Final Crisis tie-in Legion of 3 Worlds #1 came out this week. Most of the reviews that I found were overwhelmingly positive, but there were still some nay-sayers.
Scott Cederland enjoyed the issue with only a bit of disappointment:
While the title is Legion of 3 Worlds, it’s obvious after this issue that there’s only going to be one Legion really focused on–the current Johns written Legion. The other Legions are relegated to single images on the last pages of this book. Personally, I’m kind of surprised at the joy I have at seeing the Zero Hour Legion pictured again. Both Johns’s Legion and the current Shooter-written Legion are so morose, heavy and self important that it’s great to see a Legion that used to actually look and act like kids. What can I say, I like seeing Andromeda in costume again.
If there’s any great disappointment in Legion of 3 Worlds it’s that the creators didn’t really pull out any surprises during the book, other than a promising last panel that hopefully defines the nature of the miniseries. Everything leading up to those last panels are fairly standard and what you would expect out of this book. In Johns’s Legion story in Action Comics, there was a fun sense of discovery or maybe even rediscovery as he introduced the Legion, familiar yet long missing characters. In this new book, there are few surprises or discoveries amid a collection of now familiar characters and familiar art.
Kev on the F Bombcast dislikes the Legion but enjoyed the issue:
What can I say Johns is a good writer he clearly loves the DCU and that comes through in everything he writes. This issue also does not exhibit a problem that Johns had been evidencing in JSA which is trying to cram too many charcaers into a single issue at the expense of any plot progression. The A and B plots involving the Legion’s turmoils and Prime’s arrival fit together nicely. That being said this is a wholly unnecessary issue in terms of the Crisis. I am a Superboy Prime fan hence my purchase of this issue but if you don’t like the Legion but are torn beacuse you are reading FC and don’t want to be lost don’t bother with this. It is a good issue though and I for one will stick around and see how it plays out. One last thing. A personal appeal for Dan Didio. For the love of God Dan please give this man a Legion ongoing to write so I can ignore it and maybe Johns will stop having them show up constantly in the fifty other DC titles he writes that I do read. Bottom line Legion fans will love it. If you are a Legion fan the final scene will make you very happy.
Matthew of A Lay of the Land was primarily confused:
Some stuff happens, revelations that mean nothing to me, and some character bits that don’t do anything for me happen. I don’t know who any of these people are. Near the end of the issue, Superman of the 20th century is brought to the future (thank heavens – somebody I recognize) and he’s briefed on the insanity of Superboy-Prime. He says to bring the other two Legions from alternate worlds to help and kick butt.
What other Legions? When did Superman ever deal with 3 different Legions? If each Legion is a different continuity, then shouldn’t the past also be a different continuity – specifically, how does the same Superman know of 3 different Legions?
I don’t understand at all.
So what did you think?
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I like that it is blatantly alluded to within this issue that this is NOT the first meeting of the 3 Legions, and yet seemingly no one I’ve seen write about this story has addressed that fact.
Replying to the guy from The Land, Post-Crisis Superman has met each Legion before in (now in-continuity Pre- and ) Post-Crisis continuity. When he meets the Reboot Legion during Darkest Night (the Sun-Eater attacks during Present Day), he refers to Live Wire as Lightning Lad and notes that this group, is different from the prior Legionnaires he met. It’s mentioned that the prior Legionnaires he met are from the Superboy-from-the-time-bubble era, aka the original (now Johns) Legion.
The only Legion he hasn’t directly met (but Batman has in Brave & the Bold, and the current Supergirl has and probably mentioned to him) is the Waid / Shooter Legion.
Again, as I first stated, it’s heavily alluded to that this is NOT the first time these 3 Legions (and Superman, apparently) have been together; a story from the past that may be related within this series, or another time.
August 23rd, 2008 at 8:20 pm
If Supergirl-as-is was allowed to remember the full details…and didn’t she get sent back to the then-current “here-and-now” of New Earth with memories messed with by that incarnation’s version of Brainy?
(Now, said the longtime fan, if room can be found for the Giffen-and-Bierbaums edition in the multiverse of today…I hope.)
August 23rd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
All I have to say is this is the first Legion story I’ve ever bought save for the Young Justice/Legion Annual from several years back.
The first issue was “familiar” to someone who has read the Legion, it set things up for guys like me. I even thought to myself while reading it how nice it was for them to explain the origin of the Legion in this issue because I had never heard of it before.
August 23rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm
The pretext for the “first” meeting between the 3 Legions is set up in “The Lightning Saga”, the Meltzer/Johns JLA/JSA crossover. There is an allusion made there to the 3 Legions having met one time in an unrevealed story that not quite everyone completely remembers. Really, that’s just a set-up for the pay-off to come.
August 24th, 2008 at 12:46 am
I enjoyed this a lot, which was a relief after I dropped the current Legion title a few months back. I don’t know the first thing about when various versions of the Legion met, but I’ll read this one.
August 24th, 2008 at 2:25 am
If Archie Legion has any space on L3W, there MUST be space for the real one, the one who ran up to LSH #38 (yeah, the 5 Year Gap team) to show up and save the day. So, to Scott, that’s a NO MORE Archie Legion. Ever. You want it, buy the trades and Archives. The Legion should move FORWARD, not backwards to become a second-tier Teen Titans. Shooter is actually doing a great job saving 3boot from irrelevance.
And it is very clear that the “previously met” meeting of Superman and Legion has not been shown so far.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I’m confused. What is Archie Legion?
August 24th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Archie Legion is the relauched version of the Legion post-Zero Hour (which ended with the second Mark Waid reboot). It’s called Archie Legion for focusing on very early teengers with simpler stories as its major focus. Artwork was also very simple and kinda childish (Jeff Moy being its main icon), so it added to the flavor. Fans of such version do not like its nickname, of course. After the great 5YG saga, it was a major dumb-down on Legion and it revolted a great part of Legion fans. It’s true that this “dumbing down” started during Tom McCraw’s awful run as plotter, but it’s apex was during Archie Legion (RIP forever). Some people think DnA sort of corrected it on Legion Lost (a tentative of making it a bit more mature), but to this scriber here, the whole concept was flawed from the beginning to work.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Ricardo is obviously entitled to his opinion, but I’m of the complete opposite take. The so-called “Archie” Legion is MY Legion. I had tried reading the 5YG Legion when I first got into comics and found it to be dull, morose, and impenetrable. Gave up right quick. Then Zero Hour came and in my idiotic teenage brain, I felt I had to have every single 0 issue (including Primal Force and Manhunter! Yikes!), and I got Legion and Legionnaires 0. And they were awesome. I got immediately sucked into the series, and from there, went back and started buying the Archives and became a hardcore Legion fan. In fact, the only incarnation of the team I don’t like is the 5YG group.
To dismiss the post-Zero Hour team as being totally juvenile would be to ignore a lot of its strong suits. Yes, the team was obviously meant to appeal to a new, younger reader with its optimism, younger cast, and bright, cheerful art. But the team dealt with its share of meaty topics, from the death of the original Kid Quantum just a few issues in to the blatant xenophobia of Andromeda. It was never strictly cotton candy, as its detractors would have you believe. There was some really great character work in those pages, and some absolutely fantastic original additions to the Legion roster, including Gates (a teleporting Communist arthropod) and XS (who doesn’t like XS?), and a couple others. I even loved snake Sensor (but was decidedly less enamored with her creepy human/snake metamorphosis).
Granted, things kind of fell apart a couple times — Kinetix, Violet, Element Lad, Sun Boy, and Live Wire all got particularly screwed over by the end of the run — but overall I think its strong points outweigh its bad. It might not be your Legion, but that doesn’t mean it should be completely disregarded. I’m very curious to see where L3W goes. I thought the first issue was like a tour of Exposition City, but given the subject matter I don’t see how it could have been different. I just hope there’s some increased interest in one of my favorite properties once it’s all said and done.
August 24th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I read it from the beginning and though there were a number of inconsistencies with the Post-ZH / Archie (new term to me) Legion (most notably the “origins” of the Fatal Five), I felt that it did an excellent job reinterpreting existing Legion lore, re-translating and modernizing it. Certainly some ideas were not new, but they were re-imagined, and the majority of it was consistent and well done, including the many interactions with the modern DCU, such as the Superboy, Impulse, Starman, Darkest Night, Supergirl and Superman crossovers.
August 24th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I agree with Ricardo on one point- RIP Archie Legion! If I never hear that term again, it would be fine with me.
The Post-Zero Hour Legion is every bit as valid an interpretation of the Legion as the 5-Year Gap version, but I’ve generally found something to like with every incarnation of the Legion, and I came on board just after their 15th anniversary. Even the Tom McCraw Legion had Stuart Immonen drawing…
August 25th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Just to explain why I think Archie Legion doesn’t rival the original Legion or even the latest reboot:
1) New characters were usually based on “grand-grand” sons/daughters of original DCU heroes (boring) or by re-imagining characters which were nice into “something else” (snakes, male/female) for no other reason than “hey, this time it is different”.
2) Characters never developed or grew. This was one of the major premises of LSH. Nobody ever got old – which made LSH just another kid book on the market.
3) LSH reading went from 40min-1h during 5YG to 5 minutes in Archie Legion. If I wanted that, I’d read X-Men or Tiny Titans for better value.
4) Dense storytelling is tough, but rewarding. I would say that for some people, comics should always be simple entertainment, but there is one one Ramones in punk rock because it is tough to be that simple. Archie Legion was no Ramones.
5) Archie Legion was never strictly cotton candy – true – but this doesn’t change the fact that plots were painfully simple, linear, derivative (retelling old stories in a worse way) and run-of-the-mill (White Triangle Saga excruciation of what a Legion story should be about, with its tediously long splash paging and trivial solving, is a “blackout” of the period). Legion was by then just another super-hero group on the shelves. I really would like to see a single reason Archie Legion would be any different from any other team apart from being on the 30th Century (and, for a while, not even that was true anymore!).
February 24th, 2012 at 8:38 pm
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