Comics produced through an assembly-line division of labor require a strange alchemy if they’re going to be anything more than generic product. For a few years in the early 1980s, The Legion of Super-Heroes had it.
Where writer Paul Levitz was a master of DC lore, skillfully weaving the Legion’s rich past and boundless settings into a coherent narrative (and more or less single-handedly resuscitating Jack Kirby’s Darkseid), artist Keith Giffen finally took the Legionnaires into the future they had claimed to inhabit all along. He brought clean linework, visionary architecture, innovative uses of color, tons of futuristic chicken fat, the Interlac alphabet, and costumes that (80s color schemes notwithstanding) seemed to combine the best features of the Legion’s childish past and its bold new future.
And then, after building the Legion into a franchise that could support a deluxe-format book, Giffen changed his style just in time for the relaunch. Now working under the controversial (and unacknowledged) influence of Argentinian artist José Antonio Muñoz, Giffen was suddenly interested in shadows, inks, caricatured figures, and fragmented images that sometimes occluded the human figure entirely.
And then he was gone after two issues, the first of his many abrupt departures from the franchise. In this case the loss was probably a fortunate one, because editor Karen Berger (yes, the Karen Berger) replaced him with Steve Lightle. A perfect successor, Lightle’s fine linework, detailed backgrounds, and obvious affection for the characters harkened back to Giffen in his prime (especially when inked by Giffen’s collaborator Larry Mahlstedt). Unfortunately, he couldn’t maintain the regular monthly schedule – a punishing grind that wasn’t helped by issues that ran to 27 pages each. Lightle barely lasted a year, with a couple of fill-ins along the way.
He was replaced by Greg LaRocque. I enjoyed LaRocque’s work on The Flash with Mark Waid, where he had the good fortune to illustrate the greatest Flash story ever told, “The Return of Barry Allen.” On the Legion… well, he enjoys drawing the ladies, but it’s all fairly standard 1980s superhero comic art. Still, he could handle the huge cast and hit his deadlines, no small feats; the Legion has ground up many a fancier artist.
LaRocque lasts about two and a half years, and then he’s replaced by Keith Giffen. (For the final part of a long-developing storyline – reading these comics in hindsight, the utter indifference to any sort of collected edition is amazing.) Giffen returns with yet another new style: clean, crisp lines reminiscent of (but not identical to) his classic look, expressive faces that owe much to his former Justice League collaborator Kevin Maguire, and wide-open layouts that are well-suited for the Legion’s grand superheroic action. There’s a moment in issue 58 where Colossal Boy, returning to duty after a long absence, expands to fill the panels and it’s absolutely perfect –as if that’s what they were designed for all along. Giffen has once again found a style you could build a book around.
It lasts for nine issues. Two of them are fill-ins. Of all the things about Giffen that are maddening – and they too are legion – one of the worst is his inevitable tendency to change gears just when he’s starting to build some momentum. “The Magic Wars,” the final story of this volume, sees Giffen auditioning his new new look, a nine-panel grid that would define his work on the next volume of Legion of Super-Heroes. That tight focus meshed well with volume 4’s focus on conversation, character interaction, and highly mediated media images, but it’s spectacularly ill-suited to the cosmos-shaking super-action that Levitz chooses to end his long tenure on the Legion. Battle scenes and magical spectacles are cropped so closely they become almost illegible, while the quieter moments are presented with a kind of laconic abstraction that neutralizes any intended emotional effect. As he did at the beginning of volume 3, Giffen sometimes threatens to abandon the human figure, a stunningly bad decision for a genre that is, at its heart, all about the dynamism of the human body in motion.
No Keith Giffen run on the Legion, however brief, would be complete without at least one pointless Legionnaire death. (There may be other artists as eager to bite the hand that feeds them, but few have been given so many opportunities to bite the same one over and over again.) Levitz and Giffen actually manage to pack three in, claiming the last of Triplicate Girl Duo Damsel Luornu Durgo’s cannon-fodder bodies and inflicting fatal injuries on Mon-El that kill him after a long, joyless year. The last one is the worst of all, a death so forced that it doesn’t even bother to conceal its essential arbitrariness: Magnetic Kid basically dies because The Rules say somebody has to. Otherwise, how would you know it’s a big important story?
Despite all the doom and gloom, Levitz does his best to end the story, and his seven years on the title, with an upbeat note about the Legion’s enduring service – a note that would be undercut by the very premise of the volume that follows, which opens with the Legion disbanded and the United Planets fragmented in their absence. But the truth is, Levitz and Giffen had already done so much damage to both institutions on the way out that v4 feels like a logical extension of what came before it. Legion of Super-Heroes volume 3 ends with a writer who’s run out of stories to tell and an artist who holds the characters, setting, and genre in more or less open contempt.
The Legion would suffer many indignities over the next couple of decades: editorial interference, countless retcons and reboots, nonstop regime changes that repeatedly cut out its heart. More than anything else, that indecisiveness is the source of the Legion’s current troubles and its absence from the comics shelves. But when the title’s two greatest creators give it a send-off like this, it’s hard to make the case that anybody else should care about protecting what they built.
The only thing about this I really disagree with is that Giffen holds Legion comics in contempt. My reading of his Legion comics is that he has a tremendous amount of affection and understanding for the LSH... but Giffen is also a guy who is willing to try new stuff without counting the cost, and making sure that the toys are all neatly back in the box for the next kid who comes along has never been his priority.
One of the things Legion fans counted as a strength of the title over the years is that, unlike DC's other long-running titles, Legion comics could have permanent change in them. And that's what Levitz and Giffen gave us, in the late '80s and early '90s. Maybe we just didn't know as much about what the limitations were of that capacity for change. But I'm not sorry they tried, as a lot of those comics were both very good and very powerful.
Anyway. I didn't care for the end of v3 much myself. I thought #50 was great but there wasn't much that was great after that. But if Levitz is out of ideas, he's out of ideas; there's no malice or carelessness in that. And there have been so many great Legion stories since then that, well, why wouldn't I keep caring about them?
Posted by: Matthew E | June 02, 2016 at 11:29 AM
Giffen has done many Legion comics that I loved, including the first year and change of volume 4. (Although I'm rereading those right now, and they definitely read differently coming after v3.) The end of v3 feels like a low point, though, where Giffen seems to have lost interest in the type of straight-ahead superhero adventure that Levitz is still writing. Factor in that Levitz is running out of steam, too, and these are some very dispiriting issues. You're right, though, "contempt" is probably better reserved for some of Giffen's later contributions, including the abbreviated New 52 issues that seem to have killed the book.
Thanks for writing, Matthew.
Posted by: Marc | June 02, 2016 at 01:25 PM
Giffen catapulted the Legion into the highest echelon of superhero comics. His subsequent interactions with the title have inevitably resulted in its diminishment. In my opinion, of course.
To commit the sin of quoting myself, "A lot of people I don't understand at all came to the LSH fresh with v4 and loved it."
I would be interested in how reading v4 after v3 has changed your assessment of the series.
Posted by: Greg Morrow | June 02, 2016 at 10:54 PM
The noise that Giffen was making in superhero comics coincided with the onset of my complete disinterest in them, for the most part. I didn't read any Legion comics as a kid outside of a few Superman or Superboy tie-ins. I feel that for myself, as for most fans of superhero comics, the Legion, post-1960s, was this separate thing from "comics that mattered" --a sort of aside-from-continuity, literal pocket universe, in a stupid future subculture that was largely unrelated to what was happening to Daredevil this month, etc. Add to this the fact that post-1985 or so my tastes were decidedly indy/arty, Giffen to me was only ever the guy who plagiarized Munoz, and not the virtuoso artist behind "The Great Darkness Saga."
Ironically, I started going back and casually collecting the old Curt Swan et al Legion comics in the 90s and into the early 2000s, and I while I was giving myself a nerdcore education in Silver Age camp sci-fi, I was still blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the then-current DCU. Never tempted to dive back into modern LSH fandom. It still amuses me that there is a hard-core, continuity-obsessed fanbase for the Legion that cares about respecting these characters (including past characterizations, romantic subplots, etc) and whose grail is the ever-elusive prospect of good writing and art teams staying with any iteration of the product, in the hopes for some renaissance or "return to greatness." The book was never great. The 60s comics were charming, and fun, and sometimes beautiful and ground-breaking in their own way. But most any attempt to take the foundation of these children's comics and build an artful science fiction universe on top of them is going to give us a kitsch fanfic, at best. Especially if is done under the demands of the monthly marketplace in the classic work-for-hire assembly line fashion. It would take an exceptional talent to make something of these toys.
That being said, when I read the later Giffen Legion, especially the vol 4 "5-years-later" issues, older me finds a lot that is fascinating. What is sometimes called Giffen's Watchmen is a very weird book, at least artistically. It looks nothing like a mainstream superhero comic of the day. Page after 9-panel page of drawings of rocks, planets, machines, unconnected word balloons, shadows, extreme close-ups. etc. No heroic poses, sexy costumes or multi-page balletic fight scenes. No attempt to really mimic a Moore/Gibbons or Miller aesthetic, beyond a few formal appropriations and gimmicks. Ugly, lumpy jagged art. A goofy, post-apocalyptic, cyber-punky soap opera epic, with call-backs and fan-service galore that nevertheless shits all over the legacy of the Silver Age artists and writers I adore. I think I love it!
Posted by: BK Munn | June 05, 2016 at 02:27 AM
"The book was never great. The 60s comics were charming, and fun, and sometimes beautiful and ground-breaking in their own way."
That sounds like four aspects of greatness right there. Maybe not greatness as defined by current (post-1985 or so) standards for superhero comics, but that might be a point in its favor. Taken on their own terms, as 1960s kids comics, they far surpass the modest (if not downright mercenary) expectations for their genre and medium to deliver some highly entertaining stories - which is all they ever promised. A few other points in their long history (most notably the early 1980s Levitz/Giffen stuff) can say the same. This is generally the best you can hope for with a corporate-owned comic that will be published more or less in perpetuity whether the company can line up the talent or not. Reading these comics is a bit like panning for gold; you have to sift through a lot of dirt to find the bits you can use. The Legion had a particular knack for providing lots of bits that its readers wanted to hold on to. I see that as both a sign of its success and the source of some of its problems down the road, but not cause for disdain.
I find Giffen's volume 4 work fascinating as well, though as I reread it now I can see all sorts of problems that weren't as apparent to me at the time. Some of these come with the benefit of hindsight, knowing what it would build up to (or not build up to), but the art and design that seemed so affecting then don't look quite so groundbreaking anymore. I don't mean that they've been dulled by the familiarity that comes with influence or repetition; I mean that the book was never as groundbreaking as it wants us to believe. The multi-page fight scenes and grim-n-gritty appropriations are all there, they just aren't told with an appropriate or sufficiently varied visual vocabulary to pull off the desired effects. (Miller and Gibbons knew when to open up their grids.) And given Giffen's obsession with thongs and asses, the book might even qualify for some sexy costumes and bad-girl poses - at least in the artist's own mind. Rereading these books now, it's clear just how much the Image artists (particularly Liefeld) took from Giffen's character design, which makes it somewhat harder to claim volume 4 as some kind of outsider artwork standing apart from the superhero genre.
Maybe that's for the best. Of all the arguments that were made for volume 4, then and now, this type of freaking-out-the-geeks genre anxiety has most worn out its welcome. I don't have any particular desire to define my reading in opposition to some largely hypothetical group of fans and I don't see much merit in arguments that do. The book stands or falls on its own qualities.
Posted by: Marc | June 05, 2016 at 08:45 AM
Yeah, half the time I have no idea what is happening and because it's 30 yrs later I don't really feel too bad. Just enjoyed looking at a visually unusual "mainstream" book.
Posted by: BK Munn | June 05, 2016 at 06:00 PM
I missed out on the legion when i was into superheroes as a kid, but haveread a bunch since, and i like giffen's turn to unintelligibility, at least what ive read of it in the trade "the curse". Dunno where that fits exactly in the timeline here.
I like that it doesn't have any thematic fit with thescript, as if they'd made an avengers movie with cinematography by chris doyle circa in the mood for love and storyboards by yuichi Yokoyama. I like that it erases the human element in the midst of action; i see links there with toth, or some of kirby's wonkier 70s material. (not that giffen is in their league). Thats more interesting to me than, say, Mike Grell's c-grade adamsism or steve "I'm obbviously just here for the paycheck" ditko phoning it in
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | June 14, 2016 at 10:00 PM