[Legion Fan Club] 12th Month of Year 4 March 2023 Reading: JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #6

12th Month Year 4 of ongoing [Legion Fan Club] fun: (so we’re 3 and 11.999/12 years old, wahhhh)

Welcome to another very special session of the [Legion Fan Club] as we continue to celebrate a wonderful and rare event: the 2022 Justice League vs the Legion of Super-Heroes has appeared again in the DC Universe Infinite Library (as part of the digital subscription service), issue #6!

WRITTEN BY: Brian Michael Bendis PENCILS: Scott Godlewski

JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #6

Click on blur below to go to issue:

Whether you read this when it came out in September new, or are going to read it for the first time this month as part of your DC Universe Infinite membership, please join in the discussion below.

  1. Were you surprised by the mid-issue plot twist?

  2. So the Gold Lantern is different from the Green Lantern…how?

  3. What time period would you like to be stranded in?

  4. Which was your favorite Legion costume this issue?

Not a Legion Fan Club member yet? Crave a nifty gold ring for your icon? To join and get in on other discussions, our private Discord channel and our archives, click here: Legion Fan Club!

Be sure to visit the [Legion Fan Club] Presents: A Panel a Day of 63 Years of Legion of Super-Heroes for your daily ray of heroic inspiration: [Legion Fan Club] Presents: A Panel a Day of 63 Years of Legion of Super-Heroes

Long Live the Legion

Long Live the Legion

Long Live the Legion

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It made a bit more sense the second time around @jihaehae

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  1. I expected some kind of twist because the pacing would have required more issues and obviously something was up with Batman but the actual twist of it being inside the gold lantern ring did surprise me.

  2. I don’t see any explanation of a difference, but I would suspect it is due to some sort of melding of the lantern corps (Yellow, red, orange, blue etc.) There seems to be no indication of any lanterns of any color in the 31st century.

  3. I really wouldn’t want to be stranded anywhere or anywhen. If I were forced to choose, in the comics I’d pick 31st century as it seems a rather decent place to live for the common person. In real life, maybe the early sixties. I could buy Adventure 247 when it comes out. :slight_smile:

  4. My favorite Legion costume is Timber Wolf’s, but I’m probably biased. I also really like Dawnstar’s and Cos’s is growing on me.

I agree with @Don-El that it made more sense this time, but it still felt like entire issues got cut. “Oh yeah, you know that thing that destroying the universe and timeline? We’ve taken care of it.” Also, one more issue could have fleshed out Savage’s plan and explained it better.

Overall, I liked the story and the crossover aspect worked for me. It’s a shame this will probably be the last we see of this legion as it had potential. I don’t understand why, since DC is embracing the multiverse, there couldn’t be a once or twice a year anthology featuring different Legions. Of, course my ideal situation would be the retroboot in a monthly series, a bimonthly anthology, and a monthly series with the reboot legion searching the multiverse for other displaced people like they said in Legion of Three Worlds. Maybe, readers could send in ideas for legionnaires like the old bits of Legionnaires Business.

Hopefully we’ll see the Golden Age Legionnaire soon.

Long Live the Legions

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Congratulations on the long run Don-El! :tada:

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Thanks! Legion fans are the best!

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…as are Superman and Family Bronze and Silver Age fans LOL

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Yeah I agree I’m pretty sure there was plenty of plot room here for 12 issues instead of six. The various groups stranded in time really didn’t have much room to expand their storylines.

Oh and I like your revised phrase @idle453.87595 , “Long live the Legions!” very nice and very true!

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Yes indeed!!! Ty @Don-El !!

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hey hope youre feeling okay bud recovery going well?

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Forgive me, my scuba diving pal, I keep forgetting what your new identity is!

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No, your good buddy. Hope all is well! :hugs:
:trident:

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On the one hand, I think DC is on to something with wanting to do mini-series, particularly for characters that might not be able to support an on-going solo and I commend this and want to see more of it, generally; on the other hand, BMB just doesn’t know how to not overwrite something that six issues just ended up being confusing. Also, he really did not under the Legion.

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  1. Were you surprised by the mid-issue plot twist?

Yes, I was, did not expect the whole ring dream vision scene

  1. So the Gold Lantern is different from the Green Lantern…how?
    He is not a representation of will alone, and is apparently the father of his future corps, and not a loner. He also has the guardians to guide him, or at least boss him around.
  2. What time period would you like to be stranded in?
    The 31st Century of course. That future looks pretty sweet.
  3. Which was your favorite Legion costume this issue?
    I’d say Dawnstar’s appealed to me the most.
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My take on (2.) is that Bendis Is Always Going To Bendis; he seems incapable in current days of writing anything where he doesn’t create an OC; I don’t have a problem with adding to the rich tapestry of characters that are in the DCU but given the history of the Legion and the sheer number of people in it, this was totally unnecessary. When Cereal Lord wanted villains for his Superman and the Legion run, he didn’t feel it necessary to create an OC - much less a (IMHO) frankly absurdly stupid one like Gold Lantern. So for all that I will frequently slag on Johns, and Johns desire to make his canon THE DC canon, or to make money off DC, Bendis is literally 1000x worse.

I agree that the future of DC has always looked pretty sweet; while there’s a lot to like about today, who doesn’t want the jet packs that Jerry originally wrote them in or things like flight belts/flight rings!

And as for twists, once again, #BendisGottaBendis.

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What made more sense the second time around?? :open_mouth: lol
I just finished reading (on the clock! lol) and I’ll add more to the discussion later! For now I gotta get back to work :")

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Finally home and can post on the chats!! hehe

  1. Was I surprised? I guess so. But at that point I had really given up on a reasonable explanation for everything, so I was surprised in the sense that I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that to be the resolution, but not surprised in the sense that it was a well-earned and “good” plot twist…When you’ve given up on even a reasonable comic book explanation it’s not a good sign. All in all, this reaaaaally seems like you have to have read some other non-Legion stuff in order to fully appreciate it or even to understand it from a “literally what is happening?” standpoint. Like, I can tell there was an attempt to explain Epoch but as someone who hasn’t read that story it does not feel like enough explanation and I felt the story relied too heavily on Epoch’s actions (what exactly did he do?) and his credibility (why is he credible if he’s a villain? I dunno, because I didn’t read that story). It was kinda reminiscent of the main problem (imo) with his Legion 12-issue, which was that the emotional core of the story didn’t make any sense unless you’d already been reading Superman (which I hadn’t been, and thus it fell flat on its face for me). In general, this 6-issue had a TON of name-dropping that amounted to nothing meaningful as far as I can tell (granted, I don’t understand most of the references)…Readers are also assumed to understand the Green Lantern Corps, and to have heard of Leviathan, Kamandi, Batman Beyond, Jonah Hex…I’m sure all the name-dropping is great for those of y’all who actually know a bit about those characters but for newer readers it’s just confusing. I do appreciate that Bendis shows his passion for the history of DC and his love for its characters, but this name-dropping-that-doesn’t-go-anywhere-thing was the same issue I had with his Young Justice when I first checked it out; I was too new to understand any of the references and they just take up SO much space in this tiny mini…Everything was way too crammed in, and they teased us with team-ups that then were undone literally a second later.

At the end of the day, it seems like the mini was meant more for Justice League readers to dip a toe into the Legion lore rather than the other way around? Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just that I didn’t go in with proper expectations :“”) Now, whether or not this mini does a good job dipping new readers’ toes into the Legion is another question…

I did get a kick out of the “I’m smarter than you” lines though, I thought that was funny! And call me delusional, but Cham is my favorite Legionnaire and I was lowkey hoping that chained-up “Batman” was actually Cham in disguise, just so he could do something cool other than talking about calling his Mom, but oh well, haha

  1. I am very confused by the Gold Lantern thing…Like I said before, seems like there may have been more info on it in the Epoch story? I don’t know a ton about Green Lantern, so maybe it would be more intuitive to a Green Lantern fan, but to me the whole “saga” was just mega confusing. I like Kala’s origin story and he seems like a fine character, but there are so many unanswered questions about the ring/corps that it seemed like they might answer when Batman started examining the ring, but then it didn’t go anywhere. It also piqued my interest in earlier issues when Kala said he didn’t want to join a militaristic organization, kinda reminded me of Gates and I thought maybe they would take it more seriously with a humanoid character, but I guess that was beyond the scope of this story. Still, I expected the “Gold Lantern Saga” to…center Gold Lantern more? It was a general problem that there were way too many characters in this and I think Bendis should have focused on maybe five of them (even that’s a pretty big cast for a mini) including Gold Lantern instead of trying to show off literally everyone’s personality, because spreading himself so thin made every character feel a little one-dimensional. Hence why I feel like this may not have been the most successful attempt at introducing Justice League readers to the Legion.

That said though, PLEASE stop giving Batman so much attention!!! Like gosh, I love Batman and his sidekick army but boy would he be absolutely useless in the 31st century! His whole thing is his detective mind and his gadgets, but his gadgets would be hopelessly outdated, and the underlying principles of what is possible that are necessary for him to perform detective work would be questionable— like what is 31st century forensics even like?? Like I appreciated the cross-referencing database thing he did in an earlier issue, but…Brainy telling Kala to give Batman the ring and then the story suggesting that Batman would be able to use JL tech to figure out something about 31st century mystical-technology that Brainy or Mysa or Cham (is he not a detective in Bendisboot??) or Nura (is she still a scientist??) wouldn’t have been able to figure out is just…sigh. I love Bruce too, but I don’t like when other competent heroes get sidelined just to give Bruce more spotlight and that happens a lot in any book he’s in…I do understand that Batman sells but it’s still frustrating :confused: Maybe other characters would sell too if they were given the chance to show up Batman, y’know?

I heard Bendis say in an interview on the Subs podcast that he believed one of the main selling points of the Legion is the very concept that it takes place in a utopia-adjacent society 1000 years into the future; he was saying that because of how hopeless the present can seem, just the concept that there are great heroes in a society that still exists 1000 years from now is inspirational. I agree, but if he doesn’t ground that society by providing us with well-developed characters who live there, it’s still just an idea that isn’t all that inspirational to read about. Even in his 12-issue, he focused too much imo on the setting and a general vibe for its society rather than grounding it in multi-faceted characters…(I’m not saying that character-driven stories are the gold standard necessarily (though I am biased because that’s what I prefer), but I wouldn’t say this mini is the best example of a well-executed plot-driven story, either.) For this mini, it’s great that the Leaguers were able to gawk at the setting and say “well everything we’re doing is worth it,” but it shouldn’t just stop there…I’m thinking it’s probably not entirely Bendis’ or any of the creative team members’ faults, since this is ridiculously short for such an ambitious story concept, but I think the issue still stands. :“”)

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Great points and I love the point of view you’re giving as someone who, like the multitude perhaps out there of comic book readers who are brand new to a lot of this, isn’t going to come in with tons of DC comic book knowledge from the past even two decades.

I guess that’s a challenge in general with anyone that’s trying to reboot and start up the Legion again. As you’ve seen on our Legion Discord discussions, just about every individual on that Discord server has a different time period / version of Legion that they love.

Maybe you and others would have liked this mini series better if it had run the 12 issues that it appears it was really designed to run.

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It’s for sure daunting to even think about rebooting the Legion, not just creatively but also because fans are just so mean sometimes lol
One of the reasons I like our little discord community is because we all respect each others’ opinions and each other’s favorites instead of insisting, “well this version is the superior version!” which tends to happen a lot in DC fandom in general and it just spoils everyone’s fun…Not to say critical reading is bad obviously, but being able to appreciate what each iteration of the Legion has to offer (because they all have flaws but they all have things to appreciate too!) is in my opinion the most fun way to interact with the stories and other fans! (psst psst, everybody join the discord! hehe)

But I agree, I think this mini would have been much better as a 12-issue! :frowning: I guess we’ll find out eventually what drama went on behind the scenes that caused it to get cut short? Or maybe someone already knows? :“”") Based on the pace that these came out at, it seems like maybe the artist was being overworked? The sheer number of characters alone is a ridiculous stress on a lone penciller…

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