THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES:

The Legion of Super-Heroes is one of the oldest super-teams in all of comics, and one of its most original ideas. Which is kind of funny, because it was dealt with very off-handedly at first in your typical Superboy adventure. Superboy at the time was basically “The Adventures of Superman when he was a boy!”, and the Legionnaires introduced were just the original three- Saturn Girl (a telepath), Cosmic Boy (a magnetic-powered hero) & Lightning Lad (… guess). Together, they played some pranks on Superboy (ie. Superdickery), but then invited him to join their special club- a future-based group for teenage super-heroes. This was 1958, and the team soon became a popular recurring feature- eventually getting their own book (the main feature of Adventure Comics as of 1962), only four years after their debut!

Dozens of new members were created, some becoming extremely important to the series: Brainiac-5 (a descendent of Brainiac, but a good guy. And a dick), Colossal Boy & Shrinking Violet (size-changers), Star Boy (gravity), Shadow Lass (nudity), Phantom Girl (intangibility), Karate Kid (super martial arts- and yes he predates the movies by a ways), Timber Wolf (proto-Wolverine), and more. Supergirl was soon added to the adventures, as were “Superboy” characters like Mon-El & Ultra Boy, both of whom shared powers with the Boy of Steel.

The goofy Silver Age antics of the team soon began being written by a young (13 years old!) Jim Shooter, who added all sorts of new cast members (as in, A LOT), Silver Age touches, and even a character death (among the first in the industry for a recurring characters, especially a hero)! We’d meet characters like The Fatal Five (a band of super-powerful villains), deal with the mystic Mordru several times, and more. Soon, a Legion of Substitute Heroes (people with powers lamer than Eating Stuff) formed, and a new era came about in the 1970s. Dave Cockrum added his costume designs to the book (he would later co-create most of the All-New X-Men, and riff on his Legionnaire stuff with The Shi’ar Imperial Guard), and Mike Grell would turn them all into strippers (women AND men!).

Throughout their history, the team was extremely inventive, doing some of what would become Standard Comic Book Tropes first- Killed Off For Real (ie. permanently killing a main character instead of just doing a “last minute resurrection”), Fantastic Racism (ie. “Star Trek” style racism allegories that would comment on modern-day actual racism), and the Soap Opera-type stuff that would soon become industry standard. Lightning Lad & Saturn Girl were married in 1978, Karate Kid got his own book for 15 issues, and Superboy eventually faded from the book as DC got away from using that concept. By the 1980s, the Paul Levitz/Keith Giffen-run Legion would become one of the most popular books in the industry, sharing top honors with The New Teen Titans and The Uncanny X-Men. Their run had a huge big event- The Great Darkness Saga, still generally considered to be the finest tale of the series.

Levitz, a very solid writer, proved capable of balancing plotlines- he would use a huge diagram that indicated where certain plot threads reached their peak, but also where other plot threads would be picked up, thus no “big event” would happen without the next events being set up at the same time- this meant his book had very few “down periods”- this lack of cyclical storytelling, along with his large cast, kept the book exciting. He had his favorites, though- in the 4-5 TPBs I have of this era, Ultra Boy scarcely features at all, Colossal Boy might as well not exist, and Phantom Girl & Shadow Lass are basically hangers-on to their more powerful boyfriends- by contrast, it’s basically a love-fest for Brainiac-5, Mon-El and a few others.

Keith Giffen’s art style went through a weird shift- going from “George Perez Lite” (which was still VERY GOOD, mind you), to a weird, comedic “rubber people” style that I absolutely think looks like shit, then and now. But the series was still going strong, when…

The Crisis on Infinite Earths/Reboot:
Only in comics could the one event designed to fix all the weird continuity stuff end up creating an exponential number of problems. It was frankly just a huge amount of poor planning, and many characters and concepts suffered. See, John Byrne, the new head guy in charge of Superman, freshly poached from Marvel, decided that Superman should have debuted as an adult instead of having adventures as a kid, because he didn’t like the concept of Superboy (because in each story, there was the little fact that he was invulnerable to harm since we all knew he grew up to be Superman). This led to a little problem, in that the Legion was FORMED because of Superboy, and included him on COUNTLESS adventures over time. In Byrne’s defense, he claims to have TOLD the DC editors that he was going to do this, and suggested they either nix his idea or think of a way to fix it- apparently they OK’d it, then panicked months later when they realized the problem. It’s still Byrne, though, so take it with a grain of salt. But knowing how editorial works in the print industry… I have no issue believing this actually happened that way.

So DC soon had a problem, and they solved it with the most insane, weird story ideas possible- a time-travelling enemy trapped them in a Pocket Dimension that JUST HAPPENED TO HAVE a Superboy to inspire them, setting the whole thing off (adding both uber-complexity to a fairly-simple story, and ANOTHER ALTERNATE UNIVERSE to a world that just got finished wiping thousands of them out). They did a “Five Years Later” thing where Earth is ruled by aliens, and it’s considered a very good run, but every time I look at it, I see Keith Giffen’s weird rubbery-looking people and a super-gritty world, neither of which I’m a fan of. Granted, this pre-dates before ALL comics turned out all gritty, but still- it’s not my thing. Nobody’s even wearing friggin’ costumes! And “Superheroes as Freedom Fighters In a Dictatorship” is always a story I find dreadfully bleak and dull- a nasty combination. It’s good for an arc here or there, but not as a STATUS QUO, in my opinion.

Things would get even MORE complicated as things went on- there were awful Retcons (the worst involving Lightning Lad, which was even worse than the Clone Saga reveal- think about THAT), and a younger Legion would soon come out of some cloning jars to try and renew some of the old energy of the young, teen Legion- which is as bad as Clone Saga for the “hit you over the head”-edness of “We need to go back to THE FUN TIMES”. Never mind that LOSH books featured one of the highest body-counts of cast members of any book on the shelf. Giffen’s original idea was for these “SW6” clones to actually be the original Legion, who would have to fight the altered, “adult” Legion, with the deceased being chosen randomly by the writer. Sales dwindled, Giffen left after altering his plans, and in 1995, DC rebooted the entire Legion with Zero Hour an event that I couldn’t even begin to explain to you if I tried- it was before I’d ever read much DC, and the story’d stopped meaning anything even BEFORE I started reading Morrison’s JLA run, which started me on DC.

The new, “Reboot” Era Legion were a group of young teens run by a Federation-style future world government, and mostly ignored the Superboy thing since it was an all-new continuity. They tried to copy a lot of the old Silver Age stories, kind of like Ultimate Marvel would do later, but like Ultimate Marvel, it was very hit-or-miss, and often tried to jump the gun and do things too quickly. Often jokingly called “The Archie Legion” due to how young and big-eyed the cast looked, it did… okay, but was never a particuarly relevant or big book. It has its fans, though- as one of the most light-hearted series of the 1990s, it was probably a breath of fresh air for people tired of the grittiness. The iconic members of the team during this era were XS, Kinetix & Gates, all of whom are still definitive of this era of the book. The series was itself rebooted in 2004 during the build-up to Infinite Crisis.