"2995" Mayfair Soucebook: Echo thru Refleto

Boy, I'm surprised how long it's been since I've posted an entry, but getting back in the swing of things, let's continue with a look at some segments of our Legion Sourcebook, still in the "Heroes" section… ECHO : I indulged myself and threw in the character Echo, who’s always appealed to me since his inclusion among the Legion of Super-Villains in the original Adult Legion tale. Since Echo’s established identity was as a villain, I figured we had to depict him as at least a gray-area character, so we created a background for him as a roguish opponent of Khundish oppression, having been raised in a Khund-controlled region called Calish-Aetia and having been disfigured by Khundish experimentation that did enough damage that he now must wear a respirator / mask.            As I recall, I dubbed a big chunk of the galaxy “Aetia,” a region between the Khundish Empire and the Dominion, creating the name as something that kind of felt to me like “Asia,” a simple, imposing name for a huge chunk of our planet. I think I just came up with “Calish” as a random modifier to describe a part of the huge region of Aetia (just as we’d never identify someone as simply coming from “Asia,” it wouldn’t make sense to just say someone was from “Aetia”).  I don’t believe “Calish”  was intended at all to be a reference to Marvel’s Carole Kalish, who we’d met and knew casually, but with whom we had no special relationship -- but I don't mind at all it standing as a tribute to Carole whether or not we originally intended it.           We gave Echo the civilian name of “Myke-4 Astor,” a salute to Interlac / WAPAn Mike Forrester, whose personality (smart, wryly humorous, socially responsible but slightly subversive) is pretty close to what we were envisioning for our Legion-member version of Echo.           At any rate, during the gap, we have Echo seeking Legion membership as a safe haven from the bounty hunters pursuing him for his subversive activities opposing and resisting Khundish operations (this is a bit of a nod to the bounty hunters who were going after Kono when we met her in Legion #2). Echo has become a bit of a folk hero for helping rescue people from worlds where the Khunds were expanding their empire, so he puts the Dominator-manipulated Earthgov in a tough spot – they’ve turned the Khunds into the bogeymen around which to rally the people of Earth in support of the increasingly authoritarian government and in favor of the Dominators acting as allies. But here they find the Legion, which Earthgov is trying to vilify, adding to its ranks an anti-Khund folk hero.           But it doesn’t take long for the maverick Echo to tire of the harassment and regulatory gridlock in which Earthgov has placed the Legion and he takes off. To Earthgov’s dismay, Echo has safely escaped before they get the chance to discredit him, and now he’s free to tell the interstellar media what he thinks of Earthgov and its crooked puppeteers. Echo also joins a social-resistance group known as “The Gnats” that is presumably causing a lot of trouble for Earthgov as well as Khundish interests. MYG / KARATE KID II : We included the second Karate Kid among the Legionnaires during the five-year gap, probably as much as anything to enhance the diversity of the roster over time. In his brief entry, we see that Myg became a quick target of Earthgov, mostly because of his background coming from the brutal battle courts of Lythyl. It’s left to Polar Boy to bemoan the incident that turned Myg into a fugitive – apparently he lost his temper when the Science Police officers aggressively insisted that Sun Boy and Polar Boy accompany them to the Earthgov President’s chambers in the aftermath of the Black Dawn crisis. Myg flips out and knocks a couple SPEs unconscious and takes off. We then read the secret report of his capture by SPEs, whereupon he’s turned over to the Dominators’ Weisinger chambers where they’ll experiment on him and try to add sonic powers to his existing martial arts skills. We get a brief discussion of how the Dominators’ “mindwipe” technology can turn the subjects into willing servants while preserving their powers and combat skills. (After the destruction of Earth we got a look at Myg still under the influence of the mindwipe and spouting pro-Dominator sentiments, as seen in the accompanying artwork by Stuart Immonen.) ATMOS : Another addition to the team during the gap, Atmos appears to have had a quick, unhappy stint through the team’s difficult days. After joining up, it appears Atmos decided he’d like to follow in the footsteps of Dirk / Sun Boy and become a spokesman for the corrupt Earthgov, but the folks at Earthgov weren’t much interested in an unpopular, egotistical front man when they already had the very effective ex-Legionnaire Sun Boy handling public-relations duties. Earthgov instead recommends Atmos be added to the collection of experimental subjects in the Dominators’ chambers. His ultimate fate is to be used as a test of the Dominators’ BION creation that possessed all the powers of the Legionnaires, and poor Atmos was quickly disposed of by the the massively powered construct. CRYSTAL KID :  This former Academy member, with the civilian name of Bobb Kohan, was apparently named prior to our time on the book after then-editor Bob Kahan (who ended up doing the letters pages for The Hecker). I’d forgotten that Crystal Kid was among the members during the five-year gap, which puts an interesting spin on the lack of interest both Legions had in his services after he emerged from the chambers at the end of the Terra Mosaic. Our entry here describes his initial evaluation by Duo Damsel when Bobb is just 13, and he’s described as spirited and undisciplined. Next is a note from Timber Wolf as they started trying to recruit Crystal Kid during the five-year gap, finding him largely dispirited by the dark events of the five-year gap.  Then a cold, brief account of how Bobb was arrested for publishing and circulating an anti-Earthgov newsletter called The Hope. He’s sent to a work farm in Ossining, N.Y., where Earthgov raised no objection when Crystal Kid is seized and shipped off to the underground chambers for genetic experimentation. It’s a quick entry that only hints at the somewhat comic-relief personality we gave him as a boastful, presumptuous flake who was probably an OK hero but not avidly sought by either team at a time when the stakes were high and the dangers severe. REFLECTO : Another real indulgence on our part, we added Reflecto largely because it was so tempting to salvage a little bit out of the oddball, confusing Reflecto Saga from the early 1980s. Very early on we put a “real” Reflecto into our Ultra Boy story in Legion Annual #1, so at last there could be a satisfying explanation for the statue in the Adult Legion’s lineup of deceased heroes after the Reflecto Saga attempted to supply an answer that (due largely to that story being bounced between multiple writers) ended up with answers that didn’t really make sense.  So our story showed that when the muddled mind of Jo disguised himself as a Reflecto character during the Reflecto Saga, his subconscious was harkening back to a hero he likely idolized in his pre-super-powered days on Rimbor. And we then took the opportunity to add that hero to the membership during the Five-Year Gap so Reflecto could actually be killed in action as a Legionnaire by the Molecule Master.  So we’re no longer beholden to a story where Jo’s muddled mind creates a new and very specific hero and uniform out of whole cloth, briefly appears to have possibly died in that guise, motivating the Legion to quickly erect a statue to honor this possibly dead hero, which they never take down even though they quickly learn that the hero is neither dead nor the hero they thought he was. Now we have a story where it makes some sense that Jo would take on the Reflecto guise and also makes sense that the Adult Legion would have had a statue to honor an existing hero who really died while being an actual Legionnaire. The solution isn’t rock-solid – the Legionnaires during the Reflecto saga would have recognized the disguised Jo as an established hero, rather than a mysterious new hero – but I personally feel like this was a painless and pretty cool way to smooth out a pretty rough edge to Legion lore. His civilian name Stig Ah is an in-joke with our friend John Moore, whom we knew well in his high school and college days when he was a member of X-Apa and lived a few miles from us in Huntington Beach, Calif. (he’s the John Francis Moore who was assistant story editor and a writer on the 1990 “Flash” CBS series and also wrote comics for many years, mostly at Marvel). John and I shared an enthusiasm for Eric Idol’s Beatles-spoof movie about the Rutles (“All You Need Is Cash”), and in that movie’s spoof version of “I Am the Walrus” there’s a nonsense backwards voice that says something that starts with the phrase “Stig Ah…” John told us he and a friend formed a mock “secret society” called the “Stig Ah Society.” For whatever reason, that phrase stuck with me and seemed like a Rimborian name (similar to “Jo Nah”) and so I gave it to our Reflecto. The Sourcebook gives you Reflecto’s origin from a “Heroes of Rimbor” children’s book and we learn he got his power in a way similar to Devlin O’Ryan’s origin – being immersed during a powersphere accident by the kind of “null radiation” that washed over Devlin when the Metropolis powersphere was detonated. The account includes some requisite right-wing Rimborian ideology about the importance of freedom but quickly adding the need for personal responsibility that this freedom requires (in other words “freedom” that forces you to do what the most powerful in the society thinks you should do). It also hints at anti-government rhetoric by stating that Reflecto joined the Legion to fight “the immoral and illegal tyranny of the Earth government.” We also learn that the Molecule Master killed Stig the same way he attacked the Legion in MM’s original appearance in S/LSH #201 – releasing a slow-acting gas that went unnoticed and undefended until it had done its work. One could argue that Reflecto’s attack-reflecting power should have repelled this threat, but for purposes of killing Reflecto off, we came up with this weakness to his power, one that presumably Devlin would have been saddled with if he’d stayed around long enough. And that’s probably not a bad thing, it likely would have been useful to have established some sort of “Kryptonite” to keep both heroes from being too powerful. (One possibility is that the “reflective” power would strangle the hero if it prevented something like Molecule Master’s poison to be inhaled, so the power necessarily “shuts off” in that case to save the hero was suffocation.)