Animated Legion news 13: James Tucker in charge

Via a posting on the Toonzone message board, I found a discussion on the sketchbooksessions message board with some more about the Legion series, except this discussion has posts from Bruce Timm and Ben Caldwell.

Timm says that the drawing we've seen purporting to be the "final" concepts was a very early development design by James Tucker (which identifies the mystery artist) who, from my understanding of the discussion, is the main designer for the series and probably head producer. Timm says that the more recent designs "kick all kinds of ass" and he's looking forward to it. Tucker is one of the co-producers of the Justice League series. Here's an interview he did with Justice League Animated last fall, and another for ToonZone.

Timm also confirmed that he's not attached to the Legion series, but he is working on something else hush-hush.

Ben Caldwell said that his designs looked nothing like what we saw, but "they looked, in fact, like i was trying to second guess what other people wanted to see in a post semi-timm cartoon." This is the note that made its way to other forums that Caldwell was not the artist, which had been mentioned here earlier too. He then posted several of his drawings to his own message board, which have also made their rounds.

Caldwell also posted them in a separate thread on the sketchbooksessions board, complete with a Cosmic Boy drawing we hadn't seen yet. He said he did a lot more, these were the "least worst" ones because he thinks his designs were too conservative.


So there we go... the mystery artist was James Tucker, who's apparently in charge of character design, but the designs have evolved from what we originally saw and they look better.

Still no word on whether Allan Heinberg (Young Avengers, The O.C.) is involved in any way on the show, as had been rumored as far back as last summer (I last mentioned it here)