So as you may have heard, there's a new Legion of Superheroes comic. Strictly speaking, it's the fifth comic to bear that name, but who's counting? This version of the Legion is yet another reboot -- this is the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth continuity, but again, who's counting? The real question is: is it any good? Sad to say, it's not.
To begin with, let me get Waid's Legion bona fides out of the way. He's said time and again that he's a fan from way back. He's mentioned that writing the Legion is his dream job, although, to be honest, if I paid Waid to write my grocery list, two days later, he'd be on Newsarama explaining how writing my grocery list is his dream job, and he's always wanted a chance to put his own spin on my need for milk and english muffins. But be that as it may, I'll accept as a given that Waid loves the Legion. Of course, Tom and Mary Bierbaum loved the Legion, too.
So what has Waid given us? It's the 31st century, and adults are so totally square, man. Like, they won't even hit a giant robot when it's attacking downtown! They're all talking to each other on video screens even though they're standing five feet away from each other! Don't you get it, man? Parents just don't understand.
Yes, it's a comic about the generation gap. Slightly timelier than a comic about the space race, I suppose, but nowhere near as relevant as a comic about Watergate. The 31st century that Waid has chosen to portray is one in which the adults are stuffy and rule-bound, while the kids do the right thing. Just in case we miss the point, the 42-year-old Waid has replaced the usual Legion slogan -- "Long Live the Legion" -- with the much more pertinent "Eat it, Grandpa!" Why not just go with "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30?"
In this version of the Legion, we've got our core group of Legionnaires -- all those cool heroes that Otto Binder and Jerry Siegel and all the rest invented way back when. According to one character, there are 15 or 20 core Legionnaires at this point. On top of the core, though, there's a new concept -- any teenager can call himself a Legionnaire, and there are about 75,000 kids who do so. One generation got old; one generation got soul! It's an army of youth, and they're on the march!
All right, so the theme -- at least the obvious theme -- stinks on ice. But is it any good apart from that? Truth to be told, not really. This is a comic taken up by two big set pieces and one Deeply Touching Moment. The first is the "Legionnaires vs. Giant Robot" battle I alluded to before. We meet six Legionnaires, and we even find out what powers five of them have (sort of -- if you don't already know what Light Lass can do, the art and dialogue don't make it very clear). We then go back to Legion HQ, where we meet the latest Legionnaire -- Invisible Kid. Sun Boy spends a few pages showing Invisible Kid around without actually telling us, the readers, very much, and then it's off to the second big set piece: We follow the Legionnaires through the Transmatter Room, where they are teleported to war-torn Lallor.
Lallor is the site of our second big set piece: it seems that the adults, unhappy with the fact that their kids have taken up the banner of the Legion, have decided to do something about it by killing all the kids who pledged to the Legion. We enter Lallor in the midst of a slaughter, as armored troopers are killing innocent teenagers left and right. The Legion responds to this by ... standing around while their leader, Cosmic Boy, debates with the U.P. government about what to do. On the one hand, gee, it's a real delicate situation and golly, we wouldn't want to upset the intersteller political balance, yaka, yaka, yaka. On the other hand, there are people being brutally slaughtered. As Cosmic Boy spends half a dozen pages alternately debating with the government and explaining to his colleagues that there is a Really Good Reason not to stop the Lallor Slaughter, the rest of the Legion stops the Slaughter. Even Cos eventually comes around, breaking of his communication with the government by giving the new and improved Legion battlecry ("Eat it, Grandpa"). Well, in this case, it's more of a battle whimper, but you get the idea.
It's here that the comic shows some glimmer of possibility. Because the Slaughter of Lallor raises the possibility that this isn't a ham-fisted allegory about the generation gap: it could be a somewhat more subtle allegory about the Neocon movement. If you assume the Legion represents freedom loving people everywhere, with the core Legion as the U.S., the Legionnaires of Lallor could represent the Kurds, and the UP government could represent the UN. If you squint enough, you can sort of see Waid saying "When the Kurds rose up against Hussein, we should have gone right in to help them instead of sitting on our thumbs." This analogy ignores a lot of political realities, including the fact that we made our own decision not to help the Kurds for our own reasons, but it sort of works if you look at it just right. Besides, ignoring political realities to get soemthing that sort of works if you look at it just right is what the Neocon movement is all about. The real problem with reading this analogy into the story is that while it kind of fits with the Lallor piece of the comic, it doesn't really fit with the other two-thirds of the book. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if that's what Waid was going for as the series develops.
Finally, on to our Deeply Touching Moment: When we come home to Legion HQ, Invisible Kid asks Star Boy about the tent city of Legionnaires camped in front of Legion HQ. Star Boy tells a stirring story about the time the grown-ups tried to bulldoze Legion HQ and the tent city Legionnaires standing in front of the bulldozers. This is, of course, an analogy about the book itself, with the tent city Legionnaires playing the role of Legion fans, who have time and again stood in front of the bulldozers of cancellation.
The real problem for me, though, isn't the ham-fisted allegory, and it isn't the clumsy storytelling that neglects to introduce most of the characters by name and power. For me, the real problem is that it doesn't feel like a real Legion story. For me, the Legion in one sentence is "Young adult superheroes in an optimistic future." This Legion fails on two levels. First, the future is anything but optimistic. It feels like it's borrowed straight out of Brazil (the movie, not the country). Second, this Legion doesn't feel superheroic to me. They fight an army. Forget that. I want to see my Legion fighting supervillains or weird aliens. The giant robot felt right, but that was literally only one panel (a splash page, but still). Give me the Legion of Supervillains or Starfinger or Universo, not the Lallorian Fourth Regiment, Infantry Division.
This isn't to say that the comic is totally without redeeming features. Waid does a pretty good Grant Morrison impression, sprinkling off-the-wall ideas into the comic and leaving the reader to pick up on them as he or she will. Naming the giant robot a "Macrobot," for example was brilliant, and naming Reep "Chameleon" -- not "Chameleon Boy" -- is handled nicely. It's only when Waid tries to make it clear how clever he is that things get clunky; in particular, the exchange in which it's explained that Gim Allon (Colossal Boy) is not a regular-sized kid who can grow, but a giant kid who can shrink only serves to make Gim look really stupid.
Overall, then. you can color me unimpressed with the first issue of this bold new era for the Legion. I'll stick around -- hell, I stuck around through worse eras of the Legion, and I'll be damned if they'll chase me off from this one -- but I'm really hoping for improvement. I know Waid's capable of it -- his early post-Zero Hour run on the book with Tom Peyer and Tom McCraw was one of the better runs in the history of the book. But so far, this ain't it.
Posted by Jason Fliegel at January 1, 2005 3:10 PM
While I didn't find it as bad as you describe it, Jason, I'll admit that I was sufficiently unmoved at the comic store that I didn't pick it up, and I did buy a good chunk of comics that day, too.
The odds of me weakening and buying this have now dropped to around one in ten million. Thanks, gents! I can go buy something else now!
Carrying no Legion baggage of my own, I was really looking forward to this book as I'm loving DC these days, but found it disappointingly ordinary. Not great, not terrible...just okay. *shrug* Thought it was a sureshot for a monthly pull but now I think I'll just read along in the store for a couple of months to see where it's going.
Meanwhile, I liked it. Felt it started weak with too much of the "square adults" thing, but picked up quite well and shows promise.
I dunno... I liked it. Granted, I haven't touched a Legion book since the Great Darkness era, but it seemed entirely pleasant to me.
If one goes with the idea that the book *needed* a reboot, then this is a solid approach. Once you dismiss continuity, a '60s-style youth uprising against conformity and repression is one of the few good ways to justify the existence of a group like the Legion.
And I don't agree with the timeliness complaint... after all, these Legionnaires aren't preaching peace, love, and harmony. In fact, that's the hook, as far as I'm concerned. They're bored and spoiled kids who stumble upon the ideals of classical heroism in their history books, misinterpret much of what they're reading, and set off in pursuit of a dream that has darker long-term consequences than they probably imagine.
In total, I think Waid has created something with a lot of promise. Yeah, the Touching Moment was a little unnecessary, but I can live with it.
Roger: First of all, I emphatically reject the idea that the book needed a reboot. The past ten years have given us our share of good stories and our share of bad stories, but it left us with a perfectly servicable continuity. The only reason to reboot was to goose sales, and that's a terrible reason to reboot.
As for the timeliness of the generation gap, I firmly believe there is no generation gap. It's not like the 60s, where kids were strongly anti-war and the adults were, for the most part, pro-war. The divisions in our society -- pro-war/anti-war, Democratic/Republican, whatever -- seem to cross age lines these days. So I'm not convinced a generation gap has much relevance to today's readers (though I guess there's always an element of being a teenager that says "don't trust your parents' generation").
Wow - I rather liked it. My only exposure to the Legion previously was during one of the revamps in the mid 90's (I have no idea which one) - which I also briefly enjoyed.
I thought a lot of things were done very well and it interested me enough to pick up another issue.
I thought it had promise, enough that I'll pick up the next few issues.
I couldn't help wondering, when Cosmic Boy was in conflict with the UP Senators, how conscious Mark Waid was of the etymology of the word "senator".
Well said, Jason.
I think I could like a Legion comic by Waid and Kitson, but not one that's organized around a single, painfully stupid Big Idea. Especially not one that feels exhausted before the first issue is over.
I understand the practical reasons why DC wanted to restart the series, but it looks like Waid has blown most of the advantages of restarting the continuity, while retaining all the drawbacks: this series now has significantly less potential than it did last spring. It has to rebuild the cast yet again (no Timber Wolf, no Wildfire, no one post-Shooter - one of the indulgences that sank the Bierbaums' run) and the antagonists promise to be pretty boring (although the mention of the Dominators does give hope). I'm not sure what Waid gains from the reboot, except the opportunity to use dead characters like Colossal Boy and Element Lad - and Colossal Boy gets saddled with the most annoying Waidism in the book. (Element Lad's costume indicates that we may be seeing another round of Spooky Mystical Jan, which never did much for me.)
I picked this one up because I never took the Abnett & Lanning Legion off my pull list. If the generation-gap story doesn't blow away or go someplace interesting fast, I may have to rectify that.
Although the series was ok, it wasn't the breakthrough that Waid said it will be. This Legion look like they were bent on revenge on Lallor and seemed to have forgotten that there might have been some survivors who needed immediant mediacl attention and Sun Boy seems to a bigot when it comes to adults, which doesn't make any sense. Being a rebel to adults is one thing, but a bigot? Does this guy plan to never grow up? You don't start something when there are wounded people around! That's irresponsible and unforgivable! And it was the V5 Legion that started the "second" fight!
One of the flaws in Waid's writing is not paying attention on simple detail, like the fact that if this Legion were true heroes, then they would have used the time that the UP gave them to get the injured survivors out of there, instead of fueling the fire on those adult fanatics which means more innocent people will be killed because of the Legion not thinking in this delicate situation. That they believed that they were being like the 21st century heroes, even though they would probably be disgusted with the Legion for ignoring the possible survivors. I can see Batman throwing some punches to this kids in anger and telling them that they don't deserve calling themselves Legion, since he met the V4 versions, kind of. Heck, if V4 ever escapes from hypertime and enters the V5 timeline, then they would probably feel the same and a fight would probably happen.
This is like an alternate timeline where the Legion become too arrogant to be responsible and end up being just as bad as the UP when it comes to making fancy promises and that their opinions are the right ones and no one elses. Saying that they believe in diffrent opinion, but believe they representing "all" kids in the universe and that any kid with even a harmless and different opinion is misguided.
This series may end up with stories that are black & white and I believe that we all want stories that are gray because it adds more texture to the story and makes it complex enough to attract our attention. Rumors about comic book readers having pea-size brains are false. The problems when it comes to following a story isn't because we're too dumb, it's because we're too smart. If something doesn't make sense, it's probably because the writer is too lazy, too busy trying to make a name for him or herself, or thinks being famous makes them immune to writing bad stories, when they should be focus on what they wrote to make sure it's going to work as it is.
Waid is a talented writer, and Kitson a talented artist, but if you want a series that represent teenagers in a good way, but show that they have flaws like all teenagers, then do so, but have them at least act like they have a clue about the seriousness of the situation, that they know that their choices of being super-heroes means that they'll have innocent lives on their hands, instead of acting like they have all the answers and all adults are stupid to the point that they can do "anything" they want. I think even a teenager would think that's overboard. Show them that kids can be the real thing like in Teen Titans instead of making it like they think they're perfect beings that the universe can't survive without. That they're willing to make positive change and admit they made serious mistakes, instead of saying that it's attempt from the adults to make them look bad.
Hopefully, the preview of issue 2 doesn't show that the Legion are willing to put people in danger, like the UP, to make them look bad, while making themselves look good as if this was some kind of election. I can't say for sure, but if they say something about using it to promote themselves, and the fact that they had a 3 day early warning thanks to Brainiac 5, then people may end up thinking that this Legion only looks noble and honest in image, and not for real. Saying and doing are two diffrent things and this Legion seems to be doing alot of saying and giving off a show to make themselves look good.
Unless Waid is planning to have this Legion fall from grace and realise they were never the heroes they thought they were and decided to really do something about it, this series may end up being the worse version since the first issue never really tells you how good it is and it was support by hype, mostly created by Waid alone, which allowed it to reach #25 in the top 25 of how much comic book stores, and other places, bought. Issue #2 and #3 will be a diffrent story now that we seen #1.
As for being original, alot of people will probably see it as Waid taking DnA's ideas and slightly modifing it which makes it something that's not a reimaging that we wouldn't "reconize" like he said, and he said alot that was the opposite of what the series turned out to be. If this was an elseworld, and it may end up being that, it would have been an excellant book, but making them the main version will probably make DC regret it and be glad they put a fail-safe in the Special.
They do have two great talents on the book, but that doesn't mean the series will be a success. Waid's track record isn't that perfect and has at times had written bad stories. I have never heard of a talented writer of being that perfect.