Cancellation followups

Kevin Melrose at Blog@Newsarama asked me yesterday if I had anything to say about the LSH v5 cancellation. He ultimately didn't use anything I said, choosing to run some good quotes by the Legion Abstract's Matthew Elmslie instead.

“The Threeboot Legion never really lived up to its potential,” said Elmslie, who contributed to Timothy Callahan’s Teenagers From the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes. “Mark Waid, followed ably by [Tony] Bedard and Shooter, built a lot of strengths into it, including a plausible, well-conceived premise for the Legion’s place in the world, and the strongest and most subtle characterization the Legionnaires have ever had. (And Kitson’s art — followed ably by [Dennis] Calero and Manapul — was tremendous.) But the stories were too long and slow, the villains were mostly ciphers, and fans were split on whether Waid’s innovations were any good or not. Still, if we had to pick one of the three Legions to star in a comic book … the Threeboot version has the most story potential going forward.”

Meanwhile, remember how Rich Johnston kept insisting that "the New York bar scene" said that Shooter had quit the Legion? Apparently, not so much, actually. Shooter says he was notified last month of the impending cancellation (in time to wrap up his 16-issue arc in 12 issues).

And remember how he said that Tony Bedard would be writing the Legion after Shooter's run was over? Oops, what he really meant was that Bedard would be writing a L.E.G.I.O.N. book. Slight difference.

In the wake of the “Legion Of Superheroes” cancellation LITG’d back here, I can confirm that Tony Bedard is writing a new “L.E.G.I.O.N” series based on the eighties/nineties series.

At that older link, he wrote:

More San Diego creator talk tells me that the Jim Shooter’s "Legion Of Super Heroes" title ends with issue #50.

It will be replaced with a new Tony Bedard LSH project, and the Levitz/Giffen Legion project will also see publication.

Here's what we discussed in this space at the time. And I'm sure that someone in the comments here noticed that issue 50 would be roughly concurrent with the end of L3W, so it's not like it was a major stretch to link the two.

Shooter, interviewed by Newsarama as published on Aug. 19th (boldface added by me):

NRAMA: ...Do you think the Legion will be around another 50 years from now?

JS: It wouldn’t surprise me. There’s something wonderful about this series. Even if it were to go away for a while, it’ll be back.

Think he might have been hinting at something?

Some discussion over at Millarworld, ComicBloc, the DC Message Board, and LegionWorld. Jason Grey's Foenix site and Alan Kistler at ComicMix also weigh in.

Tom Spurgeon, at the Comics Reporter:

...Not that DC canceling stuff or a Legion title biting the dust is ever news, but I had to wonder: how many times out in official fashion is that for this series? Six? Seven? Eight?

Jef Peckham, over on the Legion mailing lists, wrote that he met Shooter at the Baltimore con this past weekend. Shooter told him that his arc was plotted to go to issue 54, and that almost all (but not all) of the subplots would be wrapped up by issue 50.