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Legion of Super-Talent!?!
The panel focused initially on Waid's upcoming reinterpretation of the team. Waid admitted that he and DC had been coy with details about the new title since Waid wanted to release details specifically at the Baltimore Comic-Con. Once the new series starts, Waid will join Levitz in a somewhat exclusive club: Along with pioneering writer Jim Shooter, the three writers will be the only ones to have had multiple extensive tenures as Legion writers. Waid Boy & the Legion of Super-Heroes Waid proceeded to describe his vision for the series, conceding that it was a reboot (though one with an in-continuity explanation, courtesy of the Titans/Legion crossover), and then joked that he was pleased the assembled fans had not risen up to attack him at the word “reboot.” Waid described the new team and the new vision as “the Society for the Creative Anachronism in the 31st Century,” featuring a team of teens who rebel against the stilted, polite, too-perfect future world created by adults. Their admiration for the heroes of the 20th and 21st centuries leads them to wear brightly colored costumes in order to do good...and to impose a rule stating that everyone's super-hero codename must end in Lad, Lass, Boy, Girl, or Kid. When one fan asked what this meant for Legion favorite and mainstay Wildfire, Waid replied, “As long as he's called 'Wildfire Boy,' he's in.” Along with co-creator (and Empire collaborator) Barry Kitson, Waid will reimagine the Legion for a new generation of fans, aiming to restore the book to the greatness and prominence it once had under Levitz's tenure in the 1980s (in particular when working with collaborator Keith Giffen). At that point in time, the title was second only in sales and popularity to The New Teen Titans. Both Waid and Levitz described the Legion of that era as one of DC's “tent-pole” titles. The new series will begin with the Legion having been in existence for a year already, with a roster of 18 members. The basic origin has not changed, but will not be shown right away. Waid referred to the elements of soap opera that Levitz brought to the series during his tenure and said that he wants to pick up that notion. He'll be treating the team almost as a school, with members who joined at the same time tending to cluster into cliques like high school grade levels. The team's founders - Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy - are off “somewhere,” Waid said, and the rest of the team doesn't know whether to be glad or worried that the “upperclassmen” are off doing something mysterious. Some details on the new title: • Colossal Boy is the character Waid called the most changed of the classic Legionnaires. Originally an Earthling with the ability to grow to enormous size, the new Colossal Boy is from a planet of giants and has the power to shrink to the unthinkably small size of six feet tall. He joins the Legion as Micro Lad until the other members point out that he's really more of a Colossal Boy. “But he still thinks he's off having adventures with the little people,” Waid chuckled. • Bouncing Boy is a point of contention between Waid (who wants him on the team) and Kitson (who is resisting). “I think a big fat 250 lb. guy hurtling at you at a hundred miles an hour is a damn cool super-power,” Waid said to applause. • Newer members of the Legion are told of a member named “Atom Girl,” but since no one has ever seen her, they begin to think she's a joke being played on them by the upperclassmen, and dub her “Shrinking Violet.” • Waid circumvented his own rule on code names by re-casting Brainiac 5 as the team's science advisor, not an official member. • Waid would not comment on Superboy's Legion status. When asked if any of the “new” (i.e., post-Zero Hour) Legionnaires would be on the new team, Waid paused before answering, “They're all new.” He also made a point, however, of saying that even if only 50-60% of the cast would be recognized on sight by long-time fans that he hoped almost the entire team would be recognizable by the way they act. Levitz Lad Hops into the Time Bubble Levitz spoke at length about his own time writing Legion, and a sort of torch was passed, as Levitz endorsed Waid's vision of the book and praised Waid for the ideas he brought to the project, in particular Waid's development of a different sort of futuristic social order. He discussed Waid's first run as a Legion writer (in the mid-1990s), then pointed out that Waid and Kitson are now at the peak of their creative powers and that their Legion would be worth reading. A visibly pleased Waid thanked Levitz and told the audience that when DC editorial head honcho Dan Didio called to offer him Legion, one of Waid's stipulations was that he would only do the book if he could sit down with Levitz and get Levitz's approval first. Due to an early flight, Waid had to leave the panel early, screaming, “Trust me, it's going to be great! Trust me!” as he headed out the door. Still riffing on Waid's earlier fears of being attacked by angry fans in the hallway, Levitz leaned into microphone and intoned, “Convention security requests that you all remain seated until Mr. Waid has left the building...” Once Waid left, the panel turned to Levitz's much-hailed, uninterrupted seven-year stint as Legion writer (1982-1989), as well as his philosophy on writing in general. For the first time in many years, Levitz spoke at length exclusively as a creator, not as DC's President and Publisher. He spoke frankly about his likes and dislikes regarding the Legion and DC's comics in general in the years since he stepped away from the editorial side of the company. Levitz went to pains to explain to fans that his position removes him from the editorial side almost completely, and that many times he sees the comics the same time the fans do - when they come out. At one point, a fan asked if there would be more Legion action figures from DC Direct. Levitz mock-whimpered into the microphone, “I keep begging for them,” prompting sympathetic laughter from the fans. He explained that while he personally wanted more Legion figures, he doubted that the line would continue, as they were not financially viable. He did everything possible to keep the line alive, but ultimately the sales were not there. (Levitz also admitted to a desire many Legion fans have copped to: To have a set of complete figures like the ones shown in the classic origin of the Composite Superman!) Characteristically modest about his achievements on Legion, Levitz said that if he had never written his second run on Legion, he doubted anyone would ever have thought much of his first (shorter) run at all. He also highly praised collaborator Keith Giffen, and when asked what helped keep the book so magical when he and Giffen worked on it, Levitz recounted an anecdote of meeting Stan Lee and asking Stan about his collaborations with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. Stan replied, “It just appeared that for a few years, we couldn't do anything wrong.” Levitz was quick to say he did not place his work on a par with Lee's, but admitted that his time with Giffen could best be summed up the same way: “We just couldn't do anything wrong for a couple of years,” he said. There were moments of levity as well. When one fan asked, with tongue firmly in cheek, about “extremely popular Legion characters like Tyroc and Kent Shakespeare,” Waid jokingly replied, “Tyroc Boy and Kent Shakespeare Boy will be welcome on my team!” The fan countered, “Well, I know Paul in particular loves Tyroc,” a reference to Levitz's well-known dislike of the character as an offensive racial stereotype. Levitz good-naturedly replied that he'd just seen Tyroc co-creator Mike Grell on the show floor, and that someone had apparently just commissioned a Tyroc piece from him. “So it's true that every character is someone's favorite.” On the topic of Legion archives, Levitz said that the archives would probably be switching to a biennial schedule, but would continue to come out. He joked that every time someone reminded him that the archives were approaching his first run on the series, his “hair gets a little bit grayer and I push them [the archives] back a little more on the schedule.” When asked about other collaborators, Levitz discussed the good working relationship he enjoyed with famously reclusive comic book creator Steve Ditko, with whom Levitz co-created Stalker (later used by James Robinson in The Golden Age fifth-week event) and Starman (later incorporated into Robinson's series of the same name). He mentioned a chance meeting with Ditko recently, in which he told Ditko that Mattel had decided to make an action figure of Starman, meaning that Ditko would receive a royalty check from DC. Levitz commented that this pleased him, especially in a summer when “zillions of action figures of [Ditko's] character are being sold without any royalties to him.” Levitz, who has historically downplayed his own writing contributions, also took the opportunity presented by the panel to explain how society and culture influence writers as deeply as a writer's personal maturation, how different generations of fans see the same properties in sometimes wholly different ways, and how opinions on the utility and necessity of continuity have mutated since he first began reading comics. Specifically, he described continuity as existing on two axes: One axis is continuity with “what else is being published currently.” The other axis is continuity with “what has been published in the past.” Some fans (and writers) place the importance of one over the other, while others try to balance both. In Levitz's case, with the Legion being isolated from the rest of the DC Universe for most of his tenure as writer, he was able to focus on keeping the “historical” axis straight. Waid's job now is to work on the “contemporary” axis, since the series is beginning anew. With some fans upset at more changes to their favorite title and characters (and at least the second, if not third or fourth “reboot”), Levitz opined that a change to the Legion was necessary, and not just for sales reasons. Society's definition of heroism has changed, Levitz contended. In Levitz's youth, heroes were the Mercury astronauts, brave men to be sure, but - as Levitz pointed out - trained by, paid for, and marketed by the government. (Long-time Legion fans will see a clear, almost blatant parallel to the team's origins as an arm of the United Planets government.) Without mentioning the candidate by name, Levitz used John Kerry as an example of how radically the idea of heroism had changed, stating that as a youth he never would have imagined a time when someone could run for president and use his protest of the Vietnam War as a credential. Such changing definitions, Levitz claimed, need to be reflected in fiction. In Legion, creators need to take into account not only how different society is today, but also how different it may become. When asked what comics he was reading today, Levitz said that he tended to read “the older stuff” as “comfort food,” but that he was very interested in Vertigo's output from a writer's standpoint. He explained that the forms and styles popularized by Vertigo had developed after he'd stopped writing full-time, and that when the time came for him to return to writing, he would like to try his hand at a Vertigo-style project. At the mention of Vertigo, one fan was heard to call out “Lucien!” referring to the dream librarian character Levitz created decades ago, used by Neil Gaiman to great effect in Sandman. Asked when he would write more than the occasional short story, Levitz made the understatement of the night when he patiently explained, “Well, my day job is very complex and demanding.” His recent Julie Schwartz tribute story was plotted over a long lunch with Keith Giffen and Karen Berger, he said, and then written during stolen moments on Father's Day! “Once the day job is finished,” he promised, “you'll see more from me.” The panel had already run past its scheduled stopping time, and now closed on the applause to Levitz's last answer. Levitz stayed after to sign autographs and chat with fans.
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