Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes 5YL - the first year. Some thoughts...

Continuing my read-through of the Legion from the beginning, after finishing the Baxter run a month or so ago, I recently finished reading through the first 12 issues (plus Annual 1) of the 5YL v4 series. For a point of reference, when I last read these issues, it was after I had jumped into the Reboot in 1994 and went back to understand what had come before - knowing full well that it was a completely different universe. How I felt reading this this then, when I had no idea what was going on, versus now, after reading most of what had come before, is enough that I had to say something.

Picking up these as back issues as a relatively new reader was very confusing to me with the reboot team as my primary reference. I had little idea what was going on or who anyone was. Further compounding things, I would pick up various issues from the prior runs with little guidance, so I found a lot of cool stuff (the GDS, primarily, to which I purchased the TPB). The stories were interesting and impactful, but understanding the continuity was difficult and even reading these issues as little as 20 years ago, the stories didn't have the impact they probably should have. Indeed, as I was finishing the Baxter run, I was kind of dreading this final stage of the re-read. Giffen's later art style wasn't my favorite, and I had memories of confusion and dissatisfaction.

Now fast forward to 2022, and I pick up the book after having finished the Magic Wars storyline a few weeks before. I have to say I was pretty engrossed, and found it hard to put down. The timeline had been advanced, a lot of bad stuff had happened in the intervening years, so the doling out of breadcrumbs of information from that time was part of the pull for me. Roxxas as a Jokeresque villain was at first a bit over the top for me, but then something turned for me and by the time he was captured, I was all in for the story. The little character moments at the beginning, Rokk, Garth & Imra, Vi, Cham coming together to finally see "The Legion of Super Heroes" in issue 12 made me feel happy - something I hadn't expected to feel while reading this book. (I know, I know, "just you wait....")

The storytelling feel was also more mature; something that I appreciate much more as a man in my 50s versus someone half that age. Seeing the characters older and having gone through some stuff meant something more now, perhaps due to where we are in the world today. I also enjoyed the "extra" prose pages usually reserved for providing background details of the 5YL universe or filling in the gaps about what had happened in those five years.

And the Tenzil issue. How great was that? I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading that. Very much reminded me of the Ambush Bug Nothing Special. Good comic relief at the right time. If you're gonna have a filler issue, this is the kind of filler issue I love to read!

It wasn't all great, of course. While I was familiar with the problems of Superboy's history, given the "Greatest Hero of them All" story from the prior run, I didn't truly understand how deeply the new editorial mandate to remove any reference to Superman-property characters caused so many issues with continuity at the very start of the series. Almost half of the first dozen issues were dealing with retelling stories in a veritable retcon-a-thon, especially in the annual. The fun thing for me this read was that I actually understood all the references to older stories that had to be altered due to Superboy and Supergirl's removal. But one can only reread the Legion's origin so many times. That said, the Mordruverse story was an interesting way to perform a soft continuity reset.

One other thing that I gained a better appreciation for was the relationship between Tinya and Jo. I have said many times about how they are not a fave couple of mine, primarily due to their portrayal across the ten years of the reboot. Even during most of the read through the Silver and Bronze ages, and into the Levitz run, I wasn't thrilled with the whole thing. Tinya's attitude towards Imra when grieving, Jo having flings with the pirate captain, albeit while suffering amnesia, and Ayla when Tinya and Brin were away all fed into that attitude on my part. But the Bierbaums' annual story did a much better job of making their relationship more sympathetic for me personally. They're still probably no higher than #3 in the all time relationships for me though.

So ultimately, even though I still kind of view the 5YL Legion as an elseworlds story (even though its really the retro/New 52 world that is the true elseworld), I very much enjoyed this batch of issues. Even though the universe had been put through the wringer, watching the Legion reform was joyful and a good read; much moreso than I expected.

The cover of #1, where Rokk is in the rubble but a gleaming Legion ring lies in front of him, pretty much sums up Giffen's plan for it and your reaction was just what he was after.

As I've said before, I don't really understand people who claim to love the Baxter series, but then complain that the 5YL is too "dark and gritty" or some such. Baxter is the story of the team falling apart, while 5YL is the story of the team coming back together. For me, Baxter is far more depressing to read.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the 5YL run as a whole. There's a lot of drawing on/celebrating obscure bits of Legion history that I absolutely love. But there's also a lot of re-writing/re-interpreting Legion history which, for the most part, hasn't aged well at all.

And, for the record, the Adult Legion is the true continuation of the Silver Age Legion, Everything else is an Elseworlds story.

Not certain I would say the same about the Baxter era but totally agree about 5YL.

ooh 5YL is totally my jam!!

I immediately loved it and it made me go out and get the RPG sourcebooks (which was one of the hardest things to give up when me and my ex parted lol) and Who's Who books and back issues so that I could really devour all the deep cut references....up until that point I had been a pretty casual fan and recognised Vi and Cham and Brainy easy enough, but 5YL was what really made me love the Legion's universe!

I think it probably came along at just the right time in my comic reading journey as well, as I was still very into superheroes but looking for something more mature than one issue punch-ups and while the tone of 5YL was much less four colour comic book than I was used to it also wasn't just edgy and grim for the sake of it generally speaking...and I know this is an unpopular opinion, but it's my favourite art period for Giffen too - I fell in love with the 9 panel grids and highly stylised art that you have to work at interpreting sometimes - I don't think I would like it for a more conventional superhero book at all, but along with the way it was written it made me feel like I was reading something more Vertigo than DC

That Mordruverse issue so early on in the piece was a big gamble considering how divorced the series was already from what had come before, but I loved how important it felt....I really liked that it was a book that involved having to read text pages, and sometimes not really understanding who this or that person was or what the relevance of this cameo was until months down the track, I had to work for it but then I felt like I was rewarded for doing that.

I think it probably informs the way I write my Legion fic even....like the world and the characters aren't the same but 5YL really got me thinking about how it's not just the main team that can carry a story, and sometimes you can pull a character in that appeared in like one story in the 60s sometime and get something really valuable out of using them. I mean did anyone ever think Glorith of all people was gonna make a comeback the way she did?

Also - DEFINITELY the best Tenzil!!!!

I have to disagree on this one. Considering the results of the poll I did last year I expect to be in the minority on this.
(I don't know how to link to it, it was the "What's your opinion on the 5YL era?" thread)

There are of course good things in the 5YL... it has the best version of Tenzil for probably most of the Legion fans (myself included), the worldbuilding is great, and I do honestly appreciate what they were going for... but I still can't get into it.

It's not that it's dark, I don't mind when it has a purpose... but there is a limit and for my tastes 5YL went too far on that.
The Baxter era could get dark, yes, but sometimes 5YL seems to go dark for darkness sake. If Karate Kid had died during the 5YL period he wouldn't have had a tragic but still heroic death, he would've died horribly because he completely failed to save the day and we would've been shown repeatedly that trying to fight supervillains when you have no powers is inherently silly.
It's a good period if you like some Legionnaires (Cosmic Boy, Cham...) but it's dreadful and mean-spirited towards others: just try to tell me with a straight face this was a good period for people like Wildfire, Sun Boy, or to a lesser extent Timber Wolf.

I couldn't get into any of the new characters, I found the Mordruverse and Glorithverse stuff a slog to get through, most of the retcons are just completely unnecessary, and that sprocking 9 grid paneling is just ugly to look at. At least for me.

Overall, I completely get what they were going for, but I honestly think they didn't deliver.
In the thread I referenced above Set called this era unpleasent and with an underlying tone of "I'm done with this sand castle, and now I'm gonna smash it apart", and I agree.

Most of this stuff boils down to personal taste, and if you get enjoyment from the 5YL era more power to you, but my reaction has been the opposite of yours: every time I try to re-read this period I just don't get it.

Wow, thanks for all the thoughtful comments!! Just as a general statement, this writeup is really specifically for the first 12 issues + annual. I know there are things later in this run that I don't like for sure (destruction of Earth, Legion on the Run, etc), but I'll see how I feel when I get to them, as I certainly didn't expect to enjoy these first 12 issues as much as I did.


I completely agree with this, especially the back half of the Baxter run.



ooof, that hurts about the sourcebooks!


I actually was OK with the 9 panel format, as typically you can tell more story if its done right and/or creatively. I was a big Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen fan, so it was no problem for me. Some of the Giffen art here works for me and some does not, so its a bit hit and miss.


In reading Tom's blog, the issue wasn't initially planned, but they needed a way to do a soft reset due to the Superman folks. On one hand, really creative, on the other - come on DC! In retrospect, its the beginning of editorial messing with the book to create lasting damage.

I think it probably informs the way I write my Legion fic even....like the world and the characters aren't the same but 5YL really got me thinking about how it's not just the main team that can carry a story, and sometimes you can pull a character in that appeared in like one story in the 60s sometime and get something really valuable out of using them. I mean did anyone ever think Glorith of all people was gonna make a comeback the way she did?

Also - DEFINITELY the best Tenzil!!!![/quote]



Yes! I happened to find it yesterday while looking for something else. I actually considered posting the message there, but I did vote on the poll (not that it made any difference to the result! )


It's funny- sub out some of those characters in what you wrote up there and I feel exactly the same way about the DnA era of the reboot! But I gained a better appreciation of them when I did my R/R last year. Maybe I'm just mellowing in my old age! But yeah, I totally get what you're saying - it will be interesting to see if the feeling I have towards the first dozen issues extends further into the run up to Zero Hour.

Also, I just realized, I'm going to have to read the Legionnaires stories as part of this!


I can see that; it definitely has its own quirky voice that Tom and Mary provide. I'll be paying attention to the different shifts in the book - to the point when Giffen stops drawing so they have fewer filler issues, to when he leaves altogether, to when the Bierbaums leave. I guess in some ways I'm grateful that I'm liking this more than before since I have another 50+ issues to go!

I was just thinking about how fans often mention Watchmen when talking about 5YL. The 9 panel grid is obviously inspired by it and perhaps a lot of the rest of the tone as well.

Yet I didn't really enjoy Watchmen. I can see why some people do and can appreciate the depth in it but frankly I found it depressing. Contrariwise I found 5YL to be scary and challenging but ultimately uplifting. Horrible things happened to our favourite characters but through it they mostly came out swinging. That old tale about a light shining brightest in a darkened room. Admittedly as mentioned above some characters were treated worse than others, particularly Dirk.

Nevertheless there were so many scenes that showed what could still be done in the worst situations and made me feel like yes, that's the Legion!

I'm on the exact opposite spectrum... your opinion on Watchmen is mine on 5YL. The fact that Watchmen was doing its own thing while 5YL was supposed to be the same universe we saw before might have something to do with it.

To me 5YL is like as if Watchmen ended with Night Owl and SIlk Spectre re-creating the Minuteman in the last chapter... put all the nice sentiment you want, for me it doesn't offset what came before it.

Personal taste and all, plus the Legion is big enough for multiple interpretations so we can all enjoy at least one version :-)

I want to say that I went in reverse order, so I had DKR in hand well before I read Watchmen, and I may not have read Watchmen until after I read any 5YL originally. So I guess I came to the 9-panel via Frank Miller's work.

I also had a thought - in some ways, given the Bierbaum's route to the writers chair here, the 5YL story is the ultimate fan fic. They brought a lot of the ideas that they and others had been kicking around in fandom and were given the opportunity to make it real, so to speak.

AMEN!

Absolutely.

This part of the Legion contains a number of what I think are the best moments in any Legion volume.
As mentioned it's a story of building hope and inspiration from the darkness of a post collapse galaxy,

The back end of Baxter was darker, and the 5YG means that we don;t have to see it completely fall apart.
Of course, it's fair to say Mr Giffen had a hand in just how dark it got at the end of the Baxter run.

v4 had loads of potential, but was torpedoed as early as issue 3 or 4.
As Giffen briefly quit/got involved in other things, there were the multiple fill in issues within that first year.
All of which detracted from the story we should have been getting.

Later parts of the volume still had some superb moments, but it was a downward slope from what was lost at the start.

Boy, you were not kidding! I just finished year two, and its such a contrast in quality. There are a few nice nuggets here in year two, but I didn't really care for the Khund war issues, to be honest, nor the weird Dark Circle cult story.

Of course, the SW6 mystery was teased interestingly - I wonder when folks at the time thought when they were reading this and got to the last page of 24? I knew what was coming, but still thought it was well presented - with the exception of the weird way that Vi is escorting Devlin with her new hairstyle, then all of a sudden is in a 60's do.

The Venado Bay flashback was interesting in a tragic way, with the tidbit that Rokk is responsible for Vi's eye.

I found that I rather enjoyed the Quiet Darkness storyline, as some of the other, newer Legionnaires had a more prominent role. It may have been that the story was told with a different writer that made it fresher for me, I don't know. But I enjoyed the read of a Darkseid, seemingly, kind of done with this plane of existence and looking for companionship in another. U

I wasn't really OK with the moon's destruction, as for one thing, I knew where it was ultimately going to lead, and I don't like Earth-as-punching-bag storylines. But the aspect of Superman's fight with Dev-Em from Time and Time Again being the catalyst just made me mad. It made me mad that Superman is the cause of this story thread. It also made me mad that after all that BS at the beginning of the book of "The Legion needs to not reference Superman", the Superman crew basically violates that and does it anyway. Then I start reading Bierbaum's blog, and he basically states that it was the LEGION team that ran crazy with that "no Superman" dictate and took it upon themselves to do the whole Glorithverse and Mordruverse retcon fest. That whole thing just kind of pissed me off given all the crap Legion fans have had to deal with as a result for the last 30 years, and the fact that it was mostly self inflicted makes it even worse.

Salt in the wound - the Jo lost in time storyline. Just why? It had no point and was almost as bad as reboot Tinya/Jo.

This book started with promise, but most of the second year wasn't that great to me. I feel like the creators overstretched themselves in a lot of ways and things got way out of control for them. Here's hoping the next 12, with the younger Legionnaires, does better.

Much like you I wasn't a big fan of the Khund War issues.

It seemed like a jump in approach/ pacign form what had gone before. It also had an art change and was probably surrounded by more Guiffen quitting episodes. I wasn't a big fan of the Dark Circle story art there either. The story itself had some good moments, with the chilling recruitment poster for the Circle bieng all too attractive for many (and in the face of what the UP had gone through, you could see why). It was aslo a stpping stone in the next Big Reveal of the series.

I didn't mind the Quiet Darkness either. Having since read all of the Kirby material (which I wouldn't have done then) it's actually very inkeeping with Darkseid's arc.

The Superman thing was a pain. I didn't read a lot of the connecting parts to it. At least there was a story reason for not publicing Supes. But having there be a Supes/ Leigon crossover after what happened at the start of v4 was was a pain. My memory cell tells me that it was a Superoffice Edict to remove all mentions, including retroactive ones, of Supes. That included the Els and so forth. So they created it from the Gands instead, using the Mordruverse as a vehicle to do that. Waid left the book as editor at around the time, and there's probably a connection to the arguments and the edict.

To my memory TMK did a great job under the circumstances. It also allowed them to cement in The Big Reveal of the real purpose of the the Legion.

I'll be interested to hear what you thought of the next 12 GL.

I'm trying to find the right track of posts on Tom's blog, but the way that it is discussed for his annotations for issue 19 seems to indicate that they needed to just not mention Superman mythos in the book - no one specifically tasked them to retcon everything, it was just something they took upon themselves. So I think they could have moved forward without mentioning Superman, Supergirl, etc, with the only real anomaly being Mon-El. I'm going to re-read his entries to see if I understand it right.

He would have done an interview in the legion companion as well, that might have shed light on it.

So the third year of 5YL.... What's a good analogy for how I'm feeling...

I'd say that my 5YL journey here is one of Driving down a nicely paved highway with a specific direction that you can see off in the distance. A couple potholes in the road, but a good drive. Then the road starts turning into disrepair, and the drive is a lot bumpier. Finally, the road has somehow turned into a dirt track that is very difficult to navigate and when you look out in the distance, you're not going where you thought were you were headed, but when you turn around, where you came from looks totally unfamiliar.

Between the overly populated Terra Mosaic and the nearly nonstop retcon-fest, the third year probably more than any stretch so far, illustrates the negative everyone remembers from this time. The introduction of the SW6 Legionnaires was actually a welcome addition, as the story seemed to pop every time they came onto the page; I wanted to know a lot more of what was going on there. The payoff at the very end - the tragedy of Dirk Morgna - did ultimately pay off for me dramatically, but I felt like it took forever to get there. Similarly, and probably not coincidentally, I felt the same about the Dominator siege of Earth. The resolution was mostly fulfilling, but I think it should have happened faster. But so much didn't pay off for me:

Garth/Proty, Shvaugh/Sean being the most egregious examples, but also Kid Quantum. Mainly because of the fact that they came out of nowhere. In fact, they didn't come out of nowhere but rather were decades old fanfic ideas. The "reveal" of Bounty fell kind of flat to me.

I actually enjoyed most of the Annual story of the team chilling in Winath (minus Proty, of course). The whole thing with Gim & Luornu was.... odd... I mean, ok, everyone's an adult, but why put that in there?

So overall, I found this stretch of story MUCH harder to read, especially the "extra" story items at the end. There was soooo many tiny references to Legion minutiae that I felt almost overwhelmed by it - I love continuity, but I felt like this series here has so much in it that I just want it to get out of the way and let the story happen. It got in the way of my enjoyment of the stories.

That is one of the best analogies I've ever read. Kudos.

Thanks! It came to me as I realized what a chore reading this third year of stories had become. I wish it were not!

I've been generally commenting on this run every 12 issues plus the annual.

But I just read issue 38 - " The End".

It's probably the worst Legion story I've ever read. The Legion was barely in it, and it violated the show don't tell rule.

And I am struggling to understand the WHY. Seems like a dumb move just to make things worse when they were already pretty bad.

Re The End.

What I disliked about it, was how jarring it was. FINALLY, Earth is liberated and the Dominion kicked out. and suddenly, with very little foreshadowing, Earth blows up. What?!

I actually liked the poignancy of the story itself, and the narration by Devlin coupled with the one-panel per page. But indeed, "the Legion was barely in it". and it just seemed to come completely out of nowhere...

Yeah, it was well done for what it was, but it was an absolute curveball.

Based on reading the Bierbaum retrospectives, I think that this was Giffen's last issue and he was looking to do the last thing that he wanted to do in his "master plan".

And obviously this is just my personal opinion, but after this effort reading through the Legion library, my current feeling is that Giffen should be kept far, far away from the Legion forevermore, especially with where he wanted to take things with the old "Hat Trick" in this run.

It certainly could have worked with appropriate build-up and slightly better execution, IMO. ah well...

Agree - I was flipping through this and was asking myself "why didn't they write the stories here?" I don't think I would have minded if they told the stories in issues of the events that were involved with the Legion and it culminated in this, but I'm not a fan of how this was done.

It's been a long time and my memories may not be off, but what I remember from online chatter, interviews, blogs, etc over the years is that Giffen had become extremely ticked off at a person or persons at DC (not his fellow creators on the book) and had reached the last straw, so he decided to literally go out with a bang - blow up the Earth, mess with DCU continuity, etc as a "take that". Not the first or last time Giffen would do something like this in his career.

*raises hand meekly*

I liked it actually lol....I thought they did a good job of giving it emotional impact with the way the issue was formatted, and I actually kind of like that it was senseless and came out of nowhere - I wouldn't want to be inundated with that stuff all the time, but it's a story beat worth exploring I think because we're so accustomed to everything making narrative sense, and sometimes life just ain't like that.

Not having been aware at the time of Giffen's annoying tendency to scorch everything around him when he's done with it, I also really liked that it upended the status quo and at the same time kind of protected the Legion from having to be bound by a lot of 20th/21st century continuity by just removing the setting where that continuity lives altogether

And I thought the SW6 batch Legion started putting the New Earth setting to good use - I feel like if that series had continued we could have got some interesting stories out of the different domed cities and maybe even ended up with a Legion World earlier than we got it seeing how crucial Danielle was in keeping things together during Zero Hour

There was definitely contention between Team Superman and Team Legion in a lot of ways, by all accounts. Maybe this was part of reaction to that.


Oh, it's all good, raz! I wanted to make sure I put in the "this is my opinion" disclaimer earlier, as I know there are tons of folks who really dig this, and that is a-ok by me.

I think that story would have been fine for me if it had been built up more - it was pretty well told, but my reaction here is a combination of a number of things:

-Reading the lions share of the Legion stories to get to this point in a matter of months
-My dislike of deconstruction takes on stories generally - definitely one that goes for 40 issues (I have a similar reaction to the DnA reboot work - there's absolutely some good stuff there. But as SW6 Mon-El has said, I prefer stories about preventing Armageddon versus those of cleaning up after it).
-The massive retcon-pallooza that these guys were doing in this run was really starting to annoy me.


That's a really interesting point about removing the playing board itself, rather than the pieces, off the table. I hadn't looked at it that way, and I really appreciate that viewpoint.


That's an interesting comment as well. Not trying to invoke the "B" word here, but this is also an issue I have with the current continuity. Maybe I have an issue with domed cities from Earth.

And just as an addendum, I think another (personal) challenge I had while reading this is that, yes, shit happens, but we've collectively had a lot of shit happen over the last couple years, so reading this made me do a collective "no thanks".

I get the artistic angle they were going for here. It simply doesn't work for me where I am now.

respectful opposing viewpoints are always welcome, Raz

I do agree that the whole, New Earth / SW6 Legion bit did work: a new beginning for everyone involved.

Real life IS senseless sometimes, and people get taken by surprise all the time, so it was definitely unique and different.

That is a really good point actually, my taste for entertainment has changed a lot over the past few years on this hell planet lol...like during lockdown the only thing I could really stomach was light comedy and even now I'm just not really that into dark/heavy stuff unless they really knock it out of the ballpark creatively whereas I was very into my Nihilistic Young(ish) Person phase when this stuff was all fresh so it was much more in line with where I was at the time!

Yep - maybe I'm just catching the 5YL run at bad times in my own personal situation.

I also just listened to the LOSP podcast about this issue and the end of the Giffen era. He basically destroyed the earth because "no one was looking."

Giffen is definitely a curmudgeon and spent a lot of this time with the Legion angry. We did have the one DnA era issue that he did that was fairly light, but he was pretty destructive in New 52 as well.

The more I read, the more I'm reinforced about marketing based on the Creative Name on the Cover. Namely, if a particular creator is the marketing force behind a title, I think I'll be giving it some distance, as it then starts to become a personality movement. We obviously have a very recent example that should act as an object lesson (I won't say the name), but Giffen's behavior during the New 52 was reminiscent of his actions here. But in these cases, the marquee creators typically have a lot going on, and being spread so thin across multiple tasks waters down the net result of all. That what we have is as good as it is, is fairly remarkable and a testament to the collaborative relationship he had with the Bierbaums. I think we've seen the same with Johns and others. It's a risk, but DC needs to give more assignments to hungrier writers who want to make something interesting versus tempermentally blowing shit up.

I'd dropped the book for a couple of months somewhere in this year. Not for long enough, that I didn't manage to pick up the issues I missed off the shelf of the local comic shop. But it was quite a fall form those early issues.

Think back to any Adventure Comic you like with the Legion in it. Now imagine that instead of doing anything in that issue, the Leigon instead decided to just wait it out. And for the next threat, and the next. SW6 were the Adventure era Legion that did just that, while their adult counterparts had little remaining focus. With Giffen still involved, but with any semblance of their original plan in tatters, the plot moved incredibly slowly. IIRC the SW6 were later additions to the plot, thought up due to the ever shifting plans for series that were going to spin out of the main book. Was it to be a flashback book? Was it to be a reboot and so on... Our rereads thread reminded me of just how small the plot steps were. While now I had some knowledge as to why, it really didn't help, and shouldn't have happened to the book in the first place.

That was the case with The End issue. I've no problem with left field things happening. But knowing, at the time of the reread, that it was done as part of a huff...of space doesn't help. It got through editorial not because there was backing for such gutsy storytelling, but because Giffen's parting shot happened during an editorial turnover. Which is another indicator of just what a state things were in on the book.

re the whole destroying Earth in a huff part... good point... seems very petty!


I also generally prefer more hopeful stories... real life can be tough and depressing enough!

Yep - I was just hearing/reading about that. Carlson jammed it through as the back office had tried to shut down the issue completely, but doing that would wreck the issue pipeline for at least three months. So, I guess kudos to the balls on Giffen for doing that, but shame for putting Carlson in that position; its very disgruntled-employee vibe, and I'm honestly surprised Giffen didn't wreck his cred during all of this. But the Comics industry is very different from mine, so what do I know?

Also, according to the same accounts (thanks to M. Grabois on all of this, btw), the chum was in the water as early as issue 2-3. The tension between the Superman and Legion teams did not help anything from 1989 to today, and then, in the beginning of all of that, the entire LSH early run, if you zoom out and look at as much of the forest as we can see, was a horrific political working environment. Honestly, kudos to Keith, Tom and Mary and Al for surviving all of that for as long as they did. But because of it all, the overall work did suffer.

Legionnaires (or would it have been Omega Men?) was supposed to happen a lot earlier that it did, and there would have been the "light" Legion book alongside the "darker adult" Legion story at least a year earlier.

Goddamn DC editorial. Again.

Yeah, issue 3 and the wheels started to come off. What was supposed to be a 12 issue arc showing the Legion show its heroic brightness, by reforming from the wreckage of a darker galaxy, became a retroboot with 3 fill in issues. In the main down to an editorial stropfest.

Giffen had some form going way back to the '70s I think. I do have some sympathy with someone who sees his agreed plan wrecked, and who feels some responsibility for his team on the book. But the whole mess was avoidable, and allowing further episodes/issues to happen was also avoidable. Noone comes out of it with credits, except the rest of the team who tried to make the best of it. What happened in v4, didn't stop pretty much the same scenario being set up for the end of v7, though. We did get Lurel Gand and Kent Shakespeare out of it too.

Man, what a set of dick waving scenarios. The Superman team said "no Super X references" and Giffen & team took that to an extreme. Sin on both sides. Such bullshit,. And the victims? Us in 2022, dealing with at least five reboots later. OMG.

If anything is certain, its that this specific run - from LSH v4 issues 1-39, are the most impactful of the Legion into the future vs. maybe the Darkness Saga, Certainly it was the boulder thrown into the stream that altered the course of history.

Well, one could argue that the ultimate blame lies with COIE and the complete lack of a consistent plan for what the post-Crisis DC was going to be like. Rebooting Superman while trying to preserve the Legion's history intact was just awkward as could be.

One of the worst bits of this whole thing is that after prohibiting the Legion from using anything "Super" related, thus necessitating that the Legion team create an alternative to the pocket universe patch, the Superman team went ahead and used the pocket universe themselves! It was such a complete mess.

Yeah, this is true and compounded by the friction between the two camps. I tend to think that Giffen may have made some things harder than he needed to - they could have just gone along and just NOT MENTIONED Superboy for a while, but he took it upon himself to retcon all of that stuff. But some of it is interesting reading for sure.

Given how they could sometimes go for many months, or even a year or more, without hide nor hair of a Superpeep, I agree it might have been best to not jump to 'explain' things and just sort of let it ride out for a year or two, see where the terrain lay after the aftermath of Crisis had died down, and some of the effects started to be soft-unbooted, such as a new Supergirl series or the existence of 'Hypertime' to get around the removal of the alternate Earths or whatever.

There was no hurry, IMO, to 'explain away' the disappearance of Superboy, or even the death of Supergirl. The future has always been separated (in some cases by an 'iron curtain of time!') from events going on in 'the present,' and has been stronger for it, and any time it gets dragged into 'modern day events,' such as that ludicrous crossover where Laurel Kent suddenly remembers that she's a Manhunter 1000 years too late for it to be remotely relevant, for, like, no reason whatsoever, is just bad...

thinking back, that would have meant perhaps a delay in introducing Kent Shakespeare or Laurel Gand. Maybe we still would have gotten them eventually, of course...

My memories of timing can get confused when looking back 30-40 years later so I looked up when the Superman and Legion teams published their respective stories.

(I will use cover dates but we can assume that release dates were about three months earlier. For example COIE #12 has a cover date of March 1986 but I believe was released in November-December 1985.)

Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #315 - last appearance of Supergirl with the Legion - September 1984

Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 - Supergirl dies - October 1985

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 ends the multiverse - March 1986

The Man of Steel #1 - Superman retconned to never be Superboy - October 1986

The Man of Steel #5 - Bizzarro but john Byrne states that this was originally intended to be Mon-El until the later Superman/Legion crossover was planned. - December 1986

LSH v3 #37-38, Superman v2 #8, Action Comics v1 #591 - Pocket Universe Superboy revealed and dies - August-September 1987

Superman v2 #16 - first appearance of Matrix/Supergirl - April 1988

Superman v2 #22 - Superman executes the Kryptonian genocidal murderers in the Pocket Universe and brings Matrix back to New Earth - October 1988

LSH v4 #1 - Five Years Later story starts - November 1989

LSH v4 #4 - Mon-El punches out the Time Trapper destroying the pre-Crisis Legion history - February 1990

So the important points here are:
1) The original plan of Superman meeting Mon_El to fix up Legion history would have been published about 6 months after Crisis but this didn't happen.
2) The Pocket Universe fix was almost 18 months after the end of Crisis
3) Superman's further involvement in the Pocket Universe was another year after that.
4) FYL and its subsequent retcon of no Superman/boy etc was more than 3 1/2 years after Crisis and more than a year after Superman's last involvement with the Pocket Universe.

Obviously some plans were brewing well before publication, but even so the FYL retcon was years after Crisis and the Superman team was finished with the Pocket universe before LSH v4 started and thus before the "order" came down to remove Superman's presence. Admittedly the Superman team went on to explore the consequences of his actions in the Pocket Universe, as was appropriate with this being why Superman developed his ethics against killing as well as his self-imposed exile in space and his discovery of the Eradicator device which played an important role in his later resurrection after Doomsday. This is what Glorith refers to when she admits to the importance of the Pocket Universe in history.

Whether we like the choices the teams made back then (and the Pocket Universe "solution" was made by both teams) there was a considerable time over which it all occurred and whoever decided the no Superman/Legion interaction rule and how that was played out there was no use of the Pocket Universe by either team for at least a year before that.

EDIT: Just read through this and my comments come across as far more confrontational than I thought. Not my intention and I apologise. I was simply curious about how swiftly the changes had followed Crisis and whether the Superman teams Pocket Universe story had followed or preceded the FYL retcon. In both case I was surprised by the result.

WOW! Stile, this is FASCINATING. Thank you for taking the time to break this out chronologically. And no, you didn't come off as confrontational to me. Laying out the facts like this is good. It's making me realize that there is probably another layer beneath what has been told from the written and oral histories of the Legion from this time. Namely the perspective of the Superman team in all this when 5YL kicked off, as their "no Superman" mandate was what created a lot of complexities. I don't think we've heard a take from Byrne, or anyone from the Super-camp, on the Legion business - why would they even care? All we hear is what Giffen and Bierbaum have told us via their channels. (If there is one from the Super-camp, I'd love to hear it!)

The fact that the Pocket Universe was accepted by both camps is fascinating. It says there was some level of two-way communication about the status of Superboy when Levitz ran the book. Based on the observable evidence and accounts, this apparently broke down with Giffen. If he was running most of the show at this point, and was given orders to not use Superboy & co, it makes me wonder if he took it to an extreme, especially given the later Time & Time Again. Did this act give us the Gordian Knot of continuity that has made the backoffice scared of the Legion moving forward? Given that comics creators are typically reluctant to throw others actively under the bus (generally speaking) I doubt we will ever know the truth of the matter. But I find it interesting.

I agree, Set. Unless Supergirl was integral to the story of the reformed Legion (why would it be in the continuity?) why create Laural (although I do love the character). Why couldn't Mon-El have been from the pocket universe if that aspect was so bloody important?

This whole thing really seems like a petty spat between two creators that have left us with 4-5 reboots to where we are now. Superman still flies high monthly.

I wonder. Laurel, like I said above, I very much enjoyed, especially the younger Andromeda character.

Kent (and Devlin, and Celeste and yes, even Kono) never really did anything for me. Never understood why they were around, Morduverse or not. I'm 3/4 of the way towards Zero Hour and I still can't articulate the value of any of them versus who was around before, although at least Kono has a personality. (In fairness, so does Celeste)

The more I read v4 in line with what came before (and after for that matter), the more I think Giffen let his ego get ahead of him with this project. It's unfortunate.

mega applause for your research stile, wow! this is illuminating

Yeah, thanks for researching that, stile.

I was totally thinking the Matrix/Phantom Zone villain stuff was a couple of years later, after the 5YL began.

Likewise - I thought it was early 90s.

Chiming in to say thanks stile!

And also GL, I like most of the 5YL add-ons, but Devlin was never anything other than annoying lol

(Although having said that, some of those characters are really hard to adapt to any other setting too - Kono and Loomis in particular just don't really work unless your setting contains some level of cynicism that the Legion usually doesn't)

Thanks everyone. I appreciate the thanks and comments. It was an interesting exercise and surprised me as well as I mentioned.

I was collecting the Superman titles from Man of Steel right through this period and well in to the 90's so that was my primary viewpoint. I only started collecting Legion from 5YL, although I had read many of the earlier stories in Black&White reprints here in Australia, so I was familiar with the team and the dramatic change V4 introduced drove me to find out what had happened before. That was when I bought up back issues of V2 and V3, so my perspective on this period and the interaction of the two teams is probably a bit different.

It seems like there are 6 separate but connected events that we saw happening that brought us to the change in V4 and different people were involved in each decision.

1) Killing Supergirl in COIE. I remember reading Marv Wolfman(?) writing about how it changed from a History volume to a transformation story and how they took the list of changes to the top DC editor (my memory says Jeanette Kahn but DC wiki says Dick Giordano) who pushed them to do more, so the decision to kill off Supergirl involved Wolfman and Perez but also Giordano at least.
2) Making Superman never Superboy. Byrne has acknowledged this as his concept (as well as stating that he later regretted it) but once again it was signed off at higher levels. (While Byrne gets most of the credit/blame for the Superman reboot it has been acknowledged that several others were involved such as Wolfman, Ordway etc. It thanks to Wolfman that we have Cat Grant, Emil Hamilton, and Ordway is credited with the Luthor businessman concept.)
3) Pocket Universe Legion/Superboy resolution. Comments I have read do not attribute the idea to any one person but both teams commented on the "bigger" story relevant to both properties, suggesting high involvement of both sides.
4) Supergirl/Matrix Superman-execution plot. Again Byrne seems to be the push behind this revisit to PU even though Matrix first brief appearance was by Wolfman suggesting all the Superman team.
5) LSH 5YL. This is primarily Giffen's idea and I believe he pulled in the Bierbaums, although again Levitz spoke positively about the change beforehand in the last letters pages of v3.
6) Glorithverse Valor retcon. There seems to have been enough to state that the insistence on a break came from the Superman side (at least according to Giffen and Bierbaums) but exactly who and whether it was writers or editorial or even higher up I don't know, and the execution came from Giffen.

At the time I enjoyed each of the changes, finding the exploration of the differences and consequences quite interesting. Looking back it does seem to have been the start of the pattern of rebooting Legion every few years rather than working within new limitations, a "disease" that was perhaps contagious enough for the rest of the DC Universe to catch.

For myself 5YL was fascinating reading at the time but looking back and comparing to other good periods, it ... dragged, and was less than it could have been. It also made significant enough changes that it was hard to backup from, hence the End of an Era and the Reboot. There has been some discussion regarding recent changes in X-Men about the importance of writers "putting the toys away when they are finished" i.e. leaving the "franchise" in a state where new writers can pickup without difficulty and carry on. We all like drama and excitement but we also like consistency and stability. Balancing those is the real challenge for a creative team.

stile, I dub thee comics historian! I'm in awe of your knowledge and analysis. Quite enjoyable to read too!

We say we want stories with real lasting consequences, stories with teeth, stories *that matter,* and yet, when such stories happen, all too often we say, 'not like that!'

At the end of the day, comics are serial entertainment, and DC or Marvel teams and characters are not the individual property of any one creator, not a Giffen or a Bendis or a Byrne or a Wolfman, no matter how definitive a take those writers have placed on a particular character over their time as custodian of that book.

'Cause, ultimately, that's what they are. A custodian. Not an *owner.*

They should expect to 'put the toys back' when they're done, so that the next creative team has the same box of toys to play with that they did and they aren't stealing from the future of the franchise by killing off characters or destroying parts of the setting or eliminating story options or otherwise *making the value of the IP less.*

There is still room for stories that 'change everything,' in Elseworlds or What Ifs or 'alternate universe stories.' Or, also, in runs at Indy companies like Image, where the creator *does* own the IP and can kill or maim or greatly change forever a character or team or set-piece (like a company or city or world). Or deliberate limited series. (Some of which, like the Runaways or Young Avengers, two teams I love almost as much as the Legion, have arguably farted along through various half-assed relaunches that went nowhere long after their original story idea from their original creators ended.)

And that's the other side of the coin. It *is* a serial adventure format, and yet any one creator might only have a specific story to tell, and everything the *company* does later with their creation might sort of falter around, attempting to recapture the sales of that brilliant original idea, and yet basically fail to do so, and leave fans who arrived later wondering what all the hoopla is, since the definitive story was years ago, and the modern attempts to cash in on nostalgia for it just kind of ring hollow. I feel like, in many cases, there are forced attempts to get a new book out every month for character X because 'X is popular,' even if *none of the writers have a specific awesome story to tell* with that character, and so they end up with their fortieth confrontation with classic nemesis Y, by the latest creative team, which will only evoke comparisons to the last dozen versions of that confrontation...

I'm a huge fan of all sorts of teams and would love to see them back, but also realize that some characters stories have been told, and should probably be allowed to retire, and not be like Charlie Brown, stuck at eight years old, falling for Lucy's football trick over and over again, for forty-five years.

I had a big LOL with the Devlin comment!

Celeste was odd for me in that they didn't really take her where I thought she would be going (namely some kind of a more direct Green Lantern tie in), and while she had an interesting personality, I didn't get the power set all that well. Same with Kent - he was just suddenly "there" and I never got his story or retro-backstory. Kono had moments, to be sure. Loomis was such a backgrounder to me that he just seemed like Dyrk Magz from the reboot to me. So yeah, the newbies were kind of a mixed bag, I guess.

I do wonder if Giffen's plan was to retcon Laurel initially anyway - yes, they had killed Supergirl in the COIE, but that doesn't mean they don't have to use her in some way from the pocket universe. But the Super-mandate made things way more complicated, and he had to retcon her anyway, so why not the rest? Laurel probably is one of my favorites of this era, now that I think about it.

That's probably the same for all of us - I didn't start to really get into Superman until the lead up to the Death of Superman, then had to backfill to Crisis and all that, so similarly to picking up Legion after 5YL, the points of reference were all over the place for me. Still there was enough compelling in all those that made me want to go back and read more of what came before, either through back issues or helpful folks summarizing on the early internet in those days.



I hadn't heard all of this, but its fascinating. True enough, alot of those Wolfman concepts were things that I glommed onto when I picked up the Superman titles, so its funny how one concept can lead to others. I will say that because I didn't have the history with the Legion or Superman at the time, I was totally bought into the Byrne Man of Steel world and I enjoyed it a lot.


Yes, based on multiple sources where both Tom B and Giffen are quoted separately, this does appear to be the case. Although I don't think PL quite understood what Giffen REALLY wanted to do, as by all accounts no one in the DC Back office was happy. What would be a really good question to answer is whether the "no Super-fam" mandate was issued before or after the release of LSH v4 issue 1.


As I understood it, the break came from the Superman side backed by editorial, but it was just "don't reference Superman or his family in the title." It was definitely Giffen who executed this, but also took it upon himself to retcon to the extend he did.


I think that statement of "putting away the toys" is a good idea, as these concepts can get overly dragged out (the DnA Legion is a great example of things not being resolved). I've said before that comic writers tend to get stale on a title after a couple years, so that's another thing that they should look at as well. But your comment about the title dragging I have to agree with. There were great components and stories, but taken as a whole, the entirety is not what it should have been IMO. The Terra Mosaic story went WAY too long, for example.

Guilty as charged!


One million percent agreed here, Set. I think the challenge comes when a creator is on a book too long and they make so many changes (or in the case of 5YL, jump the timeline so far that they can literally change most of the characters and setting to something unrecognizable) to where it is almost impossible to clean the toys up for the next person. *Looks* of the characters, and memberships in teams, should definitely change especially to reflect the times. And even though "killing" a character in a comic is almost always something that can be reversed, the more complex the process to get there, the more challenging it is to reverse it without doing a wholesale reboot, or even a retro-boot. In any case, I think once a character has been introduced, they should be available to be used moving forward.


And its also a reason why I'm a proponent of an extremely slow aging process of the characters. I feel like the Legion from the mid-70s through the end of the Levitz run aged WAY too fast. A year's worth of comic book issues should only be a month worth of time in-universe. Based on the Legion issue that I just read where the v4 Legion is fighting Zombie Legionnaires, Projectra makes some kind of a comment about Val dying 9 years prior. That would have made all the events in the v3 Legion take at least three years, and that seems ridiculous to me with the serial nature of the stories. Yes, time passes in a comic book universe, but when one story picks up after the next, a month hasn't passed in-universe.

I blush. Actually I think there are far more knowledgeable fans on this forum such as Set, EDE, Nightcrawler etc. There is a lot of background Legion knowledge that I only know from their comments. For example I have never had the chance to read the Legion Companion. I may have more background in the post-Crisis Superman era although even there I expect Paladin might know more. In the end one of the great things about this forum is how we share our knowledge and opinions, disagreeing but still enjoying each others comments.

You have stated the point I was trying to make better than I did. Thanks.

It really is a tricky line to walk. For example would we change the death of Ferro Lad or Invisible Kid or Chemical Kid or even part of Luornu? Reading the original stories and those around them it is easier to see that the characters had been little used prior (varies and certainly not Luornu) but as the years have gone on their deaths have become part of their mythology and it is hard to imagine them without those events. (Having said that the Reboot Legion shows that they can be successfully rewritten without those events and still retain much of the same characteristics. Oh well, great argument Stile!)

Other changes that we celebrate in the Levitz era are Projectra becoming Sensor Girl, the new Invisible Kid who would be so different without the death of his predecessor.

So change can be good and accepted, sometimes over time, as long as the background setting does not change too much. This is where I think 5YL went perhaps too far. The core concept of a team of young(ish) people working together for the common good in far future environment was still there but much distorted from its origins and it is difficult to see how another writer could ever take them back to their roots.

Incidentally, the phrase about putting toys away when you are finished is from Jonathon Hickman speaking about his intentions when he took over the X-Men a couple of years back and made such radical changes. His initial story and hinted plans were unfortunately derailed and Marvel editorial seized on the increase in sales he had brought and pushed him to extend and change his plans. Now instead of the X-Men being a team that existed as a persecuted minority, they are more powerful than most nations, dominate world economy, are effectively immortal, and even control Mars. Whatever Hickman's original intent It is hard to see how this can be restored to the core concept without some sort of huge reset. It was with this in mind that I saw some parallels with 5YL. No matter how much I enjoyed some of the individual stories it is hard to see how some sort of massive retcon could be avoided.

Well said, Stile!

Giffen and the Bierbaums definitely tried to have their cake and eat it too by including the SW6 Legion (eventually to become the reboot Legion itself) in the plot, which was always part of the plan. (Who would survive would be another story altogether! ) But it illustrates your point - they were able to turn back the original 20-odd characters so that Luornu even had three bodies again (because 'cellular cloning' made it work).

Where I think this approach worked better for the Legion was in DnA's run, where they took similar actions - made the universe way darker, put the characters through the wringer, advanced the timeline (only a year). But they did it in such a way where pretty much all their major changes could be rolled back creatively if needed (and some were). Their major mistake was taking too long to tell their character arc stories so that certain plot threads weren't addressed in 2-3 years worth of issues.

Having this discussion has actually made me really appreciate the efforts behind the retroboot. Even though I have issues with Geoff Johns as a writer, I do appreciate the fact that he retconned Superman to such a state where it sidestepped the original Crisis, Byrne MoS background and 5YL retcons, showing that you can definitely 'fix' a continuity like the Legion's. Now whether this helped anything is another debate altogether. A lot of people jumped ship at Zero Hour, more at DnA, and again at the Threeboot. Readers are tired of the resets, and with the Legion they keep smashing that reset button hard.

I never thought of comparing DnA to 5YL in this way before and I think you make an excellent point. Good thinking.


Great point about the Retroboot as well.

So year four. Very interesting due to the issues discussed in the sub-thread about issue 38, which was apparently prompted when new editor KC Carlson told Giffen that the "hat trick" was a no-go. But of course, that happened early in year 4, so then we spin into a universe that is solely crafted by Tom and Mary Bierbaum and also spinning off the younger "clone" Legionnaires into their own title. I'll discuss both separately as they spin off in different directions, at least for the most part.

LSH:

For all intents and purposes, the LSH title deals with the aftermath of the loss of the Earth on the original team. We at least have an issue where the team deals with their feelings in relation to the new situation, the coming together (then separation) of the younger and older teams, then a setup story where the team takes on Glorith and Luornu finds one of her selves. This springs into the six-issue fight against Mordru and the zombie apocalypse, including fighting their dead teammates. These stories excelled at character moments, as the Bierbaums are very character-centric writers. The reactions of the Legionnaires to the destruction of Earth is great. Violet and Ayla get probably their most definitive scene in v4 as they deal with the loss in their quarters in issue 39, and both Vi's get a good moment together in 40. Jo's situation when he deals with the encounter with his (really stupid) younger self is true.

Then we get to the Zombie story. This very much seemed to be an attempt to tie back to the Amethyst work that the writers were involved with, so I had no idea what was going on there. Also, Martian Manhunter is having sex with Nura? OK... The Mordru/zombie story was just "ok" for the character moments, but issue after issue the same thing seemed to be happening - "Mysa's breaking free/we're beating the zombies" followed by "Mysa's hate is allowing Mordru to take control/the zombies are more powerful" with a bunch of temporary Khund team members I figured were done with by the end of the story.

Well on the bright side, we did get to see Devlin's powers in full splendor, so that was ok. Also - Jamm in the Annual! The first annual to be tied into a DC Annual crossover - the awesome Bloodlines story!

Did I say bright side? Sorry, that's the bourbon talking. Honestly I had forgotten reading Bloodline almost as soon as it was done in the titles I normally read at the time, so this was a major groan fest. Like, totally, dude. But seriously, we DID get Brin back. (and no, I didn't read his series for this).

One definite bright side was Stuart Immonen on the title. I found his art style definitely made the story move, even if the story itself did not. The characters and action were made much more fluid than the Giffen era, which definitely helped the read.

Legionnaires:

I have to admit that I have a soft spot for this title, as I found it interesting to see these kids adapting to their new situation, as well as each other in the new world. The new Fatal Five were creatively re-introduced, I thought, in the context of the younger Legionnaires, especially the new Emerald Empress in Cera Kesh. The story was by no means perfect (why is Mordecai smitten with Ayla? I mean I get it - who wouldn't be - but its not really explained). The two-Eye situation for the Emerald Eye is interesting, and something that was a good take. Cera's transformation into the Empress was realistic and set the stage for the real insidiousness of the Eye that we would come to know in the reboot. Watching Cera become the empress made me actually root for her, because I honestly can't stand the portrayal of Garth or Dirk in this team. They are complete and utter assholes. How are either of them tolerated at all? Honestly, I'd have been totally happy if Cera had axed both of them and they never came back. I was literally hoping this Garth was dead after Cera zapped him. In a similar vein, I felt like they wrote Violet as fairly incompetent, which was very different from her last interaction with Devlin. And its clear that the Bierbaums love Tenzil in any age.

This was definitely a popcorn book, which I was fine with from a plotting perspective - I didn't ask for much, and it delivered a quick page turner.

Clearly this new era of the LSH is designed to be more accessible to a superhero reading audience. We do lose the gravity of the storytelling, probably for the worse, unfortunately, and this really illustrates the influence that Giffen had on the story. But with the Legionnaires' lighter take on the events, I felt more energized reading the books. Bring on year 5!

I had this whole theory one time that Mordecai was actually an SW6 Brin Londo, but Tom Bierbaum shot it down.

And I guess that would have made sense at the time - issue 2/3 of Legionnaires was out there at least a couple months before LSH Annual 4. But at least you didn't have to hold on to that theory for long!

Not the missing in time Timber Wolf, but a younger version (clone or whatever) like the Legionnaires team. A Lone Wolf who had met the Legion, but never joined it. But who had also been weirdly mutated into a monster during the whole process.

Ah! That WOULD have been interesting! I'm kind of surprised they never went there with that. Is that addressed later in the book, or did you ask Tom directly?

I think it was on FB? Maybe here, but I don't think he's a member here.

Anyway, he said that Mordecai wasn't intended to be any previously existing character.

I've always thought they should have had an SW6 Nemesis Kid as well, one who hadn't yet been revealed as a traitor, and whose life then takes a much different path given the circumstances.

Kind of surprised. T&M are notorious for making connections to the past so I'm really surprised Mordecai is an original.

Great idea on Nemesis Kid as well. It would have been better than the zombie Nemesis Kid that was dispatched by Projectra in the Mordru run...

A redeemed SW6 Nemesis Kid would have been cool!


Agree 10000%!

also, interesting discussion and points all around re putting toys away. still too groggy to contribute though... I need my coffee badly

Mordecai as SW6 Brin would have been an awesome idea, although the poetry might have had to go (or I guess we could find out Brin secretly writes romance novels on the side and just pretended to be a doofus in the 80s to throw people off the trail hahaha)

Even Mordecai's weird chest emblem is kinda wolfy if you squint!

I have to admit though, I always just assumed he had the hots for Ayla because she's a hottie

I REALLY LOVE the Nemesis Kid idea! Man, that would have made for some awesome stories...I can't imagine Queen of Orando Jeckie would have been impressed! He's got a really fun power too and he wouldn't be in any danger of becoming a Gary Stu because all you really need to do is throw two bad guys at him together to get around it!

oh, I forgot to say - the two Emerald Eyes is one of those things that just seems so obvious in hindsight, like we know that two eyes is the galactic standard so why shouldn't Ekron have two eyes? I can't believe it just never occurred to me to even wonder about it until that point! And Cera did have a good motivation, and Dirk and Garth were absolutely truly the worst....am I remembering right that this would have been pre-Proty Garth? Were they trying to say that Garth was just an abjectly awful human being before he got replaced by Proty? Dirk at least I would like to think they were going somewhere with it as a story....you could get some mileage out of it if he saw what happened to his older self and just felt like his destiny was already set in stone so he just cynically threw himself into it because why bother trying and failing to be better?

That's what I didn't get - TMK made a conscious decision to turn Dirk into a jerk, mainly based on his womanizing as depicted in the past. And they took it to a logical extreme by giving older Dirk his own fate that his younger version was able to see himself! Literally! So you think that would have made him try to be a better person. It really seemed like the writers were trying to do that.

With Garth, they straight up admitted they did a personality graft, as it WAS pre-proty. Now he's naturally a hothead, supposedly, and he gets reinforced by him hanging around with Dirk all the time. So yes, basic Garth Ranzz, according to T&M, is an abjectly awful person.

But if this Garth is like this all the time in this book, it stands to reason that he and Dirk were like that before the cloning. And I don't see the other Legionnaires putting up with that behavior and I CERTAINLY don't see Imra simping over a guy like that. I know the writers take it in that direction, but he's too much of a wrecking ball.

That was one of the unexplored threads that intrigued me about the cartoon, was the introduction of a Nemesis Kid in the last season, who joined the Legion and suspiciously had the exact same 'powers' as Grimbor's power-negating-ray-gun, so was positioned to possibly be a very different sort of traitor, or not?

Yeah, I've always thought that there was so much untapped potential in NK as a character, and even with all of the reboots, the only thing that's hinted at doing something interesting with him was the cartoon, but even that was the single episode that never got followed up on.

A "good" Nemesis Kid was an interesting idea for sure, and I think the cartoon upgraded his powers well.

I agree. Well said. I really liked the character moments in this follow-up to Earth's destruction and the meeting of the two teams was great. If we had to have that disaster then at least they didn't just forget it an move on.

Immonen's art was definitely a highlight. I thought his art was even better here than his later work on the Superman titles.

Regarding Dirk I remember a letter debating how Dirk could be portrayed like this particularly after the traumatic confrontation with his older self. The letter writer thought there should have been more change. The Beirbaums acknowledged the point but said that Dirk was probably in denial and that his journey was far from over. They had plans to further develop this and I think we see some of that in coming issues.

Regarding Garth, yeah he was acting like a jerk but we do see him pulling himself back around a bit as the story goes on. Again I think they had more tale to tell but it seemed it was more a young teen who has just been through multiple traumatic events, and is finding strength in comradery with his brasher more outgoing friend. The Proty-Garth bit is certainly intended to be a factor. I couldn't find it but wasn't there an issue where Imra says something like "why are you acting like this? It's like you were before ...". If this Garth were a clone that retained the memories of the original but not the Proty personality overwrite then perhaps it makes some sense. Of course the later Time Trapper explanation makes that different again but hey, superhero comics.

Oh and my favourite character in this period was probably Computo. Fun but strong and her interaction with Cham is just grin worthy.

Thank you! Yes, it made the whole thing feel very true, and I appreciate the Bierbaums doing this, and how they did it. Issue 39 is particularly effective

Immonen's art was definitely a highlight. I thought his art was even better here than his later work on the Superman titles.[/quote]

YES! Completely agree - I thought he did great work on Superman, but Stuart was able to handle a large cast really well.


Hah! Superhero comics indeed - IIRC the Trapper stuff comes in towards the end of the era - I don't remember the back half of the pre-ZH Legionnaires as much as the first half. I definitely remember Garth getting his comeuppance a couple times to some degree, but don't remember anything about Dirk - I'll keep my eyes peeled.


Big time agree - Danielle was a breath of fresh air as a full on team member!

Agree, the character moments were very good. And I do appreciate they built on the destruction of Earth and rebuilding of New Earth. some interesting concepts there!

Thirded. I like that she was organically introduced, and had a fairly unique powerset that totally fit the Legion future.