Nerve Than a Toothache

On the Legion World boards, intrepid correspondent Exnihil recently announced that he'd be visiting the Wizard World Philadelphia convention, and that he'd ask a question of Dan DiDio at the DC panel if anyone could come up with a good one. He picked this question from intrepid correspondent Fat Cramer:

I would like to know what the criteria would be for the Legion to get its own comic. Fan support? Sales of the Adventure book? Gut feeling? A creator begging to do the book?

and, after the panel, reported the following response:

I did ask Fat Cramer's question, and was told that fan support is essential to bringing the Legion back to the forefront. DiDio likened this period to the post Adventure period, where the Legion played backup to Superboy until enough noise was made to give them their own title. He said that although he always sees the Legion as having a presence in the DCU, this "second feature" status will continue for a period. I followed up, asking how long he anticipated that period being and he said... very discouragingly... "could be a year, could be infinity".

Well then.

Let's first of all get some bookkeeping out of the way. We're assuming for the purposes of this discussion that Exnihil is an accurate reporter. We have to: none of the other convention reports mention this particular question, so there's no independent verification [Edit: actually, there is! A comment on the Legion Omnicom's post about the weekend's cons]. Let's also stipulate that it would be silly for DC to put out any comic book that they didn't think would sell. And let's not completely dismiss the possibility, despite the complete lack of any evidence for it, that DC does in fact have big plans for the Legion but DiDio isn't prepared to talk about them yet.

(Aside: I'm not one of the many who are calling for Dan DiDio to be fired. I don't have the expertise or the information to make a call like that, and I won't pretend that I do. There is almost certainly a lot more to his job than any of us understand. Plus, he's done a lot of stuff right. Wednesday Comics? Great idea!)

Now, a lot of people who will be reading this know a lot more about the social history of the Legion than I do, so if I'm wrong about this I hope they can correct me. But my understanding is that the Legion was turfed out of Adventure back in the day not because of poor fan interest but because of editorial jiggery pokery. (Just like now, in other words.)

Look: sales for the threeboot were reasonably strong. Or, rather, they were reasonably strong until DC shifted its focus to the retroboot Legion and left the threeboot all dressed up with no place to go. Sales for the retroboot-related arcs of JLA, JSA and Action have also been quite good. And Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds has sold very well. So if there's no Legion comic right now (and there isn't), I don't buy it that low sales is the reason.

For that matter, the Legion has been one of DC's reliable-selling titles for basically the last fifty years... and now DiDio wants us to believe that DC doesn't know if the Legion will ever be able to carry their own title again?

It doesn't really make sense, does it? Geoff Johns just spent, what, more than two years of his life putting together the sequence of events that culminates with FC:L3W #5. (Well, two years for the Legion-related stuff, anyway.) And that was all to set up... an eight-page backup in a Kon-El comic?

I hope the audience at this panel had their hip boots on.

But none of this is what annoys me. People who are representing corporations tell us stupid stuff all the time and try to get us to swallow it; it's absolutely par for the course. DC's position on the Legion doesn't make sense? So what else is new.

What bugs me is that DiDio is implying that this is all our fault and that it's up to us to save the Legion. Like, if we don't run out and buy ten copies each of the new Adventure, the Legion will never have their own comic again. Oh no! If only we had been better fans! Matters should never have come to such a pass! Please, Dan, tell us how we can help the Legion! It would actually be quite amusing if it wasn't so obnoxious.

Seriously, I'm not going for it at all. I will not permit Dan DiDio to play hardball with me. It wasn't me who made Legion continuity what it is today, and it wasn't any of you either. Our consciences are clear. It certainly wasn't me who pulled the rug out from under the threeboot and LSH31C. No, for those contributions, you have to look to DiDio and his coworkers and predecessors.

So don't let DiDio snow you. Here are some things that I believe to be facts. I hope you will use them to make the purchasing decisions that seem good to you.

1. We cannot exert our will on DC Comics. They're going to publish exactly what they decide to publish. We can influence them, maybe, if we're vocal enough, but the final decision is always theirs. We can't make them do anything.

2. Voting with your dollar is a poor way of sending a message. If Adventure sells well, is that because of Superboy II or the Legion or Geoff Johns or Francis Manapul or the quality of the comic book? If it sells poorly, is that because of Superboy II or the Legion or Geoff Johns or Francis Manapul or the quality of the comic book? And how can DC tell? Think how silly you would feel if you organized a save-the-Legion campaign where every Legion fan promises to buy ten copies of Adventure, and DC responded by giving Kon-El a second title in addition to Adventure.

3. Writing a letter is a better way of sending a message. A paper letter, not an e-mail; paper letters get more attention. The best letters are legible, clear, civil and concise. DC's mailing address is DC Comics, 1700 Broadway, New York, NY USA 10019.

4. The Legion is one of DC's strongest candidates for what characters can hold down a monthly title. Not top-ten, maybe, but certainly top-twenty. Therefore it is inevitable that DC will try it again at some point, and, given the groundwork that Geoff Johns has been laying down, I see no reason why it couldn't be successful.

I'm not here to tell you to buy Adventure or not. My point is that it's your decision to make for any reason you want, and that you shouldn't let DC scare or browbeat you into it. I didn't decide myself whether I was going to buy it until partway through writing this article. Here's how I decided: I asked myself, "What if the Legion did have an ongoing series, that I was buying, in addition to the backup in Adventure. Would I buy Adventure then?" And my answer was, "Yeah, I probably would. Yes, of course I would. Sure I would! Why wouldn't I?" So I will.

Yes, I'm annoyed at how DC treated the threeboot. Yes, I'm ticked about the deceptive aspects of the retroboot. Yes, I'm irritated about DiDio trying to blame all of DC's problems on me, and I'm hacked off that the Legion doesn't have a regular title of their own. But all of that is details. What I want is interesting comic books, preferably Legion-related, and while Adventure is a poor substitute for a regular Legion comic, that doesn't mean that it isn't of interest as what you might call a supplementary Legion comic. I am willing to exchange money for such a comic book. And if I let these fribbling little disputes get in the way of these transactions, then I won't have the comic books I want. Which is not the way I want this to come out.

Anyway, that's how I'm making my decision. It's none of my business how you're doing it, and it's none of DC's either. And if Dan DiDio doesn't like it, he can go roll his hoop.

Make Us Win

The Eagle Awards nominations have begun, and I wonder if I could ask you to take two minutes to head over to the nomination page and nominate Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes for Favourite Comics-Related Book.

(It is your favourite, right? Right?!)

It's not clear if everybody has to type the title in the EXACT same way (e.g. capital vs. lowercase, hyphen vs. no hyphen) for the nominations to be properly attributed to the book, so, just in case, you might copy and paste it from here.

The nomination period ends on Friday 22nd May 2009, so if you're reading this after that, never mind.

Thanks!

Enough Stick. More Carrot, Please

The Legion Omnicom (which should be your first stop for Legion-related news) has a tidbit of news from this weekend's comic-book convention in Bristol. Dan DiDio has said that the Legion's backup stories in Adventure (yes, I know that DC wants us to call them "co-features". DC can eat applesauce) will start off spotlighting individual Legionnaires and then eventually move to featuring the whole team. And if they're successful, it's possible that the Legion will get their own title sometime down the line. It wasn't clear from the attribution how much of this was straight from DiDio and how much was interpolated by the article writer.

Well.

I said before that, in such a situation, I would want to introduce DiDio to the dictionary definition of "increased", but (if all this is straight from him!) it seems that I'd also need to show him "commitment", because this isn't one. But it's no big thing. (I think.) Here's what I figure:

1. It is inevitable that the Legion will appear in their own title again someday. Inevitable. (And DC is being very shrewd in setting up such a title: all the appearances of the retroboot Legion so far have been calculated, far as I can tell, to increase the Legion's appeal and exposure to mainstream DC readers.) Even if DC has no current plans for a regular Legion comic (which I'm not at all sure is true), it'll happen someday anyway. DC just doesn't have that many characters who can carry their own titles in the long term. The Legion, collectively, is one of them, and eventually DC will go to that well again. There is supply and there is demand and eventually the two will get back together. And I'm sure DiDio knows this as well as anybody.
2. Still, DiDio can't exactly tell Legion fans that it's okay for them to blow off Adventure because there's a real Legion title coming down the road in a year. He wants to put as much juice as he can under Adventure. Which is all very well. But it does not satisfy me.

So if you want to buy Adventure, go to it. But if you don't want to, don't worry about it.

Turf Accountant to the Space-Gentry

The key plot-point of Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds is going to be the fate of Superboy-Prime. What Johns (and, by extension, DC) do with the Legion is also of interest, but that's an issue that's external to the story. But Prime's story is at the core of this series. Superman's declaration that the heroes need to redeem Superboy-Prime is the main thing that separates FC:L3W from all the other cheesebag crossovers that have been inflicted on us over the past quarter-century: it's more interesting than just fighting and cosmic destruction, and it seems like a really hard thing to do, even for Superman.

There are those who believe (and not without reason!) that it's silly to even be discussing the notion of redeeming him; the idea is that his crimes are of such enormity that he can never be redeemed. This point of view is not without merit. However. First, it's entirely in character for Superman (and retroboot Saturn Girl!) to try it anyway. Second, if you don't redeem him, just what do you do with him? They're certainly not going to kill him (even if they could). They can't lock him up anywhere (even if they could), because he's better at getting out of impregnable prisons than Mister Miracle is. The only way to stop the guy is to get him to want to stop. No, he doesn't deserve it, but that's not the point.

So here are all the different possibilities, as far as I can tell, for what can happen to Prime. Place your bets!

It Is a Far, Far More Lame-Assed Thing I Do: (2:1) Of course, the most painless way for Superboy-Prime to both redeem himself and pay for his crimes would be for him to die fighting the Time Trapper, or the rest of the villains. It would be a very tidy way of ending the story. It would also be as boring as "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall (Extended Dance Remix)".

Nothing: (3:1) One very real possibility is that nothing will happen to Prime. He'll get away at the end, or maybe be locked up in some way that he can obviously get out of, and continue on like he has been. This one is somewhat plausible because a lot of people think that the final blacked-out figure on the cover of Adventure #1 is Prime. Plus it fits in with DC's habit of promising big changes but not delivering. Of all the possible endings to this series, this is the one I like least: it's the one that would most drastically fail to deliver on the promise of the premise. (Similarly: it's possible that the new status quo for the three Legions will be the same as the old status quo. Bleah.)

Orange Jumpsuit Plus Flight Ring: (5:1) The most likely way this one plays out is for Prime to be overcome with remorse when he finds out that Earth-Prime still exists, and joins the threeboot Legion as their Superboy, where he will work to try to make up for all the evil he's done. It could happen. I wouldn't mind this one. A couple of things I like about it: one, it acknowledges that, as Spider Robinson points out, the word "absolution" contains the word "solution", and two, it gives the threeboot Legion a role in future stories.

Steps on a Rainbow: (10:1) He could just die in the fight. Sodam Yat or one of the Legionnaires or Kon-El or Bart (unlikely) or Superman (even less likely) could be pushed too far and, somehow, be moved to kill Prime. Might make a good story. Only problem is that the focus of the story would be shifted to that character, and that could be kind of jarring.

The Faith Option: (10:1) Prime is made to feel remorse, somehow, and says to the Legionnaires, "Lock me up. I deserve it. And I promise I won't try to escape." Nothing really wrong with this one, except that it's a bit too easily reversible for my taste.

Lost at the End of Time: (10:1) The battle against the three Legions ends with Prime being stuck at the end of time, where he will eventually turn into the Time Trapper, just as was revealed at the end of #4. As an ending, this would be tidy but unsatisfying.

The Nada Option: (15:1) In the renowned Sandman series, there's one part where Dream confronts his old lover Nada, whom, in a fit of pique, he condemned to Hell for eternity. He's sorry now, and wants to know what he can do to make up for it. There's nothing, of course; she's had centuries of torment and, at best, will always remember that. But he finds a solution: he takes Nada's soul to be reincarnated as a newborn baby, giving her a fresh start. This is also the kind of thing that can be arranged for Superboy-Prime, since this is, after all, a Time Trapper story. I'd be okay with this ending.

The Parallax Option: (25:1) It wasn't Superboy-Prime doing those terrible things all along! It was an evil entity controlling him, and all we have to do is exorcise it, and he'll be a hero again! On the one hand, it would "work". On the other, it's a stupid cop-out that Johns has famously used before.

Chronal Surgery: (25:1) Send the threeboot Legion back in time to visit young Clark-Kent-Prime and teach him about heroism, so that when he gets sealed up in the walls of reality with Earth-2 Superman, Earth-2 Lois and Alexander Luthor, he doesn't go off his chump and lose control against Kon-El and the Titans. The big problem with this one is that it would erase a bunch of continuity that DC is sort of relying on these days. I still kinda like it, though.

The Field: (15:1) This is the catchall heading for everything I haven't thought of. And it's the one I'm hoping for. I don't want to be able to predict how this damn series is going to end! Surprise me, Geoff Johns!

Did I miss any obvious ones?

Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #4 Review

First the review, then a reaction to recent announcements below. I seem to have a lot to say about this!

Countdown:

Only one more Legion comic after this one. (But see below!)

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The fighting continues. Superboy-Prime carves a couple of notches onto his belt corresponding to Kinetix and threeboot Element Lad. Wildfire, Dawnstar and Polar Boy return to the future with Luthor's hair, which turns out to be the last ingredient needed to resurrect Superboy II (aka Kon-El, aka Conner Kent). The Time Trapper yoinks retroboot Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy, and Superman, out of the fight and confronts them at the end of time, revealing himself to be an aged version of Superboy-Prime.

Review:

Let's get to the big reveal first: that the Time Trapper is really Superboy-Prime. The thing I noticed most about this was the reaction from various readers on the internet. Very often, big surprises like this get responses of "Wow!" or "OMG!" or "Holy $%&#!," but that's not what happened in this case. The reaction I saw more than once was, "Let me get this straight..."*

And I sympathize. Most of this ground has been thoroughly picked over by others, but: the Time Trapper is a thoughtful villain who does a lot of careful planning and is in no rush. Superboy-Prime is a thoughtless villain who reacts impulsively. It's not impossible for the other to turn into the one, especially after allowing for the passage of all that time, but it's certainly not something that leaps easily to the mind. The other objection is, if Superman and Superboy and Kid Flash and Ion--oh yeah, and the Legions too--win the conflict against Prime and the LSV, then how does Prime become the Time Trapper? And what happens to all those old Time Trapper stories if he doesn't? And if Prime wins, then why does he bother becoming the Time Trapper? It sorta looks like you get hit by a paradox no matter which way you look.**

There is, of course, an easy way out. It has been widely noted that the Trapper has had multiple identities in the past, and therefore there's no need to expect that this one will stick any more tightly than any of the others. Which is quite true. But, to me, that doesn't really get to the core of the Trapper's nature, which is this: he is, by nature, impossible to pin. He won't stay where he's put. Because there's always another layer of deception. The Trapper is turtles all the way down, if you will. The Superboy-Prime identity will last only as long as it takes some Legion writer to show a gloating Time Trapper on a floating rock at the end of time, monologuing about how he deceived and manipulated Superboy-Prime into believing that he, Superboy-Prime, was the Time Trapper, when in fact he was only a decoy for the Legion to busy themselves with. It could happen as soon as next issue.

A lot of what I might have to say about this issue has been covered by others. Let's get it out of the way:
- what's the point of killing Kinetix off? She wasn't in the way of anything.
- the magical aspect of Kinetix’s powers is really being emphasized here. I imagine it’s because Johns has something in mind.
- her death does seem to be one of those newfangled reversible ones, though. I wonder if they're planning on not only bringing her back but also pulling Leviathan out of a side pocket while they're at it. I'm going to have to look into how reboot-Gim died; I think I don't have that comic.
- threeboot-Jan's death is also not necessarily final, depending on what kind of medical help he can get. Let's assume he's gone, though: what is the deal with getting rid of all the Element Lads? Retroboot Jan is nowhere to be found; reboot Jan's powers were traded in on Live Wire's; threeboot Jan is presumably dead. Is this going to be a plot point? I think Brainy was a little quick off the mark at restoring Live Wire's powers in the first place. Sure, the extra electricity must have come in handy, but isn't there more to be gained by having an element-changer around? If I was Brainy, I'd never let Element Lad out of my sight--he's a portable infinite supply of every element and compound imaginable! There's no limit to what could be achieved.
- although let me just say here that I’m not a fan of bringing dead characters back to life. If you didn’t want them to be dead you shouldn’t have killed them in the first place.
- Superboy-Prime's reaction to threeboot kryptonite seems to confirm everyone's hunch that the threeboot comes from Earth-Prime.
- I’ve seen complaints about the characterization of threeboot Jan in this issue. I wouldn’t call it mischaracterization; I think it’s just that Johns doesn’t have the hang of the character the way Waid did. No big thing. (Similarly: Shikari called Umbra “Umbra” and not “Dark Legion”! I hope it wasn’t a conscious choice on Johns’s part; one of my favourite things about Shikari is how she never uses anyone’s name. It was probably done just for expository purposes.)
- I’ve also seen the idea that the reboot and threeboot Legions are being shown in this comic as distinctly inferior to the retroboot Legion. I reread this issue with that in mind, but I don’t really see it.

Notes:
- it looks like Cosmic Boy’s reconstituted Substitute Heroes from the end of the Levitz era are still in continuity. Huh.
- “And incomplete. I followed it step-by-step with little success.” That’s a candidate for the best Legion line of the year.
- the Polar Boy/Sun Boy panel on page 24 has a kind of Pisces-fish yin-yang arrangement to it that I think is a neat idea, in this context. The two of them are opposites in a very obvious and superficial way, but they also have recently had contrasting personalities, and more interestingly, they seem to have the wrong personalities to go along with their powers.
- I’ve been pleased at how much Perez has managed to pack into every page, so much so that I don’t mind the unusual (for him) number of full-page panels in this issue. Still, I would have liked to get a look at the “S” that Prime was burning into the Earth.
- the cover I got was Brainy conjuring Kid Flash out of the lightning rod. Doesn’t really look that great, either; not Perez’s usual style.

I can think of a couple of ways of ending this series, while addressing the whole redemption-of-Superboy-Prime angle that hasn't been played up quite as strongly as I was hoping.

Scenario 1: Superman and the three founders manage to talk to the Time Trapper for five seconds; after all, the Trapper is not as trigger-happy as he was in his youth. Eventually the Trapper says, look, I'm not actually happy like this. Couldn't you do something to see that it doesn't all turn out this way? And they get the threeboot Legion to go back in time and visit Clark-Kent-Prime before this whole mess started, and invite him to the future, and so on, and it all turns out different and the Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds is over. The last panel of the comic shows a room at Titans Tower in the present-day, where Pantha wonders why her neck was so itchy for a second there.

Scenario 2: Someone thinks of the perfect weapon to use on Superboy-Prime. Who should it be--Superman? Bart? Threeboot-Tinya? Any of those. Whoever it is throws some Hostess Fruit Pies down in front of Prime.

Superboy-Prime (recognizing the HFP and their significance): You're kidding me.
Superman/Bart/Tinya: Am I? There they are. It's your move, sport.
Superboy-Prime (laughs, picks up an HFP and mows down on it): I don't know what to do next.
Superman/Bart/Tinya: Help us clean up the LSV and we'll talk about it.
Superboy-Prime: Just like that?
Superman/Bart/Tinya: Just like that.

Seriously. If I read that ending, or something like it, I'd think it was the most awesomest thing ever. I wonder if DC would have the nerve.

Is there a good reason why Starman would rather be wearing his costume than plainclothes to disinter Superboy II? Or is it just because he’s crazy?

All the time spent explaining the whats of the whats of Bart’s resurrection serves to highlight one of the key features of this series: the many different audiences it’s meant to appeal to. This isn’t just a Legion miniseries and I would say it isn’t even primarily a Legion miniseries. First and foremost I think it’s a Superboy-Prime miniseries, although I don’t know if Prime actually has a fan base to draw upon. Here are the people reading this comic:
- DC completists
- Final Crisis completists
- Legion fans
- Superman fans
- Superboy-Prime fans, if any exist
- Green Lantern Corps fans
- Bart Allen and/or Flash Family fans

Which is a lot of people. And the reason why it’s being written like that is so that all of these different groups of fans will get some exposure to the other characters, and thereby potentially increase sales of all these different books for DC. This is an especially important point when it comes to the Legion, since the Legion’s the one that fans of other DC properties are most likely to have never tried. I think this is a key part of DC’s strategy for the Legion, and I have to admit that it makes sense.

Anyway, my point is that as a Legion fan, I don’t really give a red snot about how much sense the whole Bart deal makes, but Bart has lots of fans of his own, and they quite properly do want to hear the details.

Hey, it’s crackpot theory time again! Check it out:
- we’ve seen a modern account of Superman’s first meeting with the Legion founders, in the “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” arc in Action Comics. We noticed at the time that it didn’t quite resemble the story in Adventure Comics #247.
- and yet, DC did reprint the Legion story Adventure #247 recently, in Adventure #0.
- here in FC:L3W #4, the Time Trapper (who is later revealed as an elderly Superboy-Prime) says that, in his efforts to erase Superman’s influence from the timeline, that his “focus had always been on the Legion, for what they did to me.”

Well, what did they do to him?

Maybe Geoff Johns is retconning Adventure #247 so that it’s now about the threeboot Legion going back and visiting Superboy-Prime and, of course, playing that stupid prank on him that he’s still mad about to this day. That sorta fits, doesn’t it? (Not a new idea for me, as you’ll see if you click on one of the links seventeen paragraphs below this one.)

(An alternate way of working it is that he’s mad that they never came back and visited him the way they did in the comics he read as a kid. Which of course ties in to one of the ways of ending the series, mentioned above.)

Oh well. We’ll see sometime in the next year or so.

In terms of quality, this issue was all of a piece with the other three, which were excellent, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe we didn’t need five issues to tell this story. It’s not a complex plot, after all: Superboy-Prime recruits friends and raises hell; the Legion recruits friends and tries to stop him. Fighting. Now, this series doesn’t feel puffed out like the Action arc did, but it seems like the five-issue structure was chosen because of the introductory beats Johns wanted to hit:
Issue 1 – premise is set out
Issue 2 – return of Sodam Yat
Issue 3 – return of Bart Allen
Issue 4 – return of Conner Kent
Issue 5 – resolution

I’m not saying I think it should have been over in four issues. It’s not like I feel that my time has been wasted. But I will point out that if the series had been only four issues long, it’d be over by now, only one terrestrial season after the end of Final Crisis.

--

Once this comic was safely in stores, Geoff Johns announced some stuff about the upcoming Adventure Comics title. The announcement is here, for anyone who wants to go look at it again.

I'm a bit leery of some parts of this announcement. I've got red warning lights going off inside my head. I'm suspicious and skeptical. I've got the jellyleg.

Let's take stock of what we know and what we don't know.

We know:
- Superboy II and the Legion will be sharing Adventure Comics, starting in August.
- Geoff Johns is the writer and Francis Manapul is the artist. Or one of the artists, anyway.

We don't know:
- the nature or composition of the Legion that will be appearing in this comic book.
- how the pages will be allocated between Superboy and the Legion.

We don't know, but can assume until we get some better information, that:
- the Legion, as a co-feature, will get eight pages of Adventure to Superboy's twenty-two.
- the Legion will, for the most part, be Johns's retroboot Legion.***

I am worried that:
- the regular Legion title somebody said was going to exist in 2010 is this Adventure time-share and not an actual Legion comic.
- Johns's take on this Legion, as an ongoing concern, is going to be primarily nostalgic.

Of course we need to wait until all the details are in. Trust me, I am going to give this title every benefit of the doubt. But so far I'm not getting a really good vibe from it.

First, the nostalgia thing. It's something I feel strongly about, and it's been a threat for quite a while now. Consider the following:
- Johns's preferred Legion to write about seems to be his retroboot Legion, which is more like Paul Levitz's Legion of the 1980s than anything else
- the comic book Johns announced is called Adventure Comics, and it stars Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, just like in the 1960s
- the cover is an homage to the cover of Adventure # 300 from 1962 (and, by extension, Legion of Super-Heroes v2 #301, from 1983)
- the art we've seen so far shows Superboy living in Smallville with Ma Kent and Krypto, throwing a baseball under the majestic arching midwestern skies, just like in the 1950s and '60s. Of course, Smallville is a small town, and as we were so carefully instructed during the last U.S. election, that's the only kind of place where traditional American values can still be found

Gee, I can't imagine what I was worrying about.

Now, I don't want to overstate the case here. If anyone likes to read Legion comics because it reminds them of reading Legion comics back when they were eleven, far be it from me to object. It's not a reaction I share, but that's okay; whatever floats your boat; free country. And if the new Adventure elicits that reaction in people, then fine. What I object to is nostalgia placed above any other consideration, and that's what I'm worried that we're getting. Look back at the three major Legion-related stories Johns has given us: "The Lightning Saga," "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes," and Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds. They all recycle old Legion characters, stories, ideas, and bits of business, and if anything new was introduced in any of them, I missed it.

I don't have much time for nostalgism in general, but I find it particularly offensive when it comes to the Legion, because one of the major defining features of the Legion is its optimistic-future setting. To say (as I have seen it said!) that the Legion is primarily a vehicle for nostalgia is, on one level, to say that believing in the future is something that we used to do but now we know better. Well, if that's the way you think then you might as well stick your head in the damn oven. We're going to be spending the rest of our lives in the future; let's not give up on it so easily.

I once wrote DC a letter (scroll way down in that link) in which I recommended that they address the Legion Problem by finding a way of reconciling the original, reboot, threeboot, 5YL and SW6 Legions, but making sure to use those Legions exactly and not just ones that were kinda like them. I figured that that was the only way people would be able to transfer over all the emotional investment they had made in all those different Legions. It turns out that I was completely

wrong

about that. The way it actually works is that the majority of Legion fans can transfer over their emotional investments just fine as long as the names and costumes are right. In fact, they'll get quite huffy if you dare to point out any of the things that aren't the same as their old favourites: if it's not the same Legion, how come they feel the same way about it? Answer that!

So that surprised me, but, hey, if everybody's happy then there's no problem.

Except, for some Legion fans--not all of us, but not none of us either--there's no difference between a warmed-over arrangement of Legion nostalgia and a good Legion story. If--if--Johns's take on the Legion is primarily a nostalgic one, there are fans out there who will still eat it up like it's ice cream. And if there are enough of them, DC may think it's got a success on its hands when actually they're just getting away with pandering. Meanwhile, those of us who want to read innovative superhero stories, who like a little science fiction with our capes and villains, who read Legion comics because it's one of the few superhero comics out there where characters can change and stay changed, who actually want the story to be good more than we want to namecheck how many Silver Age characters appear in the backgrounds... we're out in the cold. Ars gratia artis, damn your poxy eyes.

Here's a characterization that just came to mind, and I hope it’s not really what’s going on: Adventure Comics is DC's way of giving a bottle of warm milk to the many whiny suckybabies in Legion fandom. "Waah! It's not the real Legion if Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl aren't together! I won't read it! DC needs to kill these punks and bring back the Cockrum uniforms!" Maggots.

Given a choice between Jim Shooter's Hey-Ho Legion of Super-Foobs and Geoff Johns's The Legion of Your Life, I'd take the former in a shake of Sensor's tail. Shooter, for all his ill-advised moves, was at least trying to innovate a little. We weren't getting the same-old same-old from Jim Shooter. And I could say the same about Mark Waid. I'd much rather have a writer fail at something worthwhile than succeed at the Legion version of the Chris Farley Show.****

As for the rest of it: Dan DiDio said at some convention that DC would show an increased commitment to the Legion in 2009. If--if, I say--DC's plans for the Legion end with eight wistful and backward-looking pages a month in Adventure, then I'd like to show DiDio the dictionary definition of "increased". Because it wasn't so long ago that the Legion had two monthly ongoing titles in addition to all their other appearances (not to mention their own freaking TV show, although that isn't part of DC's bailiwick), and I don't consider it an increased commitment to trade all that in on eight-page monthly installments of Geoff Johns's childhood memories at $3.99 a pop.

It's possible I'm getting exercised about nothing. There are legitimate reasons to be looking forward to Adventure. Kon-El's not my particular favourite, but he's okay. Manapul's a good artist and his sample panels are beautiful. Johns is a perpetually entertaining writer and he may have some original ideas in store for us. The Legion may get significantly more than eight pages an issue (one idea I had: one issue, Superboy gets twenty-two pages and the Legion gets eight. Next issue, Superboy gets eight and the Legion gets twenty-two), and/or their co-feature may be a springboard for a title of their own (perhaps Adventure itself, perhaps a Legion of Super-Heroes v6). And there are some obvious signs of careful planning here. So we'll wait out the details. I'm just uneasy about the whole thing.

--
* …as the bishop said to the actress.
** I also have to admit that I still like my Time Trapper = Luthor idea better. Oh well.
*** Although it would be kinda neat for Superboy II to be sharing his comic with the reboot Legion. After all, a) he’s already a member, b) it sorta looks like Johns has something brewing with them, the way Kinetix died, and c) if I’m not mistaken they’re the Legion that Johns first imprinted on as a fan.
**** Remember that? That was great.