To all the posters who did the (doubtlessly painful and mind-numbing) research on these storylines, my heartfelt thanks. I pretty much gave up on the Legion because it all seemed a badly retconned, hopelessly irreconcilable mess. I’m relieved to know that even hardcore fans agree.
Lumpy: Currently, Legion is back and pretty good. The writers aren’t wallowing in previous stories but are moving the book forward. There’s been more growth and development in the last 20 issues, than in the 70 before that.
Fenris
For those who haven’t been reading Legion, the first 20-30 issues after the reboot were wonderful, fresh and exciting. Then Mark Waid left and the book turned into a fetid pile of camel-puke (Emerald-Vi ? LeVIathian?? )
Anyway, both books (there were two legion titles) were threatened with cancellation, and Abnett(?) and Lanning(?) took over. They did a 4 part story where a horrible biological menace takes over the UP. As a side effect, about 8 legion members ended up in another galaxy. With no way home. They then did a 12 issue miniseries called “Legion Lost”. The art is vile. I mean, make-your-eyes-bleed vile, but the story is pretty good. What’s nice is they said “Ok, we’ve been handed a steaming pile of camel puke. What are the logical consequces of the sort of crap the previous writers came up with?” and ran with it, dealing logically with the reprecussions, rather than "it was all a dream"ing it.
[spoiler]One of the stupidest things the previous writers did was turn Element Lad into a psychopath. When asked to rescue a little kid trapped in a mine cave-in, Element Lad made a comment about “Dead or alive, he’s still just elements, so why bother?” He made several other comments like that and wasn’t above mutilating fellow legion members just for the helluvit (he turned Monstress orange without her ok)
In Legion Lost, the writers said “Screw it. He ain’t the Element Lad from before the reboot. Rather than try to explain away all his psychopathic actions, let’s run with it” and turned Element Lad into a really cool villian.
I don’t like that Element Lad became a villian, but A) they kinda had to and B) they did it well. Really, REALLY well. [/spoiler]
Now if only they’d kill Sneckie. Slowly.
Fenris
38 dead. Ending at the Bar With No Name where Scourge killed a LOT of loser villains at once.
I think they need to bring Scourge back and have him(them ?) kill heroes and villains. Start with Speedball. Please.
Last I remember, they had Scourge cornered, and just as they were about to bring him in, he gets killed by someone off-panel who yells ("Justice is Served!). It was right about that time that I quit the habit. Did Marvel ever advance the story line beyond that?
Zev Steinhardt
(for the geek-impaired) Spidey went to a distant planet to participate in a huge marketing ploy (Secret Wars- It’s also the last story I know of that has the Lizard acting as confused, chidlike, but really dangerous creature instead of the dragon thing McFarlane turned him into in Torment). His costume was destroyed and he gets a new one from an alien machine. war ends, Spidey goes home.
Costume turns out to be a living alien. It loves Spidey and is trying to take over his body or something. Spidey manages to get rid of it. The nearly dead alien, which has this stalker love obsession with Spidey, grabs the first guy it finds- Eddie Brock, who has a homicidal Spidey-must-die thing going on. The alien costume tries to take Eddie over. They drive eachother insane. The costume is now black with white Spidewy emblem and a large mouth filled with a ridiculous amount of fangs. This is Venom, a marvellous homicidal-maniac-supervillain.
Remembering all the times supposedly dead people pop up alive, Spidey makes Venom think he has finally killed Spidey. Venom retires to an island paradise.
Then came Carnage- During a period while Eddie and the alien were seperated, he shared a cell with nut-case and Joker-look-alike Kletus Cassidy. Alien costume busts Brock out of jail. It leaves behind a baby alien, which in its culture is no big deal. The alien and Kletus join and become a serial killer called Carnage.
Spidey gets Venom to help defeat Carnage. This kills the baby alien.
Until Maximum Carnage. When despite numerous tests showing nothing abnormal, Kletus becomes carnage again. I know villains come back from the dead all the time. But, there’s usually some kind of explanation(not dead but in deep trance, death was hologram, dead guy is clone, dead guy was henchmen patsy in spare costume, etc). As far as I know, they still haven’t explained how the alien came back.
In a Venom limited series, the remaining babies are extracted and joined with humans. IIRC there are 6. In last issue, all the baby aliens die. They all turn up again in another limited series. No explanation is given. Dammit, by the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth I demand an explanation!
Then the Spidey Clone seperates Eddie and Alien-by shooting webbing between Eddie and the alien costume. I hated this. I always assumed that Eddie and alien were bonded cell to cell. But no, apparrently all the super powers Eddie gets come from wearing the alien as a leotard. Anyone know if an official explanation was given on just how Eddie and the alien are linked?
RE X-Men: Days of Future Past, Days of Future Present, Age Of Armageddon, etc
I expect a forthcoming series Days Of Future A Week Ago Thursday.
I also expect Rachel to finally snap from trying to keep all the alternate time lines straight. She’ll kill all the other X characters saying “Don’t worry! There are plenty of alternate futures where this killing spree never happened!”
I liked Emerald Vi…although, due to money constraints I stopped reading comics not long after she got the Eye.
I like the art in Legion Lost.
BTW, Copiel is presumably leaving the book as he’s going to be the new regular artist on Avengers.
Someone asked if the Fantastic Four had been rebooted. Well, yes and no. As part of the Onslaught event (1996?) most of the Marvel Universe’s non-mutant heroes got sucked into an alternate dimension. Their titles ended and were replaced by new #1’s. These new series actually were produced not by Marvel but by Jim Lee’s Wildstorm and Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Entertainment (both formerly parts of the Image defection several years earlier). This was called Heroes Reborn. There were I think four HR series (Avengers, Cap, Iron Man, and FF), each rebooting with new origins. Meanwhile, the X-books continued back in the original Marvel Universe, and the lack of heroes there was addressed/exploited by the Thunderbolts.
Heroes Reborn was not exactly a success, and in the Heroes Return mini those characters were returned to the main Marvel U. Therefore, even though the FF (and Avengers, etc.) were in fact rebooted, they have since been returned to their original continuity.
–Cliffy
Fenris,
I think you expressed some disapproval with the “Return to Krypton Part 2” story. What did you think of the ending? Krypto lived, the psuedo-Krypton wasn’t destroyed, and the Eradicator was rebooted too. Jor-El said something in the first issue that suggested he was familiar with B-13, and right then I figured Brainiac was behind the whole thing, so I wasn’t surprised by the ending. I was actually quite pleased. It didn’t mess with the continuity, or the current rendition of Krypton, (which, as I’ve said before, I like) and Clark still has a super-dog.
Photopat: I grudgingly approved of it. I’m still not excited by the books ('though whichever book came out last week…the Baseball one was good) but at least I didn’t have to quit.
I still wish they’d bring back the real Superman though 
Fenris
Fenris:
I’ll give you that the baseball story was very good. In fact, the three best stories lately have been one issue long. Missing and The Shame of Smallville, and this one.
This is the real superman. The only “pretender” was the cyborg. Heh.
Pffft. 
Superman’s been missing since the two part story “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” from about '84
This poseur isn’t fit to hold the real Kal El’s cape.
Fenris
Fenris,
What is your take on Crisis? Good, bad, awful? Do you think it was needed or that it was simply a massive 50th anniversary publicity stunt?
Myself, I think it wasn’t a half bad story, though in retrospect it seemed to cause more problems then it solved, the whole Legion/Superboy being the most glaring example.
Also, do you have any insight as to why in Marvel Comics the stories are set in actual, well relatively speaking, US cities? I mean, it seems like every Earth-bound hero is based out of NYC. Why didn’t DC do this? Or is Metropolis supposed to be DC’s version of NYC? If that’s the case, is Gotham supposed tp be the DC version of say, Detroit?
I always thought the ‘Age of Apocalypse’ thing was one of the few examples of alternate universe plotting in comic books that actually did work. It was well-explained, tight continuity-wise, and was good storytelling with good characters. I thought some of the decisions they made were lame (like Cyclops turning out to be good deep down, and how he and Jean Grey were meant to be together even in another universe – gag me), but I thought on the whole it was cool. The art was also fabulous. There were repercussions when it all went back to normal, but they were kept to a minimum and made sense, and made for some good stories. Except for the whole Sugarman thing, or whatever he was called.
Anyway, I thought Age of Apocalypse was cool, AND it inspired me to collect every issue of every mag for those 4 months, as well as the ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’ one-shots and other assorted accessories.
It was the Onslaught crap that killed those books for me, and also made me finally lose patience with the non-mutant, non-Spidey Marvel Universe.
WSLer,
I am not Fenris, but I will chime in with my opinion on Crisis. It was pretty much an unnecessary attempt to fix a nonexistant problem. I thought the story itself was pretty good, and I found Supergirl’s death to be rather moving. Then it was wiped out by Byrne’s Superman reboot, which was the one part of it that I can’t forgive. And the problems with the Legion/Superboy were not caused by the Crisis. As Fenris said above, the problems there were caused by Byrne’s Superman reboot.
DC has Gotham City, Metropolis (in Delaware?), and New York, NY. Batman originally was set in New York City, but that was quickly changed to the more generic Gotham City. Both Gotham and Metropolis are of course based on NY, Metropolis on the upscale part, Gotham the grungy part. I can’t remember the quote that has been around for years telling where the split is.
As for why Marvel actually uses NY, rather than making up something, I don’t know. And DC does have heroes based in NYC these days. GL, the Titans, and probably a few odds and ends I can’t think of right now. I think that overall, DC has their heroes spread out over the continent more than Marvel, but most of them in fictional cities.
I think it was Denny O’Neill who said something like “Metropolis is Midtown Manhattan and Gotham City is Lower Manhattan.”
I thought it was good, but mostly unnecessary. Their two reasons for doing it (their books were stagnant and their universe too confusing) struck me as BS. I never met anyone who was confused by the idea of parallel worlds and given that there were only 3 of the 6 that were regularly used pre-Crisis (1,2, and to a degree Earth-S were used on a regular basis, 3, X and Prime were there, but generally ignored) it wasn’t all that hard to figure out, and DC was actually in the process of a renessance before the Crisis: Alan Moore was doing wonderful things with Swampy, All-Star Squad, Titans, Infinity Inc, Legion and Batman were all in the middle of phenominally good runs (Batman was better than it’d been since the all-too-brief Englehart/Rodgers run). Granted Superman was in one of the worst periods in his history and JLA was ghastly (JLDetroit, anyone? Vibe? Gypsy? Vixen? :: shudders :: ) but they could’ve been fixed.
Crisis also undermined a premise that I think should have been crucial to the DC Universe: Superman should be the first DC super-hero to show up on the “main” world (1 or 2). The fix that DC did (Dream’s imprisonment lead to Westly Dodds becoming the first crime-fighter) is kinda cool, but…I dunno. Superman should be first.
In addition, Crisis killed the yearly JLA/JSA crossover (which I always looked forward to. As a kid, it was the highlight book of the summer)
Crisis FUBARed several heroes (Hawkman comes right to mind, Infinity, Inc. and All Star Squadron were destroyed by Crisis, as (eventually) was Legion) because the reprecussions of Crisis wasn’t all that well thought out.
The smart way to have done Crisis would’ve been to restart ALL books. No character has ANY history. The first post-Crisis Superman story is his first public appearance. Ditto, Batman and Flash and everyone else. That would have made sense from a story POV, but not from an economic standpoint.
Teen Titans was main reason there was such problem. Titans was one of DC’s best selling books at the time (along with Legion: Most X-Fans of the time (even the die-hard “Marvel Zombies”) would cross-over to read Titans and Legion, It was far too important a book to tamper with Since Titans was popular, they couldn’t set all the books at “year 1” right after Crisis ('cause there was too much stuff with Nightwing and you couldn’t have Nightwing without him having been Robin first and if you restart everyone with Year One, Robin wouldn’t show up 'till year 2 or 3 and the other sidekicks would’ve been later than that, which would’ve killed Titans).
Superman had the 6 issue MAN OF STEEL series which covered Superman’s first 6 years (?) as Superman. But Batman had a mini-Crisis with Jason Todd (the good Jason Todd was replaced by the street-punk in Batman…but not in Titans where the good Jason Todd continued for about 6 more months) and there was about 3-5 years where NO-one knew what any character’s/book’s history was. Batman was originally in the JLA post-crisis (there’s flashback scenes with Bats in the League), O’Neill got the dumb “Urban Legend” idea and suddenly says “Nope, never was.” and suddenly everything we though we knew about JLA was wrong. Hawkman (the Earth-1 version) took the Post-Crisis Superman back to where Krypton was in an early Post-Crisis Superman issue. Then he didn’t 'cause he never existed. But it was an important story for an ongoing Superman plot. This sort thing where an editor’s whim completly fouled up another book’s history happened far too often.
Finally, I thought Crisis itself was undermined by a last-minute editorial change: the original ending was to have everyone remember the Crisis. All the characters (at least the heroes) would’ve remembered the parallel worlds, but be “refugees” on this new world. Somewhere towards the end of the Crisis, the editorial decision was made that no-one would remember the Crisis at all. In part, that’s 'cause Byrne wanted Superman to have a completely clean slate and he couldn’t do that if there was a dead Supergirl in his past, but Byrne’s not the only reason. The powers that be decided that if the impetus for the Crisis was that 6 parallel worlds were too confusing, having all the characters on a 7th world, referring to 6 worlds that were no longer there would’ve been even worse. They had a point, but I didn’t like it.
That said,I thought Crisis as a stand-alone was very was a good story, with beautiful art. I still get chills when I see Alex Luthor (E3) rocket his infant son from a dying planet, I loved Flash’s death and I liked the E2 Superman’s final fight with the Anti-Monitor.
**
DC does have a NYC as well as Metropolis. While both Gotham and Metropolis are East-Coast cities with seaports, I’ve always read somewhere that Metropolis was everything good about New York and Gotham was everything bad about Chicago.
I don’t know why DC did fake cities, though it started in the '30s.
Lee said somewhere that he thought it added realism to his characters to have them set in “the real world”. And in the early '60s, he had a point (given how realistic Spider-Man, say, was compared to, say…Superboy). Lee referred to real-world events, and had a much more contemporary feel than the DC books of the time. Setting the characters in NYC added to that.
Frankly, as much as I love the feel of early '50s Marvels, I kind of like the fictional cities. When we’re dealing characters that run faster than light and have magic rings, I’m not all that concerned with ‘realism’ and especially today it allows artists to have some fun with archetecture: Art-Deco Opal City vs Spooky Gothic Gotham, vs '60s Glass and Steel Central City etc.
Fenris
Bah! It was only good when the Legion was involved.
I’m glad they’ve finally got some good writing again, although who is Gear? And, considering a longish gap in reading, I thought Timber Wolf had not yet been reintroduced, but there he was in issue 19, even if not ‘real’. Can someone bring me up-to-date on him please?
I’ve been itching for an excuse to get involved in this thread…
D_Odds:
Gear comes from the planet Linsner, and can grow machines out of his body. He was in a prison in which Sensor had been incarcerated briefly, and he helped her break out. His first appearance was LSH # 117.
His only post-reboot appearance prior to that issue (I assume you mean Legion # 9) was Legion Worlds # 6. All we know about him is that he ran a gang on Rimbor, and at one point, he and Apparition (the post-boot version of Phantom Girl) saved one another’s lives during a fight. From then on, Tinya hung out with his gang while he protected her, as she was pregnant with Ultra Boy’s baby (they’re married, but Ultra Boy was amongst the ten Legionnaires lost for a year in a space warp). Since she gave birth, he insists on continuing to play bodyguard for her until she makes it back to the Legion.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Legion-Reference-File Lad
cmkeller, you’re my hero. I see you’re a fellow NYer. Perhaps we can reminisce over Legion stories gone by (and refresh my sieve-like memory) some time. I’ve been a Legion fan since first introduction (the extra-large Legion in 20th century Smallville versus Mordru) a quarter-century ago.