Causing the Avengers and their ally the Silver Surfer to die, the Grandmaster and the Collector manipulated the newly deceased heroes into battling each other in Death's realm, distracting the embodiment of Death itself long enough for the Grandmaster to imprison her and usurp her power. Years later, the deceased cosmic gamesman known as the Grandmaster conspired with his fellow Elder of the Universe, the Collector, in a plot against the Avengers. Once the battle was over, Immortus restored Iron Man, the Ghost and Zemo, and sent the Legion members back to their proper times, though not before the Vision and the Torch learned to their surprise that the Vision was a reconstructed version of the Torch. Meanwhile, Hawkeye freed Rama-Tut and Immortus, who reduced Zemo to protoplasm. Feeling an instinctive kinship to a fellow artificial being, Frankenstein's Monster and the Torch protected the fallen Vision despite Wonder Man's intense hostility toward the android Avenger, and the inhuman duo soon turned against Kang, whom Thor forced to flee while Vision defeated Wonder Man. As the conflict wore on, the Legion members began to regain more of their free will. During subsequent skirmishes, Iron Man was seemingly slain by the Torch, the Ghost was apparently destroyed while gravely wounding the Vision, and Mantis defeated Midnight. Once the Legion was assembled, Kang betrayed and imprisoned Immortus, transported the Avengers to the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Immortus's castle, and sent the Legion into the tunnels to capture Mantis and kill the rest of the Avengers. Deciding to improve upon this plan by enlisting more powerful troops, Kang used Immortus's time-manipulating technology to enlist an assortment of warriors from past eras, all dead or believed dead: early Avengers foe Baron Zemo, the legendary monster of Frankenstein, the Ghost of the Flying Dutchman, the android Human Torch, martial artist Midnight and one-time Avengers associate Wonder Man (a foe selected to distress the Avengers in general and the Vision in particular, since the android Vision's artificial mind was based on Wonder Man's brain patterns). Forging an anti-Avengers alliance with Immortus (who imprisoned Rama-Tut), Kang recalled how Immortus had once pitted a group of historical figures against the Avengers (though it had actually been Immortus's shape-shifting Space Phantoms replicating those figures). During his quest for the Celestial Madonna (which turned out to be Avengers associate Mantis), Kang fought his own alternate-timeline counterpart Rama-Tut in a battle that hurled them both to the timeless realm of Limbo ruled by Immortus, yet another alternate-timeline counterpart of Kang (though Kang himself did not know this yet). The Legion grew out of the ongoing conflict between the time-spanning Kang the Conqueror and his Avengers foes. This emotional impact was a major factor in Kang's decision to create his Legion of the Unliving, and presumably motivated subsequent Legion creators as well. The one common factor seems to be that Legion members have all been believed dead at one time or another, giving them an edge in terms of psychological warfare (the horror of being attacked by dead men walking). There is even some inconsistency regarding whether all the figures represented in the Legion are actually dead - some of the "dead" beings "raised" for the Legion are later revealed to have never truly died at all. Sometimes they replicate the normal appearance of the deceased other times, they appear as decaying, corpse-like facsimiles of their once-living counterparts. Some of them retain the original personality of the dead warriors, perhaps even some element of free will other Legion members are re-created as soulless killers, or as blindly obedient pawns of their masters, or both. The actual state of the Legion's members is nebulous its ever-shifting roster has included spirits temporarily resurrected from the dead, beings plucked from time periods prior to their deaths, murderous duplicates of the dead, and various combinations of same. The Legion's various organizers - including Kang, Grandmaster, Immortus and the Grim Reaper - usually have some sway over time and space, so the Legion's membership tends to be drawn from a wide array of locations and time periods ranging from the distant past to the far future. The Legion of the Unliving is a recurring association of seemingly deceased warriors conjured by various masters to attack the heroic Avengers. Zombies, ghosts, time-lost souls, evil doppelgangers whatever their true nature, they are legion, they wear the faces of the dead, and they live to kill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |