The Legion's Supporting Cast

Here's another discussion motivated by a "Topic of the Mailing" in Apa-LSH... It seems so appropriate for the supporting cast of the Legion to compound the group’s greatest “flaw” in the eyes of its detractors, as well as its greatest quality in the eyes of its fans – its huge cast of characters. There’s no other mainstream super-hero concept that has so many heroes and I doubt there’s any that has so many important supporting characters. To those who think comic-book concepts ought to follow a set of neatly defined rules of good dramatic storytelling – especially that every character you introduce should have a specific dramatic purpose in the story -- the Legion's cast of dozens of heroes must be intolerable. So I can only relish the indignation such critics feel when the Legion piles on top of its crazy overabundance of heroes the Substitute-Heroes, the Academy members, the Heroes of Lallor, the Wanderers, rejected applicants, the Science Police, the families and relatives of the heroes, U.P. officials, media figures, etc., etc. (and we haven’t even mentioned the 31 st Century’s rogues gallery). In our time, we were lucky to have a lot of resources that kept us aware of established supporting cast members, so, as with villains and planets, we did very little ourselves in terms of making up new supporting cast and largely brought back characters from the past. It’s hard to remember all the minor characters we brought back to insert here and there, but among them were U.P. Chairman Relnick, Vice Chairwoman Jeryl, King Jonn from Pasnic, Antennae Boy as a newscaster (and I think we also used established newscaster Marella Tao), and I believe there were obscure text-page references to an antagonistic politician named Chang and Officer Dvron. I think spoiled rich kid / rejected applicant Lester Spiffany was featured in an unpublished story. Now that I think about it, though, we actually did create a ton of original supporting cast, since there were some original media figures we created and based on various friends and even some of my Variety colleagues (the dueling critics reviewing “Tenzil for the Defense” on a text page were, I think, named after my friends who were critics at Variety). I think there was a newscaster called something like Bek Spence, who was named for Spencer Beck, who at that time represented Curt Swan and who continues to be very active in the businsess (emceeing the August 2016 roast of Keith Giffen at the Connecticut TerrifiCon). The newscaster Cefn Gould was a combination of former Interlac member Cefn Ridout and current Interlac member Kevin Gould (to our surprise, an artist made our Cefn female while the two saluted fan / friends were male). And of course, we named maybe dozens of characters in the Dominator chambers after various fans / friends – we really weren’t trying to be cute and inside-y, we were just given the tough task of filling those panels with a bunch of instantly created identities on a tight deadline and pulled ideas out of whatever source of inspiration we could find. Our hope was that most readers wouldn’t think “They must be just running down a list of their friends,” but rather getting a feeling of authenticity and realistic randomness / variety that might have made those lists seem as if they came from an actual reality rather than being clearly fictitious and / or in-jokey. And we'll close with some action involving a few of the SW6 Chamber subjects when they were being transported later on in the storyline...