In my ongoing reread of all my old comics, I've just finished up my run of the Keith Giffen-Tom & Mary Bierbaum run on Legion of Superheroes, from the late 80s. I always associate it mentally with the Justice League run, which partly overlapped, forming a time when Giffen was basically the editorial director for all of DC's characters, except the Big 3 and the Vertigo universe.
Two things struck me on this reread, the first I've done since I bought these comics back in the 90s. One is that the story moved much slower than I remembered, and the second is the sense I got of the LSH fandom being somewhat apart from the rest of DC fandom.
Regarding the first point, there were just two major storylines in the 40 issues that Giffen co-wrote and drew or laid out: the first concerned the reformation of the Legion 5 years after the previous storyline (which is why this epoch is called the Five Year Gap), and the second was about the liberation of Earth from the Dominators. There were a couple of other minor stories in there, but the first storyline is just as much about telling readers what's happened to all the characters as it is about telling new stories.
This means we're left with a lot of ideas introduced early on by Giffen and the Bierbaums, but which never came to fruition. This isn't a huge criticism because what we did get was entertaining and well-written, but it's interesting to think that some of the characters that came out of this era of the Legion were positioned (because of various DC Universe retcons) as having always been part of the team, but we never learned that much about them.
For the second point, one of the things that attracted me to the Legion then was the sense of a huge history (the team first appeared in 1958). Some reading and research back in the 90s turned up back issues and fanzines talking about the Legion's history, confirming this impression. But the amount of letters from disgruntled (or happy) fans who'd been reading the book for decades, and who had strong ideas about favorite characters, was intriguing.
A lot of names kept popping up in the letters, and the Bierbaums themselves, who started as fans before turning pro, confirmed this in how they ran the letter column. They had their own language and in-jokes and references, much more so than the Justice League fans over in those books.
Back in the day, DC's books were a lot more diverse and not always explicitly connected, so although LSH started as a toss-off Superboy story, it quickly grew into its own little corner of the DC Universe, connected but largely unconcerned with what was going on in other books. But in terms of a fully realized universe, you could say LSH is up there with Jack Kirby's Fourth World books or the Vertigo books. The fact that the characters had personalities and histories also makes a difference - Superman and the Flash and Batman were basically all interchangeable in terms of personalities, whereas a lot of Legionnaires dated each other at various points in those initial 30 years of publication. And most notably, Legionnaires who died stayed dead.
The other striking thing is how mature the book is, despite not having the mature readers tag on it. In fact, I just checked and none of that series had the Comics Code Approval stamp, which is pretty innovative for a book that started out being about teenage superheroes in bright costumes in the future.
To start with, just a shitload of characters dies, especially in the first few issues. One issue features, on its cover, the villain of the storyline standing among the body parts of a former Legionnaire whom he kills in that issue. Other mature themes are non-explicit nudity, drugs, domestic abuse, same-sex relationships (as hinted in Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet's relationship), and even transgender storylines, when it's revealed that Shvaughn Erin, a female supporting character with a long-standing crush on Element Lad, was originally a man who took a sex-change drug to get closer to him.
Most interesting was the revelation in the issue that addresses this story that Element Lad himself wouldn't have been bothered to date a guy. Pretty heady stuff for a book published 30 years ago, especially when you consider that trans rights are the current battleground in American politics, the way homosexuality was a few years ago.
What's sad for me is taking the book as a whole, from the first issue to the final one I own, in which that whole continuity is erased and rebooted to be in line with DC's Zero Hour crossover. I kept on with the book for a year or two after the reboot, but eventually lost interest and at some point got rid of those issues, even though I remember the first storyline being okay.
But how successful was this Giffen-Bierbaum relaunch? Probably not very, at least not to the same level as the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, which is still regarded fondly (and collected in trade paperbacks). The Legion went through another reboot after Zero Hour, creating yet another version of their origin, before being de-booted to something that reflected the book's continuity as of 1989 - but basically all of the stuff in the Five Year Gap isn't considered canon anymore.
And the reason that's too bad is that this was really something different - the Legionnaires were all grown up now, some dead, some different to what readers expected. The universe itself was also different: a grimy "used future" rather than the shiny, optimistic one that first appeared in the 50s and 60s, with Earth now under brutal alien control. There wasn't really anywhere to take the Legion after this, and anyway DC probably wanted it to conform closer to the rest of the continuity.
So while not the most successful book, Legion of Superheroes Volume 4 remains one of my favorites, and yet another indicator of why the 80s was the best decade for comics.
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