The Legion began in the pages of Adventure Comics in the late 1950s. They were a group of teens who, inspired by the example of Superboy, the greatest teen hero of the 20th century, gathered to help the citizens of the far-flung United Planets and fight its enemies. Superboy himself was made an honorary member and frequently traveled through time to fight alongside those who follow in his footsteps.
During the 1960s and 70s, the Legion shifted to eventually be the headline feature of its own book. Aging with the slowness of comic book time, the teens of the Legion gradually became young adults. In the 1980s, some paired up and began families. Then, after a brief hiatus, they came back as a more grizzled, smaller set of heroes no longer-as-beloved by the United Planets government. Writer Keith Giffen was faced with a number of obstacles: The Legion's inspiration, Superboy, had been retroactively erased from history in order to match with the official history of Superman. Over the course of three or four of the first issues of the new series, Giffen re-created the Legion's history so that the Legionnaire Mon-El became the time-displaced hero Valor, the new inspiration of the hero team. Later, he added a group called the "SW6 Batch" of teenage Legionnaires alongside their 30-something counterparts.
Despite some very interesting storylines and some great artwork from Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, as well as Stuart Immonen and Ron Boyd, the learning curve for new readers remained very steep, and the paired Legion of Super-Heroes/Legionnaires titles were wound down during DC Comics Zero Hour event. A new series told the team's story from the beginning. It continued in the two titles for a few years. Interest never got high enough to maintain two books, even with stunts like sending half the team back to the 20th century for awhile. I lost some interest when the writers decided to split the team again by sending half of them to unimaginably distant space to end the paired books. I skipped the subsequent Legion Lost/Legion Worlds books, as well as the re-started Legion series. One of the selling points of the Legion books for me had been great, interesting artwork, and newcomer Oliver Coipel's pencils were way too often just plain ugly.
Yet another rebooted series began in 2004, which paired comics über-writer Mark Waid with the excellent art of Barry Kitson. In a nod to the old Legion's partnership with Superboy, the recently restored Supergirl was sent forward to join the team midway through this version. Waid and Kitson created a largely bland and restrictive society in which the teens of the Legion banded together to help change their world as much as save it. Their example inspired hundreds of thousands of young people across the United Planets to become their fans, or Legionnaires. After a few years, Waid and Kitson moved on, turning the title over first to writer Tony Bedard and then to 1960s Legion writer Jim Shooter. Shooter had been a wunderkind of sorts, writing Legion of Super-Heroes stories before he was even in high school when it was in Adventure Comics. Unfortunately, his return to a series he first wrote when he was 14 seemed to bring about the kind of writing a 14-year-old would do, and the 2000's were not the 1960's. The mix of baby-boomer juvenilia, Gen-Y sniggering and Frances Manapul's distorted-yet-crude cheesecake art quickly doomed the already not-so-robustly-selling title to another cancellation.
And now we're back -- literally, in one sense. This version of the Legion appeared in a Justice League/Justice Society arc in 2007, in the Action Comics arc "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes" and then as a backup feature in Adventure in 2009 before returning to its own book just last month. According to DC Comics editors, this is the original Legion that started in Adventure, without the story contortions forced on the continuity by the 1986 Infinite Crisis series. So it's got a Superboy connection, even if it's not exactly the same one we'd seen before, as well as some other tweaks that make it kind of interesting.
Paul Levitz, a Legion writer off and on between 1974 and 1989, writes the Legion's new tales, and Turkish artist Yildiray Çinar makes them visible. As an unabashed Legion fanboy since I was nine (Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #200, "The Legionnaire Bride of Starfinger," to be precise. No, I don't still own a copy. You think I'm some kind of geek?), I have high hopes that the title will do well. Çinar's work with Jay Faerber on Noble Causes shows he can handle a large cast and he has made a good-looking first issue, even though the "L"-decorated flight ring shown on the cover is apparently being worn upside-down. I'm glad there's a Legion series around, even though its up-and-down history has got to irritate publishers no end. Because no matter how many times bad writing, bad art or ill-advised creative team changes kill it, it seems like someone wants it back to try again. I'll be crossing my fingers for luck for volume six.
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