Heroes for the '90s! #28: July 1995

A Legion of My Own

Legionnaires Annual #2

Writers: Mark Waid, Tom Peyer, Tom McCraw

Penciller: Jeffrey Moy
Inker: W.C. Carani
Colorist: Tom McCraw

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Superhero comics inherently present a challenge for those who are interested but don't know where to start. With decades of monthly storytelling and the most popular characters appearing in multiple books at once, most heroes and villains have so much backstory that it's nearly impossible to prepare one's self before diving in. Most comics diehards had to go through an uncomfortable period where we were making sense of things the best we could until we found our footing. But even within that, there are concepts that are daunting even for the most experienced of us.

The Legion of Super-Heroes fall firmly into that category. In fact, they may belong at the top of the list. The Legion were introduced in Adventure Comics in 1958 as a group of teenage heroes from the 30th centry who had been inspired by Superboy. They traveled back in time to meet him and ended up recruiting him to the team. This resulted in a series of adventures that greatly expanded the concept. Since the team was comprised of representatives from the different members of the United Planets, its membership was often 30 characters strong. The team largely followed a naming convention in which its members' names ended in "Boy," "Girl," "Lad," or "Lass" (e.g. Bouncing Boy and Lightning Lass).

In the 1970s the team began to co-headline with Superboy, and the soap opera aspects (romance, betrayal, death) were emphasized. The characters also gradually aged. This continued in the 1980s, with the team taking over the title completley. Then came Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985. Because one of the main outcomes of the Crisis was the elimination of Superboy from the mainline DC continuity. This left the Legion in an awkward position, but they soldiered on. 

In 1989, artist Keith Giffen took over as plotter (with Tom and Mary Bierbaum on scripts) and jumped the book ahead five years. The tone was dark and the plots complex. Perhaps realizing that they'd gotten away from the brightness and optimism that was a big part of the Legion's appeal, the creative team introduced a set of clones of the original Legion, with new members, new costumes, and more modern code names (Lightning Lass became Spark, Phantom Girl became Apparition, etc.). They were launched in their own shiny new book - titled Legionnaires - in April 1993.

I was fullly on board with this. I loved the character designs, I loved the art by Chris Sprouse, and I loved having an opening into a concept I'd always found interesting but couldn't find my way into. The new title lasted a year and a half before DC decided to do another universe shake-up. For the most part, DC used the events of Zero Hour to launch new titles (Starman being one of them) and create jumping-on points for others, they also used it to tie up some loose ends from Crisis surrounding both Hawkman and the Legion. While the former was merged into a sort of "all versions were valid" hybrid, the Legion's history was wiped clean.

Weirdly, DC tried to play it both ways. They kept the constumes and codenames of many of the clone Legionnaires. They also didn't restart the numbering on either Legionnaires nor the Legion of Super-Heroes book (a decision that's even more shocking by today's standards, when you're lucky to get 12 issues before a new volume comes along). Even the artist (Jeffrey Moy) stayed the same. So I'll only somewhat shame-facedly admit that at first I didn't understand that when I read Legion of Super-Heroes #0 and Legionnaires #0 (both October 1994) that I was witnessing everything being rebuilt from the ground up. 

Writers Tom Peyer, Tom McCraw, Mark Waid, and artists Lee Moder and Jeffrey Moy used the two monthly titles to tell an ongoing narrative bi-weekly narrative that allowed the readers to see the Legion come togther piece-by-piece. The moment I realized that this was something special was when eight months worth of storylines came to fruition in the oversized Legionnaires Annual #2.  

The issue brought a devastating close to the team's conflict with the White Triangle (a group of murderous super-powered xenophobes), and there were a bunch of payoffs: The Legionnaires joined forces with a rival superhero team; a member redeemed her betrayal of the group; a new member arrived just in time to save the day; two members finally professed their love for one another only for one of them to (apparently) die tragically. It's not often that I can remember exactly where I was when I first read something, but I remember being in the backseat of the car on a road trip (probably to Kentucky) and reeling from what I was reading.

From that point on, this version of the Legion was "mine."

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There were a lot of reasons that this rebooted Legion worked for me. First was the fact that I got in on the ground floor. Second was that I was the same age as most of the characters. I know that sounds overly simplistic, but I hadn't had a typical high school experience from a social standpoint. Besides the fact that I was depressed, had zero self-confidence, and battled social anxiety, I also worked about 25 to 30 hours a week at K-Mart. I had a group of friends with similar interests, and that helped me feel like I wasn't a total outcast, but I didn't go on group dates, or attend football games, or ask anyone to homecoming or prom. 

Strangely, this led me to a fascination with fantasy high school worlds: Saved By The Bell, Archie comics, John Hughes movies, basically any pop culture depiction of high school. The Legion books also fell into that category. The Legion didn't take place in a high school, but it featured a bunch of teenagers trying to navigate various interpersonal dynamics while also superheroing. It was really scratching multiple itches for me.

Third was this: By the time Legionnaires Annual #2 came out, I had graduated high school and was holding onto a vague hope of becoming a comic book writer and artist myself. I was working on a superhero saga called Troupe. As I sketched characters and plotted out storylines (enough for 28 full issues), I took inspiration from the team books I loved at the time, but primarily from the Legion. I loved how the Legion writing and editorital team clearly thought way ahead, and were able to plant seeds of plot that grew to fruition in a very satisfying way.  Here's a glimpse at my synopses of issues 11 through 14 of Troupe:

The Legion books also treated the team as a dynamic thing, with constant arrivals and departures and transformations and all of the emotional ramifications that went along with those. I also wanted to emulate the way the Legion never lost sight of its characters. So many team books treat their characters like interchangable parts, but this Legion managed to tell high-stakes stories while still focusing on interpersonal relationships and individual growth.

So even began to lose my ardor for comics during college, the Legion books were always on the bottom of the pile (I like to save the best for last).

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Waid left the Legion after the first year of stories, but the rest of the original creative teams stuck around until 2000. New writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (originators of the movie version of the Guardians of the Galaxy) took over, and the two series were cancelled and replaced by a single title. By this time I'd entered a period where I didn't buy comics. When I started up again in 2005 and went back to the Abnett and Lanning years, I wasn't impressed.

It didn't really matter anyway, because that same year the Legion went through another complete reboot. I gave it a try despite serious misgivings. The series was spearheaded by Waid. I typically love his work, but it was strange that he was involved in rebooting the Legion a second time. The art was by Barry Kitson, one of those artists whose work has just never had any appeal for me. I slogged through the first couple of years but I just didn't find the spark I was looking for.

I was more excited about Geoff Johns's and George Perez's 2008 Legion of Three Worlds miniseries, which featured all three versions of the team. I thought it was a cool idea that might clean up the mess of the team's history and result in some sort of hybrid Legion that would combine the best elements of all three. The book did leave did Gates, a sardonic teleporting insectoid, in the "main" timeline, but overall Legion of Three Worlds was just an excuse to restore the pre-Zero Hour Legion. It was another in a line of backwards looking decisions that included the resurrections of Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) and Barry Allen (The Flash). This was made even more transparent when the Legion's 1970s and '80s writer Paul Levitz returned to write new stories for the team between 2009 and 2013. Again, I dabbled in this series, but just couldn't get into it.

After six dormant years, the Legion was reimaginged yet again, this time under the guiding hand of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Ryan Sook. It was part of Bendis's well-publicized-but-mostly ill-fated move to DC. This version of the Legion had great designs and some fascinating new characters, but it all got lost in the execution of Bendis's overstuffed-yet-elliptical writing style. 

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As you can see by my continual willingness to at least sample new iterations of the Legion, I'm not one of those unreasonable people who only wants it their way. Even though the Zero Hour Legion will always be "my" version of the team, I love the characters enough to want to read new stories about them. I just hope that someone eventually comes along who's willing to put the same amount of planning, care, and love into building the Legion's stories as the creators who made Legionnaires Annual #2.