I was just thinking this morning, how can we get a Lar Gand into the new Legion? The only Lar that existed in the post-Zero Hour DCU joined the post-boot Legion which is now lost in time. They didn't "unhappen" so the only Lar available from the "main" DCU is spoken for. Are they going to have to retcon the post-Zero Hour history of Lar to free him up for this Legion? Or are they going to have to pull one from Hypertime or something? Maybe we'll have to wait til after the rumored Crisis II for a plausible in-continuity "reimagined" Lar Gand.

I don't know if this has been brought us so if it has can someone point me to it?

I don't see a problem. If we're talking "possible futures", it could be that just as all roads lead to Imra Ardeen, so do they also lead to Lar arriving 1000 years in the future - whichever future that might be.

Maybe Eltro Gand will get a few minutes in the spotlight this time around...or does that make the Time Trapper inevitable?
There's still the Valor that died in Zero Hour, and the grown up Lar Gand that allowed himself to disappear from continuity (or something like that)in order to go after his Tasmia during that story too. The Valor in the reboot was the SW-6 Mon-el wasn't he?

Is anybody else as confused as I am?

Didn't Eltro Gand exist long before TMK? Prior to TMK's take, did Eltro have anything to do with the Time Trapper?

Yes, it was the SW6 batch Valor/Mon-el/Lar Gand/M'onel

Yes and no, I believe. He was a one-shot character without a connection to the Trapper.

God, I don't remember exactly but I think he drugged Mon-el and stood in as a super powered look alike and died fulfilling one of Dream Girl's prophecies thereby saving Lar's life.
Something else else like that.

Tom and Mary had a genius(?) for using these small moments and retroactively making them into some kind of major turning points in Legion history.

So with no immediate 20th or 21st century connection probably Mark and Barry will avoid Lar Gand for a while. He didn't join the Legion on day one originally anyway but I hope eventually they bring him in somehow.

IIRC, it was Eltro's interference that resulted in Lar ending up to close to death. Eltro used some kind of cosmic doohickey to save him, sacrificing his own life in the process.

During TMK, it was revealed that this process actually projected Eltro's consciousness into Lar's body.

[Yellow Kid]
{[...] Tom and Mary had a genius(?) for using these small moments and retroactively making them into some kind of major turning points in Legion history. }

Make that, IMHO,

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I enjoyed Tom & Mary's reasoning as well...and was nice to see why someone like Lar had certain weaknesses at times (personality wise).

I'm a big fan of Mon-El...Lar whatever...I like the retcon that he was the inspiration for the Legion. Give me a daxamite any day over a kryptonite. I am actually quite scared what Waid would do with Lar...(birthright sickens moi) so I am kinda glad he won't be there.

Jorge

Marvel Lad! Marvel Lad! Marvel Lad!

Wasn't it the Protycution ( ) machine? Y'know the one I mean...

A thought just occured to me. There are rumors of CRISIS2 coming in 2005. I wonder if Waid is not using Mon-El for now due to whatever changes might be coming. Better to wait than to introduce a character only to have to retcon somethings once changes in DCU are introduced....

.... ya think?

I know Greybird. That's why I added the "(?)" to the end of the word "genius" . There's so much back-and-forth between people about the validity of so many of their retcons and/or quality of the writing during the Giffen-TMK era.
I'm one of the (apparently) few that liked a lot of those stories but even I think some of it was downright stupid. For instance I liked Valorie (Laurel Gand) but didn't care a lot for SW-6.

I don't think the reboot Valor was the same as the SW6 Valor. I think his double dip through history (he had to go back in time to replace the original Valor and accomplish all his deeds after Glorith killed the original Valor) was negated by the overall effects of Zero Hour. I think the Valor paradox was one of the destabilizing factors (along with the existence of SW6 in general) that contributed to Zero Hour in the first place.

Post Zero Hour I believe Lar's history was reset so that all the events from his father's death in Invasion through his service in LEGION were intact, along with segments of his Valor career. It diverged from the pre-Zero Hour in the manner in which he was placed in the Phantom Zone (or whatever it is/was called.) It was once again "Superboy" who put him in, though it is now the Kon-El version. Since that specific post Zero Hour Valor from the "main" DCU was rescued from the Stasis Zone (?) by the 2.0 Legion, I don't think you can make a case for him also being rescued by the 3.0 Legion as well. There may be multiple futures branching off the DCU but post-Zero Hour Valor took the Stasis Zone express to a very specific future.

You could make a case that the Stasis Zone is "outside" the timestream and have the 3.0 team pull Valor out before the 2.0 team did, though that would to my mind neccesitate a retcon to the current Superboy's past to account for his involvement in 2.0's Valor resue.

These time travel/retcons/indie-reboot things make me crazy, obviously.

And for the record I hated the Eltro/Lar retcon. Pawning off all Mon-El's complexities onto Eltro just to pretty up "Valor's" bio just wasted some good characterizations from Bates and Levitz.

Indeed, the SW6 Valor has closed the time loop replacing the 20-th century Valor who died prematurely (killed by Glorith in DOA). He closed the loop but this did not suffice to avoid the reset brought by Zero Hour. Post reboot we have a different Lar; as observed above, the continuity remains roughly the same up to the beginning of DOA; DOA does not occur post reboot and Lar simply arrives on earth as an amnesiac character (Champion) in the pages of the Kon-El superboy. No Glorith this time, it is Kon-El that projects Lar in the stasis zone. But this post zero hour Valor is not the SW6 Valor, nor does the SW6 legion exist at all post zero-hour, except maybe in some hypertime branch...

Waid is the author behind the DOA storyline, so he seems to have some experience on Lar Gand. I hope that if he decides to bring him back he will do so in an interesting version (the use DnA and earlier post-ZH authors made of Lar was at best "minimalist").

It was nice, by the way, to read the typo "Mon-El" in the titan/legion special. I guess this was just a typo and not the announcement of a new crisis in time.

I close with one question: why did Waid and Johns revert to the M'onel costume? In the last issues of their run DnA had reintroduced the classical Mon-El uniform from V3 and V4 pre-ZH. Why did Waid and Johns ignore this and go back to the post-ZH M'onel suit?

Nice. You raise a couple of points I'd missed somehow. I have a hard time believing that was an accident concidering that the writers were involved with each other at several points during the writing ot that Preview.

Could that be part of the "connection" leading from Gail's story arc into the preview then into the new Legion?

I don't see how but I'll be the first to admit that I'm no Brainiac.

I think Waid and Johns perhaps started working on the layout in advance, or maybe they provided the artists with Legion layouts that were a few months old, so that the pencillers came up with M'onel old costume. As for "Mon-El" my guess is that that is just a typo (it had happened already in LSH v4 100 in the short story by Levitz and Simonson).

What you say on the link between the coming legion and the v4 legion is interesting and is certainly one possibility, let's see what happens after a few months or years.

I'm not sure why there is all the confusion about the possibility of a Lar in this version? Yes M'Onel disappeared with Legion 3.0 but so did all the rest of them!

Following this line of reasoning would mean there isn't a Cosmic Boy, or Chameleon, or Ultra Boy or any of the others in this version either. They were all in that same final panel with Lar at the anchor position.

Regarding Eltro Gand (and purely from memory since I'm at work and can't dig up the issue)...

He was a descendent of Lar's relatives on Daxam. When word of Lar's impending demise (based on a premonition of Nura's) became public, everyone tried to come up with a way to protect him. Daxam even offered to build a maximum securty facility where Lar could take refuge until the time of his forecasted death had passed.

In the end, Eltro surprised Lar and knocked him out, stashing him on an out of the way asteroid as I recall, and took his place, planning on dying instead of Lar. Of course the hour forecast passed and Eltro lived.

As he revealed the truth, he and the other Legionnaires went to retrieve and revive Lar, only to find him dead from lead poisoning. His serum had run out while he was unconscious and there was iron ore in the rocks! Eltro himself had been the cause of Lar's death!

In his grief and horror, Eltro scooped up Lar's body and flew at superspeed to Legion HQ, arriving way ahead of the Legionnaires. Once there he used the Daxamite equipement originally used to revive Garth (by Proty) to revive Lar, giving his life up in the process.

TMK did the same thing with this story as they did with Garth / Proty. Rather than Proty's & Eltro's life force being transfered, they claimed that their personality or "Being" was transfered into the host bodies (Garth & Lar). I'm not sure if there was ever an explanantion as to why Proty replaced Garth in Garth's body while Eltro joined Lar in Lar's body. Perhaps someone else can clear that up for us.

But the problem there is that we can look at the Post Zero-Hour as a hypertime variant (now) but M'Onel was also rebooted Zero Hour so that there's a one/one relationship between the 20th century Valor and the ZH Legionnaire M'Onel. It doesn't seem to me that the same character can exit the Zone in two different realities. (Plus on a storytelling level it would seem to me a limit on the "reimagining" of Lar Gand if he was basically the same guy we had in the ZH Legion.)

One thing I certainly hope for Lar in Legion 3.0 would be an end to his existence as a quasi-religious figure in the 31st century. It seemed to have stymied the character throughout the 2.0 version.

Interesting. Cannot two different hypertime branches "split" inside the stasis zone? Or is the stasis zone the same throughout all hypertime? Is there any evidence of this in DC canon?

But even so, I think we can still have a hypertime flux effect somewhere from when Lar enters the Zone to the 30th century. For example, if a completely different legion takes him out of the stasis zone this would lead, in a few years, to a completely different Lar Gand in the future.

Or if in a given hypertime branch there is no legion, in that branch Lar would stay in the stasis zone for some more time. Which means that, at least in this indirect way, hypertime fluxes do affect also the stasis zone: in my example above the permanence time of Lar in the zone itself depends on hypertime fluxes, so that events inside the zone as a whole do as well.

As a side note - we also have another Hypertime variant within the Post Zero Hour Legion - they had a bit part in Our Worlds At War, didn't they. A couple of years beyond the timeframe of DnA's run? So unless the time-lost team reemerges sometime - who fought in OWAW?

(I still want to know what Legion fought/will fight in the post-Crisis/Zero Hour version of Crisis.)

These are all excellent questions that would be interesting and fun to see addressed. I would also like to know where the SW6 Valor who closed the time loop after "DOA" ended up. All these questions would call for a series like "Hypertime Legion", "Legion Forever", o "Legion exiles" where these questions could be explored. Now that would be cool...

I can dream, can't I?

I bet you could get at least a 12 issue maxi out of dangling Legion plotlines and continuity questions. Or maybe a Lar Gand mini with all his various versions coming together to battle some big threat like Glorith. The explorer, the god, the dead one etc. Good idea Valor SW6!

I know this isnt gonna be the most popular opinon, but I never really like Valor or Superboy all that much. They were never interesting to me. Eh, I know i'm the minority, but to me, the Legion always seemed more interesting with out them.

It is probably true that extremely powerful characters lead to more difficulties in trying to write interesting stories; however, I think that a character that has spent one thousand years in a ghostly state with almost no human contact could have a quite remarkable outlook on life.

This could lead to interesting situations and interactions with other kind of characters if addressed properly.

Furthermore Mon-El's classic costume is, in its simplicity, one of the most somberly elegant uniforms among all legionnaires costumes

Valor SW6, I agree 100%. Mon-El/Valor to me is different than Superman(blah) cause he has this metaphysical aspect to him. he would fit into the Vertigo universe quite nicely actually.

I've compared him to the Phantom Stranger...and a Samuraii as well. Himself alone and Jorg-El are my nods to the character. I think he's super cool and that solitary confinement for a 1000 years definately is what makes the character work.

Jorge

I don't recall if they ever said or not. It seems possible to me that, while Garth was well and truly dead, there was still a spark of life left in Lar but Eltro was too freaked out by events to notice.

Excellent point.

IF DC's going Crisis again, let's see no connection with the new LSH til that's as sorted out as DC ever sorts out things, and prevent the need for another "Mordruverse"-style band-aid just months into a new series.

It's a possibility. Waid definitely said the Legion would not be interacting with the 21st Century for some time because of big changes in 2005. To me that implies some sort of reboot.

I don't see that it's necessary. All you have to assume is that there are alternate futures. In one future, the reboot Legion rescues Valor. In another, the WaK Legion rescues Valor. The timestream itself is what diverges, meaning that everything that exists in the universe up to the point of divergence continues to exist in *both* realities. It's just that from that point on things become different. So if Valor goes into the Stasis Zone in the 21st Century, but reality doesn't diverge until the 25th Century, then Valor is there in both realities.

My motto:

Never let "continuity" (quotes because of DC's use of the term) stand in the way of a good story.

ugh
i am tired of daxamites and their 'kryptonian/superman' level powers

why does every super-team need someone like that? ultra boy has the abilities in a way that is easier to utilize in stories

i'd prefer to keep the Legion its own entity, rather than introducing a super-stand-in so early on ... especially when new readers will immediately identify a daxamite with the S-family (the powers are way too similar) ... i want to see what happens in the Legion without an invincible daxamite solution to every problem

I still get the feeling that they'll introduce one of the Daxamites we've come to know but not very soon. Mon-El actually appeared and went away before becoming a Legionnaire the first time and Waid's a fanboy too so I think he'll do the story justice when they decide to get around to it.

We know the Legion existed for a while before we first met them way back in 1958 so it's cool with me if they're around for a while before we see them interact with the DCU this time too.