Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes All new levitz/giffen Legion of superheroes..here's hoping!

New start! New costumes! Please new costumes Mr. Giffen!
New Start! Return of Wildfire, Timber Wolf, Dawnstar, Tyroc, et all! We need a big reunion issue with Projectra and Colossal Boy as well!

New start! Time to wrap up some long un- ended plot holes..Karate Kid, Quislet, Blok and White Witch!

New Start ! New leader! wHO IS IT GOING TO BE????

New start! Thank god, the return of the classic, iconic Fatal Five!

Will we all get our wish? Or will this book stay on a mediocre at best course?

I for one would prefer if Giffen keft the costumes alone. Remember the redesign he did back in the 1980's at the end of Levitz's last run? They were horrible. If Levitz goes back to those costumes, we'll all know that this series is coming to an end.

I think they should go back to the Cockrum designs and bring in Keith's old partners Kevin Maguire and Steve lightle to do the finished art!

Hmm... I actually liked a lot of the Magic Wars designs.

I'd love to see Jo back in a leather jacket, Cham back in a hood, and Jeckie back in a blank facemask and more regal outfit.

dont let Keith touch Karate Kid ever! if he does, he will kill him off again all over. grrr.

You know what I'd really like to see?

A crossover with the 5YL Legion as "the Legion of Earth-2".

^

Well, even without a crossover involved, it would be nice to see the other Legions revisited. A whole new series might not be practical, but how about a few one-shots or annuals or something...?

A Levitz/Giffen reunion can only be a good thing! The Magic Wars era I thought was great. It matured the Legionnaires on many levels and I personally thought the costumes were great and many were long overdue. This new "retro-boot" Legion is lacking something. There are too many unresolved issues and inconsistancies. What happened to the Karate Kid I sightings?, what ever happen to the New Karate Kid III on Lythl who wanted nothing to do with the Legion? What really happened between Rokk and Lydda?, why is Duplicate Girl Luornu Durgo and not a Taine (she always used her married name)? Finally, what is the issue between Gim and Yera and will we see it resolved. The "old Levitz/Giffen" team would never let any unresolved plots go, well, unresolved!!!

Remember, there was a "soft" reboot (for the Legion, other series had complete/"hard" reboots like Teen Titans) between v6 and v7 at least comparable to the Glorithverse reboot between v4 #4 and #5.

Looking back I enjoyed some aspects of the whole Magic Wars stuff, but definitely not the new uniforms/costumes. I think with a large cast such as the legion the artists struggle to differentiate between the characters and need distinct and simple uniforms to help the readers identify the people they are looking at. I find having to stop to try to figure out who is who and having to rack what passes for my brains to remember “real” names rather than code names can interrupt the flow of the story.

So lets keep the more tradition costumes.

The problem with Keith's Magic Wars era designs for me was that they were no longer superhero costumes. Instead we got what were basically construction worker uniforms with a few minor tweaks made to each one to give them a slightly more individual look. More realistic? Yes. More utilitarian? Certainly.

But yet it contradicted the original spirit that permeated the Legion: that of a bunch of super-powered teens in brightly colored costumes who formed a club dedicated to going around doing good deeds. Looking at Keith's uniforms I couldn't help but think of a bunch of elite professionals that would be called in for their expertise and probably paid well for it, like the teams who respond to oil rig disasters in our own time.

I guess in a sense it's a visual representation of the difference between being young and idealistic ("I do this because it's the right thing to do") and being older and more pragmatic ("I do this because it's my job and I take pride in doing it well"). Comics, with their visuals limited only by the artist's imagination, are uniquely suited to the former. TV and movies, which are generally built around the skills of human actors, do better with the latter.

Why not play to your strengths?

Well, the way I see it, even in the Adventure Era about half the team don't really look like they are wearing traditional super-hero costumes as much as futuristic street clothing. Compare Shrinking Violet or Bouncing Boy to some random background character and there's really not much difference in what they are wearing.

I would say the same thing about a lot of the 70s designs, except there is this weird tradition that, particularly for women, swimsuits do actually qualify as standard super-hero apparel. But still many of the Legionnaires don't really differ significantly in look from standard denizens of 2970s, since apparently everyone is wearing swimsuits at that point.

What I really want from Legion outfits is the feeling that someone has actually sat down and thought about what somebody with this particular personality from this particular planet and background might actually wear. And that's something we very rarely seem to get.

Every artist has their own take on it, as well. For a brief time, looking at Saturn Girl and Saturn Queen, it was easy to imagine that all Titanians wore differently colored variations on the same uniform-looking outfit. But then, on every visit to Titan, everybody is wearing robes or whatever, and Imra herself went through the pink bikini phase, while later Titanians, like Esper Lass, wore similarly ridiculous outfits.

Polar Boy's another interesting one. He comes from a planet that is crazy hot, so much so that the humanoid colonists have the ability to 'radiate cold' (i.e. absorb heat, although where it goes after that is anyone's guess...). On Earth, which is naturally much colder than Tharr, he must be *freezing* all the time, explaining why he always was covered up and had fur trim on his costume, or even a furry hood.

And then some yahoo decided that it would be 'cool' to lose the hood (or the metal skullcap) and give him ice-hair, despite it being pretty friggin' clear that the boy dresses warm to avoid being cold all the time in the lower Earth temperature, and would be even *less* comfortable than a human would with *a block of ice on his head.*

Given how humans react to head-freezage, it's entirely possible that ice-hair would give a Tharran like Brek brain damage. (Which may serve to explain his whiplash characterization from tin-plated tyrant who ordered Brainy off the team and argued with Saturn Girl as to what the Legion Constitution meant to Dirk's hedonistic party boy wingman.) Does he 'ice-hair' all over? Crunchy underarms? Frosted bush? Ugh.

So yeah, even when some faint attempt at consistency is maintained for decades, someone comes along and messes it all up.