Showcase Corner - Legion Of Super-Heroes Five!

The Legion of Super-Heroes had really been one of DC's more organic successes. The team started out in the late 50's in a one-off story guest-starring with Superboy in Adventure Comics, but soon they were showing up in Action Comics with Supergirl and more and more often in Adventure Comics, Superboy, and elsewhere. That led to their own feature in Adventure Comics, replacing Superboy's feature which had introduced them and they thrived, especially among the young fans of the 60's looking for a fresh take from DC. But as they grewand devleoped and added a seemingly endless cast of characters,  they also began to dwindle in popularity and gave over Adventure Comics to an updated Supergirl. They went on to take up residence in Action Comics, hidden behind the main Superman stories. Then they were shifted over to Superboy's main title and history began to repeat itself as they came to absorb it as well. Superboy was still a significant part of the proceedings but there was no doubt the Legion was the rising star.

DC also was not experimenting with different size comics featuring reprints but also offering up complete reprint comic books. The Legion of Super-Heroes was given a four-issue run which might've been an attempt to test the waters for a push into a title of their own or perhaps DC was just trying to defend its position on the spinner racks with the myriad Marvel comics hitting shelves in droves. Despite the long history of the Legion this was first self-titled series. 

That revival was largely the result of the art of Dave Cockrum. He came to the strip as an inker working with longtime DC great Murphy Anderson, but soon was doing all the art, and bringing some fresh design ideas to the series. 

The Legion was a wonderful Silver Age comic, but Cockrum tooled it to become a wonderful Bronze Age comic. New sleek costumes for heroes such as Colossal Boy, Shrinking Violet, Element Lad, Star Boy and many more. Cockrum had a knack for drawing young characters with fresh handsome faces. He gave Timberwolf a ferocious new look. And new legionnaire Wildfire was designed by him. One of his neatest contributions was giving the Legion a sleek new cruiser evocative of a certain enterprising starship from another franchise which had its ups and downs. In conjunction with writer Cary Bates, they made the Legion exciting again. But Cockrum was only there a little while before jetting over to Marvel to pull off a similar trick with a new set of X-Men. 

Mike Grell stepped in to fill his shoes and he did so wonderfully. Grell's work was not as sublimely elegant as Cockrum's, but it was more dynamic and a bit more exciting to read. His girls weren't as pretty, but they were sure pretty enough. In tandem with Bates and returning writer Jim Shooter, Grell made the Legion a must read. Heroes married, moved into new careers, and even died in these Legion stories, and the stakes were always seemingly higher than in other DC comics. With all of space and time to play with, it's no wonder the Legion of Super-Heroes became a hit all over again. 

Below are some of Cockrum's costume designs alongside some classics. 

The Legion was so successful in the 70's that Val Armorr, the Karate Kid was granted a spin-off title making late advantage of what Kung Fu craze was still left in 1976. Karate Kid featured art by Ric Estrada and one of my favorites Joe Staton. Paul Levitz wrote the initial scripts, his first connection to the Legion as far as I know. This story has the Kid shift his work to the 20th Century where he found life at once more challenging and more fulfilling, at least for a time. 

Here are the covers from this run on which the Legion appears. Many feature the creamy art of Nick Cardy. The rest are by Grell. 

And that wraps my month-long read of the Showcase Legion tales. I've been hankering to get to this one for a long time and it's a pleasure finally get it completed. These are fun stories which speak of their respective eras delightfully. 

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Showcase Corner - Legion Of Super-Heroes Four!

The fourth volume of Showcase Presents Legion of Super-Heroes gathers together the Legion's final appearances in the pages of Adventure Comics where they'd debuted a decade earlier, created by Otto Binder. Thanks to the writing of Jerry Seigel, Edmond Hamilton, E. Nelson Bridwell and Jim Shooter with art by John Forte, Curt Swan, George Klein among others the team had found brilliant success in the fan community. But apparently sales were sluggish as the 60's wore on and the wacky Silver Age nonsense of the DCU was waning in appeal to readers wanting a richer experience such as supplied by Marvel. The team would find success in the coming decade, but in the interim they were consigned to back-up status first in Action Comics and later in Superboy, a title they'd overtake just as they'd done with is feature in Adventure Comics. But that's for next time. 

I try to be gentle in my reviews about artists, but there's just no way to say it other than Win Mortimer's arrival on the Legion scene indicated a severe downturn in the quality of the images. His first few issues are dreadful, but later the arrival of inker Jack Abel helps things enormously. The Legion features a lot of characters and making them recognizable is key to good storytelling and Mortimer fails that test in his first few issues. He's not helped by Shooter's increasingly wonky stories which seem more interested in finding new settings than developing characters. An exception to that would be Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel, two of the sillier heroes who eventually seem to find comfort in each other's company.  Shooter also focuses a lot on heroes he'd created, which is not unusual, but some of the classic heroes suffer. Karate Kid gets a lot of attention. Things in that area are not helped by the introduction of Chemical King and Timber Wolf. As good as these heroes might be, they become just more for the fire in the melee of these last Adventure Comic episodes. 

The Shooter-Mortimer-Abel team move over to Action Comics where the Legion becomes a back-up feature switching places with Supergirl who took over the cover feature in Adventure Comics. The Legion stories ranged from seven to twelve pages and given the limitation began to focus more on a few Legionnaires at a time. We learn about Matter-Eater Lad's unfortunate family life, we learn of Duo Damsel's lack of confidence and see her find comfort with Bouncing Boy for the first time, Shrinking Violet has boyfriend problems as her beau Duplicate Boy is always away, and we see Duplicate Boy seek love again, among other stories. Superboy takes on Reserve status when the ranks of the Legion grow too large to keep a tax-free status. One story uses the Legion Espionage Squad in a style reminiscent of Mission Impossible. 

E. Nelson Bridwell takes on the writing chores and is joined by Cary Bates. George Tuska becomes the artist when the strip moves to the back pages of Superboy. We begin to see new costumes for some of the heroes and heroines using designs sent in by fans. (See the bottom of the post for more on that.) Saturn Girl is the first to feature a fresh new look.  And then the most momentous event occurs when Cary Bates is joined by the art team of Murphy Anderson and Dave Cockrum. Soon the art is just by Cockrum and the Legion is on the verge of its next bright era. More on that next time as I take a gander at the fifth Showcase volume,

Here are the Adventure Comics covers in this volume and the Action Comics and Superboy covers which featured the debut of the back-up Legion tales. Most of these are by the late great Neal Adams. 

Adventure Comics interrupted the Supergirl feature to give us a Legion reprint volume. These are all classic Legion tales, but there were some fascinating pages featuring outfits designed by fans. Some of these would actually make their way into the comic. 

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