Legion of Superheroes question
mwhitt80
Posts: 4,638
I'm looking to start reading the LoS.
I'm thinking about jumping in with the 1989 series, but I have a few questions.
Do I need to read the 1984 series first?
How does LEGION and Legionaires fit in?
And Should I get them too?
I'm thinking about jumping in with the 1989 series, but I have a few questions.
Do I need to read the 1984 series first?
How does LEGION and Legionaires fit in?
And Should I get them too?
Comments
@CaptShazam I pm'ed to maybe kick him into gear a little faster.
There is a Legion omnibus starting with the Silver Age coming out soon plus a Legion hardcover book starting up where the Archive editions left off.
The showcase editions go deep into the 1970's as well.
The SA stories are wacky but generally fun. Once you get to the Bronze age, the quality - especially in art - gets much better.
I would say though, that starting with the ’89 series might be a little tough if you don’t know the characters, because they aren't usually in their traditional costumes, and they often refer to each other by their “real” names rather than their codenames. You might want to have the Who’s Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes issues—seven issues just to fit all the Legion characters in!—by your side. That being said, I picked up that series after reading only a handful of LSH comics as a kid in the ’70s, and I was able to figure things out well enough. And it’s still my favorite LSH series.
Legionaires came out of the events of the soft relaunch of LSH at the end of Giffen’s run. I dropped both titles after about a year or so into the new direction, so I don't know exactly how much they crossed over.
WRT your other questions:
Legionnaires spins out of the 89 series right around the time of Zero Hour. This is the point where the Legion gets referenced frequently as the Archies. LEGION kicks off immediately after Invasion! and moves forward in the 20th Century. It ties into LSH continuity but can also be read as pretty much a complete stand alone.
I loved LEGION. Less warm on Legionnaires - but the Archies (Jugheads to me) did nothing positive in my opinion. In fact, I'd submit that Zero Hour was, for my personal enjoyment, more damaging to the Legion than it was to Fate or Manhunter.
Silver-Age - Great primer just so you'll get to know all the principal players. As mentioned, the stories are good goofy fun, but you'll come away with the basic idea.
The Grell Run - 70s - Best costumes ever. Even Cosmic Boy's corset look. Also some of the more fun stories as the Legion deals with growing pains. Gone are the goofy fun tales and in are the more social issues (the President of Earth stealing the Legion's funding, etc.).
The Great Darkness Saga - required reading.
Legion Lost (the original series not the New52 one) - also required reading
The Giffen Era - People either love it or hate it. To echo nweathington, not the best jumping on point if you don't know *anything* about the Legion.
Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds - also also required reading.
The Waid Era - I liked this run but it tended to peter out right at the end. Fun stuff like Supergirl being part of the team but thinking they're all a figment of her imagination and the idea that the Legion are corrupting the youth of the future.
The New52 Era - Umm...it featured Duplicate Damsel pretty prominently so there's that.
Rebels - a Legion offshoot that I love. Has a pre-Brainiac 5 with (I think) only an 8th-level intellect (Brainy 5's is 12th). You may want to read some other Legion first, though.
There are runs in-between all these that are great reads as well. Anything featuring the Fatal Five or Time Trapper are worth it. Toward the pre-New52 era there were a smattering of good stories and they tried to introduce some new Legionnaires.
Also anything with the Legion of Substitute Heroes.
I ordered LoS 1984 1-31 along with the annuals, and who's who Legion 1-6. That puts me a little shy 50% of the series, gives me a big enough sample size to dig into, and time to build up the reserves to finish off the series. I'm ready to give it a try.
I knew I was forgetting something: Rebels. I've read the one from 2009 and really liked it. Was the older one any good?
That would have been right around the time my wife and I moved, and she was having to take care of great aunt in West Virginia. So it probably got bagged in an envelope and boxed away. Time to go digging.
Great price on Amazon atm: https://www.amazon.com/Superboy-Legion-Super-Heroes-Vol-1/dp/1401272916/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1491992482&sr=8-3&keywords=legion+omnibus
Then try to round up the Showcase issues of the Silver Age stories. They give you all the delightful sci-fi soap opera whackiness you need.
After those, just find runs. Continuity has been fucked over so many times, there's not really much point to making sense of it.
And don't bother with the final Levitz series--that would be too cruel an initiation prank even for the Legion.
The 1984 LoS starts with a bang a new more deadly Legion of Super Villains. I assume that this is where they become awesome bad guys (just from the text in the comics).
My question is when the LoS starts talking about Killing a character did you really get anxious about who was getting got?
One of the few things I know about LoS is characters get killed; I'm not even attached to these characters and I'm doing the survival math on who dies.
Gritty details, for those that need to be warned for a story that is older than my wife.
For most of The first 3 issues the book was about a group of happy go lucky superheroes talking junk and knowing they were going to stop whatever stupid plot the LoSV had planned.
Then it switched to Orando for issues 4 & 5 and things got real dark. The fight between Karate Kid & Nemesis Kid was superb. The art really told an amazing story of how just brutal the fight was. You could almost feel the impact of elbows, heads, fists and feet. Then you had his crispy body in issue 4 that was pretty gross, and Projectra just offing nemesis kid and tossing his body away like he was a piece of garbage.
I really liked Lighting Lord; he seems like he's going to be a great villain.
It was a great way to kick off a new series; now onto the next issues, and more reports.
I've always thought that his pre-Legion membership story would have been a fun one to explore. There have been far too many continuity punches now for that ever to happen.