scans_daily: Browsing through an old image folder, I found a couple of interesting Legion of Superheroes titbits

icon_uk (

icon_uk) wrote in

scans_daily,
@ 2010-03-01 08:42 pm UTC

Entry tags:

char: cosmic boy/rokk krinn, char: lightning lad/livewire/garth ranzz, char: saturn girl/imra ardeen, creator: george perez, creator: keith giffen, creator: steve lightle, publisher: dc comics, title: legion of 3 worlds

Browsing through an old image folder, I found a couple of interesting Legion of Superheroes titbits

Whilst digging through a folder of images which I haven't looked at in years, I was delighted to find these which I located years ago, but haven't been able to find since.

Back in 2001 Steve Lightle did some sketches for a proposed animated version of the Legion of Superheroes which never got off the ground (It would be another 5 years before a Legion cartoon series actually hit the airwaves, and would be quite different from this)

Bear in mind these are sketches, not finished designs. You can see the aim was to significantly reduce the average age of the Legionnaires, whilst the bad guys tended to look the way they always had.

Here we see the core three Legionnaires, plus Brainiac 5 (and Koko, B5's "pet" monkey for a deal of the post Zero Hour Legion, and a hark back to the Silver Age Brainiac, who kept a white space monkey as a pet, presumably to give him someone to monologue to). They're facing off against the Fatal... ummm. Four, as Mano appears to be out having a manicure or something.

"EMERALD EYE!!! I Choose you!!"

As you will note, the Pokemon craze was in full flow when this was being put to gether, as one of the concepts seriously considered was having either side able to upgrade their powerset into a new form, or most likely two new forms as fights escalated...

Lightning Lad appears to upgrade to Johnny Thunders Thunderbolt, and then Zzzax, whilst the Empress goes to a Genie type mode with the eyeball extending from behind her on a thick optic nerve, and then an unattached flaming eyeball!

Not sure how I think that would have played as a cartoon, and if I recall correctly Mr Lightle was not terribly enthused by the idea, but they're a cute couple of images I thought you might like to see.

The legality scans comes from this rather fun comics website, and is a copy of THE Legion poster put together by in remarkably Keith Giffen.

And since no one does a crowd scene like Perez, it's only fair to give hiim his chance from "Legion of Threee Worlds"!

Tags (No way in HELL am I going to try and tag all the characters!!!) group: legion of superheroes, char: lightning lad/livewire/garth ranzz, char: saturn girl/imra ardeen , char: cosmic boy/rokk krinn , char: emerald empress/sarya of venegar, char: tharok, char: validus, char: persuader/nyeun chun ti, creator: george perez, creator: steve lightle, creator: keith giffen, title: legion of three worlds

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ravenous_raven
2010-03-02 01:29 am UTC (link)

I think the reasons for a lot of all that is because they wanted the cartoon to appeal to viewers who weren't comic book readers and therefore didn't know the team (and therefore wouldn't miss missing members). From that logic, Supes was the hook to get people interested in the show. From a brief viewer who wasn't reading comics, hard copy or online, the series did its job.

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	no subject koschei 2010-03-03 02:43 pm UTC (link)
	They could easily have made the 1st season of the series about the formation of the Legion based upon the idealism Superman represents to their time period rather than having him dominate proceedings (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent) (Thread) (Hide 3 comments) (Show 3 comments)

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icon_uk
2010-03-03 03:15 pm UTC (link)

Yes, but that wouldn't have sold anything like as well as a concept. For better or worse, "Superman" gets everyone's attention in a cartoon as he's a worldwide brand, "The Legion of Superheroes" does/is not.

Same reason the New Teen Titans got Robin leading them, he was a built in draw, in a way that Kid Flash and Wonder Girl did not.

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	no subject koschei 2010-03-03 05:26 pm UTC (link)
	Except that Robin's prety much always led the Titans. And "future superheroes inspired by Superman" sells and sounds a lot better than "super powered kids abduct superman to the future to help them beat folks they couldn't beat on their own" (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent) (Thread) (Hide 1 comment) (Show 1 comment)

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icon_uk
2010-03-03 05:34 pm UTC (link)

Actually Marv Wolfman didn't really want Robin to lead the New Teen Titans, but appreciated that he drew buyers. He wanted Wonder Girl to lead since he felt he'd have more freedom to use her as she wasn't appearing in anything else at the time.

And I think we got the "teenagers inspired by Superman" in the very first episode where Clark comes to realise what his future legacy will be, it's partly why I wish they'd been able to use the name Superboy rather than Superman, since Clark SHOULD have felt unready to take on the role of SuperMAN instantly, but could appreciate that being SuperBOY served a useful transition for himself.

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