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: The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Starring Green Arrow

A couple Doctor Who: Short Trips reviews have been posted over at Unreality SF: Adric meets the fourth Doctor again in "The Ingenious Gentleman Adric of Alzarius" and Susan meets the eighth Doctor again in "All Hands on Deck."

Comic trade paperback, 304 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1946-59)
Acquired December 2016
Read January 2017

The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Volume One: Starring Green Arrow

Written by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, France E. Herron, Bill Finger, Dave Wood, Robert Bernstein

Pencilled by Jack Kirby
Inked by Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, George Roussos, Frank Giacoia

This volume collects everything Jack Kirby drew during his first two tenures freelancing for DC Comics (1941-49 and 1956-59) that doesn't fit into the other Jack Kirby omnibus volumes DC has released (e.g., The Sandman, The Newsboy Legion, The Boy Commandos); it's basically an assortment of random issues of Real Fact Comics, House of Secrets, House of Mystery, Tales of the Unexpected, My Greatest Adventure, and All-Star Western, plus Green Arrow features from Adventure Comics and World's Finest Comics.

This isn't Kirby at his best; most of the time he's writing to someone else's scripts, or at least someone else's demands. I mean he's still a great illustrator, and I love seeing his image of our supposed rocket-age future:

I just love the assured tone of this thing: "probably called 'rocketeers.'" Like, why? What leads you to think that will "probably" be the case, Jack and Joe? Also, where's my rocket tube to China?
from Real Fact Comics #1 (script & art by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby)

...but giving him a two-page feature in Real Fact Comics (don't worry, there are no real facts to be found) is a waste of his talents. The Sandman, from the same era, is a much better use of Kirby's abilities; there's little trace of his trademark dynamism here.

Kirby is good at drawing bizarre monsters, so the stories from 1950s "weird" titles are more suited to him, though they're still not great. There's an odd subset of these stories that present "rational" explanations for seemingly irrational events. But I'm actually found it more plausible that a criminal found a magic lantern during a jailbreak that the idea that an undercover cop planted it there and arranged to have the criminal's three wishes granted on command in a convoluted plot to discover the location of money the criminal had stolen. I guess "impossible" trumps "highly unlikely" in the probability stakes. This must have been a thing, though, because there are a lot of stories with these kinds of endings (I'm not really telepathic, the metal plate in my skull is just picking up your dictaphone from miles away; I'm not really immortal, I just wanted to obtain your money; I'm not really a yogi, I just wanted to sell my crystal ball to another fake yogi and so commissioned a women to pretend to be a Cleopatra waxwork and kiss you; and so on).

I feel like if Oliver Queen can get something like that to fly around in circles on command, there has to be a better application for it than trick arrows.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #251 (script & art by Jack Kirby)

This is actually the third time I've read the Green Arrow tales collected here, since DC previously reprinted them in both a thin volume of Kirby's Green Arrow work, and (in black and white) in Showcase Presents The Green Arrow. I have to say, they don't hold up to repeated rereading. Some I still didn't remember reading, though! And man, does Oliver Queen have a loose definition of "arrow" and an ability to make incredibly un-aerodyamic objects fly regardless.

"Straightened out." I think your manservant is having a little fun with you.
from Tales of the Unexpected vol. 1 #24 (writer unknown, art by Jack Kirby)

Still, there are times the King of Comics gets to strut his stuff: the cool visuals of "The Two-Dimensional Man" were probably my favorite thing in the whole book. Give Kirby something totally bizarre to draw, and he will always knock it out of the park.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Star City, Part XIX: Showcase Presents The Green Arrow, Volume One

Comic trade paperback, 527 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1958-69)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2010

Showcase Presents The Green Arrow, Volume One

Writers: Dave Wood, France "Ed" Herron, Robert Bernstein, Jerry Coleman, Bob Haney, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Dick Wood, George Kashdan, Bill Finger, Jack Kirby
Artists: Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby, George Papp, Lee Elias, Mike Sekowsky, Bernard Sachs, George Roussos, Neal Adams

This volume collects every Green Arrow comic printed between 1958 and 1969 (including those in The Green Arrow) in black and white. Though a nice idea, such an undertaking quickly reveals that these old Silver Age comics were never designed to be reprinted, as they quickly grow stale and repetitive: there are some fifty-nine comics of 6-7 pages here, all of them ending with Green Arrow and Speedy being resoundingly smug. The writing is by a variety of folks, but Lee Elias provides the majority of the art, which is good, aside from the fact that I want to punch his "cherubic" Speedy in the face.

There's a weird number of stories about Native American tribes who still practice "the old ways"; I'm assuming this is because obviously all Indians practice archery, so our hero fits right in. What makes this even weirder is that in "The World's Worst Archer!" we learn that Speedy used to live with an old-ways Indian tribe... a fact never mentioned before or since, though it would have been relevant on any number of occasions. Later stories are a little bit more sensitive towards this, though "The Wrath of the Thunderbird" has a character unquestioningly assert that the reservation system has done nothing but good for Native Americans. Also weird is this volume's depiction of women in the person of the lovely Miss Arrowette, whose arrows are of course all feminine (the hairpin arrow, the powder-puff arrow, the lotion arrow, and so on), but can't cut it because crime-fighting's too dangerous for a woman. Right, Oliver-- I see that it's not too dangerous for your thirteen-year-old ward. She returns a couple times, though, and eventually gets a story where she's able to hold her own and help GA in solving a case, rather than hinder him.

The best stories are the ones that actually have some room to breathe, and thus include a plot-twist or two. Toward the end of his run, Green Arrow began receiving ten-page stories, the strongest of which was the nicely surreal "The Land of No Return". Even better, however, were his appearances in The Brave and the Bold alongside the Martian Manhunter and Batman. My favorite story was "The Senator's Been Shot!", which sees both Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne contemplating giving up their secret identities-- Oliver so he can use his financial wealth to do good, and Bruce so he can go into politics. They don't, of course, but it's nice to see the characters wrestling with any kind of moral quandary, and Neal Adams's fantastic art and layouts make what could have been a still-somewhat-conventional story fairly edgy in tone. Coming at the end of the book and the end of the Silver Age, the changes this story brought were a long time in coming.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Star City, Part XVIII: The Green Arrow

Perfect-bound comic, 71 pages
Published 2001 (contents: 1958-59)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2010

The Green Arrow

Writers: Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Dave Wood, Ed Herron, Robert Bernstein
Artists: Jack Kirby, Roz Kirby

This volume collects all the Green Arrow stories drawn by Jack Kirby before he went to Marvel and co-invented the Fantastic Four. It's just eleven six-page stories, not exactly a lot of a reading-- or very complicated reading. At that length, there's scarcely even room for plot complications. The writing of only one of the stories is officially credited to Kirby, but Kirby disciple Mark Evanier's introduction reveals that he usually rewrote the stories as he drew them. The most Kirby-esque one is the two-part "The Mystery of the Giant Arrows"/"Prisoners of Dimension Zero!", where Green Arrow (and sidekick Speedy) are plunged into another reality where everyone is a giant... including a very familiar crime-fighter called Xeen Arrow. Nothing here stands out very much, aside from GA's ridiculous original origin story, "The Green Arrow's First Case". Who keeps a diary on a cave wall?

Green Arrow has gotten flack ever since Quiver for the boxing glove arrow, but what reading this story revealed is that it is one of the least bizarre arrows in GA's arsenal. In these mere eleven stories, he deploys the heli-spotter arrow, the ricochet arrow, the mummy arrow, the boomerang arrow, the rain arrow, the cable arrow, the cocoon arrow, the jet arrow, the firecracker arrow, the balloon arrow, the parachute arrow, the rope arrow, the short-circuit arrow, the acetylene arrow, the aqua-lung arrow, the two-way radio arrow, the fountain-pen arrow, the dry-ice arrow, the flare arrow, the two-stage rocket arrow, the siren arrow, the tear-gas arrow, the smokescreen arrow, the machine-gun arrow, the fan arrow, the net arrow, the ink arrow, and the greatest of all, the fake-uranium arrow. And that's not even counting arrows from other sources, such as the charmingly stereotypical Green Arrows of other countries, or the people of 3000 A.D., who send GA hi-tech arrows. But you do have to admire the single-minded worldview of these stories: there's not any problem that can't be solved through the deployment of the appropriate arrow.