In Adventure
Comics #247, the home of Superboy, young Clark Kent
met a strange teen taunting him about his secret identity.
Later while flying around as Superboy, another teen called
him "Clark." Or maybe it was vice versa - it's been a while.
At any rate,
it turned out that these teens (and more) were from 100
years in the future - later amended to 1,000 years - and
members of an elite club of super-powered youths. They had
traveled back in time to extend membership in their club
for only one penny and the further purchase of fourteen
reel-to-reel tapes.
Superboy did
actually have to pass a little initiation test, which called
for feats of derring-do and acts of heroism and were all
rigged to make him think he'd failed. Faster than Superboy
could say "thank you, Cosmic Boy, may I have another?" the
group revealed the ruse and welcomed him with open arms,
as at the time, they were all humanoid.
That changed
as audiences got more sophisticated (as in, they grew up
and still read comics), but for most of the sixties the
team featured members from all over the galaxy yet all still
looked human. The two exceptions were Brainiac 5, featured
in "Far From Home," who had bright green skin and a taste
for purple turtlenecks, and the tragic Ferro Lad.
A mutant before
(or a thousand years after) it was fashionable, Earthman
Andrew Nolan was able to transform his body to iron. The
trade-off for this ability was a hideous non-human face,
which he masked - get it? A Man in an Iron Face Under an
Iron Mask. He stands out in Legion history for two reasons:
he was created by the 13-year-old Jim Shooter, the regular
Legion writer who took his time letting DC know that he
was actually 13, and because Ferro Lad was the first Legionnaire
to die, in the tale that introduced "Far From Home" villains
the Fatal Five.
When the interstellar
menace known as the Sun Eater approached our system, the
United Planets teamed the Legion with the galaxy's most
powerful villains: the Emerald Empress, Tharok, Mano, the
Persuader (who rarely actually tried to persuade anybody
of anything) and Validus. The hope was that this ragtag
team would have some ability in their arsenal that would
stop the Sun Eater from devouring, well, the sun.
Brainiac 5 and
Tharok reasoned that the thing had to be blown up from the
inside, and Superboy volunteered to fly into its heart and
explode the nuclear device. Believing that the mission would
be fatal and that Superboy was a greater inspiration than
he, Ferro Lad tricked him, took the bomb, and blew himself
and the Sun Eater to smithereens.
Behind the walls
of sleep, however, Ferro Lad rested uneasily, and his ghost
appeared at least one more time, later to be joined by other
fallen Legionnaires such as Invisible Kid and Chemical King,
whose deaths were predicted by Shooter in a Superman story
featuring an adult Legion.
Supergirl joined
the Legion, too, which, true to this week's episode, sparked
one of the greatest unrequited loves in comics history.
Brainiac 5 was so smitten and so unable to express himself,
that he once even built a perfect android duplicate of Kara
Zor-El in his sleep, running away with her for a romantic
getaway.
They flew too
close to a cosmic storm, and only the timely intervention
of the real Supergirl saved Brainy from disintegration.
A sympathetic Kara listened and watched as her sex droid
doppelganger explained the depth of Brainiac 5's obsession
to him.
Awkward.
Both Superboy
and Supergirl got their minds wiped whenever they returned
to the twentieth century, so that they wouldn't be able
to affect their futures with any knowledge of the Legion's
past. Brainiac 5 not only loved a girl dead a thousand years
previously, but every time he saw her, he could have told
her how she died.
Heck, the Legion
even made Lana Lang an honorary member without telling her
that, of course, their substitute member, Laurel Kent, was
a descendant of Superman and Lois Lane.
They didn't
even tell Superboy that one until he tried to date her.
After the Crisis,
however, when Superboy was wiped from continuity, DC went
through backflips to revamp Legion history. It turned out
that their enemy the Time Trapper had created a "pocket
universe" with a Superboy in it, that was really the place
the Legion had been going to visit. When they accidentally
traveled back into their real history and discovered a Superman
clueless as to who they were, the whole jig was up.
The repercussions
of that revelation actually weren't that bad, though the
Pocket Superboy sacrificed himself, an action that eventually
rolled around to the creation of a new Supergirl, but…if
I haven't explained that one before, I'm not going to do
it now. Stick with the animated series' explanation.
After Zero
Hour, however, the Legion did officially reboot, merging
their energies with those of cloned younger selves that
caused a whole new 30th Century. Yes, it was confusing,
though some of the stories told in the wake of that were
exciting and gripping and …most people thought they were
just too confusing to even give them a chance. So last year
DC relaunched the Legion again under the aegis of Mark Waid
and Barry Kitson, a book which has not only been absolutely
rockin' and absolutely accessible, but which just last month
changed its title to …Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes.
For reasons that some think they know, DC will no longer
have a Superboy.
Of odd note:
the other Legionnaire given a speaking part in this episode
is Bouncing Boy, better known as Chuck Taine, a fat kid
who accidentally drank an experimental formula that turned
him into a human beach ball. No. Really. Weep not for him,
though, for he ended up marrying Duo Damsel - you fill in
the joke there.
In the 80's,
the Fatal Five's Validus was revealed to be the son of Legionnaires
Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, stolen at birth by Darkseid.
And…hey, let's
make that it for this week, okay?
