itsokimasenator

This may have been our most memorable issue through our time working in the Legion universe (out of many memorable issues), the story of the Earth blowing up.

Keith had been planning this event for a long time and he always had the unusual format of the issue in mind — an entire issue of full-page panels with one third of the page left for a text description of what happened.  I don’t remember how it was decided that the narration would take the form of a news account from Devlin O’Ryan, but the idea made sense and gave us a chance to really build on Devlin’s background as a journalist.  The more I think about it, the more I think that exact approach to the text was also Keith’s idea.

( Read more... )

This is the baseball issue that was penciled by June Brigman and inked by John Dell, with a Brian Stelfreeze cover.  We were excited to work with June, whose work on “Power Pack” we’d really enjoyed.  And it was neat to get a great Stelfreeze cover as well, after having met Brian several times at cons.
    
As I’ve mentioned in accounts of earlier issues, Keith had come up with the idea that Thom (Star Boy) Kallor had moved on to coaching in the “Five Years Later” world, and while Keith had given us a glimpse of Thom in a dystopian “rollerball” kind of sport in an early issue, we opted to violate what was established in that one panel and show Thom coaching a version of baseball that was about 90% unchanged from the sport we know in the 20th/21st century.  It probably stretches credibility that baseball could survive so intact over 1,000 years but I really liked the feel it gave the Legion’s universe to see the tradition of a sport I love survive into the 30th century, as opposed to us just depicting another grim futuristic blood sport.  And there was a clear depiction back in the Swan/Shooter days of a “Galaxy Series” between the Metropolis Metros and the Naltor Dreamers and I felt like it was appropriate to extrapolate a sport in the spirit of the Swan-drawn Legion if we were going to pick up on that reference.
    
( Read more... )

In this issue, the war for Earth is over, but there are lots of repercussions, some pretty grim and pretty violent.
   
This is as much as anything Bounty’s issue.  She's the coldly efficient bounty-hunter character who has an uncanny resemblance to a certain ex-Legion lady.  In #36 for the first time, we get into the head of this character and find her lusting after adrenaline and the thrill of a kill, virtually going through withdrawals after the end of the killing orgy she was enjoying during the war.  The perky SW6 kids are driving her crazy, so she takes off and runs into Sade, the assassin who joined forces with the Subs’ underground resistance during the war for Earth.  Since technically there’s a “dead or alive” bounty out for the assassin Sade, Bounty decides she’ll be the one to bring Sade in, preferably dead.
   
( Read more... )

Last week I had a lot of fun being interviewed by the team over at Legion of Substitute Podcasters, and they've now posted the interview at http://paulfrench.ca/losp/?p=595.  It's lengthy, I believe we spoke for more than two hours and their podcast includes other Legion discussion, but I found it to be a lot of fun and their questions brought back a lot of details I hadn't thought about in a long time.  They knew the "Five Years Later" run in great detail, in some cases bringing up things I'd completely forgotten about, and certainly had an appreciation for the direction the series went in. Many thanks to Matt, Paul, Darren and Scott for setting up the interview and patiently allowing me to ramble on at such length about those fun days working on the Legion.

There's been some discussion in the comments about the history of the United Planets and since I haven't often given that topic a lot of conscious attention, I felt motivated to give the U.P. a little thought and figure out what my feelings and preferences are on the matter.  And while I don’t recall specifically establishing a lot of past U.P. history during our run, I’m in agreement with Dwight in the comments section that to me, the U.P. is a lot more interesting and credible if it doesn’t largely revolve around Earth.
   
It certainly is logical to postulate that it’s a very Earth-centric body in that for much of the Legion’s run, Earth hosted the U.P. capitol. And the very existence of the Legion on Earth further promotes the idea that Earth is pretty much the central world of the U.P.
   
We also added some hints that the U.P. was very Earth-based by establishing that many of the U.P. worlds that had populations of super-powered human inhabitants (like Braal, Imsk, Tharr, Bismoll, etc.) were “Sentinel Worlds” colonized by humans under the direction of Valor, who’d rescued them from 20th century Dominator experimentation that expressed the powers latent in their human meta-genes.
   
( Read more... )

This is the issue where young SW6 Sun Boy confronts what’s left of the original Sun Boy, whose powers are burning him alive.  It’s an impactful scene that’s depicted on this issue’s cover, probably one of Jason Pearson’s best.
   
The story opens with various scenes showing that the war for Earth is still raging on, but that things are rapidly deteriorating for the Dominators and their puppet Earthgov.  The young SW6 Valor and the older original Valor are teaming up to really start mopping things up.  One cool bit that Keith came up with is that the Dominators’ caste system had really begun to work against them when the U.P. and the Legion-related characters began to capture all the command-level Dominators -- their underlings have been so thoroughly trained to take orders that they refuse to initiate any new strategy, even as the war effort crumbles around them.  Finally, a lower-caste Dominator can take it no more and he takes command of his battlewagon.  When a superior attempts to stop him, he points out (in a line that got garbled in the production stages, unfortunately) that it is not the superior’s role to question seizures of power.   This upstart knows how to manipulate the rigid Dominion caste system to his advantage.
   
( Read more... )

In this issue, the galaxy is dealing with the outbreak of open warfare on Earth between the Dominators who’ve been secretly running Earthgov and the humans who’ve risen up in revolt since the Dominators’ manipulations of Earthgov has been exposed by, among other things, the enterprising reporting of the Daily Planet.  Now a United Planets fleet has arrived to take on the Dominators and support the anti-Earthgov resistance.
   
In the early pages of the issue, we get an on-the-spot report from a news reporter whom I’m guessing was male in the layouts, because we named the reporter Cefn Gould after Interlacker Kevin Gould, but Jason Pearson drew a female reporter.  The news anchor back in the studio, by the way, is one-time Legion applicant Antenna Boy.
   
( Read more... )

This was one of the fill-in issues Mary and I plotted, an origin story for Kid Quantum.  Probably most readers at the time were pretty confused as to just who this Kid Quantum was supposed to be and why we were devoting an issue to him, because up to this point he was nothing more than an extra statue drawn into the grove dedicated to deceased Legionnaires.
 
But I think when this fill-in was conceived, the plan was for the “Legionnaires” spin-off comic to tell a revised history of the Legion that emerged after the timeline shift back in the “Mordru Universe” story in Legion #5, and we were going to make Kid Quantum a key member of that Legion.
   
( Read more... ) 

Happy holidays, everyone.  I've been overdue to post on this journal for some time and am hoping to catch up a little over the holidays.  And that made me think it would be appropriate to mention how much fun my brothers and I used to have coming up with Christmas-oriented Legion stories in our younger years.

I became a really big Legion fan at the age of 16 in 1972 when my brother Carl, 11 at the time, discovered the group and we started tracking down back issues and making our own home-made comics (later joined by brother Jim).  We really enjoyed the holiday season so it was very natural that over the holidays there in 1972 that we both started doing our own home-made Legion Christmas stories.  ( Read more... )