Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! DnA's Greatest Contribution to the Legion Mythos...

The one thing I truly loved about their run was this. They made Garth "Lightning Lad" Ranzz important to the Legion again. Yeah sure he was a founder but besides that some versions of the Legion Garth was just another Legionnaire. Rokk was the perfect leader, Saturn Girl and Brainy were always the brains and Ultra Boy was always the wild child but who was Garth really? DnA made Garth the one who heroically sacrificed himself to stop the mad god Jan and get the lost legionnaires home, he became the symbol of everything a legionnaire could hope to be. (Though I was less that thrilled when they killed him off but Garth has died before, LOL). Then they brought him back to Imra and the Legion potentially as the most powerful of all Legionnaires no less. For that I will always be grateful. Heck he and Imra actually share the last panel on DnA's run so while not my all time favorite version it is far from the worst.

IMO DnA were the BEST and WORST thing to happen to the reboot Legion.

They definitely saved us from cancellation and about 2 years of the most mind-numbingly idiotic stories that were the PMS era with their amazing work on Damned, Rifts, Lost and Worlds! Four fantastic stories that made me excited and proud to be a Legion fan again! If they'd stopped there they'd probably be my favourite Legion writers of all time.

... But they didn't. Instead they stayed on the regular series and in the most sudden and abrupt downturn in creative quality I have ever seen in my 15 years of reading comics by issue #4 or #5 this comic was back at its PMS levels of banality. And in fact, by the time the title was finally wrenched from their cold, dead hands the level of its banality would be lower than it was during the PMS years. MUCH, MUCH lower! Such was my dislike of their run that by the end of it I not only hated "their" Legion - I was starting to hate *everything* Legion!

Thank God Mark Waid and Barry Kitson came along and saved me before that hatred took hold! There are still a lot of great Legion back-issue stories out there I want to one day read and own!

As for their greatest contribution to the Legion? Hmmmmm...

Probably their Brainiac 5 and Wildfire. That is the first and only time I have ever liked those 2 characters.

Finally someone brings up The Oversight Watch! Yay!
I liked the concept a LOT if not the actual execution. They were sort of a 30th century Suicide Squad since they were all former villians (or at least adversaries).

http://www.legionworld.net/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=000883#000001

I've always thought the Legion's era should have some sort of adult Justice League types around and the OW filled the void for a moment.

Oh...and SuperLadKid, her name was Twine

DnA's greatest contribution to the Legion were new villians. Compared to the PMS creations of Domain, White Triangle and Tangleweb, we got some real heavies like The Blight, Robotica, CREDO, Omniphagos and the Progenitor - all of which made for interesting, intense conflict for the Legion. In hindsight, the DnA train lost momentum when villians used were off the DC shelves, such as Ra's al Ghul, Universo, and Darkseid. DnA's obvious talent was in their sci-fi scripting ability, which got lost in the DC Universe (tie-in this character, somehow) quagmire.

Equally impressive but probably less memorable was how they SAVED a lot of Legionnaire characters and probably the book from cancellation itself. Dreamer, Monstress,
Brainiac, Wildfire, Chuck Taine, Ferro, and Livewire all became better characters than when DnA inherited them. I place DnA in the top three in Legion history for scripting behind Levitz and Shooter!

I never want to see anyone post on this forum again with the words Credo or Progenitor EVER AGAIN! Those stories flat-out annoyed me. I was soo glad to hear that they were getting replaced right around the end of that progenitor arc.

I'd say that those guys ended up doing more harm than good to the overall mythos. Sure they did well when they took over but I think that a lot of people could have done well if they took over at the point that they did. Also, I can't say for sure if they saved the title from cancellation, because look at who's the editor-in-chief. You think he'd let his baby go bye-bye without a fight?

So long as the stories are decent and the sales are moderate, I think we'll continue to have LSH for a while. In some respects, I'd think that it would be easier to continually reboot a title (until you get it right) versus starting a brand new idea, because you've typically got a built-in audience who will at least look at the title for 6-8 issues.

But...but...I liked the Credo. And the Legionnaires were "kewl".

I did hate Progenitor though.

You took the words right out of my mouth, Kid Q.

Like them or not, DnA deserve some credit for extending the life of the franchise by five years. They didn't have the creative freedom to reboot but nevertheless did a fine job remolding the cartoonish Archies into characters and storylines with weight.

I don't mean to be cynical, but it's not clear that WaK will do any better in the end.

Hmm... for my money, for every character they improved upon (which generally consisted in getting them to some reasonable semblance of what they'd been before the reboot], there's another one they made worse or (at best) completely ignored. It was to the point that by the end of the run, half the team could have been killed and it wouldn't have had any emotional impact for me.

And I'm actually not certain that "saving" the book from cancellation was necessarily a good thing. Rather than giving us yet another in a series of failed revamps, and thus contributing to the general perception of the Legion as something that has to be majorly overhauled every few years, it might very well have been better for the health of the title in the long term to have let it lie dormant for a few years.

Of course, then we would never have gotten

Legion revamps have happened in continuity before and generally they were just fine. We went from the Adventure era to the Cockrum era with nary a bump and the Legion achieved greatness. I think I've stated before how much I disliked Staton's Legion but shortly afterward came Giffin's first run on the Legion and it then achieved one of it's golden ages.

That Damned Legion was a pretty good story (like a Legion horror story) and started DnA's run pretty darned well but I'm in the camp that believes they could have just gone on with the regular title without a reboot and we'd have been just fine. All the stories of Lost and Worlds could have been done in the regular 12 issues a year with an Annual or two format and I would have been quite happy with things.