Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Infinite Crisis - Are you stoked?

I've heard this arguement before, but I feel that above all else, Johns is fixing things that were broken , like Green Lantern and the JSA and Hawkman. DC f*cked 'em up pretty royally over the preceeding fifteen years and finally someone like Geoff came along and did us a favor.

*And* he did it in a way as to not undermine fans of Kyle Rayner, which is more than half of Kyle Rayner's fans would have done for Hal's fans.

It's not a matter of going backwards, its a matter of righting some long-standing DC comic book wrongs so the books can actually make some real progress with integrity and credibility again, after it lost so much in the last twenty years.

Sure, some things don't fall into what I'm saying--Aquaman's origin in Superman/Batman being retconned back to its Silver Age one, etc.; but for the most part, Geoff Johns in general is doing us all a service. But most importantly, he's actively taking steps to not piss on any groups of fans in the process in the way that, oh, Marvel does.

I'll say it now too: Geoff Johns does not equal DC.

I have to agree with Reboot. I'm all for moving foward. Put the big creators time and energy in the new stuff. (Sadly this Legion is all new but it feels really old).

Green Lantern was broken? I didn't think so. But I am glad he didn't make Kyle a wuss...ofcourse he did make him the only GL that has fear.

Plus I wonder if Johns and Pacheco relaunched GL using Kyle instead of Hal...it would sell the same. Ok maybe a little less since Hal was gone for so long but that would wear off.

I hope the romp via the old school stuff is fun and sells lots...but I hope it doesn't stay.

I love Wally, Kyle, Connor, etc. Oliver Queen is a joke compared to Connor.

Also I see Geoff write things like he would never retire or kill the original Green Lantern or Flash? Yet Blue Beetle gets the bullet??? ick.

But I won't be negative. I just hope after all is said and done DC puts this much energy in the new stuff...not the old.

Hawkman was broken - I don't think anyone will argue that point. And Katar was, frankly, unsalvagable, so bringing back the GA Hawkman was as good a route as any.

JSA - as I said, broken or not (and I don't think characters born in the 1910s and 1920s dying off is exactly unreasonable), it wasn't Johns who did the fixing.

Green Lantern...

Here's the thing - GL was broken, but not in the way you're arguing. Ben Raab is, frankly, a hack and can't write for toffee. And Winick and him had written Kyle into a corner (basically, almost everything from his new costume onward was a bad move for Kyle. The "gay bashing" story wasn't handled well, and thereafter...).

The logical thing to go from where things were were:

1) Have Kyle retire, or
2) Send Kyle off on his own, truly alone.

In either circumstance, John Stewart would have been the "main" GL of Earth, and the foundations were all there for the Corps coming back, of which John could have been a part. Making Kyle a Corpsman is a Bad Idea, and a disservice to the character in its' own right as far as I'm concerned (and what I've seen of Kyle post-Rebirth isn't recognisable as Kyle).

As for HJ... frankly, think about it. His "Hook" was that he was The Man Without Fear. That's a mental illness. So what happens when the MWF, already getting over depression, gets the jitters? He cracks, he can't take it. Even Marz admits ET was rushed (hell, he had to write one of the issues while at a flaming concert to make the deadline!), but the core point is salient. And after that Parallax is a misguided villain, trying to make things right that were never wrong (hey, GJ is Parallax!), until he sacrifices himself to save the Earth, The End.

Making him the Spectre (in a story written by.... ummm... Geoff Johns) was a bad idea - the character needed to be laid to rest. And everything since has just compounded that error (especially with DeMatteis in full mystical mode misunderstanding the Spectre completely).

And when Geoff Johns is the main guy of three or four basically steering the whole of DC's output, you're stretching a point to say he's not DC. Of course he's not. But he's got a veto on everything happening, so he's not far off.

The core point was so salient that DC published several stories retconning Jordan's past to make it look like he was always heading towards this kind of end.

"Emerald Twilight" was exactly the kind of "sudden yellow brick in the wall" you describe earlier.

We'll just have to disagree about Green Lantern.

The very idea that Hal could become Parallax goes against the concept of Hal Jordan in general, after countless stories in the Silver Age that showed the true differences between him and Sinestro.

The very idea that Hal Jordan became Parallax goes against the spirit of the character itself. Further, it was so poorly done and badly written, that it further took away any shred of credibility from DC (as we now know it was not Marz).

Now, I've read every single issue of Kyle Raynor as Green Lantern, and I have my own opinions. For the most part, the series was nothing spectaculur. The earliest issues were good and established Kyle as Kyle, which even teh staunchest Hal fan must concede. But the character was never much beyond 'the sole Green Lantern', other than the 'newbie-Spiderman-ish hero'. His supporting cast was almost nothing, save his two girlfriends, Donna and Jenny.

By the second half of Marz's run, Kyle was no longer a rookie, but he was also out of interesting stories. Grant Morrison's Kyle in JLA had him interesting to some, but readers of the current GL solo series were left with a sense of "this? all those dead GLs, including Hal, for this?".

Judd Winnick came in and wrote good stories, but as you said, backed him into a corner in a number of ways. Raab came in and almost destroyed the character--and I agree, almost any character could be destroyed after that.

But well before Raab and Winnick, Kyle was definately missing something. All of the concepts seemed to be lost in GL, and it was if Kyle was DC's version of the 1970's Spider-Man. The concept was essentially broken, with the lone fact that Morrison was writing Kyle actually very well in JLA.

Also, Hal as the Spectre was not Johns--that was a fan who suggested it, and a DC editor who asked the fan permission to use it, and then forced that initiative from up high on Johns, a then rookie writer. I agree, bad idea. For one brief second it was cool, and almost would be cool in fan fiction...but just not the real DC.

With Kyle to the point he was at, DC was now faced with a series that essentially lost all its original essence from the Silver Age and all its characters, and the majority of its essence from Kyle's run. They could either try and redo Kyle and further ensure that there would be a large portion of dissatisfied Hal fans, or redo Hal and ensure unhappy Kyle fans. Enter Geoff Johns, who has attempted to do both, albeit with a current focus on Hal.

But ironically, Kyle at the end of Raab's run was almost at the same point as Hal in the mid-90's pre-Emerald whatever the hell that crap was called. And I do stick by the notion that mid-way through Marz's run, the series had fallen twenty degrees south of being good anymore, with little to no cast, no real or serious antagonists and a great deal of repetition in Kyle's thinking, other than the notion that Kyle had moved on from being a rookie (which was one of his biggest draws in the first place).

Basically, I know I won't convince you and you won't convince me. But I think a series that's building something, even rebuilding, is harder than a series that is destroying something, which is what GL in the 90's had become. Because of this destructive nature of Kyle as GL's birth, the series could never get over that hurdle and stand on its own--DC had to confront this. I wouldn't mind seeing more Kyle stories sans Corps myself, as I've never disliked the character. But I'd prefer to see Hal as GL too, and even moreso than Kyle.

Exactly. Even in Mark Waid's "Brave and Bold" they depicted Hal as absent minded when that had never really been the case.

I'm with Cobie and OM. Cobie said it all better than I could have anyway.

You understand that's likely to end up in Cobie's .sig, right?

Whoops looking at my post I see that I was a bit loose with my words. I didn't mean to imply anything like that about your character. You have my apology and a retraction for the offending sentence. I was thinking in terms of the prevailing mood of creators through the early 90s.

The smile on my face is more than enough!

Fundamentally, there are only about five characters in comics who can't be "rested" permanently - Clark Kent/Superman, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Diana/Wonder Woman, Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Wolverine. They're the genuine A-list - anyone tries to do anything too extreme with them, the pendulum will swing them back towards status quo, and stories which take them out of the costume tend to be used to show why they're the "true owners" of it, for want of a better term, rather than as a genuine attempt for a successor. This applies, to a lesser extent, to their supporting cast too.

Beyond them, there is no character who can't be "rested" or killed - and if they're killed, the death should stick. QED.

And, as I said, I think Kyle should have been "rested" at the point things had reached. But bringing Hal back was pure retrograde, and Guy had moved on too. And John was an obvious option - even before he got the ring again, he had been "rested" rather than moved on from the GL stuff. Besides, he's recognisable from the JL/JLU cartoon and bringing in an actual black character in a lead role is more desirable than turning a pre-existing character black just to avoid moving on from a Silver Age cast.

I disagree.

I have mixed feelings about this. I sometimes see retro for the sake of retro and I don't like it. I think comics is a subculture of entertainment/literature and it can have much more broad appeal. My comment on professional writers having this in mind I think really makes for better storytelling overall.

I also forgot to mention that I agree with Reboot about creators selling more than characters. Green Arrow sold like hotcakes cause Kevin Smith was on it. Not because of Oliver Queen. Same with the current GL title. Pick any GL man.....Alan Scott...Guy Gardener...Geoff Johns/Pacheco? Easy sell.

Part of the reason I think this current Legion book is under achieving is Waid/Kitson is a bigger draw than the sales indicate.

I just see a mentality in comics against new and against letting go of some of the more obscure parts of it. While the X-Men are a mess today if it wasn't for the New X-Men (&Cockrum! & Byrne...creator related sales) the X-Men would not be around today.

With all this said I think Geoff gets it. Sadly bringing back Hal I don't agree with. Nor leaving Hank Pym as YJ. That may have been more fanboy than logical thought. But ohwell.

Busiek did it with the Avengers. Waid is doing with this Legion. It's "all new" yet just like before. Nah. Geoff's JSA thank him has been really progressive. Hence if Hector is not Dr. Fate and we get Kent Nelson I may drop my fave title.

Well, sure, I knew that

Maybe. Old school DC had a lot of writers edit their own stuff. For example, Roy Thomas edited All-Star Squadron for, IIRC, most of the books existence. That was some great stuff. As for Johns, I was under the impression that he's an "editor" in the sense that he's making sure everything in IC fits together. There are other editors listed for individual books.

I've come to two fundamental truths of comics:

1. If it's good, people will find it and read it. Legion was not popular during the Levitz era because the Legion was a great concept; the Legion was popular because the story and the art were great. If you want a comic book to be great, find a great writer and a great artist.

2. Retro is going to kill comics, once and for all. When was the last great new character created? When was the last twist/exciting new plot that WASN'T a retcon or a death that lasted five minutes?

So how excited am I about Infinite Crisis? Not too much. I believe in the creators, but the amount of time being spent on continuity and questions of continuity have become absolutely masturbatory.

The last great ICON character from DC was Firestorm.

They got all progressive with it and the current Firestorm book is mere inches from death.

I agree about Firestorm.

Can't think of the last non-derivitive original character since him.

Hell, the only character to even stand on his own in the 90's besides Marvel and DC's big guns was probably the Ray, and his routes are very old.

the last X-Man I can remember was Gambit, and that was 1990.

Took me time to read this thread. Many great points were made...really we all have opinions.
I have been one to believe you can never have a sequal that lives up to the original. Marv Wolfman and George Perez put out a 12 issue run that forever changed the DCU. Years later we are now faced with another change...for the new generation.
With this change I have been wondering..after it is over can I walk away. Can a let go of comics..go cold turkey. Is it time for the old generation to step aside and make room for the new.
HELL NO!
I know I am not going to like changes that are to come..but I will try to be open minded. I will not agree to some of the deaths that come with a "Crisis" story but I look forward to a good story. I think we will get that..even when we hate continuity being played with..we the fans will always remember!!