Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years by Paul Levitz, Kevin Sharpe, et al.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years

Collection published: 2011
Contents originally published: 2010
Acquired: May 2019
Read: August 2022

Writer: Paul Levitz

Pencillers: Kevin Sharpe, Eduardo Pansica
Inkers: Marlo Alquiza, Marc Deering, Eber Ferreira
Colorist: Blond

Letterers: Sal Cipriano, Travis Lanham, Steve Wands

I am working my way forward chronologically through all the Legion of Super-Heroes collections I own but have not read; that brings me to this, which (mostly) takes place during the Legion's early years (duh) but was written much later, during the so-called "deboot" era, when the continuity of the Legion was reset to circa 1989. (As Mark Waid once said, the creative impetus here seems to be, "Why can't comics be good the way they were when Mommy was still alive?") This collects five issues of Adventure Comics vol. 1, which jump around a bit chronologically. This is the order they are actually set in:

• Legion Year One
  
• #517: "Saturn Rising" (shortly after the foundation of the Legion, during events chronicled in Legion: Secret Origin #1)
  
• #515*: "Playing Hooky" (young Clark Kent's second trip to the future, shortly after the Legion's original appearance in Adventure Comics #247)
• Legion Year Two
  
• #518: "Whispers of Doom" (some time before Adventure #300)
  
• #519: "Playing Hooky II" (shortly after #518, still before #300, I think)
  
• Legion Year Three
  
• #520: "Tragedy: The Death of Lightning Lad" (immediately after Adventure #304, the story where Lightning Lad dies)
• Legion Year Fifteen (?)
  
• #516: "Brande Speaks" (the frame is set during what was the Legion's present day as of 2010, though most of the story is a flashback to the Legion's early years; Superboy appears in the frame, but he's out of his normal sequence relative to the Legion)
  

(Thanks to Cosmic Teams for helping me figure this out; it's the only website that cares about this miserable period of Legion history enough to do a detailed breakdown for it. Once I have every Legion comic, I plan to read them all in order; maybe I'll go a little nuts and read these where they take place, not where they were published.)

I'm a big fan of Dream Girl... but was her appearance here in any way meaningful except to foreshadow something that happened in a comic from 1964?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #518 (art by Kevin Sharpe & Marlo Alquiza)

Like a lot of stuff from this era of the Legion, I have to wonder who it's really for. Part of the marketing makes it seems like a way for new readers to get caught up (the back cover calls it "The Secret Origin of Superboy and the Legion!") but it also really requires you to already know your Legion history to comprehend it. I was very confused about the chronological placement of issue #516, for example, and only looking the book up on Cosmic Teams explained it was set much, much later than everything else here. There are bits of the stories that don't seem to go anywhere (a mysterious ghost in Legion HQ in #518, for example), and only by looking them up on-line did I realize they're there to foreshadow things that happened in comics published fifty years prior (the ghost is Mon-El, trapped in the Phantom Zone). In a lot of the stories, the Legion is after someone called Zaryan, and I didn't realize he was the guy who killed Lightning Lad until I got to the last issue; that would have made the foreshadowing work better, to be honest, because I couldn't figure out why we were so focused on this seeming non-story. I know my Legion history pretty well, but my earliest Legion of Super-Heroes Archive is volume 3, meaning my knowledge really begins with Adventure #318, and so all this mucking about with the Legion's early days is pretty confusing.

I would have liked more culture clash, to be honest. Cut the Brainiac Zero stuff.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #519 (art by Eduardo Pansica & Eber Ferreira)

Which is a shame, because there is some good stuff here: young Clark getting a time and place where he can just cut loose and have fun and not hide himself, but which also contains dark hints of his own future; the Legion coming back to Superboy's own time and having to goof around. 

I like a bit of Brainiac Five being awkward...
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #519 (art by Eduardo Pansica & Eber Ferreira)

On the other hand, most of what is here is fragmentary and uninteresting, or plain misguided. I don't think adding a secret Saturn Girl/Cosmic Boy one-night stand is a very good idea; it all comes across as slightly skeevy. #518 isn't really a story, just hints at other stories, and thus provides no reward to the reader. #520's impact is muted by the fact it needs to be told as flashbacks in order to fit continuity. The story of R. J. Brande given here totally contradicts the history the character received in L.E.G.I.O.N. and the "Five Years Later" era of the Legion... which is totally fine, retcon away, but my rule of retcons is the new version must be at least as interesting as the old one, if not more... and this is considerably less interesting. The old Brande was fascinating; this one is a generic inspirational guy.

Is this supposed to vaguely justify why this isn't consistent with previous accounts?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #516 (art by Kevin Sharpe & Marlo Alquiza)

So, alas. Thankfully this and Secret Origin are all I have to catch up on from this era from now; I'm next jumping ahead a bit to read a new collection of a classic Legion story...

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes: The Millennium Massacre

* Technically, this is Adventure Comics vol. 3 #12. In 2009, DC relaunched Adventure Comics with a new #1, but each issue also had a secondary number, continuing the numbering of Adventure Comics vol. 1 from where it had left off in 1983, #503. So, this issue was both Adventure Comics vol. 1 #515 and Adventure Comics vol. 3 #12. But with #516, they dropped the vol. 3 numbering, and used only the vol. 1 numbering. Totally straightforward. (The intervening vol. 2 was a one-issue revival in 1999, part of The Justice Society Returns, fact fans!)

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part XLIX: Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2009)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2015

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance

Writer: Joe Casey

Pencillers: ChrisCross, André Coelho, Eduardo Pansica
Inkers: Rob Stull, Mick Gray, Wayne Faucher, ChrisCross, André Coelho, Sandro Ribeiro, Marc Deering
Colorists: Snakebite, Pete Pantazis
Letterer: Sal Cipriano

The Super Young Team was one of the more interesting aspects of Final Crisis, a group of Japanese super-teens designed as a contemporary version of Jack Kirby's Forever People, and as a result, Dance was the Final Crisis Aftermath tale that I was looking forward to the most.

Though this came out in 2009, Dance feels like it could sit alongside what Phil Sandifer calls the "New Pop" style of contemporary comics, like Batgirl and Young Avengers. Except that... it's just not as good. There could be some interesting ideas about the boldness of youth, what it means to grow up, how to be a superhero in the era of Twitter, but none of that's actually here. Rather, we watch the Super Young Team be manipulated by hackneyed PR managers for five issues when they suddenly get their crap together and save the day. It's not quite as cliche as it sounds-- I did like that Most Excellent Superbat doesn't decide to give up Twitter, but instead invents a replacement for it that joins people brain-to-brain, and I also liked the reveal of the grave threat facing Japan-- but it didn't really have anything to say.

There are glimpses of big ideas in it, but they don't come to fruition. Both Most Excellent Superbat and Shiny Happy Aquazon ultimately turn down heroes from the previous generation to forge their own paths, but there's no sense of why it's important, of what the younger generation gains by rejecting the older generation's identity and forging its own. Or, what about the fact that the supposed deficiencies of this generation come from the previous one: we're just living in the PR-fueled world our parents created. Nothing like this is really grappled with. The book just becomes generic superheroics without anything to say that you haven't seen before, even if it does occasionally want to try.

I feel like there's potential in these characters, so it's a shame this was it for them, as far as I know; the "New 52" reboot restored the original Forever People in an insta-cancelled series by Dan DiDio and Keith Giffen. All five of them seemed like they could be really interesting given the chance, and I also really liked the sense of a history of Japanese superheroics created by Morrison and Casey, with the JLA-esque Big Science Action, who shout delightful things like "Big Science Emergency"! The appearances of ur-hero Ultimon-Alpha, with his stereotypical doomsaying, was one of my favorite parts of the books. Hopefully someone tries something with the Super Young Team again one day; I really like it when DC takes that very American idea of the superhero and filters it through the sensibilities of other cultures.

Next Week: What will become of the Tattooed Man now that he's turned from villain to hero? Find out in Ink!