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That cover reminds me of something, as did the cover for number one, I'm guessing Adam Hughes "All Star" projects are effectively canceled? Karen Gillan wouldn't be a bad choice to play a year one Babs
I wish DC would threeboot--that is, bring Mark Waid back, and let him dictate everything. I just picked up the first trade of Legion he did with beloved Barry Kitson (where is that guy these days? he did JLA: Year One, too, and he's even better here--like, really amazing), gotten about a third of the way through it, and holy shit is it great. Why was this not emphatically embraced?
Yeah, this doesn't have very much to do with the DC relaunch, except in a tangential way of being related to relaunches in general, and how sometimes they are good.
Really, I, like Myasishchev really liked it. It, unlike the post-Zero Hour Legion (which I am currently re-reading and loving, as well), avoided repeating certain events. Hell, we never actually got an origin story.
They never explained where Cosmic Boy went, though. Tony Bedard started his run with an arc with the Legionnaires looking for CB, but nothing was resolved. Then Jim Shooter took over and my interest waned. I gave up just a few issues before the comic was cancelled out of pure boredom.
Maybe it got worse? The first collection is really great. Maybe we have different takes on what makes a good comic. I thought it had some really neat ideas and it made me laugh.
Also, it reminded me a bit of early Magnus, Robot Fighter, which is always a good thing.
Just Mark Waid trying to be edgy and failing at it.
I dunno. Edgy? I thought it was trying to be cute and succeeding at that.
If this is edgy, what do you make of... well, pretty much the entire superhero genre over the past few years? Not one person vomited blood or got their head punched off, and the most risque thing was completely harmless, namely Triplicate Girl's attempt to engineer a gangbang, which, let's face it, is obvious and also extremely hilarious.
(Less obvious but also hilarious is the probably unintentional implication, due to the ambiguous passage of time between panels, that Cosmic Boy likes to watch.)
But at any rate, I'll take Woody Allen-esque sex jokes* over, for example, the brutal rape of a woman treated as a plot point to drive male characters' actions.
I guess there was a genocide, too, and usually I'm against that, but in galaxy-spanning SF stories, planets get blown up all the time.
I can see not liking it (sort of, in a theoretical way), but all I'm saying is I just don't see even an attempt at edginess. I can admit that "a future where love is against the law" maybe comes across that way in outline, but so far Waid's been playing with it in a fun way, that wasn't grim or mean-spirited at all.
Like, does half the team go on to lose limbs and/or family members (Projectra down! twenty to go!)?
*Also of note here--Karate Kid being a total dork with Phantom Girl, as well as the phrase "ultra-love," which really ought to be a power.
Under Waid the threeboot was outstanding. It was my first real exposure to the Legion and made me a fan and wanted me to explore more of their history. It's the later runs that aren't so great and when they retitled it "Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes". I'm all for Kara joining the Legion but they made her the star of their book.
Under Waid the threeboot was outstanding. It was my first real exposure to the Legion and made me a fan and wanted me to explore more of their history. It's the later runs that aren't so great and when they retitled it "Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes". I'm all for Kara joining the Legion but they made her the star of their book.
Maybe it got worse? The first collection is really great. Maybe we have different takes on what makes a good comic. I thought it had some really neat ideas and it made me laugh.
He had good ideas. He just didn't have a good story to go along with them. The character building of the various Legionnaires vs advancing the main story surrounding Lemnos wasn't very balanced out. In the end, while he was able to give each member his/her distinctive personality, the main storyline really suffered and seemed incoherent at times.
I also disliked how far he had tried to justify the Legion in his iteration. The youth social movement against the under-18 big brother surveillance apparatus just didn't work and was contrived as was much of the power squabbles between Brainiac and Cosmic Lad.
^ I agree with the latter points about the sociological situation and the rivalry between Brainy and Cos. I think Geoff Johns takes shots at the threeboot Legion in "Legion of Three Worlds" by the current version of the team insult their youth and naivete.
It's not necessarily the direction I'd have gone in--I'm really fond of the idea of people in their mid-thirties still referring to themselves as lads and lasses, not because they are British but because they actually still think of themselves as kids. I can pretty easily foresee a future where forty year olds are treated as on the cusp of adulthood.
At the same time, I really like the Legion as a social movement, with a membership potentially in the hundreds of thousands. Especially given that a good half of the team or more does not have actual superpowers, but are just well-trained examples of species numbering in the millions or billions.
Does the Cos/Brainy power struggle get serious? It seems like it might, although in Teenage Revolution all they manage is to be jerks to each other. Which is really entertaining. Brainiac 5 is at his best when he's just non-stop calling everybody else retarded, especially Cosmic Boy. (Although I'll give Waid credit, this is the first time I've ever liked Cosmic Boy.)
I also like how Waid put a little bit of color in the team. The future is still way too white (personally I'd pull a 3001), but at least it's less luminous than your average Klan robe. Also, beyond being black for a change, the threeboot Star Boy does not look awful, with a beard, or a plunging neckline, or a lack of a cape to frame his in space! version of a Hawaiian shirt. Cos' corset looked better than Star Boy's old clothes. Sure, it looked like he might have been moonlighting with the Hellfire Club, but at least it didn't look like your aunt's yoga outfit.
I also like how Waid put a little bit of color in the team. The future is still way too white (personally I'd pull a 3001), but at least it's less luminous than your average Klan robe. Also, beyond being black for a change, the threeboot Star Boy does not look awful, with a beard, or a plunging neckline, or a lack of a cape to frame his in space! version of a Hawaiian shirt. Cos' corset looked better than Star Boy's old clothes. Sure, it looked like he might have been moonlighting with the Hellfire Club, but at least it didn't look like your aunt's yoga outfit.
I liked those changes too; but didn't the Cosmic Slop episode "Space Traders" teach us that people of color were sold to melanin loving aliens in order to save the earth?
Drawing FF for a few issues, I believe. And he did some Spider-Man back when they had revolving creative teams. But it's a comicbook crime that Kitson doesn't have a regular book.
As far as the Threeboot LSH goes, I think Waid and Kitson had good ideas as far as character tweaking and world building, but the actual stories they told just weren't very interesting or memorable--at least to me.
I actually really, really liked the Threeboot Legion. I don't know, something for me really clicked. I was not able to read Legion before or since although I'll probably check out the reboot.
I liked those changes too; but didn't the Cosmic Slop episode "Space Traders" teach us that people of color were sold to melanin loving aliens in order to save the earth?
Wow. I kind of want to shoot Reginald Hudlin into space now.
Mike Farley said:
As far as the Threeboot LSH goes, I think Waid and Kitson had good ideas as far as character tweaking and world building, but the actual stories they told just weren't very interesting or memorable--at least to me.
Yeah, I could see that kinda. I mean, I just read seven issues where pretty much nothing happened, except supergoofs talking to each other (and one punch-up and, eventually, a nearly off-panel genocide). But then, that's actually how I prefer my comics.
As for Kitson, I was looking it up, and he has (evidently) really not had a lot of work in the past few years. I guess that could be for a number of reasons, including the fact that page rates almost have to be shit for DC to possibly turn a profit, and anyone with any sort of qualifications could make twice the money with half the effort.
C. Miller said:
I actually really, really liked the Threeboot Legion. I don't know, something for me really clicked. I was not able to read Legion before or since although I'll probably check out the reboot.
It actually kept me away from the LSH for a long time, the fact that there are about five billion different versions, and so many weird continuity snarls.* Superboy's on-again/off-again involvement is the most celebrated, but there are a lot of others, too, that perhaps the more hardcore wouldn't recognize, because they lived through it.
For example, I thought Brainaic 5 (as well as Brainiac 2) were robots until about two weeks ago, and I had read a couple dozen Legion (and L.E.G.I.O.N.) books already. I mean, he's descended from Brainiac 1! He doesn't shut up about it for his first decade of appearances! He has an amazing computer mind! What was I meant to conclude? Of course, Brainiac 1 wasn't a robot until the 1980s, and then he wasn't, again, and then he was, again... I don't know what he is now, but I know Brainiac 8 is a robot, too. So, seriously, what the fuck? I read comics, I research this shit, and crucially I care, and still don't understand it.
The cartoon wisely doesn't bother with the incredibly convoluted retcons needed to get Querl to both willingly take on a name equivalent to "Hitler Lad," and be flesh and blood**, and just makes Coluans the Borg instead. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people got into the Legion via that series, and maybe got annoyed when it wasn't nearly as simple and elegant in its layout. But that's the difference between a hard reboot and what DC's doing now, which is just another layer to the retcon onion. One of them tends to function more coherently, even if it does have less depth or retreads old material.
*Also, when I was a kid, I thought kid heroes were lame. Which, if I can universalize just a little bit, really makes you wonder if de-aging characters actually makes kids more interested in them.
**
Although they do get him there, eventually. It's somewhat underexplained, although I see what they were going for, and it still makes a lot more sense than anything I can glean from reading about the several dozen comics histories.
Drawing FF for a few issues, I believe. And he did some Spider-Man back when they had revolving creative teams. But it's a comicbook crime that Kitson doesn't have a regular book.
