As I say, I haven't read any Bendis Legion. I'm okay with re-skinning and re-colouring most of the Legion. They are aliens after all--you could just argue that the colourists got it wrong before--and modern colouring can do a better job of rendering their actual complexion. Although, I do like to think that most of the human-looking aliens originated on Earth and colonized these other planets--changing their D.N.A. to adapt to the conditions on these new worlds.



However, just because Lightning Lad has brown skin, that doesn't make him African-American and that's no substitute for actual representation. Hopefully the Ranzz family history was kept intact.

A lot of the design choices seem random to me. How does giving Bouncing Boy red-brown hair advance representation? He looks oafish in this new version. Chuck was always one of my favourite characters and he had a happy appearance before. Something about his black hair looked right. Maybe that's partly because his uniform is black, white and blue.

Timber-Wolf looks like a generic white guy from Earth--but he's from another planet, so why not keep his alien look? And why make him beefy and muscle-bound? The one super-power he actually has, what qualified him for the Legion, is super-agility. How does a bulky character embody the idea of agility? He should be lean so he can leap and flip with ease.

Some look so different, I'm not sure who they are. Of the members I can identify, Dawnstar is the worst. Okay, maybe they wanted to cover her up. Her original design made her look like Cher in a photo-shoot for "Half Breed." But they simply made her look like even more of a stereotype. Sure, this is how most white people see indigenous people--as these quaint relics of the nineteenth century and not as people who move forward in time and wear modern clothing.

And they clipped her wings. Oh yeah, she has "spirit wings" so the artist doesn't have to try to fit them in a panel. In the natural world, winged beings don't lose their wings when it's convenient. Their wings are a part of them and who they are. Yet in comic books now, all wings are optional.

Her design just looks vaguely "Indian." But bands own their imaging. In the past, too many colonizers stole the cultural symbols of First Nations and got rich off of them, without bothering to ask their permission. If they wanted to do indigenous representation right, they should have gone to a Puebloan band and asked an artist there if they would re-design Dawnstar for them--and then pay for the right to use that imaging. Also, create a name for her that comes from one of the Puebloan languages. Yes, her people now live among the stars, but they originally came from a group of Pueblo people.

A lot of the other designs just look silly--why would Saturn Girl have such a stupid hair cut? Mind you, many of the designs in the 1970s were quite silly, too. That's a long-held tradition with the Legion.