of meeting TMK also gave me the advantage that I did not have to wait months on end to try and piece together the story. In other words, this technique might work better in a novelization and definitely should be used sparingly.
From: East Toledo | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
I prefer stories where you don't get to find out everything at once. I love the mystery. It made me think about Legion again seeing it slowly unfold over the first 15-issues or so. I wouldn't want to become a standard device in telling LSH stories but for the plots TMK were telling it made perfect sense.
From: Kernow | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Seems to me like a lot of people here can't seem to grasp the concept of... well... a concept, preferring instead to discuss THE Five Year Gap.
I haven't actually read any TMK issues, but frankly the concept of "Big Time Jump" stinks to me. Develop a situation, don't just make Huge Changes™ because you can.
-------------------- My views are my own and do not reflect those of everyone else... and I wouldn't have it any other way.
quote:Originally posted by Sanity or Madness?: Seems to me like a lot of people here can't seem to grasp the concept of... well... a concept, preferring instead to discuss THE Five Year Gap.
I haven't actually read any TMK issues, but frankly the concept of "Big Time Jump" stinks to me. Develop a situation, don't just make Huge Changes™ because you can.
I agree, there was no reason for the jump. It seemed like a shoddy way of "starting over" I was upset that the stories were not continuing. I wanted to see the cleanup from the Magic Wars. I wanted to see Rokk mourn his brother. Most of all, I wanted to see the Legionnaires rise to the challenge of rebuilding the universe.
-------------------- Touch the magic...
From: Morganfield, KY | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I loved the TMK Legion but I really wish we could have seen more of Sensor Girl & Timberwolf as the team leaders.
The jump was very disorientating at first. In fact I nearly dropped the book but when they got to the return of Jan in the 5th issue (I think) I knew it would be well worth sticking around for.
From: UK | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
One big risk to a long leap in time is that longtime fans, as opposed to casual readers, might think that the stories and plots that have been skipped over sound more interesting than what is actually presented.
While I enjoyed much of the FYL (five years later) era, there was a lot I disliked, too.
For one thing, the gap seemed much longer than five years. The oldest Legion characters read to me as if they were around 25 when MAGIC WARS ended.
When the new series started, the same characters had seemed to age much more than five years-- even 'drama-heavy', war-torn years.
This ties into my first concern; I always thought the ages skipped in the Legionnaires' lives were the most vital, fun, interesting ones- no matter what the plot around them. I mean, they went from really being on the cusp of adulthood (as in responsibility, independence, self-awareness- *not* numerical age) to being middle-aged, cranky, and world-weary. What we didn't get to see always lessened my enjoyment of what we did. And I don't mean 'plots' like BLACK DAWN, etc. I mean the lives of the characters.
I still feel a bit cheated about that. So- while I liked a good bit of TMK's work, I really disliked the gap itself.
I loved it so much that after I read about it in LSH 63, I applied it to my own writings on a 'home-made' superhero team I was doodling.
MY characters -really- went through the wringer in those 5 years... No one died, but there were several betrayals and character switches. 2 members of my home-made team had spent most of the 5 years being tortured/brainwashed by the team's enemies.
I think the 'gap' is a totally cool concept. I in fact expected TMK to do MORE than they actually DID do with the characters.
But I agree with Todd that we missed out on some very interesting years in their lives.
posted
It's not really fair to decry those who are ending up commenting (directly or not) on "this" five-year gap, as if it's a storytelling tool that could be routinely picked up. I can't recall having seen anything comparable to it, period, in serial storytelling -- in and out of comics. So it's not as if we have a host of examples from which to abstract a "concept."
Serial tales usually show growth and slow changes in a core group of characters. They're typically open-ended, without any definite broad destination shaping the characters' choices. Everything possible is left open to continue with the same characters indefinitely. Nothing about their lives is irrevocable, which rules out deaths or absences of key characters. That is, unless the core group, as with "Trek" or the Legion, is large enough to allow for others taking up a defined role or carrying on with what the missing character had done.
Every one of these aspects works against a "gap." As I noted above, it encourages arrogance on the writers'/creators' parts, relying on the characters' growth and continual change which we, the audience, have in part not seen. It's an unearned basis for storytelling, in a sense. It's not done to save time, as with jumping ahead in a closed-end play or movie or miniseries. Showing the passage or effects of time is the essence of a serial story.
To bring it to the concrete of TMK, which we have to do at some point: They wanted a new continuum of stories, but it would have been more honest to make them a new set of tales, with a new title, and to not trade off of the past. To be perfectly fair, Giffen initially envisioned a story ultra-arc of about 36 issues -- that is, before the DC editorial interference that had them remove all traces of Superboy (thus the Mordruverse, double mini-reboot, and "Valor").
That would have been a reasonable creation, though not necessarily a good one, even if they used the same characters. (Just as it was with "Legion Lost.") What made it weak and dissembling was for TMK to then call it "Legion of Super-Heroes." That ended up trading on the serially told past, including the unseen past. Unseen, that is, except for the creators. This last was, if not quite dishonest, certainly unfair to the readers' expectations.
From: Starhaven Consulate, City of Angels | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Personally, I think the gap was the best way for the creators to have gone with the series. I mean, Keith obviously wanted to take the Legion to a different level. To have tried to do so with the end of the Magic Wars as a starting point wouldn't have worked. A break from the Levitz years was clearly needed.
By jumping ahead five years, we were able to see the Legion in a completely new territory. Sure we didn't know what had happened in the missing years, but we were slowly beginning to find out as the series progressed, and as missing characters returned to the series.
If the book had continued, the missing years could have been the subject of various mini series or storylines. Certainly the sourcebook gave us a general idea of what had happened, but these other books could have greatly expanded on it to give the full story.
Of course, with Zero Hour this never had a chance to be.
Mind you, the post-Gap stories weren't among my favorites, mainly because they just didn't fit the kind of superhero books I like to read. However, since this was the chosen direction for the Legion to take, I think it was a wise decision to break off the era. Kinda like the Levitz years was the original Star Trek, and the Giffen years was the Star Trek movies
-------------------- Some people are like slinkys: not really good for anything, but they bring a smile to your face when you knock them down a flight of stairs
From: Penthouse atop Levitz Hall, LMBP Plaza, Embassy Row, Legion World | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
If we're talking about the TMK Gap specifically then, I'd say its one of the two main editorial (and writing, in this incident) descisions which caused Zero Hour, and the results of that (the other was the decision to make Hawkworld "now", rather than "Pre-JLA founding," as intended, which shredded quite a bit of Post-Crisis 20th C continuity).
After all, if there had been no 5YG, there would have been no Superboy Edict from Carlin. Which shredded 30th C continuity as surely as the HW mess did to the 20th C. [Numerous spinoffs of that, mostly 20th C, including Eclipso: TDW running differently and no Valor spinoffs or guest-star slots].
Leaving aside the artistic merit of the Gap, it certainly had a deterius effect on the coherancy of the DC Universe.
Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't think it fair to say the Gap could have been used to restart the series for new readers. There was way too much Legion baggage still attached for a casual reader to join in.
While I liked the concept I didn't like the effect. It appeared, to me, as more a lazy way to not to have to wrap up previous events. It always felt like the beginning of the end to me, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that shoe turned out to eventually be Zero Hour.
From: Utah | Registered: Jul 2003
| IP: Logged |
Hyperpath: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic | Subscribe To Topic
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
