How does the Legion do it? How can it hold onto fans decade after decade, even as the history many of those fans cherish has been wiped out and replaced two, maybe three times?
The Mordruverse is instructive. That issue worked for the same reasons the Legion as a whole works (when it does work), because it created an immersive universe with an almost endless capacity to absorb and provoke the reader's imagination. In the Mordruverse the immersion came from contemplating the myriad changes to history, whereas in the regular Legion continuity it can also focus on the expansive setting. It's no accident that Paul Levitz, during one of the Legion's creative peaks, would often begin scenes with a little caption from the Encyclopedia Galactica to help readers navigate the endless reaches of the 30th century. The Legion's strength lies in its sheer breadth, confronting readers with a small army of superheroes and a dizzying array of allies and enemies and planets and weird powers ranging from the ability to accelerate or halt chemical reactions to the ability to make your own arms fall off. Everybody's imagination can find something to latch onto.
The same is true for the Legion's characters. They may have started off as cookie-cutter replicas stamped from the same bland mold--Jaycees In Space--but they were among DC's first heroes to grow and change in ongoing character development. Not in any dramatically plausible way: they first grew into histrionic adolescents like those published across town at Marvel. But "adolescent" isn't always a pejorative; the Legion was brilliantly adolescent, especially when written by Jim Shooter. A teenager himself when he began his first run, Shooter filled his stories with unrequited crushes, blossoming relationships, and sexually risque menaces in a way that must have been alternately familiar and thrilling to adolescent readers (especially in the 70s, when Mike Grell was dressing every character like futuristic porn stars). The number of personality types offered the possibility for reader identification on a scale even Marvel couldn't equal; the myriad combinations did the same for soap opera, especially as the Legionnaires matured into stable, well-rounded, adult personalities. Once again, breadth was the Legion's greatest asset.
But it was closely matched by the depth of the Legion's history. Beginning in 1958 and continuing, with a few tweaks and interruptions, until 1994, that history slowly accumulated into a rich, diverse body of lore. In fact, the Legion was one of the first DC features to build a Marvel-style continuity in which past stories mattered and real change was a possibility. It didn't matter if you came late to the party and had to imagine all those past events--in fact, sometimes it worked better that way. What story could possibly equal the heights of nobility or depths of betrayal you invented to fill in the gaps?
Giffen and the Bierbaums understood this. Their early issues replicated the experience of being a new Legion reader even if you had been following the Legion for years--because they created new gaps in our reading. We were all immersed into this rich and strange universe for the first time. The Five-Year Gap was one of the best features of those issues, activating and absorbing our imagination and defying us to puzzle out how the United Planets got from there to here. The Legion universe had never been more participatory.
Unfortunately, Giffen and the Bierbaums prolonged their stories beyond the point of endurance only to reach a belated and depressing resolution by destroying Earth. The Bierbaums also used their position as writers to render canonical theories from their days as fans; in short, the series faltered when they started filling in the gaps they'd so ably created. But there was enough blame to go around for everyone in the cancellation of the Five-Year Gap Legion and the destruction of its thirty-five-year continuity. Plenty of longtime Legion readers evidently didn't like being made new readers again, didn't like the changes to the history and setting. Ironically they would get a steady diet of arbitrary change for the next decade, to the point where the alterations of the Five-Year Gap era now seem mild by comparison.
DC Comics had been steadily eroding the Legion's connections to the present-day Superman family of characters. The Legion had weathered the removal of Superboy and Supergirl through a "Pocket Universe" patch, and then finessed the removal of the Pocket Universe through the Mordruverse maneuver. But the links to Superman had proven commercially and creatively vital; without them the Legion became an isolated backwater. Some writers might have turned that editorial liberation into a license to tell brilliant stories, but the neglect only empowered Giffen and the Bierbaums to wreak havoc on their own setting. By 1994, with a destroyed Earth, a seemingly intractable continuity, and two sets of ineffective Legionnaires running around, starting the whole thing over again might have seemed like an attractive option.
Instead it turned the Legion's history from an asset to a burden. Whereas before the Legion offered the possibility of bottomless immersion in a thirty-five-year story, now it had to build the story anew--worse yet, with the obligation, in the minds of many fans, to recreate the most important pieces from the old continuity or supply something better. The breadth of characters and setting were similarly reduced, but the writers could quickly boost them somewhere close to their old levels; yet even with two titles a month, there was simply no way to build thirty-five or twenty-five or even ten years of story overnight.
The immersion was gone. The Legion had jettisoned not only its tradition--the most developed in DC Comics--but one of the primary sources of its unique appeal. From then on it would rise or fall solely on the new stories its creators told to fill in the void.
You know how that worked out.
Tomorrow: how that worked out.
You hit the nail right on the head. As a loooooong time Legion reader, from about '76 on, with whatever older comics I could find anywhere.... I loved the Legion. I was invested in the characters and felt I grew up with them. One reason I love the 5 Year Later stuff was that it bumped the Legion to my age bracket.
When that ended and the Legion rebooted, I bailed. I had little interest in reading reinterpretations of stories I'd already absorbed. I also didn't care about the new Legion. They weren't the characters I knew and grew to love... they were just imitations.
It was definitely the loss of that 20 or so year investment I had in the characters that caused me to bail.
Actually, it's something similar that's caused me to bail on most of the Marvel and DC stuff right now. As they jetisson stuff from the past, I find they're setting me free from my investment in their universes. Freedom! At last!
Posted by: Jason | July 18, 2006 at 02:12 PM
I'm looking forward to seeing what you write tomorrow, but, to me, it's worked out okay. I miss some of the characters and history from the two (or three, or four) previous boots, but the current version a) makes a lot of sense, and b) is good on its own merits.
Of course, on one level it wouldn't make any difference to me even if it stunk; I've learned the hard way that the Legion has hooked me for life and there's nothing I can do about it.
But, please, no more reboots. It's annoying. Far better to work with what's there than to start over.
Posted by: Matthew E | July 18, 2006 at 03:36 PM
This is an excellent summing up of what drove me away from the comic for good...though as you pointed out in the previous post, splitting the series between the newsstand format and direct market Baxter format -- described at the time as analogous to "hardcover" and "softcover" editions, ignoring the plain fact that monthly periodicals aren't comparable to novels -- was the fundamental breach that lead to all the creative problems later on. Just prior to that, the book had finally reached a good place after years of neglect, only to be torn apart all over again by a succession of spectacularly bad choices.
Looking forward to the next installment!
Posted by: RAB | July 18, 2006 at 05:52 PM
You forgot to mention Giffen's "Hat Trick" on how he was going to end the old/young Legionnaires storyline: the adults were clones and pawns of the Dark Circle, while the kids were the "real" Legion. The two groups would fight to the death with the victims names being drawn out of a hat. The survivors would regroup and make up, with the old guys going out to the Vega System as the Omega Men, while the youngsters stayed on Earth as the Legion. The end. See this post for more details.
Posted by: wizardimps | July 19, 2006 at 02:34 AM
Someone mentioned legion-as-pokemon on the first part, but I'll mention Legion-as-Harry-Potter here. One of the reasons that the 5YL era, and later the reboots, lost favor among the legion fans was, I'm convinced, their failure to service the various camps of Legion 'shippers. Laurel Gand fell short of being a perfect retcon because no 'real' substitute Kara would break Querl's heart and run off with, of all people, Rond Vidar; Tinya/Jo never saw a payoff from the long separation arc; even in a post-vertigo era the could never come out and openly acknolwledge Ayla/Vi in the text (and none of the reboots even touched that 'ship...), Snake Projectra failed not because people didn't want a nonhuman character as such, but because it forclosed a relationship with Val...
Posted by: Jeff R. | July 19, 2006 at 12:57 PM
I don't talk about 5YL any more....
The first reboot failed for me for two reasons: It made changes, like Snake Projectra, that subtracted from the myth without adding anything I valued, and it made them fast enough that within detectable time, this was not the Legion I wanted to read about; and it didn't feel like the Legion. Little things like Apparition instead of Phantom Girl are one thing, but the issue before the big Mordru confrontation was a !@#$ strategy meeting! Real superheroes don't hold strategy meetings, they get their asses kicked in fights until they miraculously come up with a winning strategy at the last possible second.
So far, aside from a few stupid Waidisms, the second reboot has felt a lot more like the Legion to me.
Posted by: Greg Morrow | July 19, 2006 at 01:47 PM
I'm tempted to say "Give it time." I saw nothing but subtractions. And I have to admit I'm puzzled by your tolerance for a Legion that can spy on each other and split into rival factions in the midst of an interplanetary crisis--or dither around with politicians while kids are getting killed--but not one that has strategy meetings before fighting a powerful menace.
Jeff, I can't say I was ever bothered by what Supergirl would have "really" done in her love life, and Jo Nah had one of the better arcs in the series; his budding relationship with Spider Girl was a lot more interesting than another autopilot Legion romance from the 60s. I think the problem with the 5YL Legion was not its willingness to make changes but its willingness to make bad or unnecessary changes, or not to follow through on the good ones.
Personally, I always thought Snake Projectra failed because a minority of Legion fans had been bitching for years about how the Legion should have more nonhuman characters, since that would make for more realistic science fiction, and the writers foolishly gave them what they asked for. The Legion isn't about realism or even science fiction, and every attempt at writing a "token nonhuman" came across as cloying (Tellus and Quislet?). Adding insult to injury, the snake seemed to come out of a fairy tale rather than an alien planet, and a snake with magical powers is just plain stupid. The snake failed because the snake was always going to fail, because the writers badly misread the fans they thought they were catering to.
That points out another problem that brought the Legion low, one I'm loath to bring up: the fandom. Especially in the 5YL era, too many fans wanted to lock the Legion into its 80s status quo. That ossification would have been just as destructive, in the long run, as some of the capricious changes of the 90s. Even the storytelling style of the 5YL was deemed too radical, and so the book got busted down to insipid stories with Glorith and the Khunds. Sometimes the fans were their own worst enemies.
Ironically, the current Legion reads a lot like some of the criticisms of the Bierbaum Legion: the society is too unpleasant, the series is too "pessimistic," the Legionnaires are all jerks, etc. I guess Legion fans are so starved that a book that would have roiled the mobs fifteen years ago gets hailed as a masterpiece today.
Posted by: Marc | July 19, 2006 at 05:21 PM
To be completely honest, I haven't been reading Waid's LSH with enough focus to zero in on flaws. At the very casual level I'm interacting with, it's had only a couple of issues I was dissatisfied with, mostly having to do with, as you say, Legion factionalism and ineffective in a crisis.
Posted by: Greg Morrow | July 20, 2006 at 12:02 PM
Regarding the factionalism and spying, a lot of that comes out of Waid reaching back to the 60s instead of the 80s, and taking stuff like "Sun Boy goes nuts and tries to exile/kill half the Legion" that was resolved in 8 pages originally and retell it over 12 issues.
Seriously, the 60s Legion was like a high school drama series, with cliques and infighting and stuff. It just resolved problems so much more quickly than stories do today, so it was hard to get tired of any given plot.
Posted by: Dave Van Domelen | July 20, 2006 at 02:32 PM
True, but it also had a cardboard characterization that allowed writers to wreak some pretty serious (if temporary) havoc on the Legionnaires without doing any lasting damage to them; they were more templates than people. We can appreciate that kind of treatment today with irony and humor, but not as serious drama. Trying to do classic Legion zaniness with contemporary realistic characterization makes the Legion look like pricks.
Morrison has a much healthier approach to his "modernized Weisinger" stories in All-Star Superman, where he keeps the crazy antics but acknowledges the simmering dysfunctionality of the Superman/Clark/Lois or Superman/Jimmy relationships. Of course, it helps that his characters are just plain nicer, better people than Waid's Legion (much as it helps that he's Grant Morrison).
Posted by: Marc | July 20, 2006 at 03:06 PM