Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2 by Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2

 

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1992-94
Acquired: June 2022
Read: May 2024

This volume collects the second half of the so-called "Five Year Later" Legion—which is also the last two years of the original thirty-six-year Legion continuity. It not only collects the main Legion title and the Legionnaires spin-off, but also some issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. and Valor that tied into it. It's a pretty nicely put together collection, and it means that DC has collected all the Legion material from 1958 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1994 in hardcover. All they have to do is the five years of Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 (and some ancillary material from that time) and they'll be done. C'mon DC, you can do it! But as for this volume itself, I'll take it in chunks because it's so big:

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #40-48

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum with Tom McCraw
Pencillers: Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse

Inkers: Ron Boyd, Karl Story, John Dell III

Letters: John Workman, Bob Pinaha

Colorist: Tom McCraw

These issues set up the new status quo for the Legion; you may remember that in the previous volume, a group of younger (cloned?) Legionnaire surfaced, the so-called "Batch SW6." The opening story sees the two Legions divvy up responsibilities; the older (original?) will take responsibility for the wider United Planets, while SW6 Legion will stay on "New Earth," the collection of linked domed cities that's all that's left following the destruction of the Earth.

Most of these nine issues are given over to a tedious storyline about the return of Mordru, using an army of the dead to try to take over the galaxy. I found the beats of this storyline very repetitive, and it dragged on and on. Writers Tom & Mary Bierbaum, on their own after co-plotting with Keith Giffen in the previous volume, are good at character moments and comedy, but I think not great at telling big stories; there are lots of nice moments and good ideas, but the overall story just isn't big enough to justify the space given to it. The art is excellent, though; well done Stuart Immonen especially.

Legionnaires #1-8

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Pencillers: Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, Colleen Doran

Inkers: Karl Story, Mark Farmer, John Nyberg

Letterer: Pat Brousseau

Colorist: Tom McCraw

Legionnaires also starts with a multi-part story, this one about a new Fatal Five assembling to take down the new Legion. Again, it's okay but too drawn out, and again it has great art, here from Chris Sprouse.

What did really work for me in this set of eight issues were the last two, a pair of standalone stories. The first features some exquisite Adam Hughes art in an adventure where the Legion visits the Atlantis dome; the character driven stuff really suits the Bierbaums' strengths in a way that wasn't true of the earlier stories, and Hughes is all-time great when it comes to "acting"; his Legionnaires are expressive and lively. I would have loved to have seen a longer run from him on the Legion. There's also a Brainiac 5–focused story that I found so-so, but really shines thanks to some Colleen Doran art. Again, she's an all-time great, and Legionnaires was lucky to get her early in her career.

The fun thing about seeing the young Legion in a 1990s comic is that they come across as genuine teenagers in a way that wasn't really true of the 1960s squares of the era from which they were supposedly plucked.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #49-52 & Annual #4

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw
Pencillers: Stuart Immonen, Darryl Banks, Joe Phillips, Christopher Taylor, Nick Napolitano

Inkers: Terry Austin, Ron Boyd, Wade Von Grawbadger, Dan Davis, Pam Eklund, Rich Faber

Letters: Bob Pinaha

Colors: Tom McCraw

This section opens with a "Bloodlines: Earthplague" annual; it is of course terrible, but all of 1993's Bloodlines annuals were, so I don't know how much we can blame the Bierbaums for this. (It is, however, kind of misplaced; it takes place during the Mordru storyline from earlier in the book.) A skateboarder dude with attitude gets powers and travels to the thirtieth century and lives it up... and it's just awful all around, not helped by some really bad art. (There are five credited pencillers and four credited inkers.)

The last four issues here are transitional standalones: a comedy Tenzil "Matter-Eater Lad" Kem story, a big celebration for the fiftieth, a story about Kent Shakespeare and some Legion-adjacent children, and a Timber Wolf story. Most are not great. The Tenzil one was nowhere near as funny as previous Tenzil adventures; I am not sure what happened there. The one about the kids was confusing; maybe I would have liked it more if I could remember who these characters were, but I mostly did not. (It's been over two years since I last saw most of them in the previous Five Years Later omnibus.) The Timber Wolf one mixes great Stuart Immonen art with terrible Christopher Taylor art, and seems like a bit of a regression for a character I don't particularly like to begin with.

That said, I did really like #50, which was also the swansong of the Bierbaums on the main book. One thing I've really liked about their run is the sense of the Legionnaires as real people that have grown and aged and come to terms with themselves, and that's really present in this issue; there's a great conversation between Light Lass and Timber Wolf, for example. There's a strong Element Lad focus here, which really works; I think they nicely picked up the baton of treating these characters as people in a way that Paul Levitz had begun and no one before him had. It's a shame all this work got wiped out by later writers, even when DC did return to the "original" Legion.

Legionnaires #9-15

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Pencillers/Breakdowns: Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, Brian Stelfreeze, Joe Phillips, Chris Gardner, Frank Fosco, Jeff Moy

Inkers/Finisher: Karl Story, Stuart Immonen, Mark Farmer, Wade Von Grawbadger, Jason Martin, Dennis Cramer, Ron Boyd

Letterer: Pat Brousseau

Colorist: Tom McCraw

I wouldn't call this great, but it's a reasonably strong run from the Bierbaums; instead of doing one big story, it's more in the classic 1980s style of the Legion, where there's a bunch of different stories on the boil all at once, rotating in prominence, with the character work being the main throughline. I think this plays to their strengths more than other work in the volume, and I think had they been allowed to stay on the title, they could have eventually made it great. Unfortunately, what should have been the best subplot (Kono and a disguised-as-a-woman Tenzil infiltrating space pirates) turns out to be the worst. I don't know how they screwed that one up but it just doesn't make sense at all.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #53-59

Co-Plotters: Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, & Ron Boyd
Words: Tom McCraw, Mark Waid

Colors: Tom McCraw
Art: Stuart Immonen & Ron Boyd, Chrstopher Taylor & Dave Cooper

Letters: Bob Pinaha

Tom McCraw's brief run on the Legion is freaking awful. They're once again on the run and against the government, which feels like a regression; they adopt stupid new codenames; they suddenly start acting and posing in a very 1990s "attitudinal" way. I don't really know what anyone was going for here but it was pretty badly done.

L.E.G.I.O.N. '94 #69-70 / Legionnaires #16-18 & Annual #1 / Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #60-61 & Annual #5 / Valor #20-23

Writers: Tennessee Peyer, Mark Waid with Ty Templeton, Tom McCraw, Kurt Busiek
Pencillers: Arnie Jorgensen, Derec Aucoin, Paul Pelletier, Jeff Moy, Stuart Immonen, Curt Swan, Ron Boyd, Wade Von Grawbadger, Craig Hamilton, Ted McKeever, Colleen Doran, Chris Gardner

Inkers: James Pascoe, Mark Farmer, John Lowe, Wade Von Grawbadger, Ron Boyd, Jose Marzan, Jr., Dave Cooper, John Lowe, Robert Campanella, Karl Story, Colleen Doran, Dennis Cramer

Colorists: Gene D'Angelo, Tom McCraw, Dave Grafe

Letterers: Gaspar, Pat Brousseau, Bob Pinaha

First we get some pages from two issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. that wrap up Jo Nah's search for the missing Tinya Wazzo, though he finds out that L.E.G.I.O.N.'s Phase is no Tinya, but her cousin. This is a retcon I don't buy and tend to ignore, but good on DC for including the pages here. (I think these are the only issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. to ever be collected?) After that we get two Elseworlds annuals, one where the Legion are Arthurian knights in space, and one where it's an Oz riff. Neither is a great Elseworlds tale, though the Arthurian one has its moments.

Finally, we get a set of timebending Zero Hour tie-ins that draw this era of the Legion to an end. A couple issues of Valor are here, though Colleen Doran art aside, I don't rate them highly; even Mark Waid can't make this dud of a premise work. (The SW6 Valor has to replace the original Valor and do everything he did, but earlier and quicker, for some reason.) Then time anomalies begin threatening the Legion and Legionnaires in the thirtieth century, their continuity slipping around them; Cosmic Boy turns out to be the Time Trapper; a series of increasingly complicated but meaningless reveals about nothing are made. It's the worst kind of superhero comics, where what happens is more important than how.

And then it all comes to an end. I guess I can see why DC decided to start over with the Legion, but it seems to me that this was the beginning of the slow thirty-year death of the Legion. No longer was the Legion a single ongoing story to which different authors and artists added their bits, but rather it was now continuously jettisoned and started over arbitrarily. Even when later runs were strong (I do really like the "threeboot"), the overall health of the Legion as a concept never recovered. I wonder if there was a way to continue on from this era and make it work (probably such a way requires there to never have been an SW6 Legion) but we'll never know.

But regardless, this is a great collection in that it provides ready access to a key slice of DC history. Even the bad choices here are interesting, and the good choices are great. I'm pretty close to owning an unbroken 1958-94 run on the Legion, and I look forward to savoring this volume as the culmination of the original dream.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1

Review: Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 1 by Keith Giffen, Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Al Gordon, et al.

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1989-93
Acquired: September 2020
Read: February 2021

Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 1

Plot/Pencils/Layouts: Keith Giffen

Story/Dialogue: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Inker/Writer: Al Gordon
Pencils: Chris Sprouse, Paris Cullins, Craig Brasfield, Dougie Braithwaite, Brandon Peterson, Dan Jurgens, Jason Pearson, Dusty Abell, Rob Haynes, Ian Montgomery, Joe Phillips, Colleen Doran, Curt Swan, David A. Williams, June Brigman, Stuart Immonen

Inks: Bob Lewis, Doug Hazelwood, Larry Mahlstedt, Carlos Garzon, Brett Breeding, Michael Christian, Brad Vancata, Scott Hanna, Tony Harris, Karl Story, John Dell, Karl Kesel, Bob Smith, Steve Leialoha

Story/Story Assists: Dan Jurgens, Tom McCraw, Jason Pearson

Colors: Tom McCraw, Glenn Whitmore

Letters: Todd Klein, John Workman, Albert De Guzman, Janice Chiang, Coffin N. Coro, Bob Pinaha

I'm always ping-ponging around the Legion timeline, based on what DC has deigned to collect and what I can get hold of. This volume collects the first thirty-nine issues of the so-called "Five Year Later" era (plus assorted annuals and other tie-ins). In terms of publication, it began three months after the previous issue, Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 #63, but in terms of story, there was a five-year gap during which the Legion of Super-Heroes had disbanded, Earth had withdrawn from the United Planets and become a Dominator puppet state, and many of the Legionnaires had suffered various dark fates. The series was the brainchild of Keith Giffen, who pencilled and plotted the majority of the early issues-- previously a collaborator of Paul Levitz for much of his run, but now the series's lead creative force. New-to-comics writers but longtime Legion fans Tom & Mary Bierbaum dialogued his issues, and wrote many of their own; most issues were inked by Al Gordon, who also contributed to the plotting and wrote several issues as well.

You could write a book on this book (it is over 1,300 pages), but I will try to limit myself by sticking to one paragraph for each of the major storylines. The first, covering issues #1-12, is simply dubbed Five Years Later, and slowly reveals the situation of this new world. On the one hand, it's very confusing: partially this is because a lot has happened in those five years, and partially this is because the latest-published issue of the Legion I've read is from 1984 (in The Curse), so this is ten story years after what I was familiar with, and partially this is because Giffen's layouts are dense and packed and confusing. He uses the nine-panel grid here, with lots of quick cuts and little exposition, leaving the reader to piece togther events themselves. On the other hand, though, it's incredible: more happens in a single issue of this comic than in entire sixty-issue runs of contemporary comics. Giffen has always been an artistic master, but I feel like this is him at his peak: a very distinctive style and a command of characterization mostly unmatched. I didn't entirely understand everything that happened here... but I wanted to, and this is a story that will richly reward rereading, I suspect. There's lot of great character stuff here: for the first time, I care about Cosmic Boy, the rock upon which the Legion stands even when "powerless"; Cham is put into a new role of authority; new character Kono is an utter delight, a "female chauvinist"; Laurel Gand quickly establishes herself as the kind of strong woman who I love. There are time travel shenanigans and attempted genocides... but best of all is Matter-Eater Lad! Oh my god, I don't think I've laughed so much at a comic book in a long time as I did at #11, where he defends Polar Boy in court. In the midst of all this darkness, we have humor: Giffen and the Bierbaums get it. The one thing I didn't like about this storyline is that it almost seemed too easy to actually reunite the Legion: if so many of them were up for it, why did it take so long since the dissolution for this to happen?

The second is even more simply dubbed The Legion of Super-Heroes, and spans #12-25. It covers a couple different crises the Legion handles: Matter-Eater Lad battling Evillo, a Khund invasion, a Dark Circle infiltration, the Moon exploding, and the return of Darkseid. I found these hit or miss. The Matter-Eater Lad issue was great, of course. The Khund story didn't have the weight it should have; the whole thing seemed to happen so suddenly. The aftermath of the Moon exploding was interesting, but the actual way it happened didn't work for me, a crossover with Superman where Superman and the Legion reminisce about the "pocket universe Superboy," a character earlier issues went through some pain to establish had been removed from history! The Quiet Darkness, the Darkseid story, saw inker Al Gordon take over writing duties, and I found it a strong thriller with a neat take on Darkseid.

The third is Terra Mosaic, #26-36, which focuses on Earth finally rebelling against the Dominators, as well as the emergence of "Batch SW6," clones of the Legion from their young, idealistic days. Giffen switches from pencilling to doing layouts, and it's to the book's detriment. It's just not as dense anymore, it's more straightforward comics. Though some good stories are told about the Batch SW6 Legionnaires (I have mixed thoughts about the trans representation in #31, but it's an emotional triumph), they are a huge number of extra characters in a book already straining to use its cast, and most of the "adult" Legion sits around doing nothing for most of this crisis. The at first straightforward retcons start to get more complicated, too, with the introduction of Kid Quantum. But the Sun Boy story is terrific, the fight between Laurel Gand and B.I.O.N. is one of the best fights in comics, and the climax comes together extraordinarily well.

The last doesn't have an overaching title (but you could probably call it The End), and is just #37-39. #37 is a cute side story about Star Boy being a baseball manager, but then in #38 the Earth is destroyed! I'm not sure what I think about this; it feels gratuitous. It's an ambitious issue, covering lots of ground... but that means you feel rather distanced from its momentous events. #39 reads more like the start of something new; I suspect it's here because Giffen pencils some of it and DC wanted to get all of his "Five Years Later" work in this volume, but it reads more like the beginning of the next storyline.

There's also three annuals included. #1 is great, pulling together a history for Ultra Boy and deploying some clever retcons. Weaving Glorith into the events of the two Superboy and the Legion volumes almost makes what Brainiac did there palatable. I never cared much for Ultra Boy before, but this story made me appreciate him a whole lot. #2 does a lot to clarify Valor's history, though it's one of those stories that sounds better in summary than in actuality; I found its events too compressed to have much impact. #3 is half set-up for the Timber Wolf miniseries, but half a "story" where the Legion just chills out. I really enjoyed it: great character writing, lots of good moments. Plus some great Kono jokes!

And then there's Al Gordon's Timber Wolf miniseries. I appreciate that it is here, but it is quite frankly not very good. Timber Wolf is sent to the 1990s, and it's the most mediocre and generic 1990s superhero comic you've ever read. Full of bland, awful characters doing who knows what, and I didn't think it really felt much like Timber Wolf.

Lastly, the volume collects a sequence of Who's Who entries published during its run. These were helpful in orienting me, though it was hard to know when to read them: some contain spoilers for later issues, so beware! I eventually decided I'd just risk it, and usually I alternated between issues and Who's Who issue (so I wouldn't read them all in one go). There's even a series of postcards Giffen illustrated!

Given how much is in here, it feels churlish to complain about what's not, but by a total coincidence, I read Secret Origins #42 right around the same time I started this volume, and it really should have been included: it's by the Bierbaums, giving an origin for Phantom Girl that introduces some threads picked up on in Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1. When reading that story, I found myself glad I had read the Secret Origins issue. I see from Wikipedia that issues #46, 47, and 49 also featured Legion-related tales, but as I haven't read those, I don't know if they would have made good inclusions here. (Only one is by the Bierbaums.)

This volume cuts off at a pretty logical point, when Keith Giffen left the book, and when the Earth was destroyed. Another big omnibus could collect Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #40-61, the two remaining annuals, the eighteen issues of spin-off Legionnaires, and its one annual, enclosing the entire "Five Years Later" era in two large volumes. DC often starts Legion collections and cuts them off before getting anywhere, but I really really hope they can follow through on this book's "volume 1" and tie up this unique, worthwhile era of comics. I think I only scratched the surface in my reading, and I barely even did that in my write-up. I look forward to revisiting this someday and doing it justice.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion: Secret Origin