Loyal reader Mike Boyce has posted a series of questions about various entries on this blog over the past two weeks or so, and today I finally got around to responding to them. I thought it might be worthwhile to post them all together here as the first new content on this site in quite some time (sorry about that).
Hi Mike, I greatly appreciate your interest and questions and my apologies for taking so long to respond to any of them. So in the order of the questions asked…
Q. Hi again, so I went back and read the whole legion run starting with their first appearance all the way back to 1958, what a read and now I am reading 5YL again. Thanks for responding to my last question. I get confused about Time Trapper, do you have any recollections on the time trapper plan or who you thought was under the hood or who Keith thought it was?
A. Mike — I don’t really have anything to add to what the Time Trapper was up to during our run beyond what was published in #4, Annual #1 and the “pocket universe” addition they had us do in #13. We tried to make those TT machinations as logical and clearly explained as we could, but if you have specific questions about what we were thinking, let me know (I can’t speak to what’s been done with the villain after our time).
As for who’s under the purple robe, I think I can speak for Keith and ourselves in saying we strongly felt no human character was under the robe — that the Trapper was virtually a force of nature, not a humanoid being. I think before the 5YL run he was defined as entropy incarnate, while I thought of him as a hugely powerful being that had always been and would always be, through limitless cyclical repetitions of the creation and destruction of the universe. A hard concept to grasp, as I think the Time Trapper should have been.
Q. You mention that other characters were possibilities other than poor Blok (to be killed in #3), do you remember who was in the running other than Shvaughn? Any memories of possible alternatives. Rest in peace, Blok.
A. In the case of that plot for #3 where Roxxas kills Blok, I believe the only other candidate for that particular issue had been Shvaughn. Independent of that particular story, Keith had thoughts about killing off Dawnstar, Rond Vidar and probably others I’m not remembering, as well as his idea to pick five survivors’ names out of a hat and kill off the rest of the Legion. In the case of Shvaughn, Dawnstar and Rond, other members of the creative team convinced Keith to go in other directions with those characters. And Mary and I were certainly not enamored of the idea of killing off all but five of the Legionnaires and I’d imagine the editors probably agreed with us on that.
Q. Hi again, I wonder what your plans would have been for Laurel, did you have any long term plans for the character if you had continued to write the character? Also on the last page with the statues in the garden, who is the statue of with invisible kid (panel 4) I don’t recognize the costume, looks like a comet.
A. We didn’t really have detailed plans for Laurel (or anyone else) beyond the issues we did because it never appeared likely that we would be kept on beyond the expirations of our contracts. Vaguely, we were probably headed toward some kind of meet-up of the adult Laurel, Brainy and Rond, but we had non specific events or storylines in mind. As for the SW6 Laurel, no particular plans (but definitely not a bigot and definitely not a nun).
That Legionnaire with the comet symbol among the statues of dead Legionnaires was actually the starting point for the Kid Quantum character. Presumably the statue is wearing the costume KQ wore in his ill-fated initial tenure with the Legion (in which he was apparently killed, as was explained in a few places, including I think Legionnaires #11). Keith just popped that unknown character into that scene with the statues of the dead heroes and figured at some point we’d come up with an identity and story for that character and that’s where our Kid Quantum came from.
Q. Looove hearing the emerald eye possible origins, was always such a cool concept and with green energy being such a corner stone for DC if the eye was always supposed to be part of that magic
A. Yeah, I think the clever links between the Emerald Eye and the Green Lantern energy were thought up after our run. When we were on the Legion books, I don’t think we were associating the two, as evidenced by the use of the Green Energy with the Celeste character totally independent of our Emerald Eye storylines. But the connection makes real sense and if we picked up our storylines today, we’d very likely want to build on those connections (and as you can see, some of my current ideas for the Emerald Eye origin do indeed tap into the Green Lantern mythos).
Q. Loving your insights, I wish every issue had its own entry. The Allen deaths were powerful and I like Devlin a lot on second read though. Also the parallels to today’s politics and how eerie this all seems so familiar and relevant. Yesterday were the no king marches.
A. Yeah, I participated in my town’s “No Kings” rally, and agree that the events depicted in the 5YL Legion, particularly what was going on with Earthgov, feel eerily prescient of current events. I think it’s a sign of good writing when something we worked on 30 years ago feels like it could have been written as commentary about contemporary events. I dare to think that was a pretty big accomplishment of the 5YL Legion — that we were depicting more stories about the world we actually live in than telling typical comic-book tales.
And if you go through this blog’s archives thoroughly enough, I think you’ll find a separate entry for close to every Legion issue we worked on. Not 100% but probably 95+%.
Q. Has it ever been established why SW6 is the name? Also do you have any memories of why this version of legion was used as, why 20?
A. As I think I’ve explained somewhere within these blog posts, we took the name “SW6” from the postal code of a Legion reader who was particularly a fan of the Silver Age Legion. Some have wondered if “SW6” is a tribute to Curt Swan, which would have been great, but it didn’t occur to us. And there was no “in universe” explanation in mind for what “SW6” meant, just a random designation implying there were lots of other “batches” with random letters and numbers as their designations.
I personally picked that particular 1966 version of the Legion because I was a big Ferro Lad fan and really wanted to be able to include him in our storyline (which originally might have only lasted an issue or two — we didn’t originally know the SW6 kids would be kept around for the duration). Once you decide you want Ferro Lad in the lineup, there’s only a brief window from the Silver Age that featured him (Adventure #346-353) and that’s the period from which we pulled this Legion.
I guess it ended up being a 20-member team after Keith surprised us by killing off three of the kids in #32. So it could have been a 22-member team if Karate Kid and Princess Projector had survived (the young Cham was also killed in #32 but we eventually decided to bring in the adult Cham as an organizer / advisor to the kids).
