Legion: Secret Origin by Paul Levitz, Chris Batista, and Marc Deering

Legion: Secret Origin

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2011-12
Acquired: May 2019
Read: October 2021

Writer: Paul Levitz

Penciller: Chris Batista
Inker: Marc Deering
Colorist: Wes Hartman

Letterer: Dezi Sienty

I haven't read much of the so-called "deboot" era of Legion of Super-Heroes, when the continuity was reset to be as it was in the 1980s because nothing screams "teenagers of the future" like "making it like it was thirty years ago." Whenever I do read something from this era, I am kinda baffled. Never bad... but always pointless.

This, I think, is supposed to recap the Legion's origin for new readers but also fill in some background for old readers. Unfortunately, none of it is interesting. The origin we've seen a million times by now, and Levitz tries to make it interesting by putting it in the background while putting the machinations of the United Planets' secret police and the Time Trapper in the foreground. It doesn't work. The origin is such a background element that one doesn't really get a sense of why anyone would care about the Legion; it has nice roles for Phantom Girl and (less so) Brainiac Five, but the rest of the characters feel like they are barely there.

What is put into the foreground is even less interesting; I never cared about any of the new(?) characters, and there's less a plot and more bits of a plot arbitrarily strung together with some foreshadowing. It's deadly dull stuff, and the story never takes off.

The idea of this kind of way of doing a Legion origin is okay—the Bierbaums, Giffen, and Al Gordon did a great one during the "Five Years Later" era by focusing on Marla Latham—but the execution makes it clear that these were "secrets" no one needed to know about.

The best part of the book is the damning-with-faint-praise back cover blurb someone at DC picked for the back cover:

It explicitly says it doesn't give good background to the characters, but they slapped it on the cover anyway! Note that in the actual review, the first sentence is "I'm not 100% convinced 'Legion: Secret Origin' would be the perfect introduction to the 'Legion of Super-Heroes' in general." so it's a pretty unethical use of ellipses as well. But given the quality of the book, this is probably the best blurb they could find. It's not even so bad it's good, it's the kind of thing you'll forget about a few days after reading it.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years