secondwhiteline
Gun-Fu Terminator
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2025
- Messages
- 255
...you would just start watching from the first season. It's a TV show. It has seasons. You would just scroll to the first episode on whatever streaming service you're using to watch it.
Because of the Absolute line, which is a publishing line designed to give people versions of the characters where they don't need to slog through Wikipedia to get references. It was a good idea, just like when Marvel created the Ultimate line. It will probably collapse in on itself eventually just like that did, but new-continuity projects and sublines are generally worth pursuing because they give new readers a chance.
Except you know all the references in that passage because you've read tons of Legion, and since you're already committed to the world none of that sounded stupid to you. But that's not even my point. My main point is that if a book requires external sources for clarity on its own characters and concepts, it has a failed as a story in a way that drives readers away. Some books are easier to fail with in that direction than others. The Legion is extremely easy to fail in that way with, which is a barrier to entry that needs to be accounted for when you're launching a new series.
I didn't say the book would fail, I said it was likely to do the same thing most Legion reboots have done, which is kick around for a while to slowly diminishing interest. That's not failure, that's what most comics do, that's a normal publishing run. But here just to get people to stick around you have to solve a number of core issues with the property that you don't with a lot of other properties:
1. If you're a shared universe reader, it's easy to ignore in the context of DC's line because it's closed off from most other books by its era
2. It has a cumbersome cast of characters that aren't famous even to most comics fans (and again, main competitors like Justice League and the X-Men have deeply familiar characters. They can get away with more here, and JLU is still a bad book despite having a typically good writer largely because the creative team hasn't figured out how to navigate the scope of it)
3. If you're interested in a book that's easy to jump into, its history is a confusing disaster
4. If the idea of a book with a long history to delve into appeals to you, its history is still a confusing disaster
5. Its main selling points for a new reader are deeply unclear, and that's the biggest thing they're going to have to elucidate in both the marketing and the actual composition of the book, because if they go in with their whole idea being "Legion of Super-Heroes revival," they've got nothing
The thing about the Legion is that it doesn't have that much in the way of identity if you haven't been reading it since before the Berlin Wall fell. "Superheroes in the future" is something, but it's not enough when superhero comics are already so routinely futuristic. "Space opera" is another thing, but you have to present a world that provides immediate immersion. If I show you the interior of a Star Wars or Star Trek ship, you'd immediately recognize it as those franchises because their particular futures are so well-defined. Star Wars is lightsabers and X-Wing Fighters and rolling little robots and narrow walkways above impossible chasms. Legion doesn't have that, so the futurism doesn't matter when it's so generic and your potential reader's going to get a Star Wars comic instead. Hell, they don't even really fly spaceships, they have flight rings, so you're missing out on one of the best parts of space adventure!
(My recommendation would probably be a kind of 60s Retro Futurism as a guiding aesthetic principle, because this is not a cool cyberpunk future, it's a gleaming one where you have to buy into terms like "Science Police" with a straight face. Frankly I'd also consider ditching the flight rings for some cool fighter ships or mini-mechs or something for most characters who can't fly naturally, because you're losing out on narrative complications and artistic possibilities by having the tech work way too easily and invisibly. With those rings, you've just made Green Lanterns who are even less cool than Green Lanterns, which seems impossible when Green Lanterns are Narcs from Space who get their marching orders from elderly Smurfs. I'd probably go so far as to make the Legion reliant on cooler but jankier tech because they're in opposition to their gleaming future, because if you've still got mega-rich like R.J. Brande around it's a compromised future and if I know anything about rich people he probably owns not just an island but a whole planet devoted to sex trafficking.)
Well, alright, what about the scale? Lots of characters, lots of crises, lots of planets. Except we've already established that DC's already doing that with a Justice League comic right now, which might not be a good book but it's a book with Batman in it, so I guess that one wins. And pretty much every team comic since The Authority does that scale routinely anyway, let alone crossovers.
Alright then, what about the character dynamics? That's probably the thing I find most meaningful about the book, because it's Teenagers in Space and they should be messy and dramatic, and they get to be that without any adults around unlike present DC teenagers who can't go two issues without Batman making them take a piss test so they can be admitted to a big superhero picnic and eat Jay Garrick's unseasoned potato salad. Spandex soap opera is pretty commonplace, but DC's characters are all one big superhero fraternity at this point so everyone just kind of gets along? And that sucks, that's truly boring. I don't think you need to go full Marvel and have half your superheroes being Randian sociopaths with dueling secret societies or whatever RPG setting Jonathan Hickman is disguising as a script now, but they have a chance with this book to introduce mess and thirst and nuance and friction in a free-rein setting. Which are basically the same benefits you get from doing an Absolute line, so hopefully they learn from why people like those books and adapt some of those lessons here.
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