Sunday, December 25, 2022

The Legion Forever

In mid-November, when we heard about the passing of Carlos Pacheco, who drew, among many other cool things, the Avengers Forever miniseries with Kurt Busiek. As a sort of tribute, I proposed on the Subs podcast that we come up with our own version of a Legion Forever team. The only ground rules were that it includes members or Legion-related characters from any timeline or any continuity, and the pitch had to include a rationale as to why they were together. Here's what I came up with: 


THE SETUP

Back in LSHv2 Annual 1, Computo discovered alternate realities via the tesseract storage portals when it possessed the entire Legion Clubhouse. When it realized it was going to be defeated, it uploaded a copy of itself in an unused tesseract that was later activated. It has been leaping through realities, setting wrong what once went right and trying to destroy the Legions of other universes. Enter Dr. Mayavale, who has gone straight and has chosen the following heroes to help him atone. We don’t learn until much later why he chose these particular people (I never figured out the reason, I'm leaving that as a problem for Future Me to get to). Mayavale recruited the team's leader, Threeboot Cosmic Boy, to his team via the Knights Tempus (and thus closing that plot point that got dropped).

THE TEAM

It's confusing who knows who. We have four females, four males, and two robots (one female-presenting and one male-presenting).
  1. Silver Age: Hate Face
    • Never met anyone else on the list
  2. Bronze Age: Brainiac 5’s Supergirl sex robot
    • Might have met Wildfire or M-E Lad
  3. Bronze Age: Wildfire, in his original ERG-1 containment suit which allowed him to mimick the powers of various Legionnaires
    • May have met the Supergirl robot but didn't know at the time she was a robot, although he would surely have heard about after she was destroyed
  4. 5YL: BION (after it had been reprogrammed by Brainy)
    • Would have fought M-E Lad as BION, fought and killed Duplicate Girl as Computo, had their powers as well as Wildfire's when it emerged and took over Danielle Foccart
  5. 5YL: Matter-Eater Lad, with the innate power of the Miracle Machine
    • Would have known about Hate Face but never met him, may have met the Supergirl robot when she was impersonating Supergirl, worked with Wildfire briefly, worked with Duplicate Girl (although she is a different version of the one he worked with in the 5YL timeline)
  6. Reboot: XS (prior to the first L3W meeting)
    • Doesn't know anyone else
  7. Animated: Jordana Gardner, the Teen Lantern
    • Doesn't know anyone else
  8. Retroboot: Duplicate Girl
    • Would have heard of Hate Face, maybe met the Supergirl robot, worked a bit with Wildfire but she got married and left the Legion at the same time as he joined (he would barely know her, but she worked with him periodically), hates BION because it's a version of Computo which killed one of her bodies, worked with M-E Lad in the Silver Age and with XS in L3W
  9. Threeboot: Cosmic Boy
    • Post-L3W, would have met and worked with an older Wildfire, probably didn't work too closely with M-E Lad in L3W, would have met XS and Duplicate Girl in L3W
  10. Rebirth: X-Ray Girl
    • Doesn't know anyone and nobody knows a thing about her so she's a blank slate to do whatever the writer wants with her

The Legion Forever team:
top row - Hate Face, Supergirl Robot, ERG-1, BION, Tenzil Kem
bottom row - XS, Jordana Gardner, Duplicate Girl, Cosmic Boy with the Knights Tempus, X-Ray Girl

Computo, the antagonist, vs Dr Mayavale, the savior of the universes

Let me know in the comments who your Legion Forever team might be, and why they have gotten together?

4 comments:

DanielT said...

I would have included Leeta 87 and had her find out how she was fated to die.

Anonymous said...

I would include Timber Wolf (around LSH 300) and Anti-Lad

Michael said...

None of the Shanghalla tombs mention her being fated to die. Leeta 87's tomb reads: "Singlehandedly, she defeated innumerable super-villains, but one day slipped on a banyo-fruit peel, fracturing her skull. An ironic end to an illustrious career!"

And while I'm on Shanghalla:

Nimbok of Vaalor - "This mutant rescued an alien race from a score of incredible perils, until he was slain by a treacherous sorcerer who pretended to be his most trusted friend!"

Mog Yagor - "Who saved his home planet Vasmeer... but perished himself while defeating a space beast"

Hate Face - "The face of a devil, the soul of an angel, he rescued millions, yet none could bear his revolting visage. Some say he died in battle, others say it was his broken heart that killed him!"

Beast Boy - "Though he turned against humanity, this youth from the planet Lallor died heroically, saving a child from a monster!"

DanielT said...

Since every other monument in Shanghalla refers to how the character died I think it's pretty safe to assume the fractured skull killed her.