legion of super-heroes

Or maybe “Feldspar.”

filed under Categories legion of super-heroes 31 Comments

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 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.

And by the way, this month marks my 38th year in comics retail.

filed under Categories archie, doom patrol, legion of super-heroes, this week's comics 14 Comments


Well, we’re trying this again. Legion really should be one of those titles that’s always there, like Superman or Green Lantern, a significant corner of DC Comics’ fictional universe that remains always out there as part of the gestalt. However, due to reboot after revival after relaunch, the franchise has been on the ropes for years, never quite getting traction. It kinda came close the last time, a few years back with the highly-promoted Brian Michael Bendis series, but that ended after only about a year for reasons I don’t really know. It seemed to be selling well enough.

But here we are, seventh or eighth time is the charm, and…look, it’s a perfectly fine comic. Well written, certainly well drawn, and for us old Legion nerds, the Interlac alphabet is still intact and readable (with a nice Interlac-written nod to Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen right there in the beginning). The idea this time is that superheroes are outlawed in this version of the future, reminiscent of the Threeboot Legion‘s premise, and the familiar central characters of the team (Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Brainiac 5, along with Matter-Eater Lad) find themselves bumping up against that societal ban. It’s all told nicely with interesting page layouts, looking not quite like anything else on the stands.

What made the Legion “The Legion” for so many years were the longstanding subplots and characterizations and soap opera aspects and such. It’s a hard thing to build from scratch, as a Legion without all that doesn’t feel right, but jumping right into a Legion with those aspects already in place feels overwhelming. It’s a real tough needle to thread, and I’m not sure this new series is going to manage it, but I’m willing to give it a try and see how it does.


So we’re getting a series of one-shots for this comic book revival of Clive Barker’s horror franchise. Not sure if it’s in continuity with the previous series Boom! published, or how Barker’s novel The Scarlet Gospels fits in (since that pretty much put the kibosh on the whole “Cenobites” thing). And don’t even get me started on where that Sherlock Holmes/Hellraiser crossover novel fits in.

This is the first in a series of one-shots (and I’ve already read the second one, due to my evil retailer powers) setting up the current status quo for the Cenobites while also following the stories of those individuals who happen to get their hands on one of those Puzzle Boxes. It’s all gross and bloody and folks getting what’s coming to them, as you’d expect, but I am curious as to what the overall story is going to shape up into being.


So I hemmed and I hawed about picking up this latest revamping of the Archie franchise…I really liked the one they did a few years ago, with Waid and North an’ all them, and was a little sorry to see that effort wrap up. I think I finally convinced myself to give this one a try because, well, I’m a longtime Archie fan and my curiosity won out. Plus, I couldn’t resist that specific variant cover that’s pictured above.

It’s perfectly fine…unlike that previous reboot, which was a little more “soap opera (there’s that term again!) with jokes,” this new Archie #1 is more like a typical Archie comic, with several gag-filled stories. Not every joke lands, and I feel like the characters’ likenesses could be tightened up a bit…Archie and Jughead are recognizable, but others, like Reggie, Betty and Veronica don’t have distinctive enough portrayals to really grab you. Overall, it’s still enjoyable, with a Jughead story having a surprising amount of emotional depth to it that makes me want to see where it goes in the next issue. So, yeah, I guess Archie has got its hooks in me yet again.

I did almost pick up the Local Comic Shop Day variant, because c’mon, just look at it:


Anyway, this new Archie went really overboard on the variant covers, and I didn’t even order all of them for the shop. There were literally more variants than the number of issues I expect to sell of this thing. I mean, guys, you gotta settle down with these. Yes, I’m aware of the irony that it was one of those variants that factored into my decision to try out this new series.


I don’t know why we have to kinda relaunch the Doom Patrol again, when that previous Doom Patrol mini wasn’t that long ago and was perfectly fine. A continuation of that would’ve been fine. But this new attempt is good, too….Robotman, Negative Man, Elasti-Girl, the Chief, hail hail the gang’s all here and they’re doing what you want and being weird about it. Kinda the Platonic idea of what this comic should be.


It’s silly nonsense, but it’s good silly nonsense, and if it were anything else, you’d be disappointed. Which isn’t to say there’s not an affecting message central to the book. Anyway, it’ll put a smile on your face, which is Weird Al’s purpose in this fallen world.

A legion of comics.

filed under Categories legion of super-heroes, question time 17 Comments

DavidG asks what he probably thought would be an easy question for me to answer

“There’s now about eleventy million versions of the Legion. My list of them in order of appearance below, yours may vary. How would you rank them and why?

“OG
Five years later/no Superboy
Archie legion
Threeboot
Retro boot
Bendis boot”

Now I gotta be honest, it too me a second to puzzle out what eras a couple of those were referencing. For example, I’d never heard the term “Archie Legion” before…shockingly, as it turns out, when I looked it up and it seems to be in common usage in referring to this particular era. More on that when I get to it.

Anyway, I’m going to address these general eras in order, staring with the “OG,” which of course stands for “Original Garth Ranzz:”


This is The Big One, the longest last incarnation of the Legion (continuing on into the next era, more on that in a moment), starting in Adventure Comics in 1958 and running straight through ’til Legion of Super-Heroes Volume…Three, I’m pretty sure, in 1989. (Again, doesn’t exactly end here, which I’ll address.)

Over this period of time we had a natural growth of the team, as members came on, dropped out, even died, with subplots and soap opera-esque elements keeping the readers involved and interested in the relationships of their favorite characters. This was a storytelling strategy that would work so well in later team books such as X-Men and New Teen Titans, and I think we can thank Teen Jim Shooter for coming aboard and showing the grown-ups how its done.

And it certainly worked on me…I really enjoyed the variety of characters and their interactions and the occasionally oddball stuff they all got up to, particularly in the Silver Age era. I’ve noted before I started reading Legion in the early ’80s, and worked my way backwards through back issue purchases and, later, the Archive editions, and still get a kick out of these comics to this day.

This was the era of the Legion that worked the best, I think, with its established history and long-standing relationships and plots and such. I wrote quite a bit about it before in response to a question from…hmmm, looks like a certain Mr. DavidG. Interesting.

Now, DavidG, you just asked me to rank these, really, and here I am just typing my little fingers off about this series and, well, probably every other Legion series on this list, too. But if I were to rank it, this Legion, the Original Stuff, is my favorite Legion.

And now here’s the “Five Years Later Legion:


…and I wrote about this at length some time ago, as did blogging brother Andrew. As such, I won’t go overboard writing about this era, running from ’89 to ’94 (ironically, about five years), but to say this is not an entirely separate incarnation of the Legion, but rather an extension of the original material. As implied by the “Five Years Later,” Legion continuity jumps ahead five years, everything is different, things are a mess, not everything is explicitly explained to you, so this ain’t a comic you can scan through in six minutes and say you’ve read it. You gotta sit down with it and absorb that story.

The storytelling and setting eventually…normalizes, so it’s easier to follow, but things get more complicated when a younger, more innocent version of the Legion shows up. A spin-off title, Legionnaires, is added to accommodate the extra characters, but eventually it all ends up getting rebooted by DC’s Zero Hour crossover event.

As far as ranking goes…I will say that I really did find this series a fascinating read at first, reading and rereading each new issue as it came out, and being rewarded for the effort. And I was caught up in the mystery of the young Legionnaires, though I wish that had resolved differently than it did. Still, this is a solid #2 in my Legion ranking.

That Zero Hour reboot brought us to this:


…the first actual complete fresh start for the Legion. Everything that had gone on before? Forget it, this is All New! And it was also…pretty good. This is the version of the Legion where Princess Projectra was a giant snake person, which seems to stick out in folks’ minds. Interestingly, this new reboot of the Legion did not cause the cancellation and relaunching, with new #1s, of the two ongoing Legion titles. There were #0 issues introducing the new status quo, then just jumped back into the series’ normal numbering and continued on. A rare show of restraint, I thought.

Oh, right, and this is the “Archie Legion” series, so called because the characters were so young, some of the art reminded folks of Archie character designs, and Jughead joined up as “Hamburger Lad.” One of those may not be true.

This was also the era that had the relatively dark, but effective, Legion Lost mini-series, where members of the team were trapped in unknown space dealing with new threats (and maybe a familiar one). I quite liked that series.

Okay, ranking, ranking…we’ll just call this #3 of my favorite Legion runs, but honestly the space between #2 and #3 is very, very small.

And now, the THREEBOOT:


…because, you know, this is technically the third full reboot of the Legion. Started in 2004, ended in 2009. Repurposes the team as working under, and against, an oppressive society that disapproves of their shenanigans. An interesting note about the series is that it temporarily changes its name to Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes when she comes to the future to join the group.

Also I should point out that Jim Shooter, writer from the original Legions, comes back to write the last dozen or so issues of this series. However, the final issue, #50, is credited to a pseudonym and I’ve never bothered to read it. I have it in a box somewhere should I ever decide to do so, but that seems increasingly unlikely.

How to rank it? It’s a brief-ish run, though not as brief as other Legion runs to come. It is good, though, and I like that it’s a shorter standalone read, even if the whole thing ends on a slightly sour note. (Or maybe it’s great…like I said, I hadn’t read that issue.) If I had to rank it, I’d put it maybe at #3.5, which is maybe cheating a little. This was a solid attempt at trying to do something a little different with the Legion while still honoring the stories that had come before. Shame it didn’t last longer.

Now, it’s about this point that I decided I was done with Legion (save for the classic reprints) for the time being. So I wasn’t reading DC’s next attempt at making the Legion work, the “retroboot:”


I realize that New 52 cover is jumping ahead a bit. This version of the Legion began in the “post-Infinite Crisis” era around 2007, first appearing in Justice League of America and Justice Society of America, then in other books before getting their own title. The “Retroboot” team is a return, more or less, to the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity of the Legion books from the original era. It’s not exactly 1:1, but close enough, I guess.

Somewhere in here the Final Crisis tie-in Legion of 3 Worlds shows up, teaming up all the reboots of the Legion into one big adventure, and trying to establish which Legion is the main continuity Legion now. (Spoiler: it’s this one, the post-Infinite Crisis one.)

This is the same Legion that makes it through the New 52 relaunch relatively unscathed, and even gets an additional title, Legion Lost. However, this era still comes to an end around 2015.

I can’t rank this, since I didn’t read any of these (except the Legion of 3 Worlds, and I barely remember that (outside of the George Pérez art). All I can say was that my interest in Legion had been diminished by the multiple reboots and didn’t feel like diving back into yet another attempt at this point. That’s not to say I *didn’t* like the reboots, but I certainly didn’t like getting invested in a series only to have it go away and be given yet another restart.

And then, here we are, the last on DavidG’s list, the Brian Michael Bendis scripted reboot from 2019:


By this point I’d been out of current Legion books for about a decade, so I was willing to give this new version a try. I did like the two-issue intro mini-series (Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium) where we follow an immortal character into the time of he Legion. But the new Legion series itself…the art by Ryan Sook was nice, but the story definitely felt like we were pushed into the deep end of the pool in regards to the setting and the number of characters. Using Superboy as the reader-viewpoint character should have been a natural “in” to everything, but in execution it all still felt cluttered and convoluted.

Most shocking was after the promotion and big build-up, this new series only got 12 issues (plus a two-issue “Future State” tie-in, among other appearances). I’d put this run at #4 on my list…I wanted to like it, I gave it a chance, but I don’t know if the sales were there or what but it felt like DC didn’t give it much of a chance. Could it have improved given more time? Sure. But what we got wasn’t enough and it wasn’t great, art aside.

I know I didn’t discuss every single appearance and iteration of the Legion here…I mean, there’s the Doomsday Clock tie-in, there’s the stuff going on right now in the Superman books, that sort of thing. Not sure what the future (cough) holds for the Legion, whether we have yet another new attempt at a series sooner rather than later. Will it be Absolute Legion of Super-Heroes? Might be one of the few ways to get it to sell for sure at this point.

Spoilers for Great Darkness Saga, Planet of the Apes (1968), X-Men/Teen Titans, and, I don’t know, Sixth Sense, maybe?

filed under Categories collecting, legion of super-heroes 20 Comments


So with the acquisition of the above book, Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga Deluxe Hardcover, my collection of DC’s chronological reprints of these comics starting with the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives Volume 1 back in 1991 has now reached the issues I started with in the early ’80s.

Now this book is the “2025 Edition,” and apparently a version of this book had been available several years before, in both trade and hardcover, if I’m understanding Diamond’s back catalog correctly. The issues contained within pick up from where the Before the Darkness hardcovers of a couple of years ago left off, with issue #284 through #296 plus Annual #1. It also includes a gatefold reproduction of Keith Giffen’s amazing 1983 poster featuring every Legion character, complete with a guide as to who is whom.

This is not to be confused with the other Great Darkness Saga reprint volume, which looks like this:


…which, just to confused matters, also has been rereleased in a new edition with that same cover. This version reprints #287, #290 through #294 and Annual #3. As opposed to the chronologically-reprinted Deluxe Hardcover up there, this other book is intended to be Darkseid/Great Darkness-specific, including the follow-up in that third annual.

Speaking of Darkseid, one of the bits of business about the Great Darkness Saga when it originally ran in 1982 was that is was supposed to be a surprise when the Big Bad Guy, ol’ Craggy Face himself, finally shows up. After Kirby’s Fourth World reached its end, more or less, in the ’70s, Darkseid maybe popped up here and there but was mostly unused. “The Great Darkness Saga” put him back on the map as an imposing villain (along with a certain intercompany crossover the same year that also used him in an impressive fashion).

Given the fact that Darkseid’s appearance was a surprise, it’s a little amusing that his big ol’ noggin is prominently featured on these covers. It’d be like putting the Statue of Liberty on the Planet of the Apes movie poster (which I’m sure must have been done at some point). I realize the surprises for these have long since filtered into public consciousness (maybe more so the Lady Liberty thing than the Darkseid thing) and possibly no harm is done in putting a spoiler just right up front like that. However, there are people who come to these with fresh eyes and I feel bad there’s little to no chance of them enjoying the surprise as it comes, versus having it staring in the faces of those out to experience these stories for the first time.

The next Legion reprint hardcover comes out in May, but that one is entirely issues I read and own. I may still get it out of completeness because, y’know, I’m a comic collector an’ all.

Oh, and also, Bruce Willis’s character is a ghost. Look, I told you up there in the title of this post there’d be spoilers, don’t get mad at me.

A legion of reboots.

filed under Categories legion of super-heroes 37 Comments

So remember my post from last week about how I kinda lost my involvement in, my connection with, Swamp Thing post the New 52 relaunch? You folks had a lot to say in the comments, mostly along the lines of “Mike, I feel your pain, but with the Legion of Super-Heroes.”

Hey, I hear ya. I wrote at length about this…egads, was it really five years ago? Well, here we are Five Years Later (wink wink, nudge nudge) with one more Legion reboot come and apparently gone, so things haven’t changed. I suppose this newest iteration of Legion can still pop up…given that Superman’s son Jon is a member, and is about to be the focus of the Super-books for a while (where the solicitations reference the team), I’d say there’s a good chance the Legion will show up there.

Now in that post I linked, I talked about how I finally stopped reading new Legion comics after years of enjoying them. That recent Legion reboot I did read, as writer Brian Michael Bendis had been doing a good job on the Superman books, I thought, and was interested to see what he’d do with our favorite 31st century super-teen team. I don’t know if DC has given up on this version, but the big relaunch for the book fizzling out after a year doesn’t inspire confidence. Frankly, at this point it just accelerates the countdown to the next attempt at getting the Legion to stick to the wall.

Anyway, I went into extensive detail on all this back then . And pal Andrew had my back with his own analysis of the Legion’s decline.

To reemphasize…there was a lot of Good Work being done in the comics, despite editorially-designated changes to the franchise. In fact, just earlier this year I was writing about how I enjoyed the Five Years Later era, which granted was more of a soft reboot. But in the 2016 post I wrote about how I enjoyed the Zero Hour reboot version as well. And the Legions that happened after that.

It’s just…having multiple mostly-contradictory takes on the Legion, a group where a large part of the appeal was its lengthy history and established personalities, was just too much. You want to invest in the characters, even if you have to follow them from series to series, but with each reboot essentially telling you “forget everything you knew!” that appeal is completely undermined.

On the Twitters, blogging colleague and noted Legion Lover Johanna Draper Carlson said to me in regards to Legion’s restarts

“I’m not sure the ever-more-complicated soap opera history was a successful path forward, either.”

…and she has a point. I feel like there should be a way to give folks a fresh start on a franchise like this, and tell new stories, without necessarily undoing or contradicting what had gone before. But it apparently required (or DC Editorial thought it required) a new #1 and a completely fresh slate every time the comic was attempted, in the hopes to get new readers on board. And like many of the reboots and new #1s that have flooded the stands over the last decade or so…sometimes it worked for a while. But just for a while.

As I’ve said again and again, there was a lot of work to be found in these reboots. Both in Legion and in the New 52-and-later Swamp Things. It’s just that the connection wasn’t there…too much was changed, sometimes downright arbitrarily, from What Had Gone Before. When the Byrne-reboot Superman came on the scene, folks reacted with “this isn’t the real Superman,” but eventually, through an at least halfway chain on continuity, and just fact few people reading Superman in ’86 are still reading now, that Superman is the “real” Superman. So much so that the New 52 one felt like a fake, and it was a relief when the “original” post-Byrne one came back to replace him.

That’s kind of how I feel about Swamp Thing and the Legion. Maybe I’ve been enjoying their stories of late, but that deep, dark part of my fanboy mind stills asks “when will the real ones come back?”

Honestly, it’s harder to type “5YL” than it is just to type out “Five Years Later.”

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, legion of super-heroes 8 Comments

So anyway, I’d meant to have a post up Wednesday, and then tried to have it up for Thursday, and in fact I actually had most of it written on Wednesday, but I was just too tired to put finishing touches on it and I wasn’t able to tell through my sleepiness if it all made sense or not. Thus, a rare moment of “quality control” on this site. No need to thank me.

I’ll probably revise and post what was completed at some point so all that “hard” “work” doesn’t go to waste. But in the meantime, let’s talk about Five Years Later Legion of Super-Heroes.

Longtime reader Wayne brought it up in his comment (responding to my post where I mentioned I was going through that latest volume of Legion reprints), and y’all continued the discussion on the pros and cons of that revision to our favorite 30th century heroes.

Wayne asks of the Five Year Later (or 5YL, as I think it was popularly known by) storyline “anyone else remember that run?” and boy howdy sure I do. I…probably implied a reference to it here in this overall post about the Legion of Super-Heroes Vs. Rebootery, in that it was one of many attempts at revitalizing/restarting the Legion in order to expand the audience beyond the readers who would buy Legion comics regardless. 5YL was not a reboot as such, but a rejiggering of the concept designed to shake things up, re-engage readers, and also try to clean up a continuity glitch or three, while technically maintaining a continuity of character and plot developments started so many decades ago in the Legion’s first appearance in Adventure #247.

If you’re not familiar, and in case you haven’t guessed from me repeatedly using “5YL,” with the new first issue in 1989, the Legion storyline jumps ahead five years to a universe where the Legion is scattered, everything’s in turmoil, all the characters call each other by their first names instead of their codenames, and there are mysteries within intrigues within conspiracies, all told in a deliberately obfuscatory manner.

But, y’know, is it any good?

It feels silly to write out anything about this stretch of Legion when pal Andrew knocked it out of the moopsball ring with this analysis. Just kinda picture me nodding my head next to pretty much every sentence in that essay. In short, this phase of the Legion devoted a lot of time to tearing up the scripts and smashing the scenery of What Had Come Before, a propcess that eventually brought us to the point of, as Andrew says, requiring the start-from-scratch afforded by a reboot.

“Yes, yes, Mike, but is it good?”

I started reading the Legion in the early ’80s, so I came to it a little later than the “Long Live the Legion”/APA-type fans who arose out of ’60s and ’70s fandom who opined on Legion goings-on in fanzines and whatnot. Legion was noted for its loyal fanbase, surely inspired (in part if not in whole) by the soap opera aspects borne by the large and varied cast. But I jumped in with both feet, followed the title, then the two titles once the “hardcover/softcover” publishing plan (in short: DC published a version of Legion for comic shops, reprinted a year later for newsstands, but before the reprints started the newsstand version also contained new stories).

Plus I read stories in DC’s digest reprints, and picked up back issues, and that sort of thing, so I was reasonably well versed in the franchise by the time that first “direct-sales-only” comic shop series came to its end.

“Mike….”

Okay, okay, I happened to really like the “Five Year Later” relaunch. It felt…it felt almost like a superhero version of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!…I mean, not in the sexy-naughty-times sort of way, but in that the comic was, as I said before, deliberately obfuscatory. It wasn’t bad storytelling, leaving out important plot points or taking unnecessary short cuts or leaving the reader in the dark for no good reason. The information was there, sometimes between the lines, making it a challenging read, but challenging in a good way. You’d reread each issue a time or three making sure you got what you were supposed to get. It felt…adult, again not in the dirty-filthy sense but in the “we expect you to bring some interpretative abilities to this, it ain’t no kid’s book.” And look, I was, what, 20 when this was coming out? It was rewarding to read a book that made you feel smart for getting it.

Not to say some of the criticisms some of you related in my comments section weren’t valid. Yes, calling everyone by their real first names could be confusing unless you were already fully immersed in all this nonsense prior to the launch of this series. I could read stuff in the comics written in the Interlac alphabet without referring back to the key they published in the early 300s, keeping Reep, Jo, Brin and Imra straight wasn’t going to be a problem.

And sometimes the artistic choices didn’t help either. Lots of characters in shadow, the occasional super close-up of whoever the heck it’s supposed to be…it added a layer of confusion to a series that was already not open to casual reading.

The storytelling gradually switched back over to a more traditional form as the series wore on, though the focus continued on breaking the milieu in ways that couldn’t be rolled back (refer back to Andrew’s post for a cataloging of some of these events). And, you know, it was fine reading it at the time…it was suitably dramatic, and surprisingly permanent, because back then you didn’t realize “shutting it all down and starting anew” was an option on the table. The series had survived Crisis on Infinite Earths, riding out the changes wrought by that series directly affecting Legion’s underpinnings. (One of which, the removal of Superboy, was one of the continuity fixes installed in those early 5YL issues.) If it could make it through that linewide event, nothing could stop the Legion!

Well, except sales, and a back-pedaling on the whole “5YL” concept, by introducing what appeared to be the younger, more innocent version of the Legion, coexisting with the older, wiser, and occasionally embittered post-5YL team. Let’s be clear…it was still entertaining, I thought, and something of a compelling mystery…where did these younger Legionnaires come from? But it was still a splintering of the concept, asking you to maintain your loyalties and devotion to the ongoing character developments with two versions of the same characters. It was one of those bendings of the concept that was interesting at the time, but didn’t realize what it had broken.

Eventually things came to a head and, as I talked about before, DC used their Zero Hour event as an opportunity to wipe that slate clean and start again. And I already went into detail in that post why that was a bad idea, so I won’t repeat it all here.

But yes, I liked “Five Years Later.” We can look at it from a publishing standpoint and say “ooh, maybe DC shouldn’t have done that” (see also Crisis on Infinite Earths), but as a story just in and of itself, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not knowing what to expect in each issue, knowing nothing was necessarily sacred, was the kind of excitement one didn’t often get in long-running comic book franchises. But maybe there’s a reason we don’t get that in long-running comic franchises, given the Legion’s difficulty in maintaining a significant presence in the decades since.

Basically I just say I’m behind on my reading but here’s a couple of things I do like reading.

filed under Categories collecting, eyeball, legion of super-heroes, star wars 10 Comments

One thing I haven’t heard at the shop in a while is “wow, what a great job, you get to read comics all day!” Which is good, because that did get a little tiring to hear, and to explain (when I bothered to do so) that the one thing I really don’t have time for at the shop is reading comics. Particularly now, that I’ve opened my own shop, where the only hand on deck is me and spending the time to read a comic means less time pricing old comics or whathaveyou.

Does that mean I’ve never read comics in the shop? No, of course not…it’s just not something I’m normally inclined to do. The one time I can remember doing so at the new store was an issue of Doomsday Clock, I think. And, at the old store, back when DC and Marvel used to send out preview packs of full issues coming the following week, I’d make time to read Preacher whenever it showed up. However, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue to check for damage while grading or maybe briefly browse through one to find something for Instagram, and yes sometimes just to admire a page or two of art…I tend to leave the actual reading at home.

The big problem, of course, has been my eyeballs. At first, I just thought my vision was getting blurrier due to my encroaching decrepitude, causing my reading to slow down considerably (even with the assistance of progressively stronger dollar store reading glasses. And then once the actual problem was determined (“Oh hey the interiors of your eyeballs are bleeding.” “Wait, what”) and problems began to accelerate, clouding my vision or blacking it out entirely…well, “reading” became an activity that was off the table.

End result: huge backlog of reading. For nearly three years my reading habits have been impaired by my ongoing eyeball issues. For the first year, it was just “no reading,” as my eyes switched off being cloudy or dark or too blurry and so on. Then once my eyes stabilized a bit (with only occasional bouts of hampered vision)…I found I had fallen out of the habit of reading comics. Sure, I read one or two here and there (at least once using a giant glass lens as a magnifying glass) but mostly I just watched television.

Television, as it turned out, was a lot easier to enjoy with my sometimes not-clear vision, particularly with my TV’s large screen and the somewhat close proximity in which I sat. The bright colors tended to cut through whatever was in the way, and while things were still sorta blurry, at least I could make sense of what was happening. Ended up rewatching all of Babylon 5 during this period…it was all bright and colorful and those early CGI effects were crisp and clear and easy for me to see. (I do remember early on watching A Quiet Place on Amazon Prime, with one eye blacked out entirely, and the other essentially with rivulets of blood obscuring its vision…it was like looking through prison window bars.)

It wasn’t until relatively recently that I started making an effort at trying to keep up on the comics I like to read, to try to cut down some of the backlog. And I’ve made some headway…I’m still caught up on Immortal Hulk and the Superman books, for example. But it’s still slowish going, even with somewhat stable eyesight and real glasses. My vision isn’t what it was (my left eye being the strongest one, and my right eye, where all the problems began, being partially impaired and not able to easily read anything below a certain size), coupled with the fact that the backlog is…a little imposing, is still kind of putting me off a bit.

Plus, I’ve gotten into the habit of just watching TV instead, which is easier.

I’m working on it, though. I’m probably making it sound like I just have giant piles of comics teetering over me at home that I gingerly remove a single copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of Blood from the top to peruse. I don’t actually pull aside a whole lot of comics for myself, but week after week after week of not reading them means to the “to-do” pile adds up faster than you’d expect.

THUS, THE CULLING BEGAN. I started going through the stuff I did pull for myself and deciding just what I can pass up for now. The big loser here, unfortunately, was Marvel’s many Star Wars titles. Not to say I didn’t enjoy them…I did, they were a lot of fun, but it’s just too much and with Marvel’s crazy publishing schedules, it just stacks up too quickly.

I am keeping one title around, however, even though I’m desperately behind on this title as well, is Doctor Aphra (which you may have been tipped off to by the inset pic here). I think of the new Star Wars series Marvel’s been cranking out, this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most. I believe I wrote on Twitter about the appeal of the character as filling the “morally ambiguous” role that Han Solo can no longer occupy after his turn in the original movie trilogy. It’s an exploration of this universe via a fresh yet cynical perspective, told with humor and the right amount of pathos. While there is some sort of redemption arc to her story, it’s a meandering one which means we get to see her be a space asshole, which is quite entertaining.

As I said, I’m way behind, so some of my above comments may no longer apply. The last issue I read was #26, which could mean I’m two years behind or six months behind, given Marvel’s aforementioned publishing schedules. But I’ve got ’em all stacked up here and ready to read, and all her previous appearances (in her own title and elsewhere) set aside for future reference. And all other Star Wars funnybooks…back to the shop with ’em. Hate to see you go, but what else can I do, really.

I plan on cutting other titles out of the backlog as well, though I haven’t quite decided what’s next. There are things I’ll always read, stuff I’ve followed for decades: any Hulk series, for example, or the main Superman books, or any Groo or Love and Rockets and related. But there’s the other stuff, the series maybe I just started, or comics I’ve been putting off reading for so long it’s pretty clear I’m not that interested in them. Or books I dipped back into reading, like Batman or Flash, decided “yeah, read enough of those” and stopped. Again, no critique implied of the books…they’re perfectly fine, I just don’t have time for everything anymore.

That said, I did pick up this book last week:


…continuing the complete reprinting of the Legion of Super-Heroes that began in the Legion Archives hardcovers and living on in these differently formatted, cheaper to produce hardcovers which picked up where the Archives left off.

This volume brings us up to Legion of Super-Heroes #271, plus the Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes mini-series. That means we’re in the very early ’80s, and just about to the point where I started picking LSH off the stands. I was bit of a late starter, sort of, to the Legion, but I was instantly a fan and kept reading the book ’til about the New 52 era, which was just one reboot too many for the comic that had pretty much become known for its incessant reboots and the hope the New, Improved Legion would get traction this time.

Anyway, I like these books, and I suspect I’ll likely continue picking them up even as they start to overlap with the Legion comics I do have. You know, just to get the Great Darkness Saga on paper that isn’t terrible. I may stop once they hit that initial “direct sales only” series, which already exists on nice paper!

Did want to note that Paul Levitz, one time DC president/publisher and writer of the Legion, provides the introduction. He says that the contents within may feel a little…disjointed, due to various creative team pressures and deadline issues and stuff, but honestly when has a Legion story not felt somewhat like some of the pipes are rattling a bit? But Levitz does make some space to say some nice stuff about longtime DC editor/writer E. Nelson Bridwell, a fella that, from some things I’ve heard, may not have been afforded much respect from other folks in the field. Well, Mr. Bridwell’s writing, whether for a comic story or his explanatory editorial pages, were eagerly enjoyed by a young me, so he’s got my respect for certain.

Also wanted to note the artists in this volume…Joe Staton (always great), Jimmy Janes and Jim Sherman (both wonderful draftsmen…Sherman’s got a great splash with Light Lass that’s a knockout), and, of course, Steve Ditko. I’ve read that Ditko story before (hence the link to the previous post) and it’s pretty well out there.

You know, for someone who’s been having a hard time reading, I sure wrote a lot for other people to read. There’s some form of base irony there somewhere. But thank you for putting up with my typing, and we’ll chat again shortly.

Oh for the days when I used to be referred to as “Get on Down Disco Dynamite.”

filed under Categories legion of super-heroes, pal brook, superman, what 5 Comments

So pal Brook (the very one who clued me in to the Hulk single) dropped by on Wednesday after perusing the vinyl record selection at the weekly flea market a town or two over. One of this acquired goodies was the following item, courtesy the year 1978:


And behold the back cover, if you dare:


A closer look at the back cover blurb:


…and if the song title “Lois Gets on Down” didn’t get you to buy this record, surely the idea of “Superman grooving out of sight” would do the trick.

Brook was good enough to let me borrow the record for the week, and…yes, it’s pretty amazing. A number of the songs are disco versions of movie theme music (and I didn’t realize there was another disco version of the Star Wars theme aside from Meco’s, though thinking about it I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised…and the two versions are awfully close). And if you’re wondering, “Mountain Funk” is a disco-ized version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

I’ve linked to a couple of the songs on this record already, but here’s the main attraction…the disco-enhanced recording of the John Williams theme from Superman: The Movie. You’re welcome. And be sure to stick around for the weird vocalizations (surely done by those kind women on the album cover).


Also, if I may add, speaking of that cover…Twitter pal Rob pointed out that the nice young lady on the right of the image bears some semblance to Saturn Girl and her ’70s swimsuit costume, and darned if Rob’s not onto something. And I’d bet one can of Billy Beer that there was someone at that same disco dressed like Grimbor the Chainsman.

BEHOLD THE AQUARING.

filed under Categories gelatinous cube, legion of super-heroes, retailing 10 Comments


“So what’s the deal with this ring?” asked the customer, gesturing at the little pile of plastic Legion of Super-Heroes rings I had laid out on the counter, a promotional giveaway for the new Legion series that debuted last week. “Are they for Aquaman?”

Um, Aquaman? How do you get “Aquaman” from a ring that very clearly has an “L” on it? I didn’t say that to the customer, but I did let him know what the rings were actually for, and that seemed to satisfy him.

What struck me, though, is that he knew enough about comics to mention to the people he was with that the Flash used to have a ring in which he would keep his super-compressed costume. But he didn’t know enough about the Legion to be able to identify one of the flight rings, which is a fairly integral element of the series. …Which is fine, of course, just because you like superhero comics doesn’t mean you have to know Every. Single. Detail. of each and every one.

But he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what the flight ring was. I had a number of people certainly identify what it was supposed to be, but had just as many other folks, comic reading folks, coming-in-every-Wednesday-for-the-new-goodies customers, who did not know what that ring was supposed to represent.

There was once a time when Legion fandom was a thing…like, it was one of the franchise’s defining elements was its active, involved fanbase. And that fanbase eroded over the years for various reasons (discussed both by me and pal Andrew a while back) to the point where DC no longer found it profitable to even attempt at keeping an ongoing Legion book on the stands for the last several years.

Of course, that absence has changed now, with DC’s much-ballyhooed Legion relaunch last week (preceded by an entertaining two-part mini bridging the current DC Universe to the Legion’s future), brought about by DC’s equally-ballyhooed acquiring of one of Marvel’s Big Name comic writers Brian Michael Bendis. Whether that rebuilding of what was once the formidable Legion Fandom will follow is…well, okay, it won’t, it’s a different time, and the natural, organic evolution of that fandom over years and decades isn’t suddenly going to repeat itself with the latest revival, however long it manages to last without yet another reboot.

I remember the last time DC Comics provided plastic Legion ring giveaways to tie into some new Legion thing or ‘nother, it seemed like everyone was in on it. They all knew the Legion, knew what the flight ring was and what it represented, and so on…but then, Legion was still an ongoing, if not entirely what it once was, concern at the time, a couple of decades back. Now…after being basically gone, or generally off the average comic fan’s radar, for about a decade or even more, one can’t depend on a shared fan nostalgia that will remember some piece of a franchise that was dead, or might as well have been, when several of today’s fans first got into the comic collecting hoohar.

Now, the good news is that despite some of my customer base not recognizing the Legion ring, there is still enough of the rest of that base to have either recognized the Legion, or are new to it but have been intrigued enough by the advertising/guest-appearances, to pick up the book. In fact, it was a near sell-out for me, and I have a box of restocked copies heading my way…well, today, hopefully…and even then about half of those restocks are already spoken for. I haven’t even got one for myself yet, since I was saving copies for the shelf.

I spoke with a friend who has a comic shop a few hundred miles away and says he can’t give them away, so I guess Your Store’s Mileage Will Vary. I’ve experienced this before…even back in the ’90s, I was comparing notes with a retailer in L.A. and he was all like “you sell how many Legion!?” But I hope this series is an overall success (in whatever meets “success” levels in today’s diminished market)…I do like the Legion, and I would like to have a new comic of theirs I can read. It won’t be the same, with the characters all cut off from their long history that brought me to these comics in the first place, but I can still enjoy a good comic regardless. I mean, assuming it’s good.

Oh, and I figured out why that customer thought this was an Aquaman ring:


…because he probably saw one turned on its side. An easy enough mistake to make, I guess.