Hey, Whatnauts! Welcome to our last episode of the year, a little holiday bonus thrown into your Christmas stocking: done in haste, sure, but also with love and appreciation. Thanks to all of you, we’ve had a tremendous year, and we are crazily grateful.
So, after the presents are opened and you’re through tinkering/eating the all-chocolate Star Wars: The Force Awakens playset, fire up your podcast player and spend a breezy half-hour with us as we talk about Graeme’s headcanon for the Legion of Super-Heroes, and what that crazy bunch of bell-bottomed future teens, like, really mean, man.
It’s short and, for us, pretty on topic all the way through (in part because it was pretty much a trimmed digression from something else) so no show notes are necessary…what is necessary are, again, our thanks to you, and our best wishes for your continuing and/or emergent good health and happiness in these last remaining days of 2015, and for all of the new year to come.
As I said, this really is our last episode of the year, but I believe maybe all three of us will be posting here through the end of the year (I may flake, we’ll see) so rest your ears but exercise your eyeballs right here at wait what podcast dot com.
And, of course: Happy Holidays! We will see you in 2o16!
And if you need that link as an integral part of Operation: Save Christmas, here you go:
http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts/WaitWhatXmasMini1.mp3
Merry Xmas ya big lugs
Nice Christmas prezzie. Thanks guys!
I disagree that Legion ended with Levitz; it ended when Giffen left with #38 during 5YL. It even had a great big ‘The End’ there on the cover so there could be no doubt.
The Bierbuam’s struggled on for a bit with no editorial backing until DC put the boot in, replaced them with KC Carlson, fully re-booted post Zero Hour and finally laid to rest the grand soap-opera that the fans had faithfully followed for 30 odd years.
The Legion was replaced by a bunch of bratty kids, and which 30/40 year old wants to read that? Not I.
It ‘was’ a soap-opera; and in soap-operas the characters age, change, and die. That was what made the Legion great, and that Levitz bought to the fore, and that Giffen realised. Everything afterwards was weak sauce in search of an audience that had been pushed out. No amount of re-booting, or un-booting, will ever bring that audience back; something I realised during Levitz’ return prior to, and after, New 52.
Not even some faddy ‘Squirrel Girl’ type make-over.
If DC do want to bring back the concept, leave the pre-existing characters in limbo (or on whichever Multiversal Earth they’ve been assigned to), and just bring back the group name with totally new characters (no nods, no winks), and start re-building the grand soap-opera from scratch for a completely new audience. I’d be good with that. I probably wouldn’t read it, but then, my Legion died a quarter of a century ago. I’ve had plenty of time to get over it. L(et) L(ie the) L
While I think that would be ideal, the main thing I would want is an ending and a new beginning.
Give Superboy one last trip to the future…his final trip. He arrives 20 years into the Legion Future where we meet the original Silver Age characters at middle age (beyond even the 5 year later Legion who were in their 40s). We’re not sure if this is the originals, the threeboot, or the Archie Legion. All we know is that this is their last hurrah.
We get a last tour of the Legion Headquarters and the “Ghost of the Legion” haunts the halls. We learn that this ghost is really Wildfire, who Superboy ends up coaxing out and finding a new purpose. We also get closure to all these characters of the Silver Age characters and they all actively retire.
Except for Wildfire.
When Superboy ends up going back to his time, we learn that he isn’t from the past. He’s from the far future and traveling to the past was his initiation. His name is Kel-el and he’s the 52nd Clone of Superboy. He’s also the latest recruit of the New Legion of Superheroes lead by Wildfire a century into the future. There could be some reboot characters, some minor and some major. But for the most part, we never see the Silver Age Legionnaires again.
This is 100 years into the Legion Future, the year 3115.
This is a whole new Legion with a new status quo, but the idea of immigrants who save the world remains the same.
“I’d be good with that. I probably wouldn’t read it…”
That sounds like a hell of a pitch!
Thanks for doing this, guys.
Tend to agree on issue 38 being “the end.” I wouldn’t say that the Bierbaum material that followed was totally worthless – some nice grace notes for characters, some lovely Pearson and Immonen art, but overall the drop in quality and direction was rapid. Once stewardship passed to Tom McCraw, the art went downhill and the story basically got thrown out, and I was done.
Lovely Christmas surprise — thanks, fellas! Really enjoyed this. Happy holidays!
Hmm, this ep doesn’t seem to be showing up on the iTunes podcast feed…
Huh, someone else said the same thing on Twitter. You may need to refresh the feed, Joe? I only say that because it’s showing up both when I check the feed direclty in a browser and when I look in the podcasts app on my iPhone… Sorry it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do and updating automatically!
Weird, my iPhone still isn’t pulling it into the feed, but searching for the episode in the iTunes store got it. Thanks for casting all the pods, and happy New Year to all Whatnauts!
I just caught up with this, and had a lot of fun listening. I’ve also got some personal reminiscences, since I was actually contributing for a few years to Interlac, the Legion of Super-Heroes apa (amateur press association, including the first couple years of Five Years Later.
The crucial thing to know is that Tom and Mary Bierbaum were (and are, I think) long-time participants in that scene, and quite popular. From that fandom’s vantage point, Five Year Later was Our Folks Make It To The Big Time. It was, as Graeme guesses, divisive – some folks absolutely wouldn’t touch it, others loved it – but even the ones who cared not at all for it shared in that sense of Our Folks.
What was fascinating for me to learn, bit by bit, was that Interlac contributors had basically been in an ongoing dialogue with Levitz for some time – sometimes mutually satisfying, sometimes not. There’s been a gay contingent in the comics apa world for a very long time, and some of them had worked up a head canon in which Element Lad was gay. It got pretty widely accepted. But it bugged Levitz (who regularly read Interlac, though he didn’t contribute much if at all) enough that he wrote the storyline in which Element Lad gets a Science Police girlfriend to draw a strong line between canonical Element Lad and any other Element Lad. Alas, it’s been long enough that I don’t now recall any other examples; most were less significant.
I drifted away for various reasons while Five Years Later was still going; there’s an NPC named Baugh who gets killed in one panel of the Khund War storyline, but that was about it for me. :) So I don’t really know how that fandom reacted to the cascade of reboots and all.
If it were up to me, I’d set up the Legion as its own continuity, utterly separate from anything DC ever does otherwise, as much its own universe as, say, Astro City. (I personally like the riff I’ve seen where the Legion gets inspired by the legend of Wonder Woman and Amazons, but that’s fanfic for another day.) Like Graeme, I’d keep the soap opera central, but I like the stuff with characters growing up over time. The Legion was in Levitz’s run one of the few places in comics where you could see successful marriages and such, and I’d want to keep that. Otherwise…what he said. :)
Bruce: this was incredibly edifying…and entertaining! Thank you for it!
My pleasure. Thanks for the show, each time! I look forward to you guys showing up so I can listen to great rambling as I do my chores. :)
http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/johns-teases-legion-of-super-heroes-for-live-action-dc-show