On Legions of Legions

I've had this notion itching in my head that I wanted to talk about the Legion of Super-Heroes as they're currently appearing the the JLA/JSA(/LSH) crossover and some of the continuity discrepancies therein, but luckily, Matthew over at Legion Abstract did a fine job of doing exactly that so I don't have to (and, I believe, did it better than I was going to). I do have some thoughts and opinions to add, but you should go read Matthew's post first. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you come back.

Some of what Matthew had to say there got me thinking about the Legion and general and my reaction to their various incarnations over the last twenty-five years (oh my god, have I really been reading comics for that long?). My first reaction to seeing the almost-but-not-quite-pre-Crisis Legion (what Matthew calls the 2x+unboot Legion) in "The Lightning Saga" was probably much like many other fanboys in their thirties: I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing what's still my favorite Legion era represented again. Really, we haven't seen that Legion in almost twenty years, not since the Paul Levitz-penned series ended and the Five Years Gap series began.

Part of the thrill, yes, was seeing the costumes I remembered so well from when I was such a huge Legion fans as a kid, but it's more than that for me. Seeing these characters, these particular versions of these characters, strikes a powerful chord with me. It's not just "I liked it when I was a kid" nostalgia kicking in, either (not entirely, anyway): the way Levitz built up these characters and their personalities and relationships, informed an awful lot of what I still like in my superhero comics today. For all of the futuristic science fiction adventure aspects of the Legion, what really got me excited more were the soap opera aspects that Levitz did so well. Just as a f'r instance: when Colossal Boy finally got to get together with Shrinking Violet after years of harboring a crush on here -- and then we found out that Violet had actually been captured and tortured for months, and the Vi who fell for Colossal Boy was a Durlan?! And that he'd married her? That stuff absolutely blew me away when I was twelve.

(Don't even get me started on The Great Darkness Saga and how many kinds of ass that kicked. Since I was eleven and not exactly steeped in my comics history, I figured out exactly none of the clues in advance, and was truly stunned to see Darkseid stand revealed as the villain. Can't get that kind of surprise from any book these days.)

I grew really fond of those Legionnaires, even sticking with them through the Five Years Later era which, as fascinating an experiment as it was, didn't treat those characters particularly well. (On purpose, yes; that Legion was intended to be the exact opposite of the shiny utopian future the Legion has always inhabited before.) And from the bleakness of that series, we then got the SW6 batch of young Legion clones, and then soon came Zero Hour, and we essentially those same young clones became the rebooted Legion. (Yes, it's confusing; I'd say go read the Wikipedia articles, but I'm not sure those would help clear things up much if you don't already know the stories.)

And I enjoyed that version of the Legion. I did, at least somewhat. Enough to keep reading for awhile, anyway. It was bright and happy and flush with relationship angst and character interaction, which I dug. But the characters just weren't the same. They were superficially similar, sure, but many of them were quite different underneath and most of the relationships between them were totally changed... and I just didn't feel as connected to those "new" Legionnaires. Eventually I lost my interest in that Legion and stopped reading. I'd pick it up from time to time -- especially after they started the new, more simply-named The Legion series -- but this version just never grabbed me all that much.

Then came the Waid-Kitson "threeboot," wiping the board clean and starting from scratch again. This reboot was even more of a radical change than the previous one, changing even the team's reason for existence. I'm a longtime fan of Mark Waid's writing, but this series hasn't quite connected with me, either. I'll admit I haven't read every issue, but the current series seems far more plot-driven than it is character-driven... and I don't even really like most of the characters all that much. I think the Cosmic Boy-Brainiac 5 tension is interesting, but neither one is an especially likable character to me, and the personalities of very few of the other Legionnaires have stood out at all. If I recall correctly, that's on purpose to some degree; I believe I remember reading an interview with Waid saying that while they wanted to show that there were a large number of heroes on the team, they'd be focusing on a relatively small number of them. I understand, but it still irks me; part of what I loved about Levitz' run growing up was that even with the huge cast, all of their personalities stood out to me. I'm not saying that as a knock against Waid or saying Levitz was a better writer -- they had different intentions with their books, and that's fine. But I know that one approach appealed to me more than the other.

And that's the one that I'm being teased with in the pages of "The Lightning Saga."

As Matthew pointed out so clearly in his post, it's obviously not exactly the pre-Crisis Legion, though it's certainly very close. Close enough that the thought we might see more of them makes me just a touch giddy. So the big question for those of us who've long missed that team becomes: are there any intentions of doing more with them after this crossover is complete? Now that we have a multiverse in the DCU again, there's no reason to assume we can't see more stories about this Legion, though I think we can assume DC's not going to publish concurrent books about two radically different versions of the same team. [1] It's too soon, it seems, to give up on the current version of the team, even though Waid and Kitson just wrapped their run. At the very least, DC has some serious 'splainin' to do to make sense of the fact that the Legion Supergirl belongs to and the Legion Superman once belonged to are entirely different, and that means we're going to see more of the 2x+unboot team.

That's just fine with me. I've missed the Legion.

[1] They can leave that to Marvel.