A Retrospective on the Post Zero Hour Legion: a really, really long look at the Archie Legion and the Independence Day Legion

For those of you who are new, or newish, to my columns, I'm going to give you fair warning for what's about to come.

Now that we've finished with the Post Zero Hour (PZH) Legion, the Reboot Legion, or the Archie Legion and what I'm calling the Independence Day Legion (IDL), I wanted to go back and write about this entire "boot" of the Legion. Inspired by the classic movie "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", I'm going to separate the following into three sections.

Just for reference so things make sense:

• The Archie Legion is the brightly-colored reboot that came directly out of the horrors of the 5YL Legion. It's populated by fresh-faced and young teenagers who look like they just stepped out of an Archie comic (hence the name). It ran from Legion of Super-Heroes and Legionnaires #0 (Oct. 1994) to Legionnaires #77 and Legion #121 (Nov. 1999)
• The Independence Day Legion (IDL) is, basically, the Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (DnA)-written Legion (with a few exceptions). It ran from Legionnaires #78 - 81, Legion #122 - 125 and then continued into Legion Lost, Legion Worlds, and The Legion #1 - 38. It's much darker, much more overtly sexual, and focused a lot more on the science fiction element of the Legion. It ended with the Teen Titans/Legion Special in Nov. 2004. It also tends to contain stories that have two big elements that are similar to Independence Day - lots of destruction and endings that make no sense.
  

As I mention as often as I can, please leave your thoughts, comments, opinions, and anything else you want to get off your chest either here, on BlueSky, or on Reddit.

This is going to be long. The last one I wrote about the 5YL Legion clocked in at over 5,000 words, and I've never been known for my brevity. I'm also most certainly going to miss something. I'm covering 10 years and over 200 issues.

This is also been the hardest one of these for me to write, for a variety of reasons. So I'm just going to apologize right now if I get something wrong.

Please get comfortable... 

Once again, I'll mention my source for sales numbers:

The Legion Omnicom Sales Information

and

Comichron.com

Background 

I wanted to talk a little about the complete garbage pile that the creative team had been handed as they approached this reboot. If you've never read the final year of the Five Years Later (5YL) Legion, be glad. But know that both Legion of Super-Heroes and Legionnaires were spinning aimlessly, trying their best to do something that might resonate with readers, wasting the considerable talents of Stuart Immonen, and nothing stuck. Sales numbers were dropping quickly and everyone knew these books were heading towards an end.

But how could they save it?

Editor KC Carlson reached out to writer/colorist Tom McCraw, who had been writing the Legion of Super-Heroes for a bit, former Legion editor and now popular writer Mark Waid, and new writer Tom Peyer, who was desperately trying to keep L.E.G.I.O.N. afloat. With Zero Hour approaching, it was the perfect time to reboot the Legion and try to make sense of everything.

What did they need to make sense of? Man, this is a long list...

• The Superboy problem - was he a member? What was the Legion's inspiration? Could they even talk about him? Post Crisis on Infinite Earths, it was a ton of confusion.
  
• What to do with the pocket universe created by the Time Trapper, who grew a new Superboy and controlled the Legion for... reasons??
• A middle-aged Legion, with numerous dead members, who had been ground up and left in shambles
• A teenage Legion who were the Silver Age Legion returned to the dark 30th Century
• A 30th Century that was dark and depressing, populated by heroes who were, quite often, complete jerks

So they wrapped up the oldest current super team in existence, had them all disappear into a bright light, and Zero Hour rebooted the team back to their teenage days.

The Good

The Talent

I've always thought that the smartest thing an editor can do is hire talented people and then guide them and make sure they meet their deadlines. KC Carlson did exactly that. Peyer and Waid were two young writers just starting to make their names at DC and in the comic industry and they were the smart choice to reboot the book. They were both longtime fans of the Legion, knew the mythology and respected it, and it showed with every new issue that came out. They understood the characters and knew what made each of them tick. Unlike the previous version of Legionnaires, where both Inferno and Live Wire were, to put it nicely, worse than the villains, this PZH Legion was populated by heroes. We wanted to see Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Live Wire succeed because we liked them.

Editor Mike McAvennie did the exact same thing years later when he hired Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. I'm sure he gave them pretty detailed instructions and then let them run with their sci-fi heavy influences. Within just a few issues, this Legion was different, more exciting, more compelling, and had shaken off the doldrums of the previous two years. The book needed shaking up due to tanking sales and they were just the writers to achieve it. They breathed new life into characters such as Brainiac 5 and Kid Quantum and gave fans something to get excited about.

But comics aren't just about the writing - artists usually make or break the book. In the Archie Legion, the man who was primarily responsible for Legionnaires was Jeff Moy, a new artist to comics and DC in general and the creator who made the book his own. He lasted the entire run of the series, from reboot to cancellation, a run from October 1994 to December 1999. He missed 6 issues during that run. And three of those were because he was drawing the Annual. In an era where great artists can't draw three issues in a row, Moy was an callback to artists who made deadlines and pumped out 22 pages a month.

His artwork captured the spirit of the series - he drew the Legionnaires as the teenagers they were supposed to be. They had a fresh-faced, idealistic quality to them that leapt off the page. When I think of Moy, one character comes to mind immediately - XS. He drew her as the naive, overly-emotional teenage girl she was and imbued every drawing with an innocence and energy that matched the character. Sadly, I don't think Moy gets the respect he deserves when people talk about great Legion artists. But know this - Moy is the second most prolific Legion artist of all time, trailing only Keith Giffen.

Olivier Coipel was the perfect example of a Legion tradition - hire a young, up-and-coming artist and watch them grow on the book. From Dave Cockrum to Mike Grell to Keith Giffen to Steve Lightle to Greg LaRocque to the aforementioned Moy, the Legion has been a great training ground for artists either at the very beginning of their careers or ones earning a place back in the comics industry.

Olivier Coipel made the IDL his own and, with each issue, showed why he's become on the best pencillers in the business today. He brought a European style to the design and an animator's eye for action to a book that desperately needed to grab attention and gain new readers. His art leapt off the page and you couldn't help but get excited by the energy he brought. I loved the fact that he made the book feel like a science fiction book again. His redesign of Earth, and of the spacecraft, and Legion World, made certain you knew this was the 31st Century.

I was listening to a podcast interview with Mark Morales and he basically said that Coipel is the best penciller working in comics. And Morales has inked some of the greatest artists of the past 20 years. I can't disagree - and the Legion let him develop, grow, and start his journey to his status today.

Hiring DnA and Coipel brought new life to the book and kept it going years after it should've been cancelled. Whether you love or hate what they did, they got eyes on the book and they did the exact opposite of what those did before them.

When Coipel left, it looked like they were going to be in trouble, artistically. And then Chris Batista took over. What a great choice. He was a great bridge between what we had seen from Jeff Moy, making the characters look relatable and providing amazing facial work, and what we saw with Coipel, providing solid action and a futuristic design. Batista knocked it out of the park, even when it looked like the writers were less than enthused.

Two books a month

Another great decision, and I'm actually still shocked that DC let this happen, was to continue running two books and providing double the Legion stories every month. For a team as big as the Legion is, having 44 pages of story was a perfect way to ensure that every character got used. From the Legionnaire who was central to the story to the support staff who kept Legion HQ operating, everyone got "screen time" and there was never a sense that the creative team was ignoring someone.

The Characters

We saw the greatest influx of new Legionnaires since the 1960s as the creative team brought new characters and personalities to the group:

• XS tied the Legion to the Flash universe and Jenni Ugnats might have been the most accurately-written teenage girl in the DCU at the time.
  
• Gates continued the push for more diversity and provided a truly "alien" character, the first since Paul Levitz was writing the book.
  
• Kid Quantum really didn't come into her own until The Legion but, once DnA took over, quickly became one of the most important team members.
  
• Kinetix can be best described as a "what could've happened" character. It seemed like none of the writers knew what to do with her, which resulted in the horror that was the Terrorform Zoe.
  
• Monstress was unique, personality-wise, but suffered from looking a little too much like a Marvel cousin. Such a shame that we never got to see her achieve more in the book.
• Shikari may just look like a Dawnstar copy, but she brought a new look, a less problematic origin, and was a key part of the IDL.
  

As mentioned before, diversity was key in the PZH Legion, both from adding more alien members and members of different races. Even the backgrounds were filled with more aliens than we'd seen in a long time. I think this might be the only superhero team in history where there were consistently more female characters than male.

With two books and creative teams that wanted to bring more to longtime Legionnaires, we also got better versions of the following Legionnaires:

• Triad actually became a compelling character, not just someone who stood in the background and then disappeared once married. This was the first time I actually cared about what was going on with Luorno and she quickly became a fan favorite.
  
• Shrinking Violet/Leviathan was moved front and center, became the central figure in the best story of the run, and proved herself again and again to be a key Legionnaire. We actually saw personal growth and development with Salu and, although I will probably remember her character during this run more for what they could've done, I can't complain too much about what they did.
• Sensor/Jeka - I think I'm in the minority here, and I wasn't a fan at the beginning, but I really liked the changes they made here. Having a snake-like hero, a true "alien" on this team, worked wonders. And her personality change made the character even better.
  

We also saw characters fans had been clamoring for and used in ways to make Legion fans happy. The Archie Legion was packed with cameos, Easter eggs, and the team made sure almost every Silver Age character showed up in one way or another. Did it make sense to have Tenzil Kem as a cook for the team? Not in the slightest - but Matter-Eater Lad fans wanted him connected to the team, so he was there. Did it make sense to turn Chemical King into a reporter? Nope. But it was nice to see him back and still alive.

DnA tossed out all the craziness around the return of Wildfire and essentially wrote him as Levitz had years earlier. Pairing him up with their Dawnstar surrogate, Shikari, was just icing on the cake for Bronze Age fans who wanted to see them back together.

They also brought back Timber Wolf, another fan favorite, who hadn't been seen since the reboot. Giving him tons of story time, and even a solo victory over the Fatal Five (kinda), re-established him as a major player in the series.

The Stories

Here's a list of the stories that stood out to me during this run (and yes, I'm sure I've missed your favorite):

• The reboot itself - they did a great job resetting the table and starting fresh with the team
• The "Day Off" issues (too many to list individually) - no matter who was writing or drawing, they just nailed the issues where the characters got to relax, hang out together, and just be teenagers
• The Death of Trom - this was one of the best single issues of the ten years and, even though you knew what was going to happen, it still hit every emotional punch and left you speechless
• The White Triangle story - Daxamites attacking Earth, Andromeda betraying them, Apparition killed (kinda) - the end of the first year was almost perfectly done and showed just how talented the creative team was
• The entire Emerald Eye/Violet story (it ran for a large part of the second year) - they sowed the seeds, let the story percolate, killed Leviathan (which was a shock), and ended with a showdown of Legionnaire against Legionnaire... and time travel
• The Emerald Violet/Mordru showdown - they elevated Mordru to a true galaxy-level threat, we got to see every Legionnaire step up and show their importance, and it's probably the best work Moy did on the book
• Legion Lost - I don't love the dark Legion stories, but I have to tip my cap to this book, for the most part, working for me - DnA took the Legion in a completely different direction and brought a ton of new fans to the title
  
• Ra's Al Ghul against the returning Legion - the first 8 issues of The Legion started with a bang and did everything you need to do to start a title and keep readers interested
• The Robotican war delivered, for the most part, and bringing Computo back was one of the only times DnA used a Legion villain effectively, so that was a nice treat

As I said before, first the good and second, the bad... and that's where we are. If you want to keep your fond memories of the reboot and not start yelling at me, please just stop reading.

 

The Bad

The Talent?

Before I start ripping into the people who worked on this book, I just want to say that I mean no ill will towards any of them and I'm sure they're nice people. These people have showed amazing skill and ability on many other projects. I'm just going to go with this - they were either on books they didn't really want to work on or they were overwhelmed by the size and scope of the book. Nothing against them - there's a reason why the Legion is considered one of the hardest books to work on.

Did you know that Tom McCraw has more Legion writing credits than anyone not named Paul Levitz? Every month, his name appeared as a plotter for both Archie Legion books. After the complete garbage that was McCraw's run on Legion before the reboot, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why he was given any writing job. According to Roger Stern, McCraw "was not only the colorist but also the co-plotter for both books – kept track of everyone’s ideas, and every month he would deliver a plot springboard for each title." So can we safely say he helped plot both the good and the bad?

When Mark Waid left at the end of the first year, Tom Peyer had to step up and was writing both books for a while. His run on Legion of Super-Heroes was, in my opinion, always the weaker of the two books and I honestly think he just got burnt out. Or ran out of ideas. I honestly can't imagine how stressful it would be to try to write two Legion books a month, so I'm going to cut him a lot of slack here. But you could tell it was too much for him. Just like McCraw, he was there for both good and bad so he's somewhere in the middle.

Roger Stern joined the writing team in the third year and stuck it out to the end of the Archie Legion. Stern, for anyone who doesn't know, had epically good runs over at Marvel and was, at the time, the biggest name on the creative team. But I always got the sense that DC just didn't really know what to do with him. By the time he joined Legionnaires, he was only writing one Superman title and had branched off into novels. As good of a writer as he is, I don't think he ever really "got" the Legion. Here's a quote from an interview:

"But, you know, I was never completely satisfied with my Legion work. For one thing, there were just too damn many characters. That was the major philosophical difference I had with the rest of the guys. I wanted to limit the number of Legionnaires in the stories. I felt there were already too many super-heroes packed into each story; there was no room to develop them. But everyone else seemed determined to introduce even more heroes. It was unwieldy and was becoming more frustrating with every issue."

Frustrated by the number of characters and plot lines, Stern recruited his wife, Carmelo Merlo, to start plotting the book. In the above-mentioned interview, they don't come out and say that she was basically writing the book by the end, but they come close. I have no idea - but I can say that the Legion never saw the Stern who made the Avengers work so well.

On the artistic side, the Legion never found an artist who could be a great counter to Jeff Moy. Lee Moder stayed on the book for around 40 issues, give or take some fill-ins and guest artists, but I don't think there was ever a time when he came even close to Moy. His work was rushed and he struggled with a lot of basics, such as making the characters look the same between panels, or anatomy. I can't rip him too badly - he had a regular gig at DC for 4 years, his editor was apparently happy with his work, and he was learning on the job. I also think his inker wasn't helping him at all, so I'm not going to rip Moder too badly here. He would go on to be excellent on Stars and STRIPE.

Fill-in artists were always a problem for this title. When it wasn't Moy, Coipel, or Batista, the drop off was stunning. I can only think of one who I was actually impressed with, Joyce Chin. Everyone else really, really, really struggled with their issues.

The Characters

In an attempt to change up established Legionnaires, the creative team took longtime favorites into new directions and, often, they just didn't work as well:

• Apparition and Ultra Boy went from one of the best couples in Legion history and a pair that could be argued as just as key as Lightning Lad/Saturn Girl to two of the most irritating "heroes" in the Legion. And their plotlines would never, ever end. I mean, I don't think I could write Tinya and her mom fighting for 10 years, but they did. They took everything that made these two compelling characters and ruined them. The destruction of Ultra Boy, who went from being the "Han Solo" of the Legion to a man-child that Saturn Girl has to trick to prevent from getting too emotional, was almost too much to bear. And this went on for the entire 10 years. There was never a resolution to this.
  
• Brainiac 5... man, this one hurt. I don't know why every writer seems to think that a brilliant person is always an ass, but that's where they went. What was worse was that he never got better, he never connected with anyone, until DnA took over and actually turned him into a character you'd like.
• Invisible Kid - there were moments where I really started to wonder why they even needed a Legion as Lyle always saved the day and never made a mistake. He was the perfect Gary Sue for the book. When they revealed he had been trained as a super spy before he joined the team was the moment I was ready to drop the book.
• Ferro - the toughest part of Ferro is that his role is, honestly, to be the warning of how dangerous it is to be a Legionnaire. His sacrifice forced the book to grow up and gave the title real stakes. When he didn't die in Final Night, the creative had to use him... and, judging from the horrible stories they told, didn't really want to.
• Andromeda and Umbra - the writers really, really loved embracing xenophobia in the 31st Century and these two were the characters who hated everyone else because they were different. But yet they never got any sort of redemption arc, or any chance to show they were better after their time in the Legion. Andromeda was written out and joined a cult and Umbra just, kinda, stopped being racist... just shoddy for both of them.
• Saturn Girl took over Cosmic Boy's mind, while he was in a coma, brought him to life, and almost married him. Then, to prevent Ultra Boy from realizing his wife, Apparition, was not with them, she made the entire team believe that Tinya was actually there, essentially pretending to be Jo's wife. At in both cases, everyone on the Legion was fine with that. Saturn Girl had always been so morally against entering anyone else's mind, but yet in this version she was perfectly fine with it. It never worked and really turned her into a villain, in my eyes.
  

There were only two new Legionnaires who I hated, Lori Morning and Thunder. I'm not going to say anything else to be nice.

Did DC ever care about this book?

I will never understand how DC didn't restart both the Legion and Legionnaires with new number ones when they did this reboot. It just makes no sense from a sales standpoint.

This was the Nineties, when people were buying every number one they could find because they were hoping they'd go up in value. It was a way to separate the Legion from the past stories. It was a way to get more eyes on the product.

But no... we get the Zero Hour issues and then #62 and #19. If I had no idea what was going on, I'm pretty sure I'd have been really confused.

I'm going to talk about reboots in the last section but I wanted to throw this in here - DC did none of the usual things they do with reboots here. No number ones. No big-name cover artists. No trade ads. Nothing. The book just came out and... that was it.

When you look at the sales numbers, the biggest takeaway I got was this: why wasn't DC doing much, much more to try to keep this book viable years before they did? This book was absolutely hemorrhaging readers from the very beginning and DC just watched them both circle the drain. Getting them connected to Final Night did help a bit but, I don't know how anyone could look at these books and not see the writing on the wall from the start of 1996.

Just to put this in perspective - Final Night was the only time a Legion book sold more than 30,000 copies.

Here's another perspective: Legion of Super-Heroes #100 was the best-selling Legion book from 1997 to the end of the title. It sold 29,805 copies. The same month, Legionnaires sold 25,055 copies. They were outsold by such memorable books as Maverick #5 (37,360 copies) and The Tenth #3 (47,013).

In 1988, the Legion was selling over 70,000 copies of each issue.

But the books just kept chugging along, losing readers, unable to gain new readers, and you could see the creative team was just kinda running in place. By the time they handed the reigns over to DnA, it was probably too late to fix anything.

The Ugly

Let's talk about reboots for a bit.

When I was doing some research for this column, I learned something new about the DC Universe that I had never considered before: Crisis on Infinite Earths (COIE) was not the first time they changed everything.

I never really thought of anything that came before COIE as a reboot because it was always just part of their history. And I'm sure that what I'm about to write is going to be the moment where you think, "yeah, that's obvious, dummy..." But when DC entered the Silver Age, they rebooted everything. New Superman. New Batman. New Green Lantern. Justice League instead of Justice Society. When they created their new multiverse, it was essentially a reboot to keep the books fresh for readers in the 1950's and 60's.

Why did this reboot work? Because they left the past in the past, kept the elements that they needed, had the best talent working for the company on the biggest books, and gave the readers better entertainment. Artists like Curt Swan, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, and many others made the books look better and raised the overall quality of DC's output. Writers like Gardner Fox, Jerry Siegel, Otto Binder, John Broome, etc., helped create amazing new characters like Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, the Martian Manhunter, Supergirl, and, of course, the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Did it work? Considering that DC was absolutely destroying Marvel in sales in the 1960's, I'd say so. In 1965, Superman was selling over 800,000 copies an issue. Even by 1968, Superman was selling over 630,000 copies and Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel's best-seller) was over 370,000.

Post-COIE, DC was rebooting everything all over the place. There were "soft" reboots (a new character in a familiar costume) like the Flash. There were "hard" reboots (a complete re-imaging of the character's past) like Superman and Wonder Woman. Much like the Silver Age, DC got talented creators to rework their titles and give readers something to get excited about. We saw John Byrne, George Perez, Frank Miller, Keith Giffen, Tim Truman, Mike Grell, and many, many others breathe new life into DC Comics (And that doesn't count that little mini-series Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did).

In every case, the reboot was always focused on two things:

• How do we get new readers to try out a book?
• How do we clear away the aspects of the character that the modern reader doesn't care about anymore?

I found another interesting quote about this series from a blog called Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin:

"For longtime Legion fans, that was a lot of investment in the characters that was seemingly just discarded by DC, but in DC’s defense, they couldn’t depend on just the longtime Legion fans to support the title. They had to pursue new readers and build the audience for this particular franchise, and usually the #1 strategy comic publishers go to when trying to bump up sales numbers is, well, new #1s. Or in this case, #0s, where as part of the Zero Hour event issue #0s were released in which the status quos of DC’s various titles were reestablished. And, in the case of the Legion titles, the adventures were rebooted…started from scratch and presenting a hopefully fresh, new jumping on point for readers previously intimidated by the decades of backstory."

When it was time to reboot the Legion, the books were at a historic low. The Legion had never, ever sold this badly. According to The Legion Omnicom (and this is incomplete data for full transparency), both Legionnaires and Legion of Super-Heroes were, at their worst, dropping below 20,000 copies per month each. Even at their best, they couldn't sell more than 40,000. Just horrible numbers at the time.

They needed to get new fans. They needed to come up with an answer to the first question: how do you get more readers on the book?

There are two tried and true methods when rebooting/restarting a book:

One, hire established industry veterans who will bring fans to a book. John Byrne basically saved the Superman books. George Perez got people reading Wonder Woman again. When Marvel revamped the Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, and Fantastic Four, they paid a ton of money to get Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to save their core books. And when that experiment was over, they brought in Perez (he shows up a lot in reboots), Alan Davis, Kurt Busiek, and Chris Claremont to keep fan interest strong.

Or two, hire the best young talent you can find and let them develop a voice by breaking with the past and push the book forward. Just think of what they let Grant Morrison do with Doom Patrol and Animal Man. Or when Peter David took over the Hulk. Or when DnA took over with Legion Lost.

Then, second, how do you clear out the stuff that people just didn't care about?

Okay, here's my John Byrne rant... and I hate defending him because he's, to put it nicely, someone I wouldn't want to spend more than five minutes with... but when he rebooted Superman in the 80's and got rid of things like Superboy, Krypto, and multiple Kryptonites, among many, many other things, people were happy. Sales were strong and comic fans loved the new version. This was a Superman for the era, not one steeped in nostalgia for the 1960's. He saved the book. We may look back at it now and shake our head at many of the choices they made, but they did them to give the readers what they wanted. They wanted a Superman like what they saw in the movies, not what they remembered of the bonkers Silver Age comics.

Successful reboots give fans what they want and push everything forward. Chris Claremont replaced every X-Man except one and embraced the 70's desire for emotional, soap-opera stories that never ended. Frank Miller gave us a more violent Batman for the 80's. James Robinson gave us a Starman that was aimed at every Gen X reader in the 90's. Grant Morrison tossed out the costumes, shook up the team, and dragged the X-Men into the 2000's. Superman fans wanted Krypto and multiple Kryptonites, and Kandor the bottled city, so DC threw away everything Byrne removed.

What did the Legion do?

The exact opposite.

Instead of writing a book for the era, for the fans who were reading the comics at the time, they created a book for fans of the Silver Age. Again.

Instead of moving the team forward into the 90's, they turned backwards and just kept milking the nostalgia of the past. Again.

Instead of bringing in a creative team that would bring in new fans, they hired young talent who were unknown at the time. And if they had someone who could break out and reach a new audience, they did nothing to showcase that talent.

Don't believe me? Does any knowledgeable comic fan have a clue Olivier Coipel started on the Legion? Or that Mark Waid wrote this version of the Legion? They know of the Threeboot, but that was after he had made a name for himself.

Every time they took a step forward and introduced something new, they took five steps backward. Can you think of any other reboot that spent so many issues retelling old Silver Age stories? I mean, why create new comics if you're just going to redo old ones?

Can you think of any other reboot that just assumed the readers would know every relationship so they never needed to develop it? The whole Livewire, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy triangle only worked if you knew that Garth and Imra were "supposed" to be together. They never earned that part of the triangle and, in fact, made it very clear that it made far more sense for Rokk and Imra to be a couple. Same with Apparition and Ultra Boy - they were a horrible, toxic couple that didn't work from page one and yet, because they were the historical pairing, the writers just kept pushing it forward.

Speaking of characters, I actually find myself agreeing with Roger Stern - there were too many characters on this book. And I'm a Legion fan. I love the big roster. But these titles took it to the extreme. You had the Legion. The Workforce. The Amazers. You had all the rejected members who would've been the Subs. You had the support team. You had the family members. You had the U.P. Government. And you had the villains.

With those characters, you had so many, many, many subplots going along. I don't think Paul Levitz gets enough credit for juggling so many characters so well over his run. These creative teams tried their best, and you would think it would've been easier to do this over two books, but in the end, everything was so confusing that they either just dropped plot lines for no reason or kept them going for way, way, way too long.

The book even looked like it was from the Silver Age. None of the supposed future tech looked any different from what you could see in the average Marvel comic. Much of the book looked like it was set in the 20th, not the 30th Century. From both plots to artwork, the book rarely looked like it was set in the future. The technology wasn't interesting and, in the case of Lee Moder, it looked like he was really struggling with a lot of the futuristic elements. It wasn't until the IDL version that the book actually looked like it took place in the 31st Century.

The saddest part of all of this is that, when the book did push things forward, it was great. When they embraced change, they were making some amazing comics. I mentioned a lot of the great stories earlier and, in each case, it was the creative team leaving the past behind and pushing the team into the future. The new characters were great additions. Re-imaging some of the old characters breathed new life into them - as much as I hated the new look for Projectra in the beginning, I have to admit that I ended up preferring Sensor over the old version.

But you could always tell when they were running out of steam. When it was just Peyer and McCraw writing... after KC Carlson ended his tenure as editor... when you tell that they just didn't know what to do to get new fans to try the book... The end of The Legion, when DnA were just trying to get through the issues... It was fairly inevitable that they'd cancel the book and try again.

With the start of the IDL Legion, as much as I disliked the darkness of Legion Lost, I loved the fact that this was a bold move forward and they were re-inventing the team. Yes, DnA dropped the ball on a lot of plot lines and their stories often ending with you scratching your head at the illogical nature of the stories. But they also, for the first time in the entire run, made the book feel new and fresh and in the future.

They were doing what reboots were supposed to do. They solved the "too many characters" problem by getting down to 12 in Legion Lost. Unfortunately, they continued to struggle with the large cast when The Legion started and pushed many characters into the background. Legionnaires like Gates, Violet, M'onel, and Kinetix were marginalized or just ignored. Okay, they still drew Violet in some scenes, and always made her big so we wouldn't miss her, but they never gave her any dialogue.

They had Coipel, a dynamic young artist who could connect with comic readers at the time. But were they able to attract new readers with his talent? Sadly, no. It's no surprise that, when he left DC and headed to Marvel, the first book he drew was The Avengers.

Unfortunately, they had lost so many readers by the time Legion Lost began that they were fighting such an uphill battle, with little support from DC, and nothing they could do would move the needle. The reputation had been created and earned - this book was impossible for new readers.

Looking back on this run, I can really only conclude one thing: much like 5YL, they never had a clue who their audience was. Or how to reach them.

Here's the ugliest thing I'm going to write today. For all the fans of this version of the Legion, for everyone who considers this the peak of the Legion, you should be ecstatically happy it lasted for 10 years. You should cherish that it got such an uninterrupted run and that, for a large part of it, you got two issues a month.

Because there's no way it should've lasted this long. There wasn't fan support. Sales were never good. I've mentioned this before, but either DC wasn't paying attention, the book was cheap enough to produce so it wasn't losing money, or DC was just going for market share and never cared about making it a success.

Yet, the only reason it did die was because Mark Waid and Barry Kitson wanted to reboot it.

Which maybe tells you just how little DC cares about this book...

 

I want to end on a high note here, because I really do enjoy this version more than I dislike it, even with all its flaws. I would definitely recommend anyone new to the Legion to give a few of the trades a try and wish DC reprinted a few more of these stories in trades - I'm stunned you can't get every issue that Coipel did, especially considering how famous he is now.

This reboot was faced with an almost impossible task - take a much-loved series that had not only been driven into the ground but was viewed by most casual fans as almost impenetrable to new readers and make it work again. Even with all my criticisms, I have to give them credit for all the hard work and talent they brought to the books. They did make the Legion work. They may not have achieved all their goals, but they created a comic that's so beloved we're still talking about it 20 years later.

If you got this far, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed! I'll see you next week for the start of Threeboot...