So I asked for some questions/post suggestions a while back, and in comes customer Sean, trying to kill me:
“I stumbled upon an Instagram post the other day regarding a story from the ’60s where Superman goes to the future and visits the grown up iteration of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
“He walks through a hallway with sculptures of the Legionnaires who have perished in battle–Ferro Lad, Invisible Kid, Chemical King, etc., and Brainiac Five (who is smoking a pipe!), shows Kal , via tele-screen, Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl, who have started a family, at their home. There are also references to Lightning Man and Saturn Woman, Cosmic Man and Night Woman, and Timberwolf and Light Woman as married couples.”
Superman does indeed! This brings to mind the fact that initially, DC was going to make things even more confusing in regard to Legion of Super-Heroes continuity. Superboy, as we all know, would travel 1,000 years into the future to visit his Legion pals and have adventures and punch Validus an’ stuff. However, someone had the idea that Supergirl should also be able to travel to the future and hang out with the Legion.
And as you also know, DC Comics aficionados that you are, Supergirl was introduced into the Superman comics when Superman was…well, a man. Having Supergirl travel into the future and hang out with the same folks that also hang out with her cousin when he was a boy and hadn’t yet met her…well, you see the problem here.
The solution was, of course, not to have Supergirl travel into the future and meet the Legion. But instead of doing that rational course of action, she went to the future anyway. Like, just a little bit further into the future (or maybe less, given the relative starting points of Superboy initiating time travel from an earlier point in the timestream than Supergirl, but perhaps I digress) to meet…the children of the original Legion of Super-Heroes!
This is in Superman #267, from 1960, and obviously this solved all the continuity issues and…nah, just kidding, someone clearly decided “this is insane” and the Legion Kids just kinda went away. And if Supergirl met Superboy during some Legion adventure, there was just some kinda memory-adjusting hand-waving so that Superboy wouldn’t remember certain details about his trips to the future. There’s probably a citation for this somewhere in one of the comics somewhere, but I’ve already done enough research for this post.
But let’s get back to Sean’s invoking of that Superman Meets the Adult Legion story, which takes place in Adventure Comics #354 and #355 in 1967, the first issue of which is pictured here:
An interesting note about that cover: for the panels ‘n’ such I’m presenting here, I’m generally capturing them from DC Comics’ digital comics service, to save the wear and tear on my Legion of Super-Heroes Archives hardcovers from flattening ’em out on my scanner to get a good image. However, the cover for this issue that they have on this service has “Shadow Woman” colored blue, to match the famously azure Shadow Lass from the non-adult Legion. I pulled the above image from an eBay auction, which shows how the cover was originally colored. (And I should note, the cover is colored correctly in the Legion Archives.)
Speaking of those panels, here are a couple demonstrating what Sean was talking about, with Superman wandering through the memorial wing here:
…followed by the Hall of Hookin’ Up, with, I guess, the 30th-century equivalent of wedding pictures:
Now, I get what DC was trying to do here…they wanted Superman to have his own adventures with the Legion, but not in a way that would result in, say, meeting his younger self during one of his adventures with the Legion. So, like they tried to do with Supergirl by giving her a distinct Legion team of her own to visit, they were attempting to give Superman his own distinct team. Basically, the same team, but older. The “Adult Legion” made a handful of appearances, but again, someone decided that having two versions of the same team like this was too convoluted, so the idea was phased out.
However, the army of Legion fans did not forget, and the specter of this glimpse into the future weighed heavily over Shadow Lass, when she first appeared a few months later in Adventure Comics #365. The fact that she had blue skin when the “Shadow Woman” statue had Caucasian skin tones didn’t seem to matter much. It was presumed that her fate was maybe kinda sorta sealed.
You know who didn’t like the Adult Legion stories? Paul Levitz, the guy who would spend much of the ’80s writing the Legion, that’s who. When it came time to write Legion of Super-Heroes #300, the extra-sized anniversary issue, he decided to devote a portion of the story nodding towards the predictions made by that old Adult Legion story. (Also part of the issue was devoted to this.)
Even down to Shadow Lass putting on pink make-up and calling herself “Shadow Woman.”
This was Leviiz’s explicit thumbing of the nose at the Adult Legion stories being the “official” future of the Legion, as Shadow Lass does indeed save the Science Asteroid, and does not die. And that, as they say, is that. ‘Til we get to the whole “Five Years Later” thing, which is Adult Legion x1000, frankly.
Oh, and I forgot to show you Smoking Brainy, in his, I’m pretty sure, one appearance:
…smoking that soup ladle, or whatever the hell that is.
So all that actually answered a few of Sean’s other questions about the Adult Legion, except
“Have Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl’s offspring ever been mentioned or featured in stories again?”
…and I’m going to say “no,” I don’t feel like they popped up again, but I’ve not read all these stories in forever. They do have a kid in one of the many rebooted versions of the Legion, according to my Googling, but I don’t think it’s meant to be the same as what you see in the Adult Legion.
“Instead of constantly rebooting the Legion, why doesn’t DC Comics try an approach where the offspring of the original classic Silver/Bronze Age Legion (1958 – 1994) form a legacy Legion team? Clearly at least Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, and Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl did have/will have offspring at some point. So, we can assume other Legionaries did or will as well. This way new characters could be added more organically, and we could also get new power sets for new Legion recruits who aren’t offspring, but are teenagers.”
Hmmmmmm, they already tried the Legion Kids with Supergirl way back when. I think keeping the Legion as just This One Thing In Space/Time in relation to DC’s other heroes is the best idea, reducing complications and confusion.
“Also, would the offspring of Wildfire and Dawnstar be named ‘Wildstar’ or ‘Dawnfire?'”
Well, “Wildstar” is already taken by Jerry Ordway, so “Dawnfire” is it! Unless that’s taken too.
“What would Blok and White Witch’s offspring be like?”
I don’t know…a big chunk of gypsum, maybe? I’d probably be careful about naming the character after that, though.
Poor Cosmic Man and his receding hairline! You’d think male-pattern baldness would’ve been solved by the 30th Century.
While it’s true to say the Legion never fully recovered from the Crisis, this blog post makes clear that their continuity edifice — bolted together from a decade of sometimes self-contradictory Silver Age tales — was never as solid as it looked, even under the magnificent reign of Levitz & Giffin.