As Kent Brockman would say. (Is there some kind of Brockman meme floating around the blogosphere?)
Greg has (briefly) shared his take on the Mark Waid interview and Legion preview pages up at the Pulse. His reaction to the upcoming Legion of Super-Heroes relaunch was mixed. Mine is a lot more skeptical.
Is anybody really all that surprised?
If the preview pages teach us anything, it's that Mark Waid shouldn't try to do humor, he shouldn't try to do social commentary, and he sure as hell shouldn't try to do both at once.
Waid's humor tends toward the comfortably smug, whether or not the characters are in on the joke. The crusty-old-dean officials are too broadly drawn to function as any kind of workable society, let alone a social indictment, and the line about "the AI district" seems like something shoplifted from Top Ten. The characters look good, but the backdrop reads like a joke that will quickly wear out its welcome.
Waid's question-and-answer session with Pulse readers also raises a few disturbing notes, including one that touches on one of my biggest gripes with the Legion of recent years...
Flying_postman: What villans should we be expecting and would they be revamped/redesigned or would they maintain their classic style?WAID: We probably won�t know the answer to the second part of your anytime soon, because the answer to the first part is, �None, at least in the foreseeable future.�
Waid offers a pretty convincing reason for this ("we think that one of the great mistakes that�s so often repeated with relaunches is the urge to hastily repeat the past [...] rather than create new allies and new enemies"), but his stated aversion to using old villains also points out one of the flaws of the last go-round of Legion continuity, its lack of worthwhile antagonists.
In ten years we saw no Legion of Super-Villains (and only a handful of the original LSV members), only one Mordru story, only two Universo stories (one of them of questionable continuity), two Computo stories, one atrocious Dark Circle story, a handful of minor villains (Mantis Morlo? as a giant insect??), a Sun-Eater that turned out to be a hoax, and far, far too much of the Fatal Five. The slack was not picked up by the new villains, most of whom tended to be stock menaces like faceless alien invaders, sinister government officials, or present-day villains badly kludged into the Legion's era.
While Waid's right about the problems of repeating the past, many relaunches have been just as hasty to abandon the past - or worse yet, to hastily repeat it and then abandon it midway through. The result, in the last Legion continuity, was a comic stacked with pointless characters like Ferro Lad, who lacked any direction because the writers had casually eliminated his original purpose.
This relaunch runs the same risk. It's adopted all the old Boy/Girl/Lad/Lass characters - that's fine, I happen to enjoy them as much as Mark Waid does, and I agree that you can't really have a Legion without them - but it appears that it will studiously avoid any of their old nemeses. The repressive future society, the vaguely sinister government officials (again!), the parents who just don't understand - none of them seem, thus far, like adequate or even vaguely interesting replacements. In any case, all of Waid's reasons for using the original Legionnaires apply just as well to their better villains.
Another early warning sign:
Abbadon9: My question is about your creating the Legion as like the SCA. As a historian, would this allow for characters to have different interpretations and views of the modern superheroes? In other words would one member state that Batman was just an urban myth, while another would claim that he was real?WAID: Absolutely. In fact, that�s part of the fun of the character interplay--that history is open to interpretation. Wait until the Legionnaires start arguing about whether Beast Boy was in the Doom Patrol. Then the gloves come off.
I hope this is just polite enthusiasm on Waid's part, and not an indication of the high-concept Characterization-with-a-C that will be gracing the mandatory three-page social interactions between fight scenes, but I cannot think of a more dull subject for a comic book: Hey, watch the Legionnaires argue over continuity! Gosh, they're just like us! One thousand years of social advancement and they still can't make any sense out of a Byrne comic!
I know I'm going to end up at least checking out the first issue. I could tell you that it's because three pages aren't enough to judge a whole series by, and they aren't, but the real reason is that the Legion characters still exert some kind of pull on me, the last characters to do so despite DC's best attempts to sever that connection over the past ten or more years. (The persistence of this loyalty is rather odd, since I wasn't a diehard Legion fan until comparatively late in the game, but any psychological self-reflection will have to wait for another time.)
The Kitson art does look nice, and it's good to see neglected and abused characters like Colossal Boy looking themselves again - although apparently he's also getting the high-concept treatment, to judge by the advance hype. And the higher concept this series is, the more its appeal is forced to reside in a few simplistic hooks and some hamfisted social commentary, the less likely I am to stick around.
After ten years of reboots and restarts and relaunches, the connection this Legion has to the comics I knew feels like just about nothing. Waid and Kitson only have a couple of issues to convince me otherwise.
Posted by Marc at October 11, 2004 12:38 AM