"2995" Sourcebook: Chameleon Boy thru Kid Quantum

Continuing to catch up on the missing comments from the early "Heroes" section of our “2995” Mayfair Sourcebook… REEP DAGGLE / CHAMELON BOY (CONT’D) : Last time I chopped off my recollections in the middle of Reep’s section, so we pick it up with a press release from during the five-year gap announcing Reep’s appointment to the chairmanship of Brande Industries. There are some interesting “between-the-lines” aspects to the press release, including what for me was the surprising avoidance of mentioning that Reep is Brande’s son – these days it had slipped my mind that Brande’s Durlan heritage was never revealed to the general public. There’s also an interesting reference among Cham’s relevant experience his expertise in “information procurement,” a euphemistic reference to his skills at espionage. It was interesting to evaluate this fictitious press release now that I’ve actually worked in P.R. for many years, and I find it less skillful than the in-universe journalism I wrote, which makes sense, since at the time, I was experienced as a reporter but not as a publicist. That said, I was probably not too far off of how press releases were being written in the early 1990s, pretty effectively mimicking what I was seeing in the materials I was receiving in my work as a reporter. The next entry comes from Reep’s journal, when he decides to leave Brande Industries and go out and re-start the Legion. He realizes he’s becoming an obsessive businessman, in his words, “turning into Leland McCauley.” He’s proven to himself that he was capable of taking over his father’s company and building on its success, but he doesn’t want to actually become a businessman. He feels guilt that, while he was saving his father’s first dream, Brande Industries, he stood by and watched Brande’s second dream, the Legion, disband. And now it’s time to do something about it… GIM ALLON / COLOSSAL BOY : Our “Meet the Legionnaires” entry plays up Gim as a regular guy / sports fan, but one wishing for the devotion of an “old-fashioned girl.” We played young Gim as being awkward with and intimidated by girls, and, once he could see his pursuit of Violet was going nowhere, being interested in the possibilities of any girl who showed an interest in him. So the SW6 Gim was receptive to Catspaw’s advances, mis-read Gossamer’s supportive words and was intrigued when the “naughty” Lu flirted with him. (And later in life, he had no hesitation in sticking with Yera after finding out he’d married an impersonator, which luckily and improbably worked out for Gim.) Since he played a very small role in the 5YL Legion, Gim only gets one more entry here, his application for re-admission to the Science Police. Interestingly, we had Gim be the only Legionnaires from the early days who’d stuck with it to the very end of the Legion during the five-year gap, even though he had only shaky control of his powers at that time due to the injuries he suffered in Paul’s Starfinger story. That probably reflects in part Gim being from Earth, giving him less motivation than most of the others to tend to pressing matters on their home worlds or otherwise address the various crises occurring around the galaxy. LYLE NORG / INVISIBLE KID :  Again, a member who played virtually no role in the 5YL run, but was returning with the SW6 wave of kids. His “Meet the Legionnaires” entry is pretty cut-and-dried, reflecting his immersion in science. Asked the goofy fan-magazine question “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?,” Lyle’s answer is a no-nonsense “Some sort of deciduous, I suppose.” And the short section wraps with Chemical King’s eulogy after I-Kid has been killed by Validus. There’s a real under-current here of the relationship Robert Loren Fleming depicted in his brilliant “Secret Origins” Chemical King story, with Condo clearly heart-broken at the loss of his good friend and possible paramour. He describes Lyle as I’ve seen him, quiet, unassertive but as big a contributor to the spirit of the Legion as any of them. JAMES CULLEN / KID QUANTUM : Here’s an entry for an extra member that popped into the Legion’s ranks with the timeline change of  LSH #4-5. I think Kid Quantum happened because Keith had drawn a random unknown hero into a scene featurning the statues of dead heroes, so there was a sense we should address who that was. So with the timeline change, there was no reason we couldn’t add somebody to the history, and editor Michael Eury suggested that it be someone who relied on an artificial power that fatally malfunctioned, leading to the Legion’s prohibition against artificial powers. On a long car trip, Mary and I brainstormed a storyline for Kid Quantum, probably building on some of the loose plot threads out there, including what was going on back during Paul’s run when we saw R.J. Brande mysteriously meeting with Protys. That seems to have led us to the idea of the missing “Soul of Antares,” a creature housing the sentience of the Protean race that was hiding out from Glorith (getting Glorith involved had a purpose – explaining why Kid Quantum existed in this timeline but hadn’t in the previous one). In retrospect, this was a good concept but less than the slam-bang home run that I wish we’d come up with – something a little simpler, easier to explain and compelling. I guess my standard is the strength of our ideas for the timeline change in #4-5 to address the loss of Superboy elements in the legion history, or our Jo-vs.-Glorith explanation for the Brande / Tinya switch in the timeline, or our creation of Valor’s Sentinel Worlds. To me, those ideas were pretty clean, really connected and pretty comfortably wove themselves into the tapestry of Legion lore. To me, our Kid Quantum concept is good, but not on that level. Interesting that he’s another hero from Xanthu, which can also claim Star Boy, Atmos and Devlin O’Ryan (I think there are one or two more Xanthuan from after our run). Nice to have a planet besides Earth, Krypton or Daxam produce a number of Legionnaires. His “Meet the Legionnaires” entry plays up the character we tried to depict in his Legion #33 spotlight, a quasi-messianic figure who was building strategies to advance the galaxy to a state of true peace and prosperity. I think we saw this as in part the wisdom achieved by the Protean who’d inadvertently betrayed his race to Glorith (necessitating the exile of the race’s sentience in the form of Kid Quantum) and was thus sorting through the guilt he felt for endangering his race and was now doing penance by laboring mightily to make the  universe a better place, and in part the profound wisdom encapsulated in a body that holds within it the sentience of an entire race. We get Kid Quantum’s story as a “Protean Oral History,” phrases and blurbs, really a chain of sporadic thoughts, that read like quasi-poetry. It explains that James teamed with Proty I to stage the death of Kid Quantum within the Legion so he could hide from Glorith. Unfortunantely, the half-dozen Protys who’d secretly retained their sentience didn’t know where James was either, so the sentience of the race couldn’t be restored until they tracked down Kid Quantum (finding him was the secret project that was the subject of Brande’s clandestine meetings with those remaining sentient protys). Next we get the Legion report on the “death” of Kid Quantum, which interestingly enough occurs when he’s under attack by a Daxamite being controlled by Glorith, implying that Glorith knew she was closing in on the Soul of Antarres and James realized now was the time to stage a very convincing death that involved his total disintegration. I’m not sure how we envisioned the faked death being pulled off, but I suspect the “James” everyone thought they saw being disintegrated was Proty I impersonating James and then instantly transforming in such a way as to appear to be disintegrated, then hiding within the rubble after the disintegration. We dubbed the site of this battle Mount Schorer after our good friend WAPAn David Schorer, who sadly died a few years ago. I’m glad his name lives on in a little corner of Legion history.