is here .

If his blog has ever been discussed on these boards, I missed it.

It's fun reading his thoughts about the LSH in general and on his memory of working on the 5YL run, specifically.

Thanks for sharing this, Todd.

Tom's entries are short and don't contain a lot of insight, but there are some noteworthy revelations.

For one, Tom and Mary were "steered away" by editorial from making Cham and Danielle Foccart a couple because he was an adult and she was a minor.

For another, they had planned to have adult Gim and Tenz involved in an Iran-Contra-type scandal, but this plan was shelved when Tenz developed into a more humorous bent.

Humorous Tenz (complete with sunglasses) was also fashioned after Dr. Peter Venkman of "Ghostbusters." (Now that I know this, I'll probably hear Ray Parker Jr.'s theme every time I see Tenz.)

Thanks. Great behind the scenes stuff.

I found the recollections interesting as well. It's too bad that Gim didn't have a more prominent role in the 5YL series, even in a probable unflattering role as a trial defendant. One of the reasons that 5YL didn't appeal much to me is that my favorite Legionnaires (like Gim) were left out for the most part. Of course, others such as Dawnstar and White Witch and Sun Boy were twisted so badly as to be unrecognizable. None of the new characters did much for me either. I actually thought the Subs and Infectious Lass were the most interesting in that run.

I thought 5YL had no time to work with all characters as they should, Kid. Also, with Giffen leaving and returning, things sometimes got lost in the shuffle.

Interesting stuff, even though I haven't read the stories. Yet.

Oh, and I'm tickled that his writings are on LJ (it looks like Mary B. has a journal there, too). The Legion gets so little love over there.

Mystery Lad, I mentioned this on the LJ Legionnaires board, but I made sure to credit you and this space for the news. Hope that's okay.

XD! I just found out about this thanks to Cleome's post on LJ ..go figure.

I checked this out a few months ago and see Tom just put in some recent updates in June.

I recommend everyone check out some really good insight to 5YL behind the scenes dealings which really hampered the series from the onset; as well as how TMK were brillant in how they dealt with it.

Also some really good insight to the creations of various 5YL characters, including how essential inker Al Gordon was to the process.

I spent way too much of my workday yesterday reading through Tom's posts. It's interesting to me to read the internal politics between the Legion and Superman teams and to note that Tom seems to have a rather modest view of his abilities as a writer. In particular, he seems down on his and Mary's Mordru Rising storyline (which I thought was a real low point in the 5YL series). I hope he keeps adding entries. He's just getting to the Terra Mosaic, which is one of my all time favorite Legion stories.

He's still updating this, incidentally. Last post was on v4 #49 within the past week!

I spent an entertaining few hours catching up with his posts last week, then going back to the start.

Thoughts on Issue #50 and Element Lad are there.

Tom is now going through the Legionnaires issues.

an interesting quote :-

"Initially it was going to be a series of spotlight issues to give new readers the necessary background on each character ... But by then, it was turning out that there were a number of fill-in stories needed to keep the main series on schedule and I think that need for fill-ins as much as anything kept any spin-off project on hold."

Although issue 4 had the start of the Superman editorial edict come into effect, TMK got past it exceptionally well.

What really derailed the opening arc and therefore the entire series were the number of fill ins required to keep Mr Giffen on schedule. The above would suggest another casualty as a result.

As information dense as the main book was, there was always the feeling of so much else going on. A series of spotlight issues would have been lovely. It may have allowed some classic Legion artists the chance to work on the book again.

I think, and I hate to say it, that the TMK era is probably what contributed to much of the sinking of the Legion...because they did a really great job. The storytelling was dense and tight, even around edicts from other sections of the DCU.

And that's been a pike in the back of the legion for a long time. Longtime readers with a deep and abiding love for legion don't mind the density of the material. WE LOVE IT in fact.

But many times I've heard that it puts off casual readers who feel overwhelmed but so much back story. It seemed to codify the legion, cementing it in place much more so than other books or characters, like Superman, in fact.

And once that cementation took place,once the book was tied down and shackled, once new readers were stunned at the vast array of information and characters (instead of instantly falling in love with it and seeking it out like so many of us did), the legion was doomed to collapse.

Which is horrible, because it was probably the single most inventive, imaginative book out there.

I remember moans about the density of the Legion book way before the 5YG and it seemed to be mainly due to the large cast. I think it's an easy stick to beat the Legion book with generally.

For me having at least 4 of the first 12 issues of the run be fill ins or continuity driven sunk the Legion. Whatever hope the run had ended in editorial/creator sulks in there somewhere.

I seem to remember a pretty decent number of new readers that loved the 5YG Legion.

Love reading through that blog! While I've enjoyed many aspects of the various do overs and restarts since, their Legion really appealed the most to me.

Yeah, it's a regular reminder of all the great high points, as well as the fill in rushing.

The editorial interference certainly didn't help, but I feel the main problem with this run is that it was basically fanfic and fan speculation elevated to canon. Fans say lots of things that are a horrible idea to put in the actual series.

I happen to think that Star Trek (at least pre-reboot) makes more sense as a dystopia instead of a utopia, with the military running everything, free enterprise nonexistent, and no freedom of speech, press, or religion. But if I were ever to become a writer for Star Trek, I would know better than to write Star Trek like that. This is something that the TMK run fundamentally did not understand.

On one hand you can have ideas that have been created in fandom. Ideas that have come from a pool of people, have received feedback and been refined possibly over years.

On the other, some guy can walk in from his successful stint on Parrot Patrol and decide on what he wants to do.

I'm not sure either is necessarily bad. It depends on the quality of the writing. Plus all the other usual, many, comics variables.

It will also depend on what the idea is. Some fan speculation is based on the most minor of things. That can lead to either navel gazing or an entirely new way of looking at the book. Some fan speculation comes from ideas beyond the book itself, influencing the concepts that way. Some fan fic simply has very good ideas.

People may love Cham's new Parrot Pet, or they may not. They may love the fresh new ideas from someone new to the book/genre. They may resent the lack of tradition that the writer hasn't or has chosen not to follow.

I'm not a huge Star Trek follower. I'm surprised that they haven't had the Enterprise go up against corrupt Federation officials/ governors etc. Easy to plot, plenty of action, some political depth at a pinch, and it showcases what the Federation really stands for.

TMK didn't turn the Legion evil. They were the ones who stood out against the darkness. The closest exception was Dirk, who took time to come round, only to find that it was too late.

Even the UP wasn't evil. It was just run down, with a lot of the former goodwill turned inward to protect individual worlds. Earth was the place that had been taken over. As soon as the Legion were back, they were fighting Khunds along with the UP even as Earth was still in the grip of the Dominators. They were with the UP as those Dominator's were overthrown.

That's kind of my issue with the Ultimates writers moving over to the 616 universe. They had a very specific story they wanted to tell, one in which there are no heroes, just various degrees of nasty brutish thugs with super-powers blowing stuff up and eating people and basically being the thin angry line between normal folk and the *really* nasty people, and, off in their Ultimates universe, were free to express that. Thor might or might not be a delusional eco-terrorist. A Brit who loathes everything America stands for can happily make Captain America a *literal* jack-booted thug.

It's when those sorts of writers end up on a book with established characters, and warp them to speak their own agendas, to tell stories that aren't suited to the tone or theme or milieu of those characters, that things get kind of messed up.

To a lesser degree, Geoff Johns has taken the DCU in that direction as well. He's got rosy-colored memories of Hal Jordan and Barry Allen that didn't mesh with the current realities of those characters, and so he's gone and regressed them into characters that are actually less mature and developed as individuals than they were when he was a child. I grew up in that generation as well, and Barry was not a good-hearted bumbling screw-up that the rest of the League openly mocked to his face and Hal was not a hotheaded bro-code man-child who treated women like property.

There were various aspects of Legion reboots that I similarly didn't like, because the writers wanted a character like X, or someone to fill storyline Y, and decided to shoehorn someone into that role. Ultra Boy, IMO, suffered pretty badly for this, being portrayed very differently in the classic continuity, the reboot, and the threeboot. If there's ever a fourboot, he's either going to be a talking monkey or a super-villain...

As for fandom, 9 times out of 10, I'd rather have a fan write stories about a character or setting, than someone who doesn't care about it, admits to not having read huge sections of it's past, and is just there to cash a paycheck. I may not agree with every fan opinion, but I'd rather read stories written by someone who loves the characters / setting, than by someone who is indifferent to them, or, as with some curmudgeonly misanthrope who openly admit to loathing the super-hero genre, or comic fans in particular, some bitter **** who *despises* them.

I think you're misunderstanding me. The evil Federation was an example of a fan theory that might make sense but which would be stupid to put in the series itself. I wasn't implying that the stupid Legion fan theories were also about evil.

In fact I was thinking more of Garth being Proty and such.

Hi,

Your first post said that TMK didn’t understand enough to leave the dystopia out of the Legion, with the parallel being made to that of an evil Federation and giving some examples of what such a dystopia would look like.

But the evil Federation (possibly including the Enterprise) parallel doesn’t really work with the book TMK gave us

TMK’s UP was not evil. It was under pressure form other interests – Khunds, Dominators and Dark Circle, and had lost Earth to the Dominators. But the parallel to an evil Federation just isn’t what we see in the TMK series. To use your specific examples, the military didn’t run everything (they needed the Legion’s help just after it formed), there was free enterprise (started in Jo’s smuggling & Rimbor in issue 2), freedom of speech (We got constantly accurate commentary from the press reacting to events throughout) or freedom of press (Devlin was free to travel about wherever he wanted)

I covered the bases of it being just the Enterprise being evil, a section of the Federation and the whole thing in my previous post.

I don’t think any of them are stupid ideas as such, or have no place in any fictional universe. There have been enough evil doppelgangers, alternate selves, corrupt officials and deranged presidents down the decades in all sorts of work.

The second post mentions the Garth/ Proty change. When that came into the series we had already seen the Eltro/Lar Gand version of the idea. I think my eyes rolled a little at the number of personalities in Mon El’s head, but the more I found out about Legion history the better it seemed. It explained a lot about the character’s past.

When Garth/Proty then appeared it seemed a little much to retread the same concept. But since the processes involved were related why not? Where the Eltro/Lar version helped to explain a character’s past, the Garth/Proty one may well have had a view to setting up the character’s future too.

The Proty/Garth idea helped to establish the character as Livewire, by showing just how distinct the personality was before Garth’s sacrifice. That would have been explored in proposed look back at the Legion’s origins. But we certainly got to see it in the Legionnaire’s Livewire character. That’s the personality that’s remained since, so other creator’s have run with that, without having to explain the difference through various reboots.

I don’t even have an issue with the idea in principle. It didn’t rewrite Legion history and it added a lot of depth to a number of relationships.

No, it didn't. It said that they didn't understand enough to leave the stupid fan theories out of the Legion.

Not what I picked up from :-



where dystopia and TMK understanding lapse were together.

But I did cover your point about leaving "stupid" fan theories out of the Legion too. I don't think we'd have the Live Wire character we have now had TMK not gone with the Garth/Proty idea. Without it, they would have had no reason to focus on Garth at all, let alone have two personalities from before/after his demise.

So, it's one fan idea that has paid off in later versions. I saw a poll where Lightning Lad was the top rated Legionnaire with a picture of him showing off his more feisty personality.

I don't buy that. It's not as if Lightning Lad wasn't constantly overexposed before.

Anyway, Proty-Garth was just one of the worst examples. What about making Shvaugn Erin a guy taking sex-change drugs? For that matter, what about the stuff that wasn't technically a theory, but was very fannish in nature?

On Lightning Lad, it might depend on my Legion jumping on and off points. Looking at the Total Appearance thread, he's only 9th or 10th in there...



So, with his marriage leave, his poor showing as Legion Leader, his retirement and getting replaced by his sister he didn't really feature a great deal after a certain point.

While he had his spells of regular appearances, it faded away quite drastically. By the time of the 5YG he was pretty much in the background. The Proty story brought a new twist to him, and certainly Live Wire seemed popular at the time.

When I think of Garth, my first thought is of him having a breakdown as leader. Beyond the heroic sacrifice, not too many of the early adventure characters stand out for me as personalities. So the Garth/Proty thing helped to flesh (or protoplasm) out the character, while explaining a few secrets without retconning.

The officer Erin thing came as an attempt to save Erin from death in issue #3. Was it Gordon who came up with that one? Whoever it was, they were already on the book when it was pitched. So it doesn't have those direct fannish origins, unless it's something I've missed?

The way I did read it, was that it was pitched in the middle of a "Well, why should I save her?" sort of thing, so it was just thrown into the mix as an attempt to save her.

Unlike the Garth scenario, I don't think it's a coincidence that we don't see much of Officer Erin in this version of the Legion as a result of the changes made in the 5YG.

Other fan theories... how far along were they with the Legion as pawns in the cosmic balance between the Trapper and Mordru? While I'm not entirely convinced by Ultra Boy's part in it (possibly like Set above) I did like the idea. Particularly as the Legion transcend the role created for them.

You're seriously suggesting that making Shvaugn Erin a guy taking sex-change drugs did not have anything to do with the fan idea that Element Lad is gay?

No, I was referring specifically to the idea to make Erin male. I put in as an obviously unsuccessful attempt at conveying that. I should have stuck to my first attempt that rambled on about Jan for a sentence without going anywhere.

Despite the fan theories of Jan's sexuality, I hadn't come across anything that reconciled that with his obvious relationship with Erin. At least not by altering Erin in that way.

If that's the case, and I'll be surprised if it hadn't come up, then altering Erin was an attempt to keep her alive more than it was a way to further the Jan/Erin plot.

I was wondering where I could find out who was supposed to have come up with it. Why not read Tom's blog?! D'Oh!

Fans thought Jan was gay? I thought that was Jim Shooter?

Jim Shooter put it in print, but it was widespread among fandom.

That was, like, over a decade before I discovered Legion World (and therefore was a 'fandom of one'), so I'll take your word for it.

More on Jan from Tom's blog here

So Bierbaum actually designed Element Lad's costume. I honestly never cared that much for Jan until the 5 year gap. The spiritual stuff was done just right IMHO. Before than he just had a cool power and a bad perm.

I just think he's very powerful, so writers dumb him down or make him seem ineffectual to compensate.

I reread v7 a while back and it still annoys me that Mon El was torn apart, and only then Element Lad pops out and contains the foe in an instant. Gaaaah!

That bugged me too. Levitz is capable of better writing than that. Maybe at that point he was just like f it.

It's the age old problem of having lots of powerful characters getting in the way of plot points the writer wants to get too.

So there's always kryptonite or magic or energy barriers or power sucking prisons. But mainly there's a lot of slow, rather dim people in spandex.

That blogpost from Tom about Jan says:



In other words, yes, making Shvaughn a guy was based on the fan theory that Element Lad is gay.

Ah, so it was Keith Giffen, not Jim Shooter. Either way, I just thought 'fan' meant something other than 'professional comic book writer.' Although, I suppose it's technically true that Keith Giffen could also be a fan, as well as a professional comic book writer.

Anywho, Bierbaum's blog is always funner when I think of it as 'Beerbong's blog.'

But my point was that making Officer Erin a guy only came up form Al Gordon when he was already on the book. It wasn't something taken from fandom.

Or, it's based on the idiocy of Keith Giffen.

Debatable.

Please see: Justice League 3000, Larfleeze, a couple of issues of LSH that were God-awful....

"Fan theory" means "theory which comes from fans", not "theory which was put in the book by a fan", so it doesn't matter whether Keith counts as a fan.

(Besides, "the back and forth" presumably involves Tom, and he is a fan.)

I've not read JLA 3000 (Giffen must have felt like an idiot for the backtracking after Maguire was axed), or Larfleeze. The two issues of Legion seemed to be another attempt to get us back, in some instances, to where the 5YG started. For example Gand's injuries, a disbanded Legion, a technology meltdown, the feeling that everything would be harder to do etc.

I'd have thought by now, you'd know what you were getting with Giffen. Cancellation. No! that just slipped out! It did! I was distracted by someone killing off Karate Kid.

Poor Tom. Think of the time he has to spend working out which bits of his work count as fan theory.

Sure, all the stuff prior to his signing on with DC would be fan theory. But then, all of the stuff while he was signed with them may not, as it's a "theory which was put into the book by a fan"

But what of the stuff put in that came as a direct lift and drop from his fan theories? And what about the things based on fan theory ideas that were changed significantly enough to blur those lines. No wonder the guy has an issue by issue blog.

Now tell me again, am I a fan of the Legion or just a supporter of the Legion. I get that confused too...

On the (dubious) upside, Giffen did probably get Sun Boy killed off, prompting me to write Sun Boy fanfic (and giving Dirk the dubious honor of being the first Legionnaire to be dead in three different continuities!).

In fact, between 5YL and this latest death, I think Giffen has now killed Dirk more than he has Karate Kid!

He must be so proud.

For what it's worth, the whole idea of Jan being gay does seem to originate with the classic interview with Shooter in which he describes in detail his conception of the sex lives personalities of the Legionnaires. From there, it was taken up by fandom. My understanding is that Levitz's introduction of the Jan-Shvaughn romance was largely seen as a response to this widely-held belief among the fans (and remember, Levitz himself started out as part of organized fandom).

Please, use some common sense. A fan theory is a theory that is widespread among fans, not a theory which was thought up by a single fan.

And I mentioned "put in the book by a fan" to *refute* it.



This is certainly an early example of the theory being written down, but I was under the impression that the theory existed before that and Jim Shooter wasn't the first to come up with it.

The Shooter character breakdowns were creepy. I read those well after I'd heard about Jan's possible sexuality in bits and pieces from fan/future writer/lone shooter writings. So I'd always thought Shooter had taken it from other areas.

Word. I like many of the stories that Jim Shooter has written, and he's at the top of my list of favorite Legion writers, but if he never opened his mouth in public, I'd respect him more as a person. Sex, sex, sex, seems to be all he thinks about, and, while he's not a Frank "All women are whores!" Miller level-creepy-misogynist, he's still creepy.

Even growing up a fan of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, both *wildly* racist and misogynist products of their time, it's hard to pardon Shooter or Byrne or Miller (each representing different points on the 'creepy' continuum) as they are *not* products of a more-or-less 19th century mindset, and don't really have any excuse for sexist nonsense.

I always feel a little better when I see someone else react to Shooter's breakdowns in the same way. It was a bit of a surprise when I first read it, to say the least.

HPL didn't help himself with his Gentleman Anglophile routine either really.

We live in an age of access, in which we can now get almost instant feedback from our favorite creators, and they can get almost instant feedback from their fans. Instead of waiting months to read fan reactions to stuff they've written, they are getting reaction to stuff before it's even hit the stands (thanks to previews), and they can blather away their innermost thoughts willy-nilly, for all to see, even if those innermost thoughts were perhaps not quite ready for prime-time (if, ever...).

That's a blessing, in some respects, and a curse in many others, as most don't seem to realize that stuff they utter is going to hang around on the internet to haunt them *forever,* and something off-the-cuff that they meant as a one-off witty quip can turn out to be something they probably should have thought twice before hitting the enter key.

Worse, some get defensive, and instead of saying, 'Yeah, I have no idea what I was thinking, let's all pretend I didn't say that and move on' they try to double-down and dig themselves deeper into a hole by defending some indefensible comment they made or insulting anyone who took offense to it by calling them entitled or whiny or overly sensitive or PC or whatever, rather than take responsibility for their statement and just going 'yeah, my bad, that was dumb.' They end up being the guy who farted and then blames everyone else for the bad smell.

The difference between a Byrne or Shooter, is that when crap happens, they are more likely to say 'Yeah, that story about Carol Danvers riding happily off into the sunset with her incest-rapist? That was creepy and I have no idea what I was thinking approving it.' while someone else might go on a wild tear and blame the fans for not 'getting' his genius story, or write a 'Take That!' cheap shot into a story, satirizing or mocking fans who they are feuding with (such as the AU version of Peter Parker in One More Day who calls comic book and video game fans losers who don't have anything better to do with their lives, and seems to have existed only to demonstrate Queseda's vocal and well-documented contempt for comic book fans who didn't like his 'get rid of Peter's marriage' storyline, or Superboy Prime being cast as a basement-dwelling troll who posts angry on the DC forums).

Once you've devolved into yelling at the hecklers in the audience, you need to get the heck off the stage...

Gerry Conway's Justice League was reduced to that sort of level, killing it before Professor Ivo got anywhere near them.

Superboy Prime fits DC Editorial as much as it does their views of the fans. Superboy Prime was a character used as a nod to the inspiration of DC's future. Now we have a constantly petulant, insecure individual, stuck in a little world of comics while the larger world goes by outside. I can almost hear the removal trucks stopping above the basement moving the Kents out to LA. A constant reminder of squandered opportunity. Perhaps both sides deserve each other

The more honest accounts I've read about comics creators and the comics industry in general, the more disheartening it is. There's not a writer or artist I actively follow on any of the available media.

On another note, I reread the Renegade Legionnaire a few nights ago. I can see a lot of links between the Ultra Boy there and the one used by TMK in the role of pitting Trapper & Mordru against each other. There are a few points in the TMK execution I could quibble with, but it's not as much of a leap as I thought it was.

Re: Jim Shooter. If you're in high school and writing about a cast of characters likened to your classmates, it's common to consider looking at them sexually. I think that's what stuck in Jim Shooter's mind.

I always respected the Bierbaums. While their tenure on the LSH wasn't my favorite, I never felt their contribution was the reason. Thanks for sharing the link!

There's a new entry up as of June 19 about Matter-Eater Lad. Interesting stuff.