The Abnett & Lanning Reboot Legion - A look back

 

I first started this effort of reviewing the post-Legion Lost Abnett & Lanning Legion works after examining my own extreme negative reaction in an online poll about how long DnA should have been allowed to write the Legion.  I voted on it after having read all the reboot up to LSH 125 just prior. I had read the full run of DnA back in the day (not in real-time though), and just remembered checking out in the latter half of the first year's issues. One world-busting, character-morphing event after another that did not include any of the characters I loved just seemed to leave me cold. But I was vehement and voted that DnA should never have touched the book. If I'm being honest, I still would wonder what a different creative team would have done; the book needed shaking up, but I am still not convinced it needed 5 years of DnA. By the end of the journey, I started appreciating what they did a lot more, but I do think they were on the title for much too long.

Abnett & Lanning's impact on the Legion was, in the five or so years of them being involved writing the team, both amazing and inspiring but also confusingly mundane at times. Maybe the fact that their tenure ended the way it began - by editorial fiat - is why that is the case. I was/am a huge reboot Legion fan, as it was my introduction to the characters and background. And when they got dull, they really got dull. In order to fully discuss the DnA Legon run, I think we need to take a moment to look at the situation that brought them to the book.

After Legion of Super Heroes v4 #100, the editorial reins of the title shifted from KC Carlson to Mike McAvennie, who up to that point had been an assistant editor on the Legion books while being lead editor of others, like Superboy. At that point, the two Legion titles seem to flatten a bit creatively which led to a sales doldrum. Not to say that the writers and artists didn’t do a good job overall, but there didn’t seem to be a cohesive vision as to the direction of the team.  Previously rejected storylines were recycled with little impact, humdrum stories were written for a couple years and fans walked away or didn't care. Pretty much everyone, including die-hard fans of the reboot, said that some kind of change needed to happen. I'm making an educated guess here, but given what happened, it seems as if DC editorial said something to the effect of, ""We need to whittle this down to one book. Figure it out, or its gone." McAvennie hired DnA and Oliver Coipel, completely sacking the existing writers and illustrators (save colorist Tom McCraw) and the DnA Legion was born.

Legion of the Damned and Widening Rifts dragged the Legionnaires' world upside down and put them in very dark circumstances, very much different from the prior five years. But it also served the purpose of ending the Legionnaires and LSH titles to make way for the amazing drama and character study of Legion Lost. Both its drama and controversy ensure that it will be a fixture on the list of the most talked about Legion tales, and the follow-on, Legion Worlds had a similar character focus on the Legionnaires left behind, all setting up the new ongoing title called “The Legion.”

The fact that "The Legion" made it to publication with the success that it had is probably the reason many Legion fans put DnA on the “Mount Rushmore” of Legion writers.  While the pre-DnA writers were showing some signs of life at the end of the run, cancelation seemed to be an inevitability (see the Legion Omincom's discussion of Legion sales numbers). Extreme praise should be given to Abnett, Lanning and McAvennie for plotting out this relaunch that would take place over the better part of two years, as they wound down the current books, launched two successive (and successful) limited stories that laid the groundwork for a new monthly in a very interesting way, arguably rescuing the team from cancellation.  But I have to wonder why didn’t McAvennie do that with any of the existing writing staff?

So what did they do right? Lots. The characters (and many of the villains) were complicated. Characters like Saturn Girl were put in moral grey areas that cause me to seriously question whether I enjoyed the character or not. Characters were defined in a way where you actually cared about them in new ways, which had been missing for a long time in the Legion titles. DnA were MASTERS of worldbuilding. The level of detail that they would put into the setup of these stories was really amazing. The characters they focused on were very fleshed out. And for the most part, they could spin a good story with epic stakes at play. The art was also a high note. Oliver Coipel, who started out with a drawing style that I personally found EXTREMELY lacking in Legion of the Damned, ended up being an excellent illustrator when backed with Lanning's inks and it became almost a signature element of the run.

What could have gone better? The characters.  Where they did a great job focusing on a core dozen or so - primarily those featured in Legion Lost - the rest of the team suffered from essentially being background players. While it was great to see Kid Quantum as Legion Leader, she was given too much screen time. This is a Legion of 25 characters plus supporting staff. If you can't handle that large of a cast, maybe you shouldn't be writing a book called The Legion. While the world building was great, it introduced a lot of plot threads that were barely touched on, or completely ignored. They also had many five- or six-part stories that were clearly designed to be collected into trade paperbacks, but the length of those stories made the arc to drawn out or was padded to include an issue with a bad plot that dragged the overall story down, and then had extremely rushed endings. A much tighter edit, or successive 2-3 issue arcs would have likely worked better to cover more ground and characters. And as a side note, most of those stories haven’t been collected and resold in the TPB format.

What REALLY didn't work for me? A couple of main things, but primarily the fact that, apart from the COMPUTO storyline, McAvennie and DnA did everything possible to set their world completely apart from what Waid, Peyer, Stern and McCraw, not to mention the illustrators like Moy, did to set the stage for their world. There was no editorial callback to older issues from the earlier run (save COMPUTO) and there were a lot of characters that were never seen again. As a Legion reboot fan, as well as a fan of comics continuity, I found that very disrespectful of one creator to not acknowledge the prior work. It felt like THEY didn't like or appreciate what the earlier team did, and that didn't sit well with me. The other was an over-reliance on the deux ex machina concept in their stories. It's used constantly, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's very possible they realized that they overreached with repeating the "Earth in mortal danger" story and the deus ex machina was the only way out without writing another two issues. From a storytelling perspective, this is extremely bad form.

The last thing I'll point out on this topic is the favoring of Sci-Fi at the expense of magic or even super-heroics. Magic is a traditional part of the Legion, and its omission is glaring, as no characters from the reboot with mystical or magical powers are really used, or if they are they end up horribly altered. The best Legion books are those that have a blend of all the above, but this run lost its way (in my opinion) by over-emphasizing the sci-fi as the focus. Of course, the writer has the prerogative to do what they want and to create the universe as they see fit. My concern about it was that this vision of the Legion universe got old after three years.

So, all that to say they did a pretty good job. If you average out the issues across the 33-issue run based on the grades in my reviews, you end up with something about a C+ or B-, depending on how generous you're feeling. That's not bad for a run of almost three years. It's not great, but its certainly nothing to scoff at or dismiss. The DnA storylines had a very consistent pattern about them: a strong (usually REALLY strong) start, a couple of good issues, probably one stinker, then a good, but hastily rushed ending. The one exception to this is the Foundations storyline which started very weak, but then got better.

I certainly think they stayed too long on the job. Other opinions have been expressed that they should have left after Robotica was complete, and I agree with this take. That was a logical ending that wrapped up the first plot point they ever introduced in the Legionnaires title, and after that give it to a new creative team. Maybe it's the case that comic book writers, at least on a well-established title at a well-known publisher should rotate every 2-3 years for freshness sake. It may have been needed pre-DnA, as that team was there for 4-5 years, or possibly it was an editor who couldn’t handle taking over an existing creative team. But DnA also got stale in the same timeframe. The dark mood of Damned, Lost, Terrorforms and Robotica was the variation of the same theme played over three years, and it was a bit much for my tastes.

I do wish that they would have done a bit of a tighter job in the stories to reduce it to 10-12 issues. Coincidentally, that timeframe of “The Legion” aligns with when Mike McAvennie, who brought DnA into The Legion, was fired, as well as when Dan DiDio was brought into DC as VP Editorial. Whether there is any connection to all of those is unknown, but the title did seem to drift a bit when the editor who brought DnA into the fold was gone.

At the end of the day, Abnett & Lanning were a good addition to the Legion pantheon. I still don't think they were as great as some give them credit. Legion Lost is a standout title. And they kept the title alive. That's a lot of good karma that I think shined on to some of the stuff that didn't come out that well. To me this is analogous to the Marvel movies today - even the stinkers (and there are definitely stinker MCU movies, mainly the first couple Thors and the latter Iron Mans) tend to get a pass because of the really good ones. Over the course of writing The Legion, they had some serious missteps, but I think the good that they did by keeping the team alive in an interesting way kept them in good graces as the monthly's quality started to decline.

Ultimately, it seems like they were caught by the same backoffice mismanagement that seems to doom all Legion efforts since the late 1980s. I am not sure of the specifics, but it sure seemed like Dan DiDio, or someone in his staff, just wanted a change - DnA was booted off the title and Mark Waid was contracted to do the threeboot as a completely separate version of the Legion, and he (or Wacker) never bothered to tell Gail Simone that she was closing the book on the Reboot Legion. Maybe we have to wait another ten years to get an oral history of this 5-6 year period when people might be more willing to talk. But I think it would be a fascinating tale, and I hope to hear it one day.  

After all, the Reboot Legion has lasted the longest of any of the iterations save the original.  They deserve an oral history beyond the Zero Hour events of their launch.