Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! What's your Legion-reading roadmap?

Maybe, but we got really hot pirate Captain Frake out of the deal.

Almost, but not quite.

This board opened 4 years ago today, so let's celebrate with more roadmaps, sentients!

My roadmap is currently "under construction."

Today, for the very first time, I picked up an issue of the threeboot. It led, unfortunately, to a dead end.

So, while I'm waiting for new roads to open, I'm busy traveling down familiar lanes and seeing things I'd never noticed before. I revisit old friends and see the old neighborhood in a new light. It doesn't seem as big as it used to, but it's still full of love, laughter, and hope. Some of the things that went on here make more sense now that I've been away for awhile. Even the bad times were temporary and led to something better in the long run.

So, my roadmap may be a little out of date, but it still leads me to all the right places.

Happy Anniversary, Legion World!

I really don't remember ever not having comic books around. My mother always bought them for me and my older sister. Not super heroes, but Casper, Little Archie, Wendy, and Richie Rich. My parents married young. My father was still in high school and my mother had recently graduated when my older sister was born. My parents were both 20 when I was born. Neither of their families had any money, and my father always worked two or three jobs to support his young family. He would come home to sleep for a few brief hours between jobs. It was very important that my sister and I not make any noise when he was home. He could become violently angry if we woke him. Mom kept us well supplied with library books, coloring books, and comic books so we would have quiet activities. One of dad's jobs was with the post office. He sorted mail at night. His hard work paid off and he became the postmaster for a small rural community at the age of 28. The town is called Prairie Home. We moved there when I was eight. The population of the town was 265 people at the time. There was a red brick drug store across the street from dad's one room post office. My mother continued to work as a grocery store clerk in the town that we moved from. It was about an hour drive, and my sister and I would stay at home by ourselves while mom and dad were at work. Sometimes, mom would give me a quarter before she left. I would walk to the drug store. They sold vanilla cokes for a nickel and comic books were 20 cents. With my quarter I could buy one comic book and one vanilla coke. This is where I discovered super heroes. I picked up a few issues of Superboy and liked them. Superboy #198 was the first issue I bought with the Legion in it. Cockrum art. The Fatal Five in Smallville. Princess Projectra's white hair stands out as a distinct memory. I think I was confused but fascinated. From my collection,it looks like I got every second or third issue for the first year after that, but by the time I was 10 I was buying each issue, and didn't miss a single one until my senior year in high school.

My mother eventually quit her job in town, and the drug store closed. Dad bought her a small grocery store in Prairie Home which she ran for 28 years. Part of the motivation was so that they wouldn't have to leave us home alone. We stayed with her at the store.

When the drug store closed there was no place in Prairie Home to buy comics. I, however, had very crooked buck teeth and needed braces badly. My teeth were so bad that the orthodontics were experimental and took a very long time to complete. I wore braces and major headgear for a little over seven years. The braces had to be tightened once a month. Whenever I had a dentist appointment, mom would pay a local lady to run the store, and she and I would spend the whole day in town. It became a ritual for us. Mom always had lots of shopping and errands to do. There were several drug stores, grocery stores, and convenience stores on her route. She always made the first stop after the dentist my comic book stop. I would buy a huge stack and spend the rest of the day reading in the car while she shopped. I never missed an issue of my favorites, and the Legion quickly rose to the top of my fave list.

I also managed to pick up a lot of the Adventure run during this period. My dad got a real estate license, and started to sell real estate on weekends. By this point, my relationship with him was pretty strained. He has had a passion for hunting his entire life, as have all of the men in my family and the community where I grew up. I was a geeky, buck toothed,comic book reading kid with thick glasses. I went hunting with my dad exactly once. I shot a squirrel. It's head went back and blood gurgled up out it's throat, it fell from the tree as if in slow motion, convulsed at my feet and then died. It made me ill and very sad. I refused to ever go hunting again, and by so doing, greatly damaged the relationship with most of the men in my life. One Saturday afternoon when I was about fourteen my dad came into the house. He told me and my mother that he had just listed a house for a "nutty guy" who had all kinds of comic books and "Star Trek shit" in his basement. He said the man had to move and was trying to sell all the comic books, and asked me if I wanted to go pick some out. I went with him. He bought me every Legion and Superboy comic the guy had. I got the first appearance of Ultra Boy, the Moby Dick of Space, the first appearance of Element Lad, Mordu, Karate Kid, Projectra, and Chemical King, the Nardo storyline, the mutiny in space and much more. About 30 books in all. I was thrilled. I remember my mother crying and telling me how proud she was of dad for doing that for me.

I decided right before my senior year in high school that it was time to grow out of comics. I was preparing for college. I was determined that I was going to be popular and leave my geekiness behind. The Legion was in the middle of the Ultra Boy as Reflecto run when I quit buying comics.

I headed off for college with straight teeth, contacts, ripped jeans, spiked blond hair, polo shirts with upturned collars, and a gold loop ear ring. I made lots of freinds and had a lot of fun. I quickly became a party boy, which entailed becoming a regular at the local punk clubs and in the emerging gay bar scene in the midwest of the early eighties. I didn't buy any comics until the summer after my sophomore year when I started to date a really hot guy who was into comics. I decided I could be both a cool club kid and comic geek. I managed to pick up Great Darkness, and buy an occasional Legion comic over the next few years. My comic buying between 1984 and 1989 was spotty. I didn't buy every issue of any series, but never went more than a couple months without buying a few comics. After college I left Missouri for California. I spent some time in LA, and ended up in San Diego. Let's just say that life got pretty crazy at times. San Diego, of course, has some great comic shops, so my irregular visits always proved fun.

By 1989 my life was starting to get more stable. I was finishing graduate school and had fallen in love with a great guy named David. We recently celebrated our 18th anniversary. He didn't really understand my comic books, but was never bothered that I read them. He loves to shop, and my mother clued him in about stopping for comic books first pretty early in the relationship. I started to buy comics again on a regular basis. I was able to finish off the Levitz run as a regular, got into TMK on the ground floor. It remains my favorite era. I have bought every issue of the Legion since then, plus the entire Legionnaries run. We've moved around a bit. We spent 11 years back in Missouri, before David's career took us to Albuquerque, and just recently moved to Tucson. The Legion has been part of my life for over 35 years now. It's hard to write a Legion reading roadmap without it becoming an autobiography.

Wonderful story, Jerry.

Your dad sounds like quite a guy to take you to pick out those comics, even though your relationship was strained.

We have a lot in common: We're about the same age, we're both from Missouri (where I still live), and we both started reading the Legion about the same time. (I started with LSH v.1 # 1, Feb. 1973).

Also, like you, I didn't quite fit in with the masculine stereotypes in my family. My brother, father, and grandfather all have or had military experience. My dad was a mechanic, and my brother is currently a police officer. I was a near-sighted, crooked-toothed, flat-footed comic book geek.

Comic books -- and the Legion in particular -- not only provided a refuge from the so-called real world, but an alternative to it. It opened avenues for my imagination and intellectual growth that other members of my family couldn't understand. Even now, there are differences in how we view the world because of this.

Hey HHW - Twin sons of different mothers, perhaps? Where in Missouri do you live?

Kansas City area.

My first Legion issue was Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #244 (from 1978). I grew to become a fanatic, and got as many back issues as I could, while keeping up with the newest issues. I stopped collecting around 1990, and have only recently started up again. I just wish the current incarrnation was better! :-(

Welcome, insaniac5!

You're not alone in your disappointment of the current "threeboot" Legion. But there is hope, as the Levitz-era Legion (or a version of them)appeared recently in JLA and JSA.

You might also be interested in this thread , which discusses the Earthwar in detail.

Thanks! I just finished re-reading all my old Legions a few months ago, which, of course, included Earthwar. Goes to show how much Levitz hated Tyroc, though, that he didn't make an appearance during that. Oh well, that is a topic for another thread.

Welcome, Insaniac! Another Upstate NYer!

Cool! Where are you from, Kent?

This is exactly what happened to me too. Even today I can trace most of my "weird" (as seen by others who don't understand them)ideas on life, the universe and everything, back to the time I started reading the Legion in Greek and later in English.

bought my frist a few years back with the titans/legion cross over i was just geting into american comics again (i mostly into batman as a kid sue me) and i only bought it beacuse impulse was in it (i used to have a goal of geting all bart allen comics but i hated him as the flash) my comic guy told me to get the legion's new rebot and i did (this is when i had money to clow on comics) and this one i loved enough once i money was tight i still found a way to get it slowly ive been going back and trying to buy older legion, i come to love them more but there hard as hell to find (i moved a few times and finding a good comic shop can be hard) out of all of the legion so far the one i like the lest is the previous legion

BUMP for the new sentients and the procrastinating old sentients

When I was 5 or 6 I was given a stack of coverless comics that included Adventure Comics #267, 290 & 318. The first one I bought was Adv 367. I stopped buying comics sometime after Supergirl took over Adventure. A few years later I spotted LSH V 1 #3 at Shinders in Downtown Minneapolis. I've been collecting comics ever since. In all likelihood if it wasn't for the LSH I wouldn't be collecting comic books.

I think the first Legion-specific comic I ever bought was Legionnaires #32.

Do go on.

Sorry, I'm a POS!

My first Legion comic was one of the Grell issues. I think it was the Grimbor/Charma story. I had a handful of other comics from that era, too. I also remember having JLA comics and Teen Titans comics. We moved to Australia and the only shop that had comics stocked black and white reprints. They were thick and full of both new and old stories. I could tell the difference based on the art style.

When we returned to the states, I found out that the most current issue was one of the last of the Earthwar issues. I had missed a bunch. When in Seattle, we went to Golden Age Collectibles and I found all of the back issues between the current one I had and Superboy #197. My parents bought all of them for me!!!!!

Ever since, I have made every effort neccessary to never miss an issue, and I never have (I think/hope.)! I don't have each and every AR appearance, but pretty much everything within the series proper. I have all 12 Archive Editions, which filled in the eras before Superboy.

You can probably guess from my pen name that I started out with Adventure. Mystery Lad's introduction was my first Legion story and I was immediately hooked. I think the next issue I got (distribution in the UK was fairly random at that time) was the revival of Lightning Lad.

I kept reading until my folks sold my collection in about 1969 (I was too old for comics apparently and I had discovered girls so was somewhat pre-occupied)

It was only in the mid 70s that I saw a Superboy and the Legion issue and bought it. I was married by then. I started buying new issues again and then discovered dealers selling old issues. I now have all the back issues going all the way to Adventure 247.

I've stuck with the Legion through the good and bad times ever since

Queeg is nearly beside him[?]self in anticipation of your tale.

For the record, I haven't read a Legion comic since about three or four issues into Shooter's last run.

The first issue I bought was Lord Romdurs Castle when I was about seven and continued buying until about halfway through the Tales baxter reprints when my parents decided I was too old for comics and disposed of them.

Several years later I picked up the first issue of the TMK issues on a whim and was immediately hooked again. I went back and repurchased all of the issues from Lord Romdurs up to the end of the Baxter run and continued getting both LSH and Legionnaires up to the start of the DnA run. Soon after this I moved in with my partner at the time and had to sell all of my comics due to a lack of space.

This relationship ended at pretty much the same time as Shooter came back to the Legion so I bought that issue to see if it was still as good as I remembered it.

It was and I now have a complete run from the original Action stories and have sufficient space to both continue going back for the remaining Adventure issues I have outstanding and for the new series to come.

Personally I cannot wait!

I found a stack of comics in my Uncle's room as a young lad. Among them were several Superboy comics. This ine in particular stuck with me for some reason...

S/LSH #208

Read that issue so many times, it's kinda sad. Got back into them somewhere aroung the Great Darkness Saga, and have been a fan ever since. I did take part of the three boot off due to financial reasons however.