John Forte

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The beginning of this volume actually sets up three ongoing mysteries for the Legion. Saturn Girl mentions two pieces of unfinished business: "the Time-Trapper, the scientific criminal who escaped into the future" and "the unsolved mystery of the vanishing world [...] swarm[ing] with monsters." Chameleon Boy adds a third, "the recent deluge of hardened space criminals reforming and surrendering." As far as I know, this is the first mention of the mystery planet and the reforming crooks, 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: the spray from the Fountain of 1,000 Chemicals had something in it that "must've neutralized the Legionnaires' age-regression at infancy." Is having such a thing at a fun fair even a good idea? If these rare chemicals can interfere with the operation of time devices, what are they doing to the bodies of passers-by? (This story also establishes that it's Mother's Day on one page and that it's Halloween-time six pages later. Either the Time Trapper is substantially messing around with time but no one mentions it, or Jerry Siegel is a forgetful writer. You decide which is more plausible.)

I guess you have to appreciate the effort, though. This volume also features the first multi-issue Legion stories I can recall: one about the evil Dynamo Boy taking over the Legion from within, with the help from the Legion of Super-Villains (this is the earliest of their appearances that I've read), and one about the mysterious crime lord Starfinger ("more dangerous than Goldfinger," one cover trumpets; the James Bond film would have come out about a year prior).

Like so many Legion stories of this era, they range from terrible to contrived to terrible and contrived. This volume has less dependence on Legion members behaving erratically (though you still have Lightning Lad pretending to be vengeance-obsessed for somewhat ill-conceived reasons), but still multiple stories where someone in a mask is dramatically revealed as someone else, and the reasoning doesn't stack up. Superboy says he knew it was not Ultra Boy because Ultra Boy can only use one superpower at a time, so he couldn't have both seen through the lead mask with x-ray vision and used other powers, and so he concludes the unknown "boy" must be Supergirl. But as acknowledged on the next page, Supergirl can't see through lead at all, which really undermines his supposed deduction. He should have disqualified her as the suspect too! Lucky for him that red kryptonite had this "weird side effect."

The best part of the book is probably the feeling that the Legion is an ongoing saga, where things and people can change. Lightning Lad loses an arm, and instead of being brushed aside, his mechanical arm comes up in multiple stories. In another story, a Hero of Lallor (introduced in volume 3) goes misanthrope and fights the Legion, only to end up dead, the fact that he'd actually appeared before as a (sort of) hero adding a little bit of pathos. In one story, two pairs of Legionnaires even get married and quit.

Though this of course turns out to be yet another overcomplicated ruse, it sets the stage for what's to come in the 1970s and '80s, where relationships would increasingly dominate the storytelling.… (más)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

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.

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.

Almost without exception, these stories can only be liked for the potential they possess, rather than the actual ideas in them. A good case in point is the Time Trapper, a rare example of a genuine story arc in this series. He's mentioned in a couple stories as a contrived way to get the overly poweful Superboy and Mon-El out of the action, but he intrigues nevertheless: because of the "Iron Curtain of Time" he's created, the Legion can't pass beyond their own time period, no matter how hard the more powerful Legionnaires try. But the way this plot plays out is a bit silly. After a few mentions of this Iron Curtain of Time, the Legion considers using a never-before-mentioned superweapon, the Concentrator, against the Time Trapper. They decide not to do it, but having mentioned this device to the Science Police Chief, he decides they must be put through rigorous psychological evaluations to see if they'll break and reveal its existence and function to outsiders under pressure. The S.P. Chief turns out to be the Time Trapper in disguise, and they foil his plan using the Concentrator, but he escapes back into the future beyond the Iron Curtain of Time. The next story is all about the Legion making preparations to track the Time Trapper down... but they never actually do this, and he's not mentioned again in this volume. The Time Trapper's name intrigues, as does the idea of the futuristic Legion having an enemy from even further in the future, but the stories using him are dumb.

This is especially so of the story where the Legion is preparing to track him down. They're so desperate they call in the Legion of Super-Pets from the twentieth century: Krypto the Super-Dog, Comet the Super-Horse, Streaky the Super-Cat, and Beppo the Super-Monkey. Chameleon Boy's pet, Proty II, gets jealous and demands a position on the team, but because Proty doesn't have any superpowers, they make him do a try-out to demonstrate he can make the cut anyway. There are a lot of problems with this. The first is that Proty is seemingly as sentient as any Legionnaire; he seems to have been designated a "pet" solely because his natural form is of a small blob instead of a humanoid. The second is that any of the "pets" count as pets, since they all seem to be capable of reason and communication. The last is that being a shapeshifting telepath somehow isn't enough a superpower to qualify Proty for membership in the Legion of Super-Pets, even though his "master" Chameleon Boy gets to be in the Legion of Super-Heroes on virtue of just being a shapeshifter and not a telepath! In a later story, Proty sets up a puzzle to determine the Legion leader, one that only one member of the Legion can even solve, yet he's somehow still just a pet. Space racism at work, I guess.

You can see how many of the stories here had potential that was picked up by later writers: the Heroes of Lallor, four super-teens from a planet ruled by a dictatorship, would recur now and again, and their tale is one of the better here. (A villain manipulates the Heroes of Lallor and the Legion into seeing each other as enemies, but understanding and compassion win the day.) I was fascinated to see the debut of Lone Wolf, the hero later known as Timber Wolf; he eventually becomes something of a savage loner, but here he's as whitebread as all the other Legionnaires. And though his actual plan was dumb, I loved the idea of Lex Luthor travelling into the future and pretending to be a pre-evil Lex by wearing a wig to earn the trust of the Legion in order to kill them just because they're friends with Superboy/man. So there's some potential here, but most of it isn't delivered on.

Also: what's up with the Bouncing Boy subplot? He gets his powers removed by mistake in an aside in one issue, and they're temporarily restored for mere minutes in another. Like, I can't even work out what motivates these little snippets because he hadn't even done anything in the book before he showed up to have his powers eliminated.

* Continuity is never a strong point of the Legion: in Adventure Comics #318 (Mar. 1964) and #319 (Apr. 1964), Sun Boy is leader; in Adventure #323 (Aug. 1964), Saturn Girl is up for re-election as leader. Saturn Girl had previously been elected leader in Adventure #304 (Jan. 1963), so it seems like Jerry Siegel forgot about #318-19 when writing #323. We could assume, however, that there was an unseen election between #319 and #323-- after how disastrously Sun Boy's leadership went in #318 (and #319 wasn't exactly a shining hour, either), it would make sense for there to be an election and for an established safe hand like Saturn Girl to be reelected. What weirds me out is not the fault of this book though: none of the on-line lists I can find of Legion leaders include Sun Boy, which seems an odd thing for the detail-oriented Legion fans to miss.… (más)