Just read a few Wildstorm books (Authority, Point Blank, Sleeper, Wildcats V3.0) and wondering how the Legion would be different under the Wildstorm banner.

Grim and gritty would return. The legionnaires might be older, not necessarily. They would pursue corporate and organized crime intrigues. Openly gay couples as well as straight liasons. Violent sex in dirty alleys, drinking, hostile encounters with the Science Police...well, it would be a change and it would get the fans outraged, screaming "Travesty!!". But I'd still be interested, maybe as a parallel Legion, Elseworlds kind of thing.

I've also wondered what direction the Legion could take if it were done by an independent. Just speculating, I'm not unhappy with the current regime.

Cramey, would you please quit kicking those soapboxes out in front of me? Pretty Please??

I like the Legion best when it portrays a positive up beat future. The same way I like STNG. I want to have some hope that our decendants are not doomed to unending cycles of endless violence and misery.

"They would pursue corporate and organized crime intrigues." They have always done that, the difference is; in the Legion the bad guys are portrayed as being in the minority, not as everybody's doing this but we (the good guys) are going to take down the worst offenders.

"Openly gay couples as well as straight liasons." Fine by me if it is done done as a normal part of the character development, not purely for shock value, See Shvaugvn/Sean.

"Violent sex in dirty alleys, drinking, hostile encounters with the Science Police..." Doen't this aptly describe V4, TMK, 5YG, or whatever that trash was called? And remember, no matter how many people jump to the defense of those gritty and realistic stories, *barf, gag, puke* The SW6 legionnairres came into being because the writers went way too far in the wrong direction with the originals and it was the only way out of a horrible situation.

<finished venting now, steps off of soapbox, kicks it aside, walks away slowly shaking head>

If Legion were Wildstorm:
-- Ayla would be getting "buggered" by Gates.
-- The Legion would blow up entire planets.
-- Shvaughn would turn out to be a guy (oops)
-- RJ Brande would be a closet pederast.
-- And of course:

• Sun Boy = Hellfyre
• Timberwolf = Death Claw
• Umbra = Dark Sire
• Karate Kid = Kill Fist
• Wildfire = Blood Fire
• Saturn Girl = Soul Striker

re: Drake's post:

I've only read a couple of Wildstorm comics and was not impressed. There's nothing wrong with grim and gritty comics, but I'm not interested in shock value.

Somewhere between the optimism of the future depicted in most Legion and Star Trek stories and the world-gone-to-hell depicted in other comics lies a sense of realism that I prefer. When the Legion experienced Earth War, a point was made that, even after the bad guys were defeated, earth still had to recover from the damage they wrought. The government was bankrupt, motivating a caring president to steal from R.J. Brande (who, it was pointed out, was hoarding his own treasure while the rest of the world suffered). R.J., magnanimous as he was, allowed the government to keep the stolen funds, even though the president resigned.

There's a wonderful ambiguity in all this. Was R.J. Brande the bad guy? No, but he just wasn't thinking about how his personal fortune could be used to alleviate suffering. Was the president the bad guy? Not really -- though he did criminal things, he did so out of the best of intentions for the people he represented. Perhaps misguided is a better word for him than evil.

I prefer it when these sort of "real world" concerns appear in the Legion, when good and bad aren't so easy to define. After all, even an optimistic future should have its share of difficulties, or there would be no need for heroes.

And the legion would be a super heroes club and not an organization like the JLA

any one remeber the legion spoof they did in the Authority in i think the miller run? they had kid Apollo and a girl version of him plus a bouncing girl? and a kid with magnets

I liked that Legion send-up! It seems like they had a version of most of the standard Legionaries, although a couple were pretty hard to figure out. They killed 'em all real good though.

I'm a pretty big Authority fan (except for the recent Authority Prime crap-fest). And I have to agree with He Who Wanders, I like a realistic story and a story with some depth. The traditional "lets battle the bad guys because they're evil and we're good" has been done to death. That squeaky-clean version of the Legion and their future was fine fifty years ago, more naive times, a much younger readership etc. I want to see people who act like and talk like people. I want to see somewhat believable situations and complex stories. I definitely don't want to see a Frank Miller like over-the-top noir thing but I really don't want to see happy-go-lucky teenagers in space either. I think Waid may have been striving for that to some extent but his take for the most part didn't work too well for me. Personally, I love to see Millar, Morrison or Ellis' take on the Legion but I won't be holding my breath.

if they did an else world ark that would rock

Vi would have competition in the gun-toting bad@$$ category. She'd regularly fly into someone's ear and shoot their brain to kill them.

Brainy would be less 'scheming, but for the greater good,' and more T.A.O. (Tactically Augmented Organism, clever enough to talk people into fugue states or convince them to kill themselves.)

Brin would have claws, and use them a lot. His eyes would glow for no damn reason, usually when he was saying something, 'cause anything he says is *very portentous* and needs to be emphasized.

Element Lad would have a billowing 'coat of pain' (black leather trench), a scar on his face (or perhaps be missing an arm) and walk through people, with them dissolving into nitrogen and dissipating like wet farts in his passing, to reform as a fine rain of blood a minute later, falling in his wake. He'd never talk, and look all world-wearied and beaten-down, using his powers almost exclusively to destroy stuff, but rarely making an example of someone by turning the air around someone into lead or acid or phosphorus and leaving them to die.

Cosmic Boy would carry an assortment of razor blades and metal implements, as well as concealed metal-mesh armor under his street clothes, that he could magnetically reinforce to stop most incoming attacks, while he flung forth clouds of magnetically controlled razor-disks that would orbit around him at near-sonic speeds in a deadly scirroco.

Lightning Lad would have a huge bionic arm, powered by his massive internal bioelectricity that could deal devastating attacks, and which he would need to periodically discharge as his power built up to insane levels. (More Cyberforce-like, a 'mutant' requiring cybernetics to channel and regulate his power output.)

Ultra Boy would be an amazing slut, spending most of his out-of-combat scenes in hot-tubs, beds or back-alleys with an assortment of hot supermodel-looking women. And possibly hot supermodel-looking men. He'd have one of those thorny armband-looking tattoos that are so five minutes ago. And he'd smoke, drink and do drugs, but it would be a morality lesson, because he'd end up having some dark secret about only having a few years to live, or being self-destructive, or some lame crap like that to justify how all of the worst-role-model-ever stuff he does isn't *bad,* technically, just a symptom of how poor woobie has been hurt so.

Dream Girl would be a billionaire, using her power to play the stock market the way most of her girlfriends play with mens hearts. She'd pretty much run the team as her personal good squad, always throwing them up against corrupt rivals or extremists or other 'bad guys,' but darn skippy always making a tidy profit on the side.

Saturn Girl, on the other hand, would be kinda-sorta possessed by an alien psychic entity that came to earth as part of a parasitic psychic invasion, but was twisted by contact with her mind (it was near-mortally wounded when it merged with the brain-damaged young girl, and together they form a singular intelligence, vastly greater than the sum of it's wounded parts). She's the only one who can recognize the possessed, who are all evil and manipulative and regard her as the worst traitor ever (while being boggled by how much tougher she is, unable to comprehend how the wounded alien and the wounded girl, in surrendering to each other, gained so much more strength than they have subjugating the enslaving the minds of their own hosts). She 'talks to herself' a lot and is regarded as a little off, and untrustworthy to boot.

Wildfire would remain unchanged, although his powers would revolve around blowing up and then needing another containment suit every couple of issues. He's pretty 'Wildstorm' as is.

Karate Kid wouldn't be a student of 'eastern philosophy.' He'd be a student of surgically taking people apart and *hurting* them. He'd also be a veteran of some black ops secret war, have lots of government contacts, speak a few surprising languages (Hebrew, Russian, Mandarin *and* French? What's up with that?) and be a trained medic!

Phantom Girl would be an actual ghost, and be able to pull people into walls and let them resolidify. Occasionally this would even kill them.

Triplicate Girl would painfully *grow* her duplicates out of herself (and they'd appear naked). They would sometimes die and that would cause her to fall to the ground with bruises and bleeding from her eyes, mouth, ears and nose, but she would recover in a few days and be able to replace them through the same painful process. She wouldn't be mentally linked with them, but would have to go through a very sexualized looking process of re-absorbing them, which, again, would generally involve gratuitous T&A shots of hot chicks snugglin,' followed by less sexy shots of hot chicks flesh-melding into each other like something out of one of Clive Barkers funner dreams.

In a bizarre twist, 'Grav Girl,' Ayla O'Ryan, would be the twin sister of Lightning Lad, and never be seen touching another male, usually hanging off of her brothers arm in creepy twincest identical tight leather costume. They'd rarely, if ever, be seen not touching, and while it would never be stated whether or not they were 'doing it,' Ayla would sleep in Garth's room.

Set. Wazoo. Good stuff man. Put that out as an Ultimate Imperial Guard book and I'd buy it!

Great run down Set! I don't know if I'd be more scared of the villains or the Legion here.

Well, we'd probably see some female British character become a Mary Sue for awhile, and she'd be all 'hardcore' and 'badass' and ultimately extremely annoying to this reader.

Well at lest if Warren Ellis was writing it.

Set & Drake = hilarious!!!

The different Wildstorm / Image writers and artists each have their own little quirks.

If Rob Liefield was drawing the Legion, they'd all have ramrod-straight posture, lots of pouches (including pouches *on their headbands*), jackets over tights, individual chest components (either boobies or pecs) several times larger than their tiny heads and have something bodily shoved through them in a spray of blood at least once per issue (and be completely unharmed by the next page, other than some blood on their uniform).

If Jim Lee was drawing the team, each of the girls would switch to a thong, and have upper thighs bigger around than their waist, and longer than their torso and head put together. They would push their ass out a lot as well.

If Mike Turner was drawing the team, each issue would have six splash pages of eye-candy, sometimes guy-candy and sometimes girl-candy. Everyone's costumes would be shredded off of them to hang in just-barely-legal scraps by every use of their powers, and every character shown for more than one issue would have long straight flowing hair and a breath-taking physique, regardless of gender. Nobody would get anything done, standing around breathlessly admiring each other and their various forbidden loves, but they'd look darn purty.

Marc Silvestri would add tattoos and bionics to most of the team, and there would be lots of orange and purple in the coloring (which would mean that Cham would be back to his traditional look...).

I've been toying with Set's ideas, possibly for a game session or two, probably just for fun.
Here's where I've been wandering off to with the Wildstorm/Image Legion:


!

Some ideas I've been toying with:

Element Lad (whatever he winds up being called in this incarnation) has both the facial scar AND the missing arm. He is the Last Trommite, having watched his entire world's population be exterminated by Roxxas and his space pirates. He escaped by voluntarily transmuting his arm to a highly reactive and explosive compound, which caused enormous pain and a whole lot of collateral damage. He is technically capable of speech, his muteness being trauma induced. With everything he ever loved dead, he doesn't have any qualms about executing evil where-ever he finds it.

Saturn Girl (Soul Stiker? i dunno...) is possessed by a sentient hydrocarbon psychic liquid being from the moon Titan. As an homage/tip of the hat to a certain tv series, the Titans are all oily black fluid beings that slither and soak their way into their victims' brains. The evil Titans are ruled by the Saturn Nine (heh) and I can see them using sort of dark dopplegangers of certain Teen Titans as their champions. (I already envision a Raven double, replacing the dark cape and smoky teleportation with a cloak of living black fluid and an ability to turn liquid, seep away, etc. with some of the other psychic powers duplicated in bizarre ways.)

Timber Wolf/"Death Claw" is a mutant super soldier who is brainwashed into believing that he is a synthetic being with the "memory engrams" of a dead teenager. (false, he's the original, only horribly dehumanized by his own father) and that he is just the prototype of an army of similar beings. (false. his "creators" can't reproduce his powers in any other being but benefit from the sham "army"--the threat of which holds their enemies at bay.)

I'm thinking about making Vi a freedom fighter from the "Bottled City of Imsk"--which is kept in some warehouse somewhere by the government. Imskian micro-agents are just so USEFUL for infiltration and assassination work!

The Legion "Clubhouse" in this version is an actual alien battlecruiser that slammed into the ground in the middle of New Metropolis. It's nose is buried in the ground and it is surrounded by craters and a couple of miles of rubble and abandoned buildings. The Legion uses the still active armaments to hold a hostile goverment at bay, having achieved a sort of stalemate and grudgingly cooperative arrangement with the local regime over the past few years.
Clubhouse quirks: The artificial gravity is still active so the "up" on the decks is at a disturbing angle, even upside down possibly, in relation to the outside ground.
and...
The ship is a kind of bio-organic construct with a mind of its own, masquerading as a disabled piece of technology. (say hello to "Fortress Lad"--the Living Dreadnaught! hee hee.)

The T.A.O. version of Brainy may actually be a construct used by the ship's mind to interact with its "infestation"--or he may have stumbled on to the secret of the ship and is at least partially under its control.

I see Validus as a Godzilla-sized juggernaut far beyond anything the Legion could throw at him. He is a living Disaster more than an opponent.

The Emerald Empress...oh. Couldn't you just see how the Image boys would've handled her? Thigh high green boots on impossibly long legs, with a slutted up corset and green hair that totally FILLS the panel behind her (so Rob wouldn't have to draw any backgrounds....).

The Persuader is probably a sanctioned executioner for the state...
Mano is powered back up to being able to disintegrate the entire planet if he places his palm on it. (his hand is a "biological singularity", a fist-sized Black Hole


Computo is the name given to the Clubhouse's "operating system" interface. It's also a gold-colored remote functioning armored fighting vehicle with a globe full of icky synthetic brains, nasty tentacles (for that Hentai moment with Triplicate Girl!) and bristling turrets full of gigantic cannons. (It's a brainy version of the old SJG's "Ogre".


Oh. heh. Yeah! The Subs! aka: The Dropouts or some such.

Chlorophyll Kid: Long-haired stoner who can instantly grow plants from seeds. He is the Weed King extraordinaire living in a cannibis jungle. (probably the main supplier for a drug-using Ultra Boy.

Fire Lad: Pyromaniac. plain and simple. At Chlorophyll Kid's side when he shouts "Fire it up!"

Night Girl: um. Has "super-powers" that only work in the dark. capice?

Color Kid: fluttery interior decorator and one man psychedelic light show!

Stone Boy: er. everybody always comments on how hard he is or can get. all the time. It's all anyone ever has to say about him. He spends most of his time on panel with a smug smirk of superiority...

Polar Boy: barely pubescent kid with a manic grin. You know how you can dip any living thing into liquid nitrogen and have it come out as a brittle corpsecicle that you can smash like blood-colored glass? That's what he does with his bare hands. At the drop of a hat. Any hat.

Great ideas Library Lad! Pretty creepy, but good creepy. I'm thinking this is what the Wanderers should have been, battle-scarred, angry and more than a little weird.

I love the dropout Subs - they could have been Legionnaires, not rejects, who couldn't live with the regimentation (or something).

Interesting Fatal Five too - but what about Tharok?

Set wholly approves! Awesome stuff.

Alkahest? Supposedly the 'universal solvent' of alchemy, able to destroy *anything.*

Cool.

Love the in-jokes.

Given the fluid theme you've got going on, Beast Boy seems like another obvious Titan convert, only all of his forms would be black and oily-looking, instead of green.

Very cool, and reminiscent of the cartoon-verse Brin, whose father likes to make organic 'weapons' out of people.

That's just awesome. Vi might be a mutant among her people, able to change her size (shrinking *even smaller* or growing to human size), or some agency (perhaps even Vi herself, if she's envisioned as a super-scientist) has figured out how to 'tweak' the shrinking process used on her people to allow them to very, very temporarily (and perhaps with much physical strain) alter their size further (again, to become smaller or larger than their 'normal' barely visible scale).

Bonus cool points for having the clubhouse be a rocket that slammed headfirst into the ground!

Instead of the 'at odds with the gubmint' option, the clubhouse might be smack dab in the middle of the city, and hidden by a holographic generation of a normal-looking brownstone or office tower. Another Wildstorm trope would be to have it out in plain site, and oddly accepted, despite everything.

Worth it for the Escher value alone of having a Legion meeting consist of a bunch of people showing up and some standing on walls, others sprawled out on the ceiling, etc.

These days, who *doesn't* have an AI in their headquarters? Only this is Wildstorm. It's not just an AI, it's the disembodied intellect of a former alien dictator / cyberinvasion, reprogrammed to work for the people who stopped the invasion. Until, of course, it glitches and the HQ turns against the team and tries to take over the world again, but that doesn't happen all that often...

Nice. I've always seen Brainy as just a little bit cyborg, and he's been getting more and more that way in the comics with his interface stuff. The idea that he's some shmoe (a member of the city clean-up crew?) who touched something he shouldn't have and had AI viral goop ooze up his nostrils and is now puttering around the HQ playing janitor with his IQ of 6224 is too funny.

Very cool. Eventually, in ever-escalating big-screen fashion, he will be revealed to be a child, from a species of creatures such as himself...

She'd also be a kickass physical combatant, and jump around a lot, flipping over people and smacking them in the back. (Quite gracefully, for a woman with bosoms the size of her head, 9" stilettos and a mass of hair that weighs more than the rest of her body combined.)

Every team has to have a few nemesis characters. Mano would be the nemesis for Wildfire, both entities of destructive energy trapped in containment suits. Mano's energy would be anti-energy, many, many, many times more destructive than Wildfires, but Wildfire would be able to stabilize his form and exist outside of the suit for brief periods of time. They would hate each other, and possibly be related, in whatever manner energy-forms can be related to each other. (One might even be a creation spawned off of the other, an energy fluctuation come to sentience, created deliberately and gone terribly wrong?)

Also nifty. The disembodied brains gives it that definite Wildstorm vibe.

Just use the code name Weed and have him look (and act) like a longer-haired version of Shaggy, from Scooby-Doo.

Having both him and Polar Boy as manic might be a little too much manic in one team!

On the other hand, Weed grows a wooden barricade, Polar Boy creates a hunk of ice, Fire Lad turns it to steam, and instant sauna-party. Clothing optional.

They are actively recruiting for 'heroes' who can generate music, preferable something danceable. Color Kid has the lightshow down and Weed handles the pharmacopeia (and has recently learned how to accelerate the aging of plant matter to cause instant fermentation, covering the drinks angle).

No one is exactly sure what she does to them, but when the lights come up, all the boy villains are lying around in no condition to fight.

He also changes costumes more often than the Wasp used to. And the customes of anyone else that will let him. (Such as Weed, who is laid-back and will wear anything he's handed.)

Cute.

The last Sub you'd expect to be psycho. Neat choice. He might also be the 'Psylocke' of the group. He doesn't just use his powers, oh no, he has to *describe* his powers Every. Sprocking. Time.

Hello,
Sketch Lad, your current Museum of Legion Arts Curator, here. Not to spam or anything, but in April, the theme for exhibits is a combination of the current Action Comics Legion and the Legion as if they were presented by Wildstorm Comics. That theme was inpsired by this thread.

It'd be great if any of you could contribute to that exhibit (and any others!).

I'll be doing some research so that I can contribute some artwork.

If you have any more suggestions for what a Wildstorm Legion would be like, I'd love to know.

Okay, thanks!

BRAVO, ABIN! BRAVISSIMO!

This whole thread is full of gold but this line made me LOL...I mean it's Polar Boy so you know he'd be a massive dork about it