Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes I think Lo3W's suffered...

The Legion core doesn't appear to number enough to keep a monthly title regularly above the current cancellation watermark of ~30k per issue. They need something to generate more of a draw. Don't ask me what that can be - the REBELS series has been great IMO so far but can't get arrested, while Marvel's rip off of the Legion, Guardians of the Galaxy, are cruising along in their own title? Go figure...

Really? Maybe I should go buy that.

I always find it sad that something drawing in 25k or 30k readers a month is officially a "failure." If I thought that one-third that number of people were checking out my work every month, I'd probably keel over from sheer ecstasy.

If they want a bigger audience, they need to get up off their rears and move outside the traditional venues to get it. If they want a sustainable fanbase, they should start with trying to engage people who aren't already immersed in the culture.

I don't care about the names, they're just indicative of the maturation process.

And that's what I need in the Legion or any story that I read or see.

Stories need to get me somewhere, the characters somewhere.

With an adult population, the growth doesn't have to be so reflected in the 'look' of the characters.
Part of 'children' is that they are constantly changing their appearance as well as their personalities and knowledge and experience.

The reboot Legion was growing and getting older and I loved it.
Just look at Dreamer.
She went from a silly ditz of a girl to a hardened military survivior and commander.

I hated the change after over 10 years to something that was, in my eyes, a huge set back for those characters.

I'm fine with going back to the post teen Legion and there's a huge amount of time that can happen before they make drastic changes to them, but change will have to come.

Change is life.
Life has to have growth.

Unless you're Peanuts or Archie.

And I agree, forget about the fanbase.

Marvel didn't care about the X-Men's fanbase when they reinvented them, back in the 70's, I think.
I remember being married with a little one then, and I was so surprised at the new team.
They were almost ALL new characters.

Yeah, forget the old farts and just do what needs to be done.

Oh, yes. This is what I've been saying for years. The scale of comic sales compared to other media, when combined with the realization that the "fanbase" is aging and unpleasable, should clue the big companies in that the only way to significantly increase sales is to stop playing to the current fans. I can think of many ways this change could go, but all of them offer potential sales far higher than what they currently have.

But we are not unpleasable. We were fine until the did something stupid and removed Superboy. Things started going to hell then. Questionable art at times, the heart of the legion, the connection with a kid from the 20th century ripped from the legion and replaced with a "Inspired by all the old hero's of the 20th" idea that had no real heart.

Then, to add to that, rather than have the characters grow into the new forms, the threw them out there.

And DC's frustration with us not accepting wholesale changes to the team was evident in their treatment of the readership with 50.

Sorry, I don't blame the fanbase for this, i blame kneejerk slapdash bandaids on a situation that was caused by them in the first place.

You can forget the fanbase if you like, call us unpleasable, dismiss us...but without us, whats the prognosis for a sustainable book?

zero

my opinion, anyway.

I agree with Rick 100%. The problem lies with DC editorial and the crap writers trying to rewrite history with their latest continuity spin than with the readership.

SUPERBOY'S LEGION's success is proof of that. Tell good, well drawn stories with or without the previous continuity and you can please the most people.

Even most of the complaints (mine included) of the re-established continuity is the useless add-ons and unexplained changes for changes sake.

It's pretty simple tell great stories and they will come.

I'm not even sure what "pleasing the fanbase" means. And how has the constant reboots been accomplishing that in the past twenty years? If anything maybe they need to stop and listen to the fanbase for a change instead of shoving their crap down everyone's throats and expecting old and new fans to jump for joy.

Absolutely. Superboy's Legion captured the wide-eyed enthusiasm and optimistic future that I expect of my Legion of Super-Heroes fare, and yet still included some adult 'dark' moments (the death of Colossal Boy, Cosmic Boy losing an arm).

Made all the more galling by Didio constantly blaming the fandom for the state of affairs, as if *we* are the ones making the editorial decisions that have dropped the book's popularity, and saying that we *have* to buy whatever they produce or they won't even bother making a new Legion book, putting the onus on us to reward them for bad behavior.

Does any other company have the balls to do this? Does Coca-Cola put out ads that say, 'Buy our crappy new Lime Vanilla Coke or we'll stop making *all* Coke!'

Look at "new coke". Coke screwed the pooch with that, and instead of blaming the customers, got smart real fast and went back to the one that people wanted to begin with.

A lesson there for some folks.

(snip)

Nightcrawler wrote:

Quote

...It's pretty simple tell great stories and they will come...

Nightcrawler, and Rick (and whomever) I'm sorry if my comments sounded harsh. That wasn't my intent. Nor was it my intent to put the problems with keeping the series afloat squarely on the shoulders of long-term fans.

However, I respectfully submit that it's not that simple.

Look at it this way: I wasn't a Legion fan in the womb. (I'll be impressed if somebody surfaces on this board who has outside verification that they were, however. ) I was a casual consumer of comic books until I was fourteen or fifteen years old. That's pretty much when I made the crossing from casual reader into capital-F Fan.

I stayed that way into my mid-twenties, then kind of wandered off for reasons that are better in a diary than in this thread.

There are millions of people out there that DC makes no attempt to reach. They are non-readers that the company doesn't bother to try and make into casual readers. Without casual readers, there's no seeds being planted that would create future fans.

With a huge-selling "franchise" like Batman, I presume it doesn't matter so much. Pop entertainment is so saturated with the character(s) that it's actually easier for most of us to consume the product in some fashion than it is for us to avoid it. So there's maneuvering room there. If something in the "franchise" goes through a downturn sales-wise, it's still not in imminent danger of comepletely disappearing.

The Legion doesn't have that kind of maneuvering room for the same reason that other worthy, but less familiar "franchises" don't. The companies try over and over again to get more blood from the same stone they've been squeezing for decades. It's frustrating to me, because there was a time when I had no idea that these characters existed, and then I fell in love with them. Then I forgot about that for a long time, only to literally find the TV show by accident and have that door opened all over again.

And I'm about the most ordinary person you can imagine, so I would be pretty damn annoyed with anyone at DC who tried to tell me, "Well, the average person doesn't want this. They never will. It's not worth our time to try and reach them."

And that's what bothers me the most. So much potential just being wasted.

Uh, well... I guess that would be true if I consumed stories for the same reason that I consume soft drinks.

I don't want to blame the fans. It's not really even an individual problem. Okay, I've certainly encountered individual comic fans who are personally antagonistic.

But what I mean is... if there was a healthy rate of turnover in the readership, the majority of Legion readers wouldn't remember Superboy in the Legion.

Individual fans tend to prefer a series as it was when they first saw it. If a series (and the industry) were healthy, you'd expect those "first saw it" points to be spread across the series' publication history.

What actually happens: If a comic loses popularity for a while, there's a period when few new readers come on board. Okay. Then, instead of trying aggressively to market to new readers and get the audience size back up, they decide to market to the demographic they currently have. This reinforces the problem, as said audience includes few new readers. You're marketing to the tastes of older readers who've been with the series longer. Some of them will consider that the series got bad, but felt compelled to keep buying. It's those readers who are the most problematic. They have increasingly fixed ideas about what the series should be, but keep reading it when it doesn't live up to those ideals, aggravating themselves. And also, by continuing to buy, they create a market for exactly the books they don't want to see.

Also, over time, fans sometimes become the creators. This generally means that the writers are older than the average reader, with an earlier coming-on point. They may not see eye-to-eye with the audience. Rarely, it seems, do such writers supply the moderate rate of change the fans often ask for. They seem to be either like Johns (consciously retro) or the Bierbaums (consciously radical and new). These are the hallmarks, not coincidentally, of fan fiction: most is either slavishly emulative or jarringly alternate.

Most comic series should be reinvented for every generation, if not more often. And some should just be done once and end.

"Uh, well... I guess that would be true if I consumed stories for the same reason that I consume soft drinks."

I consume them for the basic reason...enjoyment. Don't you?


That's why i read comics, for the enjoyment.

(snip)

Then let me rephrase that:

I don't absorb a fictional adventure story in the same manner that I absorb a soft drink.

If I consume a soft drink, I enjoy it and then it's gone. Even with "pop" entertainment, there's usually something of it remaining with me even after the initial consumption. (Assuming it's any good.)

And Lord knows, you can make a sound argument that DC wants to market most of their product like Coca Cola markets soft drinks, but even at that level they're doing a piss-poor job. Again, except for a scant few flagship characters, they don't really try.

So even if you could argue that, say, Threeboot is like "New Coke," it's as if they manufactured the soft drink, left 80% of it in various warehouses or venues where hardly anyone ever goes, didn't bother to advertise it on a mass-scale, didn't price it well, and then shrugged their own laziness and hidebound practices away; grumbling that they really tried hard but nobody was interested.

Sorry, guys, but I'm one of the 'old farts'.
(The oldest one here, I think.)

I think that if the Legion is going to survive so that my grandchildren can enjoy it, DC has to forget what I want and just go with drawing in a new generation.

I don't 'blame' us or think we're unpleaseable.

I just think that time moves on and if my grand daughter and her friends aren't brought in soon, then who will read the Legion?

I loved watching 'the Avatar' on NTOON.
I tried to talk about it with the kids at my middle school this year.
They said, "The bald kid with the arrow on his head? NOBODY watches that anymore."

I don't know.

(And they've really only 'rebooted' the Legion twice in 50 years, right? The other changes were just tweeks and skips, right?)

but, lets look realistically at "reboots".

They seem to be good for bringing in new readers for a few months to a year, year and a half tops. then, the young kids that they want to bring in are off to other things, and the "New" continiuity is really the "old" continuity to any new readers after that.

Its good for a temporary bump but thats about it.

Now look at GL. it wasn't a reboot, it was an organic story in the regular line *if a miniseries can be called that* that updated the character, brought in new readers, and did NOT jettison the history. I may have tweaked it,but it wasn't a wholesale *that was the old universe, this is the new one, here's the line, do not cross".

and GL is argueably the best book out there right now, and it is the MAIN book, not some event thing, even with Blackest Night. Sinestro Corps war was a self contained storyline in the two GL books, with the best talent, and it tore it up.

I think that way works much better, with a good growndwork buildup, create anticipation and have a good core creative team.

Its really what Legion needs right now.

To me, the five years later, then the waid, then the other Waid didn't take because of that. The changes were wholesale, radical, and didn't flow from the book itself.

GL was (from what I've heard) by all/most accounts a revival done right - rescuing a long-trashed character and that character's history.

there have been plenty of characters who were resuscitated in a less-than-successful manner; it isn't enough just to revive a character in a half-@r$ed way. Alan Moore revamped Swamp Thing and Marvelman/Miracleman in the 80s and made it look easy - and suddenly everyone thought they could pull it off. They couldn't.

If you're going to revive an existing property, you need to successfully deal with its history, one way or the other. Not everyone can be an Alan Moore and jettison/revamp everything; it's a much wiser course of action to figure out what worked previously and breath new life into it.

If the sole intent is to make something to appeal to the newer generations at the expense of history, then make something new. Threeboot ultimately could have been called anything else, with character names + costumes changed, and it could have easily been Generic Team Z from any company.

Let a Legion book really be a Legion book... or don't publish one at all. If, in the 80s, DC had decided the only way for Superman to survive in print was to make him Rambo, then we'd be better off without a Superman. Regardless of Waid's intentions, in retrospect it's pretty clear from right out of the gate that he was so far removed from Legion in all but name, that he was wasting his time - and ours (but he got paid for it).

He has the right to complain that Johns' Neoclassic Legion undercut him, sure - but it wouldn't have undercut him if he was delivering a Legion book in the first place.

The most annoying aspect of Superboy is that Geoff changed him overnight in terms of body and personality. He was a fast-talking cocky, Michael J. Fox type one moment -- then a beefy farmboy who seemed unsure of himself. It's like two different characters.

And I think it's time he got a proper costume.

So, what's being said is that the Legion stories have to keep all(or most of) the original Legion history and be written for the 20+ audience in order to be correctly constructed to bring in new generations of readers to keep the numbers high enough for publication?

I don't know.
That sounds wrong, to me.

I don't know about GL.
It got screwy for quite awhile and I've only gone back a little.
I dislike the Sinestro Corp and all of the involved storylines, so it's not a good example for me.

I DO see that we haven't really gone back to the 'old' Superman from the 1930s(?).

For one, we have a very active and popular Alex Ross series of publications with a reconfigured world lineup and consequences.

We have a totally out of continuity TV show, 'Smallville', that's been going for a number of years, 7-8-9?.

We've had 'Lois and Clark' before that, which was pretty popular.

Not to mention the Superman movies which were also different from the comics (some of which is now IN the comics).

And New Krypton is certainly not the Kandor I grew up with!

How can we say that reboots don't work when these do?

I DO think that changes should flow naturally, but the new Superman and the new Batman and the new Wonder Woman suggest differently (the reboot characters, which we still have, today.)

I just think that the reboot Legion would have worked IF they had had at least one of the Supers.

The rebooted DCU wanted to get rid of all the extra super Kryptonian characters in Superman's life.
They 'diluted' him.
~ An argument often used here to keep the Legion alone in it's time period, no matter how unrealistic that is.

I guess that problem is going to be rectified.
I hope it works.

I hold that trying to make Superman the absolute only Kryptonian was missing the point. Phantom Zone villains, etc. can be quite useful for storytelling. What they should have done to make Superman "unique" was to not allow anyone else to wear the S. I feel THAT diluted Superman, that these characters with less connection to him were now allowed to be Super.

Wasn't there only two who wore his identical S ~ Superboy, who was Superman as a kid and Supergirl, his cousin?

The gal with invulnerability, of a sorts, was in the Legion academy, the insignea was on her poncho, which she usually didn't wear.
But she was a descendent.

Then there was Superman Red and Superman Blue, but they were Superman, just split in two.

Oh, and the Superpets.
LOL!!!

Maybe, your point is well taken!

Who else wore the same red S in the old days?

In the now days, Conner wears a version of it and soon, Lar will.
And Kara.
Who else?

Recently, as I was looking at a lot of old threads about the ups and downs of the Legion, the above comment from Rick really stood out to me.

While, with a decade's hindsight, it's now arguable whether the Retroboot really was or was not The Real Legion, I don't think that's here nor there. It was the Preboot characters, or the closest approximations DC could manage at that time.

I've said many times in recent years that the Postboot/Post-Zero Hour Legion has really grown on me, and I still feel that way, and for a whole generation of fans *that was The Real Legion.* I'm not trying to discount any of the Postboot's merits or disrespect it's biggest fans.

But I also now believe that the closest thing to a sure-fire way to have a substantially selling Legion relaunch is to somehow continue the story of the Preboot characters.

The Retroboot is widely considered a failure. I agree to a point, but I also consider it a qualified failure.

Try, try again, DC.

^What the lady above me said.

Thanks, Kid!

I could already tell a long time ago that you're gonna go far.

Now I'm even more certain of it.

Cheers.