Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Invasion! LSH in Crossovers pt. 4

In anticipation of the upcoming Infinite Crisis, I continue my look back at the Legion's involvement in DC crossovers of the past. This time arounds it's Invasion! Let's get to it:

Plot - An alliance of aliens threaten to invade and conquer the earth. They don't succeed.

How's the Legion involved - They aren't.

Crosovers - No Legion related crossovers.


Um, ok. So if that's it let's move on shall we? Uhh, not so fast. This crossover actually has the most LSH influence than any DC crossover ever (except for maybe Final Night). You see this is the series that introduced the Legion Universe to the mainstream DCU. Look at the members of this alien alliance. First of all it's headed up by the Dominion. The bulk of its forces are made up of Khunds. Durlans play a role in the invasion. Daxamites become even more important in the plot. There's the presence of a Coluan, some Imskian technology, and even Zymyr's race, the good old Gil' Dishpan make appearances.

To my knowledge none of these races have ever made any major appearances outside of Legion comics before this point. But thanks to this series, most casual DC fans could tell you that Durlans are shapeshifters or that Daxamites get Superman's powers under a yellow sun.

As far as stories go, I like this one. It had a straightforward plot and showed the superheroes at their best. It also, I believed, introduced DC's counter to mutants by creating the metagene, which is playing an important role in the current OMAC series.

I only have issues 1 & 2 and a handful of crossover issues, so if there is some actual Legion content I'm missing, please let me know. I have to think that this must have been cool as a Legion fan to read as our universe is being shared with the rest of the DCU. I had dropped comics for a bit when this came out, but what did you guys think of it?

It´s important to remember that Invasion! it was where varios ancestors of legionnaries met and later create L.E.G.I.O.N.

It also had awesome McFarlane art showing off the above mentioned alien races--his Dominators were freaking terrifying to the fragile mind of an 11 year old kid!

Adam Strange and Vril Dox was cool to see together.

And you could just see that Giffen was channeling his vast Legion knowledge into one hell of a story.

I loved that mini series. If I remember it had Power Girl,Firehawk and Starman (Will) team up.
The mini was good and the crossover issues went well with the story.

Really, the only time that a hughe crossover story made sense.

One of the all times best.

As Lobo Gris already said, Invasion introduced L.E.G.I.O.N., something for which I'll always be grateful.

I wasn't into superhero comics yet in the late 80s, so I bought the three issues of Invasion as back issues, and none of the crossover issues.

I think the Invasion miniseries is excellent. It's the only project of Keith Giffen's that I like without any reservations (of course, everybody here knows I love L.E.G.I.O.N., but as I've said before, I think it got much better after Giffen left and Grant & Kitson took full control.) I've always loved it when superheroes and space opera are mixed together, and this mini-series did it on a grand scale. I'm not generally a fan of McFarlane or of Bart Sears, who drew the third issue, but the story was so good, it seems to have inspired them to do some of their best work.

I'm with you on that, Stealth. I love space-opera and political intrigue and this series gave us somewhat of a roadmap of what space in the DCU looked like.

It's also very interesting to see what is going in the DCU at the time as the three leaders of the operation to take down the Alliance were Amanda Waller, Max Lord (in non-murderer mode) and Captain Atom. This was at the time when the government's role in superheroing played in important part in many of the books and made IMHO an interesting backdrop for the DCU.

Invasion was the best comic book crossover ever!

Fantastic art, exceptionally intelligent and well-executed, decent monthly cross-overs, no crappy "laurel kent is a manhunter" style revelations...I've yet to see a cross-over event beat this one.

Didn't Valor owe some of his origin to this crossover?

Also, since I was a big Marvelhead at the time, there was a really funny Invasion parody in X-Men, right after Inferno. It included the "Jean (Grey)-Bomb."

Also, wasn't it after Invasion that Valor "seeded the worlds?"