Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Tom Bierbaum's blog...

is here .

If his blog has ever been discussed on these boards, I missed it.

It's fun reading his thoughts about the LSH in general and on his memory of working on the 5YL run, specifically.

Thanks for sharing this, Todd.

Tom's entries are short and don't contain a lot of insight, but there are some noteworthy revelations.

For one, Tom and Mary were "steered away" by editorial from making Cham and Danielle Foccart a couple because he was an adult and she was a minor.

For another, they had planned to have adult Gim and Tenz involved in an Iran-Contra-type scandal, but this plan was shelved when Tenz developed into a more humorous bent.

Humorous Tenz (complete with sunglasses) was also fashioned after Dr. Peter Venkman of "Ghostbusters." (Now that I know this, I'll probably hear Ray Parker Jr.'s theme every time I see Tenz.)

Thanks. Great behind the scenes stuff.

I found the recollections interesting as well. It's too bad that Gim didn't have a more prominent role in the 5YL series, even in a probable unflattering role as a trial defendant. One of the reasons that 5YL didn't appeal much to me is that my favorite Legionnaires (like Gim) were left out for the most part. Of course, others such as Dawnstar and White Witch and Sun Boy were twisted so badly as to be unrecognizable. None of the new characters did much for me either. I actually thought the Subs and Infectious Lass were the most interesting in that run.

I thought 5YL had no time to work with all characters as they should, Kid. Also, with Giffen leaving and returning, things sometimes got lost in the shuffle.

Interesting stuff, even though I haven't read the stories. Yet.

Oh, and I'm tickled that his writings are on LJ (it looks like Mary B. has a journal there, too). The Legion gets so little love over there.

Mystery Lad, I mentioned this on the LJ Legionnaires board, but I made sure to credit you and this space for the news. Hope that's okay.

XD! I just found out about this thanks to Cleome's post on LJ ..go figure.

I checked this out a few months ago and see Tom just put in some recent updates in June.

I recommend everyone check out some really good insight to 5YL behind the scenes dealings which really hampered the series from the onset; as well as how TMK were brillant in how they dealt with it.

Also some really good insight to the creations of various 5YL characters, including how essential inker Al Gordon was to the process.

I spent way too much of my workday yesterday reading through Tom's posts. It's interesting to me to read the internal politics between the Legion and Superman teams and to note that Tom seems to have a rather modest view of his abilities as a writer. In particular, he seems down on his and Mary's Mordru Rising storyline (which I thought was a real low point in the 5YL series). I hope he keeps adding entries. He's just getting to the Terra Mosaic, which is one of my all time favorite Legion stories.

He's still updating this, incidentally. Last post was on v4 #49 within the past week!

I spent an entertaining few hours catching up with his posts last week, then going back to the start.

Thoughts on Issue #50 and Element Lad are there.

Tom is now going through the Legionnaires issues.

an interesting quote :-

"Initially it was going to be a series of spotlight issues to give new readers the necessary background on each character ... But by then, it was turning out that there were a number of fill-in stories needed to keep the main series on schedule and I think that need for fill-ins as much as anything kept any spin-off project on hold."

Although issue 4 had the start of the Superman editorial edict come into effect, TMK got past it exceptionally well.

What really derailed the opening arc and therefore the entire series were the number of fill ins required to keep Mr Giffen on schedule. The above would suggest another casualty as a result.

As information dense as the main book was, there was always the feeling of so much else going on. A series of spotlight issues would have been lovely. It may have allowed some classic Legion artists the chance to work on the book again.

I think, and I hate to say it, that the TMK era is probably what contributed to much of the sinking of the Legion...because they did a really great job. The storytelling was dense and tight, even around edicts from other sections of the DCU.

And that's been a pike in the back of the legion for a long time. Longtime readers with a deep and abiding love for legion don't mind the density of the material. WE LOVE IT in fact.

But many times I've heard that it puts off casual readers who feel overwhelmed but so much back story. It seemed to codify the legion, cementing it in place much more so than other books or characters, like Superman, in fact.

And once that cementation took place,once the book was tied down and shackled, once new readers were stunned at the vast array of information and characters (instead of instantly falling in love with it and seeking it out like so many of us did), the legion was doomed to collapse.

Which is horrible, because it was probably the single most inventive, imaginative book out there.

I remember moans about the density of the Legion book way before the 5YG and it seemed to be mainly due to the large cast. I think it's an easy stick to beat the Legion book with generally.

For me having at least 4 of the first 12 issues of the run be fill ins or continuity driven sunk the Legion. Whatever hope the run had ended in editorial/creator sulks in there somewhere.

I seem to remember a pretty decent number of new readers that loved the 5YG Legion.

Love reading through that blog! While I've enjoyed many aspects of the various do overs and restarts since, their Legion really appealed the most to me.

Yeah, it's a regular reminder of all the great high points, as well as the fill in rushing.

The editorial interference certainly didn't help, but I feel the main problem with this run is that it was basically fanfic and fan speculation elevated to canon. Fans say lots of things that are a horrible idea to put in the actual series.

I happen to think that Star Trek (at least pre-reboot) makes more sense as a dystopia instead of a utopia, with the military running everything, free enterprise nonexistent, and no freedom of speech, press, or religion. But if I were ever to become a writer for Star Trek, I would know better than to write Star Trek like that. This is something that the TMK run fundamentally did not understand.

On one hand you can have ideas that have been created in fandom. Ideas that have come from a pool of people, have received feedback and been refined possibly over years.

On the other, some guy can walk in from his successful stint on Parrot Patrol and decide on what he wants to do.

I'm not sure either is necessarily bad. It depends on the quality of the writing. Plus all the other usual, many, comics variables.

It will also depend on what the idea is. Some fan speculation is based on the most minor of things. That can lead to either navel gazing or an entirely new way of looking at the book. Some fan speculation comes from ideas beyond the book itself, influencing the concepts that way. Some fan fic simply has very good ideas.

People may love Cham's new Parrot Pet, or they may not. They may love the fresh new ideas from someone new to the book/genre. They may resent the lack of tradition that the writer hasn't or has chosen not to follow.

I'm not a huge Star Trek follower. I'm surprised that they haven't had the Enterprise go up against corrupt Federation officials/ governors etc. Easy to plot, plenty of action, some political depth at a pinch, and it showcases what the Federation really stands for.

TMK didn't turn the Legion evil. They were the ones who stood out against the darkness. The closest exception was Dirk, who took time to come round, only to find that it was too late.

Even the UP wasn't evil. It was just run down, with a lot of the former goodwill turned inward to protect individual worlds. Earth was the place that had been taken over. As soon as the Legion were back, they were fighting Khunds along with the UP even as Earth was still in the grip of the Dominators. They were with the UP as those Dominator's were overthrown.

That's kind of my issue with the Ultimates writers moving over to the 616 universe. They had a very specific story they wanted to tell, one in which there are no heroes, just various degrees of nasty brutish thugs with super-powers blowing stuff up and eating people and basically being the thin angry line between normal folk and the *really* nasty people, and, off in their Ultimates universe, were free to express that. Thor might or might not be a delusional eco-terrorist. A Brit who loathes everything America stands for can happily make Captain America a *literal* jack-booted thug.

It's when those sorts of writers end up on a book with established characters, and warp them to speak their own agendas, to tell stories that aren't suited to the tone or theme or milieu of those characters, that things get kind of messed up.

To a lesser degree, Geoff Johns has taken the DCU in that direction as well. He's got rosy-colored memories of Hal Jordan and Barry Allen that didn't mesh with the current realities of those characters, and so he's gone and regressed them into characters that are actually less mature and developed as individuals than they were when he was a child. I grew up in that generation as well, and Barry was not a good-hearted bumbling screw-up that the rest of the League openly mocked to his face and Hal was not a hotheaded bro-code man-child who treated women like property.

There were various aspects of Legion reboots that I similarly didn't like, because the writers wanted a character like X, or someone to fill storyline Y, and decided to shoehorn someone into that role. Ultra Boy, IMO, suffered pretty badly for this, being portrayed very differently in the classic continuity, the reboot, and the threeboot. If there's ever a fourboot, he's either going to be a talking monkey or a super-villain...

As for fandom, 9 times out of 10, I'd rather have a fan write stories about a character or setting, than someone who doesn't care about it, admits to not having read huge sections of it's past, and is just there to cash a paycheck. I may not agree with every fan opinion, but I'd rather read stories written by someone who loves the characters / setting, than by someone who is indifferent to them, or, as with some curmudgeonly misanthrope who openly admit to loathing the super-hero genre, or comic fans in particular, some bitter **** who *despises* them.

I think you're misunderstanding me. The evil Federation was an example of a fan theory that might make sense but which would be stupid to put in the series itself. I wasn't implying that the stupid Legion fan theories were also about evil.

In fact I was thinking more of Garth being Proty and such.

Hi,

Your first post said that TMK didn’t understand enough to leave the dystopia out of the Legion, with the parallel being made to that of an evil Federation and giving some examples of what such a dystopia would look like.

But the evil Federation (possibly including the Enterprise) parallel doesn’t really work with the book TMK gave us

TMK’s UP was not evil. It was under pressure form other interests – Khunds, Dominators and Dark Circle, and had lost Earth to the Dominators. But the parallel to an evil Federation just isn’t what we see in the TMK series. To use your specific examples, the military didn’t run everything (they needed the Legion’s help just after it formed), there was free enterprise (started in Jo’s smuggling & Rimbor in issue 2), freedom of speech (We got constantly accurate commentary from the press reacting to events throughout) or freedom of press (Devlin was free to travel about wherever he wanted)

I covered the bases of it being just the Enterprise being evil, a section of the Federation and the whole thing in my previous post.

I don’t think any of them are stupid ideas as such, or have no place in any fictional universe. There have been enough evil doppelgangers, alternate selves, corrupt officials and deranged presidents down the decades in all sorts of work.

The second post mentions the Garth/ Proty change. When that came into the series we had already seen the Eltro/Lar Gand version of the idea. I think my eyes rolled a little at the number of personalities in Mon El’s head, but the more I found out about Legion history the better it seemed. It explained a lot about the character’s past.

When Garth/Proty then appeared it seemed a little much to retread the same concept. But since the processes involved were related why not? Where the Eltro/Lar version helped to explain a character’s past, the Garth/Proty one may well have had a view to setting up the character’s future too.

The Proty/Garth idea helped to establish the character as Livewire, by showing just how distinct the personality was before Garth’s sacrifice. That would have been explored in proposed look back at the Legion’s origins. But we certainly got to see it in the Legionnaire’s Livewire character. That’s the personality that’s remained since, so other creator’s have run with that, without having to explain the difference through various reboots.

I don’t even have an issue with the idea in principle. It didn’t rewrite Legion history and it added a lot of depth to a number of relationships.

No, it didn't. It said that they didn't understand enough to leave the stupid fan theories out of the Legion.

Not what I picked up from :-



where dystopia and TMK understanding lapse were together.

But I did cover your point about leaving "stupid" fan theories out of the Legion too. I don't think we'd have the Live Wire character we have now had TMK not gone with the Garth/Proty idea. Without it, they would have had no reason to focus on Garth at all, let alone have two personalities from before/after his demise.

So, it's one fan idea that has paid off in later versions. I saw a poll where Lightning Lad was the top rated Legionnaire with a picture of him showing off his more feisty personality.

I don't buy that. It's not as if Lightning Lad wasn't constantly overexposed before.

Anyway, Proty-Garth was just one of the worst examples. What about making Shvaugn Erin a guy taking sex-change drugs? For that matter, what about the stuff that wasn't technically a theory, but was very fannish in nature?