Thursday, January 14, 2010

Artist on LSH v6: Yildiray Cinar; plus TWO Levitz titles!

The DCU Blog announced today that newcomer Yildiray Cinar will be the artist on the new Legion book - that's LSH v6, for those who are counting. There are a few sketches and a kick-ass looking cover/pinup:


(click to enlarge).

The post has this from Paul Levitz:
“It’s such fun to be back in the future, blowing up planets, undoing Legion marriages, revealing unrevealed factoids, and starting improbable new relationships. If there’s a better job in comics than writing the Legion, with its vast cast and creative opportunities, I’ve never held it.”
There's way too much for me to quote from the Levitz interview at IO9, but - get this - he'll be doing the Legion Secret Origin story in Adventure Comics AT THE SAME TIME as he'll be doing the Legion v6 book. Holy schnikies!
PL: On a more professional level, one of the things that's always been satisfying to me as a writer is working in the corners of the DC Universe where I didn't have to play well with others all of the time - things like Justice Society [of America] and Legion where, although they fit the continuity of the line, you didn't have to do a ballet around "Why isn't Superman just flying in from Metropolis to solve the problem this week?" That's always been attractive.

Most significantly, and what I think is key to the readers of the Legion, is that it's a world that is large enough and imaginative enough that you can really fuck up the lives of so many different characters, and there's always someone new to play with. I don't know when you were a Legion reader, what kind of terrible things I was doing that week...

IO9: So the Legion you're going to be working with in the regular Legion of Super-Heroes book, that's based on what you left behind, and as updated by Geoff Johns. It's come back around after a couple of reboots.

PL: I think I would characterize it by saying that we're picking up the story after some gap after my last issue and what we saw in Geoff's work in Legion of Three Worlds and "Superman And The Legion of Super-Heroes." Something's happened in that time that Quislet came back, Tyroc showed up, other stuff has happened - I don't have a complete list of things to be revealed, but it's quite clear that things have happened in people's lives. There's at least one major Legion romance that's gone to hell in the time inbetween. And that's a great liberty as well, it's not leaping forward but stepping forward just enough so that you have some abiguities to work with.

...My first story picks up more from the end of "Superman and The Legion of Super-Heroes" than Legion of Three Worlds, in the sense that you get [alien-hating supervillain-turned-faux-superhero] Earth Man back. The first page of the first issue deals with Earth Man getting dealt with by the Science Police, and not necessarily gently, and it kinda goes running from there. I imagine I'll go back and explore things that happened in the inbetween on occasions, but I don't think those will be flashbacks. I think you'll pick up the story when the story is and you might learn things that happened that you didn't know about.

...IO9:So what is "Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: Secret Origin"?

PL: It starts from a challenge that Geoff [Johns] gave me, which was that if you want [a new reader] to pick up Legion of Super-Heroes, there's no book to hand them. You're bringing someone in in the middle of the story no matter what you're doing. You can say, "Here's 'The Great Darkness Saga,' this is the best regarded Legion story published," but then you have to hand them the Cliff's Notes to go along with it because of that wonderful insanity. [The challenge was] can you do something with what you're doing in Legion that would be a good first Legion book?

I'm trying to do something that will be an introduction to the characters, an introduction to the worlds, an introduction to some of the history in it, without being a version of the old Mayfair Games Sourcebook that I did. I've done one chapter that I had a ball with, which is "The Last Will and Testament of RJ Brande." In one of Geoff's stories, [Legion founder] RJ Brande is assassinated, and this is a pre-recorded will as he's telling Brainiac 5 what a pain in the ass he's been since he's known him from when he was a child, apologizing to Chameleon Boy for abandoning him on Durla, revealing things about his own background about how he got off Durla, how he made his money, how he lied to the Legionnaires over the years... Over the course of it, we retell the incident that created the Legion, and we begin to show a little bit of the history and a little bit of the relationships. That may be the first or second story, we're playing with doing one that's very Superboy-focused as a way of edging into more easily than that, but I haven't hit the keyboard so I don't know how well that'll work out.

... IO9: When do the titles launch?

PL: May for Legion of Super-Heroes and June for the series in Adventure Comics. The delightful thing is, I'm ahead of schedule so far.
Interesting that the last couple of new artists the Legion has had - Francis Manapul and Olivier Coipel - have turned out well and have gone on to bigger and better things after leaving the Legion.

10 comments:

Shadow Kid said...

TWO Levitz-penned Legion titles?

It's like Christmas all over again!

The art looks top-notch too!

May seems way too far away . . .

:)

Shadow Kid said...

Levitz also mentions there being Easter eggs in the first issues of both titles for the "deep Legion fans".

Hmm . . . I'm wondering if one of those Easter eggs might have something to do with whether Shady & Mon ever tied the knot in current continuity?

<>

If the cover's accurate (Tasmia certainly appears to have all ten of her fingers, including a complete left pinkie), then I'm guessing we can assume that Shady never enacted the traditional Talokian bonding ceremony with her Daxamite (who's currently cheating on her in the 21st Century anyway).

But we sort of knew that anyway, since she's apparently had all ten digits throughout Johns' story arcs.

Shadow Kid said...

Odd...Levitz' comment that I quoted didn't show up in that last post.

Anyway, here's what he had to say on IO9 (that I assumed was about Shady/Mon):

"For the longterm fan, if you look closely at a certain Legionnaire and they have ten fingers, fully-grown, and you know enough, that should tell you something about the last batch of years."

Miamian said...

Where are XS and Gates?

Keith said...

A Christmas-metaphor has already been made so I'll just say wooooohoooo!!

Richard said...

"You know, it's not only my third time, it's also my second time taking it over after Jim Shooter."

Uh oh, this suggests we have some really bad Gerry Conway scripts coming up.

"…instead of having Saturn Girl say "And by the way, I read minds," there's a caption saying "Saturn Girl, Powers: Telepathy" is a wonderful tradition and I'm hoping that will help…."

If you made them placards on the table instead of captions, Legion stories have been doing that from the start! Maybe this incarnation of the group could have their names stencilled on their costumes? Just a thought.

Jim Drew said...

Isn't Gerry Conway doing some comics writing again recently?

Ricardo said...

Levitz also does Mark Waid a discredit, because it was his run, and not Geoff's, which started the whole caption thing.
I do hope to see the 5YG Legion at some point, since they can apparently still exist (not through L3W directly, but indirectly). Or at least those characters.

Jonathan L. Miller said...

Was it me, or did Levitz sidestep the question about letter columns/leadership elections?

Can't wait until May!

Brainy Pirate said...

so happy!

and the art looks fantastic!

I'm sad about Shady and Mon, but I can see how the current storylines with Mon might make it hard to keep them together....

I wonder if Thom will make his way back to the 31st century -- in the meantime, can't Brainy send some meds back for him?