Z-A of Me Meme

L is for Legion of Super-Heroes

Ah the Legion. The comic that launched the careers of more upper-management types than any other. If you can handle the legion and all the storylines, characters and continuity that it involves, you can handle pretty much anything. I look forward to Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, or Tom Peyer running DC in around 20 years when Paul Levitz steps down.

I was first introduced to the Legion through the old Adventure Comics digests that made up the final issues of the run. I believe my first digest included "The Face Behind the Lead Mask!" and "The Castaway Legionnaires" I was in love at first sight. These have recently been reprinted in:

A very intriguing thing about the Legion, is that different writers had different continuities for them from day one. The more thinsg change the more they stay the same.

The Legion is also a very good argument against a hard reboot of the Marvel Universe. People are constantly saying that there's too much backstory and baggage involved in the Marvel Universe and that it should be restarted anew, like DC attempted to do back in 1985, and 1994, and apparently are going to try to do again next year. The only people who have trouble with continuity and baggage are the fanboys who want every little thing explained and interconnected.

Continuity can be a great thing in small doses. The reason The Winter Soldier works so well over in Captain America is that there's no predetermined baggage for the aging comics fan to complain about. I like that the Fantastic Four were trying to beat the Russians to space, and that's why they made the fateful trip way back when, or that Tony Stark was captured by the Viet Cong. These stories don't make any better sense when they're updated. Why did the FF sneak onto a rocket now? And why, as in the latest softboot of Iron Man, if he was captured by insurgents during the first Gulf War, doesn't someone take Tony Stark right to the best heart surgeon in the world after freeing him? The reason most of these origins worked in the first place is because of the state of technology and world politics at the time. When you try "fixing" them, they just get broken.

When/If the Marvel Universe gets rebooted, you'll just have people complaining that it's hard to keep up with what all has and hasn't changed in the new iteration of the universe.