Legion Of Super Heroes fans - what would you like in a new book?

[Jim Kelly]

Like with Star Trek, it's the optimism that I admire in the Legion. If people think that science fiction has to be always pessimistic then they're forcing a sameness and predictability on all sci-fi. If so much is dark and depressing, the bold choice is to go in the other direction, not try to copy everything else.

And why do we think that it makes more sense for the far future to be so dystopian? The forces in the world right now that would create such a dark society are the ones that deny things like climate change and use up resources in the present without preparation for the future--they are so screwed up that they can't save themselves and they will destroy this planet in fifty or sixty years--nobody is getting out of this century alive and there's never going to be a 22nd century. Yet if you're proposing that human beings will be alive a thousand years from now, that's a huge leap of faith and an incredibly positive message. It means that reason and good judgement won out in the end and those self-interested idiots didn't survive. Hurray for evolution.

What doesn't ring true for me is the science fiction that implies we somehow overcame all our bad impulses and reached out to the stars and survived to do great things, yet insists you must regard that with a jaundiced eye and look at all people as garbage and adopt a misanthropic view of everyone. That's just silly.

As far as the look and feel of the 30th/31st century goes, as I said before, I play a game with myself and I try to imagine what is really going on. You can think creatively and imagine that this is all a constructed reality and there are more levels to the future than we see at first. After all, it's the future. It's easy to use science fiction to explain how the world can appear one way in those stories, but in fact this is not the whole story--it's just a superficial image.

Personally, I doubt that if we survive that far into the future that we will be living in a material reality. Already the push is to make people acquire stuff that isn't manufactured in reality and is only constructed in an imagined reality. So I think we will be living more and more in this imagined reality. And if you're living all your life in a fake world, then that world can look however you want it to be--you don't need mateiral objects in your fake world, so there's no need for heavy industry. In fact, you could either be living on a planet that's a garbage pit or a pristine natural preserve--but either way you don't see it, because you're living all the time in your own constructed immaterial world.

[j9ac9k]

My main problem with the Legion is that it’s archaic. It’s a vision of the future that Is to tied to the past. We need a new future one more indicative of our vision.

Personally I think they should lean into how archaic the Legion is. These are kids in the 31st century who formed a club out of reverence for heroes who lived a thousand years ago, put on colorful costumes and gave themselves "lad" and "lass" names. I would love to see a new iteration emphasize how odd they must seem to their contemporaries - as odd as modern audiences view the names and wearing underpants on the outside. Having the 31st century based on a modern vision of the future could bring into high relief how the Legion lives according to a really old-fashioned mode. We're actually far away enough from the Legion's origins that using that analogy could work now.

[mathew101281]

How would you write any story set in the future without it being "archaic?" You're always going to exist in your home time period and you can't filter out features of your existence--nor would it work otherwise, because there have to be some touch points for the audience.

The answer is to lean into that--not try to get away from it. Make the "archaic" aspect of your reality a feature in the future you're writing.

A lot of what I see in today's science fiction is like steam punk. I mean steam punk is just one version of this approach--it's essentially mashing up different time periods which gives the work a heightened style.

You can see this in works set in the past like THE WILD WILD WEST or MURDOCH MYSTERIES or PENNY DREADFUL. But you see it also in works set in the future or alternate realities like ALTERED CARBON or GAME OF THRONES or WESTWORLD.

When I re-read the old Legion stories, I play a game with myself where I imagine how this is actually working a thousand years in the future. I see the 20th Century-ness and Buck Rogers future-ness as style choices of the future. It could be nostalgia or it could be that they modeled their time on old records from the past (which have been damaged so they don't have a full record). It could be like STAR TREK's "A Piece of the Action" or "Patterns of Force."

And the more we learn about the United Planets, in the original classic run, the more we see different planets have their own identity--resembling different nations or time periods from Earth. Which supports my take that the colonists modeled themselves after records they had from Earth. And sometimes maybe those records were totally fiction--but that's the model they used for constructing their societies.

In any event, this kind of conceit is necessary in science fiction, because it allows the stories to speak to us. And you have to give them creative license, suspend your disbelief, for the story to work. If you need a way to explain that to yourself, then make up some excuse. For example, pretend that this is all being transmitted from the future in Interlac, but it has to be translated and altered into images you can comprehend. So in the 1960s, it was translated and altered to make sense to those readers. And for 2018, you have to imagine a different translation and series of images.

Part of reading is decoding. So whenever we look at a comic book, we're decoding it for ourselves. Don't blame the comic book if your decoder malfunctions.

The current depictions of the legion either has a very 1950’s or 1970’s sensibility(cub scouts or hippies).Neither version feels really relevant to where modern superhero comics are right now. If I were revamping the legion I’d keep the code names and the basic concept( future heroes) but play up the alien nature of the future. We are talking about a 1000 years in the future even the human characters will be alien to us.

[CaptCleghorn]

The current depictions of the legion either has a very 1950’s or 1970’s sensibility(cub scouts or hippies).Neither version feels really relevant to where modern superhero comics are right now. If I were revamping the legion I’d keep the code names and the basic concept( future heroes) but play up the alien nature of the future. We are talking about a 1000 years in the future even the human characters will be alien to us.

The alien nature of the different races should be a big part of Legion for it to be distinct from every other superteam out there. The future stuff is nice, but flight rings and ray guns don't give us much more than an Avengers or a Justice League does. Characters like Gates, Quislet, Brainiac 5, and Chameleon show us cultures that are different from ours with priorities that aren't necessarily ours. Now every story shouldn't be a political discussion, but seeing different tactics based on who's involved and where they are would go a long way towards bringing this concept into the 21st century.

A question is "who is this series geared towards?". Personally, I'd like to see deeper issues and a more mature focus. Not with nipples and f-bombs, but stories where there are more than just good guys and bad guys punching each other. Now something lke this could easily droift into young animal or vertigo level stuff and move the book out of the range of younger readers. That's a risk. I guess it's just going to have to be good enough to attract new readers who can't wait until they get to Legion. Yes, I do have a healthy fantasy life, thank you.

[Jim Kelly]

To borrow a term from the Michael Fleisher encyclopedias, the representation of characters in the past that made them look like WASPs are just "chroniclers' errors." Being fallible, the chroniclers sometimes got it wrong, and with better science, new chroniclers were better able to represent how the LSH might actually look.

For example, when Dave Cockrum was a chronicler, he was better able to see the true face of Brin Londo (Timber Wolf). Dave and Mike Grell were also able to tune in on how Val Armorr (Karate Kid) actually looked.

As chronicling improves, we can expect to see better and better representations of how the Legionnaires should appear. Although, I think making Princess Projectra a snake and making Brin into Furball were chroniclers' errors.

On the whole, while there can be the odd Proty or Blok--I still think most of the LSH has to be humanoid in appearance because it's fiction for humans. Even when animals are the subjects of fiction, they are anthropomorphised so we can relate to them. Changing character to look truly alien is a nice academic exercise but it defeats the purpose of fiction which is to present stories that human beings can engage with.

Characters need to have faces so we can read their emotional states.

[j9ac9k]

Characters need to have faces so we can read their emotional states.

Don't tell that to Wildfire

[Lee Stone]

I think a good idea would be to do a LoSH heavy event.
Maybe a fifth-week event, kinda like the JSA one they did years ago with the one-shots.

Do like eight one-shots. Each one with three members teaming up with a modern day hero.
And then a couple bookend issues. The first one the week before and the last one two weeks after, leading into a new ongoing that would launch a month later.

The team-ups would be:

Superman & the Legion (Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad)
Batman & the Legion (Timber Wolf, Karate Kid, Phantom Girl)
Wonder Woman & the Legion (Shadow Lass, Dawnstar, Dragonwing)
Flash & the Legion (Ultra Boy, Star Boy, Blok)
Green Lantern & the Legion (Quislet, Comet Queen, Mon'El)
Titans & the Legion (Dream Girl, White Witch, Colossal Boy)
Supergirl & the Legion (Brainiac 5, Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet)
Booster Gold & the Legion (Element Lad, Wildfire, Invisible Kid)

[Lemurion]

Keep the history, but focus on smaller groups. Do more with Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet

[Tazpocalapse]

I want the world building that gave us such a huge universe that had so many different types of aliens and alien worlds that it was able to incorporate different elements of the DCU like magic and technology clashing. Build on the 5LY run that had so many innovative stories it made the Legion really feel futuristic.

[LordUltimus]

Part of the problem is that a team of teenage super-heroes isn't new anymore. Once it was the first and only one of it's kind. Now DC is literally making an imprint out of young heroes.

[j9ac9k]

I would like (it would never happen) a weekly "Year Zero" series that rebuilds their origin where you take your time, establish key five or six Legionnaires and a few others to a lesser degree in their own worlds, their own lives, etc. Where they are *each* heroes in their own right first before deciding to ban together. (so a bit more like a teen JLA than a "teenage club") Get into their cultures and the greater UP culture that leads each of them to get to the point where they realize that the universe needs a group of "super-heroes" who model themselves after people who have been dead a thousand years and what it means to them and the message it sends to the UP.

[Incognito]

I would like them to move from the name which ends with ''lass'' and ''lad'', and go with their alternative names such as Cosmic Boy becoming Polestar, Phantom Girl becoming Phase and Triplicate Girl as Triad. I would like to see some of their members having alien features rather than all of them looking humans, they are all from different alien planets. I prefer Shrinking Violet look from the Tv series than her actual comic appearance, because it makes her stand out from the human-looking aliens.

[Jim Kelly]

I feel like the Boy, Lass, Lad, Girl names have a more timeless quality, where names like Thunderstar are so much of a particular comics period. I always thought that the Damsel, Kid, Queen, King names were part of the Legion's charm. One thing the Legion should be able to do is laugh at itself and not be deadly serious all the time. Anyway, a modern membership would probably have a mix of different styled codenames.

Also, when you get deep into the series, you tend to think of the characters by their actual names--Imra, Garth, Rokk, Chuck. Luornu, Tinya, Nura, Thom, Brin--and not their codenames (especially when their codenames sometimes change and multiple characters can have the same codename).

The cartoon Shrinking Violet looks humanoid to me. Just like Timber Wolf looks humanoid. Most of the Legionnaires, including Blok, look humanoid. Humanoid means resembling humans--having a head, arms and legs like a human--not necessarily that they are human.

But I find it easier to believe that the United Planets is mostly made up of planets that were colonized by Earth humans some time in between now and the 30th century. And the reason for some of the super-powers is genetic science giving the coloinists adaptations for the conditiions on those planets--and some of these adaptations changed their physical appearance. That explains why so many of them look humanoid and why they have a common culture and language that unites them.

The really strange aliens should be mostly outside of the United Planets and in the further reaches.

[CaptCleghorn]

I feel like the Boy, Lass, Lad, Girl names have a more timeless quality, where names like Thunderstar are so much of a particular comics period. I always thought that the Damsel, Kid, Queen, King names were part of the Legion's charm. One thing the Legion should be able to do is laugh at itself and not be deadly serious all the time. Anyway, a modern membership would probably have a mix of different styled codenames.

Also, when you get deep into the series, you tend to think of the characters by their actual names--Imra, Garth, Rokk, Chuck. Luornu, Tinya, Nura, Thom, Brin--and not their codenames (especially when their codenames sometimes change and multiple characters can have the same codename).

The cartoon Shrinking Violet looks humanoid to me. Just like Timber Wolf looks humanoid. Most of the Legionnaires, including Blok, look humanoid. Humanoid means resembling humans--having a head, arms and legs like a human--not necessarily that they are human.

But I find it easier to believe that the United Planets is mostly made up of planets that were colonized by Earth humans some time in between now and the 30th century. And the reason for some of the super-powers is genetic science giving the coloinists adaptations for the conditiions on those planets--and some of these adaptations changed their physical appearance. That explains why so many of them look humanoid and why they have a common culture and language that unites them.

The really strange aliens should be mostly outside of the United Planets and in the further reaches.

I like the idea of the UP being derived from Earth colonies. But I also have a love for Quislet, Tellus, and the more DS9 derived reasoning for the Durlans. I'm pretty sure we can all find a balance between alien races all being humans with a super-power and a different skin color and alien races that we all need a wiki page to learn about.

[Zero Hunter]

I love this Annual because it does give a reason why so many of the UP worlds are human looking. The Dominators took thousands of humans captive during the Invasion event, and experimented on them giving many powers. Valor frees the captives soon after and because they have been so altered by the Dominators they are settled on other worlds as sort of a buffer zone between Earth and the Dominion, many of which latter go on to become charter members of the United Planets. I know Polar Boy, Triplicate Girl, and others all come from planets seeded by Valor in this storyline. I wish it would be made full cannon again.