Thoughts on the Legion reboot

[dvandom]

Breaking news from the Baltimore Comic-Con has it that the Legion of Super-Heroes won't just be restarting at a new #1 in a few month, it'll be rebooting the continuity. Behind the cut is a post of my feelings on the matter, pasted from Usenet.

     Count me among those who don't really mind the reboot.  In fact, for a
property like the Legion, a periodic reboot is probably a good idea, in part
because of what I see as being the Legion's core themes.

     1) The Legion of Super-Heroes is a bunch of kids out to save and/or
change the world.

     2) The world they live in is worth saving, and despite any flaws is a
better world than the one the readers live in.

     The "change the world" clause doesn't contradict point 2, because the
better the world is, the clearer the remaining problems become.  So there's
always something to fix, some societal attitude to realign, etc.

     As corollaries to these two points, there's two things you can do that
make it a LOT harder to write good Legion stories.

     1) Have the team grow up.

     2) Point out the seamy underside of the universe and how it's really all
quite doomed, and probably not worth saving.  The threat isn't some grand
villain's plan, it's the inherent corruption of society.

     Both of these things can lead to good stories.  But I claim that such
stories will not be good Legion stories, unless cast as alternate possible
future sort of stories, like Elseworlds or What Ifs.  A bunch of super-
powered kids in the Warhammer 40K setting may be fodder for some good
stories, albeit very short ones, but it's not the Legion.  And if they grow
up and become cynical, losing that youthful enthusiasm, well...that's not as
fatal a problem, but it's still not really the Legion.

     Unfortunately, people (writers and readers alike) often lose track of
these core themes of youth and optimism.  They want more serious stories, and
all too often that means growing up and finding out that the world sucks.
Always being young and hopeful isn't realistic, it isn't serious, it can't be
taken seriously.

     So.  What.

     There's a big wide world of serious literature out there.  If you've
grown tired of what makes the Legion what it is, stop reading it and go read
something else.  Don't try to turn the Legion into All Quiet On The Western
Spiral Arm.

     If it offends your sensibilities that Cosmic Boy never grows up, then
let him grow up, get married and retired.  Have Magnetic Kid take his place
for a few years.  And after him, some other of their countrymen.  Maybe
eventually Rokk's child can join.  The Legion is like Menudo in that respect:
youth is important, so cycle the roster.

     Or reboot before the temptation gets too great to start making the
future dark and perilous just to increase the sense of challenge.  It's set
in the sprocking FUTURE, after all, there's no real need to tie it to a real
life timeline.  A series can reboot annually and still be vibrant, as long as
you are more interested in the themes than the specific events.  Look at the
Final Fantasy games, for instance.  Each one is (as far as I know) a totally
separate world.  FFX is not a prequel to FFXI.  They share a lot of
characters, designs, themes and so forth, but each one is a reboot.

     So let Waid and Kitson start from scratch again.  As long as they get
the core ideas right, I don't mind putting a coda to the previous version of
the Legion and moving on to a new beginning.  Even if I *didn't* dislike
Abnett and Lanning's work of recent years, I wouldn't mind endcapping it.
Stories end, new ones begin, there doesn't have to be a big Shakespearean
ending where everyone dies to separate the two.

     Dave Van Domelen, dislikes Marvel's current halfassed take on
continuity, but a clean break like the Legion reboot is just fine.  Clear
discontinuities rather than a muddled mess.

Comments

[head58.livejournal.com]

But v4 rocked! For a while, anyway. And it violated the Legion ideal you put forth here in nearly every conceivable way. The team was all grown up AND there was all this darkness as the society had willingly chosen the Dominators over the Legion. It was the Subs shining hour! President Foucart! Rokk's Dinner with Mordru! Jo meeting Nabu! Trying to figue out who the hell Kent Shakespear was supposed to be!

For whatever reason, the post-Zero Hour Legion never really grabbed me. Even before the Abnett & Lanning stuff. I never really could put my finger on why. It was just missing the depth of relationships that I remembered from the old Giffen/Levitz eras. That and it seemed to be going out of its way to make things different from the preboot while still maintaining some of the same elements. Pretty inconsistent in how they balanced that I guess.

Well, this will be a good time to jump back into the Legion fandom, I guess. Every time I try to get out and all that.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Sure, early v4 had some great bits. And it's where I started reading Legion, so at the time I didn't really have a standard for comparison. But looking back, I'd have to say that while there were good stories there, they weren't really Legion stories. It was an extended What If that just sort of ground to a halt before the reboot, choking on its own premise. They were stories featuring characters and settings from the Legion, but they weren't *Legion stories*. Heck, a rather large percentage of the good ones didn't involve the team at all, just a few individuals off on their own business.

[aberrantangels]

They lost me with issue 7, when I said to myself "Now, in addition to explaining what happened during the Five Year Gap, they've got to retcon what happened before it. One or both of those things is going to get shortchanged, and they're going to continue blithely referring to past events as if we-the-audience knew all about them. And I've already started to wonder why the nass I should care, and I can't seem to answer that question to my own satisfaction." So I put the series down, backed away from it slowly, and didn't return until the summer after ZH, when penguinzero had one of my Illuminati University characters and one of his start waxing rhapsodic at another of my characters over how cool the coldbooted Legion was. And then, not long after I'd picked up all the issues back to the #0s, they sent half the team to the 1990s and rapidly lost me again. If I return to the 30th century any time in the foreseeable future, I think it'll be via TPBs.

[jim-smith.livejournal.com]

What I don't get--and I freely admit to knowing virtually nothing about the Legion--is why a reboot is needed right here, right now. The reasons for the Zero Hour reboot, as laid out in interviews and such, were apparent even to me--the kids had grown up, their teenage clones had their own book, continuity between the 20th and 30th centuries was shot to hell, etc. I was under the impression that they fixed all this in 1994 (in fact, wasn't Mark Waid one of the writers involved in that reboot?), so what happened? I actually picked up an issue a few months ago, and the kids are still kids, the future is still nicer than the present (from what I saw), and things seem basically stable.