No More Books. That Is Cancelled.

Most people reading this have probably heard that LSH v5 is cancelled as of issue #50.

Kevin Melrose of Blog@Newsarama scraped some thoughts out of me on this topic and included them in his article here, if you haven't seen it.

One thing I mentioned in my e-mail to him that wasn't included in the article, but that I particularly want to mention, is this:

But it could still turn out all right; the Legion has a long history of ill-advised decisions resulting in good comic books.

Because it's true. If anyone had asked me whether I thought Five Years Later, or the pocket universe, or the Mordruverse/Glorithverse card trick, or the reboots, were good ideas, I would have said that they were not. I wouldn't have signed off on those decisions at all. And yet I love many of the comic books that were created in the wake of those decisions. Obviously the same thing could happen again.

Not that we know just what the decision is that's been made, or is being made, or will be made. What I object to is a) the timing and b) the sense I have that DC has no plan at all for the Legion.

First, the timing. One doesn't celebrate the 50th anniversary of a comic book by cancelling that comic and everything else related to it.

Second, the no-plan thing. Apparently Mark Waid thought enough of his Legion vision that DC brushed the reboot Legion aside to give him the space to achieve it. Very good. Except that he lost interest within thirty issues and DC had to scramble. They got Shooter. No, they didn't get Shooter, but they have Bedard. Yes, they did get Shooter. But we've also got Geoff Johns bringing back the original Legion. Except it isn't the original. Well, it sort of is. It's the original Legion, just like you remember it from the Levitz era, except it's completely different but we'll all pretend it's the same. And there'll be a few stories about the original Legion except they'll all be really about Superman. And everybody will get so excited about the original Legion that they'll forget about the stuff Shooter is doing. And then they'll just cancel everything and everybody will be happy.

DC says they have big plans for the Legion in 2009. I don't believe it. I'm sure they'd like to do great things with the Legion in 2009, but... like what? Don't tell me Geoff Johns is going to write a Legion series. I don't buy it. Johns can't write all the comic books. Still, he's the only logical choice: whatever the Legion's new status quo is going to be is going to be built by Johns in Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds; no point in writing it and then turning it over to somebody else. So now we have this hiatus of indeterminate length.

Maybe I'm selling DC short. Maybe they have a great plan, and, understandably, don't want to let us in on it. Maybe, starting in 2009, the Legion is going to be on rails and will produce wonders the likes of which we have never seen.

But I'm not getting that vibe.