Although an old Legion fan, I really loved and miss the Tom Peyer/Jeff Moy/W.C. Carani Legion. That incarnation was so fun, and the kids were all right. The stories were interesting. The personalities were complementary. I could tell who was speaking by the little nuances in dialogue.

Typical of DC, when it’s broken they don’t fix it, or the repair amounts to duct tape and a wad of gum. When it isn’t broken, they “fix it.” Imagine… if Supergirl had been drawn by Jeff Moy.

Ray

I recall Waid being somewhat testy with you on the old CIS boards, and in general I wasn’t crazy about the tone of his work back then, although I’d liked him prior. But he’d been doing good work here, and I’m sorry to hear the Onlines have it in for him.

The animated LSH is for kids, true,but there’s an odd frisson from seeing Night Girl,Polar Boy an dthe Subs animated. I’d have been out of my mind when I was in grade school.

And the Other animated LSH, seen in the last Supergirl appearance in JLU, was a blast. Wish there was more of that – Rory Gilmore’s boyfriend Logan voicing Brainy, Supergirl’s crush? Unimprovable.

I hope that this LSH run continues, but Bedard is an unknown quantity. Too perfect a jumping of point,

I’m sure part of DC and Marvel’s turn to big stupid crossover events has been motivated by a desire to get people to need to read new books as soon as they come out…

Dan Didio has said as much, a while back — I think he discussed the initiative as “making Wednesdays important again.”

And earlier, I wrote:

I have to admit seeing Dawnstar’s arm in JSA #1 offered a thrill that surprised me — a relic of MY Legion was coming back, and up until then I hadn’t even realized how much I missed them.

I got the same thrill reading the last page of today’s issue of Justice Society. Tease or not, something with the old LSH is coming…

I’ve found myself less and less interested even in monthly comics by creators I like — if you’d told me five years ago that Grant Morrison would be writing Batman, Kurt Busiek would be writing Superman, and Mark Waid would be writing Brave & Bold, and that I’d be reading NONE of those books as they came out I’d have said you were nuts. But as it is I’d rather wait for a trade I can put on a shelf instead of a single issue that will be stacked in a box and pretty much forgotten about.

I’m sure part of DC and Marvel’s turn to big stupid crossover events has been motivated by a desire to get people to need to read new books as soon as they come out, but those events are so brutal and mean and stupid that I’d rather ignore than read them.

Then, they introduced Supergirl to the team, and readership went back to 55K. But in less than twelve months, the readership slips back down to about 33 K. 40% of the audience walked away again.

This title has actually captured significant Direct Market action twice in the last two years, only to watch significant portions of the audience walk away. Before the 2nd reboot, the audience was only 25K, but it was a steady 25K. It’s now 33K, but it’s dropping like a rock, and facing a creative change.

You can look at the total number of copies sold over the last two years, and say the reboot was a success. Or you can look at the fact that you held two “tentpole” events in two years- the reboot and Supergirl- and the audience, after giving it a chance, ran screaming.

The only thing I can think of that would mitigate the sales drop is TPB sales. Only the first few issues of the post-ZH reboot were ever put into trade paperback. Legion Lost should have been put into a trade, I believe, based upon the skyrocketing prices it received in the back issue market. DC could have built an audience with those who wait for the trades. Instead, it rebooted the whole thing, and threw its weight behind Waid/Kitson.

But, the Waid/Kitson stuff, barring a two or three issue hiccup just when Supergirl joined, has been pretty interesting. He hooked me from the start with the idea of teenage rebellion as force for positive change and he made Brainy into one of my favorite characters.

I’ll freely admit that I have no frame of reference here for story quality in relation to past LSH tales, though. In terms of hooking new readers, they seem to be doing okay. LoSH used to be one of those dark corners of the DCU that a Marvel Zombie like myself knew nothing about.

Yes, sales on the current series have dropped, but sales on all comics are dropping (though maybe with different rates). However, sales are still higher than at any point in the last ten years, and that’s got to count for something.

When I was a kid just getting into comics GI Joe and Transformers, yet when they brought them back they weren’t the same. As I was passing from those originally though I found and loved the LSH, and now they just don’t have the sam oomph either.

I think it shows a certain amount of growth, when what you read changes over time. I hope there are more readers like that, as I think a trap comic readers often fall into is reading the same thing over and over.

One thing that the Legion’s lost is the audience’s willingness to interact with the material and the characters and create new things based on the “official” comics. LSH spurred fan-fics, APAs, newsletters and amateur art based on what was in the official comics. I can’t think of any other comic that generated that much fan activity- there’s more Legion fan-fic than, say, Batman or Spider-Man fan-fic, even though the latter two characters are more well-known.

Maybe DC should try encouraging that sort of spirit with the new Legion. Hiring big name talent didn’t work for this reboot. Why not let the audience write the stories to some extent? Hold contests where the audience proposes story ideas, pick one, and get a decent writer to craft a story. Encourage the audience to create new costumes, new characters, and membership rosters. Restore the tradition of having the audience pick the team leader. And don’t do this stuff one or two times- make audience participation essential to the Legion experience. The Legion could be “the” Web 2.0 comic, recreating the traditional fan experience that only the LSH had.

As for whether any writers DC might employ could recapture the old spirit of the Legion — well, there’s always Paul Levitz, or — drum roll — Jim Shooter… On the other hand, that might really be disappointing.

The funny thing it, his first go-round was only a few years earlier, and to me that’s a great period in the series’ history.

So being at this point so totally removed from my personal “golden age” for the Legion, I can sit back and enjoy (or not) the individual visions that new creators bring to the series. In that sense, it’s almost nice that the book gets rebooted every few years.

Barry: I hope you’re able to come back to comics at some point when there are books you’re excited about reading. Thanks for still reading here in the meantime.

So yeah, comics are pretty much a thing of the past for me. But I still like reading people’s thoughts about them, so I’ll still be checking out this site for the foreseeable future. :-)