Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2

Collection published: 1992
Contents originally published: 1961-64
Acquired: November 2023
Read: July 2025

Writers: Edmond Hamilton, Jerry Siegel
Pencillers: John Forte, Curt Swan
Inkers: John Forte, George Klein
Letterers: Joe Letterese, Milton Snapinn

This volume continues on from volume 1, establishing the Legion of Super-Heroes as a regular ongoing feature; it contains the Legion stories from issues #306 to 317 of Adventure Comics, plus one story from Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen guest-starring the Legion. All of the regular Legion stories are written by Edmond Hamilton (husband of Leigh Brackett, fact fans), usually with art by John Forte. We can see that the Legion has bedded in as the regular concept we now recognize. Though the early stories here claim they come from the twenty-first century, it soon switches to the thirtieth and stats there. Beyond that, we get key concepts like the idea of Legion tryouts, the Legion of Substitute Heroes, the debut of Proty (and then Proty II), the resurrection of Lightning Lad, the first mention of the Time Trapper, Phantom Girl's thing for Ultra Boy, Star Boy's thing for Dream Girl, and so on. Overall I found this a solid set of Legion stories that really show how it can work as an ongoing concept; I reread my review of volume 3 (into which this ones leads) before writing this one, and I was I quite grumpy about it, writing, "Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft." Well, maybe Hamilton's early days were better than his later ones, or maybe I was just in a bad mood back in 2016, because I didn't think this was great literature, but I did enjoy it for what it was. Maybe it was interesting because you can see the Legion concept developing, as was the case in volume 1, whereas that wasn't really a factor later on.

I like how in the DC universe, a random guy who sees a kid fall into vat of chemicals can state with confidence that he'll grow up to have superpowers... and that he'll be right.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #306 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

In any case, here are some notes and highlights. Like I said above, this volume contains the debut of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and in fact two other stories focused on them. Obviously I know about them from later stories, but this was my first time reading their debut. I can see why people glommed onto them, they are actually quite charming. Polar Boy, Night Girl, Stone Boy, Fire Lad, and Chlorophyll Kid are all rejected at Legion tryouts, but remain so dedicated to the Legion that they decide to form a back-up group for the Legion. (Legion rejects get flying belts, which seems kind of over-the-top, but maybe flying belts are a dime a dozen in the thirtieth century.) What really makes the story shine is Polar Boy's determination to make the Subs work as a group; they keep trying to help the Legion but are unneeded, but Polar Boy knows if they don't prove useful sometime, his new friends will fall apart. 

Good guy Stone Boy.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #315
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

The other highlight for the Subs is the one where the Legion creates a contest to admit one Sub. It's neat to see them use their crappy powers cleverly, and it's charming both that Stone Boy wins because of his motivation, not his powers, and that he turns down the offer so he can stay with his friends. You can see why these characters would make an impression on the readers, and why later writers would keep going back to them.

You might think that someone handed a cast of characters with (I believe) eighteen members might think to themselves that that's enough, but not Edmond Hamilton, who introduces three more Legionnaires here: Element Lad, Lightning Lass, and Dream Girl. Element Lad's is okay, more an excuse for a scientific mystery than a new character (and I don't think he really does much in the rest of the volume). 

Lightning Lass's is interesting; I had never read her debut story before, though I was familiar with the broad strokes from later stories: joins while her brother is dead, gets her powers changed. What I hadn't known was exactly how this all happens, and I was actually surprised. I've read the story where Lightning Lad is resurrected before, but it was an awful long time ago, so when Lightning Lad was seemingly resurrected I thought it really was him. It turns out to be his sister disguising herself as her dead brother. Sun Boy figures it out but plays along; the Bierbaums would later make him into kind of an entitled player, but here he's a good guy, helping her out covertly (or at least he thinks he is, because he doesn't know she has lightning powers too). I'm a bit surprised they didn't pick up on the cross-dressing angle later on, as Lightning Lass makes a very successful boy.

I said this story makes Sun Boy into a good guy but maybe not, since he's apparently the kind of person who scrutinizes people's Adam's apples to determine if they "really" are the gender they present as.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #308 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Later, after Lightning Lad comes back to life, she continues in the Legion. I knew she got her powers switched later on, to control of gravity (thus making her "Light Lass") but I had figured it was by accident or something. It's actually done deliberately by Dream Girl in her debut story (who knew it was so easy to change someone's superpowers? who knew someone who take their powers being changed so easily?), because the Legion doesn't permit member to have identical powers. Lightning Lad came back to life in Adventure #312, and the power swap happens in #317. I'm assuming they got letters from earnest fans who noted the contradiction because no one in the intervening stories notes the issue.

The face of a woman who is mean... and likes being mean...
and of a man who likes it when she is mean.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #317
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Speaking of Dream Girl, she doesn't join up permanently in her debut, but she immediately makes an impression, both in terms of her physical attributes (the subplot about all the boys swooning for her is hilarious) but also in terms of her cleverness, using her powers to try to save the Legion's life without threatening the timeline. Dream Girl is one of my faves, so I was delighted to see this story. If I'm not mistaken, it would be a long time before she returned, not until a story collected in volume 5.

And speaking of long gaps between appearances, Star Boy was one of the very first Legionnaires we learned about, in Adventure #282, but then promptly disappeared, appearing in no other Legion stories for over two years, until #310 (collected here). He finally does something of note in the Dream Girl story, though it's mostly falling for her. During his run, Paul Levitz would explain this long absence, as well as Thom's changing powers, in one of my favorite Legion stories. Another story that later writers would do a lot with is Adventure #316, where Ultra Boy goes on the run... though of course he turns out to have good reasons for it that he can't tell anyone about.

From this, the Bierbaums would later birth a very controversial retcon...
which I'm not gonna lie, I kinda liked?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #312
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Chamelon Boy's "pet," the seemingly sentient, telepathic, shapeshifting blob named Proty, makes his debut in #308, the story where Lightning Lass debuts... and dies in #312, just four issues later, sacrificing his life so that Lightning Lad can come back to life. But Proty II debuts immediately thereafter, without fanfare, in Jimmy Olsen #72. Jimmy identifies someone disguised as him as Proty (how he does this, I don't know, because there's no story where Jimmy meets Proty), but he's corrected by Chameleon Boy: "Actually, it's 'Proty II', a friend of my first protean pet, who died when he sacrificed his life for Saturn Girl!" And that's it! I wonder if Jimmy Olsen #72 was mostly done when someone informed its writer/editor that Proty had been killed off, so they had to add this comment at the last minute... and thus a whole new character was born! When Proty II pops up in Adventure for the first time, it's with no more explanation.

"Superboy's brain has been replaced by that of the
man responsible for one of history's worst genocides!"
"Ah, well, must be Tuesday again."
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #314
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Obviously a lot of these stories are ridiculous (e.g, the one where Supergirl fights her own duplicate, who turns all the female Legionnaires pink), but the place of honor has to be set aside for the one where a criminal sneaks into their clubhouse and steals a time bubble... so that he can team up with Emperor Nero, John Dillinger, and Adolf Hitler ("the three wickedest men in history"), transferring their brains into the bodies of Superboy, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy to create super-criminals. I am not so sure you would see Hitler treated so casually these days; funny that he gets taken more seriously the further away we get from him. 

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 5

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1 by Otto Binder, Al Plastino, Jerry Siegel, John Forte, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1

Collection published: 1992
Contents originally published: 1958-62
Acquired: May 2024
Read: November 2024

Writers: Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Robert Bernstein
Pencillers: Curt Swan, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, John Forte

Inkers: George Klein, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, Sheldon Moldoff, John Forte

Having reached the maximum forward extent of the original Legion of Super-Heroes with the Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2, I now jump back to the beginning, to fill in with the Legion Archives I haven't yet picked up. The very first of these also happens to be the first very one full stop, which collects the Legion's legendary original appearance, a smattering of guest appearances across various titles, and then the beginning of its ongoing run in Adventure Comics. I had read a few of these stories before (their original appearance, the death of Lightning Lad) but not most of them, and as both a literary scholar and a continuity nut, what interested me here—far more than the actual contents of the stories to be honest—was the way in which the Legion concept evolved and mutated as it was first established. There was absolutely no intention, originally, of making it into an ongoing thing... and how that would come about is not very straightforward!

It all begins with Adventure Comics #247 (Apr. 1958), where Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Boy (as he was then) come back in time to invite Superboy to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. Because this in the 1950s, and these Superboy stories for some reasons love for the characters to be assholes, they set up an initiation test for him that they purposefully rig to fail. At the end, they say, "it proved you're a super-good sport, taking it all with a smile!" I once read this aloud to my six-year-old, and they didn't understand why Superboy just wouldn't say why he couldn't complete the initiation tests (he had a legitimate reason every time), or why the Legion would do this to them. 

Okay, but then who's the guy in red behind Brainiac? And the guy who we only see the back of his head?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #247 (script by Otto Binder, art by Al Plastino)

Other members of the Legion appear in crowd shots, but only a couple are ever in focus, on the final panel of page 11. One seems to be Brainiac 5, but apparently he had white skin in the original printing of this story; the Grand Comics Database tells me this character was recolored to look like Colossal Boy when the story was reprinted in Superman Annual #6 (Winter 1962/63). It's not clear to me when he was first recolored to look like Brainiac 5; the GCD first mentions the recoloring in its entry on this volume, but I can see that in the interim, it was also reprinted in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #1 (Mar./Apr. 1980) and Adventure Comics #491 (Sept. 1982).

Anyway, it took over eighteen months for the Legion to reappear, in Adventure #267 (Dec. 1959). While their first story was written by Otto Binder, this one is by Jerry Siegel, and you can see that Sigel closely studied the first Legion story, in that once again, the three Legion founders turn up and act like assholes: they deliberately upstage Superboy so that he feels isolated and lonely and flies away from the Earth, enabling them to trick him into going to a planet with a kryptonite prison, where they lock him up so that he cannot commit crimes they saw him perform five years hence on the "futurescope." (Surely it should be the pastscope, because these events would occur 995 years earlier for the Legion!) Like a lot of comics stories from this era, once has the feeling Jerry Siegel made it up as he went along. Superboy escapes the prison because a trophy on the planet explodes, "launching an atomic chain reaction" the causes the collapse of the kryptonite prison; the chain reaction also releases the element "sigellian," which is poisonous to the Legionnaires, so Superboy shouts loud enough to change its molecular structure, rendering it harmless. At that exact moment, Saturn Girl happens to hear a radio transmission from Earth where the U.S. president releases Superboy from his oath of silence, allowing Superboy to finally explain that he didn't commit those crimes five years in the future but just then (the futurescope was miscalibrated), and they weren't really crimes, but things he was asked to do by the U.S. government! 

Superboy probably has an anxious attachment style.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #267 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by George Papp)

Like Jesus Christ, could this chain of events be any more contrived and nonsensical? There are repeated references to the planet being built by a group of superheroes along with the Legion, who we see in some crowd shots; I kind of think Siegel missed that the Legion was from the future because there's only one quick reference to a time-bubble, which I feel like could have been added by an editor. Anyway, it seems like the first Legion story was a success, but the perception was that what people really liked about it was the Legion being jerks to Superboy for contrived reasons, so they just told that same story again. I did really like the art by George Papp, though, which is more expressive than normal for the era.

The Legion wouldn't appear in another Superboy story for over another year, but in the interim they did pop up in a Supergirl story, in Action Comics #267 (Aug. 1960). Once again, it emulates the original story, this time by having the three original Legionnaires pop up to tease Supergirl that they know her secret identity, before bringing her to the future to undergo an initiation test, which she ends up failing. (Here because red kryptonite causes her to turn into an adult, rendering her too old for Legion membership; rather than, say, help her, the Legion just dumps her into the past, where luckily she soon de-ages.)

Convenient, I guess... and oddly specific.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #267 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

The story is the first to give us new, named Legionnaires: Colossal Boy, Invisible Kid, and Chameleon Boy. What's also noteworthy here is a fact that later stories would eventually ignore: the Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy who meet Supergirl here are in fact the children of the ones Superboy met; I guess the idea was that the Legion was always travelling exactly one thousand years into the past, and while Superboy is Superman when he was a boy, Supergirl was the adult Superman's contemporary, and thus from a generation later. Eventually, though, this would be streamlined and retconned away, so that these were the same three Legionnaires Superboy originally met, and indeed, my understanding is that at some point it was established that from the Legion's perspective, Action #267 actually preceded Adventure #247, so that the Legion actually recruited Supergirl first. I am not sure when or why this was done.

A tumble!? Wow, Lana is pretty horny for a 1940s girl.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #282 (script by Otto Binder, art by George Papp)

After this, we get a string of minor appearances, lacking the full Legion. In Superboy #86 (Jan. 1961), Lightning Lad cameos in a story about Superboy battling Lex Luthor, seemingly just there to point out that he is yet another "L.L." in Clark Kent's life. Then in Adventure #282 (Mar. 1961), we get the first story that actually substantively uses a new member of the Legion, when Star Boy chases super-criminals back in time, and Lana Lang decides to date him in a failed attempt to make Superboy jealous. We spend a lot of time here on Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu in the future, which I don't remember seeing much about in later stories. It has two noteworthy aspects: it's first story to really expand on the Legion's future world, and it also deviates from the Adventure #247 formula, so clearly writer Otto Binder was putting some thought into what people liked about the Legion stories. But also it has Chamelon Boy as a Legion member in Superboy's time, so Binder seemingly missed that Chamelon Boy was from a generation later according to Action #267. Or, I guess, this Chameleon Boy is that Chamelon Boy's parent! Either way, the confusing nature of having two Legions both a millennium hence but a generation apart is pretty obvious, and is already causing problems.

A very fast courtship.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #276 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

Supergirl goes into the future again in Action #276 (May 1961); this is the story that sees her gain Legion membership, alongside Brainiac 5, in his first appearance. Is Brainiac 5's appearance here the reason for retconning Supergirl to predate Superboy in the Legion, so as to line up with Brainiac 5's appearance in the reprints of Adventure #247? Anyway, this story is pretty dumb but I guess you have to hand it to Jerry Siegel for coming up with a clever spin on a villain with Brainiac 5.

I don't think this is really consistent with later stories of the "Adult Legion," but I'm willing to be told I'm wrong.
from Superman vol. 1 #147 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Curt Swan & Sheldon Moldoff)

I'm not totally going story by story here, but Legion lore develops in a really significant way with Superman #147 (Aug. 1961), the first story where the adult Superman meets the Legion. In this story, Lex Luthor reaches out into the future to discover that just as there's a Legion of Super-Heroes, there's also a Legion of Super-Villains. I hadn't realized that the LSV (do people call them that?) first appeared in a Superman story—but that's the reason they're adults, I guess, because they come from one thousand years in Superman's future, and thus the era where the Legionnaires are grown up. The Legionnaires appear here, too, and since they're relatively contemporary to Superman, they are also grown up.

Nothing I love more than a plot that hinges on a previously unmentioned critical fact.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #290 (script by Robert Bernstein[?], art by George Papp)

The collapsing of the two Legion eras into one somewhat happens in Adventure #290 (Nov. 1961), which establishes how Sun Boy joined the Legion—we saw him get rejected at the tryouts in Action #276, a Supergirl/Superman-era Legion story, but now he's in the Superboy-era Legion. Was this on purpose? Was the unknown writer just confused? (I should also note that many of these early Legion stories indicate only one person can join the Legion per year, but later timelines would indicate all of these happened over the first year of the Legion. Which makes sense as a retcon; there are so many members now that the founding members couldn't be teenagers if there really was one new member per year!)

(One should also note that for many of the stories here, the Legion is said to be from the twenty-first century, not the thirtieth. Not sure why this happened, except maybe carelessness. In one of the stories to mention the twenty-first century, we're also told evolutionary processes have happened since Supergirl's time. I mean, I know one thousand years isn't enough for that, but certainly one hundred aren't!)

Saturn Girl knows what she wants, I guess, and is not afraid to cross the line. But the best thing in this sequence of panels is probably Supergirl's assumption that Phantom Girl is probably pathetically single as an adult.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #289 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

I think the last story to clearly have the two different Legion time eras is Action #289 (June 1962). This is a deeply weird story where Supergirl decides Superman needs a woman worthy of him; among the things she tries is taking him to the time of the adult Legion, to see if Saturn Woman could be it. (She's not, because she's married to Lightning Man... that says, she allows Superman to give her two really deep kisses anyway!) This story has Superman and Supergirl devise the flying belts that replace the rocket packs the Legion used in earlier stories... but the flying belts continue to appear in Superboy-era Legion stories after this.

We also get the first Legion of Super-Pets story in Adventure #293 (Feb. 1962); I hadn't realized that in Comet the Super-Horse's original appearance, he was picked up from Supergirl's relative future, as he hadn't actually been introduced in the Supergirl stories yet! 

Look, who among us hasn't accidentally downed an entire bottle of a bizarre chemical formula instead of soda pop?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #301 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by John Forte)

After appearing once in 1958, once in 1959, once in 1960, five times in 1961, and four times in early 1962, the Legion got an ongoing feature in Adventure #300 (Sept. 1962), the first six installments of which appear here. Adventure #301 (Oct. 1962) is the first Legion story with no Supergirl or Superboy or Superman, the first to purely take place in the future era, indicating that DC saw what the appeal of these characters really was. Adventure #302 (Nov. 1962) is the first where there's no specific reason for Superboy coming to the future, he just zips in to hang out with the Legion.

That the Legion was on ongoing concern is very clearly demonstrated by the second-last story collected here, Adventure #304 (Jan. 1963), where Saturn Girl is elected Legion leader and Lightning Lad dies. Here we see that adventures can have real, meaningful consequences. Also, this is the establishment of Saturn Girl's practical, ruthless side—she is one of my favorite Legionnaires. Manipulating her way to become Legion leader so she can save everyone else's life! Amazing. Along the same lines, we do get the saga of Mon-El, who first appears in a non-Legion story included here, Superboy #89 (June 1961), where he is trapped in the Phantom Zone, and then reappears in Adventure #300, where he temporarily gets out, and then he permanently gets out in #305. Disconnected from the need of superhero comics to be in an eternal present, the Legion can develop and change over time.

These stories, as my comments probably indicate, are generally not very sophisticated, in either art or story, though I did generally appreciate the work of George Papp. But there are a multitude of character and concepts here that would provide fertile ground for what has been sixty years of stories thus far. I am glad to finally dive back into these earliest tales, and I look forward to seeing the Legion continue to develop when I get to volume 2.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2

Review: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 4 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.

Comic hardcover, 222 pages
Published 1994 (contents: 1965)
Acquired December 2014
Read June 2017

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 4

Writers: Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, Otto Binder

Artists: Jim Mooney, John Forte, George Klein, Sheldon Moldoff, George Papp
Letterers: David Huffine, Milton Snapinn, Vivian Berg

The beginning of this volume actually sets up three ongoing mysteries for the Legion:

In the introduction, KC Carlson (who edited the Legion in the 1990s) calls the flight rings "bane of Legion artists and editors," but I don't know why. Surely it beats the flying belt anyday! Interesting to note that the flight ring does not yet incorporate the Legion symbol; I wonder when that comes about.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #329 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

As far as I know, this is the first mention of the "vanishing world" and the "hardened space criminals reforming," but the Time Trapper bedeviled the Legion multiple times in volume 3. The Time Trapper ends up being the only one of these elements to come up again; if multiple recurring plots were being set up, they didn't pay off within the next year despite Saturn Girl's intentions.

Not that intentions count for much. The Legion doesn't finally defeat the Time Trapper because of anything they do here (or any of the preparations they undertook in the previous volume), but because he decides to attack them by sending a minion with a de-aging weapon, from which they are saved by the most contrived of circumstances:

Review: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 3 by Edmond Hamilton, Jerry Siegel, John Forte, et al.

Having reached the most recent unread Legion of Super-Heroes collection in my possession, it's time to loop back around to the earliest:

Comic hardcover, 222 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1964-65)
Acquired December 2014
Read November 2016

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 3

Writers: Edmond Hamilton, Jerry Siegel

Artists: John Forte, George Papp, Al Plastino, Sheldon Moldoff, George Klein, Curt Swan, Jim Mooney
Letterers: Milton Snapinn, Joe Letterese, Vivian Berg, David Huffine

Whenever I dip back into the pre-Great Darkness Saga adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes, I'm like, this is what people look back on so fondly? Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft.

A subtle critique of 30th-century gender roles.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #326 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by John Forte & George Klein)

The dominant writers of the period, Edmond Hamilton and Jerry Siegel, are obsessed with plots where it seems like the Legionnaires have turned against one another: the stories collected in this volume include leader Sun Boy* going nuts from space fatigue and the Legion having to take him down, the Legion imprisoning Lightning Lad for revealing their secrets to their enemies, the female Legionnaires seducing and eliminating the men under the influence of evil women from the planet (I shit you not) Femnaz, five Legionnaires traveling back in time solely to screw over Superboy by revealing his secret identity, and short-lived member Command Kid turning the Legionnaires against each other. Each plot is more contrived than the previous, and the Femnaz one is ridiculously awful: the women of Femnaz destroy their planet's men because the men try to clamp down on violent arena games and won't let them shoot rockets at the moon. They see the error of their ways when they crack their moon in half with some of their rockets, and the male Legionnaires put it back together for them. Uh huh.