On Sundays, I’m going to be re-reading (or sometimes re-watching) old pop culture I have around, primarily comic-books and genre fiction. Sometimes, I’ll be talking about how I’ve become aware of something I didn’t really see or pay attention to when I was younger, sometimes I’ll just be getting back into it like putting on an old pair of comfortable slippers.
Today I’m going to just talk about the old Legion of Super-Heroes comics, before DC rebooted itself a zillion times. These were comics written very firmly within the Silver Age rules that settled over superhero comics in the wake of the moral panic over comic-books in the mid-1950s, and with the distinctively weird feeling that many DC comics had during that period, with adult men trying to write comics for what they imagined boys felt and wanted to read. This is the era that provided many of the covers and stories associated with “Superdickery”, e.g. Superman constantly foiling Lois Lane’s insane schemes to trap him into marriage, or Jimmy Olsen being turned into space-turtles and whatnot.
I had real fondness for the Legion of Super-Heroes when I first came across them in the 1970s, though I mostly liked Marvel characters. My comics buying in elementary and middle-school was sometimes complicated because my mother was of the opinion that it was time for me to stop reading comics and I had to kind of smuggle them into the house after buying them from a dime-store wire rack, at least for a while. I also had to settle for whatever was there on the day when I walked to the town center. Legion was always a welcome sight.
The thing about the Legion that felt daring relative to the usual Silver Age constraints was that they had so many characters and all their adventures were in some sense outside the core shared universe of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. The Legion interacted with Superboy and Supergirl, but they lived in a far future time and you had the sense that things could actually happen to them, that their status quo could change. Even, unthinkably at the time, that they could die. The futuristic setting let writers and artists do some interesting, if inconsistent world-building and design, including some extremely bad-looking or sexually provocative costumes. (I’ll probably do a future Re-Read on those.)
The Legion had a very loyal fan base that was unusually organized for that time, which led among other things to the incredibly charming tradition that the fans would send letters in to vote for the leader of the Legion at regular intervals and then the writers would accept the fan choice and write the stories with that character as leader.
The thing is, the characters were supposed to be, like Superboy, teenagers. They often looked like the kind of teenagers you’d see in some TV shows, being played by people in their mid-to-late twenties. What this led to was the strange dissonance of adult men writing teenagers the way they thought pre-teens would find appealing while staying inside the Comics Authority code. In the case of the Legion, that meant that they often came off, I think accidentally, as bullies and mean girls. I sort of felt that even when I was ten, but man, does it scream out now looking at these old issues.
The most intense example of this? The repeated story trope of tryouts by super-powered teens hoping to join the Legion. The Legion had some membership rules, some super-heroically conventional (if you killed someone even accidentally, you had to quit; if you got married, you had to quit) and some not (every member had to have a completely different power than any other member). But they were always open to adding new members, in theory, and would hold regular tryouts. You got one chance to demonstrate your power. If you screwed up at all, the Legion would generally insult and humiliate you and send you away forever. (Much later on, as comics began to do slightly more sophisticated and self-aware storytelling, the writer Paul Levitz blunted the edge of this trope by giving the Legion an academy for hopefuls where they could train and to which they could return if they messed up their tryout.)
Let me show you an example.
The first guy, Porcupine Pete, shoots quills from his body in all directions. This gets rejected, with some justification. Superboy doesn’t soft-coat it, though. “Your power is more a hindrance than a help! Rejected!”
The second candidate, Infectious Lass, gets turned down as well.
This despite the fact that she can give anybody almost any disease in the galaxy—in her tryout she instantly incapacitates one of the Legion heroes with an intestinal disorder. She apologizes, but says it’ll wear off in a few minutes. No good! Rejected!
I mean, I’d want her on the team—that seems like a pretty amazing power that could stop adversaries who shrug off every other kind of attack. Mordru may be an amazing sorcerer who can turn Superboy into a newt, but I bet he would have trouble if Infectious Lass gave him a strong case of Regulan shingles.
The third guy makes the first cut, but he’s actually an evil android who has been sent to kill the entire Legion and steal something from them. He gets stopped by the energy cloud in the above panel, who becomes a member of the Legion named Wildfire. This is another great thing about the tryout stories—they frequently made rejected applicants into bitter adversaries later on.
Anyway, this is just a good example of why many of us reading Silver Age DC comics now are amused by the unintentional whimsy and cruelty that many of them have.
(Apologies for the images—my scanner is not cooperating this morning.)