Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Revisiting the "Great Darkness Saga"

My problem with any Darkseid story that came after the '82/'83 story, is that it fails miserably in comparison. I was there when that first great story was published...little did we know it would become the classic that it truly was. The Legion was on the brink of becoming DC's best book at the time...rivaling the New Teen Titans. Even the follow up story (where Imra's other child is finally returned to her), pales in comparison to the original. I would rather never see Darkseid again, than to see creators attempt to bring the same level of intensity to new "darkness" stories. I remember the great Avengers/Ultron stories of the '70's. Those stories can never be revisited in the same way. But when Marvel returned Perez those pages back in '98, it truly felt like 1977 all over again! Yes, this is "A Legion" title and that alone will keep me here for a long time. But this is not "The Legion" I began collecting almost 24 years ago. It is what it is.


Long live the Legion!!!

Darkseid had great surprise value in that first story. Even in the few times he's been used in the Legion since, it becomes "what do you do for an encore?" Then it gets tired. If they try to do another Darkseid blockbuster story in a few years (and the door was left open for that at the end of Floundations), I fear it will be even more tepid.

We did have some interesting build-up of suspense in this latest series, as we did in the Great Darkness Saga. There was a lot of speculation here and in other forums on whether it was truly Darkseid, or was the Trapper involved, or something else; what was really going on with the time anomalies?... then it just faded into a splash-page fist-fest and some hasty, WTF resolution.

Successful unusual characters seem to be doomed by their success in comics. I thought Mordru's return in the 5YL stories was good, although those were very different stories from the original Adventure-era saga - yet by the end of 5YL, the Mordru character, de-aged, was pretty ho-hum even as he was taking over the universe or time or whatever it was. The post-boot Mordru was even more pedestrian, IMO.

One of the worst examples of this is the Lobo character - talk about a one-trick pony - yet he keeps getting revived and re-used across the DCU. Maybe it's me, but I think Lobo outlived his interest potential long ago.

I just got the TPB of the great darkness and found it very good one of the last great legion sagas before the crisis crap

One of the things that many of today's writers just don't seem to get is that villains are better as the plotter of misdeeds than as the muscle that actually carries them out. Look at Darkseid in the original New Gods series. He almost never goes toe-to-toe with Orion. He sends Kalibak to do that. And in the meantime, he's putting the pieces in motion to carry out his master plan. Ras Al Ghul in his original appearance only physically fights Batman at the very end. Generally, he's the mastermind behind everything. Look at Luthor when he was the evil scientist, or any of Batman's enemies other than Killer Croc. Heck, even in his first appearance, Croc was as much brain as he was brawn. And perhaps the most classic example is the Adventure and Earthwar era Mordru, who uses layer upon layer of misdirection so that you don't even know it's him until it's way too late.

Writing villains well requires far more finesse than many modern writers are willing or able to muster. I agree that any appearance of Darkseid in Legion inevitably suffers from comparison to the Great Darkness Saga. It's one of the reasons I liked the Quiet Darkness so much. It didn't try to match the original. It did something very different.

Foundations was all bombast and no subtlety.

I agree with everything said above (except I did not care for the Quiet Darkness story).

One thing I would argue, Myg, is that if Darkseid vs. Legion stories aren't tried, then we may never get another great one. I'd like a writer to have at it, and would hope the editor would keep sending it back until it was worthy of a great character like Darkseid (or Mordru). That's what editors are supposed to be doing, anyway. The Legion has suffered in storytelling when the editors don't seem to take an active role in the create process (IMO).