I think at one time she could make people think/act a certain way. Later they gave that power to Saturn Girl. Imra was supposed to be one of Saturn's preeminent mentalists -- so they need to show it in some way.
So 31st century Legion still exists -- and 32nd century is a brand new crew? WTF?! So will these be clones -- because a lot of the 32nders closely resemble the 31sters.
Last edited by kcekada; 06-27-2019 at 04:56 AM.
What's funny about that is that her upgraded powers now include super-senses. She's not a speck more offensively powerful than she ever was, only her attitude regarding her powers and how she uses them has changed. Instead of being really obvious about being an illusionist and creating big improbable monsters out of thin air which everyone knows are obviously fake, she's just blinding people by blacking out an area (which they couldn't 'disbelieve' even if they knew she was creating an illusion of darkness, because an 'illusion' of darkness *is* darkness).
Similarly, her illusions have always been multi-sensory, able to be seen and heard. It's less clear on whether or not she could create sensations of taste or scent or touch. If she can, watch out, because the 'illusion' of horrible incapacitating pain, is horrible incapacitating pain...
It'll probably be shorter than Threeboot. The Legion is just not a high priority thing for current day post-Levitz DC and DC letting them languish in obscurity for so long has definitely thinned the fanbase. It seems like this book is more Bendis wanting to expand the Superman franchise (perhaps at the behest of his editors). But given his sales performance on similar books like GotG (and this is with the MCU), the new Legion is going to struggle to survive especially since Bendis has lost most of his sales power.
There seems to be some fine line where you can update / streamline / modernize / hype older characters enough to make them more interesting and accessible to new younger fans, without driving off or alienating too many of the older fans of the original characters, and end up increasing sales and making money.
But DC hasn't found it yet.
So far the attempts to 'update' seem to be a bit too radical, and drive off more old fans than attract new fans. "We are going to make a new Legion! Only everything about them is going to be different! Wait. Who's our target audience? People who *don't* like the original Legion, and were looking for a book called 'the Legion' which was about a bunch of people nothing like the Legion in a setting nothing like the original Legion setting? That'll surely work this time, just because it failed every time we tried it in the past! We can just blame the unpleasable fans if it doesn't work again this time..." :/
Still, I bought the Reboot. I bought the Threeboot. I bought Superboy's Legion (that was a great AU!). I bought Legion of Three Worlds (yikes, so bad, nice art, though). I'm a sucker for the Legion, and just wish they could ever be as good as they were in the eighties, when they were, along with the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans, A) well-written, and B) one of DC's top-selling properties.
Good points. You can't really reinvent the wheel -- and DC has a horrible track record of trying to reintroduce once successful properties. Books like Titans and Legion should have been course-corrected way back when they were starting to bleed readers. The Wolfman run on Titans went on way too long -- especially after Perez left. And not taking anything away from Wolfman, but I doubt New Teen Titans would have been half as successful without Perez. But when he left, they couldn't fill the vacuum. Even Jose Garcia-Lopez wasn't up to the task. Legion had a similar problem -- except that they were able to find an artist worthy of replacing Giffen when he left. Unfortunatley, Steve Lightle's run was way too short -- and the Laroque period that followed was just not up to the book's standards. Yet, he was the series for a long time. So when Levitz left (and I have to say that I think he did a better job of maintaining the book than Wolfman did on Titans), they decided to let Giffen revamp the series in a way that was interesting, but also took away the book increasingly frustrating for previous fans. The asshats in the Superman office didn't help but separating any connection the team once had to the character.
I hope the new series avoids two of the pitfall of previous reboots:
1) Starting over from day one. A lot of new readers complain about Legion because there is so much history, so starting may seem like a smart move. Well X-Men has a long, complicated history -- and it's managed to remain a top seller. Trying to appease readers who have this kind of mentality is never going to work. History is part of what works for established characters. I think DC throwing out so much of its history has probably alienated more readers than its gained. When the Legion was rebooted, it just seemed to drag.
2) Neglecting or wildly changing fan favorites. Giffen's Legion, the Reboot and even the Threeboot were not favorable to Bronze Age Legoinnaires. Timber Wolf, Projectra (who gained newfound popularity in the 80s), Wildfire, and Dawnstar were either missing or virtually unrecognizable after the long-running Legion series was cancelled.
This is my preferable fix for the Legion's timeframe. While the "1,000 years in the future" is cute, it also suffers from the same time problems as books in he present that go on for decades. I've suggested 3247 as an origin year for the Legion and keep the time there. Really, do we have a clue as to the relative differences in future tech between a 1000 and a 1200 year jump?
3247 adds to the Legion's past and recognizes the series' history.
I have to agree with both Sutekh and kcekada.
People do complain about accessibility.
But people complain about accessibility in any book that’s run longer than a year. I just think it’s lazy and selfish to demand a book start over for them instead of them making an effort to get into the established storylines.
If long-running narratives were all that bad, Walking Dead would be dead by now. Game of Thrones would be forgotten.
The MCU would’ve been over five years ago.
The X-Men wouldn’t be as big as they are.
Heck, we wouldn’t even still be talking about the Levitz Legion and the Wolfman Titans. And we especially wouldn’t be calling them two and the Claremont X-Men the ‘Gold Standards’ of comics writing.
Last edited by Lee Stone; 06-28-2019 at 09:11 AM.
"There's magic in the sound of analog audio." - CNET.
I kind of understand the accessibility argument, but at least for me, half the fun was diving in backwards and figuring it out for myself.
Your underlying assumption that there is groundswell of Legion fans that DC has left untapped is simply incorrect. The Legion fandom is very much a shadow of its former self and the assumption that somehow appealing to an oldguard will help sales is simply incorrect. Anyone who was around during the 90s especially in the nascent days of the internet can tell you this. The reason that DC has gone with multiple reboots and newer takes for the Legion to appeal to new readership is because the contraction of overall comic book readership since the 90s has left them with very little in the way of a LoSH fanbase. Any new Legion book has to appeal to outside new readers to survive. There is not enough diehard Legion fans out there for a book to survive by itself.
But it hasn't. They may have been the best seller in the 90s and even the 00s, but the X-Men franchise is not in good shape. It's questionable whether the self-sabotage conducted under Perlmutter is reversible. But the overall change in readership is I think a culprit. The fact that they have gone with multiple unsuccessful takes with Bendis, Lemire, Guggenheim, Rosenberg, etc really shows that the franchise is struggling. And the fact that Marvel brought out one of their biggest guns and all of editorial for the newest reboot while cancelling all the current X-books is the biggest sign of that. I think the x-books are probably going the way of Teen Titans and the Legion, it just took longer since they were bigger and had better stewardship (until House of M at least).
Last edited by Bruce Wayne; 06-28-2019 at 10:52 AM.
It's probably more a combination a) self sabotage, b)changing demos that decimated the marvel zombie category and c) bad stewardship. But even in the 90s after they got rid of Claremont and let the artists run wild, the books still sold so bad stories can't be the chief culprit.
Last edited by Bruce Wayne; 06-28-2019 at 11:02 AM.