Legion of Super-Heroes #259-267

Legion of Super-Heroes #259-267

Originally released in 1980

Written by Gerry Conway (#259-267), J.M. DeMatteis (#266)

Art by Joe Staton (#259-260), Ric Estrada (#261), Jim Sherman (#262), Jim Janes (#263-267)

Better late than never, I'm dipping my toes into the Legion of Super-Heroes, a team of super-powered teens from the 30th century.  I've only ever read the Great Darkness Saga as far as this team goes, which is a big story for the team, but it felt kind of like watching Avengers: Endgame as my first Marvel movie.  Despite the numbering, this isn't the 259th Legion of Super-Heroes story; a Superboy comic included the Legion of Super-Heroes as a back-up story, and they gradually became so prominent that they more or less took over the series, leading to it being renamed to just "Legion of Super-Heroes". (there were earlier stories featuring the team on the DC app, but they jumped around a lot in terms of numbering, whereas from this point on, they're uploaded on to the app more consistently)

However, it does start in the middle of a storyline - fittingly, Superboy's last storyline (at least for a while) with the team.  An escaped madman is targeting core members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, trying to drive them mad with their greatest fears.  The founding members (Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Sun Boy) are out of commission, and as the Legion learn, the madman had a particular hatred of Sun Boy, who was a living reminder of how the woman he loved died by being caught in an exploding sun.

When he tries to attack the rest of the Legion, Superboy goes after him, only to wind up in a Superman museum where he learns about how Ma and Pa Kent die and that it's partially his fault.  He manages to bring some sense to the Psycho-Warrior, but he no longer sees the future as some kind of Never-Never Land as a result.

He'll forget what he learned in the future when he returns to the present (presumably to avoid time paradoxes), though he'll remember it again when he returns to the future.  This leads to Saturn Girl using her psychic powers to make it so Superboy won't return to the future, in order to save him from the heartbreak of recalling how his parents die.

This leads to a bit of a problem for me, as the character that I'm familiar with from this series is no longer a part of it, and the Legion of Super-Heroes has twenty-five characters in it, most of whom I don't know at all.  I've heard of Brainiac 5, an upgraded version of the Superman villain Brainiac who rejects his ancestor's desire for gathering all knowledge and destroying the worlds that it originated from, and I'm vaguely aware of the founding members, but everyone else is new to me.  I can guess what Karate Kid, Wildfire, Shrinking Violet, Chameleon Boy, and Shadow Lass can do based on their superhero names, but I'm not sure what they look like or what their personalities are like, forcing me to figure it out on the fly.

The team is drawn into a murder mystery at a traveling interstellar circus that's being used as an olive branch between Earth and a rival planet.  The murderer could be any of the employees, though Brainiac uses logic to determine who has the means and motive and narrows it down to three options.  However, it's likely not as simple as that; I have a feeling that the murderer is a circus employee who isn't part of that trio of suspects.

Rather than risk their plans being exposed, the killer tries to murder the Legion of Super-Heroes, first with a bomb and then personally; the plot is resolved rather quickly, with the murderer's reveal and downfall happening in the last two pages, but it does a good enough job with building it up that the reveal felt logical when it happened. (even if realistically, the options were limited to begin with since barely any members of the circus troupe got characterization)

Elsewhere in the galaxy, another group of Legion members are facing off against space pirates who have a rather old-fashioned view of the term, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if their captain had a peg leg or a hook hand.

As it turns out, the pirates are androids designed to serve the engineer who designed them.  They've been trying to entertain him, and whenever they fail, they increase the scope of their efforts.  Entertaining him proves to be rather difficult considering that he's been dead for hundreds of years, but their efforts have gotten to the point where entire planets have been destroyed as a result of their futile attempts.

The situation is quickly resolved once the truth is discovered, though back on Earth, more problems have risen.  The parents of several members of the Legion have been kidnapped by a masked man known as Dagon the Avenger.

So far, the series has a charming retro sort of feel to it - despite being made in 1980, a few years before Crisis On Infinite Earths changed DC's universe forever, it feels like something out of the 1960s or late 1950s.  However, between that and the sheer number of characters on the team, there's less of an emphasis on characterization as a result, which makes the book suffer a bit in my eyes since it's hard for me to get attached to anyone on the team.

The Legion narrows Dagon's identity down to three former employees of R.J. Brande, the team's sponsor who lost his millions and had to lay off his employees as a result. The difficult part is finding where Dagon is hidden, as he could be anywhere.

The series handles race in a rather questionable manner, despite it taking place a thousand years into the future.  Dawnstar, who resembles a Native American, has the super power of super-tracking (and flight,  it every Legion member gets a flight ring that lets them do that), while Tyroc, the only black member of the team, comes from an island that only appears on Earth for thirty years before vanishing for two centuries - there's talk of racial equality in the Legion's time, but the inhabitants of this island are the only black people that we see in this time period (at least going by the issues that I've read), which raises some unfortunate implications.

If this series came out in the fifties or sixties, that would be one thing, but it came out in 1980, and DC already had success with characters like Cyborg in the Teen Titans, who first appeared in that same year. The whole thing feels weird; I'm not sure if the editor refused to let the Legion have a black member without some weird restrictions or what else could have led to this, but it feels like such an odd plot point to include.

The story ends with Tyroc helping his teammates escape the island, though he remains trapped there, seemingly for two hundred years.  It's such a weird storyline - Conway and DeMatteis seem to do the best they can with the material, but it's still uncomfortable to read, and not even in a way where it feels like the uncomfortable nature was intentional.

Not wanting to end with that, I moved on to a two part story that involves two former Legionnaires, Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy, who accidentally free a genie that was imprisoned on an ice world.  Element Lad and Colossal Boy were on monitor duty, so those two work with Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy to try and stop the genie from reaching Earth.

Up until now, the series has felt relatively disconnected to the broader DC universe, but there's a brief nod to the present when it was revealed that the genie was imprisoned for trying to attack Oa, the base of the Green Lantern Corps. and home to the Guardians of the Universe.  The genie and his allies were cursed to follow three wishes from whoever frees them, and now the genie is headed for Earth to free his allies.

Taking advantage of their warp drive technology, the Legionnaires get to Earth, take the bottles off-world, and then use the remaining wishes to trap the genie in a bottle.  There's also a back-up story dealing with a time when the team fought Vibrex, the Master of Vibrations, and created the standard-issue Legion flight rings.

For the most part, the series felt like a fun retro-inspired romp, though nowhere near as interesting as the Teen Titans comics that came out around the same time and featured characters who were around the same age.  At the very least, the Legion of Super-Heroes wasn't as hard to get into as I thought, though the characters seem rather basic and two-dimensional.  It would have been nice if it slowed down and took some time to let characters interact - I know that Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl are a couple, Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy are also a couple, and that Lightning Lad and Light Lass are siblings, but in terms of connections between the various characters, that's about it.  I suppose that's a downside to starting midway through the series, but it felt like the number of active members could have been cut in half (at least - you could probably trim it down to eight characters) and nothing would be lost.