The journey ends with this final issue preview. Legion Lost #16 preview

Who will live? Who will die? Will the Legion ever be the same?

And will it at least not suck (for a change)?

Jeepers! I may have to actually buy this!

Er... unless there's a lot of good stuff out this week...

Oh hey, look who's on the cover again! You know, someone we thought was dead. Ah, but everyone knows covers depict exactly what happens inside the comic!

They never said that they thought Wildfire was dead. They all know he's around in his anti-energy form. But they've also said that the technology that allows him to interact with the world is centuries away technologically.

You know, now that I think about it...now that we know that this Adym guy that's part of ECHO is actually a time-displaced Captain Atom...I can't imagine that this won't play a part into how he comes back. Maybe Drake is able to create his own personal field around himself?

That was... umm...Better than 3boot #50?

Not the most climatic ending, and a lot of stuff was left dangling: brushing aside the Tyroc and Chameleon girl subplots, running what seems like a big Superboy reveal in another book, leaving the Lost team at status quo, inexplicable panel time to the Ravagers who did nothing for the story, and the nonsensical handling of the Wildfire resolution. It was all just a little bit messy and a kind of lazy.

So I didn't read Captain Atom, but this issue seems to imply Adym is Harvest, am I wrong? I still don't get the motivation of Harvest, but then i didn't read the crossover last year.

And what's DC thinking? The concept and the book have proven a failure, no one's yearning to use the lost members in their books, and no one's buying this one. What's the point of leaving the team in the present?

Not a very satisfactory ending.

That's it? That was the final issue of Legion Lost?!? It resolved nothing... Not Harvest, not Captain Adym and Echo, not Tyroc's prophesy or Yera's betrayal. What's worse, the Legion did not even get their final panel time bubble ride back to the 31st century. They are lost, trapped in time, with no conclusions to their storylines, and worst of all cancelled there!!!! Now we have to wait and see if Levitz decides he wants his characters back at some later date, or If the DC editorial board decides to co-op the characters in some other book. I hate titles that leave everything in limbo.

What's worse, the storyline messed with Superboy and the Ravangers for no apparent reason. They weren't even crucial to the story...just took up space.

I guess if there is a silver lining, it's that the whole Legion Lost team survived intact. But what good are they alive if they are lost forever? I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Levitz decides to ever pick up the Lost Legionnaires storyline and the Echo plot sometime in the far distant future in the Legion book. Until then: goodbye Tyroc, Dawnstar, Timber Wolf, Gates, Tellus, Wildfire and Yera. I'm going to miss you guys!

What we have here is a failure of imagination.

Jeepers! I thought there'd at least be stuff in here to get be nice and annoyed at DC! Instead this was just blah.

This is exactly how I felt when they got rid of the reboot Legion team. They didn't kill them, they just...left them in limbo somewhere in case DC ever decided to use them again! It actually pisses me off more when they do things like this versus just killing them. I don't like needless character death, but I'll take them going out in a blaze of glory over leaving beloved characters floating around uselessly in another century or wandering the freakin' Multiverse!

Bad form, DC! BAD FORM.

Really? You'd rather they be dead than alive with the possibility of their story resolved in another title or a miniseries in the future?

OK so the comic is finished. Not sure I like the ending with all its sub plots left unresolved.

However.

At least these legionnaires are alive in the present. We have a chance to see them again.

The fact that they are time lost and to the Legion of the 31st century ‘dead’ gives those fans who want ‘new’ legionnaires a chance to see some arrive, maybe a few more from the Academy. Yet it does not alienate those fans like me who prefer the Lost legion members to these new and pretty unimpressive and unlikable academy students, as there is always the chance to see them back.

Now some of the things I did not like were a lot of the loose ends. I don’t know who this Adym is, nor do I really care enough to follow him into other comics. I hated the Ravergers interruption into the Legion, and Harvest just seems superfluous. Also who is this barbarian and his talking dragon.

Still all in all a lot of potential future storylines that can hopefully be followed up.

And I really enjoyed Gates in this episode, running from his fate, and then realizing he is Legion so has to go back. I think the time displaced Gates should be an interesting little story and hope to see it sometime soon.

Poor Gates. This is the second time that he's gotten stuck in the 21st century, isn't it? Worse still, this time around he could be stuck for good. This--plus the trauma of being transplanted from one reality to another--must be a real mind frak.

Hopefully, the powers that be will sooon see fit to rescue to time-lost legionairres. My Legion definitely needs Wildfire, Dawnstar, and Timber Wolf to be "legitimate".

If Adym is indeed Captain Atom, then that might be a possible way for the Legionanires to return to the present. He was still learning about his powers in his own series.

Absolutely! This sort of sad, pathetic ending isn't worthy of characters that I genuinely like. Any dangling carrot that DC could offer to placate me isn't good enough to take back the HORRIBLE way they're treating characters that people have grown to love. I'd like a little closure, truthfully.

Not to mention...you know as well as I do that death is FAR from permanent in the comic world. Not to mention, even if they DID die, all DC has to is reboot the universe again and bring them back to life. No problem.

I actually thought DeFalco would have the guts to kill off one of the Legionnaires. Leaving them lost in the past is a useless ending. All it would have taken was one or two panels to send them home, and the multitude of fans would have been satisfied, especially since they were borrowed characters from the main Legion title to begin with.

I guess what irks me the most, is given how the series ended with everyone alive and stuck in the past, that series could have actually concluded at issue #12. That seemed like and ending issue. The storyline since then, about Echo, Harvest and Tyroc's prophecy, while they all could have led to something interesting, ended leading nowhere at all. The only saving grace at this point was that the Timber Wolf spotlight in #0 was pretty good. The rest of the stories, secrets and all, ended up being very disappointing. I wish Yera could have had time to explain herself about her being an Echo agent. I wish we could have seen the Tyroc grave thing pan out in some way. I wish Wildfire's containment suit issue hadn't been resolved in such fluff way. DeFalco was lazy in his story telling. I hope Levitz actually has plans to resolve these plot threads in a meaningful way, so that this series won't seem such a waste in the future. I want to believe that Levitz was actually working with DeFalco in leaving all of these plot threads dangle so.

Timber Wolf, Dawnstar and Tellus have always been some of my favorite Legionnaires. With Legion Lost, I really came to like Tyroc and Gates as well. They all deserve a better ending than what this issue offered.

Timber Wolf used to be a favorite, when he was a super-acrobat, as I've always loved characters like that, such as Nightcrawler or Spider-Man or Nightwing, who flip around all over the page in a very dynamic kinetic sort of way.

Lately he's just been growl-and-charge, with the claws and the regeneration, and I'm not a fan of that.

Tyroc, on the other hand, was really just getting good, after having been pretty much rescued from the trash-heap of history, and I was eager to see more of that.

Chameleon Girl had always been 'Gim's wife' or 'Salu's punching bag,' and it was kind of nice to see her away from both of them, even if I don't like that she had to be off-panel retroactively divorced from Gim to justify it.

Tellus always cried out for more development, and I was hoping to see it here.

Dawny and Drake have been tiptoeing around the same deadly dull star-crossed romantic twaddle for what, decades? I was *so* hoping for a story that didn't involve their romance, or Drake's containment suit issues. Those wells done been tapped, tapped and tapped again, and far better than they were here. I haven't seen a compelling use of Drake since he was teaching at the Academy, and I've yet to see a compelling use of Dawny, ever.

Gates, I knew the least about, and this could have been a great chance to get him away from his joke beginnngs (let's make a little nonhuman teleporter with a red and dark blue color-scheme, but, to make him not an *obvious* Nightcrawler riff, let's give him Colossus' politics instead!) and develop him as a character in his own right.

If I hate what they've done with Legion Lost, it's because they just flat out missed so many good opportunities to really stretch these characters, most of whom were underdeveloped, one-note wonders, or flat out ignored, for decades.

I don't mind some stuff changing, particularly when we are talking about origin stories from the '50's, '60's and '70's, but my gosh, that Timber Wolf retcon was terrible. The cartoon had a better 'new' Timber Wolf origin!

How can you have a less thrilling origin story in a comic book, where your effects budget consists of 'can Timmy draw a 'splosion?'

Gah.

While I won't go so far as to say I wish someone had a heroic death compared to this limp ending, I do have to say that it's a sad choice between wondering whether you'd rather be angry at a story, or just disappointed.

Uh... What?

Firstly, yeah he started as a one-shot joke, one of a pair Cham & Leviathan failed to recruit, but (a) he didn't wear red there [I really don't see your forced Nightcrawler link. Or Colossus either, who was too busy being the big, dumb, naive idiot to show any sign of politics outside the one time he was brainwashed] and (b) after the fan reaction got them to bring him back (after Waid was gone), he *was* treated as a proper character!

Your "not having actually read any comics with him in" is showing.

Gates DID have some very good character development in the Postboot, particularly in his interactions with Brainiac 5.

I did like his use here though, particularly in his new "friendship" with Timber Wolf.

Really hoping Levitz brings them back soon... I can imagine he would love to be writing Wildfire, Dawnstar, Timber Wolf and Tellus again, and hopefully he'll want to take a crack at Gates, Tyroc and Yera.

Maybe it will be Levitz & Giffen to the rescue and the original members will be brought back to the 31st century. By the Subs. Who also find Infectious Lass.

Well, I don't like them in 'limbo/lost in time', either.
But, I would hate the alternative of 'they're all dead', much more!
gads

I don't want some of my favorite characters waiting for a possible reboot 20 or 30 years in the future, or even 10.
I had a hard enough time with the reboot's delay of introducing Tasmia all of those years ago.

Gates and the retrobooted Tellus are on my top 20 list of most beloved comic charaters (Gates is in my top 5.)

LOST increased my caring for TWolf and Tyroc, too.
sigh

DC is such a disappointment in it's dealings with the Legion, and we can never trust them to bring our favorites back, even if they're still alive!

Yes, I don't want all my Legion Lost crew end in the limbo status. Like Drura or the poor reboot Inferno.

So Tom DeFalco is done with these characters but he's still not letting Paul use them. Thanks for nothing, Tom.

There is probably no room for integration of the Lost Legionnaires into Levitz's burgeoning Fatal Five story line. So they have been put in hold pattern for the time being. Perhaps their situation will be addressed once that plot is resolved.

That's pretty much my point. I think it's more awful knowing that these characters will probably sit useless for years while Levitz does whatever he's going to do. They may as well be dead. At least if they "die" (because we all know how permanent death is in the comic world) they get a noble ending and some closure for the fans. Even if the fans got angry, better that than this pathetic attempt at storytelling.

What little I saw before this series was 'did I mention that I'm a communist and hate you all?' over and over and over again. It felt more like a curmudgeonly caricature than a fully fleshed out character, since he almost always went for the grumpy negative comments, which, for me at least, made him kind of unlikable.

And so, I was hoping for some decent character development here, with Gates now temporarily stuck on a world that does have a few communist societies, and where his political views aren't necessarily considered a whacky aberration / punchline by the UP 'world government.' Instead, I literally have no idea if Gates is even aware that communism exists on Earth, after he's been in this century for as long as a year and a half.

Instead, I get him arguing with himself about whether it's okay to abandon the team, and while I do understand that he was drafted unwillingly into another Legion, and may not have started out the wide-eyed 'I want to be a superhero!' type as some of those who showed up for Legion tryouts in other continuities, I kind of thought, that, at some point, he had
graduated past 'I hate you and the teenaged death-squad your rode in on' and become a willing super-hero.

I don't blame Gates for that, btw. I totally blame Tom deFalco for wanting to impress upon the readers how uber-scary his big machine was by having Gates freak out and be all terrified.

I'm clearly no Gates expert, but IMO, he earned his place back in the Reboot, and the way he's been portrayed in the last year has been an unsympathetic regression for the character.

It's also my opinion that Fabian Nicieza had a very different plan in mind for where Gates was held for the time he was presumed dead, and for how he got the messed-up face. DeFalco's been calling it 'scars,' but it's pretty darn obviously not 'scars,' it's something very much more like what that virus was doing to everyone at the beginning of the series. The question of why only half of Gates' face was changed remains, and it could be inferred that whoever was holding him was using him to test a potential *cure* (or perhaps just charting the progression of the virus by watching how it affected Gates, but that seems less likely since they had no shortage of infected humans to observe).

Anywho, my opinion stands. Gates, IMO, like Wildfire and Dawnstar, was a character that could very much have benefitted from more character development and I'm disappointed that he didn't get it.

I haven't read that much of Legion Lost, but Gates this issue didn't read much like the Gates of the reboot at all.

I suppose it's possible they were left in the present for Giffen to use them in Threshold?

^^Not a bad theory.

I'm guessing it is a more a matter of someone having some plans for them in the present than Levitz not wanting them.

Well, that was underwhelming... a bit like the 15 previous issues, really. Now let's get back our characters in their century to play with the rest of the team.

Actually, in his debut appearance, Piotr asked Professor X if the former's mutant powers didn't by right belong to "The State"?

The time he dressed up to sneak into The Hellfire Club, he thought to himself that "It is wrong to wear clothes that cost more than my father makes in a year."

There may have been more moments like that, but those are two that spring to mind for me.

FTR, I actually like Gates, despite only having seen him here and there.

Getting back on track now: please, nobody ever ask me if want characters I like to be dumped into Comic Book Purgatory forever, or would I prefer to have them senselessly killed off at series end?



It's like asking if I want an arm broken or an arm AND a leg broken.

Hopefully Levitz will bring the lost home soon Brainy and Glorith may be moving in that direction. Ideally, I would like all the Yera as spy and Tyroc prophecy be written off as Harvest brainwashing rather than truth.

Now that I've finally been to the comic shop and gotten to read it, I'm about as underwhelmed as I'd expected.

The Gates time travel loop was handled deftly, if nothing else, and a random bad-guy shooting Wildfire a new containment suit sort of wraps that subplot up in a shiny bow.

The whole 'Adym is Harvest' reveal didn't do much for me, since I didn't care one bit about Adym *or* Harvest.

Were I a big fan of the Ravagers or this new version of Superboy, I'd be pissed that they got so little play, or, in SB's case, were treated like chumps.

This issue sort-of epitomizes the series in the way--not bad in a storytelling sense, but a LOT of missing potential.



I thought that maybe DeFalco would reutilize them again in Superboy (perhaps a slight retweak of "Superboy and the Lost Legion of Superheroes?"), but I would like that a lot better.

Threshold is a likely place for them, if they're going anywhere, although that book already sounds pretty crowded.

The thing I'm wondering is, everyone in the 31st century has concluded they're dead and gone - so no historical record whatsoever remained of their time in the 21st century? I guess it's the old "everything was destroyed in World Wars III-VI", except the Superman Museum stuff.

If Wildfire is just energy, won't he eventually catch up to the future and tell them what happened? Will there be two Wildfires just like we had two Gates for a moment?

You know I like that idea. Sort of Mon El 'ish' in that as energy he is unable to interact with people so if he lost his containment suit he could be in a personal version of the Phantom Zone.

But would his disembodied energy survive that long or would entropy cause him to slowly dissipate. (unless of course he trans morphs into the Time Trapper, driven mad by his desire to return to the 31st Century)

They should totally have followed up on Gates' joke a while back and had an issue with him visiting Kyrgyzstan.

One good thing about this series was that it made me like Tyroc, Timber Wolf, Yera and Tellus quite a bit more. Enough to care about how little was actually done with them, and how much more could have been done.

Which begs a couple of questions which have never been seriously addressed:

(1) If you found yourself a thousand years in the past, would you (a) try like mad to get back to the future or (b) accept your situation and try to carve out a life for yourself?

(2) Given 1a or 1b, where would you go? The answer might differ for the different Legionnaires.

Tyroc can physically blend in. Wildfire, if he wants to get back to the future, may just need to wait. Wildfire and Dawnstar are capable of unassisted faster-than-light flight through space. Tyroc and Gates can teleport; Gates at least, up to interplanetary distances. Tyroc may be able to travel to 21st= century Marzal. Timber Wolf can sort of fit in human society; also, he has friends in Gorilla City. Tellus is the most alien, but can project telepathic illusions.

As for me, I would immediately head for Shadowcrest in San Francisco.

They keep turning Brin into KK. He's been to the 20th/21st century now almost as much as original superboy. Wolf and the newbies (yeah, I've been around long enough to consider everyone after Brin a newbie) deserve more than being shunted off into limbo so we can get an entirely new bunch of newbies. Hey, why not use the cast from S&TLSH from around 200 to 250 again? This seemed to be the most stable time in the legion.

The problem with the Legion Lost team being left "lost" is that that team contains some of the most "alien" members of the team: Tellus, Gates, Yera, Dawnstar and Wildfire. The Legionnaires on the main title are mostly humanoid looking. We need these characters back just to bring back alien diversity to the Legion.

It wasn't #50 bad, but it wasn't good. Legion Lost, focusing on those seven characters, and the last issue seemed to focus on everyone BUT the seven.

I find it interesting that in LSH #16 they show part of the Memorial Hall with statues of the Lost members. Apparently, the 31st century Legion has already given up on them. Also with the reveal of more info on Harmonia and her immortality, you'd think she may have some real-time news about the Lost team.

I enjoyed the first half of the series, but the change in storyline and the introduction of Superboy and the Ravangers really brought the book down into a pathetic attempt of a cross-title story sales pitch on the part of DC. The momentum of the Legion characters was cut short to a screeching halt and it never recovered. I doubt the other titles benefited much either.

It's not certain that Harmonia was on Earth in the 21st century, so she may have been unaware of any superhero activity there.

I reread Legion Lost (up to #12) yesterday and agree entirely that the series broke down with the Ravagers introduction. There were just too many characters splitting the attention and Harvest, while threatening, got boring fast. I never bothered getting the Titans and Superboy tie-ins, but, as you suggest, I doubt those titles were improved by the addition of the Lost team.

Up until that point, it was quite a good story, with the distinct personalities of the Legionnaires, the effects of the virus. If they'd kept it to that storyline, then thrown in Yera's subterfuge, with a specific end in sight (i.e. Lost team goes home), it would have been enough for me.