Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! How do you plan on reacting to the Fourth Boot?

WARNING: Massive, nostalgia-ridden post. Look away if you are squeamish.

We, the fandom, will never all agree on ONE version of the Legion, can we agree on that?

Several of these things I have stated before, so if you want to, overlook them. I have been a fan for 33 years, and I am amazed by those of you who have been fans even longer. Of course I went back and collected a number of the Adventure Legion stories, as well as the back up shots in Action, although I still don't have them all, and likely never will.

1. I liked the Legion and particularly Superboy (go ahead, sue me) because they were young, and so was I. Never having even read a comic book before, I thought Mike Grell's art was SO COOL! Now granted, I have developed a respect for many of the other artists like Dave Cockrum, but Grell was the first. So, the 70's Disco Legion was my first love. And the girls' costumes, especially Saturn Girl and Projectra, were just, wow. (Hey, I was a healthy young red-blooded male) When I think of "the original," that's what I think of, go-go boots, bell-bottoms and all.

2. I enjoyed the way the Legion battled the bad guys, had boyfriends and girlfriends, heck, even married. They almost seemed like real people who were growing up as I was. I know a lot of people hate that, but not me. They battled, they won, they were real friends to each other, they died. They were heroes.

3. The 80's was great too. As a teenager, and going into college, I just read the books for fun. That was what comics were to me, escapist FUN. As someone who's not particularly fond of it, when profanity and more real-world issues started coming into comics, I thought, "man, this is what I'm trying to get away from for awhile." I bought both books, spending my hard earned student money on them, even the reprints because I had to have 'em all. The death of Superboy hurt tremendously. The Pocket Universe crap still sucks. I never saw the 5YL coming.

4. I <span style="font-size: 16px;">HATE</span> 5YL. Too dark, too brooding, too depressing, too confusing, and Keith Giffen's beyond-his-prime art. I thought T & M Bierbaum were the Lad and Lass who wrecked the Legion. I checked my Bible to see if the Antichrist could be a husband and wife team. I despised the whole concept as it was presented.

5. But, you know what? Dangit, I'm a hard-headed Legion fan. I bought 'em, because I had what the Legion represented to all of us in the early days: Hope. Long Live the Legion, right? I was actually glad when the SW6 batch came in. They were more like the young kids I grew up reading. They were all alive! I especially enjoyed Ferro. He was a hero I had never read about on a first run basis. His struggles as someone who was alone to me were very poignant. Even in the 5YL Legion, he had no counterpart, he was alone, and I felt that. I kept up with them for the entire run. Then,I started reading "Legionnaires." I liked the kids. Then, by the late 90's into the new millenium, I had acquired a lovely wife and two kids, and due to a downsizing my salary had been cut in half, and well...something hadda give. Comics.

6. I missed "The Legion." I missed "Legion Lost." Still have never read an issue. Never wanted to read whatever that crap was called "Superboy's Legion." He wasn't a hero. He was a loud-mouthed fraud. Period. Along the way, I went back to college, got a better job, and began perusing the periodicals. Then, I noticed the Threeboot, not even realizing it was such, about a year and a half into the run. I think Barry Kitson's art was what grabbed me. But, still, I put it off. Then along came the Action Legion. I started reading that and going, "This kinda looks like the old Legion! So I devoured that. Then I had to go back and find the Lightning Saga. More interest piqued. I was hooked again. My first new Legion issue was #37. Both covers. I found this website, and the Omnicom, and I have been hooked since. Why?

Because it reminds me of better, simpler days. Would the 1960's Legion sell today will all the "groan", "choke", "thanks, Pals!" and such?No. Not that my life now isn't great, it is, but when I was a kid and this team was kids, pure and simple, they were my heroes, and that never really has changed. I've said all that to say all this:

Long Live the Legion.

I love it, likely always will.

Yep, I'll buy it, if it happens, till somebody makes me mad.

Till then, I'm collecting back issues.

I sincerely hope the Wildfire-as-Red-Tornado thing is gone, but the Ayla-dead thing was only ever our interpretation. You could spin what Timber Wolf said in the Lightning Saga a number of different ways.

I'm not so sure. You may be right. But I'm not so sure.

It honestly surprises me that people find it so easy to see the original Legion in Johns's retroboot Legion. They really are very different. There are huge differences between Johns's Lightning Lad and any Lightning Lad we've ever seen before. Or compare Johns's Polar Boy to Levitz's. Or look at Blok: the guy had one word of dialogue in everything Johns has written about his Legion, so far, I think, and in that one word he showed himself to have a completely different personality from Levitz's Blok. I'm not saying that anybody shouldn't like Johns's version. I'm just saying that it's as different from the original Legion as the reboot or threeboot are, but hardly anybody notices. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Define 'agree on'.

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I've become more attached to the Legion franchise as a whole than to any specific version of it. Original, 5YL, SW6, reboot, DnA, threeboot, Superboy's Legion, animated... I appreciate them all on the same level. Not to say that I don't like some versions better than others, or that reboots don't bother me. But all the different Legion versions clearly have elements in common, they're all obviously the same kind of thing, and it's the exploration of the possibilities of those common features that I like. So a fourboot (and I don't consider Johns's Legion to be a fourboot, exactly; more of a 1.5boot) would be annoying but not traumatic.

Agree with every word.
I'm likely to like that exploration. A new version will, of course, also introduce new features not derived from previous versions. Am I going to like those? That's what I don't know.

What I want to see is (among other things) an increased SF emphasis, both technological and sociological. I want a series that gets more mileage out of being in the future. A series that asks the question "What does being in this different world mean for the Legion?"... and actually offers an answer. This is probably the biggest example of what I meant above: If a 4boot doesn't take the opportunity to do something distinctly new and better than previous versions, I'll be disappointed.

BP: i see you're new here. here's a tip: no using this crazy logic with legion fans. we're all pretty sure that what we want to happen is going to be the actual result in reality

Don’t’ feel sorry for me. I leave with no regrets and happy in the knowledge I’ve read the very best the Legion has to offer -- I wouldn't trade the next four months of Shooter for four years of Geoff Johns. Fact is, I feel a little sorry for folks who'll be sticking around to watch DC exhibit the Legion's unburied corpse as a sideshow attraction. Most of all, though, I feel sorry for the newbies who'll never appreciate the original Legion (or its great modern interpretations) because all Geoff Johns has to offer them is a bunch of reanimated corpses. I started out with the Legion in the old Adventure days, I believe I know the originals as well as anyone, but I don't get any warm and fuzzy feelings whatever about Johns' doppelgangers. I just get a chill down my spine, like I'm seeing the LSH touched by the hand of cold death.

I think what you fear has already happened. Because of fans' refusal to support the modern interpretations of the LSH -- even ome written by the Legion's greatest living creator -- TPTB has judged the Legion a non-self-sustaining property (for the forseable future, anyway) and resorted to a nostalgia version as its final option. What some people see as a "rebirth", I see as the demise of originality, growth and creativity.

Very philosphical, Tromium, even if I can't share your feelings. But just like you, I really feel sad that Shooters approach did not succeed on a larger scale. It was his bad luck that he came on board of a heavily damaged ship (due to Waids lack of ideas and storytelling). He was able to totally turn it around, but somebody had already called for another ship to pick up the passengers...

Still, just reading Johns JSA from #1-87, I feel quite confident that he will breathe some life into those Legionnaires you perceive to be corpses.

My main reason for being optimistic about John's Legion is his statement on the originals history being back in continuity,writers come and go and with the reboots it had more of an effect on the sales than it did with the original,I don't want Mark Waid's Legion or Kieth Giffen's Legion because once their gone so is their Legion,I want THE LEGION the one that survived Gerry Conway's and Roy Thomas's writing and still was one of DC's top selling books and after they moved on we got Paul Levitz back for his great run,My Legion is the Legion of hope,that can substain the title through the hard times,because the characters are so wonderful due to that rich thirty years of history in which it survived and thrived that Geoff John's said is now once again back in continuity.

Hear hear, Lone Wolf - splendidly said! My feeling 1994 after Zero Hour were like this: "Did they actually just erase 35 years of history???"

To get this history back as a basis for new stories is by far enough for me to be optimistic. Considering that Marks Waid seemingly actively refused to give his Legion a new history (no origin, no history, no team but a movement), to get this old stuff back - even Dr. Mayavale (!!!) - is all the more reason for joy, even if they shoehorn and retcon some stuff in.

And who says this Legion will outlast Geoff Johns? Any big-name writer coming after won't necessarily want to play with the toys the last one handed him...

Actually with all the lame trends that have come and gone through comics over the years I've been really pretty glad that the Legion I grew up with reached a conclusion even though I was displeased at the time. At least to my mind those characters were put out of reach from those who would have handled them with less care. I'm not saying the Post Zero Hour creators were untalented; I think the first couple years of the Zero Hour Legion blew the "Legion on the Run" era out of the water.

Let's face it, the 90s were in many parts not an actual "storytelling nirvana", if you get what I'm meaning. Many books quality declined, at least in my eyes, no matter which publisher. Image changed the industry back then with the emphasis on cool art no matter what "story" it told. DC and Marvel followed suit, thus destroying franchizes like Titans or X-Men. Avengers too, but that one was later salvaged by the Busiek/Perez run.

The Legion after Zero Hour was a victim of the "cool young superhero funny ack ack" trend - Impulse, Superboy, this was a countermovement after so many years of dark and gritty. For me, those books were never any interesting, so the Legion also totally lost me. Of course, Legion on the Run was a disaster. And you might be right, staying in the old continuity would probably only have resulted in even more bad convoluted stories.

But the Reboot to me was a nightmare - for many more reasons than just silly stories.

CK, i think waid DID give them a back story, i've been re-reading waid's run recently and if you look carefully he does give hints as to their beginnings, something i want to sit down and write up one of these days.

he doesn't sit down and go "this, this and this" happened, we get it in tiny bits of conversation and mentions. it's a specific type of storytelling that some people enjoy and others don't. i like it, personally, it feels more natural than "okay, let me explain" because they'd have to find a character that'd been living in a cave to explain since the legion was very public in waid's run. (johns solved this problem with a trip through the museum, you recall). one thing i remember was their trip to colu and you, as well as the team realize "IS THAT YOUR MOM, QUERL?!", and then they don't explain more. and later there's a mention in passing that the coluans did something REALLY BAD to querl. these are tiny things that will NEVER, unfortunately, be explained.

and i also rail against the idea that there was no characterization, these were the most well thought out characters i've ever seen, there were whole issues devoted to characters where a single punch wasn't thrown!! like the one with phantom girl and KK?! or the one where trips goes on that triple date and she even gives her own appraisal of some of the members?!

and i'd say the silliness of more current boots is NOTHING compared to the original stories. seriously. go re read those. legion of super pets, anyone?! i don't know what people are comparing things to when they say they want the originals back. i don't know what that could POSSIBLY mean because the originals are like... 1950s nonsense stories for tiny children.

arm fall off boy: AHHH!!!! you haven't read any of The Legion and Legion Lost?! Oh my GOD! ahhh! it knocks EVERY THING out of the park! to me, i picked those issues up and that was when i went "oh this just became a REAL comic book" with modern storytelling and gorgeous art. it drives me INSANE that legion lost or legion was never collected in a trade, when people ask me "what's legion, give me something i can read to understand it" i wish i could just hand them some trades be like "oh sure, read this"

i hope in the future that DC will put more contemporary legion things out in trades. i know, i know, you just hate the reboot. but when i and other shoppers look at trades (and yes, people are buying TRADES now, btw), we tend to shy away from the stuff that looks like it was colored before computers existed or drawn in that 80s style. if you were born in, let's say the mid to late 80s, you understand that the comics before you were born were written in a DIFFERENT style than the ones in the 90s or the ones today. a VERY different style. and they were also DRAWN in a different style.

it doesn't matter if the story is totally the best story ever, it's really hard to make people read a book that LOOKS old. so if i go to the book store now, i see waid-run legion trades and... MAYBE that eye-for-an-eye thing, if i'm in a comic book store, i see those as well as giant archives. the legion is almost completely impenetrable. when i first read waid's legion, i had almost no idea who anyone was because i just wasn't used to such a giant cast of characters.

admittedly, the way waid's run begins, it makes you think "i missed an issue/trade here, wtf, this isn't the beginning", i see a big problem with not having the previous run in trade format here, which is that if you want to read what came before this, you'd be screwed. unless you find those issues at a con, you'll NEVER know reboot even EXISTED.

i think dc sees this impenetrability. i think it wants to make the legion digestible and comprehensible. and right now, the action comics version direction, seems to be the EASIEST to understand but they might opt for something else that very Year One (what i'm hoping for, actually)

and yes i'll read it and i uh, well i won't know how i'll like it until it's in my hands, right?

This is the kind of thing I've been trying to convince people of for a long time.

Unfortunately, Waid's stories haven't convinced me... Again, I think his run was hampered by his weak premises (Eat-it-Grandpa). It's hard to get into characterization when you have yet to give any decent glue to why they were together, why THOSE characters were the "chosen" ones... There were too many loosen points to make characters work well.
That's why Shooter deserves a higher praise: he "glued" the team by focusing on a non-end of tasks and challenges that reinforced each one's roles and their ties to each other.

So in other words, Waid was doing the Morisson style which is so "hip" nowadays - don't show the story, just give hints and let the readers watch up the rest in the internet?

Definitely not my cup of tea, and also not what i was used to get from Waid, who really did great work on books like Empire or Kingdom Come. But I would be very interested in a collection of plot elements Waid did, I recently reread the threeboot as well and was astonished that I found it to be as bad as I felt it was the first time - I believed I might have been biased at first, but the stories simply didn't work for me. As did the villain, Lemnos, oh my god how incredibly bad... I thought it got a little better with the Dominator storyline (which actually WAS a story), ut that was by far too late...

How do "I" plan on reacting to the Fourth Boot? same way i reacted to the 3 boot with an grain of salt. i've re-read most of Waid's run and looking back i was just waiting for it to get better and to me it just didn't.
at least with the 1st Reboot i got excited because it was like starting from the ground up and i was there this time to witness it. with the exception for Kitson's art when he didn't skip an issue that was the only thing that kept me hanging on to the 3 boot. so unless it's something that totally rocks the foundation of what we Legion fans have grown to love i wont be waiting for the Fourth boot with baited breath.

I think Waid gave the characters' personalities, but they were pretty shallow personalities and did not really deviate in any interesting fashions. Cosmic Boy was uptight; Braniac Five was aloof and machiavellian; Element Lad was spiritual; Karate Kid was zen, Ultra Boy is a dumb jock, etc. But how many people do you know who are completely consistent in their personalities no matter the circumstances? What about teenagers? Wouldn't it have been nice to see Karate Kid actually lose control? Element Lad face a challenge to his spiritual beliefs where he had to decide between compromising or suffering serious consequences? Even after 30+ issues, the Waid Legionnaires seemed to lack any realistic depth. They had their "personalities" but seemed primarily to go through the motions of reacting to whatever threat was pending. (I would submit that Mekt Ranzz displayed more depth than just about any Legionnaire.)

The nice thing about Shooter is that it no longer seems possible to sum up the characters' personalities in one or two words. I worry, based on Johns' description of the Legionnaires, that he sees the members more like Waid -- as particular archetypes rather than human beings who may not be all that consistent in their behaviors.

I think you are right about that. I don't think Geoff is a brilliant writer in terms of characterization (far from that). He is good at scenery and "big complex universes". His Green Lantern run is a great sci-fi book, but his portrait of Hal Jordan is maniqueist at best. Gerard Jones (and Keith Giffen) were the best recent writers of Green Lantern, at that respect - Hal was a bold and corageous hero, but not at all a loose cannon.
That's why Ron Marz botched attempt at doing Hal as an a%%$%le was so stupid: it made no sense, it had nothing to do with the past character at all.
So, I am not hoping for a great Legion book in terms of characterization (this is Shooter's domain, and it seems fanboys are not into it), rather, it will be a fun cosmic saga with a bunch of Jedis and Imperial Guards on the other side fighting a lot.

There's a rule against using words that we have to look-up.

I wonder if that is what long-time Legion fans really want. Part of the problem is that I suspect the audience for Legion is older than the general audience for comic books. We look back with fondness on The Great Darkness Saga not because it was some big epic, but because of the character interplay that occurred in those issue. I doubt those fans are going to stick around for "Legionnaires in Space," just as they did not stick around for the Archie Legion. I suspect DC has a bit of a bind. It could have a bunch of new readers for a Legion book coming out of Lo3W, but I suspect their preferences in comic books is inconsistent with what a lot of older Legion fans want to read. I fear that if DC goes the "cosmic saga" route, which may keep more new readers, we will have regular blootbaths.

ohhh man guys! i think you read waid's run way way differently than i did!! LET ME TYPE MANY WORDS TO YOU.

ck: ahh morrison isn't my cup of tea, and to put it bluntly... i'm not patient enough for his writing style, and i haven't been rewarded for it with his writing when i was. i threw away the second issue of batman RIP because it confused me violently. i read it and then put it right into the trash. i'd say waid's stories were a lot easier to follow than that. but i think his stories were about the characters' varied personalities combining to go against bigger problems. i liked seeing people able to go "ok, listen, we don't get along but there's a bigger bad guy", they do SQUABBLE but they pull it together, and those are the sorts of teams i... hmm, respect might be the word..?

i think the difference between morrison and waid is that i can't enjoy morrison until i've spent my money and bought the whole thing and even then i might not like it. in waid's run, i felt like he gave me plenty enough information to understand and enjoy the story.

reckless: you know, i don't think waid was simplifying the characters as much as you think. ultra boy for example. he makes you think he's simple on the surface (dumb jock), but then later shows you that he's not quite what you're expecting. on that date issue with triplicate girl she's clever enough (GASP!!!) to figure out that ultra boy stick with the legion because he feels more comfortable in groups because he was in gangs back on rimbor. and later than that, we think "oh he just wants to bone supergirl", he's a horny jock, but later we find out that NO, he's actually being COMPETITIVE with her. to me, that's a multi-layered and interesting character that isn't what he appears.

as for querl! oh god. *psychotic mode on* *weeps with embarrassment*

brainiac 5 isn't REALLY a heartless, cold, aloof, jerk of a person. again, waid gives that SURFACE impression of him but if we actually look at his actions and reactions, he reacts more sensitively and sentimentally than ANY of the others. reread that second issue where dream girl first shows up. there's a panel where nura says something to the effect that she's worried about what she'd just done, disabling the system the naltorians were using to keep the kids from dreaming, a silent panel where querl looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and then he tries to COMFORT her (badly). this after spending the issue being jealous of her. later, when lyle has his giant mess up with the psi-cops, querl compliments and forgives him (also note that he'd been protecting lyle's secret diligently until that moment). AND when dream girl dies, he takes it the hardest. he takes it Superman Movie I hard, like.. crazy obsessed, want-to-defeat-death hard.

and that aforementioned trip to his planet, he has ANOTHER emotional break down there, freaking out that his whole planet is messed up. i could go on and on. so no, i don't think that waid's characters were 2 dimensional, did he have favorites that he tried to describe more thoroughly than others? yes, you HAVE to with a book this big. but when you have a writer willing to devote entire issues to nothing but people having conversations and learning about each other, i'm really surprised that waid gets "shallow" as a criticism. it might not have been the personalities you WANTED or in the preferred format, but i'd say they were definitely there.

futhermore, i'm not sure that waid was writing them as teenagers per se, young people YES but... 18-19 MAYBE... lyle seemed 17-ish? kitson's art didn't help. i felt like waid was telling stories about the exploitation and abuse of young people, which was something i appreciated. i felt like the characters weren't condescending? sometimes when authors write teenagers, they insist on making them do things that make no sense, erratic, etc. i don't know if any of you still know the people you knew in highschool, but on my end, people didn't change much. at all. people think kids are weird because they have them trapped in a school where they can stare at them and analyze them. but in my experience, the people i've worked with are just as likely to be insane or sensible, socially awkward or confident, etc.

ok this is getting really abstract. my point is that as a fairly young-ish person, waid's run appealed to me and it was accessible enough to spur my obsession on to bigger, more fanatical things (like podcasts, posting on message boards...). is that the format/style/etc that should be followed? iiiii dunno. I have no idea. i would enjoy it and it sold well, didn't it?

other things i would enjoy:

year one legion, though not 15 year olds, please.

babylon 5/star trek style - discovering cool new planets, learning about different cultures (with contemporary applications), something that promotes acceptance, diversity. bedard asked me why i liked the legion, why i was attracted to it and i said "I like it because it's so hopeful", i really like the idea that in the future, the earth gets itself together and is a pretty nice place to be. i compared it to star trek, saying something like "it's really nice to think that the future is a good place, something to look forward too". so. something not horribly depressing, something uplifting and hopeful. is that what other buyers want...? i don't know, i think so, WALL-E had nice sales, didn't it?

I will read the Legion, if another boot takes place. A new start would have to have entertaining stories and nice artwork, or I will have little patience to continue at this point.

I wouldn't want to pigeon-hole any creative team into creating a specific type of Legion, past or new. HOWEVER, if the premise isn't about different teens in a diverse, hopeful future (see VeryVery above) then to me it isn't really the Legion. The reboots which went away from these concepts didn't last more than a few years - let's stick to the basic working formula.

That said, there must be a billion unexplored concepts in a 31st century galaxy, and plenty of adventure for old and new Legionnaires (and villains!) alike. While not a big fan of the recent Waid reboot characters, I came to like them through the writing of Shooter, which I didn't think would ever happen at issue #30.