Chris and David vs. the Legion, Part 1

 

 

Today at ComicsAlliance, David Uzumeri and I bring you the first of two articles where we discuss the best and most obscure characters from the Legion of Super-Heroes in preparation for the new series that starts tomorrow!

Originally, this was supposed to be one big post, but when it hit 6000 words–largely because of the addition of a series of truly hilarious character descriptions Jim Shooter wrote in 1976 that focused on the uncomfortable and sometimes bizarre details of the Legionnaires’ sex lives–we decided that splitting it up might be a better option. So today, check out our thoughts on Calorie Queen, Shrinking Violet, Ultra Boy, Dream Girl and Polar Boy, and tune in tomorrow for another five!

21 thoughts on “Chris and David vs. the Legion, Part 1

  1. It’s all well and good to make fun of Shooter’s interest in the Legionnaires’ sex lives, but it was only a detailed knowledge of the LSH’s throbbing snake pit of sexual hangups, betrayals and insecurities that allowed Batman to single-handledly outsmart The Composite Superman…in that fanfic I wrote.

  2. I think I remember from some interview with Shooter where he said the reason he got the Legion job was because he thought he could fix DC comics to be “less dumb”, and saw the LOSH as the “dumbest book DC had at the time”. From what I remember, characters he commented as being “stupid” didn’t really appear in the book too often during his tenure.

  3. It’s in his text piece in the 1,050 Years in the Future trade: He tried to write Legion because he figured it was so dumb that he could definitely do a better job. He goes on to say that he later realized that Binder, Bridwell, Siegel etc. had it right all along, but I still kinda respect that. It’s like how Kirby got Jimmy Olsen: “Give me your lowest selling book and I’ll make it your best.”

  4. I enjoy knowing that, 1,000 years in the future, a near-infinite number of worlds consist entirely of white people. No, really. Of the nearly limitless forms life might take, all the incredible powers and abilities in the known universe reside almost exclusively in a relatively small subset of the population of a tiny planet in a remote corner of the universe. Golly, the future is a grand and glorious place!

  5. No, really. Of the nearly limitless forms life might take, all the incredible powers and abilities in the known universe reside almost exclusively in a relatively small subset of the population of a tiny planet in a remote corner of the universe. Golly, the future is a grand and glorious place!

    Actually, it’s not so much that only white people have super-powers as it is that most other planets are just full of white people. Which, ah… isn’t really better, is it?

    There was an attempt to explain that in the Reboot: Valor/Mon-El/M’Onel “seeded” a bunch of worlds with Earth-people that the Dominators had kidnapped and experimented on. Who, uh, were pretty much all white. But hey, maybe the Dominators raided Nebraska or Connecticut or something?

  6. (sigh) It’s worse, in a way. I just find it depressing that comic book creators, people with the sole job of thinking up bizarre shit, couldn’t imagine a future with any people of color. Of course, considering the depiction of minority characters before Black Panther, maybe it’s better than nobody thought to include Shoeshine Boy or Taco-Bender Lad.

  7. No love for Dream Girl? C’mon, she was leader during the Great Darkness Saga and in the threeboot, she had one of the best lines in comics ever: “You won’t feel that way when we’re married”.

  8. I guess I wasn’t as familiar with the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Legion as I thought. I’m mostly familiar with Paul Levitz stuff such as Great Darkness Saga where Ultra Boy seemed just as bright to me as pretty much every guy who wasn’t Brainiac 5 (and probably smarter than Chameleon Boy). I would have defined him more by his ongoing bromance with Mon-El.

    You’re totally right about his powers. I thought his gimmick of only being able to use one at a time was completely awesome when I was eight. So for a long time, I never thought much about how that doesn’t actually make any sense.

    For example, he would sometimes use his ultra speed to keep up with Mon-El when they needed to fly somewhere in a hurry. Unless the Speed Force kicked in to protect him or some junk like that, invulnerability would have come in handy. It’s a similar deal when he uses his strength. How could he punch through walls and lift things without hurting himself? It would make more sense if he was resistant to injury all the time—just more so when he would “switch” to that power.

    Also, how did that ultra speed thing work, exactly? When he wanted to fly quickly wasn’t he technically using two powers? Or was he using his flight ring to hover and then using his ultra energy to provide thrust somehow? Actually, that confused me when I was eight.

    But still… The idea is just so dang fun that I was able to suspend disbelief for that long after I became the jaded, bitter, nitpicky guy I am today.

  9. @Tracer Bullet:

    There have been a few Legionnaires of color. I don’t know much about the reboot, but in the original continuity there were guys such as Tyroc and Invisible Kid II (a Black guy who mixed French phrases into his dialogue like he used to be in the X-Men) and women such as Dawnstar (basically a Native American with wings).

  10. I don’t know if knowing about Tyroc will calm Tracer’s nerve, especially if he learns about just where he came from.

  11. Yeah, Tyroc. I appreciate the effort DC, but, please stop. You’re really just making things worse. I imagine a bunch of writers were sitting around the offices the day Tyroc was created: “Wait, so you’re telling me NOBODY here knows ANY black people we can show this too? We’re in New York; how the hell is that possible?! Alright, what do we know about black people?”

    “They like fried chicken and watermelon?”

    “They like women with big asses?”

    “Right. You two. Get the hell out and don’t come back.”

    “Uh, slavery?”

    “Good, Dave! Anything else? No? Ok, let’s go with the slavery angle.”

  12. Essbee, I think you’ll find Chris and Company gave Dreamy a lot more love AND a lot more respect than Shooter did. For god’s sake, Shooter, precognition is potentially one of the most powerful teammates you can ever, EVER have, and you can’t see her as anything but the club bicycle? ASDFADSFASDFASERAAARRGGGHHH *head explodey*

  13. Not only that, but back before Crisis on Infinite Earths, she was some kind of genius mad scientist when it would help advance the plot. She changed Lightning Lass’s powers so she could stay on the team when her brother came back, IIRC.

    When I was a kid, they used to say that she was almost as smart as the original Invisible Kid. So, in addition to rocking the Farrah hair and walking around half-naked, she could have been helping Brainiac 5 do stuff in the lab.

    She may have not been much use in a fight, but there were plenty of other reasons to keep her around.

    If I was going to pick on anybody, it would be Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel. Duo Damsel’s power seems cooler before you realize it’s not good for much other than pornographic fan fiction. I guess that’s why they upgraded her a few times. Bouncing Boy is like Speedball without the cool protective field. How exactly is that supposed to help against anybody tougher than Arm-Fall-Off Boy?

  14. Adler, what is it with Shooter’s obsession with demeaning Dreamy? It’s kind of kined. Then again, I always assumed that Bouncing Boy was the coolest Legionaire BECAUSE he ended up married to Duo Damsel, but that was just my prurient teenage mind.

  15. Spam!

    Ahem, anyway…
    There have been a few Legionnaires of color.

    Such as Chameleon Boy who’s orange. And Brainiac 5 who’s green. And Shadow Lass who’s blue. And Blok who’s, er, a sort of, erm, grey colour. And, well, I’m sure there are others.

    Wasn’t Ferro Lad supposed to be black?

    I’m surprised no-one has commented on why all these aliens are generally humanoid-shaped that look like (white) humans.

  16. I’m just going to assume that Shooter wrote those when he was 19 or something.

    The reason I’ve tended to avoid the legion reboots is that you get the inevitable story where they try to convince you that Matter Eater Lad or Bouncing Boy or whatever useless fringe legioner who’s been there forever aren’t completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed for thinking so.

    These should fool no one.

  17. That Shooter thing– wow.

    I wonder how much of the awesomeness of the Levitz 80s run was attributable to the characters all being *so* flat in their prior development that a) he had a completely free hand in giving them depth and b) he didn’t have to give them *much* depth for it to seem incredibly sophisticated compared with what came before.

    Comparisons to the Titans before Wolfman picked them up obviously come to mind.

    In any case, since the Levitz versions of the characters are, to me, the definitive ones (much as I loved the reboot), and since Levitz did so much work to let almost all of the characters outgrow those earlier characterizations, I can’t help reading the Shooter descriptions and thinking, “wow, that’s really dumb,” over and over again.

  18. “The reason I’ve tended to avoid the legion reboots is that you get the inevitable story where they try to convince you that Matter Eater Lad or Bouncing Boy or whatever useless fringe legioner who’s been there forever aren’t completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed for thinking so.”

    Neither character was a member of the team, either reboot or threeboot. Both were reboot supporting cast members, and Tenzil made a brief threeboot appearance, but neither operated as a super-hero.

  19. The revamped Ultra Boy was about the only thing I liked in the Threeboot Legion (normally, I consider Mark Waid to be one of the best superhero writers out there, but this Legion just didn’t work for me. Then again, maybe I was just still pissed about the DnA getting the boot, cause their run was awesome). The whole one power at a time thing always seemed stupid and arbitrary to me, even when I was a kid. Plus, he always came off as a slightly mentally unbalanced jock. Played football (or whatever the hell the 30th Century equivalent was).

    Spot on with Violet. I always liked her as a character,m but never really felt like any wirters really did her justice.

    And I had no idea Johns did that to poor Polar Boy. Glad I’ll never actually read it.