Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33
"Untitled"
Cover Date: September 1992
Writer: Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: David A. Williams, Chris Sprouse

Previously...

The Legion is still fighting the Dominators for control of Earth, as is the other, younger Legion. It was just that sort of time for the Legion.

Plot

Get your tinfoil hats on people, because it's time for some double-barrelled Bierbaum retcon action! Fortunately, I'll be here to keep it all manageable.

Chameleon Boy (the adult one, since his SW6 counterpart died in the previous issue) is on the planet Val to meet with his father R.J. Brande. (Finding out that R.J. Brande was actually a Durlan and Chameleon Boy's father was one of the first and most respected of all of the Legion's retcons).

Meanwhile, on Winath, Adult!Lightning Lad meets with Proty II, the Legion's old team pet/mascot thing. Lightning Lad wishes that he had gone to help Kid Quantum. (Because, you see, he is actually the soul of the first Proty who basically possessed Lightning Lad after the later had died, although very few characters know this fact. This was another fan theory that the Bierbaums wrote into their Legion run.) So, two pages, two retcons mentioned already? We are making good time!

On Earth, a head Dominator hears about the 'Soul of Antares' and so hires a guy named Adam Orion, the Hunter to go capture it.

Totally, definitely, not a rip-off of Kraven.

Anyway, back on Val, a man named Rouvin heads to the local saloon, flirts with the bar-tender, and bribes a robo-sheriff, before heading back to his cabin which contains a Legion Flag, a Legion costume, could he be the mysterious Kid Quantum? And, more importantly, can he convince the readers that he isn't a terrible character that has no reason for existing? Spoiler Alert: Yes, and emphatically no, respectively.

But now it is time for some exposition. Both the Dominators and R.J. Brande and Chameleon Boy have conversations that, between the two of them, give the audience the backstory here. So, it turns out that there was a planet called Antares where a species of telepathic shapeshifters lived, but Glorith, who at this point is essentially the arch-enemy of the Legion, wanted to enslave them, so they...and bear with me here....put their species' sentience into one of their number, who was stripped of his telepathy and shapeshifting skills for some reason. Anyway, he is the Soul of Antares.

And there's some more. So, the Soul of Antares decided to create a new identity for himself, that of James Cullen, Kid Quantum, who had some sort of belt that let him manipulate quantum...stuff. But his identity got compromised, so he faked his own death and has been hiding out on the planet Val ever since.

Okay, almost done. Apparently, seven other Antareans also had their sentience preserved, and so have been bugging R.J. Brande and Adult!Lightning Lad to find the Soul of Antares/Kid Quantum for a while now. Yeah, well, let's just go with it.

So, Adam Orion shows up on Val, and starts wrecking shit and taking hostages, looking for Kid Quantum, Chameleon Boy and Brande try and stop him and fail horribly. So, finally, Kid Quantum shows up to save his friends, but, before he can do that, we really need a page where the characters try and talk themselves into the idea that this whole set-up makes even the slightest bit of sense.

"Yep...no need to question it any further."

 

 

 

But, just as Adam Orion is about to do us all a favor and plug Kid Quantum in the skull, those sentient Antareans from earlier show up and stop him. And so Brande, Cham, and the Kid Quantum head off to Antares to restore the spirit of the Antareans people, except the Emerald Eye shows up to redirect them to a planet called Gallan. I'm beyond caring at this point.

Back on Earth, SW6!Lightning Lad is pissed that a bunch of his SW6 friends got killed last issue. SW6!Saturn Girl shows up and wonders why Garth is being such a dick. The short answer: because of retcon bullshit. The long answer...

The Long Answer (Take Two Aspirin Before Reading)

At this moment in Legion continuity, it had been established that when Lightning Lad was brought back to life, it was really just his body being possessed by the soul of Proty. Now, the SW6 Legion were originally from a time after Lightning Lad had died and come back to life, but, for some convoluted reason, the Bierbaums decided that SW6!Lightning Lad would have the soul of the real Lightning Lad, even though, from a continuity perspective, he should have the soul of Proty. The change in souls also affected Lightning Lad's personality, so SW6!Saturn Girl is confused to why Lightning Lad had reverted to the way he acted before he died, rather than his new personality after he came back from life. And that is exactly the sort of story knowledge and intuition you need in order to make sense of the closing scenes of this issue, which basically explains everything that was wrong with the Legion at the time.

Commentary

Why? Why did they make this story. I mean, if you want to make a new character, fine (although at this moment, readers already had to keep track of something like forty characters). But why retcon another new character into Legion history? It just makes the entire continuity that much more unstable.

As for the Kid Quantum character, well, he's a complete dud. I mean, he's such a dud that when Mark Waid had an edict from editorial to kill off a Legionnaire in the first issues of the reboot Legion, Kid Quantum was his sacrificial lamb.

But, yeah, he's the sort of character where, just due to his backstory, the other characters continually go, "Oh, man, remember the awesome times we had with Kid Quantum", even though no such stories were ever printed, which means if feels like we're something like 80% of the way to fanfiction.

So, yeah,  in summary, 1992 was a shitty year to be a Legion fan.

Damage Stars: *****
 

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #31

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #31
"The Elements of Heartbreak"
Cover Date: July 1992
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Coleen Doran and Curt Swan(!)

Previously...

Okay, get some Tylenol because we're now in the part of Legion history where the stories make no God-damned sense unless you've read thirty years worth of Legion stories AND know exactly how the retcons have affected them.

The adult Legion (I'll get to that in a minute) is on Earth. In five-year gap between Levitz' and Giffen's runs, Earth has been secretly taken over by the Dominators, who, as you might guess, aren't great dudes. Anyway, the revolution against Dominator rule has starter, and the Legion has spent the better part of last year fighting them.

But wait, there's more! As part of the story, some stasis chambers under the surface of the Earth have been opened, releasing the SW6 Legion, who are essentially younger versions of the Legionnaires, meaning that, in addition to the two dozen or so characters already in the Giffen run, now you've got another entire Legion to keep track of. Oh, and no one knows if they're clones or not or where they've come from, but they're fighting the Dominators too.

Oh, and for the past dozen years or so, Jan Arrah, known as Element Lad, has had an on-again, off-again relationship with a Science Cop named Shvaughn Erin. Okay, ready? No, you aren't, but let's get on with it anyway.

Plot

On the wartorn Earth, adult!Element Lad breaks into a drug store to get some pills for Shvaughn. 

At the same time, and not too far away, SW6!Chameleon Boy and SW6!Element Lad are attacking a Dominator patrol squad. SW6!Element Lad fucks up and accidentally kills a bunch of them, so runs off alone out of shame.

Adult!Element Lad get the drugs back to Shvaugn, who is taking them to help her get through her ProFem withdrawal. You know the second you hear the word 'ProFem' that things are about to go off of the rails. Anyway, Shvaughn wants something to take her mind off the pain, so asks Adult!Element Lad to tell her a story.

Not missing the chance to use a tired dramatic device, Adult!Element Lad's narration of the story is juxtaposed with SW6!Element Lad's running around being sad. The story is about a Trommite kid (on Trom everyone had the power to transmute the elements at will, but they all got killed, and now Jan is the only one left). So, the kid asks his father why he can't kill things with his powers. His dad answers "A Trommite can kill no one if not himself." The kid does not respond well to this zen bullshit, and so kills his dad by turning him into "flakes of carbon."

Around this time, Shvaugn cuts her hair and insists on being called 'Sean', but wants Adult!Element Lad to finish the story. So, it turns out that all of the people and animals of the planet Trom shun the kid for killing his father, and, depressed by the isolation, the kid kills himself by turning himself into "flakes of carbon." The End.

The lesson that Sean takes from the story is that he has to go through the rest of this transition on his own, which does not seem like a particularly good interpretation of the story that Adult!Element Lad told. He leaves, and Adult!Element Lad lets him go. Sean stumbles around for awhile, and then collapses into a snow bank, and who should happen by but SW6!Element Lad, they talk for a bit, and SW6!Element Lad gets retrieved by SW6!Saturn Girl while Sean just kind of wanders off.

Meanwhile, in space, SW6!Valor meets Adult!Valor, and they're mighty confused by this turn of events. Also, the Emerald Eye teases a return, but it's hard to get excited about that.

Finally, as was the custom of this era's Legion, there are a couple of text pieces that give important exposition. It's really a testament to how continuity-heavy this Legion was that, even with Keith Giffen using a Watchmen-esque nine-panel grid for every page of his run, they still didn't have enough room to get all of the necessary information in the actual comic.

The important text piece her is a letter written by Shvaugn Erin right before she became Sean. She explains she grew up as a dude on a planet with some seriously regressive gender-identity norms, so he had trouble fitting in, and he had a crush on the young Element Lad, so this led him to run away to some sort of future-hippie commune on Earth, and then decided to become a woman for some vague reasons about not being comfortable with who he was, also, so as to make the wooing of Element Lad slightly easier. And she had been doing it ever since, except the Dominators outlawed ProFem, and now she's about to turn back into a man.

Commentary

I suppose my first question is...why? I mean, on the one hand, I guess making a long-term recurring character a transgender person is a novel form of retcon, but this probably isn't the way to do it, not the least of which is because it kind of conflates being gay and being transgender in a way that's confusing at best.

I've heard two theories about why they made Shvaugn Erin into a man. Keith Giffen in an interview he did for the Legion Companion said that he wanted to kill Erin off, but some other member of the creative staff was against is. Giffen said the only way he wouldn't kill her off is if she had some sort of interesting hook he could use. The other guy blurted out 'She's really a man' and there you go.

The other theory has to do with the Bierbaums, who were longtime fans of the Legion before they became writers. There was a popular fan theory that Element Lad was gay, primarily centered around the fact that he originally wore a pink costume and didn't have an established girlfriend. Eventually, when Paul Levitz took over, he gave Element Lad a new costume and a girlfriend in the guise of Shvaughn Erin, thus foiling the fan's speculation. Ten years later, the Bierbaums find a way to make continuity conform to their wishes by making Shvaugn into a man, which would then lead to Element Lad becoming gay or something.

Anyway, either way, those theories do kind of point to the problems the Legion were having at the time. On the one hand, you had a guy like Giffen, who could be a tad bit capricious, and on the other you had the Bierbaums, whose stories often teetered close to fan-fiction. Incidentally, their partnership ended about as badly as you might think, with Keith Giffen blowing up the Earth in his last issue, and then the Bierbaums moving on to a spinoff featuring the SW6 Legionnaires.

Just not a good moment for the Legion.

Damage Stars: *****

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #4

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #4
"Untitled"
Cover Date: February 1990
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Keith Giffen (Pencils), Al Gordon (Inks)

Previously...
 
A ton of stuff, but the only story that really mattered was the one where the Legion fought the Time Trapper and killed him, but Mon-El got mortally wounded in the process. It's been five years since then.

Plot

On Talok VIII, Shadow Lass is still in mourning for Mon-El, her husband, and gets removed from her position as planetary protector as a result.

Mon-El, however, isn't quite dead, and rises from his grave to find Shadow Lass. The problem is that his body is hosting not only the essence of the Time Trapper, but also the essence of another guy, who we'll hear more about a bit later. The Time Trapper starts making some noise about this all being part of his plan.

Mon-El and Shadow Lass reunite, but he feels compelled to inform her of his possession problem/ They fly off to Colu to meet with Brainiac 5, who will presumably come up with some sort of science-y solution to their problem. Meanwhile, the spirit of the Time Trapper explains who the third voice is. It turns out it's from a guy named Eltro Gand, who was the descendant of Mon-El (just go with it, okay.) Anyway, in an earlier story, it was prophesied that Mon-El would die soon, so Eltro Gand showed up to save him. Of course, prophecy usually wins out, so in trying to prevent Mon-El's death, he accidentally caused it. So, as an act of contrition, he sacrificed his life-force to bring Mon-El back to life, but, as it turns out, that also ended up transplanting Eltro Gand's soul into Mon-El's body, which is the retcon for why Mon-El had been acting kind of erratically for the latter part of Paul Levitz's run.

Anyway, Brainiac 5 figures out how to get the essence of the Time Trapper out of Mon-El's body, but the Time Trapper decides it's time to step in, and manages to spirit Mon-El away to the Pocket Universe (I'll explain in a minute), while siccing Brainiac 5's erstwhile android assistant on Brainy and Shadow Lass.

In the Pocket Universe, the Time Trapper explains that what he really wants is to take full possession of Mon-El's immortal body, and the two start to fighting. Mon-El manages to eventually wear the Time Trapper down, so the villain decides to explain exactly what the fuck is going on. And here we go:

The Time Trapper, who is the personification of entropy and the ruler of the end of time, decided that he wanted to conquer some eras in history where people actually, you know, lived. But, looking back through time, he noticed that the 30th century was ruled by the wizard (and perennial Legion villain) Mordru. The Trapper knew he couldn't beat Mordru in a straight-up fight, so he decided on an insanely convoluted scheme. He wanted a team of super-heroes that would keep Mordru out of power, and then be swept aside by the Trapper himself. To that end, he created a Pocket Universe with its own Superboy that would inspire the creation of the Legion, and made sure that when the Legion traveled back in time, they always ended up in the Pocket Universe. He also put Mon-El in the Pocket Universe as a failsafe, so that the Trapper would have an invulnerable body to retreat into in case of emergency. Finally, he pulled R.J. Brande, the Legion's original financier, from the regular universe's 20th century. The upshot is that the Legion would not exist were it not for the Time Trapper's machinations.

But wait, there's one more catch. Because of the Time Trapper's relationship with time, if Mon-El kills him now, then the Trapper will retroactively cease to exist, erasing all of the things he's done, including the creation of the Legion and the prevention of Mordru's conquering the galaxy. Mon-El's reaction to this news? Well...

"Better oblivion than retcon, motherfucker!"

 

 

And that's the end of the issue.

Commentary

In case you're wondering, this wasn't actually a reboot. What happened was that Levitz had set up the Pocket Universe explanation to get around the fact that Superboy, who was crucial to most of the Legion's early stories, was no longer in the main continuity. It was a pretty good work-around, but after he left, the Superman editorial staff issued an edict that no Superman or Superman-related characters could appear in Legion stories anymore. Giffen and the Bierbaums had a choice between either never mentioning the vast majority of past Legion stories, since they contained the offending material, or rewriting continuity to remove all instances of Superboy and the Pocket Universe. They elected the latter.

So, this issue was the set-up for the next issue, where history is restored, but with several notable changes, starting a period known as the "Glorith continuity". Honestly, though, it was just a bad idea all over. Almost every single story had some sort of retcon in it, whether from which characters were in it to much more drastic changes. For example, in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50, a group of Legionnaires traveled to the end of time to kill the Time Trapper for killing the Pocket Universe Superboy. In the revised continuity, a group of Legionnaires traveled to Glorith's home planet to get revenge on her for destroying Daxam. And these stories are supposed to occupy the same slot in the Legion's history.

Really, this was basically end of the first incarnation of the Legion. Once Giffen and company were forced to rewrite the continuity this heavily, things were never going to work right, because virtually every story was somehow different. Not that Giffen and the Bierbaums are blameless, since the Bierbaums, who had started the careers as two of the more prominent fans of the Legion, seemingly couldn't help themselves from retconning things for no particularly good reason. In this issue alone, they decided that Mon-El's character over the past five years or so of Legion comics hadn't been to their liking, so they decided he was acting oddly because he was possessed by Eltro Gand. And they did stuff like that every issue, culminating in the infamous issue where they decided, since the popular fan theory had been that Element Lad was gay, but had since been paired, in continuity with a female character, that they would retcon the woman into really being a man, which would somehow square things. Not coincidentally, shortly thereafter Paul Levitz ordered a hard reboot for the Legion's continuity.

 

Legion Of Super-Heroes (v3) #55

Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #55
"Different Paths"
Cover Date: Holiday 1988
Writer: Paul Levitz
Artist/Co-Plotter: Keith Giffen
Guest Artists: Ernie Colon, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Erik Larsen

Previously...

Okay, settle in.

Polar Boy was elected leader of the Legion, which hasn't been going all that well. The most recent catastrophe is that a few Legionnaires banded together to go kill the Time Trapper after the villain put together a hopelessly complicated plan that ended with an alternate version of Superboy getting killed. The grand result of the plan is that a bunch of Legionnaires resigned for various reasons.

In another sub-plot, the guy named Atmos, from the same planet as Star Boy, has stolen Dream Girl, Star Boy's girlfriend, which led to Star Boy quitting the Legion out of frustration.

Finally, Blok, a giant rock-man, is going through puberty.

Plot

The White Witch is on the Sorceror's World, having resigned from the Legion a few issues ago. She's trying to decide whether or not she want to rejoin the team, but eventually decides to stay on the Sorceror's World and be a mentor to a young Khund boy in the ways of sorcery.

Elsewhere, on Colu, Brainiac 5, who also resigned from the Legion, is hanging out on Colu trying to figure out what they hell he's supposed to do now. He eventually decides that he wants to tinker around with time travel, since it was recently revealed that the Legion didn't really know how to travel through time so much as the Time Trapper wanted them to think they did. Some Coluan leaders come into to tell Brainiac 5 that he's not allowed to fuck around with the fabric of space and time for fun, and this makes Brainiac 5 sad.

On Xanthu, Atmos, feeling that merely stealing Star Boy's girlfriend from him doesn't really show the depths of his own assholish-ness, has decided to show Star Boy up on their home planet out of spite. Star Boy, who must be secretly hated by every Legion writer to date, decides to just get the hell off of Xanthu. This pisses Atmos off, and Dream Girl starts to suspect that Atmos is using his powers to screw with her mind.

Somewhere else, Blok is having the least-subtle subplot about being a teenager in comic book history.

"Adults don't understand, man!"

Anyway, it turns out the Blok is being manipulated by some villain to...you know what, there was a reason that neither the reboot or Threeboot Legions featured Blok, and why Keith Giffen couldn't off him fast enough.

Back at the Legion base, Polar Boy is kind of depressed that he's been such a terrible leader. The End.

Comments

I know a lot of people like the Levitz Legion, but I'm not really one of them. Probably because I didn't really grow up with them, so I don't have that same sort of emotional attachment. I did have something of an attachment to the reboot Legion that came around after Zero Hour, but well....

At any rate, this comic falls near the end of Levitz's initial run of Legion, and it came at a weird time for the book. After the crisis, the Legion had to hurriedly figure out how to fix its continuity to make up for the fact that Superboy, who had appeared in basically every foundational Legion story was no longer in continuity. So Levitz wrote a story that involved a pocket universe and an incredibly convoluted scheme by the Time Trapper, and it basically held everything together as long as you didn't think about it too hard.

And it wasn't all bad, since the story itself was decent enough, and it did lead to one of my favorite Legion stories ever, an epic showdown with the Time Trapper in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50. But, by this point, it's fair to say that the Legion was getting kind of stale. After all, Levitz had been writing the book for something like a decade straight.

I guess the thing I was always thought was interesting was that Levitz took a book set 1000 years in the future, one which had loads and loads of characters, and decided, 'What the hell, I'll make a soap opera out of it.' In his defense, it worked out pretty well, but it did create one rather large problem.

Soap operas rely, to a large extent, on continuity, in order to have tons of character development, you need earlier stories to be recalled by the reader. Once the Crisis hit, the Legion's continuity started falling apart, and that kind of made this version of the  Legion untenable.

Here's what I've never gotten, though: What is so fucking special about this version of the Legion? I mean, what's so great about it that DC went to extraordinary lengths to bring it back after about twenty years in Limbo? It's a fine book, but a book like this is never really going to attract new readers, as evidenced by the fact that the Levitz-penned Legion #1 released as part of the line-wide reboot was denounced as wholly unwelcoming to new readers.

Damage Stars: **

One for the book, one for Atmos' Mohawk