morganminstrel

https://itsokimasenator.livejournal.com/42966.html

I've finally gotten around to responding to the last several weeks of comments on this blog, and in case there's interest in those responses (which are scattered across the comment sections of many entries), I've collected the questions here (slightly edited) along with my responses...

Q. Not to make it political once again but… ‘you’re someone who’s been secretly taking a drug the Dominators don’t approve of, your ability to get that drug is going to come to a screeching halt.” As the current administration takes away access to gender affirming care, you said it yourself when you wrote this 15 years ago, “ahead of its time.”

Side note, I never knew that Paul Levitz did not care for this run, that makes me sad.

A. Good point, of all the ways the 5YL run can feel “predictive,” cutting off access to gender-affirming care is probably the one that most eerily hits the nail on the head.

And in fairness to Paul, I think it’s difficult for any creator to see their successors take over something you’ve poured your heart and soul into, and I myself find it very difficult and unpleasant to read anything that followed our run. It’s not a reflection of the quality of what others have done, it’s just the intensity of the connection you get when you work that hard and immerse yourself in a world that you then have to hand off to others who’s job becomes to turn that world into their world.

Q. Dumb fan boy question, did Keith famously not like Val? I was confused about how Colossal boy was a decoy in the story (Legion #32). It was a great escape and great use of Jeckie. Was there any story behind not using adult Jeckie as sensor girl at the start of the book?

A. Yes, Keith was upfront about disliking Karate Kid (the explanation I remember is that he felt “super karate” was a ridiculous power).

The “decoy” bit for Colossal Boy wasn’t explained very well, but if memory serves, I think in his enlarged state Gim tricked the Dominators’ radar-like tracking systems into thinking he was Pinnacle Command's large craft that Projectra had disguised Pete’s little cruiser as. Then as the Dominator speeders were closing in, Gim just shrunk down, making it appear the large craft had disappeared, and leaving the Dominators looking for a large craft and not noticing Pete’s small cruiser or the shrunken-down Colossal Boy.

Regarding Sensor Girl, I don’t have a clear recollection but I think we can assume Keith settled on a core team he wanted to work with when he launched the 5YL Legion and preferred not to include Sensor Girl / Projectra. I don’t remember if he particularly had ideas for what had become of her, but perhaps it was his thinking or on my initiative that it seemed more interesting to put Jackie back on the throne on Orando trying to lead that planet through the difficult times they were experiencing (after the rash decision to relocate to another dimension and then have the bad luck of deciding to return when the United Planets had suffered its Great Collapse).

Q. Horror tradition versus heroic tradition, I have never thought of comics in that way. How interesting, I wonder if that’s why I gravitate towards the older stuff, I always thought it was the nostalgia of it but maybe it’s more.

A. Yes, nostalgia is a powerful force drawing us to the comics we enjoyed earlier in life, but I think there’s also been a big shift in the tone of comics since I was a kid, as discussed in that comparison of horror vs. heroic.

Q. Love finding out comic lore like this (about Chemical King), I immediately went to read the Fleming story (in Secret Origins #47) which I never read before and loved it, love that they seem like lovers and I can’t wait to reread the silver age stories with this new lens. What a great way to end the last day of Pride month by reading this entry.

A. Good to hear you were motivated to check out the Robert Loren Fleming's Chemical King origin, which is really exceptional.

Q. Did Keith ever give a reason for wanting to have Tinya go to the past, or not be in the book? Thank you!

A. I don’t remember him ever describing a particular reason for the Tinya switch. One guess is that he thought Jo would be more interesting if he lost Tinya than if he continued on in a steady relationship with her.

Q. What a great idea! And to Tom, I wonder if you plotted an origin in the creating of Squire (Burroughs, Drake’s brother).

A. No, we didn’t really get deeper into the Squire Burroughs character than putting his name on the lists of subjects in the Dominator experimental chambers and then using him in that scene in #40 showing he and other chamber subjects had been brainwashed by the Dominators. I think Squire's presumed origin was that the Dominators took advantage of his similar DNA to Drake's and subjected him to a comparable exposure to "antimatter energy” and artificially created a “second Wildfire.”

Q. This was a fun issue (Legion #42), I wonder if this was the first time Luornu was officially given different personalities for her different bodies, something that was picked up on and explored at great length in reboots.

A. Way back in Action Comics #380 they showed one of Duo Damsel’s bodies falling in love with a super-hero whose energy powers turned her temporarily evil. Other than that, I think LSH #42 is indeed the first issue that officially shows differing personalities for the different Luornus. Note that we were foreshadowing this twist in Legion Annual #3 when we showed that Gim / Colossal Boy may have been fooling around with Luornu. (Or was it Yera, or did Gim think it was Yera but it was really the “misbehaving” Luornu duplicate that they were destined to face in #42? We never revealed an answer but I feel it was indeed the misbehaving Luornu who’d infiltrated the Legion reunion, and I leave it to individual readers to decide whether Gim realized it was Lu or thought it was Yera.)

Q. I did love the line (in Legion #48) BUT THERE ARE SMALL VICTORIES, THE CONQUERING OF OUR OWN HATREDS. I wonder if you originally had intended for the Khundish Legionnaires to remain on the team?

A. Had we stayed on the series longer I’d have wanted to keep Veilmist and Flederweb around for at least a while, especially Veilmist. We killed off Firefirst and Bloodclaw and didn’t consider them to be a good fit with the Legion beyond this story (so we were a bit chagrined when they rewrote the ending and brought back Firefirst).

Q. Was there an actual Black Dawn story plotted? Or did you and or Keith ever talk ideas about it?

A. Keith and we talked in general about Black Dawn, and just toward the end of our time writing the Legion Mary and I did plot out the Black Dawn story as a series of brief scenes to run over two or there issues and then a full issue to tell the main story. There wasn’t enough time left in our contracts to make use of that plot and the story didn’t get published.

But speaking of Black Dawn, over the last few years I’ve been kicking around ideas for how to tell it in detail and have started writing out a prose version of the story. I haven’t finished a first draft, but it’s possible I’ll have the story together within maybe the next year or two and I’d probably run it through Interlac and Apa-LSH, the apas (amateur press associations) that I’m in and most likely eventually post the chapters on this blog.

Q. A spin-off series Keith wanted to do, oh what could have been! How far along did this concept get?

A. The spinoff series telling Legion origins didn’t go too far — we did that Ultra Boy plot that turned into Annual #1 and then did a Timber Wolf origin that was dropped, and I think by then they’d abandoned the idea of a series of Legion origins.

Q. Does that Timberwolf origin plot still exist? Would love to hear about it more

A. Somewhere buried in our attic or something there may be copies of our Timber Wolf origin story and / or the old “floppy disk” upon which we did the work, but it’s unlikely we’d come across any surviving materials any time soon.

As I recall, the crux of the story was that Brin’s Zuunium treatments were something like super-steroids that gave him his powers but at a cost. Over time, the Zuunium was causing him to become more aggressive, temperamental and feral.

The story also showed that the “wolfish” appearance Dave Cockrum gave the character in 1973 was the true native appearance of people from his home world of Zuun.

And we hinted at Ayla’s developing lesbian relationship by suggesting her severe reaction to finding Saturn Girl and Timber Wolf together when they were marooned on an asteroid was more feelings of jealousy involving Saturn Girl than Timber Wolf.

We also tried to establish that Brin’s home world preferred to be called Zuun (rhymes with “fun”) rather than the old Zoon (rhymes with cartoon), and that “Zoon" was associated with the world being looked down upon as a low-status over-exploited planet and was considered somewhat of a pejorative (we did end up using the “Zuun" spelling in the main series and it looks like it’s largely stuck).

Q. I’m a little confused why the (SW6 “Legionnaires") team doesn’t reference their history with the Fatal Five.

A. We aimed “Legionnaires” to be a straight-forward easy-access series where the reader didn’t need to know a lot of background and continuity, so the complicated storyline of the kids being “SW6” clones or in some other way duplicates of an adult Legion that was also out there in galaxy would have been potentially complicated and confusing for our “entry-level” readers.

And in fact, the “SW6” kids were plucked out of Legion history from shortly before the Fatal Five was brought together, so the kids' knowledge of the Fatal Five would have been second-hand rather than from direct experience, again requiring some explanation that would have contradicted our “easy access” strategy with the series.

Q. Was it hard to work with Tom McCraw who was now the writer on the mother ship or was there any communication there? Also why was the editor being so unprofessional? It makes me sad.

A. We didn’t really work with the team that succeeded us on the main “Legion” book — the two creative teams basically did their own thing and there wasn’t a lot of overlap (until after we’d left “Legionnaires,” at which point they started moving both books toward the events of “Zero Hour”).

And in fairness to the editors, it was just an awkward situation — the wheels were in motion to move on without Mary and I and nothing (short of a miraculous surge in sales) could have changed that. It wasn’t going to be easy or fun for our editors to oversee that transition no matter how they approached it.

In reality, it was up to Mary and I if we were going to make a living as free-lance writers to accept that every assignment was going to have an end point and it was up to us to find the next assignment.

And it's worth noting that by this point, we'd had a five-year run on "Legion" and “Legionnaires,” which is pretty substantial for the comic-book business.

Q. I’m so excited to have found this blog of yours. I joined Legion fandom during your run on Legion, enjoying the unraveling mystery of the backstory of the missing five years, and loved all the deep-dive references. Your run inspired me to collect the back issues and to create a hyperlinked reference file for Legion fans.

Forgive me if this question had been asked and answered earlier in your blog, but I would love to know more about the original plan for an "early days of the Legion" series that was hinted at by a Who's Who loose-leaf entry and seemed to have been turned into what became Legionnaires. Why did that get scuttled, and how much of the original concept survived into Legionnaires?

Thanks so much, I look forward to diving into this newly-discovered treasure trove.

A. Thank you for your interest and questions, and I’m very pleased the 5YL run helped spark your love of the Legion.

I think the original plan for the “Legionnaires” spinoff (to tell the new history of the Legion in the revised “Glorithverse" timeline) was changed to the adventures of the current SW6 kids mostly because there was an initiative at the company to spend less time rehashing the past and more on moving forward and it felt like retelling revised Legion history would have been out of step with that initiative. I personally was happy to change approaches since I’ve never particularly liked retelling and changing established continuity, and in fact we’d labored mightily with the Glorith timeline change (in LSH #5) to alter existing continuity as little as possible and keep it as simple as possible to just switch everything back to the original timeline if that ever became the desired course.

Probably somewhere in our boxes of old things there might be copies of what we were proposing for the “Retelling” spinoff but we haven’t run across it in years. Something to keep our eyes out for. I don’t remember a great deal of details, other than we wanted to bring in a mystery “Legionnaire X” whose identity would be masked and there’s be an ongoing mystery through the early issues who it was.

And I think we were going to give Glorith a big role as an ongoing villain and give her some background about her formative years and the abuses she faced that helped mold her ruthlessness.

I wanted to preserve the early Legion costumes as much as possible but I suspect they were going to let Chris Sprouse or someone else redesign them to make the “Retelling” series feel contemporary.

We’d have also told the story of Kid Quantum’s short tenure in the early Legion (as someone who apparently lost his life because the Legion let him in with an artificial power that relied on some sort of technology, motivating the Legion to amend its rules to prohibit powers that relied on devices or other artificial assistance).

Otherwise, I’m not remembering a lot and I don’t believe much of what we were coming up with for the “Retelling” was kept around for the “SW6” version of the spinoff (other than our general characterizations of the Legionnaires), though it’s possible Chris might have begun to design those great “Legionnaires” uniforms before the changeover.

https://itsokimasenator.livejournal.com/42966.html