Legion of Super-heroes – KyleGarret.com

I love the Legion of Superheroes.

I could — and probably will — write endless posts about how much the Legion has meant to me over the years. I could write about how fascinated I was when I first read about them, how hunting down back issues was so much fun, how fan fic filled my head with the release of each new issue.

I can’t even begin to describe how much the Five Years Later era meant to me.

I read 5YL before I got around to The Dark Night Returns or Watchmen. The Legion was dense, mature storytelling to me. It was the standard.

I loved the years that led up to 5YL. I loved the Levitz era. For all his flaws, Levitz told complex. layered stories. Every issue featured an a, b, c, d, and e plot. He knew when to go big and he knew when to go small. He was able to write about the Legion in the scope that they deserved.

Yes, like an episode of Pokemon, Levitz made sure every character in a scene said something, even if it wasn’t necessary. And yes, maybe of the characters remained rather two dimensional. But he fleshed out as many as he could, even if he had to use personality short hand for a few.

I was onboard for the first reboot, when the so-called Archie Legion was born. I loved it. I’ve never been the kind of fanboy who holds on to his beloved characters so hard that he refuses to see them any other way.

Seriously, if you’re going to jump into the Legion, the reboot version is actually a great place to start. It’s like this amazing distillation of what made the Legion great. It was also planned out incredibly well, the kind of long term planning that you just don’t see in comics anymore.

The characters were fleshed out, although the creators used their previous incarnations as a kind of shortcut to make them fully formed characters in a hurry. And why not?

Look at it this way: any new iteration of the Legion is going to bring a fair amount of long time fans. One of the easiest ways to get them enthusiastic about a new version of a team they love is by at least keeping the broad strokes of the characters. The intricacies can change, but why completely bulldoze over something that was working?

Plus, given the Legion’s extensive history, it’s possible that new fans will go digging into the back issue bins and/or digital stores to learn more. Why would creators not take advantage of that if the characters weren’t horribly offensive?

I suppose if I were to make a checklist of what’s essential in a version of the Legion, it would look something like this:

3 dimensional characters
a lot of them
multiple story lines at one time
complicated interpersonal relationships
hope

That’s not a lot, is it? I don’t think I’m too demanding.

The New Legion

So far this new Legion series has accomplished exactly one of those things: there are definitely a lot of characters.

And as of yet, those characters are ill defined. Not a single one has displayed enough personality to stand out. Hell, even the current version of Jon Kent has been something of a generic teen superhero.

What makes this all the more baffling to me is that a fair number of the characters come with personality short cuts. They were so clearly defined in the past that it would be easy, with just a sentence or two, to establish who they are. There’s no need for years of exploration, you can cut right to the chase.

And yet, for some reason, these personalities have been thrown out the window. I don’t need Ultra Boy to be exactly like he was, but he should be similar. The character running around the new Legion series is not him — he’s wholly brand new, or at least that’s how he’s behaving.

And I have no idea why. Jo Nah was a great character. You could claim that a number of Legion characters were two dimensional and lacked complexity, but Ultra Boy wasn’t one of them. He had a background that was unique to the team and a personality that had been fully developed.

Jo’s not the only one gets the short shrift, but he’s the worst case.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about the diversity issue with the Legion. They’ve never been the most diverse team, although there have been very minor in roads made over the year.

In particular, Fabian Nicieza and Pete Woods put together a great team for the New 52 Legion Lost series, which was sadly undone the way that most New 52 books were undone (if they were even good to begin with): editorial interference. Still, the line-up was probably the first great example we’ve seen of a Legion team that’s connected to original yet pointed at the future.

It wasn’t surprising when Bendis and Sook revealed their version of the Legion and some familiar characters had been changed to diversify the team.

It was hard, however, to not immediately think about this column on the trope of black superheroes and electric powers.

It’s also hard not to notice that the effort to diversify the Legion for some reason involved getting rid of all the (albeit few) diverse characters that had been Legionnaires in their history.

Why keep say, Matter Eater Lad but not include XS? Or Kid Quantum II, who was a stand out character from the Archie Legion. What about one of my favorite Legionnaires, Invisible Kid II? Hell, Nicieza and Woods had already made Tyroc cool.

I am all for diversifying the Legion, but doing so at the the expensive of the actual non-white characters is a really weird choice. And it’s not an either or. Give me black Lightning Lad, yes, but give me XS, too.

The XS thing is particularly egregious given that, like every other writer, Bendis appears determined to connect the Legion to the 21st century DCU. XS is the perfect connection.

It’s also strange to me that this new iteration of the Legion doesn’t have any non-humanoid members. You would think, since this is no longer the 50’s, we’d see some creativity what a Legionnaire looks like.

Again, that’s not something the previous versions of the Legion were particularly good at, but there were a few strides. Gates, in particular, has a fair number of fans. I’ve always loved Quislet. And who didn’t love Tellus?

Who Are the Legion?

The concept of the Legion doesn’t fare particularly well in this reboot.

The beauty of the Legion’s origin is that three teenagers who have never met before suddenly step up and save someone from being assassinated. They weren’t called to service. They acted out of selflessness and responsibility. They acted as a team right from the start — three kids from very different planets acting as one to save someone they’d never met.

It’s simple and wonderful and where you go from there doesn’t really matter. How the team is officially formed and grows doesn’t need to be set in stone. But that initial origin story matters. It sets the tone for the entire idea of the Legion.

And for some reason that’s been discarded.

I guess you could make the argument that it’s to tie the team to the United Planets more closely than they were before, as the UP seem to be just as important to this series as the Legion. But that feels wrong, too.

Consider this: the last Legion reboot (the threeboot) was build on the premise that the Legion existed at odds with the UP. This new version was build on the premise that the Legion exists because of the UP. Neither interpretation is great. At least the Archie Legion, drafted and expanded by the UP, ultimately threw off those shackles. The original Legion didn’t really work for anyone but themselves.

Making the UP so important also takes some of the focus away from the Legion itself, as does including Rose, a character from the 21st century. We’re seven issues in and I couldn’t tell you how any member feels about any other member, but that makes sense given that I couldn’t tell you anything about any of them.

And everything so far seems to be funneled through the lens of the UP. Each story so far has been connected to the UP. I could say that it’s all one big story, but it’s not really that big. There are bad guys with Aquaman’s trident and the Legion are fighting them. Ultra Boy’s dad is mad.

There’s your 140 pages of story so far.

The Legion CAN’T Be Decompressed

To a certain extent, none of this should be surprising. Multiple stories and large casts aren’t really in Bendis’ wheelhouse. Perhaps interpersonal relationships are, but the cast is so large that I don’t know when he’s going to find the time to actually develop any of that. The fact that Bendis writes every character the same exact way is going to make it that much harder to make a number of different relationships seem unique.

I suppose the idea was that Bendis loves Superman and Superman conveys hope and Bendis wrote Ultimate Spider-man who was a teenager, so you combine those two and presto! You have the Legion of Super-heroes.

The problem is that there’s more to the Legion than that.

The problem is that DC has spent a long time now trying to figure out what the essence of the Legion is and it just isn’t what it was to begin with.

That’s not to say that the Legion no longer represents hope, because they do, at their core that is what they were and what they ever will be.

But hope doesn’t mean simple, and this Legion series so far has been as simple as they come. It’s not even shallow popcorn movie simple. There’s just nothing there. There’s no meat on that bone.

And it’s not even doing a good job of making the team and the book about hope, which is theoretically what it’s supposed to be doing. Nothing about the book so far would indicate that hope is in short supply somehow.

Is There Hope?

I’m honestly at a loss for how to turn this book around. The obvious answer would be to have a story that requires them to break into smaller teams and give each team its own dynamics and its own mission. Give us the Espionage Squad. Give us five pages an issue on two or three teams for an arc.

Have them struggle against something big with real stakes. Give us time to see how each of them reacts — how any of them reacts.

Stop using Superboy as the way into the Legion because this particularly Superboy has been around for like 10 minutes and no one is any more invested in him than any of the other characters.

Give us some idea of how the Legion is organized. Show us what they do every day. Show us the cliques in the team, the grudges. A throwaway line every now and again isn’t that.

Just do some of the things.

Because I love the Legion.

But what we’ve gotten so far is not living up to the name.

Let me start with three opinions:

1. Super Sons (Jon Kent and Damian Wayne) was fantastic and I miss both the series and the relationship that those two characters had. I loved that imaginary stories from decades earlier suddenly became real in the DCU.

2. The actual story that aged Jon was bad. It made no sense that Clark and Lois would let him go off with Jor-El even if Lois was going with him (which made no sense, either) and Lois certainly wouldn’t have left Jon with Jor-El by himself. The whole thing made no sense, but that’s often how Bendis writers: he has a point A and a point B and he forces a line in from one to the other, even if it doesn’t work.

3. I love the Legion of Superheroes, so if points 1 and 2 were necessary for 3, I figured I could get over it.

The problem is that it’s become clear that 1 and 2 weren’t remotely necessary for 3. And, honestly, 1 and 2 have made 3 worse.

Who Is Jon Kent?

Part of the problem is that teenage Jon Kent hasn’t been developed at all. The extent of his development has been that he’s less childish than he was before, I guess?

The idea that Jon is responsible for the United Planets is a bit of a stretch and completely unearned. Superman doing it? Yes, totally makes sense. It makes so much sense, in fact, that the story of the UP forming had to eventually focus on Superman. Scores of other alien races would ultimately ignore Jon’s involvement when they tell the story, because who the hell is Jon? But everyone knows Superman.

But somehow the story of Jon inspiring the UP lasts until the far future, so the Legion comes to get him. Jon goes to the future and…does nothing. So far in the Legion series he has done nothing at all, other than break a rule by going to get Damian and bringing him to the future.

Jon is there for exposition, for backstory. But even that has taken forever. And, again, it’s unnecessary. He’s not acting as a POV character because he’s freaking Superboy. And hundreds if not thousands of comics have managed to give the backstory of superhero teams without a supposed POV character.

Honestly, the series would probably be covering more ground if it weren’t for Jon’s involvement.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-heroes

When Geoff Johns brought the “original” Legion back in 2008, he made a few changes to limit some of the elements of the team that required fixing every few years. The biggest and best change he made was how Superboy was a member.

When the Legion first appeared, Superboy was, well, Superboy. Clark Kent flew around Smallville having adventures as the Boy of Steel. When he grew up, he’d be Superman and fly around Metropolis as the Man of Steel and somehow no one put the two together and figured out who he was.

That’s not really the kind of thing that would have worked in modern comics, so post-Crisis Superboy went away and Superman never put the tights on until he was in Metropolis.

This was a problem for the Legion, given that their history was so intertwined with Superboy, their inspiration. The Superboy they knew wasn’t the real Superboy, or at least not the Clark Kent who would grow up to the Superman in the main DCU reality. It’s a story that the Legion would revisit multiple times in order to provide more clarity and make it more urgent.

Reboots would point to the adult Superman as inspiration for the team, but it didn’t have the same feeling. Whether it made sense or not, Legion is and will always be connected to Superboy.

So when Johns brought back the “original” team, he made some changes (thus putting “original” in quotes). One of those changes was to address the Superboy issue. He did so in a surprisingly simply and poignant way.

Clark Kent had met them when he was a teenager, just as the original story went. But he wasn’t Superboy at the time. He went with them into the future and had adventures, but did none of that in our time. This allowed him to maintain his secret identity.

Honestly, you could make the case that he used the Superboy costume in the future and just kept it hidden in the present until he was an adult. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

The idea of lonely teenage Clark Kent finally finding some friends who all had superpowers is fantastic. Emo Superman is a characterization that writers go back to again and again and it always feels at odds with who Clark Kent is. So why not explain why the lone survivor of another planet who could barely touch people without hurting them didn’t become an anti-social outcast?

What About the Story?

What does a teenage Jon Kent do for the comics? What doors does he open up, what stories does he introduce that could not have existed before?

As noted above, he wasn’t necessary for the Legion and he shouldn’t have been necessary for the formation of the United Planets.

What about all those stories about Lois and Clark dealing with a teenage son? That’s easy: what stories? Not long after aging Jon up, he was sent to the future and for some reason hasn’t returned, even though it’s time travel and he could literally return the moment after he left.

I suppose we needed a POV character to meet the Legion of Superheroes, but has that even mattered so far? Did we need Jon Kent for exposition? Origin stories are revealed all the time over the course of a story without the need for a single character to be taught everything.

But the Super Sons? The Super Sons are unique. The concept itself was formerly set in the “imaginary story” reality of the DCU. But it was suddenly real! Or, as real as they can be in a fictional universe.

Robin was Batman’s actual son! Superboy was Superman’s actual son! And they were both crazy dangerous kids and even more extreme opposites than their dads! It’s such an awesome concept and it actually happened.

I would say that Lois and Clark would never let their pre-teen son run off to the future alone, but the awful story which sent Jon off with Jor-El proved that wrong. I mean, logically they would never let that happen, but what do I know? I actually think everyone should have different speech patterns, too.

So what, exactly, did we get out of aging Jon Kent up? A teenage Superboy? Here’s the funny thing: Kon-El is back. So there are now two teenaged Superboys, so aging Jon makes even less sense.

Legacy?

Apparently, Jon is supposed to be the next Superman at some point and will surpass his father as the Superman. There is nothing about any of that that I like.

But it’s not really a big deal since it will never happen. This is comics we’re talking about. More specifically, this is corporately owned superhero comics we’re talking about.

This couldn’t have been done for Jon to take over his father’s role, then, even if that was some kind of a vague plan before Dan Didio left DC. I don’t care how much upheaval there is at Warner Brothers these days, no way they start their own streaming service and ax their most popular IPs at the same time.

The Super Sons are a great IP themselves, although Warner Brothers still owns that, of course. There are so many things they could do with that comic and those characters.

Even better, Superman and Batman being fathers created one of the best dynamics DC Comics has seen in years. There was so much potential there and we got to see so little of it.

Aging Jon Kent up on its own has meant very little, but when you add in the fact that it ended the Super Sons it makes the decision all the more unfortunate.

Tag: Legion of Super-heroes

The New Legion Isn’t Working