The Bendis Legion: What Could've Been

[Superlad93]

So with the current mangling of 5G's ideas in this era, I thought it would be a great time to talk about what could've been with Legion, and likely why it wasn't. Be warned that this isn't fact, nor is it wild theory crafting (as far as I know), but rather an educated guess based off everything we know-- or assume to know-- in and out of the comics. Hopefully there's something here we can discuss.

Bendis' Legion has been something that's been conceptualized for quite a while. It's kind of an open secret that Lee and DiDio basically waited for Bendis to finally make the jump to DC in part because they were offering Legion. If you didn't know, Bendis is a Legion SUPER fan. Along with X-Men, Spider-Man, and other Marvel works, Bendis was regularly following Legion growing up. Alongside his love for Legion, he also really dug DC's Camelot 3000, Herbert's Dune novel, and the indie comic Love and Rockets. All these books he mentioned alongside Legion during an interview for the book talking about how it was a particularly strong and creative time to be reading fiction because all of those books were coming out back to back. That's really where "what could've been" starts-- at Bendis' influences.

As far as I can tell, Bendis' Legion reboot was to be remix of the King Arthur and Camelot myth filtered through the science fiction eye of Dune, and given the emotional interpersonal play of Love and Rockets. Clearly, he read a LOT more books growing up, and those are in there too, but these three seem to really hit upon where he was possibly going with his take.

The first thing I should mention is that early on Bendis insisted that the book was set in the 32nd century, and that it "didn't erase anyone else's Legion runs". If you know Legion, then you know not doing that is functionally impossible due to a number of factors, but Bendis insisted. This is where Camelot 3000 comes in. For those that don't know, Camelot 3000 is the King Arthur myth set in the year 3000. Arthur wakes up in the future after healing from his final battle, and his knights are reincarnated in new bodies (some genders and races don't match up with their old ones). The whole plain is put into motion by Merlin so he can stop Morgan le Fey. The influences in both story and imagery are pretty easy to spot...






Jon is our Arthur. The United Planets is his kingdom/Camelot that he united. The Legion are his knights. But it goes even deeper because Bendis seemed to imply that the original plan was that one of the members of the team-- likely Brainiac-- would remember or have knowledge of the alternate timelines/alternate Legions. This would be how Bendis would make sure that all of the other runs "happened", and also how he would pay homage to the reincarnation idea present in Camelot 3000. This is supported by the fact that you can actually see older continuity Legion members in the visions both Zod and Clark have in Bendis' Superman run. The big stand out tell in the very clear appearance of the member Gates in the image.



This ties into Bendis' take on the Great Darkness Saga. He recently told CBR that he never viewed the Great Darkness as a singular foe or force, but almost a general idea of the oncoming end that the Legion fought back almost spiritually every day. This is supported by the new Guardians of New Oa that Gold Lantern answers to telling him that the Legion itself was the Great Darkness. My theory on this is that it's something of a Many Lives of Moira X situation (but without them knowingly living those lives). By this I mean, the Legion's "we always lose" moment is the fact that in every incarnation no matter how different, they eventually become the Great Darkness. That's why in Clark and Zod's visions of alternate worlds the Legion always comes to kill them. Rather than Mutants vs machines, it's the idea of superheroes vs the dark.

Now, before you say I'm barking up the wrong tree by wildly assuming Bendis was doing Hickman's X-Men in Legion around the same time as it was coming it, let me remind you that the two are very good friends. You can listen to their interviews and see that they like a lot of the same fiction. Hickman, just like Bendis, loved Legion, X-Men, and Dune. And the two have likely talked story in terms of what they'd eventually do if they ever got to Legion (both of their holy grails), so it's no leap to assume that the two went into their respective runs working off some of the same base ideas that they'd talked about in private. I mean, Rucka and Fraction did the same with him even after their books became minis.

The idea seemed to be that Brainiac and the OG three (Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy) were to act as our "quite council" and likely know the secret of the multiple versions of themselves. Rather than doing what they'd almost always done and brining in Clark Kent from his boyhood, they instead when further into the timeline to get Jon in hopes of that being part of what helps them change their fate as Jon is also supposed to face off against an aspect of the Great Darkness in his present. It's possible the reason Jon is so special to this plan is because due to his journey up till then he'd been left slightly "unglued" from time, and that meant that he could affect things in ways that no one else in his time could. That's in part where the Dune aspect comes in if you know it.

Then we get to the real meat of Legion: who's fucking who.

Bendis made a pretty big deal about the fact that he wanted to have new Legion parings. And I think this was in part due to the alternate timeline stuff. The crown jewel of this is Jon and Saturn Girl. This was to be our Arthur and Guinevere, and if you know anything about Arthurian legend then you know how this ends. We only saw act 1 of what was planned for that romance. Bendis made the romance so spontaneous and "hey, you're hot and I'm hot" in part to play to the college vibe, but also to not treat this as Jon's One True Love...because you know what happens next.

I'm guessing Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl would strike up an affair like Lancelot and Guinevere did behind Arthur's back. This would likely be brought on by them not being able to help but wonder what it was like for them to be together in all those other realties. I also imagine Lightning Lad would've been placed more as Jon's good friend as time went on. There's a very easy to spot Harry Potter influence in Bendis' Legion, and Lightning Lad is very much our Ron (he even has the large number of siblings, and comes from a poor background). Jon's scar not also calls back to Arthur's near fatal scar, but also Harry's.

And if you're under the impression that I'm way off base with all of these theories, please look back at the fact that solicitations were changing drastically and regularly. Just look at what issue 8 was supposed to be

"The United Planets are at war as a new epic begins! The president of the United Planets is unable to maintain peace as Ultra Boy's homeworld of Rimbor and Chameleon Boy's homeworld of Durla declare interplanetary war! With the Legion of Super-Heroes choosing sides and a civil war brewing, will these young heroes need to split into separate teams? Plus, Superboy makes a discovery about the future that will change everything he knows...there is a new Krypton! Find out what happens next in the only book telling you the future of DC Comics every month! "

New Krypton was supposed to be shown 2 issues beforehand, and as far back as issue 3 and 4 Mon-El was supposed to come clean about being Jon's descendent. And either Doctor Fate, Monster Boy, or Gold Lantern were supposed to have a connection to Jon and the 21st century, but that never came about.

And as for who our Mordred and Morgan le Fey were to be? Seems pretty obvious, right? It was Rogol Zaar and the wizard Mordru. As hinted at during his Superman run, Zaar was actually Clark's half brother via Jor-El. If Camelot 3000 comparison holds, then Jor-El likely left him for dead. Zaar was also an "Ultimate" take on the Legion foe Persuader, but no Fatal Five was ever formed or hinted at.

My guess is that eventually Zaar would've been the avatar for the Great Darkness, and he'd have commanded a fatal five armies of alternate Legion incarnations that were infected. Once the new Legion beats back the Darkness they'd likely free the other timelines and give them all happy endings.

Bendis Legion was likely supposed to be much, MUCH longer, and much MUCH more epic in scale. But the shifting of plans for 5G made it impossible to do as intended because so much was clearly leaning on linking closely with the newly formed present day DCU and timeline. The book will unfortunately never get credit it should for how ambitious it was going to be.

[Vordan]

There was also a Bleeding Cool rumor from way back when that Bendis was going to use some of Hickman’s ideas for the Legion in his reboot so I think you’re on the mark. I liked a lot of the worldbuilding of Bendis Legion but I found some of the dialogue and plotting off-putting. I would love to see the planned HBO MAX Legion show deliver on this story you’re selling however, especially with other writers in the room to help Bendis plot and write dialogue.

[HsssH]

The book will unfortunately never get credit it should for how ambitious it was going to be.

I don't know, should we give credit to things that did not happen?

But this all sounds rather interesting, maybe we'll get some of it in the upcoming Legion show?

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I think it's still possible we'll get some of this, but it's going to be adjusted to fit whatever DC's post 5G plans.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

I think Superlad93's superpower is "Potential Vision."

Honestly Bendis is a creator I tend to loose interest in. He tends to meander alot and pacing is a problem. So I can't blame fans for dropping his run.

[HsssH]

Oh yeah, at some point I think I'll drop DC comics entirely and just read Superlad93's posts about them

[LordUltimus]

Sounds like it, but I don't think it was just 5G falling through, it looked to me like sales weren't doing as well as expected, same as his Superman stuff.

I also get the feeling that the backstory of the Future State two-parter (where Element Lad betrays the team but it was actually the Titanians) would have been the plot going forward as well.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Oh yeah, at some point I think I'll drop DC comics entirely and just read Superlad93's posts about them

It's certainly cheaper. .

There was also a Bleeding Cool rumor from way back when that Bendis was going to use some of Hickman’s ideas for the Legion in his reboot so I think you’re on the mark. I liked a lot of the worldbuilding of Bendis Legion but I found some of the dialogue and plotting off-putting. I would love to see the planned HBO MAX Legion show deliver on this story you’re selling however, especially with other writers in the room to help Bendis plot and write dialogue.

Al Ewing might've been a better fit for the Legion. I never found bendis good at scifi or fantasy. Al Ewing is better at balancing hard scifi with real emotional gravitas. Shane he's stuck at Marvel.

[LordUltimus]

Also, gotta say, if Imra's character arc would have had her cheat on Jon, the fans would have hated her EVEN MORE.

[Factor]

The OP was certainly more entertaining and well thought out than anything Bendis actually wrote for the Legion.

[Zero Hunter]

Bendis' Legion has been something that's been conceptualized for quite a while. It's kind of an open secret that Lee and DiDio basically waited for Bendis to finally make the jump to DC in part because they were offering Legion. If you didn't know, Bendis is a Legion SUPER fan. Along with X-Men, Spider-Man, and other Marvel works, Bendis was regularly following Legion growing up. Alongside his love for Legion, he also really dug DC's Camelot 3000, Herbert's Dune novel, and the indie comic Love and Rockets. All these books he mentioned alongside Legion during an interview for the book talking about how it was a particularly strong and creative time to be reading fiction because all of those books were coming out back to back. That's really where "what could've been" starts-- at Bendis' influences.

Yeah I don't buy Bendis was a superfan. A superfan would not have come in and rebooted like he did. Bendis always claims to be a big fan of whatever he is writing like when he took over Guardians of the Galaxy. He takes on projects that have TV or movie potential or projects were he can redesign characters to hopefully be used in latter adaptations so he can get that Hollywood money and his name in the credits.

[Adekis]

I gotta say, I would have probably had a lot less enmity for this series if the weird replacement characterizations for the Legionnaries had been different people. I was never sure what was up with feudal prince Ultra Boy, one-percenter Cosmic Boy, or Kryptonian bigamist Mon-El, among others.

I'll never love Bendis' version of the Legion; the characters are too different in personality from the versions I hold so dearly. But knowing that the new Cosmic Boy was never meant to be My Son Rokk Krinn, but someone else more explicitly distinct two hundred years later, aware of his differences from the original? That actually makes a little more sense. Maybe I wouldn't have dismissed the concept so readily had that been made explicit.

Not to mention that I'm a sucker for Arthurian parallels in super-hero fiction. I might have read through that more too.

Oh well. We'll probably never get a version of the Legion closer to this pitch, as all the parallel realities and continuity references are too comic booky to be really effective on a more mainstream scale for TV I think. Though maybe the Arthurian stuff could still work?

Also, learning Bendis was a Legion fan from Old Times does give me a glimmer of hope, however faint, that maybe his Legion show will have more in common with the classic characterizations like Ultra Boy the street punk or Cosmic "Captain America" Boy.

[John Venus]

When you realize that the Legion has failed to pick up a new generation of fans for almost 30 years now......

[Thor-Ul]

(I apologize in advance for any spelling errors. Work the text in my language native and I translated it to the fast one with translategoogle, so if there is any point that I don't know understand, I'll try to clarify later).

I honestly think SuperLad93 is giving Bendis more credit than he deserves. Even his own interpretation of a Legion based on Arthurian myth is more interesting than what Bendis put on the pages, but in the end it is more a product of the own vision of Superlad93 than of any concept that Bendis embodied in his era of the Legion.

All the details, pieces and data that Superlad93 uses to justify how "great" it is could had been the Legion of Bendis can perfectly be explained by either errors of communication between penciler, writer or editor or simple administrative incompetence, last minute changes, mismanage, late deliveries to the limit, but I hardly see a well-planned scheme in the long term as Hickman demonstrates in X-men, in opposition. Since we can't get into the Bendis's head and since we can't take what he says as 100% true either, we should stick to what was published and not rely on intentions or statements. The intentions and words are carried away by the wind and of course everything is always more beautiful in the imagination.


Although the idea of ​​exploring the Arthurian myths or at least using them as a basis for a science fiction story could serve as a reference point and it sounds appealing, I am not interested in a legion based on them and following them point by point. and although interesting, it is still somewhat limited, especially when the Legion is supposed to have its own lore that becomes uncharted with each reboot. personally i want one Legion other than Dune, or Star Wars, or Arthurian Myths, or anything like that. I'm interested a Legion is The Legion. Let him drink from his own identity, from the mythology he has built, expanding from its own myths, a Legion to be the Legion. a legion that grows and matures, with members who have retired or died and that integrates new
characters, not a Legion that perpetually remains in adolescence, returns to distorted versions of the original characters, which is what each reboot has insisted on offering and it seemed more like an obsession of DiDio, because under his regime, the Legion it was rebooted three times.

(BTW for a Legion based on the Arthurian myths, you can look up the Annual Legionnaires #1 (1994) "Castles in the air", translating the Arthurian myth into the 30th century, with CosmiC Boy as Arthur, Garth his Lancelot, and Imra as Gwenevere.)

What was released is a constant stream of constant changes and patches, and an unclear idea of ​​what was going to happen with the lagion. The look of the 32nd century? It would have been preferable if it had really been that, even more acceptable. But also It could be due to a typing error. Sure Bendis said there was an explanation for it, but then I never mention the subject
again. If it was a behind the scenes change or a mistake of typing, Bendis was skillful enough to keep up the expectation, and in the same way that with a lot of his stories, he didn't give any answers or resolutions. I can accept than Bendis maybe had a road map or some vague idea of ​​where he wanted to go. but honestly, this Legion seemed like they were making things up on the fly.
If it really would have been a Legion that took place a century later after the original, it would be more acceptable, but I doubt Bendis even knew what he was working with. Or if the others pencillers even knew.


That scene with the profiles of the legionnaires where Gates' silhouette is seen? We would have to consult the original Bendis script or ask the artist if in that scene if Bendis deliberately noted that Gates's profile should be visible or if simply wrote something like "Silhouettes of legionnaires we can't identify" to which Reis could perfectly have liked the visual profile of Gates and use it, having no idea than that particular legionnaire was or was not going to be part of the Bendis legionnaires. Because it is clear that Reis had no idea at the time which Legion was going to show up.

Just remember the mess Black Lightning's racial change caused. Hell, Reis had no idea about the racial change they did to Lightning Lad, something than made noise later. You can still find on the web images of the original design of Sook of the caucasian Lighting Lad (and of Light Lass too, that Sook designed with a feather as icon) and Reis drawings of him. But the change of race of the character is proof that the situation was unclear to the pencillers. You can't argue there that that was something planned from the beggining. That change of race was a last minute change that forced to redrawings, destroy copies and to suspend distribution of an issue of Action comics/Superman, where the caucasian Lightning Lad appeared on the pages. It even came to the destruction of the copies that were not distributed. I think now those issues are very valuable for their scarcity, but not for Bendis's literary skills. Can you imagine the cost that this entailed? The bad image that it caused to DC in front of its customers? You won't tell me that was part of a well thought out business strategy. In that case I would reply you that those who created the new Coke were
visionaries.


This and other details (the identity of the Invisible Kid for example, which changed from Lyle Norg to Jacques Foccard from one number to another) give the impression that Bendis did not have a
very clear idea of ​​what characters he was writing and rather he was inventing things in the path.


Bendis has a history of broken promises and changing plans that simply ignoring explain them. In New Avengers #1 an alternate cover featured a character who Bendis promised it would be a new thing, but it never materialized. Bendis just don't I mention again. And not to mention what happened with the Leviathan event. Do you remember how ended with a terrorist organization taking over a country, Markovia, a country that has with their own superheroes? (Hi Geoforce! Nobody rememn¿mbers you!) . Did it have any impact? No way. It could had been happening in Antarctica and it would have been the same. And such a situation is resolved in a turn of sterile script that aims to impact but leaves you cold. And that in the end points to the Leviathan's impact that was zero. Because that's how Bendis writes, with script tricks: good beginning, but in the end he brings a character as a surprise factor, to solve with his arrival an "impossible" plot for the heroes. Argument very seen in the Avengers of him and that repeats in the Justice League. The same has happened with the Legion. And I fear that with JL vsLoS the same thing will happen.


Now, if, as Vordan suggests, Bendis took Hickman's ideas as a basis for making a whole reboot of the Legion, that does not speak well of Bendis as a creator. Even when somebody checks his creative history it seems that his best works end up being elongated rehashes from the works of other creators which he fills in with his dialogues. I admit, that may be an unfair assessment of my side, but considering his works like Ultimate Spider-Man (reworks of the whole spider-man story) and Daredevil (a revisitation of Frank Miller run) would seem so. Furthermore, although Hickman applied a story in HoXPoX that includes alternative timelines, in essence what he did was a huge retcon, but it did not alter the continuity of the X-men at all, Hickman didn't rebooted anything. Would he had done this with the Legion? It would have been better? I don't know, but I do know that if Hickman had also come up with yet another reboot and a return to the adolescence of the legionnaires instead of continuing with the point where they were left in the latest Levitz story, he would also have counted on my rejection.


I insist, things should not be judged by what they could have been, but by what they were. Thinking that things could have been great "if only" is a waste of time (unless you are planning to write a novel based on it, or make a documental, it seems to be the rage now, so who knows) but get carried away sSeeing wonder in something that lacks it, pretending than it had potential, is losing perspective on things. In the case of this era, still is too early to say it has finished. Who knows if some other author takes up this version or if Bendis returns, now that he still has to finish massacring the Legion along with the Justice League, although I doubt it, because working on TV can take time and he will continuing damaging the characters on the animated series,but anyway, it was not the promised return to greatness, no matter how many promises Bendis did.


I even bet that SuperLad93 could write something much better.

[LordUltimus]

I will say I disagree with the notion that Hickman's sweeping retcons didn't change continuity. The general outline is the same, but the details are seriously twisted, particularly with the character of Moira, who is essentially a new character in Moira MacTaggart's skin.