Speaking of comics (because there still is nothing remotely Transformersish for me to talk about)...
Remember when I had an "opps I crapped my pants" moment back in May?
Well... Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #1 came out Wednesday!
Damn! I've got some semblance of my Legion back and I get it all drawn by my favoritest super-hero artist ever George Perez.
My love-hate relationship with paper crack is just about as crazy as the love-hate relationship with plastic crack!
Alas, I sold off 95% of the comics and obviously PaperCrack.com can never truly become what I wanted it to be.
Then again... when would I have time.
It's been a while since i've been here but damn i love the face lift, btw i had no idea you were a Legion fan i just picked it up in my local pull-list yesterday
I've boycotted Final Crisis. I also wont buy any title that has a tie in. Did they really bring Barry Allen back? I don't think I like that idea at all. I'm a Wally West fan. I'm just sick of all this Crisis crap. The direction DC's been going lately might soon end my Papercrack addiction. I only really buy DC.
Yes they brought Barry Allen back so far it's not as bad as you think, they also updated many of the new gods such as Blackracer but what sucks about final crisis is that i've seen Orion die 3 times in 3 other books. But Legion of 3 worlds will finally clean up the mess of the multiple legion versions and arcs and find a home for superman prime
Am I the only one who's sick of Superboy Prime already? I mean, really. Who thought it was a good idea to bring a character from the seventies and then give him the "super invincible, plus planets around with my pinky-finger" level of power from the sixties/seventies and then have him fight the modern day version of Superboy and Superman?
Literally THE only reason he's able to clean their clocks is because he's at DC seventies power levels, and Superman is at post John-Byrne-Revamp levels. What kind of bullshit is that?
And I'm with Carl. I've been reading comics for so long that I'm really getting tired of them killing people off and bringing them back for literally no reason other than some writer always had a hard-on for the character so let's figure out a way to make him not-dead! Yay!
What's the worst is that the character deaths in the last several years, they've worked hard to make each one this big lead-up thing with the death at the end so as to impart an emotional impact...which is then rendered irrelevant.
What's next? Some sort of time/dimensional travel by the JLA and they land in alternate Earth plane (yet again) and then they run into Blue Beetle who decides to come back to the main DCU with them?
I sincerely believe that's going to happen at some point soon.
I'm sure i haven't been reading in as long as you as i only got back into reading comics (other than Transformers titles) after a 8-9 year stint of not reading comics around Infinite crisis for DCU and for Marvel about civil war. as for killing off and bringing back characters on that will piss me off is if Marvels secret invasion is a way for them to bring back Captain America by saying "yes he was in space so we had the Skrull version killed in The Death of Captain America" i'll be pissed. As for the DCU i only really read the current LoSH and both Green Lantern titles but i have always hated superman because he has so many powers but unless your batman he can't be beat and thats why i think i like Prime because he does'nt give a shit and abuses that power and yes he whines a little too much and thats my only defense i'll have on prime lol
Brotha James: Huge Legion fan... of what I call my Legion. I came in on the Legion around 1982 when I was 12 or so and suffered through the Crisis-history butchering. I think I'm one of the few fans of the "5 Years Later" era, though I lost interest with it when the clone Legion was bring brought to the front. Zero Hour wiped all of that out and unfortunately, I didn't get into that version of the Legion until right around when it was totally unnecessarily rebooted. I have yet to find anything about the current version that is appealing.
From what I've gathered, DC editorial really f'd up Morrison's Final Crisis with the Countdown and Death of the New Gods shit. None of that had anything to do with Final Crisis and he explicitly did not want them doing the New Gods things since it was pivotal to his story. Hence, you get all these different deaths that make no narrative sense.
StormSigma: Ok. I hated Superboy-Prime too once Infinite Crisis decided to do the "crazy loner" bit with his character.
However, with that said, I started thinking about the silly "punching the walls and changing reality" shit, as well as what was established about Earth-Prime back in the old multiverse.
Earth-Prime was "our" world and during its early appearances was a used as a tool for the comic creators to interact with the characters that they were supposedly writing about.
It was the real non-superhero world until the eventual appearance of a totally minor D-list character Ultraa (I think) and then in 1985 when Clark Kent of Earth-Prime discovers that just like in the Superman comics, he is himself a survivor of Krypton and then Earth-Prime basically gets destroyed by anti-matter a few weeks later.
Now since the writers who lived on Earth-Prime seemed to be able to effect the rest of the multiverse Earths, it made a great amount of sense that the sole survivor of Earth-Prime could somehow, with Kryptonian-level powers, affect reality. When I started to think of the character that way, all the Infinite Crisis stuff "worked" for me in terms of having this in book character actually be able to alter comic reality.
And, since he grew up reading the 70s comics as fiction, when he actually was thrust into dealing with these characters in "reality" the nature of his being a comic book reader would make him whine and bitch just like real comic book readers do. Except he could actually make massive differences in continuity and such because of where he came from.
I wish they'd have kept him, crazy or not, as this kind of meta-aware threat. He's totally unique in that respect. If he came from Earth-Prime, his abilities are way beyond Superman's because of the very nature of Earth-Prime's interaction with the other Earths.
I'm hoping they do indeed redeem him to some degree in Lo3W. And I think that's what is gonna happen.
It has been established and now re-established with the reintroduction of this new pseudo-like "Earth-1 Legion" that the big three had a major impact on teen Clark Kent and helped to shape who he'd be in the same way that the Great Depression and World War II shaped the Earth-2 Superman (my personal favorite take on the character).
I'm thinking that Superboy-Prime will end up staying in the future, being toned down and tutored by the Legion somehow.
I could be wrong. But the mere fact that the last panels of issue 1 deal with Superman wanting to redeem him really could make this story more than just superhero fistfights.
I stopped reading Marvel regularly back when Uncanny X-Men split into 2 books. I literally have zero idea what the hell history these characters have anymore and I find myself totally not caring either. (Though I did love Waid/Perez's run on Avengers.)
Regarding bringing characters back... well... that's where I think as adults we fight the geek internal love-hate battle between having outgrown the superhero comic medium yet we keep coming back to it regardless of what happens.
As adults, we typically need "more" from whatever fiction we read and the tools of superhero comic storytelling with the now-important concept that these are valuable intellectual property contradicts good storytelling.
If character X becomes popular and helps sell a book, regardless of how wonderful the fiction is around that characters, X will always reset to the norm.
Now what bothers me most about DC now is the fact that I do not know what the hell is actually the history of any characters anymore since Infinite Crisis. There seems to be so much fucking contradiction that it hurts me to some degree since I do have a need to have some storytelling continuity in my reading.
I'm extremely happy with the way the Legion is back, and how Johns did it is so much simpler than what Byrne did.
I hate the concept of "Superboy". It just doesn't hold up to modern sensibilities and I found the whole "past life" of Superman totally stupid, even as a kid.
But taking Clark Kent into the future, and building the Legion around that, works so much better than just ripping out Superboy from the series.
If John Byrne had done that back in the day, the mess of Legion history would have had a lot less damage. (Though I don't necessarily blame him since there was a lot of editorial shit controlling the revamp.)
I'd pay money for goddamn book... or even a few web pages, devoted to explaining exactly what the hell these characters are supposed to have gone through.
While I am reading the current Action Comics story because I like Brainiac, I have absolutely no clue what the past history of Superman and Brainiac is anymore. It is like the history is rewritten in every story and to me, that goes against my need for a cohesive narrative for the most part.
I agree with StormSurge on Superboy Prime. I'm behind in Countdown so I don't know what the hell is going on there with Prime, but I figured he was done and done good after Darkest Night. Why is he still around? (rhetorical...)
I also find it amusing that, by everyone calling him Prime, they are basically acknowledging the fourth wall and their own 2Dness.
Nala, who are your favourite Legionaires. I like Dawnstar a lot and Wildfire, but I have a soft spot for Sunboy after the Giffen issue that focussed on him. One of my favourite comics ever. Sniff.
I am torn on the Final Crisis. I loved #3 and the last half of the book, but I hate that they killed J'onn for no apparent reason. Grrrr.
FPT: This may sound odd but my favorite characters are honestly Quislet, Polar Boy, and Brainiac 5. I also became a fan of Laurel Gand too during the 5 years later era... which I happen to love up to the clones SW6 batch introduction.
I just have a special place in my heart for Quislet and always wanted more non-humans in the Legion.
The DCU 30th century has more humans than aliens and I always hated that.
Nala, I am blown away by your response, as it brings to glaring light that I've forgotten a LOT of DC history, apparently. Something that before I'd have argued wasn't the case. Thusly, your post was great because I was reminded of some things, and a few other bits were totally new, or at least presented in a light I hadn't considered.
Furthermore, I agree about Infinite Crisis having completely screwed up the history I previously had down pretty cold. But then again, that Hypertime nonsense didn't wash with me as a way of trying to explain how everything in the DC universe that has ever happened, to include all the Elseworlds and crazy 60's and 70's (our years) of the comics all happened theoretically, it was just in different dimensions.
Talk about a band-aid on a bullethole.
As for Superboy and the Legion, I wasn't a big Legion fan, because most of the stories I'd read (old Silver age books) as well as the modern stuff just seemed kinda contrived. "Oh no! It's the evil counterparts of our main three guys! (Cosmic King always cracked me up)" or "Oh no! Some techno-thieves have stolen (insert some crazy technology here) from the Science Police archive! Let's send Bouncing Boy and Matter Eater Lad to investigate!"
The only good thing was that the nineties Legion books were drawn much better, which was a bonus to a teenage comic book nerd like me since most of the team are women in skimpy outfits. Dream Girl? Worthless but man she was hot. Who was it that was drawing the books for awhile? Barry Kitson?