Legion of 3 Worlds (revisited)

With the podcast coming up on episode 700, we thought we'd take this special episode to focus on George Perez's work on the classic "Legion of 3Worlds" (L3W), while saving the rest of his career for another episode. The Subs reviewed and recapped each of the issues only as they came out in 2008-09, so now with the benefit of hindsight we're going to try to cover all five issues in a single episode.

Fortunately for me, I don't have to do much in the way of annotations for this miniseries, given that I already did them back in 2008-09, so I'll just link them here for your reading pleasure. I remember getting the issue and then spending literally hours researching everyone and everything, racing to be the first one to post the annotations (and then reading everyone else's to see what I missed). As an annotator, it was the nerdiest fun hard work I've probably ever done. 

Sadly, no guarantee that any of the links in my blog posts still work, all I can say is that they worked at the time I wrote the posts, 13-15 years ago.

• 5/27/07 - first mention of "Legion of 3 Worlds"
• 7/31/07 - Geoff Johns and Dan DiDio talk about L3W in San Diego
• 10/21/07 - Johns interview with CBR where he talks about the Superman & The Legion story and how it fits into L3W
• 4/2/08 - Johns explains how L3W and Final Crisis fit together
• 4/3/08 - Interviews with Johns and Perez, and the panel that was cut from a JSA issue that would have shown the first 3-way Legion teamup
• 7/24/08 - Johns teases what's coming in L3W
• 7/30/08 - Perez has a giant binder full of costume references
• 8/15/08 - Pre-annotations part 1 (pre-Zero Hour + Glorithverse + Retroboot) and part 2 (post-Zero Hour Reboot) listing the creators of each Legionnaire and their first appearances
• 8/16/08 - inker Scott Koblish looks forward to my brain melting as I try to annotate the series
• 8/17/08 - Pre-annotations part 3 (Threeboot)
• 8/19/08 - Pre-annotations part 4 (all the villains)
• 8/19/08 - L3W #1 annotations (part 1)
• 8/20/08 - L3W #1 reviews part 1, part 2
• 8/28/08 - L3W #1 annotations (part 2)
• 10/15/08 - L3W #2 annotations
• 11/12/08 - DiDio comments on L3W delays
• 1/17/09 - Final Crisis #6 annotations and what it all means for L3W
• 1/29/09 - Final Crisis #7 annotations and what it all means for L3W
• 2/4/09 - L3W #3 annotations
• 4/30/09 - L3W #4 annotations
• 7/22/09 - L3W #5 annotations
• 8/4/09 - I reveal my (extremely minor) role in the writing of L3W
• 1/2/20 - All the variant covers from L3W

Of course, what we didn't realize at the time was that the delays were caused by problems with Perez's eyesight, which wasn't really something that DC could (or should) say. But they did stick with Perez on pencils despite the fact they could have gotten someone else to finish in Perez's stead.

After it was all over, George Perez was at the Baltimore Con in 2009 and had this to say about working on L3W:

First, when asked about his "wish list" for future projects, Perez discussed the creators with who he wanted to work rather than characters. Basically, L3W fulfilled his last wish from his fandom days. For him, working with creators is what is interesting when considering new projects. He volunteered that having known Paul Levitz since their days in fandom, he would enjoy drawing a Legion project for him.

Second, I asked Mr. Perez what his feelings were about L3W. His response reflected a lot of fan criticism of the mini. He was originally disappointed that so much of the story hinged on non-Legion characters. He wanted the Legion to be more directly involved in solving the conflict. He came to understand that Kid Flash, Superboy and Green Lantern characters were needed to help the Legion reach a larger audience. This reach was important to ensure that the Legion would survive in the current environment. He was very complimentary of Geoff Johns and his answers were always positive and upbeat.

In an anecdote, Mr. Perez said that Johns sent him a full script for one of the early issues. In it, Johns listed all the characters to appear in one of those giant group scenes. Perez was not used to working from a full script and was a little taken aback. In COIE, Marv Wolfman's script basically said "draw characters here" without spelling out exactly who to draw. He then realized that Johns had essentially reversed engineered Perez' Crisis work, spelling out in words the type of scene for which Perez is famous. Perez found it amusing.