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

On Lightning Lad, it might depend on my Legion jumping on and off points. Looking at the Total Appearance thread, he's only 9th or 10th in there...



So, with his marriage leave, his poor showing as Legion Leader, his retirement and getting replaced by his sister he didn't really feature a great deal after a certain point.

While he had his spells of regular appearances, it faded away quite drastically. By the time of the 5YG he was pretty much in the background. The Proty story brought a new twist to him, and certainly Live Wire seemed popular at the time.

When I think of Garth, my first thought is of him having a breakdown as leader. Beyond the heroic sacrifice, not too many of the early adventure characters stand out for me as personalities. So the Garth/Proty thing helped to flesh (or protoplasm) out the character, while explaining a few secrets without retconning.

The officer Erin thing came as an attempt to save Erin from death in issue #3. Was it Gordon who came up with that one? Whoever it was, they were already on the book when it was pitched. So it doesn't have those direct fannish origins, unless it's something I've missed?

The way I did read it, was that it was pitched in the middle of a "Well, why should I save her?" sort of thing, so it was just thrown into the mix as an attempt to save her.

Unlike the Garth scenario, I don't think it's a coincidence that we don't see much of Officer Erin in this version of the Legion as a result of the changes made in the 5YG.

Other fan theories... how far along were they with the Legion as pawns in the cosmic balance between the Trapper and Mordru? While I'm not entirely convinced by Ultra Boy's part in it (possibly like Set above) I did like the idea. Particularly as the Legion transcend the role created for them.

You're seriously suggesting that making Shvaugn Erin a guy taking sex-change drugs did not have anything to do with the fan idea that Element Lad is gay?

No, I was referring specifically to the idea to make Erin male. I put in as an obviously unsuccessful attempt at conveying that. I should have stuck to my first attempt that rambled on about Jan for a sentence without going anywhere.

Despite the fan theories of Jan's sexuality, I hadn't come across anything that reconciled that with his obvious relationship with Erin. At least not by altering Erin in that way.

If that's the case, and I'll be surprised if it hadn't come up, then altering Erin was an attempt to keep her alive more than it was a way to further the Jan/Erin plot.

I was wondering where I could find out who was supposed to have come up with it. Why not read Tom's blog?! D'Oh!

Fans thought Jan was gay? I thought that was Jim Shooter?

Jim Shooter put it in print, but it was widespread among fandom.

That was, like, over a decade before I discovered Legion World (and therefore was a 'fandom of one'), so I'll take your word for it.

More on Jan from Tom's blog here

So Bierbaum actually designed Element Lad's costume. I honestly never cared that much for Jan until the 5 year gap. The spiritual stuff was done just right IMHO. Before than he just had a cool power and a bad perm.

I just think he's very powerful, so writers dumb him down or make him seem ineffectual to compensate.

I reread v7 a while back and it still annoys me that Mon El was torn apart, and only then Element Lad pops out and contains the foe in an instant. Gaaaah!

That bugged me too. Levitz is capable of better writing than that. Maybe at that point he was just like f it.

It's the age old problem of having lots of powerful characters getting in the way of plot points the writer wants to get too.

So there's always kryptonite or magic or energy barriers or power sucking prisons. But mainly there's a lot of slow, rather dim people in spandex.

That blogpost from Tom about Jan says:



In other words, yes, making Shvaughn a guy was based on the fan theory that Element Lad is gay.

Ah, so it was Keith Giffen, not Jim Shooter. Either way, I just thought 'fan' meant something other than 'professional comic book writer.' Although, I suppose it's technically true that Keith Giffen could also be a fan, as well as a professional comic book writer.

Anywho, Bierbaum's blog is always funner when I think of it as 'Beerbong's blog.'

But my point was that making Officer Erin a guy only came up form Al Gordon when he was already on the book. It wasn't something taken from fandom.

Or, it's based on the idiocy of Keith Giffen.

Debatable.

Please see: Justice League 3000, Larfleeze, a couple of issues of LSH that were God-awful....

"Fan theory" means "theory which comes from fans", not "theory which was put in the book by a fan", so it doesn't matter whether Keith counts as a fan.

(Besides, "the back and forth" presumably involves Tom, and he is a fan.)

I've not read JLA 3000 (Giffen must have felt like an idiot for the backtracking after Maguire was axed), or Larfleeze. The two issues of Legion seemed to be another attempt to get us back, in some instances, to where the 5YG started. For example Gand's injuries, a disbanded Legion, a technology meltdown, the feeling that everything would be harder to do etc.

I'd have thought by now, you'd know what you were getting with Giffen. Cancellation. No! that just slipped out! It did! I was distracted by someone killing off Karate Kid.

Poor Tom. Think of the time he has to spend working out which bits of his work count as fan theory.

Sure, all the stuff prior to his signing on with DC would be fan theory. But then, all of the stuff while he was signed with them may not, as it's a "theory which was put into the book by a fan"

But what of the stuff put in that came as a direct lift and drop from his fan theories? And what about the things based on fan theory ideas that were changed significantly enough to blur those lines. No wonder the guy has an issue by issue blog.

Now tell me again, am I a fan of the Legion or just a supporter of the Legion. I get that confused too...

On the (dubious) upside, Giffen did probably get Sun Boy killed off, prompting me to write Sun Boy fanfic (and giving Dirk the dubious honor of being the first Legionnaire to be dead in three different continuities!).

In fact, between 5YL and this latest death, I think Giffen has now killed Dirk more than he has Karate Kid!

He must be so proud.

For what it's worth, the whole idea of Jan being gay does seem to originate with the classic interview with Shooter in which he describes in detail his conception of the sex lives personalities of the Legionnaires. From there, it was taken up by fandom. My understanding is that Levitz's introduction of the Jan-Shvaughn romance was largely seen as a response to this widely-held belief among the fans (and remember, Levitz himself started out as part of organized fandom).

Please, use some common sense. A fan theory is a theory that is widespread among fans, not a theory which was thought up by a single fan.

And I mentioned "put in the book by a fan" to *refute* it.



This is certainly an early example of the theory being written down, but I was under the impression that the theory existed before that and Jim Shooter wasn't the first to come up with it.

The Shooter character breakdowns were creepy. I read those well after I'd heard about Jan's possible sexuality in bits and pieces from fan/future writer/lone shooter writings. So I'd always thought Shooter had taken it from other areas.

Word. I like many of the stories that Jim Shooter has written, and he's at the top of my list of favorite Legion writers, but if he never opened his mouth in public, I'd respect him more as a person. Sex, sex, sex, seems to be all he thinks about, and, while he's not a Frank "All women are whores!" Miller level-creepy-misogynist, he's still creepy.

Even growing up a fan of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, both *wildly* racist and misogynist products of their time, it's hard to pardon Shooter or Byrne or Miller (each representing different points on the 'creepy' continuum) as they are *not* products of a more-or-less 19th century mindset, and don't really have any excuse for sexist nonsense.