Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes What's your opinion on the 5YL era ?

I'm rather curious of the forum's general opinion of the 5YL. I've tried to include all options since no period is either 100% or 100% bad, especially if it lasts this long.
For clarity, I'm including everything from the beginning up to Zero Hour since I have the same opinion on all parts of this era. If there's a significant split (say, you loved the main title but hated Legionnaires), vote your overall opinion and elaborate the separate parts in the thread.

For me, it's firmly in the "I don?t like most of it, but some parts are very good" camp.
My first Legion story was the Great Darkness Saga; I could understand everything and fall in love with the characters and the lore despite knowing absolutely nothing about its universe. After that there was no regular publishing of Legion stories in Italy, so when 5YL and a few "Who's who" were published I jumped in eager to finally get my Legion fix (ironically, a few years later)... and I could not understand anything.
I've been reading comics for more than 30 years now, and I've read every single Legion story published before 5YL, but when I try to get into this era I still can't understand what's going on. Reading the 5YL for me is just a chore most of the time.

There are parts I really like... Tenzil is awesome (only character where the 5YL one is my favorite version), there's some good worldbuilding (which to me still pales in comparison to the Baxter era, but still), there are a few individual moments that stand out, and on an intellectual level I appreciate the guts to do wildly different stuff... but that's about it.
I don't mind bleak tones or dark stories but it was just too much. I couldn't find most of the characters interesting, there is some serious character assassination for some Legionnaires, and don't even get me started on how that sprocking 9 grid paneling makes every single issue look the sprocking same.

What's your opinion on the 5YL era ? single choice
	Almost entirely positive! I can find negative things only if I look hard.
	I really liked most of it, but some parts are very bad.
	I really liked some of it, but no strong opinions on the rest.
	Just okay. I do not get what all the fuss is about.
	No strong opinions about it (or I did not read most of it)
	Not that great. I do not get what all the fuss is about.
	I do not like some of it, but no strong opinions on the rest.
	I do not like most of it, but some parts are very good.
	Almost entirely negative. I can find positive things only if I look hard.
Votes accepted starting: 02/14/21 05:10 AM
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Almost entirely negative.

Although I went for the "I really liked most of it but some parts are really bad" though don't think they were really bad, just not as good as other parts. Would appreciate if the wording could be modified, thanks.

Any particular part or storyline which you think isn't at the same level of the rest?


I don't know how to do that or if it's even possible... but thanks for the feedback.

I didn't read much of it, but what I did read seemed really unpleasant, as if the writer kind of hated what had come before and wanted to tear it all down.

And not in a deconstruct it to strip the characters / concept down and build them back up stronger than ever, but more 'I'm done with this sand castle, and now I'm gonna smash it apart.'

That's similar to how it felt to me. But I think it was more like, "I only like so-and-so era and so-and-so characters, and everything else is fair game."

5YL: love it or hate it, not much in between.

I really liked most of it. Some parts were so-so, a few were bad. Quiet Darkness dragged and Darkseid was unnecessary with everything else going on in the galaxy. Some things didn't hang together too well, but were more noticeable on the re-read than initially. I didn't like how all the characters were portrayed (notably Mysa) but that goes for any Legion version.

It began with loads of potential, storytelling depth and some great plotting/art.
4 issues in and DC torpedoed it editorially.
In among the fill in issues that formed part of the fallout from that, there were some great moments.
More uncertainly behind the scenes, resulted in glacial plotting of future arcs.
Giffen's departure allowed some okay issues with excellent art.
The last creative team produced better issues than I thought at the time.
It's still ahead of us in the rereads, but I don't recall thinking much of anything around Zero Hour.

Some if it is great, there are flaws, and some is only okay/ passable (but much better than a lot of later volumes).

I think looking back the FYL Legion was a precursor to the problems that plagued the New 52 and later Rebirth due to consistent editorial meddling and inability to decide on what was kept and what was removed, while the further attempts to make sense of things led to its demise. The Mordruverse issue was pretty much Flashpoint told in one issue and not nearly as grating. Stuff such as Bounty, the Proty-Garth retcon, and Sun Boy's eventual demise were horrid and/or simply cruel for the sake of cruelty. SW6!Inferno also happens to be one of the few Legionnaires I genuinely hate. I still cannot make sense of what happened with Jan and Shvaughn/Sean.

That said, it wasn't entirely bad. There was some great character development in regards to Jo, Tenzil, and Sussa, plus we had far more representation regarding Ayla and Vi even if they STILL couldn't outright be called lovers. The Tenzil issues will always be my favorites. Over on Legionnaires, Computo II's one of my favorites of the era. I enjoyed Dream Girl's redesign as a full figured "Auntie Mame" type of character and the fact nothing about her new physique was played for comedy against her. This era also gave me most of my favorite supporting characters like Ivy, Styx, Stiletto, and the Tartarus heroes.

The biggest draw for me regarding this era was the usage of Glorith as the main villain because it's been so rare that we'd have a villainess as the long standing arch rival. No I don't count Scott Snyder's Perpetua because I refuse to acknowledge the Dark Multiverse retcons as legitimate. Not only did Glorith manage to gain power through manipulation, but she also knew about everything which came before so the comics were acknowledging the universal reboot as a plot point.

What many find a flaw in this series, the obscurity of certain facts and the need to put significant effort in to understand what was going on, was something I really enjoyed about it. This wasn't a comic I could read through in a few minutes and think "that was good - what's next?". It took effort and thought and piecing together the puzzle pieces offered. The reward however (at least to my mind) was finding a world that had been thought out - what the ending of the Baxter era implied for the future, the implications of that, how it affected the existing characters, what might happen as a result. To me it fitted together and made sense, and rather than destroying a hopeful view of the Legion it showed the Legion's ultimate strength by rising up from the worst that had ever happened to them.

Note that I don't like obscurity for it's own sake. I am not a fan of Grant Morrison's style, to take an example, of pondering the imponderable and being airy-fairy vague and weird. I found Final Crisis incomprehensible, and even reading it again later knowing what the story was I didn't enjoy it. 5YL on the other hand drew me right in. I had read a number of Silver and Bronze age stories in my youth but this was my first foray into more modern Legion and it made me a fan. It made me go back and get all of the Baxter era and earlier and study them so I could get a better grasp of what was happening.

I imagine many would say the need to do that was poor writing and that is a valid argument. Nevertheless it worked for me as, while I didn't like every choice made, most paths made sense to me as a possible outcome - and the end result was still a bunch of heroes who banded together and fought for what was right, bringing light to a much darker universe.

It probably sounds weird because a lot of it was very destructive to the Legion's history, but 5YL was when I really learned to love the Legion. Up until that point I liked the old stuff from the 60s in a cheesy way, and I liked the Baxter stuff that I had read though I don't remember being super familiar with it, but I never really thought of any of them as individual characters until 5YL came along...I loved that vision of the future as being kind of dirty and banged up but still at its core optimistic, and the only place I had ever really read the same depth of relationships before was in stuff like Shade the Changing Man. Vi and Ayla's relationship, Vi and Rokk coming to terms with Venado Bay, Brainy and Laurel's whole 'two ships that passed in the night' thing....I loved that it wasn't Earth-centric, and I thought the issue where Earth died was actually really touching and if I recall I'm sure young Raz shed a tear over it at the time

It got me to go back and re-examine all those old stories with new eyes and it got me really interested in reading the stuff that I hadn't seen yet. To me, it took a massive nose dive in quality toward the end when they started just being superheroes again, but up until that point I thought a lot of it was pretty special

I really liked some of it, but no strong opinions on the rest was my vote.

Loved : Ultra Boy , Laurel Gand , just about everything with Shrinking Violet was great, Cosmic Boy , the ads , Matter-Eater Lad, The Subs grown up, Kono ,

Dislike : They roughed up Sun Boy something fierce (this might be my strongest negative opinion) , some of the artwork seemed rough , the disguise legion on the run, didn't exactly like Blok getting dismantled nor the issue 50 timberwolf transformation look (furball was okay),

My opinion is I thought the stories were well done.

However...

I'm thoroughly sick and tired of dystopian futures where everything is bleak and grim. A couple of interesting takes on it in scifi, okay. But the endless "It's all bad oh woe!" turns me off to no end. Legion was about a bright future. Not perfect by any means, but bright. This was all grim, gritty, and depressing.

"But Rick, it shows that no matter how bad, the spirit and will to live of hominids etal finds a way."

Yeah. Great. Yee freakin Haa.

After the nine hundred and thirty second take of this, meh.

So, i can see that the stories were mostly well done, the art was mostly well done (though not to my taste), and the writers had to work around some bad editorial choices.

I still wanna read a hopeful Legion.

Agreed 100 percent.

As much as I enjoyed how the 5YL stories and how reading them brought me back to the Legion, I have to say that I feel much the same. Enough with the doom and gloom. People can be bad but they can also be very very good and a future built on that aspect is something I would like to look towards.

I haven't been around these parts in a while, but I saw this thread and wanted to chime in . . .

I didn't care for 5YL when it was published but later came to admire it. Much of the preboot Legion's history was about growing up, and this series took the grown up life and slammed it into the Legion's collective face. They were no longer the darlings of the galaxy who had their own one-percent funded headquarters, '80s rock star looks, and interweaving subplots. They had to grow up and face unpleasant realities: war, loss of power, loss of political favor, separation of old friends, and even a loss of identity (represented by the abandonment of the old code names). 5YL was mainly about loss of innocence.

There were several aspects I didn't like, such as the nine-panel grids (blatantly copied from Watchmen, even though Giffen denied it), the upheavals caused by Crisis and the removal of Superboy from Legion history (which made an already complicated story much more complicated), and the Timber Wolf/Furball subplot, which seemed unnecessary. But I admired the more complex look at the Legion's world, and how several characters--including Vi and Cham--got to shine in new ways. The story line also barred no holds about the consequences of being a hero (the destruction of earth, the deaths of so many SW6 Legionnaires). Even though Sun Boy was one of my original favorite Legionnaires, I thought his demise made perfect sense and was a natural evolution of the character and his darker side. The Sean/Shvaughn change was difficult for many fans to accept, and I think that was the point. It was meant to challenge our settled notions of who these characters were and who they could be.

5YL was a challenging series and one that ultimately failed to live up to its full potential, but it was a very brave series in that it attempted to redefine beloved characters in a new way and to show the struggle of being a hero.

Good to see you here again, He Who.

I appreciate the even-handedness and eloquence of the case you make in favor of this era, but I still think the failures far outweigh the achievements. And while editorial is partly to blame, I think the lion's share of the blame has to go to the creators. Their arrogance, elitism, pretentiousness, ignorance, indecisiveness, and tendency for mean-spirited fan-windups all combined to destroy any hint of a solid foundation upon which to build their "challenging" work of art.

I'd go so far as to say that the superhero genre *simply cannot* support the level of ambitious deconstruction that the creators aimed for! There are several issues where the super-powered protagonists literally sit around doing nothing, because if they did, the story would be resolved too soon! And as for Erin, that fiasco of a subplot is simply transphobic bigotry and we all need to stop acting like it's anything other than that!

For me there was much to like in the 5YL era. I didn?t care for Giffen?s art or lack of costumes but this was my favorite title where the characters were aging right along with me. Characters became more 3 dimensional imho and it was never a five minute read. I cared about the characters and it was so cool that they had this long history that they were using and building onto. I?ve actually liked the various relaunches that came afterwards but they all came at the cost of throwing out all that history that I find as a big attraction to the title. I liked that Bendis in this latest launch used Computo and some other 5YL ideas in there.

I didn't think the Sean/Shvaughn change was transphobic. I think it was a somewhat clumsy attempt to depict a transgender character in a time when transgender was not as well understood as it is today.

That was my take on it, too, Malvolio. Transphobia means dislike of or prejudice towards transgender people, yet the message I took away from the story is that Jan loved Sean's spirit, whatever body he was in. The sad truth is that many transgenders are shunned by family members, friends, and their communities, so they reject themselves or hide who they really are, as Sean did. I thought it was very forward thinking for the book to address the issue at all. But, yes, it may have been clumsy considering how new the approach was.

I also think it's worth contextualizing the story. Almost all of the Legionnaires of 5YL had to experience some great loss. For Rokk, it was the loss of his power. For Dawnstar, it was her wings and her identify. For Jo, it was the love of his life. For Brin, it was his humanity. And for everyone, it was the planet earth. It can be argued that Giffen went to extremes to tear the Legion down, to strip them of the things they (and fans) held dear, but he was consistent.

Sorry. You're both wrong, and I'm right. There is NOTHING forward thinking about addressing an sensitive issue in such a fucking insensitive way as the creators did. Their phobia may not be as blatantly obvious as, say, the villain from the movie Silence of the Lambs, but in its own insidious, passive-aggressive way, it was JUST AS MUCH OF AN INSULT TO THE TRASNGENDER COMMUNITY!

Has anyone ever fucking considered that, in almost 30 years since that story was published, the creators have NEVER given us a fucking direct answer as to their real motivation?

And chew on this for a bit: How can it not be exploitive if the whole fucking reason they did it was because of Al Gordon's boorish suggestion: "Keep her alive because she's really a man."

Get your fucking heads out of the sand already, people!

Censor me if you want. Delete this post, rewrite, do whatever the fuck you want. BUT THE TRUTH WILL OUT, AND I SPEAK THE TRUTH!

Just don't private message me. I know some people are gonna be really pissed off about this post, AND I DON'T CARE!

I'm leaving this forum. I'm not even sure at this point if I'm going to be posting in the other forums anymore.

It's been a (mostly) nice 16 years. Bye.

Guys I agree with Ann in how badly that story handled Shvaughn Erin. If they're saying Shvaughn only transitioned just to get Jan's attention, then that IS transphobic. If anything, it makes Shvaughn appear super creepy and manipulative, like she was trying to catfish Jan all this time. If they're trying to tie that into a narrative about Shvaughn being transgender, it, it doesn't make Shvaughn sympathetic or paint a good picture of transgender people at all. It just makes her a creepy stalker who went as far to change her gender despite not identifying as it just to get a guy. And the fact that there were barely ANY narratives about transgender characters when that issue came out, baring possibly Wanda in Sandman and Coagula in Doom Patrol, Shvaughn made up like a third of the transgender characters in comics at the time. Do we know if anyone reached out to actual transgender men or women to help with this story's development? Were there any sensitivity readers?

Look, everyone, you don't have to consciously HATE transgender people to say or do transphobic things. Just like you don't have to consciously dislike Black people, or gay people, to say or do something prejudiced or homophobic. Look at the way Bendis depicts the new versions of the Ranzz twins. They were made Black to make this Legion more inclusive, and then gave them the most blatantly stereotypical backstory for Black characters. Do I think Bendis is a raging racist begging to join the Klan? No. But that doesn't change the fact his handling of Garth and Ayla's still gross.

I mean, look at me! Two years ago someone called me out on being racist about Cheshire from the Titans comics and I realized they were RIGHT. And I had to stop and rethink how I was handling things because how could I ever be a fan of Lian Harper if the things I'm saying about her mom are racist?

I've said this before, it doesn't matter if a person had good intentions when it comes to stuff like this. The means do not justify the end.

I'm going to agree with Ann & Sarky here: the entire Shvaughn situation was transphobic, no matter what the authors' intent was.

But I'm going to say that the Bierbaums' intent was pretty clear - You can find an interview where they talk about how they think Jan is gay. The fact is they made Shvaughn trans with the implication she only transitioned to get Jan's attention, and then had her detransition because they wanted him to be gay.

That in itself is transphobic.

I like the idea of Shvaughn being trans. I hate the way it was handled and everything that came after it.

I've never read any of the Shvaughn arc (and only snippets of the rest of 5YL) and maybe I'll keep it that way.

As the story arc is described here, it's neither the first or last time where romantic subplots in these stories took on seriously creepy overtones as consciousness was raised, by the marginalized group described, to the readers/public at large.

Nor is this just a phenomenon which affects only our own medium or genre. It's everywhere.

Unlike Sarky (whose points I largely grasp, though I'm unfamiliar with the Cheshire situation), I'm willing to take into account that a creator's intentions were good at an earlier point in time. But those creators ought to have the maturity now to grasp that they had faulty or incomplete information back in the day, and that they were in error. (It's a do-unto-others thing. I've been both the perpetrator and recipient of the "good intentions" defense... being both Jewish and a woman online for a long time now.)



I hope Ann comes back.

Yes, and that's why I agreed that the approach was clumsy.

Sarky makes a good point about the lack of representation of transgender characters, and I can see how any such a depiction can be taken as representative of an entire group, whether it was intended that way or not.

I don't wish to apologize for or excuse the depiction of Shvaughn/Sean, and I have no opinion as to whether the creators should admit errors. I was only trying to look at the story in the broader context of the 5YL narrative.

I'll concede that its creepy of Sean to change his gender in order to appeal to Element Lad, but people take extreme actions all the time in order to win the affection of someone, especially when that someone is a celebrity. It makes Sean a very insecure and perhaps mentally disturbed individual, but then I'm seeing him as an individual character, not a representation. I'm not saying it's wrong to see him/her that way, but I wonder if the intention was to make Sean sympathetic or appealing as a transgender, or to merely to show someone facing his/her worst nightmare and being unable to do anything about it. If writers create a character who has no flaws, the character comes across as too saintly, too unrealistic.

To me, the story was about Sean being stripped of everything he/she held dear, including a sense of identity (which was really a lie), just as most of the Legionnaires were, and still finding the courage to move forward. But I appreciate the very different interpretations others have.