As great as it was, however, it also is a giant flashing signpost pointing towards why comic book companies shouldn’t actually do great giant sweeping reboots; the amount of story telling possabilities that were lost was enormous. Once the drive of Giffen and his (many) collaborators began to wane, what was lost became more and more clear, and the Legion universe began to look rather broken, and the status quo that had lasted for decades was impossible to recapture. There hadn’t been anything wrong with it when the 5 Years Later story started, it was change for the sake of change, and while some fantastic stories came out of it, stories I love, it prevented so many more stories from even being possible to happen.

Which brought the first reboot. It had me out of loyalty until Legion Lost, but it wasn’t the same as the original. The characters lacked the depth they once had and the stories seemed like do overs but not as good. The Thirtieth Century had been broken and the hasty patch up job was not fixing it.

Supergirl and the Legion hasn’t fixed it either, but at least I don’t feel like I’m reading shoddy rewrites of better stories – it is telling its own sort of story with its own Legion.

And The Lightning Saga made me a very happy man. Maybe there is hope for fixing the “real” Thirtieth Century yet.

Levitz-Giffen– late v. 2 and the Baxter series– greatest the Legion has ever been.

5YL/ v.4/ TMB– some awful missteps (coughProtycoughShvaughncough) but really a lot of excellent stories and storytelling– original, creative, sophisticated plotting and characterization, and some real emotional punch.

Things started to go downhill with the debut of the SW6 batch, they went downhill with the foot on the accelerator after the destruction of earth, and the final year before End of an Era was just not even trying.

The reboot was terrific through the close of the White Triangle, a *lot* of fun up until sometime in the interminable 20th-century storyline, and then intermittently pretty good up through Legion Lost, though it never really recovered after . However bad Monstress and Sneckie were, the second Kid Quantum, XS, Gates, and Kinetix were great characters, and I hope we haven’t seen the last of them.

DnA was a mixed bag, and I didn’t like it much– for me both 5YL and the reboot depended on a careful balance of nods to nostalgia and breaking new ground, and this era lost too much of the nostalgia for me (even if they were good stories, I don’t *want* to see Element Lad turned into a genocidal monster, thanks). I even stopped buying Legion, for the first time in a very long time. But I still recognize there was good storytelling here.

And the threeboot is fun stuff– not an era of Legion greatness, but genuinely fun stuff.

Eventually the two books were cancelled and replaced by a single one (the famous “Legion Lost” LS), which was fairly sucessful and was followed by a regular series, but the team had by then just a fraction of its former popularity, so DC decided to reboot everything again.

THIS time they did the right thing and started with a new series (and new numbering). I don’t know wy they went with Mark Waid, though, since he had already done an unsucessful reboot a few years before, but there you go. This is the current Legion series. Creative choices aside, it has been a reboot done in the right fashion, starting fom the beginning and with a constant stream of TPBs to keep new readers up to date. To me, that’s the reason why it’s more sucessful than the Zero Hour reboot.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Of course, it made things even more confuse having two sets of the SAME characters running around at the same time – and the series already had a large cast to begin with!

Giffen left to work in other stuff and the Bierbaums found an ellegant solution: Create a SECOND Legion series (the Legionnaires book) starred by the “young” team, while the “old” team was still on the main book.

I thought it worked (and initial Legionnaires sales apparently were quite good), but certainly DC thought otherwise, since they decided to fire the Bierbaums and reboot the whole thing in Zero Hour, under the writing team of Tom McCraw (also the series colorist), Mark Waid and Tom Peyer.

But DC made a HUGE mistake on this reboot: They did not renumber the series and announced that they would be starting again! I can’t imagine why, after FOUR series, they did’t start the darn thing again, but it certainly kept a lot of people “in the dark”. I only found out more than an year later myself (wasn’t buying the series at the time).

More later.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Until the late ’80s the Legion (originally a team of teenagers) had slowly aged until most of its older characters were on its mid-20s. Some of them were even married and had kids! It had also been somewhat independent from the main DC continuity (thanks to being 1000 years in the future…), with only one major retcon: The one that shown that the Superboy that was a member of the team came from a “compact universe”, since post-Crisis Superman was never Superboy. It worked quite well at the time.

When the third Legion series ended and the fourth one started, the main creator involved on the series (Keith Giffen) decided to take it to its logical conclusion and start the series “five years later”, with the team disbanded and most earlier members now jaded adults. What was a standard all-ages super-hero book became one of the most complex adult comics in the market!

There is STILL a debate today over if it worked or not (I loved it, but I’ll admit that it removed a lot of the franchise’s appeal), but it had A LOT of consequences. First and more important, the former “compact universe” retcon had to be retconned away – and Giffen did it in the most confuse and obscure fashion he could!

There was a (comprehensive) backlash from the older readers and Giffen (and his writing partners, the Bierbaums) decided upon a real unexpected solution.

(More later)

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Legion clones????????

I must have been in a cave at the time!

I can definitely see where that was coming from editorially. Two more questions if I may:

1) Where were the adult versions (I don’t remember there being two of anybody)?

2) What happened to the clones?

This was an attempt to give the readers BOTH aspects of the Legion.

1. The old fashioned Legion

plus

2. The grown-up Legion.

Originally, it was actually going to be the grown-ups who were the clones, but they switched it to the other way around.

What do you do then??? If the whole point of the Legion was to protect the earth, well, it made them look like a failure…

Still, I didn’t like the Post Zero Hour Legion. That is, until Legion Lost. Then I loved the Legion again. I loved that bug girl they brought in as an update for Dawnstar. I lost interest again, shortly after the lost Legionnaires returned home. But still, I didn’t hate them any more.

And now they reboot the Legion, AGAIN!

That’s TWO reboots of both the Legion and Supergirl since the Crisis.

Somehow I don’t think DC continuity was as confusing before they tried to fix it!

Also please note that I haven’t drank any Haterade today, so that may color my enjoyment of a comic series.

I hope we see this Legion again, if we’re gonna just be out and about with every permutation that’s been.