Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Colu's Technology

I have been reading some articles about technology lately, and have been wondering about Colu's portrayals in various versions of the Legion. It seems like each version was very different (with the exception of the Threeboot and cartoon versions which were similar because they were in parallel). I have a feeling each version was influenced by the latest theories and science-fiction of the day, as we have progressed in technology very rapidly since LOSH debuted. Which version do you like the best and why? Also feel free to share any thoughts about each version.

There was a story during the Reboot in the Showcase title where Brainy (stranded in the 20th century) teamed up with Vril to take on Brainiac. It had an interesting bit where Brainy's shocked to find Colu of 1,000 years ago isn't that much different. This ended up being a result of the Coluans, in reaction to Brainiac's crimes, focusing more on theoretical science than practical science in the intervening millennium. I thought it was an interesting way to explain how most of the space-faring races in the DCU are more or less on par with 31st century tech.

The first story from L.E.G.I.O.N. springs to mind, with Kitson showing that technology does not necessarily bring any sort of freedom.

Fascinating topic Emily - and merits more time than I have today. For the moment, a few comments, just going on memory:

Superboy's Legion had the most advanced and creative version of Colu. The Coluans (Brainiac 5's parents were the only ones we met) were truly advanced, benign beings. Instead of throwing their mental weight around the galaxy, as Coluans tend to do in other versions, they essentially hid from other beings. I'd have to reread the issue to get the precise description of their self-described purpose in life.

We didn't see much of the original Colu (through Levitz era) and encountered very few other Coluans - the elders who warned Brainy against practical research (IIRC), one of whom looked like Ghandi, and various people who griped about the failure of technology in the wake of the Magic Wars.

Reboot Colu was even more pedestrian in terms of behaviour and architecture. They did invent things that other races couldn't, like a prison inside a sun, by which they profited financially. Their political representatives were haughty and condescending. Brainiac 4 was a sociopath. They did help the Earth with the Robotica invasion, primarily from their own belief that machinekind could not be permitted to surpass biological intelligence, and they sent Sharn Nux to sabotage any effort of Brainiac 5/the Legion to come to terms with the robots. The Sleepnet was pretty cool, but I don't think we saw too much else of their tech.

In the threeboot, we got a Colu that was once again profit-oriented and so far advanced in data technology that they had turned their planet into a giant hard drive, or something like that, and shrunk themselves to make room. Unfortunately, we never got to see this version further developed; I think it had great potential to illustrate a higher intelligence which retained a sense of practicality (business) and compassion/love (reference to singing a lullaby). It didn't match the Superboy's Legion version for way-out-there thinking, but I believe a writer could have done a lot with it story-wise.

The Johnsboot showed a Colu addicted to information, uniformly dressed, wired and possibly distracted enough to permit Brainiac 5 to take over as supreme leader for a limited time. They all dressed the same and were all bald. There were small children present but everyone seemed pretty robotic.

Retroboot Colu is actually the most vague in my mind, despite being the most recent version, so I'll refresh my memory before further comment.

to add, Lyle and Brainy had an argument on this once. Lyle scoffed at the Coluans' inability to translate their research into practical uses, while Brainy was shocked at Lyle's inability to appreciate the beauty of theory.

I want to elaborate on my original post, about the versions of Colu being so different due to rapid advance of technology in the almost 50 years since Legion's debut. I kind of want to go decade by decade and see if we can parallel the technology/science fiction to what was going on LOSH. Did Colu originate in the larger Superman family books?

Well, yes. Remember that the original Superman villain Brainiac came from Colu, which was already more technologically advanced than Earth, at the time. The time in question was the late 1950s.

I have the notion that Colu joined the United Planets almost entirely to retard their progress, engaging in the political equivalent of industrial sabotage to keep the other races from dashing too far forward, too fast, not for entirely sinister purposes, but because they were intimately aware of how dangerous unrestrained advancement could become. The Science Police's remit to control restricted technology seems to be part and parcel of this. Who decide what technology is to be 'restricted?' The UP, probably at the urging of the Coluan delegation, who can produce reams of research as to how this latest pleasure-stimulating wirehead tech will turn entire societies into helpless junkies, or how this time-saving personal wormhole technology will weaken spacetime in the regions in which is used, leading to all sorts of horrible extra-dimensional incursions.

Various other people would resent the SP (and, by extension, the UP, and Colu) for acting to suppress their inventions and research into potentially dangerous technology, like nanofabricators that self-replicate (gray goo!) or a viral vector inoculation that spreads like a disease, or some other 'great idea' that could go horribly, horribly wrong.

The 'meta' context for this would be to 'explain' why 30th century technology isn't crazy advanced, compared to even the advanced technology used by people (generally super-villains or heroes) in the 20th century, because Justice League teleporters and whatnot have little-known long-term dangers (and not just to their users, but perhaps to space time itself!), limiting them to something a small group of people can use from time to time, without too much whackiness ensuing, but could never be scaled up for commercial use by millions or billions of people without there being an earth-shattering Ka-Boom, at some point. And so the League can teleport to their satellite, and yet, by the Legion's time, when you'd expect technology to have progressed to allow everyone on the planet to teleport around the galaxy on vacation, the Legion itself can't even reliably teleport anywhere!

Set, nice two-birds-with-one-stone explanation for Colu's motives for joining the UP and explaining the slow or no advance of tech.

To look at how depictions of Colu change relative to our contemporary technology presents the problem of not having much information about Coluan tech, apart from what we see through Brainiac 5 himself. We can probably assume that he's representative of Coluan technology. In the Adventure era, there were a lot of medical devices that he developed or worked with; sometimes it seemed that he was the team doctor. Were the 1960s an age particularly focused on medical advances? A number of drugs, like tranquilizers, were introduced in the 1950s, but big advances like the first heart transplant were in the late '60s; the MRI was early '70s.

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for, Emily?

Yes, Fat Cramer that is a perfect start. I also want to note that people in the USA in the 1950s would be a bit scared of technology because of it's use by the USSR to advance it's goals in the Cold War (both real and imaginary). While we were obviously developing technology before the Cold War, it got accelerated due to competition with USSR. The USSR for their part not only was reaching to the stars for military reasons, but ideological ones as well. If you go to nostalgic films and websites, you will see the high hopes citizens of USSR had for the future.

At a certain point, the US started looking to the stars with more hope as well, as seen from "futuristic" furniture in the '50s and '60s. One Youtube commentator thinks it coincides with Sputnik, but I am not entirely sure.

Thinking more about this question, I think it's not just our contemporary technology that may affect how Colu/Coluans and the 30th century in general is depicted, but the mood of our era as well. The Legion came to prominence in the later 60s, not just the moon landing and Star Trek, the whole society was changing. It wasn't always looking bright - the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Vietnam, youth culture itself represented a danger to some sectors of society - but it was a pretty positive time.

The 70s were much darker; major recession, the failure of the Vietnam misadventure, energy crisis - and it was a spotty era for the Legion. There were many technological advances - personal computers started appearing, Voyager was launched to explore the outer planets - but they took a while to reach through the general population.

I'd have to go over the Legion stories from that period, but as I recall from the Archives re-read, we had a mix of futuristic and everyday technology. It was sort of muddy rather than coherent future and I wonder if that was because of the writers or if the mood of the time played a role. Just tossing out an idea - a sort of muddy idea....

That is a really cool idea. I know most of the writers (at least initially) were Silent Generation, so many of them probably just wanted to sell comics and everyone to get along. I do have to give credit to Curt Swan and the other early artists for at least keeping the fashions up to date. We do have a weird dichotomy in the Big Two's respective universe, in which the super-hero teams have access to futuristic technology first.

Some great ideas here - Set posed a very intriguing question, and I think the Coluans are indeed smart enough to realize that unchecked technological progress isn't all good.

FC and Emily pose great ideas as well, on how the depiction of technology in the comics was likely influenced by real-life attitudes...