Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Re-Reading the Legion: Archives #3

I seem to recall mentions of both flora and fauna being poisonous, but I'm not 100% certain. I want to say that later versions actually had the human colonists copying the matter-eating ability of native animals. One of my fan theories has it that Bismollian humanoids would also be poisonous to eat!

Adv 323

YES! YES! YES!

What a great comic! What a terrific story! How will they ever top this?! (Alright nurse, I'll take my medication now.)

Excuse my excitement but this is the first Legion story I ever remember reading, many, many years ago (probably before some of you were more than a twinkle in your mother's eye as they used to say) in a black and white Australian reprint album of Superboy stories. In fact I remember being quite surprised years later to learn that Imra was blonde, Brainy was green, and Cham was orange. So reading this has brought back many happy memories.

So a few thoughts from way back then.

- Wow who are all these "kids" (big teenage kids to me) with different super powers? What a terrific idea!

- Double-header is creepy.

- Saturn Girl seems a bit stiff but nice.

- Proty - what a weird little blob.

- A puzzle! I'll never figure it out.

- Rodeos look fun. Oh kangabroncs come in green? I guess if they say so. Ultra Boy has a nice hairdo. Mine never looked that good. (Looking back it's interesting how distinctive each of the guy's hair was, much more than in the later "better" art days.

- The mighty Gazor was a real baddy. I wish I had a Garf-Og.

- Element Lad was clever.

- Who is this Pete Ross guy? Glad they explained it to me. (As I learnt more it still felt weird to see Pete and Jimmy together.)

- Wow Brainiac 5 must the nicest most humble smart guy ever. I wish I was like him. (This was my image of him for a long time. No wonder the later arrogant versions still grate against me. "What a swell guy!" indeed.)

- Jimmy Olsen has super powers? He is really tricky with those puppets. I can't see how those four strings make some puppets do those tricks. (Artistic license was a concept I would learn much later.) Wait there are more super-kids? Who are Light Lass, Shrinking Violet, Triplicate Girl, Invisible Kid and Matter-Eater Lad? (Ironically I would never read a comic with Invisible Kid alive until I had read others much much later with his successor and learnt that he was dead.)

- Wow! (again) a super acceptance ceremony. And some more super-heroes I don't know - yet. As Superboy says "Surprises are the rule, instead of the exception, in this most amazing club of all time ... the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES!" This was GREAT! Where can I find another story about these kids?

Well I did find another story and another ... and like the rest of you became stuck for life.

So please excuse me for feeling that this is one of the greatest Legion stories ever, maybe with no big bad guy, little danger except for Element Lad, and their pet choosing the next leader, but still one of the most fun and full of different powers and characters. This is where history was made - at least for me.

Future Legion writers please take note of the above post.

Hear, hear. The heart of the Legion - camaraderie, diversity, interesting events and adventures, and the halcyon optimism of youth.

Adventure #325

It's been a few issues since a Superboy character was prominently featured in the Legion, so that is rectified with Lex Luthor battling them. Unlike Urthlo, this is the actual younger Lex. In years past I never cared for Lex in Legion stories but I've begun changing my mind.

It's also been awhile since we had some brains in jars. Well, not really, but hey, welcome Brain Lords of Khan.

Best line goes to Atro, the Brain Lord that you love to hate: "Bah! Your mutual admiration is sickening!"

It occurs to me that a totally awesome idea would have been for a pre-accident Luthor to have become an honorary member of the Legion. Thus, his turn towards villainy, which the Legion would know about in advance, would be all the more tragic. In a post-Smallville world, which awesomely played up the Clark / Lex friendship, this would be a fantastic story arc.

In his first few panels, this really comes across, though later in the story you learn its all a ruse. But what if...?!!

The Legionnaires are having fun goofing around and showing a side we haven't seen much of yet. Then Mon shows up ready for a street fight! That's two issues in a row he's done that! Could it be the PTSD of the Phantom Zone is breaking through?

Brainy then mumbles so quasi-science mumbo-jumbo that made my head hurt. Er, ok Brainy.

With a great set up in part 1, part 2 becomes basically all action. And to be honest, it kind of falters for me there. The tension is lost as Lex becomes pretty redundant and cliche, plus I hate seeing the Legion taken down one after another again.

Superboy and Supergirl are shown working side by side again, but we still don't get an in-story reference to how odd this would be to them. I was hoping this would be story we do, given the cover.

We see the highly rare (for a Legion story) parallel worlds sci-fi trope as Cham and Proty visit their alt selves. Cool! And more Atlantis connections.

Hold the phone! Who is the masked criminal in panel 4, page 6, part 2? A yellow costume with a skull & crossbones on his mask? Hella-kewl! We must learn more!! He appears again on page 7.

The opening panel on page 7, part 2 is magnificent. The entire Legion surrounding Luthor. Someone must post it! Really fantastic!

All in all, though it falters at times, this is still a good story. It benefits from strong character bits in the beginning and then every Legionnaire appearing in the finale. It succeeded in making me want to see more Lex and the Legion interactions.

Special bonus: this issue answers my question a few pages earlier and presents excerpts from the Legion Constitution! Very cool!

It establishes that the manner in which the annual Legion elections shall be held will be determined by a vote of 3/4 of the LSH membership. Explaining how the Eight Impossible Missions could fit into what's been established.

Great idea for pre-bald Luthor! Kind of the reverse of the TV Smallville's Brainiac.

Superboy and Supergirl working together may simply not be that weird. First, they have had amazing adventures already, second, they're time-travelling. When you're living la vida super, at some point you just learn to go along for the ride.

But you're right, it wouldn't have hurt to have one moment with Kal thinking "there's another survivor from Krypton, and she's my COUSIN!"

Or maybe Kara having impure thoughts about her older cousin's suddenly age-appropriate buff body.

Adv. 325

This is one of those Legion stories I know happened but forget that it happened until I re-read it. Then I remember why I forgot it.

"Lex Luthor Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes" could have been an epic story, but it's not. Superboy/man's arch enemy finds a way to travel into the future and get his revenge on the Legion. How could such a story miss? Well . . .

As with the Dev-Em story, this one starts off with an excellent idea that could have developed into an outstanding story. A pre-evil Lex Luthor travels to the future where he learns that he is destined to become one of Superboy's greatest enemies. Oh, the anguish! Oh, the drama as the Legionnaires try to find some way to prevent this likeable guy from becoming one of the worst villains the DCU has ever known. But instead the Legion brushes Lex aside with enough scientific babble that would put Star Trek to shame and tells him to enjoy himself in the 30th century. But no matter. It's a ruse anyway with evil Lex yanking off his toupee as soon as he's alone.

Why evil Lex went to such troubles to ingratiate himself into the Legion is unrevealed--though a hint can be found at the end when he goes to equally great and absurd lengths to embarrass the Legion on intergalactic TV. His ego, apparently, demands it.

OK, a super-sized ego is one of Lex's well-established traits. Even at this point, the story could have been awesome. But Lex goes about his revenge by building a disintegrator ray and ambushing the Legionnaires. Taking Mon-El by surprise is moderately plausible (Mon does seem to charge recklessly into situations), and then he ambushes a handful of Legionnaires after calling them back from various missions. But by the time he ambushes the rest of the Legion, all drama has dissipated as these scenes fail to build upon one another. Lex (who, oddly enough, qualifies as the story's protagonist since it is he who has a goal) doesn't truly risk anything and there are no real obstacles to overcome. His victory over the entire Legion is far too easy.

But wait! It's trick ending time. It turns out that Lex couldn't build a disintegrator ray, after all (why not?), so he had to settle for a paltry Phantom Zone projector. One would think if he could build the latter, he could build the former. And it turns out, while trapped in the Phantom Zone, Mon convinced his teammates to mess with Lex's mind. They manipulate him into freeing them, embarrass him on intergalactic TV (the fate he had intended for them), and let him return to his own time, free to plot even more revenge (which, miraculously, he never carries out).

Ho hum.

If you're going to feature a major villain like Lex, there should be consequences to the story. Granted, Hamilton was constrained by the fact that Lex couldn't die or be sent to prison in the 30th century. But still something MAJOR should have happened here. But we don't even get to see Superboy and Supergirl square off against Lex, even though they're the only Legionnaires featured on the cover.

It's nice that Mon figures out the solution and that said solution builds off his previous story line, but that's about the only thing I like about this yarn. Even though it features the entire Legion, few of them do anything of note.

Huh. That must also be why I barely remember this story as well! Most of the other stories we've reviewed, I have some residual memory of (enough for me to locate the appropriate archive or remember the plot concept).

With this one, I remember only the scene where young Lex reveals he's actually adult Lex.

He's still a teenaged Lex. He lost his air while still a boy.

Oh, so he pretended to only be a slightly younger version of himself from when he lost his hair. The shocking reveal of the story and I misremembered it!

My post was also misleading when I wrote "a young Lex Luthor." I've changed it.

Incidentally, Adv. 329 publishes a letter from a fan who questions how Lex can wear a wig since it had been previously established that he was "allergic to any human hair other than his own and he couldn't find an effective synthetic hair wig." Mort's response is that Lex wore the wig with great discomfort and took it off as soon as he was alone.

Maybe, but he wears the wig an awful lot in this story.

He DID have a lot of motivation to suffer through that discomfort - his almost irrational hatred of Superboy and the Legion.

Except what did he hate the Legion for?

He hates everyone that reminds him of Superman?

Not really reason enough to travel 1000 years into the future just to embarrass them.

I mean how did he ever hear of the Legion?

Not that it isn't a good concept for Luthor and the Legion to meet, but laying a teeny tiny bit of groundwork would be nice.

Your wish is my command, at least this time:

We definitely should have had an All Brains in Globes story for the Legion. And why were there no noble brains in globes, apart from the one Jor-El had?



That would have been awesome! Lex and Pete Ross (forget Jimmy) traveling with Superboy to attend Legion meetings. At least, Brainy would have had someone intelligent to talk to.



This was the best part of the story. Brainy should have had more mumbo-jumbo lines in later tales.



The ultimate ego-deflator would have been to have Proty II defeat Lex.




After reading this story (and not much liking the Lex Luthor stories anyways), I was thinking this could have been a Twilight Zone sort of thing. Lex has a real time capsule, yet he keeps getting pulled to the 30th century to confront the Legion - and lose - and he keeps returning. Maybe it's more like Groundhog Day.

It might have been interesting if Lex had met his adult descendant (the one in the story with Mr. Mxy's descendant); another twist of the knife, that his line became do-gooders.


Lex's parting words: "But I'll get back at them someday! I swear it!" suggests that he crossed the Fourth Wall and eventually became head of DC Comics, cancelling the Legion.

I love how most of the Legionnaires are just looking confusedly at the silly bald man disintegrating them without much panic on their faces.

Continuity Alert! So why didn't Tinya use her ability to move in and out of the Phantom Zone (as shown a mere 2 issues ago in her encounter with Gazor!) to get the LSH out of this fix?!?! Both issues were even written by Jerry Siegel, so that ain't the reason! Lazy work, Siegel!

So what you're saying is that the Lex Luthor of the Time Trapper's pocket-earth survived that planet's destruction by escaping to Earth Prime and changing his name to Dan Didio?

Makes perfect sense to me.

Adv. 326

Quick joke: What did the boy Legionnaire say to get his face slapped? "The girl Legionnaires are revolting!"

"The Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires" is a story I have a lot of mixed feelings over. In many ways, it's nowhere near as good as the similar "The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines" in Adv. 368, but, if one can get past the rampant sexism and anticlimactic ending, it's not that bad.

Okay, the sexism first: Many young boys pass through a stage where they fear girls will take advantage of them (and girls probably pass through the same stage), and this story plays on that fear. For some reason, the girl Legionnaires have decided to betray the boy Legionnaires by pretending to get romantic with them and then, as soon as the boys are in a compromising state, trick them and leave them for dead.

The girl Legionnaires are portrayed as mean-spirited and conniving. They refer to the boys as "you gullible simpleton" and "Cosmic Mite". They even blast statues of the boy Legionnaires with a futuristic cannon to celebrate each victory.

As if boys and girls don't have enough trouble relating to one another . . . sheesh!

On the other hand, the girls are portrayed as smart and capable in planning the various boys' demises. (No "too dangerous for a girl" dialogue here.) First, they misdirect a shipload of boy Legionnaires--including two of the most powerful members, Mon-El and Ultra Boy--into a month-long mission away from earth. Then they group-date the remaining boys so the boys will let down their guards. Then it's divide and conquer time.

Element Lad, strangely, is the only boy who fights back. After Light Lass makes his boots super light weight so he'll float up to a mountain top (wouldn't he float upside down?), he counters by turning his boots into neutronium (wouldn't doing so have caused him to crash land back into the earth?), only to have Ayla counter with another burst of super-lightness. I wish this scene had played out longer, with Jan and Ayla getting into a weightless-versus-elements duel, but at least we get a real fight going on here. The rest of the boys are far too passive.

Phantom Girl's means of dispatching Star Boy, however, is clever: tricking him into making himself super-heavy so he sinks into the earth and cannot escape. Poor Thom. I felt sorry for him.

And then once the girls have gotten rid of the boys, it's anticlimax time. There must have been some mandate in these early stories, either from Mort or elsewhere, that the villains in Legion stories be as non-threatening as possible. Aside from The Time Trapper, nearly all of the Legion's villains so far have been easily defeated or have recanted. Such is the case with Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz, who contacts the girl Legionnaires and reveals it was she who brainwashed them into betraying the boys. The reason? Femnaz is populated only by women, so the queen thought she was doing the girls a favor by turning them into murderers!

That was until the boy Legionnaires whom Saturn Girl misdirected (remember them?) show up to save Femnaz after one of their goddess-worshipping ceremonies literally cuts their moon in half. (Dumb women! Can't be trusted not to destroy their own moon.) The boys save the day, convincing Azura that men aren't so icky after all. Azura cancels the girls' brainwashing, and they save the boys they tried to kill. Hurray!

This story, like so many others, was a product of its time. It assumes several things: 1) Men are smarter than women. 2) Women need men to save them from their own misdoings. 3) Women villains, once they've seen the error of their ways, are too nice not to recant.

This sort of sexism was not unique to the Legion or comic books. A brilliant student-written article called "Lucy, You Have Some 'Splainin' to Do" by Nicole Benbow explains how even "I Love Lucy" subtly hinted that women's place was in the home and not the workforce. TV shows and movies of the 1950s and '60s were rampant with these assumptions. (And, it can be argued, not much has changed in the five decades since.)

Worse, "The Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires" shows how such messages were inculcated to the audience at a very young age. Giving children such messages is dangerous, as they can grow up with distorted images of who they are and what the opposite sex is like based on "innocent" stories such as this.

But, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln thought this was a really good show.

Perfidy, thy name is woman!

At last we get a story with all the girls present and active, and they're the villains! Quite wicked, too! I wouldn't blame the boys for swearing off girls altogether after this...

On the other hand, it does suggest that the boys are terribly gullible - all of a sudden, females they've been working with all along are looking for romance? Only Superboy feels it would be ungallant to refuse a requested kiss rather than think he was about to get lucky

quote=He Who Wanders]

On the other hand, the girls are portrayed as smart and capable in planning the various boys' demises. (No "too dangerous for a girl" dialogue here.)[/quote]

It would have been better if the girls had employed these deceptions against criminals.



That was an abrupt and shallow turn of events. Azura's sorry she brainwashed them into attempted murder and now sees the error of her ways. Too bad the girls couldn't have fought off the brainwashing through their deep sense of loyalty and camaraderie, and an aversion to take life.



Where was the Comic Code on this story? It just goes to show the prevailing attitudes of the time.

Regardless, I agree it was an interesting story and made good use of the girls different powers.

Adventure #326

One can't help but think of the later Thora story when you read "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires". That story is a much better one IMO, though both have their flaws. With women's liberation something many people were still struggling to understand in the early and mid 60's, it didn't take much for some missteps in pop-art presenting that. Though Hamilton was a clear supporter and a liberal, this story doesn't gain any charm as it ages unlike so many others.

One thing about this story as compared to the Thora one is this one shows the various girls actually seducing the boys which is kind of scandalous. The mean-spiritedness of the seductions kind of take all fun out of it. Still, cool that badass #1 Imra takes out Superboy.

Panel 1 introduces the Cellular Trim Ray, including years of groans and hilarious posts on LW!

There isn't much to comment on besides one mean trick after another other than "why a rocket launcher?". It all leads to the best panel ever, with the girls dancing to celebrate their victory as if they're drunk and high. Complete with Vi's skirt around her waste and Imra cackling like the Time Trapper.

The resolution is rushed and feels patronizing. All in all, this is the worst story in the third Archive, and possibly since Adv #267.

Meanwhile the Letters Page is actually more interesting. Mort basically confirms coyly that Supergirl joined before Superboy due to Brainy being present for Superboy's initiation with "time travel is tricky".