Chameleon Boy / Reep Daggle

Another entry re-purposed from a recent Apa-LSH "Topic of the Mailing" discussion: This Legionnaire (appropriately enough) feels like he's really a number of characters that periodically morph from one to the next. In the early days, he seemed as much as anything to be a quasi-comic relief character, often smiling broadly and sometimes having fun with his transformations. Once he was established as the head of the Legion espionage squad, he started to take on more of a mysterious, cerebral feel, in some depictions being the Legion’s ultimate spy and / or detective. Then they grafted onto him the back story that he’s R.J. Brande’s son and he became the sometimes moody offspring of a colorful business tycoon. During our run of the book, Cham evolved into the successful steward of his father’s sprawling business empire and the spark behind the Legion’s reformation. I hope during our run, we kind of pulled all the facets of the character together into one credible three-dimensional being – capable of the shrewd spy / detective work we’d seen from him in the past, but also somewhat seduced by the wealthy life he’d come to know while running Brande Industries, and also enough of a lighter character that he was one of the consistent targets of Kono’s mischief and a sometimes overmatched sparring partner with Computo. Keith mostly charted the course of the character through the 5YL “Legion” issues, showing Cham seeking out Rokk to get the Legion going again, and then being somewhat more uptight than Rokk about the new group’s need for structure and tradition. Keith established a lot of the Durlan background on a toxic, hateful world that Reep was only too glad to flee. In our retelling of the Legion origin in #8 we touched on Reep’s overall motivation, which was to escape the poisonous bigotry of Durla and work against the spread of similar bigotries in the broader U.P. Ironically for a completely non-human shape-shifter, Cham seemed to really have an eye for the ladies, going back to his early depictions, where he was quite the masher with Supergirl in the “Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires” and an enthusiastic participant in the kissing game in “The Legionnaire Who Killed.” He also went head over heels for Elwinda, the princess from the other dimension, and later fell for her lookalike, while also having an interesting relationship with ambassador Jeryl. We were under specific instructions to avoid anything sexual between he and Computo during the Legionnaires run because of the possible perception that he was having a relationship with an underage woman. We weren’t thinking along the lines of any sparks between them, though we could see how people would anticipate it, given that they were bickering in much the way couples-to-be clash in just about all romantic comedies. And we well might have absent-mindedly had their relationship progress had we not been given instructions otherwise, but in any case, it did strike us as amusing that these were considered iron-clad restrictions for a completely alien lifeform whose life cycle might have nothing to do with a human’s. I’ve never done the math to figure out exactly how old Computo may have been – I certainly thought of her as being at least 16, probably a little older. (Okay, I just checked our “2995” Sourcebook, and the Legionnaires team was formed a little less than 12 years after the story where we meet Danielle [and Jacques gets his power], so if Danielle is 6 in that story, she’d be 18 or close to it by the time the Legionnaires team forms. In any case, until Reep runs for the Senate in the state of Alabama, he’s better off avoiding any relationship with the younger Legionnaires. As I’ve written before, we drifted away from what Keith established in one of our earlier issues – that Durlan’s shift around their vital organs to protect them from harm. After that issue, as Mary and I started to try and figure out how the Durlan power could logically work (especially in our sourcebook entries), this idea of Keith’s made less and less sense.  First, evolution has already put our vital organs in the most protected places, so, other than to trick assassins into shooting at the wrong part of your body, shifting around your organs would expose them to more danger rather than less. Secondly, it’s hard to accept a traditional human-like set of organs for a being able to instantly transform into anything from a futon to a housefly. Our sourcebook entry essentially describes Durlans as being much like Protys – creatures of undifferentiated material, any segment of which can sustain itself and morph into whatever shape or function is needed for that particular disguise.