Boy, you leave for a few days and the whole place goes to the 30th century.
While most of what I could say about Legions past and present would simply echo the thoughts of Greg, Chris, and many of our commenters, there are a few points where I deviate from what seems to be rapidly shaping up as the conventional wisdom around here.
So, in more or less chronological order...
The Universo Saga. This is my least favorite sacred cow among all Legion fandom, actually. Oh, there were days when I would get into bitter Usenet disputes over the quality of the Giffen/Bierbaums run - because I did not realize there would be days when I wasn't 21 and single - but I've made my piece with the naysayers now that even I have to admit that run ultimately disappointed. (My defenses have retreated in a series of concentric, ever-shrinking circles; the Mordruverse issue and its two immediate successors, and the Kent Shakespeare/Persuader battle, are the ones I'll never give up.)
But I really don't understand the almost unanimous praise heaped on the Universo Saga. The basic concept is sound, I'll give you that (at least until you get to the "I'll round up all the heroes who might resist my hypnotic powers and gather them on the same planet and then not kill them or blow it up" concept, but then a lot of ships have foundered upon that very same rock).
The problems are mostly in the execution, and there are many of them. The arc is oddly structured and paced, with Relnic and Hykraius subplots that lead nowhere the plot wouldn't have gone anyway; the new heroes were about as exciting as a mouthful of dirt, which makes it only a structural weakness that they disappear halfway through the story and not a visceral one; the final battle against the hypnotized Legionnaires was poorly blocked and wholly without tension (see "The Judas Contract" for how to write scenes of the team's lowest-powered members on the run against overwhelming odds - and note that at no point do they ride a luxury liner). The depictions of mental powers and mental combat, crucial to the action, are fairly dull, and the arc's supposed masterpiece, Saturn Girl's journey inside her colleagues' minds, is spectacularly uninventive and unrevealing. (I did like the basic concept for Dream Girl's mind, but even there, how lazy did Larocque have to be to envision that just as a standard Dream Girl figure inside a cage? How lazy did he have to be to repeat the same "trick" with Chameleon Boy four pages later?)
In short, this arc reads not like a minor masterpiece but like a late gasp from a creative team that's already getting tired of its long run. I wonder if Legion fans of that period valorize the Universo Saga because it just so happens to be the last "major" arc before the death of Superboy, the point at which they all want to hijack the continuity and abort the property's long decline.
(My own personal break-off point, incidentally, would be the Khund War in v4, the point at which Giffen and the Bierbaums markedly abandon their ambitious plans and begin the first of many moron-simple stories featuring Glorith. But then, I also realize those prior issues weren't quite as perfect as I'd remembered them either. If I were really trying to freeze the Legion in the amber of their glory days, well, the Star Boy spotlight issue right before Omen/Prophet would be a popular choice, wouldn't it? Or perhaps right after the big LSV war. Or, if you really wanted to save the franchise, just prevent that damn Baxter split in the first place - and spare the Titans while you're at it.)
Abnett and Lanning. I've seen a couple of references now to the horrors they have wrought upon all that is Legion, as if their crimes were so apparent they scarcely needed mention. I'm not sure exactly what they did to alienate Legion fans (or, let's be honest, that fraction of Legion fans of around our age who are likely to be reading and commenting on this site). Yes, they corrupted and killed Jan Arrah, but then the "spacey Jan" of the past ten years wasn't exactly the version most readers cherished anyway.
The worst I could say about Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning is that they favored the apocalyptic "widescreen" mode to the exclusion of all other types of stories, that their "mad ideas" weren't nearly as mad as they probably hoped they were, that they relied too heavily on using modern-day DC characters or their simulacra in an earnest but vain attempt to prop up sales, or that they tended to set up plots they'd never get around to answering. In other words, that they adopted a mild and inoffensive blend of other recent trends in superhero storytelling and as a result produced a book that was mild and inoffensive.
But I thought they also did a lot of good for the Legion. They undid the previous five or six years of juvenilia, not through the franchise-destroying method of the reboot, but by advancing the book in a direction where the single biggest thrill for fans was not counting how many tongues were sticking out in each panel. They restored some action and danger to the comic, ending its period of unfunny humor and inconsequential plotlines. They reintroduced popular, storied, and absolutely essential characters like Wildfire and Timber Wolf to the Legion, and they brought them back in forms that were fairly recognizable and not marred by the strained coyness of earlier nod-and-wink attempts at reinstating old continuity. (Anybody who's read this far probably knows I'm talking about "Lori," among others.)
Plus, and I cannot stress this enough, they killed Monstress. I'm not sure who decided the Legion needed a Hulk ripoff who spoke like a septuagenarian librarian, but dumping this character was a great way to signal that the inertia and drift of the previous couple of years was over. In one stroke, their Legion was less of the joke it had been allowed to become.
I realize I may be offending some partisans of the previous run on the Legion. That isn't my intent. I had read the rebooted Legion for a long time, I genuinely enjoyed some of the earlier stories (the super-stalag, the Nazi Daxamites, the membership drive issue, and the first Stern Mordru arc in particular), but at some point the joy - and, I suspect, the writers' commitment - went out of that run. I held on and read it faithfully, on the strength of my fond memories for previous incarnations of the Legion that would no longer even be part of the narrative, but while I could ignore the fact that I was no longer being entertained by the comic I eventually realized I was just plain embarrassed to be reading the damn thing. I dropped those books like acid on a school bus and didn't look back until well after Abnett and Lanning had come aboard, when I took a glance at the Legion Worlds miniseries and decided it was safe. So I appreciate the two of them just for making the Legion readable again, when it was previously fucking un-.
And finally, we have The Latest Reboot. I know I'm probably going to give the first issue a look, but I'm not terribly sanguine about the prospects of yet another restart, especially since this one sounds a little too high-concept. (But then, what DC or Marvel superhero comic doesn't these days?) I am glad that Waid has chosen to begin the reboot after the Legion has formed, as I'm not sure I could sit through yet another iteration of "Look out, Mr. Brande!"/"Say, you kids should stay together"/"Can I join?"/"How about me?"/"Oh no, the black kid is dead!"/et cetera/et cetera. Waid's work runs hot and cold with me but I have enjoyed some of his past Legion stories and I'll give this one a chance. But I don't expect it to have nearly as much of a grace period as some Legions past.
Also, I both admire and resent DC's cravenness in hiding the news of the rebooted continuity until after they sold me five consecutive fill-in issues of no import whatsoever. (Issues that, strangely, set up plot points and reintroduced old characters that will now never be seen again.) You magnificent bastards.
Posted by Marc at October 4, 2004 12:09 AM