I Am NOT the Beastmaster

The House that Keith Built

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.

End of the (30th) Century

On Free Comic Book Day, the local comic store was selling a bunch of dollar comics, including some back issues of Legion of Super-Heroes volume 3. So I bought a few. A steal!

The next day I hit eBay and bought some more. Well played, "Free" Comic Book Day. Well played.

I spent the rest of the month rereading volume 3 (not the whole thing, just the issues I have, which is the bulk of it now). I had never exactly been a fan of this run. I read the Legion in the early 80s before DC split the book in two, resulting in a book printed on high-quality Baxter paper and sold in the direct market and a cheaper newsstand version that mostly told fill-in tales before switching over to reprints. That split basically marked the end of my ability to read the Legion stories that mattered. I had never been in a comic book store when volume 3 debuted in 1984. (My first visit would be about a year later, to pick up Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 and 8.) Most of volume 3 was inaccessible to me, and the few issues I did manage to track down – most notably the death of Superboy – didn’t convince me I was missing much.

Reading the full span of the series now both confirms my initial impressions and softens them a little. It helps that I finally read two of the best storylines from those years. The recruitment drive and all the stories that spring from it – the betrayal of Mentalla and the ongoing mystery over Sensor Girl’s identity – read like classic Mort Weisinger Legion tales blown up to modern length and given modern characterizations. The later Legion Conspiracy story that springs out of Superboy’s death is much better than I would have expected (the Starfinger subplot that runs alongside it is about as good as I would have expected), but it probably did lasting damage to the book's tone, cast, and cohesion. After that the book seems to lose all sense of direction, meandering around for a year before it finally sputters to an undignified end.

Part of the problem is that longtime Legion writer Paul Levitz was much, much better at working with existing characters and histories than he was at creating new ones. This is no knock against him; working with an expansive, unwieldy cast and a rich but frequently inconsistent history and pulling them together into something that resembles a cohesive whole is an important, undervalued skill in corporate-owned superhero comics, and Levitz at his peak did it better than just about anybody else. But you can tell by the end of the volume he’s running on empty. (The fact that he spent the first year trying to juggle two Legion books every month clearly did not help.) He runs out of things to do with most of that expansive cast and just starts bumping them off one after another – a trait that his final collaborator could only have encouraged.

If the first couple of years, culminating in the end of the Sensor Girl subplot, see an influx of new members in an attempt to give the book some vitality, the last couple of years reverse course drastically. Levitz kicks a half-dozen Legionnaires out of the book, kills some of their most enduring villains, and writes fairly conclusive endings for several others. Oh, and he kills off Superboy, the reason the team was founded and its biggest commercial draw for most of its history. That one probably isn’t his fault – no other book was hit so hard by the one-two punch of Crisis on Infinite Earths and John Byrne – but it certainly didn’t work to the Legion’s long-term benefit. By the end of the series even the Legionnaires are complaining about their empty roster and Levitz has moved on to cannibalizing his own creations, few though they were.

Which brings me to Quislet. Brought into the team to satisfy a pointless and ultimately misguided outcry for more alien members – the membership drive inducted three white superheroes, one mopey fishface, one disembodied entity with a “quirky” shtick, and zero minorities – Quislet is one of my least favorite characters in Legion history. Tellus is another; I’m tempted to blame it on their lack of expressive faces and body language, but the dialogue and actions as written are pretty thin, too. They’re proof that not only can’t Levitz write new characters but he shouldn’t really try.

Quislet is defined by annoying tics and forced fun right up until LSH #58, the final battle with the Emerald Empress. She’s taken down all of his teammates. He’s the only one left. And little Quislet takes her on anyway, fighting alone and scoring some solid hits until she casually destroys his containment vessel, forcing him to return to his homeland. (Where, we are told, he might be executed in some sort of Plato’s cave scenario. The eighties, everybody!) It’s a frustrating scene, because that character… the plucky little guy who fights on against overwhelming odds, who refuses to drop his positive attitude even in the face of personal loss… that guy is one of the all-time classic superhero character types. It’s a shame Levitz couldn’t figure out how to bring him out until his final scene. But given how miserable the next (and last) storyline would be, perhaps Quislet had to go.

Speaking of the eighties. These issues came out at a time of creative upheaval at DC Comics, when the company took a chance on projects that still define the company thirty years later. The books are filled with house ads for Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Justice League, Suicide Squad, V for Vendetta, Animal Man – high points of my comics reading. Those years, as much as anything, are probably responsible for why I’m still reading them today.

But this was also the time when DC learned all the wrong lessons from those groundbreaking comics (lessons they continue to mangle thirty years later). Here are the in-house solicitations for some contemporary Batman issues written by Jim Starlin.

• “Batman 421: Batman knows the identity of the person murdering women in Gotham—and there’s nothing he can do about it.” Holy misogyny!
• “Batman 422: Batman stalks the vicious Dumpster Slayer while Robin succumbs to the darker side of his nature.” What, you don’t remember the Dumpster Slayer from the TV show? I think Joey Bishop played him.
• “Batman 424: A beautiful woman dies, but the killer has diplomatic immunity. Robin can do something about it, but is he willing to pay the price?” You know, I’m beginning to sense a trend here...

The same tendencies are becoming part of the Legion at this time – not the overt misogyny, thankfully (although there’s a Dream Girl subplot that rivals the worst of the eighties for its casual recourse to sexual coercion and abuse), but all the gratuitous death, angst, and infighting. Levitz is trying to produce stories that have some of the impact, the finality of Watchmen or DKR or The Killing Joke, but most of those projects were located safely outside of a continuity they couldn’t destroy. Levitz is enmeshed in that continuity (even as it’s collapsing around him) and his many successive changes to the status quo result in a book that’s been stripped of all the things that made it popular in the first place.

The least sensationalistic but most destructive change was the gradual abandonment of the premises that made the Legion the Legion. Prohibitions against killing are routinely discarded, but so is the core assumption, ridiculous and essential, that a bunch of teenagers can band together and use their abilities to make the universe a better place. Without that, what’s left? Maybe the Legion of Superheroes hadn’t been completely exhausted yet, but their greatest writer certainly was.

Tomorrow: the art paragraph post.

Long Live the Legion: Postscript from Shanghalla

Last one, I promise.  After I wrapped up "Long Live the Legion" last week I realized the history of the Legion of Super-Heroes neatly encapsulates the generic evolution of DC Comics over the last fifty years:

First it has a period of invention in the late 50s and early 60s, at the start of the Silver Age, marked by an inundation of new ideas that compensates for the juvenile ambitions;

then it gradually adopts Marvel-style plotting, characterization, continuing storylines, and even page layouts in the mid-60s;

then it shifts to a focus on soap opera and interpersonal conflict in the 70s, with all the stock character types and hyperintense emotions that typically entailed;

then it develops a wildly successful synthesis combining the best elements of the new post-Claremont Marvel (intricate ongoing storylines, more nuanced and mature characterization) and the old Silver Age DC (tight plotting and pristine, uncluttered art) in the early 80s;

then it attempts to replicate Watchmen and other mature-readers superhero comics in the late 80s and early 90s with ambitious, elliptical storytelling and a cynical worldview--although the initial thrill of innovation gradually gives way to an artistic dead end as the experiment fails to live up to its promise;

then it attempts to reverse or throw out the excesses of the previous years with a back-to-basics retro approach in the mid-90s, although it's often less entertaining than the old stories to which it frequently alludes;

then it briefly rejuvenates itself with a spark of widescreen action in the early 2000s, although like most "mad ideas" comics, the ideas turn out not to be all that mad, just a futuristic gloss on standard, workmanlike superhero plots.

Sometimes the Legion leads these trends (the mid-60s, the early 80s), sometimes it's just a follower, but it's always right in the thick of them.  As DC goes, so goes the Legion.  Or is that the other way around?

And what does the current Legion tell us about DC Comics today?  Just that like Infinite Crisis and its infinite tie-ins, the new Legion of Super-Heroes comes across as a cunningly marketed but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at reinvigoration.  It doesn't appear to have learned any of the lessons of previous relaunches and it isn't nearly as much of a break from the past as it thinks it is.  But this smug phase won't last forever--the Legion's history reminds us of that.

Every longtime Legion fan has their own alternate timeline, their own pet theory on how to fix its tortured past if they could just turn back the clock.  The best changes to the Legion worked by addition, though, not by wholesale erasure; as Abnett and Lanning showed, even the worst periods in Legion history offered something to build on, and the foulest aftertaste disappears with the first good new issue.  To that end I offer the world my personal solution for what's ailing the Legion, the easiest way to restore the breadth and diversity and tradition that made it strong without invalidating any of its current texture.

Picture if you will the first issue after Waid and Kitson's run comes to an end.  The first page is a starry background in full bleed, galaxies swirling in cosmic grandeur.  Above them floats a single caption, in bright bold letters:

FIVE YEARS LATER...

Long Live the Legion 3: The Legion Is Dead

In 1994 the new writers of the Legion of Super-Heroes, tasked with rebuilding the group from its origin story, faced an unenviable dilemma.  They could retell the old continuity or break from it entirely; either approach risked alienating the Legion's large and voluble fanbase, which had become resistant to change but wouldn't necessarily want to read the same stories over again.  Mark Waid, Tom McCraw, and Tom Peyer understandably tried to split the difference, using the past continuity as a launching point for new stories told in a more modern style. But for every clever update or engaging new invention (and there were a few in the first couple of years), there was a story that found exactly the wrong balance.

The failures of this approach were most apparent in their handling of the legendary Sun-Eater.  Jim Shooter's original story was one of the centerpieces of Legion lore--so central that even the Mordruverse issue included a quick retelling.  Shooter established the Legion's greatest enemies in the Fatal Five and, in Ferro Lad's death, the possibility of real, irreversible sacrifice that would lend a sense of danger and consequence to the Legion's heroism.

Twice in 1996 the rebooted Legion comic tried to retell the Sun-Eater story without its two most important ingredients:  the sacrifice, and the Sun-Eater.  The most important tale in Legion history had been gutted for a cheap sense of novelty.  The point was made--things could happen differently in the new Legion--but the more important, unintended point was that they would also be far less entertaining.  Every Legion comic from that point on was left with a reminder of the writers' failed attempt to have it both ways:  a Ferro Lad who, deprived of his immortalizing sacrifice, didn't have anything to do.

The series degenerated rapidly.  Waid left and a poorly-executed story sent half the Legion back to the 20th century, where they made several unsuccessful attempts to go home and fought menaces largely of their own making.  Veteran scribe Roger Stern arrived and contributed a strong storyline featuring the classic Legion villain Mordru, but he soon seemed to lose interest; Legionnaires, which had been more compelling than its time-lost sister book, soon devolved into a giggly mess that gave more attention to its supporting cast than its stars.  The comics became consumed with the minutiae of the characters' personal lives, teenaged angst as only middle-aged adults can imagine it. Whole months passed by in which the Legionnaires did nothing.

By 1999 everything about the Legion seemed inconsequential, and my purchases had already slowed to a trickle when the solicitations began trumpeting the arrival of a new creative team.  The solicitations promised a massive upheaval that would darken the Legion's universe with death and devastation, as if that needed doing.  It seemed like the perfect jumping-off point.  I'd had enough; I didn't like these comics anymore; I was gone.

As it turns out, I left just as the Legion began to pick up again.  I've written before about what Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning did for the comic--how they swept out the juvenile characters and restored a sense of urgency to the Legion's actions.  They also restored something of its old breadth, bringing new versions of Wildfire, Timber Wolf, and a very, very different kind of Dawnstar into the fold.  This was an important step, since from Giffen and the Bierbaums forward every other writer had studiously ignored the Legion's more recent recruits.  The message was loud and clear:  if they postdated Adventure Comics--hell, if they postdated the Sun-Eater--they weren't the "real" Legion.  (Batch SW6 was the most snidely literal expression of this bias, although ironically if Giffen had gotten his way I suppose only the post-Adventure Legionnaires would have been the real thing.)  Abnett and Lanning reversed that, building a Legion with a more inclusive awareness of its past.

And they built it in the right way, not by retconning or rebooting the franchise but by adding the pieces they wanted and writing out the ones they didn't like.  If they could be a little bloodthirsty in the latter regard, at least it was for a good cause.  I'd already dropped the book when they began Legion Lost, and I could accept that Jan Arrah or Garth Ranzz were gone if the Legion as a whole finally read like the Legion once more.

For whatever reason--and I'm really in no position to speculate--the creative team changed yet again after just a few years.  Abnett and Lanning had begun to stall,  faltering as their predecessors had on an attempt to retell a Legion classic (in their case, the Great Darkness Saga--bad idea).  But they ended on a high note, clearly still in possession of skills and story ideas that could have sustained a much longer run.  After they departed DC rebooted the comic yet again, just ten years after the last one.  And here some kind of crucial threshold was reached.

If the Legion had been disconnected from its rich tradition before, now it was doubly disconnected--and any fans it had gained in the interim would be just as irritated to see their own continuity erased.  The newly rebooted Legion would also face the same dilemma with regard to its past, but writer Mark Waid--who had edited those brilliant early issues of the Five-Year Gap and written the better early years of the first reboot--was aware of the problems of the last reboot and was looking for a way around them.  He announced that his Legion would restore all of the early membership, right down to the Boy/Kid/Lad/Lass codenames (once again, though, nobody post-Adventure) but would encounter new menaces and new stories.

Unfortunately, those stories would be limited by a heavy-handed and surprisingly outdated social commentary.  Waid's vision of the 30th century was from start to finish a generation gap narrative, in which saucy Legionnaires led a youth rebellion against the crusty old officials of the United Planets nanny state.  Nothing seemed to motivate this conflict--a draft was mentioned but never initiated--which made it all the more surprising when U.P. troops began gunning down children.  The setting was so thinly conceived that there was no public outrage against this atrocity, largely because there was no public, just idealistic kids and incompetent or murderous authority figures.

I expressed some early reservations about Waid's high-concept approach, but I couldn't quite pin down what was wrong until Jim Roeg nailed it a year into the new series:

the teenage revolution conceit feels surprisingly claustrophobic.  The Legion I love is a giant soap opera set in a future where the canvas is huge and the story possibilities are wide open.

This isn't that Legion.  It's a comic that spent thirteen issues on a single plot, set in a universe that's reduced to one simplistic hook.  Even the characterization became monotonous as Waid scripted all his Legionnaires in the same snarky, backbiting voice.

The fourteen issues I gave the book consumed the last of my goodwill, the last of my nostalgia, even the last of my inertia.  After twelve years of reboots the things I loved about the Legion were gone; even my fondness for Legions past had nothing to latch onto anymore.  Neither the comic I grew up with nor a good comic in its own right, Waid's Legion of Super-Heroes was surprisingly easy to drop.

I still felt twinges of interest or guilt.  The title was improving towards the end, and it sounds like Waid has since added some enjoyable elements from the old continuity:  Supergirl, Bouncing Boy, the Dominators.  But then if I heard plot synopses of his first year I might have thought that sounded interesting too, not having read it.  I flip through issues on the stands from time to time, but I always end up putting them back on the shelf.

Before I moved back to Maryland I went through a fairly merciless purge.  It was only supposed to get rid of those godawful 90s DC comics filling my longboxes, but once I got started I couldn't stop.  If I felt slightly stupid getting rid of comics I'd bought less than a year earlier, well, it was less stupid than moving comics I never wanted to read again.  By the end it was rather invigorating, saying goodbye to Powers and Astonishing X-Men and Y the Last Man.

And goodbye to the Legion.  Ditching it is probably a good sign.  Most of what I purged were filler comics, comics I bought because I wanted to buy a big stack of comics that week and I liked the characters in concept if not in execution and I could discreetly overlook the fact that these books weren't very good.  The Legion been my very last filler comic, long after I knew that fondness for the characters doesn't matter when the characters aren't being written well.  I'm done with that.  If I need to immerse myself in the boundless worlds of the 30th century, the old comics are still around and far more entertaining than these pale imitations.  I ordered the Archives collections of Jim Shooter's run last week.

The Legion is dead; Long Live the Legion.

Long Live the Legion 2: Encyclopedia Galactica

How does the Legion do it?  How can it hold onto fans decade after decade, even as the history many of those fans cherish has been wiped out and replaced two, maybe three times?

The Mordruverse is instructive.  That issue worked for the same reasons the Legion as a whole works (when it does work), because it created an immersive universe with an almost endless capacity to absorb and provoke the reader's imagination.  In the Mordruverse the immersion came from contemplating the myriad changes to history, whereas in the regular Legion continuity it can also focus on the expansive setting.  It's no accident that Paul Levitz, during one of the Legion's creative peaks, would often begin scenes with a little caption from the Encyclopedia Galactica to help readers navigate the endless reaches of the 30th century.  The Legion's strength lies in its sheer breadth, confronting readers with a small army of superheroes and a dizzying array of allies and enemies and planets and weird powers ranging from the ability to accelerate or halt chemical reactions to the ability to make your own arms fall off.  Everybody's imagination can find something to latch onto.

The same is true for the Legion's characters.  They may have started off as cookie-cutter replicas stamped from the same bland mold--Jaycees In Space--but they were among DC's first heroes to grow and change in ongoing character development.  Not in any dramatically plausible way:  they first grew into histrionic adolescents like those published across town at Marvel.  But "adolescent" isn't always a pejorative; the Legion was brilliantly adolescent, especially when written by Jim Shooter.  A teenager himself when he began his first run, Shooter filled his stories with unrequited crushes, blossoming relationships, and sexually risque menaces in a way that must have been alternately familiar and thrilling to adolescent readers (especially in the 70s, when Mike Grell was dressing every character like futuristic porn stars).  The number of personality types offered the possibility for reader identification on a scale even Marvel couldn't equal; the myriad combinations did the same for soap opera, especially as the Legionnaires matured into stable, well-rounded, adult personalities.  Once again, breadth was the Legion's greatest asset.

But it was closely matched by the depth of the Legion's history.  Beginning in 1958 and continuing, with a few tweaks and interruptions, until 1994, that history slowly accumulated into a rich, diverse body of lore.  In fact, the Legion was one of the first DC features to build a Marvel-style continuity in which past stories mattered and real change was a possibility.  It didn't matter if you came late to the party and had to imagine all those past events--in fact, sometimes it worked better that way.  What story could possibly equal the heights of nobility or depths of betrayal you invented to fill in the gaps?

Giffen and the Bierbaums understood this.  Their early issues replicated the experience of being a new Legion reader even if you had been following the Legion for years--because they created new gaps in our reading.  We were all immersed into this rich and strange universe for the first time.  The Five-Year Gap was one of the best features of those issues, activating and absorbing our imagination and defying us to puzzle out how the United Planets got from there to here.  The Legion universe had never been more participatory.

Unfortunately, Giffen and the Bierbaums prolonged their stories beyond the point of endurance only to reach a belated and depressing resolution by destroying Earth.  The Bierbaums also used their position as writers to render canonical theories from their days as fans; in short, the series faltered when they started filling in the gaps they'd so ably created.  But there was enough blame to go around for everyone in the cancellation of the Five-Year Gap Legion and the destruction of its thirty-five-year continuity.  Plenty of longtime Legion readers evidently didn't like being made new readers again, didn't like the changes to the history and setting.  Ironically they would get a steady diet of arbitrary change for the next decade, to the point where the alterations of the Five-Year Gap era now seem mild by comparison.

DC Comics had been steadily eroding the Legion's connections to the present-day Superman family of characters.  The Legion had weathered the removal of Superboy and Supergirl through a "Pocket Universe" patch, and then finessed the removal of the Pocket Universe through the Mordruverse maneuver.  But the links to Superman had proven commercially and creatively vital; without them the Legion became an isolated backwater.  Some writers might have turned that editorial liberation into a license to tell brilliant stories, but the neglect only empowered Giffen and the Bierbaums to wreak havoc on their own setting.  By 1994, with a destroyed Earth, a seemingly intractable continuity, and two sets of ineffective Legionnaires running around, starting the whole thing over again might have seemed like an attractive option.

Instead it turned the Legion's history from an asset to a burden.  Whereas before the Legion offered the possibility of bottomless immersion in a thirty-five-year story, now it had to build the story anew--worse yet, with the obligation, in the minds of many fans, to recreate the most important pieces from the old continuity or supply something better.  The breadth of characters and setting were similarly reduced, but the writers could quickly boost them somewhere close to their old levels; yet even with two titles a month, there was simply no way to build thirty-five or twenty-five or even ten years of story overnight.

The immersion was gone.  The Legion had jettisoned not only its tradition--the most developed in DC Comics--but one of the primary sources of its unique appeal.  From then on it would rise or fall solely on the new stories its creators told to fill in the void.

You know how that worked out.

Tomorrow:  how that worked out.

Long Live the Legion 1: Five Years Later

Legion of Super-Heroes is my favorite comic that I don't read anymore.  After the Darkseid discussion last week I glutted myself on Legions past--the Great Darkness Saga, the Jim Shooter/Cary Bates/Mike Grell run in the 70s, and the Giffen/Bierbaum "Five Years Later" Legion--to figure out why that was the case.

Of course I read the Legion off and on in the early 80s, when Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen were both at their creative peaks.  Unfortunately I came along at just the wrong time to become a regular follower.  DC split the Legion into two comics, adding an expensive Baxter format book (which I couldn't always find--I still did a lot of my comics buying off the newsstand spinner rack back then) while maintaining the newsstand title.  The strain on the creators was immediately apparent:  the newsstand Legion book, which I could follow more easily, shifted to a series of largely inconsequential short stories, losing the sense of an overriding plot that's so important to serial fiction.  (The few hints of an ongoing storyline, something about missing Legionnaires, referred to events in the Baxter title.)  And Keith Giffen left the book, although that loss wasn't as devastating as it would have been a few months earlier, before he changed the crisp, futuristic design sense that had reinvigorated the Legion into something blotchy, ink-saturated, and inscrutable.

Someone should write an article about how the Baxter switch destroyed DC's two most popular franchises--the effects on the Teen Titans were not as immediate, but ultimately just as ruinous--but that's for another time.

I didn't become a diehard Legion fan until about five years later (appropriately enough), when I casually picked up a new Legion comic (#7) off a spinner rack in a record store.  Giffen was back with yet another art style, his figures sporting a renewed clarity and heroism.  Once again he brought a cohesive vision of the future, albeit a future whose fashions had changed in the intervening five years--now everybody dressed like an extra in Purple Rain.  But the most striking visual element was Giffen's unyielding use of a nine-panel grid lifted from the pages of Watchmen.  In fact, the entire comic presented a Watchmenification of the Legion, from the text pages in the back to the generally bleak portrayal of a 30th century wracked by war, corruption, and economic collapse.  Best of all, the comic demanded close reader attention, rewarding intense scrutiny with revelations about the plot, characters, and events of the previous five years.

I was the perfect age for it.  I'd read Watchmen two years earlier and was fully prepared to associate its stylistic experiments with artistic maturity, just as Giffen and writing partners Tom and Mary Bierbaum wanted me to, just as they probably did themselves.

Reading the early issues again, I can see Giffen and the Bierbaums didn't rise to their inspiration nearly as often as I thought they did.  The elliptical narrative style made no distinctions between the important and the irrelevant, and the comics were cluttered with unnecessary complications and superfluous characters (I guess Mr. Weisen is still orbiting Trom to this day).  The incremental storytelling meant some plotlines lingered forever with no appreciable advancement.  Even worse, for all that the comic reveled in its baroque stylings it was just as likely to oversimplify the truly important things.  The series' major plot hook--that Earth's government had secretly been taken over by the Dominators--was revealed entirely too early, the secret conspiracy exposed by a newspaper article that appeared off-panel between issues.  (This would be the first suggestion of another weakness that would ultimately cripple the series:  the Legionnaires were too often spectators in their own title.)

But the comic hit its stride right around the time I began reading.  Two months earlier, Giffen and the Bierbaums produced their single greatest work, an issue that alone almost justifies the entire run.  Legion of Super-Heroes #5 is set in the "Mordruverse," an alternate history created when the disappearance of one super-villain allows the dominance of another.  In the span of twenty-three pages the comic establishes the alternate timeline, sets up the usual ragtag band of rebels who fight against Mordru's rule, shows the ragtag band of rebels discovering they are living in an alternate timeline, and dramatizes their plan to restore time to its proper course; I haven't even gotten into the subplots involving the ambitious wife or the dutiful secret policeman.  With so little space for exposition the issue moves with an astonishing narrative economy, yet somehow it manages to preserve a moody atmosphere that combines Orwellian oppression with Philip K. Dick metaphysics.

This comic is all the more remarkable when you realize that it was written to satisfy an editorial mandate that the Legion completely disconnect itself from former members Superboy and Supergirl, who had been written out of DC continuity in an ill-conceived revamp.  Most continuity-patch stories are a shambles, as dramatically unsatisfying as they are ultimately ineffective at fixing whatever continuity errors they address, but this one worked:  an in-story excuse to rebuild the missing pieces of the Legion's past, it was still an entertaining story.

After that the new series was on a roll, for a few months anyway, reassembling the disbanded Legion while introducing elegant substitutions for the forbidden characters.  The best of these was Laurel Gand, still the only Supergirl substitute who comes close to reproducing the original (although subsequent writers would do their damnedest to undo her, writing her first as a xenophobic chauvinist and then as a space nun).  By issue #12 the Legion had reformed and it seemed like the grim tide of events in the 30th century was beginning to turn; issues 12 and 13 featured a fight between a never-before-seen Legionnaire named Kent Shakespeare (his name and eyeglasses promising some connection to Superman, the ultimate optimistic superhero and the Legion's original inspiration) and a classic villain called the Persuader which dramatized the selflessness and sacrifice at the heart of the Legion's ideals.  The Mordruverse was the series' finest moment, but that throwaway fight may have been its most Legion-like.

And then the directive came from on high:  enough with these confusing stories.  Combined with Giffen's ever-increasing absences, the newer, simpler tales were a crushing disappointment.  It turned out Giffen and the Bierbaums were much better at implying stories, or advancing them in short snapshot-like installments, than they were at telling them.  Forced to dramatize their fairly thin plots from start to finish, the Bierbaums relied on moth-eaten cliches and dei ex machina that revealed a paucity of imagination.  The series went more or less downhill from there.

But the point of this post isn't to talk about where Legion of Super-Heroes went wrong, a topic that's been belabored in any number of frothy Usenet discussions.  The point is to talk about what it did right, and if Giffen and the Bierbaums could hold onto me through neverending Terra Mosaics and bad fanfic theories stamped with the holy writ of continuity--if they could hold onto me even after their continuity was erased and the Legion settled into half a decade of teenagers sticking their tongues out at each other, and then hold onto me after that continuity was erased and replaced by a whining, sniping Legion whose inspirational slogan was "Eat it, grandpa"--then they must have done something very right indeed.

Tomorrow:  something very right.