Now that Legionnaires has reached the end of the Bierbaum run, the rest of the series will mostly revolve around the time travel shenanigans of Zero Hour.
While the full origin of the so-called “SW6 Batch” Legionnaires won’t be told for a bit more, at least thanks to LSH #53 we know that they are not clones like it was originally thought.
So I think this is a good time to examine the original idea of them being clones created by the Dominators and put in stasis for years.
I’m only talking about the in-universe explanation, by the way, leaving aside the original plan of using the Legionnaires series to re-tell old Legion stories.
Is it possible to identify a single point in time from which ALL these characters could have been taken?
Given that Ferro Lad is one of the Legionnaires, that already gives us a narrow window: he must have been taken between Adventure Comics #346 where he was introduced and Adventure Comics #353 where he dies.
But we can narrow it down further: Lightning Lad has two organic arms and Matter-Eater Lad is not obese, so they must come from after Adventure Comics #351 where their previous status quo is restored.
That’s a very close window now. There are only 3 potential moments to choose here:
A) between Adventure Comics #351 and #352
B) during Adventure Comics #352
C) during Adventure Comics #353
Option A is the one with the least problems (for now… more on that later).
Option B could also be true, even if it’s the first part of the Sun-Eater storyline: the first scenes of #352 establish the Fatal Five, and while the SW6 didn’t give any explicit mention of having already met the Fatal Five during the first issues of Legionnaires (unless I missed something)… it’s a possibility.
There’s also a missing opportunity here: in #352 several Legion members are said busy in “dimension QK-51” (whatever THAT is)… some of those missing ARE part of the SW6 batch, so if they WERE supposed to be the originals they could’ve said that the real ones never came back from QK-51.
I doubt the Legionnaires could have been taken from the second half of #352, otherwise a few would have asked what happened to the Sun-Eater immediately after waking up.
Option C is the least likely, because Adventure Comics #353 doesn’t have a clear point where the story is interrupted long enough.
But even given these possibilities, there is a potential additional clue: Laurel Gand.
While she’s a completely new character, she IS supposed to be the equivalent to Supergirl… who returns to active duty in the finale of Adventure Comics #351, even if she’s not in the Sun-Eater storyline that follows.
So there you have it. Pretty straightforward, right? The Legionnaires were most likely either cloned right after Adventure Comics #351 ends, or at any rate their duplicates have memories that get up to that point.
Except… we have a big problem.
The Proty retcon.
Because the Lightning Lad that joins the Legionnaires (before he changes his name to Live Wire) is supposed to be the ORIGINAL Lightning Lad: thanks to the retcon, the one who was resurrected had Proty’s mind.
Saturn Girl acknowledges in LSH #33 that the SW6 Lightning Lad doesn’t sound like the one she remembers from her immediate past, suggesting this is the original one before his “death”.
Except this is completely irreconcilable with the idea that he was picked up after Adventure Comics #351, considered he died in Adventure Comics #304 and was resurrected in Adventure Comics #312.
It’s outright impossible for the SW6 Lightning Lad to have been cloned or picked from time THAT early, because his memories don’t match AT ALL with the people he interacts.
He wouldn’t know a lot of the other SW6 kids! Element Lad was introduced between his death and his resurrection, as was Light Lass: obviously he’d still know her (she’s his twin sister!), but she wouldn’t get gravity powers until Adventure Comics #317.
And the Shooter characters (Projectra, Karate Kid, Ferro Lad) would be introduced even later.
So since clearly he MUST have memories that go past Adventure Comics #312, we have few scenarios left… and I don’t think any of them make much sense.
SCENARIO A: the clones
If the SW6 Legionnaires are clones, they were cloned shortly after Adventure Comics #351, which is where their memories end.
Lightning Lad, however, also maintains the memories of what Proty was doing after taking over his dead boy. SOMEHOW.
As mentioned this was dismissed by LSH #53, but while it was considered a viable scenario it would have needed to consider the Proty retcon.
SCENARIO B: the switcheroo
If the SW6 Legionnaires are the original ones, they were kidnapped (potentially when some of them were in “dimension QK-51”) shortly after Adventure Comics #351, which is where their memories end. We have been following clones for all the years after that.
Lightning Lad, however, had the mind of Proty erased and transplanted into a cloned body, SOMEHOW, and for years we have been following the LL clone with Proty’s mind.
But also, SW6 Duo Damsel is able to recover her third body: while this could make sense if she was a clone, if she’s supposed to be the original it means she WAS kidnapped after Adventure Comics #351, but her body is healed in order to give her back her Triplicate Girl powers
SCENARIO C: the time duplicates
This is suggested from the revelations of LSH #53.
The SW6 Legionnaires are time-displaced versions of the originals, kidnapped or copied shortly after Adventure Comics #351, which is where their memories end.
Lightning Lad, however, requires two sub-categories… as does Duo Damsel.
She ALSO causes problems here, because she lost her third body in Adventure Comics #340 but regains her Triplicate Girl powers.
This gives us TWO sub-categories!!!
C-1: Lightning Lad and Duo Damsel were was kidnapped or copied at the same time of the others, but he had the mind of Proty erased while maintaining his memories while her body was healed in order to give her back her Triplicate Girl powers
C-2: Lightning Lad was kidnapped or copied before his death in Adventure Comics #304, but had the memories of Proty from #312 to #351 transplanted into the new body. Duo Damsel was kidnapped or copied after Adventure Comics #351, but her body was healed in order to give her back her Triplicate Girl powers AND she was given her memories from #340 to #351.
SCENARIO D: nobody thought this through
Yeah that’s probably it.
Normally, cloning means taking a cell sample from the original and growing a complete body from said cells. Cloning via cell samples would create a body identical to the original, which would not have any characteristics acquired during the course of the original’s life. That means clone Garth would not have lightning powers, but would have both arms. Clone Chuck wouldn’t be fat, but also wouldn’t bounce. Of course, exposing clone Garth’s body to a lightning beast would be easy enough, as would dosing clone Chuck with super-plastic formula. By extension, clone Luornu would naturally have all three bodies.
The Garth/Proty thing is still a mess. Assuming these are cloned bodies, they would need memories implanted from the originals. Garth’s memory tapes would need to be seriously tweaked to get a clone Garth who doesn’t either have a big memory gap or think he’s Proty. The real question is, why would someone go to all that bother to create a clone Garth with Garth’s original personality when his original personality is so insufferable? It would be better to leave him thinking he’s Proty. And I say that as someone who hated Proty.
I don’t have a problem with clones keeping powers, since the vast majority of superheroes work on the assumption that whatever gives a person powers alters their DNA enough so that it’s linked to the power itself.
It’s not a universal thing, either at DC or Marvel, but very close to universal.
Fair enough, although that raises issues with things like power-switching rays or Amazo robots. If the power is an inherent biological part of the person, right down to their DNA, it shouldn’t be possible to suck the powers out of someone or to switch powers with someone else.
It was officially stated in the letters page (don’t recall which issue) that the SW6 Batch of Legionnaires were taken from between Adventure Comics # 349 and # 350. The fact that Lightning Lad’s arm and Matter-Eater Lad’s slim figure were already restored was explained in LSH # 25 as something Dominator bio-technology was capable of doing (ditto the restoration of Luornu’s third body, though that was not discovered until LSH 39-41).
I’m not entirely sure how the Bierbaums intended the Garth thing to have worked (in-universe) because I’m not sure which was going to be the clone and which was going to be the original. IIRC, Keith Giffen had the adult Legion as being the clones (in his infamous “pick out of a hat” concept) so perhaps SW6 Garth would have been said to have his mind restored by Dominator healing biotechnology. In the end, with the SW6 batch being revealed as some sort of time copies stored by the Time Trapper, it was explained as the Time Trapper grabbing Garth from before his death because he wanted his copy of the Legion to be sunny and optimistic, without having experienced death. (Also explains Triplicate Girl.)
My best guess is that the Bierbaums came to the project wanting to revisit and rewrite the earlier years of the Legion – roughly during and after the Jim Shooter period – and perhaps for reasons beyond anyone’s control ended up lacking the editorial power and/or the foresight to properly establish that they were creating an alternate timeline for the Legion going forward.
Perhaps the idea of a separate timeline for the LSH was a hard sell at the time, relatively soon after Crisis and shortly before Zero Hour, when DC was at its highest hopes of establish a sole, consolidated Post-Crisis continuity. For all I know the editorial instability of early Vol 4 happened because their higher-ups couldn’t agree with that intent.
Or perhaps it was instead that the disconfort with the complexity and lack of clarity of the continuity situation of the “Five Years Later” status quo became a major motivation for doing “Zero Hour” and the resulting LSH Reboot in the first place.
Probably some combination of both, although I feel that ZH had many separate motivators, including the abuse of alternate timelines elsewhere and specifically the need to bring some sort of carefully balanced resolution to the “Team Titans” book, characters and continuity. There were also other considerations, such as the attempt at “retiring” the core JSA members and just plain establishing the opportunity for a variety of new status quos and a new line of books.
Anyway, if my guess is roughly correct, we ended up with a situation where the Bierbaums just did not have the freedom to establish their own nice little pocket of isolated continuity and probably realized that they would not be writing the Legionnaries for a very long time. So the best way forward for them was to simply ignore other books to the best of their ability and write their own thing as long as they had the opportunity to.
For what it is worth, they apparently never wrote for DC (or Marvel) again after Legionnaires. They wrote several books for Image and a few independent publishers, though.
In all fairness, I don’t think that the DC of this time was the most receptive of environments. My subjective perception is that they were publishing far too many books and had far too many editors. They were probably working under considerable pressure, writing a book that in recent memory had been one of the stars of the line and during a time when the other big star team book (New Titans) was clearly faltering.
Reading this post and the comments, I see why sometimes writers just say “I can’t deal with this, let’s destroy the whole universe and start over.” Or, in the words of Doctor Doom,
“Whatever stories you tell will eventually be replaced by other stories. Or worse, be reimagined or repurposed. In the long history of humanity, all the work you have done will disappear. It will be erased.”
Tom and Mary Bierbaum were said to be fans of the Legion before they were hired to write the book, but, for fans, they didn’t seem to know a lot about the Legion or to take much care with details.
An earlier Legion writer, Cary Bates, played fast and loose with previous stories, but Bates is quoted somewhere as saying he hated the Legion and willingly passed it on to Jim Shooter when the latter returned to the series.
I have not read any of the Bierbaum’s run on Legionnaires and stopped reading LSH during the insipid “Legion on the Run” story, but, based on the descriptions above, the book had devolved into a glorified fanfic. It reads as if the book was taken over by fans who wanted to do their version of the Legion regardless of what went before or if it fit neatly into established stories. Not only is the continuity a mess, but the story lines and characterizations read as if the writers are talking down to the audience, telling us the Legion is cool because they say so.
All of this makes me appreciate the Reboot even more. Even though the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, the Reboot was written by creators who demonstrated genuine interest in the characters, world-building, and the series history. When they changed that history, they usually made significant improvements. Looking forward to those reviews.