by Sean McQuaid

nyone out there remember the original A Legion of Super Heroes? You know, the

30th century group of teen heroes who formed a club dedicated to battling evil and upholding truth and justice and all that good stuff. They wore colorful costumes, sported names like ‘‘Cosmic Boy’’ and ‘‘Saturn Girl’’, and were headquartered in this cute- as-a-button clubhouse that looked like an upside-downrocket ship. Somehow the team

developed a loyal fan following that has \ \‘

_ persisted for decades, but many fans .

expressed concern that the Legion just ain’t ,\\ )

3 Bar ‘ 2 “Te a t members are in their thirties, with various =] PS ¥ LZ) 9

what it used to be. The problem is, they’ ve grown up. By the time of the current Legion

realities as career moves, marriage, and death. Gone are the bright costumes, the silly

codenames and the goofy clubhouse. The >

current Legion book deals with adult charac- < ters who face rather sobering adult issues . (‘zt

and challenges against the backdrop of a

war-scarred future that isn’t as bright as it &

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once was. Many old and new fans have . embraced the Legion’s sophisticated new direction, but many fans also continue to g wistfully recall the old Legion with its col- ourful spirit and youthful idealism. It’s to

satisf aa « y those fans that DC has produced the 3 Ca

new Legionnaires ongoing monthly series. Ina book thick with deja vu we are presented with a new team of strangely familiar super-

istic-as-all-get-out...they’ve even managed to dig up that absurd rocket ship clubhouse. Before you think we’ve stepped into a timewarp, think again. The new Legionnaires series is not the most original creation to come down the pike but it’s also not a reprint, a flashback, or an imaginary story. There really is ateen version of the Legion running loose in the thirtieth century again. How, you may ask? Well, nothing’s ever simple in the decades- long, character-cluttered continuity of the Le- gion of Super Heroes, but here’s a stab at a capsule explanation: Earth, as shown in the Legion of Superheroes series of recent years, had secretly fallen under the control of the alien Dominators, whose hidden activities included

teens, the Legion as they were in their youth: eager, exuberan:,, brightly costumed, ideal-

14

the use of humans in bizarre genetic experi- ments. During the subsequent war to free Earth, one of the Dominators’ underground experi- mental chambers was accidentally opened, re- leasing from stasis a batch of teen-aged ver- sions of most of the early Legion of Super Heroes members. Whether these new Legion-

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i J / LZ naires are clones of the original or if the adult originals are clones who at some point replaced the kids who were then placed in suspended animation is a question the two Legions have been batting around ever since, and it’s also not known for what purpose the Dominators hoped to use acloned Legion in the first place. Regard- less, the end result is that there are now two Legions on the go, and it’s a good thing too since Earth was blown to bits at the conclusion of the war to liberate the planet. The two legions helped evacuate the bulk of Earth’s population, and the planet’s major cities survived by being

'

J es concept was pretty silly to begin with. It

// seems rather confusing and unoriginal to (Pam, ave two age versions of the same charac-

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‘launched into space where they linked to form

New Earth, a massive collection of domed cities in which the culture and institutions of earth survive. Still, the surviving populace has a lot of work ahead to restore order and prosperity to its society, and it’s more than conventional au- thorities can handle alone. So, with the adult

Legion now headquartered in deep space,

- what do you do? Send in the clones. The ’ Y young Legion, known simply as the Legion- FY naires, set up shop on New Earth to serve as Paes Li asource of protection and inspiration for the rs Yj embattled populace...and that’s where the

new Legionnaires series begins. There’s a few unavoidably annoying things about this te new series. For one thing, this whole clone

ters running about within the same continu- ity, and it’s a rather unoriginally contrived move designed to pander to the fandom 2 faction that cringes at the presence of de-

Sa) Pressing realism in comics, the segment of ‘== the reading populace that has been most

vocally critical of the recent Legion of Super Heroes series. A better move might have been, say, having the Dominators create an

gz. entirely new batch of teen heroes with pow-

ers based on the Legion’s, thereby creating an original cast still in keeping with the

readers: recapturing the exuberant spirit of the early Legion. Confusing duplication and : silly concept aside, though, the book has shown some promise.

While the characters are out-and-out clones of the adult Legion in both power and personality, the writers have managed to make them distinctive to some extent, giv- ing them new costumes and new codenames (i.e. the new Sun Boy calling himself ‘‘In- ferno’’ and the new Element Lad calling him- self ‘‘Alchemist’’) and stressing the sometimes considerable differences in character between the mature Legionnaires and their youthful coun- terparts. Some of the youngsters are especially unique in that their adult counterparts are de- ceased: for example, Sun Boy, Ferro Lad, and Invisible Kid, all of whom have long been absent from the Legion, and it’s refreshing in the cases of Ferro Lad and Invisible Kid to see these obscure, long-dead characters given a