This is one of my all-time favorite Legion adventures, despite the fact that it tells the tale of a much-depleted membership, and, apparently, that it was forced on young Jim Shooter by his crusty old editor, Mort Weisinger. Shooter nonetheless did the idea proud, taking the Legion credibly forward, and, along the way, creating two new permanent Legionnaires (never mind that they were doomed to die someday), as well as the Wanderers and a mystery named Reflecto.

It’s a gripping cover, isn’t it? A memorial hall to a bunch of dead Legionnaires, only one of whom readers had met at the time, and he had died in the previous issue. This was the first of many ways that the Legion would let us know that Andrew Nolan, Ferro Lad, was gone, but not forgotten.

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This is Jim Shooter’s most famous Legion story—well, the first part of it anyway. It introduces the greatest threat the team ever faced, and also, arguably, a team of their most memorable villains. While I’m actually a big fan of the Legion of Super-Villains, let’s face it, they’re five copycats and a bunch of Legion rejects. Lightning Lord and Nemesis Kid are their only real contenders, and that’s because of their ties back to the Legion itself.

The Fatal Five, on the other hand, are their own creations; and while they’re a bit two-dimensional here, each carries in his (or her) origin story the makings of a fully realized character. Look at the first three: Validus, a creature who is not evil and does not want to hurt anyone, but is nonetheless sentenced to death because he cannot control his violent rages; Tharok, who hates all protectors of law because a police officer’s stray shot vaporized half his body and left him a disfigured cyborg; Mano, a mutant shunned by his peers because of his destructive hand, who turned that hand on his very home world and killed everyone on it.

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Still drawing his own layouts, finished by Curt Swan and George Klein this time, Jim Shooter created an enduring Legion villain, Universo, and an important supporting character, Rond Vidar. (Although, surprisingly, Rond is not named in this story. He’s just, “The kid who invented the time cube.”)

Like the Dr. Regulus story last issue, this story opens more traditionally than Shooter’s “One of Us Is a Traitor,” with the Legionnaires visiting a science fair. It then uses the same device used last issue to pull the team away from a public appearance—an emergency at the clubhouse. Brainiac 5 informs them that someone is desperately trying to break in, though he never explains how he knows.

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For his first Legion adventure written and drawn after being hired by DC, Jim Shooter fleshed out the origin of Sun Boy, a favorite character who had not been featured in a while. He appeared in #342’s “The Legionnaire Who Killed,” and the Computo Two-Parter, but in fairly minor roles, as compared to his early, take-charge appearances. His last real character moment was back during the Starfinger saga.

And Sun Boy’s origin is tied to that of Dr. Regulus, the villain of the piece.

The story begins, traditionally enough, with Superboy arriving at the clubhouse for a meeting—an election, in fact. Invisible Kid is the new Legion leader, a good thing for Lyle Norg, since he has played, up until now, a fairly small part in the Legion’s adventures. Most likely writers had a hard time figuring out what to do with his fairly limited powers.

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Part two of Jim Shooter’s cold-submission Legion story has artwork finished by Curt Swan, and shows us the Legion’s first battle with Garlak and his Khund warriors, humanoid aliens from a galaxy at the edge of known space. It gives a great showcase to new Legionnaires Ferro Lad and Karate Kid, with perhaps a bit less action for their cohort, Princess Projectra.

This issue continues to show the bigger, hipper, more action-oriented Marvel style being brought to the Legion’s pages, particularly in a second splash page being devoted to the Legion meeting the Khund forces in battle. If ever before a DC comic had present a splash page in the middle of a story, I don’t know about it. It was very rare. And, indeed, even the primary splash pages in the Silver Age weren’t full page—they usually had two to three panels of the story at the bottom. This shows the evolution of the Legion to a more visually gripping storytelling style. Continue reading →

Here is possibly the most ground-breaking story in Legion history—the one that changed the game forever. For the first eight years of its existence, the Legion had been written by seasoned pros—Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton. All experienced and capable, but all also years past their teen years. America invented the very concept of the teenager, and it was in the 1950s and 1960s—the era of the Legion’s birth—that teens began to be recognized as a distinct body of people. They weren’t children, they weren’t adults, and it was considered rather difficult to communicate with them, to “reach” them, because they had their own ideas and pretty much their own secret language. Adults who tried to speak that language inevitably came off sounding like oafs. And teen characters written by adult writers came off a little too stiff, a little too-good-to-be-true.

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