Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Let's have a LEGION of Super-Heroes

With Legion Lost about to finish, by my estimation there are at least 50 Legionnaires available to be members of a ramped up Legion. How about this for a fighting team?

1. Cosmic Boy
2. Phantom Girl
3. Chameleon Boy
4. Brainiac 5
5. Star Boy
6. Sun Boy
7. Shrinking Violet
8. Ultra Boy
9. Mon-El
10. Element Lad
11. Lightning Lass
12. Dream Girl
13. Shadow Lass
14. Invisible Kid II
15. Polar Boy
16. Chemical Kid
17. Dragonwing
18. Glorith
19. Comet Queen
20. Harmonia

The Lost
21. Timber Wolf
22. Wildfire
23. Tyroc
24. Dawnstar
25. Tellus
26. Chameleon Girl
27. Gates
28. Infectious Lass

Academy
29. Duplicate Girl
30. Bouncing Boy
31. Night Girl
32. Otaki
33. Mwindaji

Resigned
34. Lightning Lad
35. Saturn Girl
36. Colossal Boy
37. Matter-Eater Lad
38. Sensor Girl
39. Blok
40. Black Witch

Who Knows?
41. Quislet
42. XS

The Subs
43. Chlorophyll Kid
44. Color Kid
45. Fire Lad
46. Stone Boy
47. Porcupine Pete
48. Rainbow Girl

Not Forgetting
49. Superman
50. Supergirl

Wow, hadn't realized there were so many warm superpowered bodies in the 31st century now.

That doesn't even include "rejected"/quit Academy students (who could maybe be called upon as reserves?) Nightwind, Lamprey, Crystal Kid, Power Boy and Gravity Kid.

Throw in a resurrected Kinetix and I'm all happy (though I'd want to see new versions of Kid Quantum II and Gear as well, and even Monstress and Shikari!)

Plus Laurel Gand, Kent Shakespeare, Celeste McCauley, Kono, Danielle Foccart and the rest would put the number up to 70+

Bring them on

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There's enough potential with the Legion of Super-Heroes concept that the right visionary creators could produce a successful group of LSH books. We've already seen an Espionage Squad, an Academy, Wanderers, just to mention a few that could be developed into rich long-term stories.

Legion Lost, though not my favorite concept, could have been a contender if they had focused on the 7 Legionnaires instead of giving so much storyline to Superboy, Titans, and Ravagers.

IB,

I think Lamprey, Crystal Kid, Gravity Kid, & Power Boy had graduated the Academy


There are also, although not introduced in current continuity, the Heroes of Lallor and the Wanders.

Heck yeah. If DC had jumped on this bandwagon back when Teen Titans and the Legion of Super-Heroes were two of their best selling titles, they could have gone with an Espionage Squad title, an Academy title, a 'core book' and perhaps a deep space 'Wanderers' title.

Instead, Marvel thought of doing that with the X-Men (allowing them to have *dozens* of active X-Men at one time, by splitting them among various X-teams), and DC pretty much sank into being the all-Batman network, because they failed so spectacularly to develop their other properties.

They had tons of potential. 21st century Marzal? What about all that Durlan bio-tech scattered around and serving as origins for other characters? Would earlier visits to the past have fallout (for example, would Iris Jacobs serve as a point of contact for them, rather than 'random dude Timber Wolf bumped into')? Starhaven explicitly already existed by the 21st century, so Dawnstar could have had a storyarc involving the distant past of her homeworld. Same with Gates, who may have his own buggy agenda to meddle with his species history, and end up in a time loop where he saves his people from a disaster he read about as a bugling, and only at the end recognizes himself as the mysterious savior!

Tons of potential, pretty much squandered with this harvest / culling nonsense, IMO.

We should definitely have an Academy series. Add Star Boy in his chair as an instructor and....well, I guess that has been done.

Still, an Academy series could definitely work. I'd buy it.

Thanks Quis. I should have been clearer; I meant the Academy grads who were rejected for active Legion membership.

51. The Skreaks
52. Urk

I am 200 percent for this idea. Better to know your favorite character is ON the team and will be used at some point-- even if that point may be a year away-- rather than have that character go unseen for 12 years or so.

The increased membership opens up unlimited possibilities.

That's true about just knowing someone's on the team. Think about how happy many of us were when Gail Simone brought back Infectious Lass and Nightwind for a brief appearance at the end of the post-boot.

There could be many situations in a story for which a seldom-seen member is called on for a specific skill; they wouldn't have to be part of the longer term plot.

I think what I'd really like to see is a version of the Legion that's been around for something like twenty-five or thirty years, with the Adventure Era cast having moved on to more of an administrative role. The main team itself could be expanded dramatically, and include versions of characters from all of the various versions of the Legion we've seen. Even duplicates where they are significantly different than the original could be included. Prefer split-personality Triad over girl-next-door Triplicate Girl? Just make her another Carggite who joins later. Prefer black Star Boy over old school honky Star Boy? Whose to say Thom Kallor doesn't have a nephew or something who gains similar powers in comic book-y fashion? I dunno. It just seems like it could be done somehow.

The secret to the phenomenal success of the X-men lies not in the book's concept itself, but in the way Chris Claremont recrafted the team from a static group that had pretty much proven its inability to sell into an organic, ongoing, constantly changing group of individuals who generally (although not always) worked together as a team. Eventually even characters that had been responsible for the original book's cancellation were allowed to grow into more interesting individuals who could carry their own weight.

DC has seldom allowed its characters to grow so organically. Either they remain the same for years on end or they are radically transformed by some major "event" that entirely redefines them, only to become locked in to the new version just as badly as they had been stuck in their old incarnation.

The Legion's greatest potential has always been that its characters, due to a certain built-in distance from the DC mainstream, could continue to grow, with some long-time members moving into a more administrative role (Rokk) while others remained active members (Jo and Tinya) and even others retired entirely to raise families or whatever (Garth and Imra). New characters, with their own unique backstories, could then step into the spotlight, and, after some off-camera life changes, even stale older characters could return with renewed life (Jeckie).

Unfortunately the 5YG team took it all too far too fast. Rather than allow evolution to follow its course, they jumped five years into the future, established that everything about the entire universe had changed and then went about slowly revealing just what was different now.

Not that this was a bad approach. But despite its good points, the 5YG series had, by instituting too many sudden changes, alienated too many of the group's longtime fans and the creative team found itself playing "can you top this" trying to keep the interest of those who were left. Eventually they crossed an event horizon (blowing up Earth) that made the demise of the series inevitable.

An effort was made to put the team back on track by rebooting the entire franchise, and would have worked if they had maintained the distance from the main DCU that had allowed the original book to become the company's second-best selling title in the first place. Instead, they stranded a good portion of the team in the 20th century for a full year, essentially killing the momentum of the reboot.

Since then, the sheer baggage of having changed directions too many times has doomed every new version to come along since (including the current incarnation).

I now believe that the only hope the Legion has to achieve greatness is for the entire series to be cancelled and written off by TPTB at DC once and for all. The franchise can then be sold to another company who can start with a clean slate and make the Legion the focal point of a 31st-century universe completely unrelated to the DCU (or any other pre-existing universe).

yep

Are there any writers or artists who could cope with doing a group with 50+ members justice within 20 pages a month? Doubtful many would be able to cope, so I guess there would have to be two comics each month or even a giantsize comic to have a chance of accommodating that many. Personally I'd like to see two giantsized issues a month

Oh and I's also love to see the NuDCU's version of Gear, Thunder, both Quantum Kids, Retro and Amp Girl, Babbage, Dragonmage, Danielle Foccart as Computo, and Monstress.

The books could be similar to the format of the animated Justice League Unlimited show - the original core 7 were still there, and there were about 50 other Justice Leaguers in the background. Each episode featured a small team of 3-5 Leaguers or so. Characters like Vixen, Supergirl, Steel, Green Arrow, Black Canary and Captain Atom got quite a lot of use that way.

agreed i would love to see these characters again!