THE ALL-NEW GRIM AND GRITTY BOUNCING BOY

Welcome, wretched and bedraggled visitors, to the Bargain Basement of Dooooom. Time to take a look at another neglected 50p bin gem – the 1989 revamp of LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES.

For some reason, many humans and comic geeks alike seem to recoil at the mere mention of the 30th century’s galaxy-spanning superteam, and series under this banner have struggled to gain traction over the last couple of decades – indeed, both Legion titles in the New 52 were eventually cancelled, and the whole concept is currently residing in comic-book limbo, alongside Merryman and the Blimp. People’s resistance to the Legion’s charms is understandable… the team has about 250 members, half of whom have shockingly ridiculous names and/or powers, everything’s firmly rooted in Golden and Silver Age Superboy-based goofiness, and new readers soon find themselves ensnared in an impenetrably convoluted tangle of multi-planetary continuity stretching back to 1958. And that’s before we get into time travel and temporal paradoxes…

On the other hand, when handled well, all of this makes for an incomparably richly layered fictional playground, one that lends itself to gut-wrenching drama as much as it does high silliness, creating the potential for some wildly imaginative stories. The Paul Levitz period of the early to mid-1980s is probably the best era of the traditionally superheroic Legion, peaking with the absolutely classic Great Darkness Saga (which is definitely worth seeking out in trade form). Levitz’s run on Legion ended in 1989 with the Magic Wars storyline, which concluded in #63. Three months later, the series was relaunched, with Keith Giffen, the penciller for much of Levitz’s run, handling both art and plotting. As the none-more-dour cover to #1 made clear, the new Legion was a very different beast to what had come before. 

Giffen (assisted on plot and script by Al Gordon and long-time Legion fans-turned-writers Tom and Mary Bierbaum) set the new Legion five years after the previous series, in a new and much darker context. The missing years had seen the universe ravaged by economic and political collapse and constant war, the Legion had long since disbanded and the diabolical alien race known as the Dominators were in control of Earth. Issue one begins with Chameleon Boy setting out to reunite the Legion, starting with founder member and former leader Cosmic Boy. As the series slowly unfolds, we learn what has happened to the Legionnaires – some are content in retirement, others have changed radically, while still others have met with unpleasant fates.

We also meet some new faces, including Laurel Gand and Kent Shakespeare, analogues for Supergirl and Superman, respectively, after Crisis on Infinite Earths negated those characters’ presence in the 30th century. And here’s where it gets complicated… in the original lore, Superboy was the inspiration for the founding of the Legion – however, as the Crisis retroactively did away with the Superboy part of Superman’s history, a replacement impetus had to be found. In his Superman run, John Byrne had previously established the existence of a ‘pocket universe’ created by long-time Legion foe the Time Trapper, containing an alternate history including the Golden Age Superboy, but pretty soon everyone’s eyes started to bleed from an excess of temporal anomalies. Giffen dispensed with all this in #4 of his Legion run, in which the distinctly Superman-esque Legionnaire Mon-El takes Kal-El’s place in history by beating the Time Trapper out of existence, obliterating the pocket universe and creating an entirely new timeline. Or something like that.

If the above paragraph leaves you feeling bewildered, well, that’s to be expected. Reading Giffen’s ‘Five Years Later’ Legion is a generally bewildering experience. For a start, it depends on the reader having a fairly comprehensive understanding of the three preceding decades of Legion comics. In terms of storytelling and dialogue, there’s a constant sense that you’ve started eavesdropping halfway through a mumbled conversation. Rarely in costume, with nary a flight ring to be seen, the characters are not referred to by their catchy-but-dumb codenames, but by alienating monickers – Rokk, Reep, Rond, Tinya, Kono. But it’s Giffen’s art that you’ll either love or loathe. Wildly experimental and distinctive, often with characters depicted unrecognisably, in heavy shadow, at odd angles and contorted into bizarre forms, seemingly made of lumpy clay. There’s an almost surreal, dreamlike aspect to a lot of this stuff. Compounding matters, Giffen deliberately offsets the freeform, fluid, nigh-horrifying abstraction of his pencils with the formal rigidity of a post-Watchmen nine-panel grid, which he deploys almost exclusively. Quite honestly, between the convoluted continuity, the abstruse storytelling style and the wilfully disorienting art, it’s often hard to tell what in the name of Mordru is happening.

However, that’s not always a bad thing. While not my first introduction to the Legion (I’d been an on-off dabbler for a while, equally intrigued and repelled), it was without a doubt Giffen’s run that sold me on the concept. It’s true to say that on first reading, with little knowledge of Legion lore, I didn’t have a clue what was going on half the time –but for me that was much of the appeal. It piqued my interest, hinted at a much wider and more optimistic world, one that had been lost. Initially bleak in tone, Giffen’s Legion is both symptomatic of and a response to the darker comics that were beginning to dominate at the time – rather than revelling in its grim-and-grittiness, the series consciously sought to return to its brighter roots. The first issue finds the team at their lowest ebb, and the story that subsequently unfolds is one of escaping the darkness that has befouled the universe. But it takes its time to do so – it’s many issues before we see anything close to a traditional Legion. And even then, not all is as it appears to be.

As impenetrable as it could sometimes be, I still think this is one of the most interesting and most underrated series published by DC in the late ’80s/early ’90s. In terms of art, pacing, storytelling, atmosphere and its handling of well-established characters, it remains remarkably brave and bold, and unlike anything else on the racks at the time (or possibly since). It was, in theory, a fresh start for a fairly major mainstream title, one that for 30 years had been the epitome of bright, almost naïve superhero hokum – but somehow it ended up as a half-remembered sci-fi nightmare, like Bladerunner directed by David Lynch.

So does the above constitute a recommendation or a dire warning? Answers via omnicom (in Interlac, obviously).

(originally published on The Big Glasgow Comic Page)