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Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.
HEROES OF TOMORROW ISSUE!
020
™
Interactive Catalog
2020
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CONTENTS American Comic Book Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Companion Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Digital Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Comics Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Modern Masters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Jack Kirby Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Magazines:
Jack Kirby Collector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Draw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Write Now (and “how-to” books) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Comic Book Creator/Comic Book Artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Alter Ego . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Rough Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Back Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 RetroFan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 BrickJournal (LEGO® magazine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
respective owners.
All characters TM & © their
Pop Culture Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 LEGO® Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
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You’ve probably heard that Diamond Comic Distributors closed in March, leaving small publishers like us with no way to get our publications to comics shops. Then, our distributor for the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain also closed without warning, just as our new issues were about to go on sale. The end result is, we took a huge loss by printing and shipping tens of thousands of copies of six new magazines and our Anniversary book that distributors are not paying us for, and having to dispose of the unsold copies. We hope distributors and stores will eventually reopen, but until then, mail order and digital sales are TwoMorrows’ lifeline, to ensure we stay in business. We have bills to pay on all those existing publications, and plan to keep publishing new ones. So if you’re able to help, please: 1) Purchase our World of TwoMorrows 25th Anniversary book, which is available now in Softcover, Ultra-Limited Hardcover, and Digital Editions. If you’ve enjoyed the material we’ve produced for the last quarter-century, you’ll love learning how we made it happen all these years! 2) Download our new, easy to use 2020 Digital Catalog at: https://www.twomorrows.com/2020InteractiveCatalog.pdf and order some books and mags online. Best of all: We’re currently offering 40% off most magazines! And we’re fully operational and shipping worldwide (my wife Pam and I are packing and mailing all the orders due
to North Carolina’s stay-at-home mandate). If you have trouble ordering online, we’re happy to take your order by phone or email. 3) Pre-order copies of Alter Ego #164, Back Issue #120, BrickJournal #62, Comic Book Creator #23, Jack Kirby Collector #79, and RetroFan #9, all of which will be shipping by mail over the next few weeks. Or please consider: Since BrickJournal #62 and #63 and RetroFan #9 and #10 (and possibly later issues) will not be sold at Barnes & Noble, now is a great time to… 4) Subscribe or renew your current subscriptions! The next issues of all six of our magazines are ready to go to press, and by subscribing, you’re helping us maintain a regular release schedule for your favorite titles. In 1994, I founded TwoMorrows Publishing with the publication of The Jack Kirby Collector #1. I didn’t start out by selling through comics shops or bookstores—only by mail order and subscriptions. And I’m prepared to keep working that way indefinitely, regardless of when stores and distributors reopen. So stay safe, and together, we’ll keep the World of TwoMorrows spinning for another 25 years! John Morrow, publisher TwoMorrows Publishing 919-449-0344 www.twomorrows.com
Volume 1, Number 120 June 2020 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow
Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!
DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Steve Lightle (Legion of Super-Heroes commissioned illustration from the collection of Ted Latner.) COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Mike Baron Dan Jurgens Tom Bierbaum Joe Jusko Kurt Busiek John K. Kirk John Byrne Ted Latner KC Carlson Legion Lad Howard Chaykin Legion Wiki.com Nicola Cuti Steve Lightle DC Comics Ed Lute Lenin Delsol Val Mayerik Cecil Disharoon Tom McCraw Colleen Doran Luigi Novi Robert Loren Amanda Powers Fleming Thomas Powers Jim Ford Bob Rozakis Lar Gand Rose Rummel-Eury Peter B. Gillis David Scroggy Al Gordon Walter Simonson Grand Comics Steven Thompson Database Mark Voger Mike Grell Mike Vosburg Heritage Comics Mark Waid Auctions John Wells
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FLASHBACK: Uncommon Valor: A Mon-El History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 “Superboy’s big brother” and his long road to solo-stardom TOY BOX: Bits of Legionnaire Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Legion of Super-Heroes merchandise from the BACK ISSUE era FLASHBACK: Manhunter 2070 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Mike Sekowsky’s mostly forgotten DC hero and his reappearances ONE-HIT WONDERS: The World of Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Mayerik, Vosburg, and Jusko look back at Bill Mantlo’s fanciful hero FLASHBACK: Space: 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 From TV’s Moonbase Alpha to Charlton Comics BEYOND CAPES: Mike Grell’s Starslayer: The Future of Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The sci-fi epic’s trailblazing journey from publisher to publisher INTERVIEW: Mike Baron’s Sonic Disruptors: Comics Interruptus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The plug was pulled on the cutting-edge writer’s offbeat DC limited series FLASHBACK: Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 An oral history revealing the ambitious yet perilous 1989 reboot GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD: Steve Lightle’s Legionnaires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 An interview with the writer/artist about an ambitious Legion spinoff that never happened WHAT THE--?!: Defective Comics and the Secret Origin of the Sketch Card . . . . . . . . . . . 75 The story you never knew you needed to know, in a BACK ISSUE bonus feature BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Reader reactions BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $89 Economy US, $135 International, $36 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Steve Lightle. The Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2020 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1
C’Mon… Who is This Guy?
TM
by J o h n
Wells
From his debut as “Superboy’s big brother” to his own series and beyond, DC Comics’ Daxamite do-gooder has seen his share of reboots. (left) Superboy #89 (June 1961) cover by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye. (right) Valor #1 (Nov. 1992) cover by M. D. Bright and Al Gordon. Unless otherwise noted, art scans accompanying this article are courtesy of John Wells. TM & © DC Comics.
For an orphan, family was everything. That was certainly true for Superman, whose heart leapt when an alien visitor crashed on Earth with documentation from his Kryptonian father Jor-El. The stranger suffered from amnesia, but Superman was convinced that Halk Kar was his older brother and brushed aside any evidence to the contrary. Eventually, though, the alien’s failure to manifest superpowers on Earth led to a near-fatal electrocution that serendipitously restored his memories. Halk Kar was, in fact, a native of the planet Thoron who had made an emergency stop on Krypton decades earlier. Jor-El had hastily repaired his craft before the planet was destroyed, but the impact of its explosion was enough to place Halk Kar into suspended animation as he hurtled to safety. With his head clear, Superman’s “sibling” resumed his journey home to Thoron.
THE KID FROM DAXAM
TM & © DC Comics.
Written by Edmond Hamilton and drawn by Al Plastino, late 1952’s “Superman’s Big Brother” (Superman #80, left) was ripe for reassessment by 1961. By this point, editor Mort Weisinger was regularly refurbishing old plots for new stories and the tale of Halk Kar got its turn in Superboy #89 (on sale in April 1961). Like his predecessor,
2 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
the amnesiac Mon-El (found on a Monday) wore a costume with a color scheme that was roughly the reverse of Superboy’s—red shirt and leggings with blue cape and boots—but Robert Bernstein and George Papp’s story departed in meaningful ways. For one thing, Mon possessed Kryptonian-class powers. For another, Superboy’s elation over having a big brother turned to suspicion and he feared that he was being played. Determining that Mon was unaffected by kryptonite, the Boy of Steel decided to fake a meteor shower with lead boulders painted to resemble Green K. Sure enough, Mon-El collapsed, but Superboy’s “gotcha” evaporated when he realized that his counterpart’s agony was real. Recovering his memories, Mon explained that he was a native of Daxam who had made a stopover on Krypton and met Jor-El before traveling on to Earth in suspended animation. Exposure to lead was lethal and, unlike kryptonite, removing the substance wouldn’t make things better. Desperate to avert the death sentence he’d rendered, Superboy projected Mon-El into the immaterial Phantom Zone. One day, the Boy of Steel vowed, he would rescue his “big brother” and an editorial comment promised “a 3-part novel featuring Superman’s return to the Phantom Zone.”
Over the next year, Mon made a few guest-shots (Action Comics #284, 288; Adventure Comics #293; Lois Lane #33; Jimmy Olsen #62), but that three-part novel never materialized. Instead, salvation was delivered in a feature that hadn’t even existed in 1961. After three years as recurring players in the Superman universe, the 30th Century-based Legion of Super-Heroes was given its own series in July 1962’s Adventure Comics #300 and Mon-El emerged from the Phantom Zone in the inaugural installment to destroy a Luthor robot who threatened the team. Legionnaire Saturn Girl had devised a treatment for Mon’s lead poisoning, albeit short-term enough that he quickly had to seek sanctuary in the Zone again. A permanent cure—employing a bit of Green Kryptonite—was synthesized by Brainiac Five in Adventure #305 and Mon-El was finally able to rejoin the material world as the newest member of the Legion of Super-Heroes. The victory was tempered by the fact that it had taken Mon a millennium to get there and flashbacks touched on the horrors he endured in the Zone as ghostly Kryptonian criminals tormented him. Characteristic of Silver Age comics, that wasn’t something that was dwelled on. Instead, Mon-El emerged as an even-tempered presence in the Legion, whose coping methods with centuries in limbo may have endowed him with a degree of serenity. Fans could infer more from tales like a flash-forward in 1967’s Adventure #354, where an older Mon-El was said to have left the hubbub of the team for the solitude of space and colonizing worlds for new generations. Within the Legion, he was also part of a trinity, joining Superboy and Ultra Boy as members who possessed essentially the same set of powers. Ultra Boy’s point of distinction was that he could only access one ability at a time. Mon-El belatedly acquired a real name—Lar Gand—courtesy of an E. Nelson Bridwell-scripted text page in 1966’s Superboy #129. That same write-up included another sharp observation. “One of the things I most appreciate about Mon-El’s story is that it contains a great example of retroactive continuity,” Mark Waid tells BACK ISSUE. “In subsequent stories, it was revealed that Green Kryptonite was the critical element in the serum that prevented Mon-El from dying of lead poisoning. But years after that, when the origin story was reprinted in Superboy #129, it was editor E. Nelson Bridwell who realized and noted something interesting. There’s a scene in which Superboy exposes Mon-El to Green K in order to find out whether or not he’s Kryptonian—but the Green K was in a lead box, which should have poisoned Mon-El but had no effect! In other words, the Green K-as-acure gimmick was accidentally ‘established’ in that very first story only because the editor and writer made a mark waid mistake, and no one but Nelson even noticed!” Future Legion editor Michael Eury was wonderstruck © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. by another Silver Age issue. “Mon-El was in the first Legion story I read as a kid: ‘Mordru the Merciless!’ in Adventure #369 (June 1968). That remains, to me, one of the all-time best LSH tales, a raw, riveting story by Jim Shooter that had the Legion’s two most powerful members, Superboy and Mon-El, running for their lives.” Joining the heroes during a grim siege in the 20th Century were Duo Damsel and newcomer Shadow Lass (Tasmia Mallor). By the time the story was over in issue #370, romance had sparked between Shady and Mon-El. Even this happy development caused speculation about Mon’s future: According to the aforementioned issue #354, Shadow Lass was destined to die saving the Science Asteroid. In 1969’s Action #384 (by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and Jack Abel), Mon’s own demise was foretold by Dream Girl. On Daxam, Eltro Gand—a descendant of Lar Gand’s older brother—tried to impersonate Mon-El but wound up killing him instead by inadvertently depriving him of his anti-lead serum. Desperate to make things right, Eltro used a Daxamite device to revive Mon at the cost of his own life. (The unit first appeared in a 1963 tale wherein Proty died to resurrect Lightning Lad.)
WILL THE REAL LAR GAND PLEASE STAND UP?
Mon-El lived on to be elected Legion leader in 1970’s Action Comics #392 only to have the feature cancelled out from under him with that very installment. When the LSH returned in Superboy with Cary Bates as primary writer, Mon was noticeably more vulnerable. The seeming death of Shadow Lass shook him deeply (Superboy #183) and he later confided to Saturn Girl that he had no desire to remain Legion leader. “I… might crack under the pressure and strain of another term,” he admitted in Superboy #190. “I guess I’ve just lost confidence in myself.” An encounter with Tharok and Validus reignited Mon’s sense of responsibility, restoring the confidence he needed to accept a second run as team leader. “Mon was never quite the same” after his resurrection, fan Margie Spears declared in issue #5 (Fall 1973) of the Legion Outpost fanzine. “The normally quiet, gentle, considerate Mon-El suddenly became bossy, cold, impatient, and unsure of himself.” She argued
Mon-umental Moments (top) Mordru spooks the Legion in Adventure #369 (June 1968), by Shooter/Swan/Abel. The Mon-El/Shadow Lass relationship had its beginnings here. (center) The new Legion leader! From Action #392 (Sept. 1970), by Bates/Mortimer/Abel. (bottom) Mon slaps some sense into the Teen of Steel in a fan-frustrating scene from Superboy #225 (Mar. 1977), by Levitz/Sherman/Wiacek. TM & © DC Comics.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3
the Daxamite technology didn’t so much revive Lar Gand as it did reanimate him. “The vital force of one-time Eltro Gand now inhabits the body of Mon-El,” Spears concluded, albeit mingled with Lar’s residual memories. Indeed, Spears contended that the same thing held true in the early case of Lightning Lad and that his body was now inhabited with the consciousness of Proty. The idea was entirely too dark for consideration in the 1970s Legion series, of course. Instead, Cary Bates recalled happier things like the brotherly bond between Superboy and Mon-El during their vacation to 20th Century Smallville in 1975’s Superboy #208. Fans were less receptive to the opening scene of 1977’s Superboy #225, wherein Mon slapped Superboy after he protested the election of Wildfire as new group chairman. “The Mon-El/Superboy sequence in #225 didn’t work for most readers,” incoming writer Paul Levitz conceded in issue #231’s letters column, “so I now consider it a mistake. My thought at the time was that Mon-El’s relationship to Superboy was an older brother’s, and therefore he might have lost control and tried to bring his kid brother into line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t communicate that—for which I apologize.” Levitz’s Mon-El solo story in issue #236 (with artists Mike Nasser [now Netzer], Joe Rubinstein, and Rick Bryant) went over better. The plot found Mon entangled with an invasion by the Khunds that interrupted his vacation among the stars, subtly reminding longtime fans of the hero’s possible future as a solitary space explorer. When writing Mon-El, Levitz tells BACK ISSUE, “I focused on his 1000 years in the Phantom Zone and the effect that had on his personality.” Mon’s relationship with Shadow Lass also factored into the writer’s portrayal of the character. “I thought they went well together—she had crushes on powerful figures, and I think he’d need a gal who could bring him out of his shell.”
ZONING OUT
Mon-El’s Week-ness (top) A Mon-El solo story by Levitz and Mike Nasser, with inks by Joe Rubinstein and Rick Bryant. From Superboy and the LSH #236 (Feb. 1978). Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha. com). (bottom) Cartoonist Fred Hembeck has fun with the Kid from Daxam in this strip from DC’s Daily Planet news page in titles appearing during the week of February 25, 1980. TM & © DC Comics.
4 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
Much had changed by the time Mon-El took another sabbatical. Superboy was dropped from the regular lineup and the comic book renamed Legion of Super-Heroes. Paul Levitz left for a few years, returning as scripter in late 1981 and soon pairing up with penciler/co-plotter Keith Giffen and embellisher Larry Mahlstedt. And an opus called “The Great Darkness Saga” (1982’s LSH #290–294) put the feature on fan radar in a big way. [Editor’s note: Levitz and Giffen’s Pro2Pro interview in BACK ISSUE #22 recalled their “Great Darkness Saga” collaboration.] Mon-El played a pivotal role in the serial, starting with a prologue in which his and Shady’s first joint vacation was disrupted by the emergence of a mysterious planet (LSH #287, with art by Pat Broderick and Mahlstedt). Unbeknownst to the couple, they had also awoken a monster that embarked on a series of galactic attacks. Mon-El came face-to-face with the cosmic mastermind in LSH #292 and—thanks to his centuries in the Phantom Zone— recognized the threat. Mon was no match for the villain, who left him comatose and plundered his mind for information on his homeworld. At the end of issue #293, the population of Daxam rose as one, empowered by a sun that had turned yellow and enslaved by a monster who compelled them to carve the planet into a monument to their master: Darkseid! The classic Jack Kirby villain was ultimately thwarted in LSH #294, but the scars he inflicted lingered far longer. The reconstruction of Daxam became a subplot in the series into 1984. In the meantime, Mon-El and Shadow Lass took a break from it all in LSH #296 and checked in at a locale called the Science Asteroid. And, yes, that would be the same Science Asteroid where the Adult Legion story prophesied that Shady would die. That choice was deliberate on Levitz’s part. The crux of the subsequent LSH #300 was that previous glimpses of the team’s destiny were invalid. When Shadow Lass did not die in the story’s climax, it sent a signal that the future was up for grabs and anything was possible. A trip to Shady’s home planet Talok VIII was traumatic in its own way when she and her lover faced the villainous Lady
Memory (1984’s Tales of the Legion #318–319, by Levitz, Terry Shoemaker, and Karl Kesel). Stirring up Mon’s memories of being trapped in the Zone, she sent him into a state of hysteria that could only be arrested by confronting him with an even greater fear: Superboy arrived with a Phantom Zone device and threatened to project him back into the shadow realm. Musing privately in the aftermath, Mon thrilled to the simple sensation of breathing or—in the vacuum of space—not breathing. “This is what I love best—the icy openness of space. It was an awfully long time ago when I began exploring this endless universe—back before I visited Krypton or Earth—much less the Zone. But one day I’m going to talk Shady into coming with me and then we’ll find out exactly how far away forever is.” A powerful companion to the story ran in 1986’s Legion of Super-Heroes #23, by Levitz and co-plotter/ penciller Steve Lightle. Having built up an immunity to the kryptonite in his anti-lead serum, Mon-El was forcibly teleported back into the Zone despite his explicit preference to die. Once again, memories of past events he could only witness filled his mind and the trauma nearly broke him. Brainiac 5’s last-ditch solution was to implant irradiated cells from Superboy’s bloodstream into Mon-El’s body. The treatment was a success and the need for the anti-lead serum was finally eliminated. In an interview with Glen Cadigan for The Legion Companion (2003), Lightle remarked on “this well-adjusted, most Superboy-like character. […] What if there was more to him? What if the idea of going back into the Phantom Zone terrorized him? What if it was so deeply scarring that
this rational, sensible man couldn’t be rational and sensible about going back into the Phantom Zone? I thought, ‘Man, that just makes him such a more interesting character!’ “I also told Paul, ‘There’s something that’s been overlooked about this character. He spent a thousand years waiting for his friend to save his life, waiting for Superman to develop a serum, and this is Superman’s biggest failure. He never developed a serum. He put this kid in there, and every issue of Superman is an issue he fails Mon-El.’ That’s how I put it. “Mon-El is in this place where he’s cursed to see a multitude of worlds, but not be able to touch anything. He’s surrounded by evil forces that he’s opposed his entire life. It’s like putting Gandhi in prison—because he’s a moral person—only imagine Gandhi wasn’t so well adjusted. Imagine Gandhi as a teenage boy and throw him in prison with all these crazed psychopaths, and he’s waiting for his friend to help him, except— unless Superman lives eternally—he sees his friend grow old and die and never save him. He sees worlds decay. In one panel I drew Darkseid standing over these humans who were naked and groveling on the ground and there’s a tear in Mon-El’s eye because he’s a hero! “If his mind was not shattered, then he had to have been affected in such a deep way that perhaps he’s even repressed it, and it’s the idea of going back into the Phantom Zone that brings his trauma to the surface. […] It probably should have been played as more than just a single-issue story, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people have tried to pick up on elements of it since, but that was something I was proud of.”
Epic Challenges (left) Mon-El versus the then-unrevealed villain of “The Great Darkness Saga,” from Legion of Super-Heroes #292 (Oct. 1982). By Levitz, Keith Giffen, and Larry Mahlstedt. (right) Mon’s old weakness returns, in LSH #23 (June 1986). By Levitz, Steve Lightle, and Mike DeCarlo. TM & © DC Comics.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 5
In Memoriam Mon-El eulogizes the Pocket Universe Superboy in LSH #38 (Sept. 1987). By Paul Levitz, Greg LaRocque, and Mike DeCarlo. TM & © DC Comics.
NO LONGER IN SUPERBOY’S POCKET
That was the last time Superboy ever saved Mon-El. In the real world, it was 1986 and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths had changed everything. Writer-artist John Byrne’s Superman reboot that started in The Man of Steel had eliminated the hero’s teenage career, and the repercussions had to be addressed in the series most profoundly impacted by the Boy of Steel: Legion of Super-Heroes. In LSH #37, Paul Levitz remarked on addressing “the discrepancies in Mon-El’s origin by having him arrive on Earth in Superman’s time. [It] was one of the most seriously considered options in reconciling the new Superman continuity to ours […] and was at one time the plotline of Man of Steel #6. We’ve opted instead for a grander scheme.” A 1987 four-parter explained that the Legion’s Superboy had now originated in a “pocket universe” created by the Time Trapper. That realm was collapsing and it fell to Superboy to save this alternate Earth… at the cost of his life (LSH #38, by Levitz, Greg LaRocque, and Mike DeCarlo). “He called me his brother and took me into his home,” Mon said over his casket. “And from the day we met, he thought of me every day of his life. Sleep well, Kal-El, Clark… my brother.” Loving, loyal Shady was there for Mon in the months ahead, but his driving passion was now revenge against the Time Trapper. Working secretly so as not to involve the rest of the team, he, Brainiac 5, Saturn Girl, and Duo Damsel launched a strike at the end of time in 1988’s LSH #50 (by Levitz, Giffen, and DeCarlo). The team succeeded in destroying the villain, but Mon-El paid a heavy price as he was buffeted by cosmic forces. Rejecting Brainy’s diagnosis that he would not recover, Shady took the comatose Mon into space in search of help but to no avail. Praying for his recovery, she essentially married him in issue #52, severing part of a finger in a Talokian bonding ritual. In issue #61 (on sale in April 1989), Mon’s life support shut down and his vitals flatlined. Two issues later, Paul Levitz bid his own farewell to the book and Lar Gand’s fate was left in the hands of the veteran writer’s successor: Keith Giffen. As plotter/penciller, he was joined by longtime Legion fans Tom and Mary Bierbaum (dialogue), Al Gordon (inks), and Mark Waid (editing), all of whom contributed to the overall story. September 1989’s relaunched Legion of Super-Heroes #1 was set “five years later” and was a densely plotted affair that employed expository techniques employed a few years earlier by Alan Moore in Watchmen. 6 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
The throughline was the reformation of the Legion in a 30th Century where corruption, poverty, and war were on the rise. Still grieving her lover’s death, Shadow Lass had returned to Talok VIII. And Mon-El? He literally rose from the grave at the end of issue #3. Discussing LSH #4 in a March 28, 2009 blogpost (https://itsokimasenator. livejournal.com/1392.html), Tom Bierbaum wrote that, tweaking Margie Spears’ old theory, “we’d find out that Mon-El wasn’t really dead back in [Action #384], he was very close to dead but not quite there yet. So the device projected Eltro Gand’s being into Mon-El’s body and Eltro’s personality took over, though what was left of Mon-El’s surviving personality was kicking around in there too, relatively dormant as Eltro became the dominant personality. This, to us, fit in as a neat twist on why the well-adjusted Mon-El of the 1960s became the brooding, psychologically unstable Mon-El of the 1970s and 1980s. “Keith’s idea for the story in #4 was that the Trapper had left a seed of himself in Mon-El and that seed would allow the Trapper to raise up Mon-El’s body as the Trapper’s new invulnerable vessel. So that was the story of #4, Mon-El is resurrected as the Trapper’s unstoppable vessel and at that point we discover that Eltro Gand has been the dominant personality within Mon-El for many years, but this death and resurrection has shaken loose the original Mon-El personality and allowed it to re-assert itself. I don’t really recall how the issue was going to end, but I think the idea may have been for the original and very heroic Mon-El personality to finally take charge and destroy himself to stop the Time Trapper once and for all. By the end of the issue, as I think it may have been planned, Mon-El would really be dead, essentially having committed suicide to make sure the Time Trapper was really dead this time as well.” A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to completing the plot. The Superman office abruptly declared that any reference to Superboy— even the Pocket Universe version—was now forbidden in Legion of Super-Heroes. The edict even extended to details like the Phantom Zone and names like Mon-El and Superman descendant Laurel Kent. “I get it,” Mark Waid sighs. “The whole point of Crisis was to streamline continuity. But, boy, what a pain in the butt for a Legion editor. John Byrne wasn’t about to make any concessions—his disdain for the Legion is legendary and well documented. But the ‘no’ rule kept expanding. No Rond Vidar as Green Lantern because ‘it ties that strip into the future.’ Same with Thanagarians. Systematically, the 30th Century was stripped
of any and all connections to present day. The last straw—and the reason [Mon’s] name had to be changed—was the decree that no one else could even be named ‘-El,’ which given that this was 1000 years removed from Byrne’s stuff and that writers could always avoid mentioning the source of the name, or even just eliminate the hyphen, was absurd and petty and I’m still steamed about it 30 years on.” The Bierbaums, with the blessing of Giffen and Waid, suggested a revision of their plot for issue #4 that would ultimately get them to a timeline free of Kryptonian influence. On the psychic plane, Mon had the power to destroy the Trapper forever, but there would be consequences. If the Trapper never existed, his machinations would never have created Superboy and the Pocket Universe… and, by extension, the Legion. It was a risk Mon-El was willing to take. As issue #4 ended, the world went white. In its place, a new timeline emerged where Mordru—unchallenged by the Legion—ruled the 30th Century. Attempting to set things right, the villain’s first wife Glorith (based on a character from 1965’s Adventure #338) cast a spell that substituted her for the Time Trapper (LSH #5) and restored a timeline where the Legion did exist… albeit without any version of Superboy. Mark Waid adds that “if anyone can explain Legion #4 and 5 to me, I’d be grateful. And I was the editor. I’m sure they’re great, but they still make my head hurt.”
THE AMAZING GAND CLAN
As detailed in LSH #8 (on sale in April 1990), the Legion of Super-Heroes was now inspired by Lar Gand, a mythic 20th Century hero also known as Valor. In another interesting wrinkle, the new world also included a substitute Supergirl. This was Laurel Gand, cousin of Eltro and descendant of Lar. Tom Bierbaum recalled in a February 3, 2019 blog post (https://itsokimasenator. livejournal.com/34878.html) how he, Mary, and friends Arnie Starky and James Ricklef developed the heroine. “Since Laurel Kent was going to be absent from our new timeline (all Kryptonian elements were not to be used in future Legion issues), the use of the ‘Laurel’ name seemed logical. And we wanted the character to have some familial bond with the hero taking over the Superboy role in the new timeline, Mon-El/ Lar Gand/Valor, and thus Laurel Gand was created. I think it was the next day, a Sunday, that we called Keith and told him the idea and my recollection is that he immediately loved it. And you’ll note she shows up in the first possible issue she could have, LSH #6. I suspect Keith had penciled much of the issue, since Laurel comes in fairly deep in #6.” Going forward, she was a prominent part of the revamped Legion. The same couldn’t be said for Lar Gand, who instead joined the Legion’s 20th Century companion book L.E.G.I.O.N. ’90 effective with issue #16 two weeks after LSH #8. L.E.G.I.O.N. was a spin-off from 1988’s Invasion miniseries, wherein an unnamed Daxamite had died of lead poisoning to save Earth from the alien Dominators. That detail was retroactively tweaked to reveal that the casualty had been Lar Gand’s own father, Kel! Unfortunately, life with the L.E.G.I.O.N. was very different from Mon-El’s adventures with the pre-Crisis Legion. Team leader Vril Dox loved the idea of having a young superman on his police force, but he immediately exposed him to lead and offered regular dosages of the anti-toxin in exchange for his loyalty. Within a couple months, a new “first” meeting between Lar and Superman was engineered for Adventures of Superman Annual #1 and the young Daxamite finally got to see the world that his father died for. From Dox’s perspective, Lar had entirely too much of the Man of Steel’s morality and principles. He promptly fired him in L.E.G.I.O.N. ’90 #19, sending him packing with a supply of anti-lead serum. Running parallel to the L.E.G.I.O.N. stories, Lar Gand also appeared in New Gods #17–21 (on sale from May to November 1990). Curiously, he functioned largely as a viewpoint character throughout, a superpowered nomad who was following the trail of devastation left by Darkseid’s father, Yuga Khan. Unlike L.E.G.I.O.N., Lar was dressed in his familiar costume—tweaked with the addition of a hood—but it wasn’t immediately apparent. The traditional bright crimson and sky blue color scheme was swapped with purple and navy. Back in the 30th Century, Lar (as Valor) and Shadow Lass reunited with the Legion in 1991’s LSH #15–18 to help the team its fight against the Khunds. The issues were also instructive on how revered Valor was in this post-Superboy reality. Allies and adversaries alike reacted with awe in his presence.
Time Out! (top) Mon-El battles the Time Trapper in LSH #50 (Sept. 1988), by Levitz, Giffen, and DeCarlo. (bottom) Another confrontation between the two in the rebooted Legion #4 (Feb. 1990), by Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum, and Al Gordon. TM & © DC Comics.
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The reasons had been teased since 1990’s Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1 but the particulars weren’t spelled out until Annual #2 in October 1991. Alerted by a mysterious time traveler (future teammate Ultra Boy), Lar discovered that the Dominators intended to invade 20th Century Earth a second time. Valor freed thousands of humans on the Dominion homeworld, but discovered that they’d all been mutated, divided into camps that each manifested specific superpowers. In the aftermath, Valor offered to return any victims to Earth who wished to return, but he also suggested an alternative. He asked for volunteers to colonize a series of unpopulated “buffer worlds” between Earth and the Dominion that would serve as a line of defense against further strikes against humanity. Further, the worlds would be tailored to groups whose powers would be most effective there. Ice-powered humans would live on the hothouse planet Tharr, for instance, while the magnetic fields of Braal would make a fine environment for a lodestone-like group. Valor’s role in seeding the planets made him a legend, but he was unprepared for the time-mistress Glorith taking credit for putting it into motion. When Lar spurned her advances, she condemned him to a millennium in the “Buffer Zone” that separated Earth from otherdimensional Bgtzl. (The Phantom Zone was another one of those things that the Superman office put on its prohibited list.) In a reworking of Adventure Comics #300, Valor emerged in the 30th Century to something beyond a hero’s welcome. To the descendants of Braal, Tharr, and countless worlds, he was virtually a god.
“A REAL ACT OF VALOR!”
The Lar Gand who was flying around the DC Universe in the early 1990s hadn’t achieved that stature yet. A Giffen-plotted/Peter David-scripted romp in April 1991’s Starman #35 found its titular hero in conflict with the Daxamite émigré in outer space thanks to a language barrier and
the antics of Mister Nebula. Notably, Lar was finally wearing his classic red-and-blue costume in a present-day story. He continued to stick around on Earth for cameos in Armageddon 2001 #2 (Sept. 1991), Justice League Quarterly #5 (Oct. 1991), and the Superman titles’ “Panic in the Sky” serial (Jan.–Feb. 1992). Lar Gand’s next meaningful role came in an event that would cross through all of DC’s 1992 Annuals: Eclipso: The Darkness Within. Discovering the demonic Eclipso on the dark side of Earth’s Moon in May 1991’s opening chapter (by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming, Bart Sears, and Randy Elliot), Lar became the first in a string of superheroes to be corrupted by the villain’s evil. The book-ending Darkness Within #2 found the ensorcelled Lar brought to his knees by Superman and tenuously freed from Eclipso’s control. Aware that his freedom was fleeting, the wounded Daxamite rushed back into the lunar rogue’s fortress to ensure that a blinding solar burst definitively severed Eclipso’s influence on Earth’s heroes. Downplaying his heroics afterwards, Lar was praised by Superman. “Don’t sell yourself short!” he insisted. “That was a real act of valor!” And that was the origin of Lar Gand’s new codename, albeit one that ignored the fact that his Starman and Justice League Quarterly appearances had already used it. Regardless, the name would soon be on a comic-book marquee. Project editor Michael Eury notes, “We approached Eclipso: The Darkness Within with the intention of the crossover launching both the monthly Valor and Eclipso titles (we’d also hoped to give the Creeper a chance to spin off, but that didn’t happen).” The preliminary title of Worlds of Valor was abandoned before publication. “The thing that sticks in my mind about Valor was my original conception of the book,” series writer Robert Loren Fleming tells BACK ISSUE. “I wanted to call it The Legend of Valor and feature disconnected stories in which it’s revealed that the character has performed feats of bravery and heroism on many disparate worlds across the universe over a long period of time. In doing so, Valor became a mythic figure in each of these civilizations, a Joseph Campbell-style hero for all times and places. My wonderful editor, Michael Eury, felt that this was too grandiose an approach, and he was probably right. I was happy to go in the direction we ultimately took and was particularly pleased to work with Mark Bright, whose visual storytelling was superb.” “I really wish we could’ve called the book (and the character) Mon-El,” Michael Eury adds. “This was still just a few short years after Crisis, and with a Legion without a Kal-El as its inspiration (well, the Pocket Universe band-aid aside), a ‘Mon-El’ was not allowed to be. “This was frustrating for me as Legion editor (and as a fan of the character who appreciated his history), but I understood and did my best to move the franchise forward under the new, post-Crisis rules. Of course, the trickle-down from the removal of Superboy from the Legion mythos was the beginning of the slow leak that ultimately led to the first of several continuity fixes for LSH.” Picking up where Darkness Within left off, Valor #1 arrived in comics shops in September 1992 sporting a logo by Todd Klein. Lar Gand had become the first Legionnaire to have his own ongoing book—Superboy and Supergirl excepted—since Karate Kid in the 1970s. Penciler Mark Bright created a revised costume for the occasion, giving Valor short sleeves, shoulder pads, and a retractable cape while keeping the essence of the original red/blue design. The first issue dug further into the underlying anger Lar felt toward his father for “abandoning” him and dying to save Earth. A clash with surviving acolytes of Eclipso helped the Daxamite come to terms with his feelings.
Lar Gand, Guest Star Among the hero’s appearances in the early ’90s: (top left) L.E.G.I.O.N. ’90 #16 (June 1990, cover by Kevin Maguire and Gordon), (top right) Adventures of Superman Annual #2 (1990, cover by Kerry Gammill and John Byrne), and (bottom) Starman #35 (June 1991, story by Giffen and Peter David, art by Jason Pearson and Bruce Patterson). TM & © DC Comics.
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A more confident, focused hero didn’t sit well with the Earthman who had appointed himself Valor’s benefactor. At this point, Lex Luthor was passing himself off as a benevolent titan of industry and was growing concerned that Valor might detect his true plans. Having duped the current Supergirl (an artificial being otherwise known as Matrix) with his act, Lex may have also been bothered by the fact that she and Lar got into a brawl in issue #2. Luthor’s solution was to offer Valor a Lexcorpconstructed star cruiser and send him into deep space for a long, long test drive.
BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO SUPERMAN HAD GONE BEFORE
Lift-off took place in issue #3, where Lar was introduced to Pilgrim One’s sardonic artificial intelligence Babbage. Their first stop was L.E.G.I.O.N. headquarters, where Lar sought more anti-lead serum from Vril Dox. The visit also ensured a commercial clash with Valor’s former teammate—and popular 1990s anti-hero—Lobo. The eternally scheming Dox reprogramed Pilgrim One’s controls and sent him hurtling straight to the prison planet Starlag II. Valor #5–8 was a nostalgia-fest for fans of the 1960s Justice League of America, with appearances by Starlag warden Kanjar Ru (female counterpart to Kanjar Ro), the Unimaginable (last seen in 1966’s JLA #42 and 44), and former League mascot Snapper Carr. “I was able to incorporate a group of characters, the Blasters, that I had created for DC’s Invasion! series but had never actually gotten to write, so that was fun,” Fleming adds. There were also reported plans to revisit the Omega Men moving into Valor’s second year, but it was not to be. “I honestly can’t remember what my future plans were for Valor after I was fired from the book.” “While I’m very happy with the work writer Robert Loren Fleming (with whom I had a great working relationship on Eclipso and Ambush Bug) and penciler Mark Bright did on Valor,” Michael Eury reflects, “my first intended creative team for the book was writer Chris Claremont and artist Kevin Maguire. I figured that their fan-favorite statuses would generate some heat for this start-up. Also, Chris was no stranger to sci-fi superheroes, from many of his X-Men storylines to his Star-Lord work and beyond. “Kevin said he’d do it if Chris would commit. I had a conversation with Claremont about it and he was interested and considered it, but opted against another companyowned book, his intention being the creation and writing of a creator-owned title. (Sovereign Seven followed.) “I had met both Howard and Adam “After Claremont, Mark Waid was at shows and had great conversations with both, followed by strange unmy next choice to write Valor. He knows Legion lore better than almost explainable things,” Carlson tells BACK anyone and has since become—and has ISSUE. “One of my quirks as an editor was stayed—one of comics’ best writers. that I didn’t want creators that could just write or draw, I wanted creators Internal politics prohibited me from robert loren fleming allowing him to take on the book, that could participate in interesting, however. In retrospect I wonder what intelligent conversations. Comicvine. might have happened if Mark had “I remember Howard and me been the Valor scribe from day one.” wandering around NYC late one night, looking for something Within a year, most of the original Valor team was (but whatever it was has been lost to the mists of time). gone. Michael Eury left first, succeeded as editor by KC Adam inadvertently turned me into an animated cartoon Carlson after the first two issues. Mark Bright only stuck character when he shyly asked me to look at his portfolio. around for four issues before helping launch Milestone’s Suddenly, both my eyes popped out of my head, and little Icon series in 1993 with Dwayne McDuffie. Jeffrey Moore cartoon birdies were circling around my head at supertook over the pencils with Valor #5. speed. I really enjoyed seeing what he was capable of. Among the distinguishing qualities of Carlson’s As you can probably imagine, both of these guys were well tenure was an impressive run of covers drawn by on their way to much bigger things before I met them. Howard Chaykin (Valor #6, 7), Adam Hughes (Valor “Stuart Immonen was discovered by me the old#8–10, 12), and Stuart Immonen (Valor #13–15, 18–23). fashioned way (much later than the others)—he sent
Bad to the Bone Lar Gand gets “eclipsed” in Eclipso: The Darkness Within #1 (July 1992). By Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming, Bart Sears, and Mark Pennington. TM & © DC Comics.
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Valiant Valor (top right) Todd Klein’s Worlds of Valor logo. The series’ title was shortened to just the hero’s name. (top left) From issue #56 of DC’s Direct Currents newsletter, a 1992 feature touting the launch of the new Valor series. (bottom) Valor card from Skybox’s 1993 DC trading-card set. TM & © DC Comics.
me samples of his work—and I think I only saw the first page of his presentation package before I reached for the phone. Yes, it was that good. (However, I also have vague memories of both Stuart and inker Ron Boyd just showing up in my office one day, portfolios in hand.) I was so lucky to have creators this talented and creative approaching me at this early stage and I learned so much from working with them.” Robert Loren Fleming resolved a detail from the Starlag four-parter before his departure. Valor had rescued a decrepit Green Lantern on the prison planet but issue #10 restored “him” to his true form and revealed a beautiful woman named Alia. Mark Waid, who’d already scripted a fill-in for issue #9, picked up the story in Valor #11, where Lar brought Alia to the Green Lantern Corps for medical attention. Valor wasn’t in great shape himself, suddenly afflicted with spells in which his heat vision or enhanced hearing spontaneously went out of control. Ominously, Waid’s first official issue closed with a shot of the Time Trapper observing him from afar. “His name was Valor,” a teaser read. “He was the most powerful hero ever to roam the stars. His legacy would have spanned ten centuries, inspiring a Legion of young champions kC Carlson to galactic heroism… if only he had lived.” Westfield Blog. Gulp. If that weren’t perplexing enough, consider the fact that a third iteration of Lar Gand had been introduced in 1991’s Legion of Super-Heroes #24. He was part of a group of younger Legionnaires who seemed to have been plucked from 1966 issues of Adventure Comics. Were they clones dubbed Batch SW6? Had they been pulled out of the timestream? No one knew. When their alternate Valor used a time bubble to go back in time to investigate in issue #37 (Oct. 1992), an uncharacteristic crackle of energy heralded his departure. He did not return. The older Lar Gand and Shadow Lass were still alive and well but no longer appeared in either LSH or the new Legionnaires book featuring the youthful alternate team.
VALOR, D.O.A.
Waid tells BACK ISSUE that “I was actually hired to launch Valor by editor Michael Eury—my first solo monthly launch—and had already written a few pages when I got the call from him telling me that I’d been vetoed by his boss for whatever reason. I was crushed.” Destiny prevailed, however, and Waid finally connected with his fill-in story and pitch for “D.O.A.” Effective with issue #14, he was joined by new penciler—and longtime Legion fan—Colleen Doran. “We had such fun with [Valor],” she enthused in an October 31, 2018 Twitter post. “Some of my happiest memories working in comics!” “One of the funny things about working on this comic was having trouble getting copies of the art before I shipped it via FedEx to DC Comics,” Doran continued. “Because Kinko’s copies had lost a major copyright case and didn’t want to make copies of art! So I was trying to get my art copied, and there I am with a Kinko’s clerk, and I call up Mark Waid on the phone, trying to get him to talk sense into the clerk so I could 10 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
make copies of the comic art! And they just wouldn’t do it, it was hilarious! Comics publishers had to send creators releases to take to copy shops so we could show them to Kinko’s clerks so we could get file copies of our originals before popping them off to FedEx. All in the days before computers and FTP uploads! Fun times.” “If I’m remembering correctly,” KC Carlson tells BACK ISSUE, “I think I met [Mark and Colleen] at comic shows long before I ever dreamed I’d be working at DC. And yes, it’s incredibly likely that we bonded over LSH stuff. I think they both made me a bigger LSH fan from their enthusiasm!” In the “D.O.A.” arc (Valor #12–17), the 30th Century— through the eyes of Legionnaire Triad—became an observation deck for what was happening to Lar Gand in 1994. And what was happening wasn’t good. Grudgingly seeking out his old nemesis Vril Dox, the Daxamite was informed that he’d built up an immunity to the anti-lead serum. He had perhaps a month to live. The only positive development was that Valor now had a shoulder to cry on. He’d rescued a lovely platinum blonde explorer—who’d saved Lar in turn—and they became fast friends. Savvy readers realized that “Lori” was actually Glorith, but Valor hadn’t met her yet at this point in the timeline and he was thoroughly smitten. A trip to Daxam not only yielded no cure but revealed the horrifying news that much of the population was afflicted with a plague that Lar Gand linked to global lead poisoning. Among the victims included Lar’s kid brother Del and his mother Marisa, the latter of whom died as Valor held her hand. Earth offered no answers, either, although Superman cautioned Lar from approaching the untrustworthy Luthor. Having just returned from the brink of death himself, the Man of Steel encouraged the young hero not to abandon hope. “But what if hope isn’t enough?” Valor asked. “I’ve only had these powers for a short time, Superman,
but they’ve been a dream come true. I wanted to use them well—and for years to come. I wanted to be a guiding light… not a falling star.” “Stars aren’t measured by how long they burn, Lar,” Superman replied, “but by how brightly. You’ve already accomplished more than a hundred men in a hundred lifetimes. If there’s any consolation to be found, it’s in that.” Determined to make his final days productive ones, Valor and Lori flew to the planet Baaldur—not coincidentally the future base of Glorith—and ended its centuries-old civil war. Back in 2995, the young Legionnaires were shaken by the fact that Valor’s pivotal place in history was blinking out of existence. The team mobilized for an emergency mission to 1994 to ensure that Lar Gand survived. They arrived to find Lori finally revealing herself as Glorith and taking full credit for Lar Gand’s lead poisoning. She promised to cure him in an instant but only if he agreed to be her lover and help conquer uncounted worlds. He refused. “I’d rather die free… than live under your spell.” And he did. Valor may have died, but the operation to save his comic book was a success. Still, there was some confusion
Valor, D.O.A. (left) Lar Gand rescues Lori—a familiar figure to Legion readers, although not by that name—on the Adam Hughes/Joe Rubinstein cover to Valor #12 (Oct. 1993). (right) A tearful farewell, from Valor #17. Art by Colleen Doran and Misha McDowell. TM & © DC Comics.
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Daxamite in Graphite Colleen Doran’s pencil studies of Valor, Mon-El, various Legionnaires, and Glorith. Characters TM & © DC Comics.
in the marketplace that led to a report that the title was cancelled. “Though our big ‘D.O.A.’ storyline does indeed end with issue #17,” Mark Waid wrote in the Comics Buyer’s Guide #1054 (January 28, 1994), “though the star of Valor does indeed die and isn’t coming back, the series will not end there, nor has DC ever indicated that Valor would be cancelled following ‘D.O.A.’ “In fact, interest in the comic book has increased significantly over the past few months, since DC announced that Valor will serve as a ‘prequel’ to this summer’s Zero Hour. The resultant buzz has helped the series gain momentum—but a false announcement of cancellation could easily cripple that, and we still have stories to tell.”
BACK ISSUE. “The first two issues were a present-day story about Braalians being obstreperous, which was a story I’d wanted to do for a long time. If Braalians were out there with magnetic powers, then what were they like in the 20th Century? Could they fight Green Lantern, or someone like that? I got the opportunity with Valor, and since Colleen was drawing it, I referred to these Conan-esque magnetic warriors as “the savage Fabios of outer space,” and she went to town with that; we had a blast doing it.” By the time Valor #22 opened, Lar Gand had lived his life all over again and the older, wiser husband of Shadow Lass was now the star of the book. Unfortunately, it was also literally the “End of an Era,” a six-part crossover with Legionnaires and Legion of Super-Heroes. The integrity of time and DCU history was crumbling— STEPPING INTO A LEGEND as detailed in July 1994’s weekly Zero Hour miniseries— That story began on the last page of issue #17 when and the Legion was facing the brunt of the damage. a perfectly healthy Lar Gand—clad in his original costume— Members blinked in and out of existence or were replaced stepped out of a vortex. This was, issue #18 confirmed, by variant versions as Glorith and Mordru engaged in chronal battle—with the Infinite Man in the midthe alternate version of Valor who vanished into the colleen doran dle—and the Time Trapper lurked from afar. timestream back in 1992’s LSH #37. Already disoriented It was the Trapper who revealed in Valor #23 that by his journey, Lar didn’t react well to Glorith and the Facebook. Legion’s suggestion that he fulfill his late counterpart’s he had created two different timelines in order to destiny—including a second millennium in the Buffer Zone—in order preserve a “pure” backup for the Legion if temporal catastrophe wiped to preserve the integrity of recorded history. out the primary team. For the sake of time’s continued survival, it was Plunging into a Khundian warzone, Lar worked through his immediate explained in LSH #61’s conclusion, both versions needed to merge so anxieties and—supported by time cop Waverider—agreed to fulfill that their spirits could be reborn. the legend of Valor. “In order to guarantee the Legion’s development,” “The last two issues were ‘End of An Era,’ and [Legion writers] Mark he summarized in issue #19, “I have to cripple the Dominion’s galactic Waid, Tom McCraw, and I beat out that particular outline together,” empire, free thousands of captive humanoids and (whew) single- Kurt Busiek tells BI. His primary contributions included “the bits with handedly terraform and colonize a score of planets.” Plus, Waverider Infinite Man, because I’ve always liked his visual, and I liked the twist of giving Mordru infinite power and perception, which would make added, he had to do so within 48 hours. No pressure. It was an impossible task, or would have been had the fracturing him feel claustrophobic, because there was no bigger to get.” He also answered “the question of who the SW6ers were, and why timeline not created dozens of duplicates of Lar Gand. Momentarily stabilized by Waverider, this Legion of Valors achieved what a single they’d been created. The reunification of the SW6ers and the Daxamite could not and the mission was accomplished. Cast once more-adult Legion was a way of saying that both sets were real, more into the Buffer Zone by Glorith near the close of issue #21, and they were the spirits being transformed into the reboot Legion, Lar consoled himself with the knowledge that “this time I know there’s to establish a continuity of spirit even though time was being reordered a light at the end of the tunnel—and friends waiting for me.” and they wouldn’t remember it. I didn’t want to say one set was ‘real’ Stepping in to write issues #20–23 (June–Sept. 1994) was Kurt and the other wasn’t, and I didn’t want to say that any of them were Busiek. “I knew it was the end of the run when I signed on,” he informs being killed off, just transformed. 12 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
Braalian Brawlers Lar Gand’s attempt at world-seeding goes awry in writer Kurt Busiek’s Valor #20 (June 1994). Colleen Doran inked her own pencils on this stunning page. TM & © DC Comics.
“Anyway, it was a blast to write those issues. It was the first time (and the last?) that I’ve gotten to write the Legion, who are big-time favorites, so getting to write them at such an important moment was a treat and sending them off heroically was pretty important to me.” In an October 31, 2018 Twitter post, Colleen Doran added, “While I don’t think I’ve worked with either Mark or Kurt since, they were great and very supportive. The book did well (sales actually went up), but got cancelled anyway because of company-wide story-arc demands.”
RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT
There was a moment of elation before the grand finale. Superboy rematerialized in Valor #23 as if he’d never died, united once more with his big brother as they rallied the troops. The happiness was short-lived. An energy blast from Mordru left Shady mortally wounded. She literally faded away as Valor cradled his wife in his arms. He blinked out moments later. “Fix this, guys,” Lar Gand pleaded to his fellow Legionnaires in his last seconds. “Find a way to put it back together. Make it work again.” That plea was also directed at the new Legion creative team. After years of struggling with the hodge-podge continuity formed in the wake of John Byrne’s Man of Steel, the decision was made to simply start from scratch. In August 1994, editor KC Carlson, writers Mark Waid and Tom Craw, and pencilers Stuart Immonen and Jeffrey Moy elegantly began the saga of the LSH anew in the pages of Legion of Super-Heroes #0 and Legionnaires #0. This time around, the Legion’s inspiration was not one superhero but several. Sponsor R. J. Brande pointed to the 20th Century’s Superman, Batman, the Flash, and Wonder Woman as his models for what he hoped his 30th Century group could aspire to. Valor was nowhere in sight, but that had been the case in the original account, too. His time would come. In the post-Zero Hour timeline, Superman still never had a costumed While visiting R. J. Brande on Mars, Valor had time for reflection career as a teenager, but there was a Superboy. He was a goodheartedif-brash clone who first emerged during 1993’s “Reign of the Supermen.” (Apr. 1996’s Legionnaires #37, by Roger Stern, Tom McCraw, Jeffrey Moy, By 1995, he was into the second year of his self-titled comic book and and W.C. Carani). He returned with a new costume that incorporated came into conflict with a certain Daxamite in issues #17–19. a prominent starfield along with the traditional red and blue colors. Most of Valor’s 20th-Century exploits prior to “D.O.A.” With official sanction in the Legion constitution, Lar would were still canon and he’d already colonized the worlds now be a “special detached agent” who could serve with the team whenever he wished but leave to explore the that made him a legend. Once again, Lar Gand was dying cosmos as often as he desired. of lead poisoning, its symptoms this time manifesting themselves as delirium that brought him into Along with the new look, the Daxamite also conflict with Superboy. Thanks to the long-forgotten announced a new codename, an ancient Martian term A.I. Babbage, the super-clone discovered what was translated as “he who wonders.” Henceforth, Lar Gand really going on and rushed him to S.T.A.R. Labs. would be known as M’onel. With no cure handy, they projected him into a Perhaps inevitably, this lifespan of this latest version “Stasis Zone,” only to have its communication device of Lar Gand was finite, as well. The next reboot of the team in 2005—written by Mark Waid—eventually short out and leave Valor trapped within. introduced its own version of the character in 2006– The payoff came in September 1995’s “Future Tense” (Superboy #21, Legion of Super-Heroes #74, 2007’s Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #23–30. kurt busiek Legionnaires #31, collectively by Karl Kesel, Tom Peyer, Although details on his background were vague, this incarnation was notable on two fronts: He was Tom McCraw, Tom Grummett, Lee Moder, Jeffrey Moy, Joshin Yamada. Doug Hazelwood, Ron Boyd, and W. C. Carani). called Mon-El and he was freed from the Phantom Traveling to 1995 for clues about the Stasis Zone device, the Legion Zone. “So many years later,” a triumphant Waid noted, “I got no grief.” brought Superboy back to the future with them while Brainiac 5 worked This latest Mon-El overlapped with one who appeared in early 2007’s out a way to safely rescue Lar Gand and cure him. Alas, word leaked and Action Comics Annual #10 (by Geoff Johns, Richard Donner, and Eric hysteria over the return of the deified Valor reached a fever pitch. After Wight). Aside from substituting a teenage Clark Kent for Superboy, publicly pretending the rescue attempt failed, Brainy privately released this latest origin was fairly close to the 1961 template. Courtesy of Lar in the Quraci desert and gave him the much-needed anti-lead serum. writer James Robinson, Mon-El was temporarily cured of his lead Valor was none too happy about having to maintain a low profile, poisoning and became the de facto leading man for much of Superman even snapping at Triad—whose ancestors were on one of the worlds #685–699. An epilogue in May 2010’s Adventure Comics #11 brought he colonized—for her uncomfortable adoration. Shortly after meeting things full circle with Mon returning to the Zone and emerging to his descendant Laurel Gand (alias Andromeda) in Legionnaires #36, find a Legion of Super-Heroes that once again resembled the one that Lar finally found a solution. Paul Levitz wrote many years ago. Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 13
More Changes for Mon (left) Lar loses his book as Valor fades out as part of “Zero Hour.” Valor #23 (Sept. 1994) cover by Stuart Immonen and Jose Marzan, Jr. (right) Recognize this guy? M’onel makes the scene in Legionnaires #37 (June 1996). Cover by Jeffrey Moy and W. C. Carani. TM & © DC Comics.
Levitz was, in fact, writing the Legion again, complete with Mon-El (briefly moonlighting as a Green Lantern) and Shadow Lass active among the cast. Curiously, their romance had gone sour in the 2010–2011 LSH revival and its New 52 continuation. Shady’s feelings for Mon resurfaced late in the series under terrible circumstances: he was nearly killed by the Emerald Empress in LSH #19. When the book ended with issue #23 in August 2013, Levitz left the lovers in the same straits they’d been back in 1989: Shady was once again leaving the team to care for a comatose Mon-El. Asked about the parallel, Levitz believes he “probably” did so intentionally.
MON-EL FOREVER
With his life on pause in the comics, Mon-El was reborn on film in the second season opener of the CW’s Supergirl TV series (original airdate: October 10, 2016). Typical of most TV and movie adaptations, this version of Mon-El (played by Chris Wood) departed drastically from any version of the source material. Mon-El was now the young man’s real name, for one, and Daxam became an adversarial sister planet of Krypton. Anything resembling the classic red and blue costume remained off screen until 2018. Lead poisoning was still Mon’s downfall, though, and Season Three revealed that he found salvation in the 31st Century with “the Legion” (don’t call them superheroes). Mon’s budding romance with Supergirl was confounded when he returned to 2017 with his wife—Saturn Girl rather than Shadow Lass—by his side. Proving that everything really does come around again, even the prototypical Halk Kar resurfaced in 2019’s The Green Lantern #9 and 10 (by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp) as part of a group primarily composed of one-shot 1950s/1960s space-heroes. Soon after, the latest iteration of Mon-El returned to the printed page in Brian Bendis and Ryan Sook’s Legion reboot. Among the creators who worked on earlier versions of Lar Gand, the degree of sentimental attachment varies. “As a kid, I never really focused on him except as a Superboy ‘clone,’” Paul Levitz recalls.
Likewise, KC Carlson remarks that “at first, as I considered him too close to Superboy in so many ways. The other thing about that was, I was never a fan of the lead characters of anything. I was always more interested in what Matter-Eater Lad or Shrinking Violet were doing rather than Superboy or Mon. Same with George Harrison or Ringo. Or John Entwistle or Keith Moon. I’m just weird that way.” Mark Waid, on the other hand, was a fan. “Along with Brainiac 5, he was always my favorite. I love, love, love his origin story—I was always extra-fond as a kid of any Superman Family stories built on emotion rather than plot. That’s why I wanted to write Valor, and that’s why I put him into Supergirl and the Legion. Michael Eury echoes Waid’s sentiment. “Mon-El and Ultra Boy are my two favorite Legionnaires and have been since my childhood. Their bright costumes attracted my young eye, but I appreciated the nuances that made them TM & © DC Comics. more than Superboy stand-ins: Mon-El’s weakness to a common element, lead, and his banishment to the Phantom Zone (I was one of those Brave and Bold readers in the early 1970s who wanted a Batman/Mon-El team-up by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, which would’ve been possible since Mon was trapped in the Zone during Batman’s time); and Ultra Boy’s one-power-at-a-time gimmick. “As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, Mon-El emerged as much more than ‘Superboy’s Big Brother.’ He even had his own 7-Eleven Slurpee cup (with Dave Cockrum art)! What’s not to love?” JOHN WELLS is a comics historian specializing in DC Comics who has served as resource for projects ranging from Kurt Busiek’s The Power Company to Greg Weisman’s Young Justice animated series. He is the author of the TwoMorrows books American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960–1964 and 1965– 1969, and co-author (with Keith Dallas) of the book Comic Book Implosion.
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Well known for its multifarious membership, the Legion of Super-Heroes has its own legions of fans who are just as plentiful, with numbers expected to soar even further now, in the wake of the Legion’s recent relaunch after more than five years’ absence. The fervent collectors among them aim to acquire every issue that features Legionrelated content, even hunting down stories with the most tenuous connections: mere mentions of the Legion or its members, cameos of Legion-related characters or alien races, the use of the Interlac language, right down to the Legion flight ring that Booster Gold uses. And much like the Legion’s sinister scavenger the Hunter, there’s a sub-set of these fans that prefers to narrow the quest down further, focusing their searchlights on Legion-related memorabilia and paraphernalia. The pursuit of such treasures can be daunting, but encouragingly, there’s a known, finite amount of such items (which will obviously increase as new product gets released), thus ensuring a definite target to aim for. Compare this to such long-standing characters as Superman or Batman, for whom the amount of licensed material over the decades has been so ubiquitous that it’s nearly impossible to make a list of every known souvenir. This article details the main Legion-related merchandise and non-mainstream comic publications that were released up the end of the 1980s, the era which BACK ISSUE covers. It’s important to note that the article covers only official DC Comics licensed product in the USA, so you can ignore all the homemade shirts, cosplay flight rings, custom bling and things, and oddities from foreign countries that have been mass produced over the years. For a more comprehensive listing of Legion collectibles up to the present, see the reference at the end of this feature.
TOPPS SATURN GIRL COMIC BOOK FOLDEE (1966)
7-ELEVEN SLURPEE CUPS (1973)
Ostensibly a baseball and generally sports-themed card manufacturer, the Topps Company also sidetracked into non-sporting fields. In 1966, it released its innovative Comic Book Foldees series, a set of 44 cards that came in the form of foldable triptychs. By flipping and folding the perforated components of each card, the user could mix and match various characters and create up to nine oddball new ones. Although the set included many comic-book heroes—hence its name—it also included historical and sports figures. The card that interests us is Number 16, which features Saturn Girl drawn by the legendary Wally Wood, the only time he illustrated a Legion character. She is described as “The Legionnaire,” and shares her card with Pork Chops “The Pig,” and Ulysses S. Grant “The General,” thus rendering possible humorous manipulations such as Saturn Girl “The Pig,” or Ulysses S. Grant “The Legionnaire.” The cards came in two sizes, one only slightly larger than the other. If you’re a completist, you’ll likely want both versions.
In the early ’70s, the 7-Eleven convenience-store chain encouraged customers to drink their Slurpees from a range of white plastic cups with images and short biographies of various DC Comics characters printed on them. Licensed from DC, a total of 60 characters were featured, including six Legionnaires: Brainiac 5, Chameleon Boy, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, Mon-El, and Saturn Girl. You could also get cups featuring Superboy and Supergirl, who despite featuring on the vessels in their own right, were of course Legion members at one time or another. As well, honorary LSH members Jimmy Olsen and Lana Lang had their own cups, although neither was shown in their Elastic Lad or Insect Queen superhero guises. The images for all the cups were lifted directly from the comic books; in the Legionnaires’ case, they were illustrations by Dave Cockrum originally used on various profile pages of the Superboy Starring the Legion of Super-Heroes title. In contrast, Marvel Comics produced exclusive art for the cups when 7-Eleven licensed their characters for use a couple of years later. Frustratingly, back then customers would only get what the store would dispense when they ordered their Slurpees, and could not pick and choose the characters of their choice. As a word of warning, the images on the cups are not resistant to wear and tear, so if you have them as part of a collection, avoid washing them or storing them in direct sunlight.
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AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS (1974–1978)
DC Comics’ excellent self-produced fan magazine of the mid-1970s ran for 17 issues, featuring articles on DC characters and their creators, and was exclusively available through mail order. Incorporating a mix of text articles, strips, regular columns, and comics features, the publication accommodated an interesting assortment of Legionrelated content. Issue #2 depicted a group of characters including Invisible Kid and Mon-El. Issue #12 used Legionnaires on its cover and delved into how the Legion fit into Kamandi’s universe; a regular column for Legion fans was introduced, named “The Legion Outpost”; and a visit to the DC offices by a group of Legion fans was famously chronicled. Interestingly, a competition for possible Legion applicants and members resulted in three entries eventually being accepted as Legion Academy students: Crystal Kid, Lamprey, and Nightwind. But undoubtedly the best known of the AWODCC Legion issues was the ninth, which devoted its entirety (apart from plugging upcoming comics) to the futuristic fighting force. Sporting an exclusive cover by Dave Cockrum [which was repurposed as the cover for BI #68—ed.], the issue included a checklist of all members; a history and description of Legion Headquarters; features on the Legion’s members, equipment, constitution, allies, enemies, and policies; and various articles on topics such as time travel and planets in the 30th Century. It also included a hitherto-unseen page that was excised from Superboy #212, which focused on Matter-Eater Lad’s lack of confidence in his abilities. AWODCC #9 was edited by Neal Pozner, who had produced the original manuscript as a fan publication, which impressed DC Comics enough for them to buy and publish it. Neal subsequently worked for DC as a production designer and group editor. Curiously, the company did not provide illustrations for the issue. Instead, many repurposed images were used to portray the Legionnaires, including several apparently lifted from bodybuilding magazines. [Editor’s note: In an AWODCC article in BI #100, DC Comics’ Paul Levitz theorized that Pozner himself manipulated images to illustrate the special edition.]
LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES VOTING BALLOT PAPER (1976) DC Comics held its inaugural (and so far only) Super DC Convention in February 1976, at New York City’s Hotel Commodore (taken over by the Trump Organization that year itself and duly converted into the Grand Hyatt). With so many fans attending the threeday event [also chronicled in BI #100—ed.], DC decided to ask them to elect a new leader for the Legion. Ballot papers featuring all the Legionnaires were made available to attendees, who were asked to circle their preferred leader on the form as well as write down the character’s name in the
space provided, and placing them in various Legion ballot boxes placed around the venue. Random forms were drawn at regular intervals throughout the sessions and door prizes awarded, with the fans’ choice announced on the last day. Superboy was the clear winner, with Wildfire coming in second. But because the Boy of Steel was only a part-time member, Wildfire was named leader, and duly sworn in in Superboy #225, Paul Levitz’s first Legion story as writer. Element Lad came in third, and surprisingly, [littleseen Legionnaire] Tyroc placed fifth. Measuring 8.5 x 11 inches, the double-sided ballot papers were accompanied by a survey form compiled by “the DC staff,” asking fans a series of questions about what they liked and disliked about DC Comics, with three lucky participants winning pieces of original art. While many fans filled in the ballot papers, those with more collectors’ instincts kept a few for themselves. There are probably only a handful of these unmarked papers left today.
DC COMICS CALENDARS (1976–1978)
Full 12-month calendars in their own right issued by comic-book companies are nothing unusual these days, even if they appear to be only released at the publisher’s whim. But at the dawn of the ’70s, such items were non-existent, appearing only occasionally as novelty pieces within the pages of comic books. The first DC Comics calendar that has any sort of Legion connection appeared in DC’s Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-34 (Christmas with the Super-Heroes), which featured a standard 12-month listing of dates for 1975, embellished on the periphery with images of various DC characters, including the Legion. This Murphy Anderson illustration also adorned the covers of the four-issue Legion of Super-Heroes series, which reprinted various stories from the Adventure Comics era. The following year was a momentous one, with the United States celebrating its bicentennial, an event that seemed to inspire the production of a beautiful 1976 calendar featuring DC’s characters, with monthly spreads gloriously illustrated by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, including the now-iconic Legion fly-by scene. Even more interesting was the calendar’s citation of the birthdays of various DC heroes and supporting cast members, featuring all Legion members and the Subs, many of whom had not been previously established. (Never mind that Legionnaires who were not from Earth would not
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have birth cycles aligned to a Terran calendar. And miraculously, none of the characters ever shared a birthday!) The 1976 calendar sold well enough to convince DC to repeat the venture with a 1977 calendar, this time with the theme “SuperHeroes versus Super-Villains.” While the cover was again drawn by Neal Adams, the interior art was spread out among DC’s stable of artists. The Legion literally took center stage, with a Mike Grell depiction of the group battling the Fatal Five on top of the Statue of Liberty, an image reprised on the back of the calendar. The calendar for 1978 highlighted a year of “Super-Spectacular Disasters.” The premise: A mysterious villain plans “the total destruction of the Earth and leads up to it with monthly menaces which tax the powers of the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes.” With clues to the mastermind’s identity provided, readers were directed to fill in a grid on the JLA computer screen to spell out the villain’s name. Each month featured a battle scene that led up to the conclusion on the last pages of the calendar. Karate Kid and the Legion of Super-Heroes, beautifully illustrated by Jim Sherman and Jack Abel, were featured in December, taking on the Toyman at a New York department store. The calendar dates for December featured a wraparound framework consisting of Legion members. The details for the month explained how some Legion members decided to spend an old-fashioned Christmas in the 20th Century, arriving on December 16. They visited the home of Karate Kid (who was then living in 1978) on December 21, then battled the Toyman on December 23. DC Comics stopped publishing these “Super DC Calendars” after 1978, opting instead for one-piece calendars that featured the months and various illos of DC characters. Surprisingly, even though the Legion was hot property in the ’80s, they never appeared in any of these publications.
SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES TEMPO PAPERBACK (1977)
While just about very comic-book series gets collected in a trade paperback these days, it was certainly uncommon back in the ’60s and ’70s, when the only reprints found were to be in annuals, 80-page Giants, or intracompany titles dedicated to publishing old stories for fresh eyes. Publisher Tempo Books went out on a limb in 1977 and gambled on reader interest in reprints by reproducing several DC Comics stories in pocket-book-sized format. Six books were released: Justice League, Batman, Superman, Wo n d e r Woman, World’s Finest… and Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, which featured an eclectic selection: “The Curse of the Blood Crystals” (Superboy #188), “Superboy’s Darkest Secret” (Superboy #158), “The Six-Legged Legionnaire” (Adventure #355), and “The Legionnaires Who Never Were” (Action Comics #392). The cover features the Neal Adams illustration used for the 1977 DC Comics Calendar, while the interior is published in black and white, with several panels cropped and resized to fit the smaller format. Originally issued as individual publications, the books were collected into a box set in 1978. [Editor’s note: See BI #81 for more details about the Tempo paperbacks.]
DC SUPER-STARS APPLICATION FORM (1978)
Just before the DC Implosion of 1979, readers were invited to join the much-heralded DC Super-Stars Society, for which there were 12 chapters (including one for the Legion). Each application kit consisted of the same format: four pages comprising an introductory page relating to the chapter’s character(s), a quiz page, another outlining what the membership kit contained, and then the actual application coupon, which fans had to fill in and return along with payment of $4 for each kit. Promised with the packs were a DC cloth patch; a glossy DC Super-Stars Society insignia decal in color; an insignia transfer for a T-shirt; a membership certificate; a membership card; discount coupons for comics and merchandise; and best of all, a huge color poster of DC’s Super-Stars. Nothing ever came of it because of the Implosion, although some members did receive the poster (which is a collectible in its own right), which depicted several Legionnaires. As most fans would have actually sent in the forms, tracking down an original, unmarked, and unused application kit for the Legion chapter can be a futile, frustrating exercise.
SUPER HEROES AND SUPER VILLAINS POSTER BOOK (1979)
It wasn’t until the ’70s that comic-book posters began to be mass-produced for the public. Before that, fans had to be satisfied with pinups inserted within the comics themselves, and many a comic book would have been ruined by young readers tearing the pages out to stick to their walls. For Legion fans, the first real poster of their favorite group came with The Super Heroes and Super Villains Poster Book, published in 1979 by Western Publishing’s Golden Book imprint. It consisted of eight posters large enough to hang on a door, one of which was the clean artwork by Joe Staton and Dick Giordano used for Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #250. (The first time Legionnaires appeared on a poster was actually in 1978, in the piece featuring various DC characters that was issued as part of the failed DC Super-Stars Society; see previous entry.)
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OTHER POSTERS AND PORTFOLIOS (1983–1986)
In 1983, artist Keith Giffen was charged with producing a megaposter (top) that featured just about every Legion-related character up until then (but curiously omitting those featured in the Action Comics Legion backups). Originally a labor of love that was suggested by the artist himself, the work required him to draw so many characters that he was exhausted at the end of it all. Measuring a mammoth 40 by 15 inches, it has infamously become known as the poster “that broke Giffen.” In an interview in BACK ISSUE #22, Keith said it was the cause for him leaving the book at the height of its glory. “When DC wanted to do posters, I said, ‘Let me see if I can put on a poster every single character that appeared in a Legion book since it started.’ And by the time I was done with it, it’s like being force-fed pizza for a year. After that, do you still want more pizza?” A smaller version of the print was inserted into the trade paperback collection of The Great Darkness Saga in 1989. Two more Legion posters followed in quick succession: one promoting the Baxter run of the title in 1984 (center left), then the following year a recruitment poster (center right) calling for new readers of the book. In 1986, a lavish portfolio of ten pieces of black-and-white artwork by some of the industry’s leading artists was released in conjunction with the History of the DC Universe set. It included a beautiful rendition of the Legion by Steve Lightle, which was later reprinted and colorized within some collected publications. Attached to the book was an artist jam piece of various DC characters, including an image of the White Witch drawn by P. Craig Russell, which was also available as a poster to fans who sent in a coupon.
DC COMICS GIFT WRAPS (1980)
DC Comics has and continues to license its characters for various merchantable stationery goods, including the likes of postcards, bookmarks, pencil cases, folders, and wrapping paper. By and large, the characters featured are restricted to the big guns of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Flash. However, in 1980, various Legionnaires were featured in two different gift wraps manufactured by Hallmark, sporting birthday and Christmas themes, respectively. The former included various DC characters around a birthday cake, while the festive paper featured Legionnaires with gifts around a Christmas tree, as Santa looked on from a monitor screen.
TYR SUPER POWERS FIGURE (1986) Despite the Legion’s popularity, no actual action figures of Legionnaires were manufactured until the turn of the century. Strangely enough, the only Legion-related character to have had a figure made (apart from the Superman family) in the 20th Century was the villain Tyr, who had been licensed to Kenner as part of its Super Powers toy line. A collection of 34 figures released over three series, the Super Powers action figures were modeled on definitive DC style guide artwork, and featured moderate articulation and hidden action features. Despite vigorous marketing
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including three DC Comics tie-in miniseries [see BI #16—ed.], the line collapsed after three years. Tyr came with a detachable rocket launch arm, which was activated when his legs were squeezed together. As the text on the package states: “Tyr is equipped with a powerful bionic gun in place of one of his real arms. The gun can fire powerful energy blasts, and can somehow control the minds of others. The gun can detach itself from Tyr’s body and fly away, in the event he is captured.”
MAYFAIR ROLE-PLAYING MODULES (1986–1989)
Because the Legion consisted of so many characters, and its history and settings were so rich and diverse, Mayfair produced two comprehensive reference manuals on the world of the Legion. Volume 1 (module 213), co-written by Paul Levitz, focused on all past and present Legionnaires, with comprehensive explanations of powers and statistics for use with the RPG, as well as “intimate details on the Legionnaires’ lives you can’t find anywhere else.” Volume 2 (216) featured “the world book,” and included information on the Earth of the future, its government, the Science Police, technology of the time, the Legion Academy, plus the various worlds of the United Planets. It incorporated a large and detailed schematic of Legion headquarters. Original covers for the two sourcebooks were drawn by Ed Hannigan, Jose Delbo, and Larry Mahlstedt. Several other books also contained Legion references, including the Hardware Handbook (232) and modules on Superman (233) and Booster Gold (207). To promote the games, Mayfair released a poster and a set of ten miniature lead figures made by Grenadier. Looking more at home as Monopoly tokens, the unpainted figures comprised five Legionnaires (Wildfire, Dawnstar, Blok, Element Lad, and Sensor Girl) and five villains (Mordru, Persuader, Tyr, Lightning Lord, and Emerald Empress). The RPG modules continued into the ’90s, which included the well-received 2995 Legion of Super-Heroes Sourcebook, considered essential reading for followers of the so-called Five Years Later incarnation of the group covered elsewhere in this issue.
DC COMICS BACKING BOARD CARDS (1987, 1989)
In 1987, DC Comics tested the waters for trading card demand in the US market, but chose to release the product in a unique fashion: as part of backing boards for comics sold in three-packs at large retailers. The first set came in six different sheets of eight, with un-perforated cut-out lines for the cards and a header for hanging the item. The Legion-related cards featured Tyr and the cover of Adventure Comics #307, which introduced Element Lad. A second series with nine sheets was produced in 1989. One of the cards featured the cover of Crisis on Infinite Earths #1, which included Dawnstar on the cover. These collectibles preceded the trading-card craze that was to develop in the ’90s, in all manner of styles: ordinary card sets, chase cards, oversized ones, foils, extended art “rares,” stackers, promotional items, one-off sketch cards, and the like. The Legion formed the basis or part of many of those card sets.
Specializing in board, card, and role-playing games (RPGs), Mayfair Games released a number of modules featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes. Four were strictly game-related: Pawns of Time (module 223), Knight to Planet 3 (224), Mad Rook’s Gambit (225), and King for All Time (226). A couple of others were reference books that also served as a trove of information for Legion fans, even those who do not play the games.
As mentioned in the introduction, these are just some of the Legionrelated memorabilia that was released up to the end of the ’80s. The following decades saw an influx of further paraphernalia, including flight rings, trading cards, posters, action figures, and various promotional items for the Legion’s book as well as the animated Legion television shows. For a complete list of these, refer to the link below. LEGION LAD has now launched a new website which fans can access to refer to the complete lists of merchandise and publications: www.thelegionofsuper-heroes.com.
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OLD GODS & NEW: A COMPANION TO
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As anyone who’s been paying a lick of attention knows, the DC Universe has Manhunters out the proverbial boom tube! There’s the original Paul Kirk Manhunter, the green Martian one, the one with the dog, the Simon & Kirby one, the later Kirby one, the pirate one, the metal-masked one, the giant robot ones, the Simonson one, and even an old Star-Spangled Comics feature entitled “Manhunters Around the World”! You’ll be glad to know this article isn’t about any of them. No, this article is about a white-haired bounty hunter in outer space named Starker, Manhunter 2070, who only appeared three times back at the very beginning of the Bronze Age in the final original-run issues of Showcase. Or did he? Starker’s creator was artist Mike Sekowsky, who, of course, had plenty of experience drawing aliens, demons, and monsters during his long run on Justice League of America. Sekowsky was going on three decades in the business by the time he did Manhunter. Like many other comics artists, though, his work had grown to be more and more stylized (and sometimes a little sloppy) over time and in the wake of Neal Adams’ ultra-realistic Batman, the fans of that period deemed Mike’s artwork unsophisticated. In a 1996 interview in the Central New Jersey Home News, longtime DC inker Joe Giella stated, “Mike was a
teven Thompson
pleasure to work on. He was a terrific artist. I mean, you know, he drank a little bit. And then later on his work style did deteriorate, but he was always very talented.” Sekowsky wasn’t just an artist, though. In fact, as DC Comics began its big period of change in the late ’60s and early ’70s, where artists were being given more power and creative freedom, many of the old guard were controversially put out to pasture, but not Mike. Along with the likes of Joe Orlando, Carmine Infantino, and Joe Kubert, Mike took several floundering titles off in directions that would have been unthinkable just a year or two earlier. Sekowsky’s Metal Men, for example, were no longer just wisecracking, bickering robots fighting other robot menaces. No, theirs was now a dark and gritty title, with our heroes on the run for murder, wearing human disguises much of the time. The biggest change of all came in Sekowsky’s controversial “New” Wonder Woman, done initially with writer Denny O’Neil, which found the classic, star-spangled Amazon Princess all but retconned out for several years, replaced by a karate-kicking Emma Peel clone named Diana Prince who was mentored by a tiny, blind, Chinese character with the unlikely name of I-Ching who served as Wonder Woman’s version of John Steed. [Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #17 for the full scoop on the “New” Wonder Woman.]
Sekowsky’s Space Stalker Starker—a.k.a. Manhunter 2070— as seen on the Mike Sekowsky/ Dick Giordano covers to 1970’s Showcase #91–93. TM & © DC Comics.
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MANHUNTER’S SHOWCASE
TM & © DC Comics.
about international policemen, given the overall cover title of… Manhunters!) By the late ’60s, although the new characters like Nightmaster and Jonny Double were still well done, the big hits for Showcase had stopped. Sekowsky edited the last two trilogies before the title took a long break. First up was Showcase #88– 90’s “Jason’s Quest,” a hip, modern tale of a young motorcyclist seeking to find himself. The final series of the Jason’s Quest run echoed back to issue #5 with a short story titled “Incident on Krobar 3,” featuring “Manhunter 2070.” Starker’s initial appearance actually comes one issue prior to his technical debut. It’s in a three-page preview (inked by Dick Giordano) that’s actually a mini-episode all its own. We’re introduced to the deep-space setting, the background, and the character. Essentially, it’s a Western in space, with aliens as the bad guys and mike sekowsky Starker the good-hearted, whitehaired bounty hunter with a © DC Comics. mysterious past played by… James Coburn? Lee Marvin? Leslie Nielsen? Hard to tell. Sekowsky was never a realist. Maybe a combination of all three. Manhunter 2070’s tall and lean and cool, all dressed in black here. Oh, and we also meet his faithful steed… err… robot, 17001, a.k.a. Arky, with a repository of all known criminals in five galaxies listed in its computer memory. Starker’s first full adventure occurs in Showcase #91 (June 1970). “Planet of Death,” with betterthan-normal inking by Vince Colletta, gives the reader a more proper introduction to our protagonist as well as the two young ladies who act as arm candy to him. Perhaps at the suggestion of the Comics Code Authority, lip service is given to him chaperoning his investment counselor’s daughters, but one girl hangs on his shoulders while he’s gambling, he’s gone for a week and they pined for him while he was away, he calls them “my pets,” and is just generally played as if he ain’t chaperonin’ nothin’. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. The girls are still with Starker for his second full issue, Showcase #92 (Aug. 1970). In fact, the entire issue (inked by Frank Giacoia) has him recounting his origin to them, explaining how he became “the richest bounty hunter around” by killing off the space pirates who had kidnapped him when he was just a boy. All of this was in preparation for his third outing, Showcase #93’s (Sept. 1970) delightfully titled and nicely drawn (by Sekowsky with Giacoia) “Never Trust a Red-Haired Greenie,” in which our Manhunter teams up with his own quarry on a quest that leaves him unconscious on a planet, about to be beaten to death by some Neanderthal types. How he got out of that spot we will likely never know, because all that was left was the call to readers to write in if they wanted to see more of Manhunter 2070! And apparently, they didn’t.
Being the editor as well as the writer/artist on Metal Men and Wonder Woman gave Sekowsky an almost unprecedented amount of control from DC, which he also brought to the final two story arcs of the company’s long-running Showcase title. Showcase was on its last legs at that point. The experimental comic had debuted in 1956 as a means of trying out new series without having to apply for new second-class mailing privileges every time. It had amassed an impressive track record early on, essentially creating the Silver Age by introducing readers to Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, the Challengers of the Unknown, Adam Strange, the Inferior Five, and more. (Perhaps the most forgotten issue of Showcase was #5, Nov.–Dec. 1956, shown at left. It featured a series of short stories
Are You Ready for Manhunter 2070? Teaser page 1 (of 3) from Showcase #90, the final issue starring “Jason’s Quest.” TM & © DC Comics.
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Grave Matters Original Sekowsky/Giordano cover art for Showcase #92, Manhunter 2070’s second installment. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.
MANHUNTER’S TWILIGHT
Many years later, in Secret Origins #22 (Jan. 1988), writers Roy and Dann Thomas ambitiously attempted to tie in all the various DC Manhunters, which led directly to DC’s Millennium event. No mention of Manhunter 2070, though. Starker was one of a kind. Although he referred to Manhunter 2070 as a feature of interest in his introduction to the 1992 collection, The Essential Showcase 1956–1959, writer Paul Kupperberg had only managed to squeeze Starker into one pointless panel of his all-star Showcase #100 (May 1978), highlighting all the characters who had appeared in the anthology series. If he hadn’t been identified in the key at the back of the book, no one would have even known it was him. Starker certainly ranks among the most forgotten DC heroes, with only two creators bothering to revive the character since that initial test run, more than 20 years apart and to perhaps even less fanfare. They say actor James Dean only made three movies, but real buffs know he actually acted in seven films. Thus it was with Starker. In 1991, following in the wake of Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s revisionist takes on the superhero theme, the oft-radical Howard Chaykin teamed with the amazing but oddly unsung artist José Luis García-López to give us three issues of Twilight. No sparkly vampires here. Instead this is a seriously deconstructive look at a number of DC’s more innocuous science fiction-based characters including, among others, the Knights of the Galaxy, Tommy Tomorrow, Space Cabby, and, yes, our man Starker. No longer a heroic bounty hunter, the nowunrecognizable Starker is portrayed in Twilight as a burntout immortal, drowning himself in robot sex and alcohol to forget his agonizing, endless life. If one squints, one can see this weary, boozy version as a natural outgrowth of Sekowsky’s more traditional space cowboy, sort of John Wayne’s Ringo Kid aging into Rooster Cogburn. Starker is given a first name—John (sometimes written as just “Jon”)—and a younger brother, Axel (a.k.a. Star Hawkins, an earlier Mike Sekowsky character), and becomes a somewhat reluctant major player in Chaykin’s complex revisionist storyline to bring down the false godhood achieved by DC’s original space hero, Tommy Tomorrow. Twilight writer Chaykin had been a longtime Sekowsky fan. “He had a fine sense of design,” Howard tells us, “which frequently acted counter to his draftsmanship. His picture skills were top drawer and his draftsmanship had a comic sensibility that served lighter material well.” For Chaykin’s miniseries, Sekowsky’s work served as a starting point. “The first work of his that struck me was the Star Hawkins material. I really dug what he was doing there. I grew to like his work from then on, including in particular the Manhunter 2070 stuff, which deeply informed and inspired my ‘Monark Starstalker’ one-shot for Marvel.” [Editor’s note: Chaykin’s Monark Starstalker headlined Marvel Premiere #32 (Oct. 1976).] It’s been said that the Starker-inspired Monark Starstalker book led to Chaykin getting the Marvel Star Wars assignment, and may even have influenced Han Solo!
MANHUNTER’S RETURN
Although in Twilight we witness Starker’s final fate, there were still many untold adventures of the character. Yet another two decades would pass, though, before we’d be witness to another one, before Starker is seen again in what, to date, is his final appearance. Walter Simonson created an unusual and fascinating graphic novel in 2012’s The Judas Coin, and although Batman is prominently cover-featured, he’s only a small part of the far-ranging story arc that goes from Biblical times to the year 2087. Each chapter of the book follows the title coin through history and Simonson gives each chapter its own individual look. Batman’s sideways, black-and-white chapter, for example, seems to mimic newspaper story strips. Starker finishes out the book in a colorful pseudo-manga style. Although again nearly unrecognizable as the same character—either from Sekowsky or Chaykin/ García-López—Simonson plays on the same Sekowsky tropes with the girls and the robots and the money. At first, one might suspect the long-haired hero here to be a younger version of the character, but the story is
howard chaykin © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 23
Starker, Robot Hunter (left) Now “John” Starker, Manhunter 2070 as seen in Twilight #1. By Chaykin and García-López. (right) Simonson’s use of Starker in The Judas Coin is artistically cheerier than the character’s previous outing. TM & © DC Comics.
According to friends and relatives, said to be set in 2087. References are made to his original adventures and Mike Sekowsky was a very troubled man, one flashback panel even depicts his with more than his share of personal original look. demons. It’s said that he left comics over In fact, the Manhunter 2070 massive alcohol-fueled arguments and chapter in The Judas Coin serves as disagreements with editorial director a belated wrap-up of the original Carmine Infantino not long after the walter simonson “red-haired greenies” storyline that failure of Manhunter 2070. Mark ©Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. no one was clamoring for by that Evanier, who knew the artist when he point. Simonson tells BACK ISSUE, “Honestly, I really later worked in animation, has referred to Sekowsky’s just enjoyed the original stories, and since nothing “really twisted sense of humor,” though, too. In the had been done with the character since the original end, Sekowsky left a rich legacy in comic-book history Showcases (at least not as far as I knew), I had all the that simply can’t be ignored. room in the world to tell a story about him. Because the last of the three original issues ended on a cliff- For more info on the life and times of Manhunter 2070’s creator, hanger, I had a great opportunity to tell a story, see TwoMorrows’ Alter Ego #33 (Feb. 2004), the special Mike Sekowsky picking up where the Sekowsky stories left off.” In 1977, less than a decade after Mike Sekowsky’s original Manhunter 2070 stories, Britain’s weekly 2000 AD comic came along. In its pages, alongside the futuristic dark parody, Judge Dredd, one could find strips like Robohunter, about an old-fashioned bounty hunter with a robot sidekick, or the Stainless Steel Rat, with its James Coburn-based galactic con artist, or Strontium Dog, essentially a Western set in outer space. Mike Sekowsky’s unappreciated Manhunter 2070 may well have just been ahead of its time.
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issue. Special thanks to Howard Chaykin and Walter Simonson and for their contributions to this article.
STEVEN THOMPSON is Booksteve of Booksteve’s Library (http:// booksteveslibrary.blogspot. com) and a dozen other blogs. He has written for Fantagraphics, TwoMorrows, Yoe Books, Bear Manor Media, and Time Capsule Productions.
by C
ecil Disharoon
Paranormal… Paradox Paradox’s two blink-and-you’llmiss-them appearances: Marvel Preview #24 (Winter 1980), cover by Paul Gulacy, and Bizarre Adventures #30 (Feb. 1982), cover by Jeff Easley. TM & © Marvel.
What would the most unpredictable agent of the late 22nd Paradox to play the role of spy, to learn the connection between the Century be like? Writer Bill Mantlo found his creation amid a bizarre pyrotechnic drug trend that claims an immolated ambassador. futuristic setting: breadbasket Earth and her solar system colonies From my discussions with the artists who drew this obscure of gene-engineered industrial classes. Here begat the question, Marvel character’s scant two stories, the memories of Paradox’s creation Who is Paradox? present… a paradox. I wish Bill could tell us that, and any number of things. First I spoke with Mike Vosburg, who drew the Paradox If Bill Mantlo is ever able to tell us, he would need a sequel, with finishes by Joe Jusko, printed in the Marvel neuro-scientific breakthrough. A rollerblading accident black-and-white magazine Bizarre Adventures #30 in 1992 left Mr. Mantlo unable to communicate due (Feb. 1982), which went on sale on or around January to severe head trauma. His brother Michael Mantlo 26, 1982. Yet this job, by the artist’s recollection, maintains a Facebook page where you can read about precedes the start of his work, following artist Bill’s struggles to survive on life support, and the John Buscema’s premiere, on The Savage She-Hulk. website BillMantlo.com allows the writer’s fans to Since Vosburg’s She-Hulk run began with #2, with a contribute to his medical needs. March 1980 cover date and approximate on-sale date Bill, now best known as the creator of Rocket of December 11, 1979, according to Mike’s memories Raccoon, put a lot of his life into his fantastic stories, his Paradox story was produced in 1979. including Paradox. His characters often spoke about I next talked with the visual originator of Paradox: hope. Val Mayerik. His collaboration with Mantlo on bill mantlo Paradox’s creation apparently pre-dated Mantlo’s Paradox’s debut saw print in the black-and-white work on ROM: Spaceknight, where the Dire Wraith magazine Marvel Preview #24 (Winter 1980). 1975 photo © Marvel. Lastly, I spoke with Joe Jusko, inker of Mike race shape-shifted in united infiltration; ROM #1’s December 1979 cover-dated first issue went on sale approximately Vosburg’s pencils on the Paradox sequel. September 4, 1979. What follows are my interviews with all three Paradox artists, starting Paradox is an ideal of individualism—his motivations are all his own. with the first artist on the character, Val Mayerik. – Cecil Disharoon However, the powers-that-be need devil-may-care, dancing, bisexual Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 25
Float Like a Butterfly… Val Mayerik drew inspiration from (inset top) martial artist Bruce Lee and (inset bottom) Mikhail Baryshnikov in his design of (main) Paradox. This art was used for the corner box of Marvel Preview #24 and for promotion. Art and photos courtesy of Heritage. Art TM & © Marvel. Lee Enter the Dragon photo © Warner Bros. Barishnykov photo by Max Waldman.
CECIL DISHAROON: Tell me about the creation of Paradox. VAL MAYERIK: The inception of Paradox came entirely from Bill. I believe it was 1980 or 1981. Bill and I had been friends when I lived in New York. I had left New York and he called me. I was living in Cleveland, Ohio. He said, “I’ve got this idea and you’d like it. It’s about a guy in the future. He’s a dancer and into martial arts.” I said, “That sounds good.” Bill sent me the script and I drew it. That’s about it. I really didn’t have any role in coming up with the idea. I finished the idea by creating the character—finishing off the character in terms of what he looked like. DISHAROON: Sounds like once it got into your hands, it moved pretty fast. How long did you work on it before it saw print? MAYERIK: Well, it was a full-length magazine… It was close to 50-some pages, wasn’t it? DISHAROON: Yes! It was the entire issue. MAYERIK: It must have taken me two or three months. Back then, prior to the digital age, of course, when you could send scans in to be lettered and colored and so forth, I did the pencils. Those were sent to Marvel; they lettered it, and sent it back to me. Then I finished with inking and toning it. What now seems a laborious and arduous process, to me was a pretty good way to work. It must have taken me at least two months to pencil and ink all that material. DISHAROON: You can see that Marvel was trying to use the magazine format to open the field to more prestigious creations, where they could go outside the boundaries of the Comics Code and color comics market. MAYERIK: Yeah, that was after they developed the Epic [creator-owned] comic line, which was pretty exciting at the time. It gave artists and writers a lot more flexibility. DISHAROON: It must have meant a lot that Bill would call you up and offer you the opportunity to work on something outside the Marvel Universe as we typically know it. MAYERIK: Yeah. Bill and I met years earlier when I moved to New York City, and had apartments in the same building. We socialized, but never had a chance to work together. As I recall, I might have inked a Micronauts job or something like that or something long before that, but nothing significant. We always wanted to work together, but nothing came up. Then when I left New York, about a year later, Bill gave me a call. DISHAROON: Paradox is an interesting study in some ways. The character was meant to break several taboos… or what constituted a taboo around 1980. Also, his entire strategy—the success of his strategy— depends on not being predictable. MAYERIK: I’m not clear—what do you mean by “taboo”? DISHAROON: By taboos, for one, Paradox, the character, as far as I know, was the first openly bisexual character Marvel published. Also, he’s a geneengineered offshoot of humanity: his abilities comes from being a part of the less-privileged class. As he solves this initial case, the revolution that he’s helping stop begins to change his mind by his second episode. And we glimpse an array of unusual tactics, to hint at his disregard for playing it safe. MAYERIK: Right. You’re getting into nuances of the plot I’ve forgotten, I have to say… DISHAROON: You’ve been busy since then. [laughter] MAYERIK: We didn’t get very graphic with the bisexuality. There was some mention of it or some hint of it. There was an erotic scene that went on between he and a female character. When I initially penciled it, I had depicted bare breasts and buttocks, which Marvel bristled against and told me to change it—”just cover her up, even if just minimally.” Even though they were trying to go outside boundaries, there were still limitations with what they were willing to do on that level. Other than that, it was quite an unusual character. I modeled the character after Mikhail Baryshnikov… DISHAROON: Ah-ha! MAYERIK: …his facial features. He was a dancer and also had martial-arts skills, as well. I kind of combined Baryshnikov with Bruce Lee. That was the genesis of the physical rendering of the character. DISHAROON: You did an excellent job depicting the character. He appeared to us as a celebrity, and celebrities are generally considered frivolous. What a great cover: He can take the forms of these different colonists. Earth is where food is grown, which makes it the central political power of their solar system-wide group of colonies. They use the usual conditions of those planets to foster different parts of their manufacturing, so they don’t have pollution on Earth. The problem is, if you aren’t on Earth, you don’t have the same kind of life. The Moon’s levels represent the social strata that pervade the solar system. MAYERIK: Yeah, it was pretty creative. Bill had a lot of ideas in that vein in terms of the haves and the have-nots. He was always looking for a vehicle, which expressed that without being overly political.
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At the time, with that particular book, he wanted to be entertaining, but then he put some of his own political philosophies in there. That was definitely present in the story. DISHAROON: I was reading about how media mogul Arthur Brown got his entire cast on his television program to take dance lessons—the men, largely against their will. Hollywood brought us guys with brilliant dance routines, and out in the country, just break out the live music!—but it seems it was considered silly for a grown man to dance. MAYERIK: Just as an aside, the actuality was, Mikhail Baryshnikov was very heterosexual and had a lot of beautiful val mayerik women following him around. It was interesting. Not so much now that ComicVine. I’m older, but when I was 19 and up to my 40s, I was pretty active in martial arts, so I was always looking for a martial-arts character that wasn’t cliché like Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. I wanted to work more subtle nuances into a character. I think Bill wanted that, too, because we had discussed how most martial-arts comics were pretty one-dimensional, and also drawn by artists who didn’t know a damn thing about martial arts, other than watching a Bruce Lee movie. So I thought that would be a really good way to use the knowledge I had into a character. The physicality of it, the fact that dance—I never did study dance, but I had a couple of girlfriends who were ballet dancers. I always admired their discipline and physical athleticism. Their training reminded me of martial-arts training, although it stopped, of course, at physical contact. They didn’t spar and knock each other around. I’ve always admired dancers because of the sheer physical discipline they have to endure. Just like Olympic athletes, like a gymnast. They are conscientious about their diets and sleeping patterns. You can’t do that stuff and be unhealthy. You can be in martial arts and be a thug, but you can’t perform in the way that dancers do and not be in shape. DISHAROON: When you are thinking about the scenes, where you didn’t when you depicted the colonies and their levels in Paradox, I was wondering if you remember anything at all about when you were designing the levels of the Moon. “Don’t do anymore of that. We’ve decided not to do MAYERIK: I just went along with what Bill was describing that!” [laughs] I think that somehow Paradox came right in the middle of that run, and when I was done, in the script. I probably started She-Hulk—started working back on So when further considering Mantlo’s creation of Paradox, the Marvel color books. a useful contrast might be: Marvel had won big, successfully DISHAROON: Thanks for putting that timeline together! adapting a far-flung, non-modern setting, with Conan the VOSBURG: Well, don’t quote me in a court of law! Barbarian. Civilization is set in on a planetary scale, but [laughs] Somewhere around here, I have my calendar again, we have a protagonist living as a law unto himself, date books—I know they go back to ’82 or ’83, but I’m with eyes penetrating the accepted order. not sure about before then. With Paradox, Marvel could use the future to openly I’ve actually got the book [Paradox in Bizarre Adventures redefine action heroes, and break out with a non-superhero— #30] right here. I think I only did the layouts. My thoughts which suited artist Mike Vosburg just fine. looking at it: Star*Reach comics—familiar with that? —that was very popular. One thing about established MIKE VOSBURG: I was shuttling back and forth between companies—they look at what’s selling and say: “We should Battle Creek [Michigan] and Nashville. I probably be doing that.” [Editor’s note: Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach did that job around the time I worked on some Satana was a revolutionary Bronze Age anthology that cultivated stories that never got published. [Author’s note: Mike creator-generated characters and stories. See BACK ISSUE drew what was for years Satana’s final appearance, #12 for more information.] co-starring with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up #81, I look at the tones, and unfortunately, the printing May 1979.] process just couldn’t handle it yet. This is probably [Paradox] was as close to a hard “R” story as you more from Joe Jusko’s perspective—he’d be doing could get… Sure enough, I was doing the third issue, these beautiful grayscale tones on a book. When they’d when I got a call from whomever at Marvel, saying, print it, they’d get very blotchy and black. The printing
He or She? Paradox shape-shifts on this original art page by Mayerik from the first Paradox tale. Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Marvel.
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process couldn’t handle any of the facility—the finesse—of what One of the things you learn early: There’s two words in your job he was doing at that point. So, the books came out—they were all description. And that’s: commercial, artist. Part of it is, you want to be muddy and murky. the artist. Part of it is, you’ve gotta make a living at this stuff. I remember doing a job, about the same time, a chromium It’s like what I say about periodicals: You could do a job, book. The books hadn’t figured out how to do the printing, comparable to Michelangelo. But if you miss the deadline, and it was specifically a Marvel thing. They were always it’s worthless. “We can’t print it: it’s late.” looking for ways to cut corners financially. If you look Mike then tells me the legendary story of DC’s at the Warren books of the same time, they had none Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. It came out half a year of those problems. All of the reproduction on them after its marketing push. “Gorgeous,” said the editor, was superior! Marvels looked like they were run to “but it wasn’t worth the wait.” some printing press on the corner. Well, let’s not have our Eisner-winning editor saying DISHAROON: I noticed the toning changes drastically— that about me, because I’m hardly Neal Adams. after page eight, set on the planet Mercury. The rest of the issue has a different palette. It seems to be working with the limits of reproducing grayscale. DISHAROON: So, Mr. Jusko, at the time you inked There’s not nearly as many lines. The way the first Paradox you were 21 years old, consumed with mike vosburg Paradox appearance had been done, there was a lot cover illustration, and had no idea what you of this… modeling, I guess, is the word for it. were doing. How did the penciled pages of Bizarre Marvel Database. VOSBURG: There’s a couple of things that could’ve Adventures #30 arrive on your drawing board? been going on there. For one, it could’ve been a deadline issue, where You’d done some illos for Bizarre Adventures and its predecessor, in the first eight pages, its like: “It’s early in the deadline; I’m going to Marvel Preview, earlier. take the time and get it right.” Then suddenly, you go: “Oh, great, JOE JUSKO: Being new, and with a limited amount of magazine I’ve gotta do 20 pages by the middle of next week?! So, okay. covers to go around each month, I was willing to take on any work How’m I gonna take short cuts?” that was handed to me. I happened to be in the [Marvel] office one day during late 1980, looking for Christmas money work, and editor Lynne Graeme, if I remember correctly, asked if I’d be willing to ink the Paradox job that just came in. The only caveat was that it needed to be done within a fairly tight deadline. I thought it would be a fun job and was happy to get the work. DISHAROON: What reference did you have for Paradox? JUSKO: Working for Marvel you got to be on the comp list, so I’m sure I received the magazine [with the original Paradox story] with everything else. DISHAROON: Did you work closely with Bill? With Voz? JUSKO: Not at all. I took the pages home and just went to work on them. As I remember the pages were pretty tight and needed no explanation. It was basically, “Get them done and get them back.” DISHAROON: How did time constraints, your then-limited experience, and the perils of printing work together around your approach? What did you want to try? What did you learn here, and what did you best like? JUSKO: If you look at the first page, you’ll notice a marked difference between it and the rest of the book. I started off a bit overly ambitious, with the intent of fully rendering the story as I did the John Buscema job [“Shandra”] in issue #23 [of joe jusko Marvel Preview, themed “Bizarre Adventures 2”], with opaques and airbrushing. Thesupermat. I realized after that one page, it would not be doable in the allotted timeframe, so I went straight to inks, with marker tones added. Not having much experience as an inker at that point— and not having the confidence to add anything to the art beyond what was there (besides the tones)—I did what I think was a serviceable, though inconsistent, job over Mike’s pencils, especially considering the entire job was inked and toned in under three weeks. I’m actually glad I abandoned the airbrush rendered approach, as that first page looks really soft, dark, and muddy on the pulpy paper. DISHAROON: What made Paradox different, Joe? JUSKO: I’d be lying to you if I told you I remember anything about the character, or the story itself. I was just batting cleanup for the guys who did all the major work.
Footloose A carefree Paradox, as rendered by Mike Vosburg and Joe Jusko, from Bizarre Adventures #30. TM & © Marvel.
CECIL DISHAROON wonders if, curating these interviews, is he a Bullpen batboy, or more like a groundskeeper? Cecil presently writes about his experiences teaching English as a Second Language online for his book with Angela Disharoon, Great Job! You Get A Star!
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by J o h n
K. Kirk
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Space: 1999 (1975–1977) was only one of the many iconic sci-fi television productions they created (their TV series included Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, and UFO, among others), but arguably was their most recognized. Co-starring the husband-and-wife team of Martin Landau as Commander John Koenig and Barbara Bain as Dr. Helena Russell, as well as Barry Morse as Professor Victor Bergman, Space: 1999 was the most expensive series the Andersons produced, one of their few live-action shows, as opposed to the “Supermarionation” puppet shows for which they were internationally known. [Editor’s note: See our sister mag RetroFan #4 for a look at one of those series, Thunderbirds.] Television’s Space: 1999 included a multitude of supportive media efforts with toys, novels, audio dramas, and two ancillary comic-publishing initiatives that included early comics work by talented creators like Joe Staton, Nick Cuti, and John Byrne.
AS SEEN ON TV
The two Space: 1999 comic series created between 1974 and 1976 were both published by Charlton Comics, the small publisher of periodicals in Derby, Connecticut, known for its 24/7 printing-press operation and its eclectic variety of mostly low-budget magazines. The first was a bimonthly black-and-white Space: 1999 comics magazine, a format that included three visual stories along with three text-only stories. It was edited by George Wildman and Gray Morrow and featured the art of Morrow, Vincente Alcazar, Pat Boyette, Dick Ayers, and Carlos Pino. Writers on this magazine were Mike Pellowski, Nick Cuti, and Charlton’s most prolific scribe, Joe Gill. This was a publication aimed at a more mature audience, with its lack of color and the emphasis on text; in fact, adults and young adults were the target audience gray morrow of all of the comics-related magazines published in the 1970s by Charlton, Portrait by Michael Netzer. Marvel Comics, and others. [Editor’s note: The B&W Space: 1999 title was included in BACK ISSUE #88 in an article exploring Charlton’s magazines of the 1970s.] Like its black-and-white sibling, Charlton’s Space: 1999 full-color comic book included the editorial efforts of Wildman and Morrow. Along with the talented creators previously mentioned, it saw the work of legendary artists Joe Staton and John Byrne. It was also written by Cuti and Pellowski. The premise of the comic naturally mirrored that of the television series: a surge of electro-magnetic radiation nick cuti caused the stored nuclear waste on the Moon to explode, with the resulting Hey Kids Comics Wiki. kinetic thrust propelling our natural satellite out of Earth’s orbit. After leaving the solar system and entering a black hole (and a number of space warps), the Moon was long gone with no chance of returning home to Earth’s demesne. Moonbase Alpha was adrift in the cosmos.
Gonna Party Like It’s 1999 Covers to Space: 1999 #1 (Nov. 1975)–6 (Sept. 1976). Issues #1 and 2’s covers painted by Joe Staton; issues #3–6’s covers penciled and inked by John Byrne, with Byrne watercolors. Space: 1999 © ITC Entertainment Group Limited.
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The first issue of the comic included a truncated version of this origin story from television, setting up the premise for original adventures to follow. From a publishing point of view, the purpose of the two Space: 1999 comics seemed fairly straightforward: to support the profile of the Space: 1999 television show as far as its younger audience was concerned. It was part of what we would regard today as a multimedia initiative that included a syndication of the series in multiple countries, including Great Britain, various European nations, the US, and Canada, as well as countries in South America. There was a Space: 1999 toy line from Mattel that was released around this time, along with vinyl recorded audio dramas from Power Records in Britain and North America. Despite its success in many other countries around the world, the hopes of landing an American audience for Space: 1999 was key to the show’s success. Charlton’s promising acquisition of the Space: 1999 property was based on the success and profile of previous Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series. With the emphasis on additional publicity initiatives, it seemed like a good risk.
Art editor Gray Morrow recounted his initial introduction to the project at the 1982 Space: 1999 convention: “I was contacted by Gail Munn, who was the agent for ITC [a.k.a. Incorporated Television Company, the Space: 1999 license holder], to come for a private screening of this fabulous new series that was going to appear on television here in the States. She wouldn’t tell me at the time what my part in it was supposed to be; she wanted to build up a little suspense. I went and met the English representative and watched what I thought was a pretty damn good show, which I guess was the first episode. Then they asked me if I’d be interested in doing a Space: 1999 comic book, and we went from that. When you’re working with a two-dimensional medium and you’re trying to compete with a three-dimensional one, your best shot is to make the stories wilder or [farther]-out. In other words, attempt to do something they couldn’t do on film, at least not inexpensively. I don’t know how successful we were. I knew the writer Nick Cuti was very enthusiastic and worked very hard on making [the comics] as entertaining as possible.”
AN ENERGIZER FOR CHARLTON
The mid-1970s was a period of great excitement for Charlton Comics. Along with the creators previously mentioned, other artists and writers had joined the john byrne fold, affectionately known as the “CPL (Contemporary Pictorial Literature) © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. Gang”. [Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #100 for more about the CPL Gang.] Recruits during this period included the likes of Bob Layton, Roger Stern, and Mike Zeck. Under the editorial leadership of George Wildman and Nicola “Nick” Cuti, Charlton’s titles experienced a massive revamping that saw the decline of a good deal of their romance titles, but a surge in horror anthologies and sciencefiction television tie-in books. Space: 1999 was one of these titles and one, given the sense of anticipation around the show, in which Charlton had invested a great deal of hope. Nick Cuti shares with BACK ISSUE his recollections of that period: “At the time—I recall it was the early 1970s—Charlton was beginning to take its comic-book division very seriously. With the hiring of George Wildman as editor, they had found a very creative and dynamic leader. Before then, Charlton had treated the comic division as fodder to keep the presses rolling. Then we began to receive the rights to the shows Six Million Dollar Man, Emergency!, and, of course, Space: 1999. “Joe Staton was our premiere artist, and after the demise of E-Man we needed to give Joe work,” Cuti continues. “So I wrote the first few issues of Space: 1999 with Joe in mind. Since Space: 1999 was created in England,
“Nightmarish” Premiere Original cover art to Space: 1999 #3 (Mar. 1976), John Byrne’s debut as artist on the title. He found licensor approvals of celebrity likenesses to be a burden to the project. Scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). (inset) Space: 1999 #1, the black-and-white comics magazine. Space: 1999 © ITC Entertainment Group Limited.
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From Beyond the Unknown (top right) Original Byrne art (courtesy of Heritage) to Space: 1999 #6’s (Sept. 1976) splash, featuring H’r’nath Kem-Tohr. (top left) Writer John Kirk noticed a similarity between that alien and the Quwrllns, who Byrne featured nearly a decade later in Marvel’s Alpha Flight #25 (Aug. 1985). Space: 1999 © ITC Entertainment Group Limited. Alpha Flight TM & © Marvel.
they needed an American contact to do the magazines and the rights were given to Hanna-Barbera. George and I had a meeting with the representatives of H-B and they were very happy with Joe Staton but they wanted a more realistic approach for the black-and-white magazines. Gray Morrow was a good friend at the time and was fantastic at realistic comic-book art. I suggested him and the people at H-B were familiar with his work and agreed. Later, Gray suggested Neal Adams’ Continuity studio as a backup, and we had the magazines covered.”
FROM MOONBASE ALPHA TO DERBY, CONNECTICUT
The color comic book Space: 1999 #1 (Nov. 1975) included an abbreviated retelling of the first episode (“Breakaway”) of the television series in a story by Cuti and Staton titled “Moonless Night.” It also included an original short story titled “Intelligent Species” as well as a short text-only story called “The Kammerer Effect,” under a painted cover of Commander John Koenig and Dr. Helena Russell by Joe Staton, a dramatic pose with strong celebrity likenesses that no doubt appeased the egos of the star couple. For 25 cents, it was an admirable start that set the tone for the rest of the series. Issue #2 (Jan. 1976) also sported a painted cover by Staton that was widely reminiscent of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk’s legendary battle with the Gorn in the episode “Arena,” showing Commander Koenig in physical combat with a larger, alien foe. Staton also provided the interior art on Cuti’s lead story “Survival,” in which Koenig and an alien are stranded on a planet until Moonbase Alpha can dispatch a rescue team. A text-only story also by Nicola Cuti titled “The Stars” was also included. Space: 1999 #3’s (Mar. 1976) stories, “Bring Them Back Alive” and “Space Sirens,” were written by Cuti, with both the cover and interior art drawn by relative newcomer John Byrne. Space: 1999 #3 was not a pleasurable issue for Byrne. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “The Anderson reps completely rejected my first issue. They said I had the characters move their faces too much. Joe Staton redrew all the likenesses, and in subsequent issues I just copied what he’d done. The main characters ended up looking like they belonged on Easter Island.” Despite Byrne’s misgivings, there was still a sense of optimism at Charlton at the time of this book, as Nick Cuti explains: “There was a feeling of ‘high hopes’ for the entire Charlton line. We knew that competing with the Big Two, DC and Marvel Comics, was a lesson in futility. We were a niche company, filling in the gap left by the Biggies. Our comics were horror, Western, war, mystery, romance, big-foot [cartoons]. We filled in the genres
Meet Maya… …but don’t get too comfortable with the Season Two cast member, shown on the Pat Boyettedrawn cover of Space: 1999 #7 (Nov. 1976), as Charlton’s TV tie-in series ended here. © ITC Entertainment Group Limited.
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The Action “Comes Alive” Another comics legend associated with Space: 1999 adaptations: Russ Heath, who illustrated the Power Records comic based upon the show. Space: 1999 © ITC. Entertainment Group Limited.
other comic-book companies ignored. Yes, we did some work in superheroes—Blue Beetle, The Question, Captain Atom, E-Man, and Yang—but mostly we wanted to give the public a choice, in case their taste wasn’t for superheroes.” Issue #4 (May 1976), with Byrne again on art, opened with Byrne’s cover, a tech-focused drawing with Professor Bergman and Commander Koenig watching the destruction of an Eagle transporter vehicle on the central monitor of Main Mission. Cuti and Byrne’s story in this issue was titled “Demon Star,” and was backed up by a prose story, “The Micron Metamorphosis.” John Byrne tells BACK ISSUE about what he liked and didn’t like about Space: 1999, the show: “The tech and the aliens! The costumes and acting didn’t thrill me, and I thought the premise was absurd, though when I was offered the comic, I saw a lot of potential fun to be had with the technology. The Eagles were a hoot to draw. I’d been a big fan of Supermarionation since discovering Supercar when I was a kid. I’d followed the Anderson product through Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, and the rest. I was also a big fan of UFO at the time.” Cuti and Byrne returned with issue #5’s (July 1976) “Gods of the Planet Olympus,” where the Alphans encountered a planet that had a shared history with the Ancient Greeks and their mythologies. It was followed up by another text story called “The Contaminator.” In Space: 1999 #6 (Sept. 1976), the main story was divided into two chapters, “Flotsam” and “Survival,” and dealt with Commander Koenig and his co-pilot trying to survive a catastrophic disaster in an Eagle while investigating an alien artifact. This issue was a unique one for John Byrne, as he remembers it being his first opportunity to tackle both writing and art roles on a comic. “I’d submitted scripts for stories with ROG-2000 and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch that were approved, but they didn’t get drawn,” Byrne recalls. “The story for Wheelie was a little sojourn into sci-fi called ‘Star Cars.’ Incidentally, I referred to that as my ‘Larry Niven story,’ as I was shamelessly aping his style. When I met Larry a few years later in San Diego, he told me he’d read it and was amused when he recognized what I was doing. I was very flattered.” It’s of developmental interest to see the similarity in this story between Byrne’s ancient plasmic alien, H’r’nath Kem-Tohr, and his Quwrllns in Marvel’s Alpha Flight #25. Issue #6’s text-only story was titled “The Presence,” an uncredited prose piece with Byrne illos that is about the dangers of bringing a fungal organism into the protective habitat of Moonbase Alpha.
Space: 1999 #7 (Nov. 1976) featured a change in the book’s cast as well as the creative team. “The Metamorph,” a 14-page adaptation of the first episode in the second season of Space: 1999, saw the comic’s introduction of the alien shapeshifter, Maya, played on the TV series by Catherine Schell. Accompanying this tale was an eight-page story titled “Escape from Vipon.” Both stories were written by Mike Pellowski and illustrated by Pat Boyette; Boyette also painted the issue’s cover. The text-only story for this issue was titled “Primitive Planet,” about another of Commander Koenig’s excursions in an Eagle to an unknown planet. This transitional issue suggests that this would be direction of the comic for issues to come. This was not to be the case when the principal photography of TV’s Space: 1999 ended December 26, 1976, despite plans for a 13episode third season. With the show’s termination after a two-season run, the comic book followed suit.
WHAT I LEARNED ON MOONBASE ALPHA
When asked what he learned from Space: 1999 and this early part of his career, Byrne says, “To avoid likenesses! And, generally, to avoid licensed projects. I stuck by those rules until [Marvel’s Further Adventures of] Indiana Jones, which turned out to be another nightmare. It was a couple of decades before Chris Ryall, at IDW, was able to lure me into Star Trek and the ‘Buffy-verse.’” The writer/artist’s take on the overall Space: 1999 experience? Did he enjoy it? “You’re probably not going to like this answer, but, no,” Byrne tells BACK ISSUE. “Pretty much all the wind was taken out of my sails by what I felt was the butchering of that first issue. I’d been really quite proud of the job I’d done.” Nick Cuti’s recollection of Charlton’s Space: 1999 is vastly different. “You are talking about two of the most talented and nicest artists in the business,” Cuti tells BACK ISSUE. “As a writer, working with Joe and John was a dream. I couldn’t wait to see how they interrupted my scripts.” The demise of Space: 1999, the comic, was paralleled by the cancellation of other Charlton titles around this time, and most of the CPL Gang found their way into working for either Marvel or DC Comics after honing their talents and skills at Charlton. Charlton’s Space: 1999 was not only an outlet for future superstars to prove their themselves, but it also carved out its own place in the history of an iconic science-fiction series that still evokes powerful nostalgic memories today. JOHN K. KIRK is a librarian and English teacher with the Toronto District School Board in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who incorporates comics and comics history into his classroom teaching.
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by E d
Lute
While there have always been smaller publishers such as Archie Comics and Charlton Comics, when most people think of comic-book publishers, they think of the “Big Two”: Marvel Comics and DC Comics. This was especially true during the Bronze Age. If comics creators wanted to work in the field, they usually worked for Marvel or DC. This began to change during the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of independent publishers. It was during this period that Mike Grell’s Starslayer premiered, published by Pacific Comics, an independent. The series was originally supposed to be released by DC Comics, but this didn’t end up happening. Pacific wouldn’t even be the last publisher to handle the series. Since Grell owned the series he could move it from one mike grell publisher to another, and that’s what he did. Dr. Dan Yahnian/Mike Grell. Mike Grell and Starslayer were at the forefront of not only independent comics publishing but creator-owned material. BACK ISSUE looks at the Starslayer series, how it originated, its move from DC to Pacific then to First Comics and finally to Valiant, and how Grell and this series helped to set the stage for the future of comic-book publishing.
Starslayer TM & © Mike Grell.
FROM A WARLORD TO A STARSLAYER
Grell’s Warlord originally premiered in DC Comics’ 1st Issue Special #8 (Nov. 1975) before moving into its own self-titled series a few months later. The series revolved around a modern man named Travis Morgan who was thrust into the prehistoric, hollow-Earth fantasy world of Skartaris. With Starslayer, Grell wanted to do the opposite of what he did in The Warlord. This time Grell transported Celtic warrior Torin Mac Quillon from the time of the Roman Empire under Caesar to the distant future. Grell tells BACK ISSUE, “Originally, Starslayer was supposed to be published by DC as a companion book to The Warlord. It was conceived as the reverse of The Warlord. Warlord was a modern man in a primitive society while Starslayer featured a primitive man in a futuristic world. It evolved into something more over the years.” The first issue of the series introduced Torin, his wife Gwynth, and son Brann. While defending his village, including his wife and son, from an invading Roman army, Torin was about to die upon Roman spears when he disappeared in a flash of light. The onlookers thought that he had been favored by the gods and saved. For a series called Starslayer, the first issue didn’t offer much in the way of sci-fi. That didn’t matter, though, because although readers bought the comic thinking they would get a science-fiction tale, they were treated to the tale of a Celtic warrior who was battling to save his family and tribe from the invading Roman hordes. It wasn’t until the last few pages of the issue that readers were given the first science-fiction aspect of the story, Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33
but although the issue was light on the science fiction, it provided readers a glimpse of the outstanding characterization that would be a hallmark of the series. Torin’s family and their freedom from the oppressive Roman regime are very important to him. Without this issue showing readers the importance of family to the comic’s star, the decisions Torin must face later wouldn’t have the same impact. Grell notes, “I originally viewed the series as high action, high adventure book featuring Torin just like The Warlord featured Travis Morgan. It evolved from an action-oriented series to one that emphasized characters more than story.” Even though the first issue was light on science fiction, the rest of the series would make up for it in spades. While the onlookers thought he was saved by the gods, Torin had been transported to the 22nd Century by Tamara, who saved him because she needed his help to save the human race. Tamara had located Torin via the Time Scanner. She had been searching not only for a warrior who could help her in her quest but someone that history wouldn’t miss. Tamara explained to Torin that the Sun had burned out and she had been tasked by the Directors of the Earth with finding a way to help humanity survive. She needed his help to collect pyramid-shaped pieces that when connected were the key to saving the human race. These pieces had been given to the separate tribes of Earth that had left the planet to colonize other planets. Torin and Tamara were joined by SAM (Symbiotic Android Mindlink), a cross between a monkey and a computer. Tamara had SAM download ancient recordings so SAM could communicate better with Torin and his archaic speech patterns. However, the oldest recordings SAM was able to download were Humphrey Bogart movies such as the Maltese Falcon, African Queen, and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “I thought it was a fun little bit and it added to SAM’s personality,” Grell tells BI. “In order to communicate with Torin, he was tasked with going back to earliest surviving recordings he could find. I’m not sure what the recordings were found on DVD, CD, Beta, etc., but these were the earliest he could find. If you are going to use early 20th-Century celebrities, you would pick one of the most popular and recognizable—and that would be Bogart. Everyone knows his speech pattern.” Just as Han Solo and Chewbacca had the Millennium Falcon, Torin, Tamara, and SAM traveled in the Jolly Roger. The spaceship was originally a pleasure ship that provided passengers with a leisurely voyage through space. It had been retrofitted into a combat vessel that enabled our heroes to search potentially dangerous areas for the missing pieces. During their search, the crew of the Jolly Roger faced off against the remains of the Venus attack fleet that was headed for Earth before the fleet was destroyed by the solar flares from the Sun, a pair of brothers who are fighting over the throne of their kingdom, and a race of humans that had modeled their society after Viking warriors. Grell imbibed the diverse people with unique characteristics that differentiated them from each other. His work on the series contained incredible world building that stands up to some of the best in science fiction. The sixth issue of the series showed that Tamara knew that obtaining the pieces would save the human race, but at a terrible cost. According to Grell, “The ending to the quest was always in the back of my mind. I love the hardchoice decisions. This decision haunts Tamara.” BACK ISSUE isn’t going to spoil the surprise ending to the quest, but it is a must-read. This was the end of Grell’s first story arc on Starslayer. While the story was originally pitched during the late 1970s, it wouldn’t see print until the next decade. The story behind the story was as interesting and intriguing as anything Grell put on the comic-book page.
STARSLAYER IMPLODES
The Warlord proved to be a popular and strong-selling title for DC Comics, lasting until issue #133 (Winter 1988). So, you would think that DC Comics would have been interested in publishing Grell’s new series. Actually, this was originally what was supposed to have happened. However,
Imagine That… Were it not for the dreaded DC Implosion, Mike Grell’s hot property, The Warlord (which premiered in 1st Issue Special #8 (Nov. 1975), might have been joined by Grell’s Starslayer as a DC Comics title! While that wasn’t so, thanks to the Photoshop wizardry of our daring designer Rich Fowlks, here’s what a DC Starslayer #1 might have looked like. The Warlord TM & © DC Comics. Starslayer TM & © Mike Grell.
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due to circumstances beyond Grell’s control, DC didn’t publish Starslayer. In 1978, DC Comics launched the oft-reported DC Explosion, which was an initiative to offer readers comic books with a higher price point (50 cents compared to 35 cents) but with added pages, resulting in more value for their money. The initiative also was enticing to retailers because they would make a bigger profit on these higher-priced books. DC not only planned to increase the page count of their current books but produce new comics in the expanded format. With some of the new titles, DC planned to produce more diverse material. DC was going to go beyond superheroics with Mike Grell’s sci-fi epic Starslayer. However, the initiative didn’t take off due to market oversaturation and inclement weather-caused distribution problems, and the new titles didn’t see print until years later, if at all. Thus, the DC Explosion became known as the DC Implosion, with many titles—and a few DC staffers—being unceremoniously axed. “The book was greenlit at DC Comics until the Implosion happened,” Grell recalls. “It had already been announced. I had the concept and pitch done. Back then, that’s all you needed to get something greenlit at DC—a concept and a solid pitch. It was cancelled along with a lot of other material.” Most of the DC work that was cancelled or shelved because of the Implosion saw print in two issues of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, a makeshift publication to preserve copyright that presented the comics in a black-and-white photocopied format that never saw release to the public. However, Grell’s Starslayer wasn’t included in these issues. According to former DC Answer Man Bob Rozakis, “Pretty much anything that had completed art went into CCC. Projects that were only in the script stage (my Duela Dent/Harlequin series and Secret Society of SuperVillains #18, for example) did not.” This wasn’t the end for Starslayer, of course, as Grell would take the project on what at that time was relatively unexplored territory.
PACIFIC COMICS
Pacific Comics was formed when brothers Steven Schanes and Bill Schanes began selling comics via mail order in 1971 through publications such as the Comics Buyer’s Guide. The brothers eventually opened brick-and-mortar retail stores. By the end of the 1970s, the Schanes brothers saw an opportunity to start publishing their own comics through the direct-market system. Prior to the rise of comic-book retail stores and the implementation of the direct-market distribution system, comics were usually sold at newsstands, convenience stores, and pharmacies, where the comics could be returned for credit if they weren’t sold. Independent distributors shipped the comics to these outlets. The directmarket system enabled comic-book retail stores to bypass independent distributors and order merchandise direct from the publishers at a deep discount but on a nonreturnable basis. The direct market enabled publishers to not only get their product into fans’ hands through the stores but also to offer more mature-themed series that couldn’t be sold on newsstands. Grell recalls, “Bill [Schanes] had heard about Starslayer. So he and Steve approached me and said they were getting into comic-book publishing and they’d be interested in publishing it at Pacific. They told me that I would own my own characters, so that’s what sold me. I liked the idea of having the copyright on my work. I remember thinking at the time this would be the future of comics.”
Portfolio Premiere Fans feasted their eyes on Grell’s Starslayer Portfolio in 1981. Shown here are its cover and Plate 3, featuring Tamara. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © Mike Grell.
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Grell wasn’t the only popular creator to sign with Pacific luxury of little interference from their editors. Former Pacific Comics. Jack “King” Kirby and Neal Adams also signed on Comics editorial director David Scroggy tells BACK ISSUE, with the new company. Grell tells BI, “I was the first to “We were pretty ‘hands off’ at Pacific most of the time. sign with Pacific Comics. Kirby was the second, and Neal We felt Mike Grell knew more about making comics Adams was the third. However, Starslayer was the than we did, and he had done his best stuff on the work, second title that Pacific published. Kirby was such a which as mentioned was already finished for the most prolific writer and artist he could almost finish a whole part. We were, of course, happy with his work. It was book while we are here talking. So his was finished our second title, and he was a top-selling talent at the first.” Kirby’s Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers time. It was a success—what’s not to like?” #1 (Nov. 1981) was the first comic published by Comic-book fan Scroggy had been an early hire of the Pacific Comics. Neal Adams’ Ms. Mystic debuted in Schanes for Pacific. He recalls, “My roommate and I were exploring an old bookstore, and came across a flyer for Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #3 (Mar. 1982). [Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #93 for the Captain the 1975 [San Diego] Comic-Con. Our heads exploded! Victory story and BI #94 for more about Ms. Mystic.] Many of our comics heroes, hitherto only bylines david Scroggy in the books, were scheduled to appear in person. Besides the allure of owning their own properties, creators who worked for Pacific Comics also had the We wrote a letter to the Comic-Con post office box and © Dark Horse Comics. asked if we could help out. The president, Richard Butner, phoned and invited us to a committee meeting. Both of us wound up working on the 1975 Comic-Con. Through founder Shel Dorf’s recommendation, I landed an assignment writing a column for the weekly comics newspaper Comics Buyer’s Guide. Those two credentials made me the successful applicant for a job at Pacific Comics, then a retailer and mail-order business, which was expanding from one store to two. I started there in 1975, and as the company grew to an early direct-market comics distributor, and publisher of art portfolios and later on comic books, my job grew with the company and I eventually became editorial director.” Prior to the first issue of Starslayer, Pacific Comics published a portfolio of Grell’s Starslayer artwork. The portfolio consisted of six black-and-white plates. According to Grell, “The portfolio was developed as a promo piece for the book. Portfolios were a new idea at the time and proved to be very popular. All 1,200 copies sold out. It helped enable the book to be produced.” After a false start with DC Comics, Starslayer: The Log of the Jolly Roger #1 (Feb. 1982), finally saw print through Pacific Comics. The issue was written and illustrated by Grell. He would write and illustrate all the issues published by Pacific. As an independent publisher, Pacific was a relatively new and unknown entity in the realm of comics. So you would think that Grell might have been worried or have reservations about publishing Starslayer with them. However, this wasn’t the case. “I wasn’t nervous at all. I saw this as the future of comic-book publishing.”
Back to the Future Starslayer’s double-page spreads like this duo dazzled Grell’s audience. Both, from issue #1. Original art courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Mike Grell.
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This was uncharted territory for both the publisher and creator. Scroggy recalls, “It was pretty chaotic, but exciting. We knew we were onto something with the comics, and we were! One time Steve Schanes remarked, ‘We’re making history!’ Don’t forget we were wrangling a distribution entity in a volatile marketplace that was rapidly reinventing itself and being publishers as well. It was like holding onto a skyrocket. Literally—it blew up at the top of its arc.” Even though Grell wasn’t worried about teaming with Pacific for Starslayer, only six issues were published via the Schanes’ company. Grell remembers, “Pacific had problems from the start. They had some organizational problems and other difficulties. I didn’t know if my checks from them were going to clear the bank.” Although successful creatively, Pacific Comics had financial difficulties that they were unable to overcome, which ultimately led to their collapse. According to Steve Schanes in a 2004 article in the San Diego Reader, “Most of our comic books still made money hand over fist, but there was a big problem in distribution. We extended too much credit to retailers who didn’t pay us on a timely basis, and we were already working on a minuscule profit margin, maybe five percent to eight percent. We didn’t push hard enough to get the money from receivables, who owed us hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you had to boil down the single biggest reason we blew it, that would be our poor cash management on the distribution side.” Grell wasn’t the only one who was affected by Pacific’s financial problems. Scroggy tells BACK ISSUE, “As it became obvious that the company would not be able to overcome its financial challenges, I felt the best course for me personally was to step away while it was still a functioning entity. So I did. I became an agent for illustrators, representing artists in comics, sci-fi and fantasy painting, and advertising. [Pacific] didn’t end very well for most of the folks involved. Most everybody reinvented their career paths, some staying in the comics business, others trying other employment fields of endeavor.”
Even though Pacific Comics folded, it didn’t mean the end of Mike Grell’s space epic. Grell did something unheard of at the time—he took the opportunity to move the series to another publisher.
FIRST COMICS
First Comics, founded in Chicago in 1983, was the brainchild of then-former DC Comics staffer Mike Gold and Ken F. Levin. Just like Pacific, First looked to take advantage of the direct-market system and the flourishing comic-specialty shops. Grell and Gold had previously worked together at DC, so when Gold was looking to acquire creators for his new venture he approached Grell. “I was approached by Mike Gold from First to come up with anything,” Grell recalls. “While I was working up the ‘anything’ that would become Sable [Jon Sable Freelance, covered in BACK ISSUE #10—ed.], Mike suggested that First could publish more Starslayer as well. I jumped at the chance to have the series continue.” Issue #7 (Aug 1983) was the first issue of Starslayer at First Comics. With this move from Pacific to First the series would also go from a bimonthly publication schedule to monthly. The first First issue contained a recap of the Pacific issues as well as setting up the direction of the book, going forward with the Directors of Earth attempting to hunt down the Jolly Roger and Torin having to make a difficult decision.
Blast from the Past (left) Torin’s none too happy with his future fate as he argues with Tamara in Grell’s Starslayer #2. (right) Courtesy of Heritage, a 2001 Grell sketch of Torin and SAM. TM & © Mike Grell.
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Starslayer’s Second Artist Lenin Delsol followed Mike Grell on Starslayer, concluding his run with issue #13 (Feb. 1984). Inks by Bruce Patterson. TM & © Mike Grell.
Since Torin had completed his mission to save the human race, he wanted to find a way back to his wife and son. Tamara told him that if he went back in time, she wouldn’t be born and thus unable to save humanity. After Torin disappeared in the flash of light, Gwynyth and Brann were held in high regard by the Romans. Gwynyth even caught favor with a Roman Centurion, and for the safety and future of Brann, she reluctantly married him and they had a child together. Tamara is the descendant of that child. So if Torin were to succeed in going home to his family, not only would he most likely die, Gwynyth would not have been seen as favorably as she was and most likely would not have married and had a daughter with the Centurion, resulting in Tamara not being born to bring Torin to the future and save billions of humans. “I love that Tamara has a personal involvement, because she was a descendent not of Torin but of his wife and the Roman Centurion. So there is a paradox here,” Grell explains. “If Torin succeeds in going back to his time, one, he is going to die at the end of a Roman spear, and two, he is going to interfere with the time line where his wife marries the Roman Centurion. Gwynyth and Brann were held in high regard because to the Romans it seemed as if Torin was favored by the gods by being saved from death in a flash of blinding light. If he goes back, these things don’t occur and Tamara is never born to save the universe.” Torin had helped Tamara so that when the job was done, he could find a way back to his family. Unfortunately, because of Tamara’s revelation, Torin was forced to say a final goodbye to his family because he knows that he can never go back lenin delsol to them. He had the choice of going back to them, which would result in Tamara never being born Photo by Steve Ewert. © lenindelsol.com. and thus unable to save humanity. “Again, I love the hard-choice decisions,” Grell remarks. The issue was written by Grell, who also did the art breakdowns. Grell would only work on this issue and the next one before moving on, saying, “I figured that I’d start off Starslayer for them and then turn it over to others to continue.” Artist Lenin Delsol finished the artwork for issues #7 and 8 before taking over the penciling duties with issue #9 (Oct. 1983). He confirms Grell’s account: “The first two issues [#7 and 8], I worked from layouts provided by Mike Grell. This would help ease me and the audience into the series. Mike had very little to do with the series, I think, once he laid out the two issues to get me started. He was busy writing, penciling, and, I believe, inking Sable at that time.” Delsol nicely followed the style that Grell had set up for the series. According to Delsol, this was intentional. “Mike had some very specific things that he wanted for the sake of artistic continuity. The main thing he wanted, and I would have done this anyway, was just what seemed to be a little thing—keep the rendition of the hair worn by the two principle characters a flat graphic black. I always liked that look when he did it, and was happy to comply. I think it worked,” While Delsol’s artwork was great for the continuity of the series following what Grell had laid out, it didn’t allow much room for the new Starslayer artist to put his own mark on the book. “When I look back on the series, I feel a little mixed about it,” Delsol admits. “I wasn’t really allowed to make any changes in costume, or really anything established by Mike Grell. That was fine for continuity of appearance, but looking back I think it made me feel as if I was merely holding an artist place for the series and not really contributing anything beyond pictures to tell the story. While I did enjoy the storytelling aspect, I didn’t enjoy not being able to fully impart my visual ideas into the series.” Starslayer #13 (Feb. 1983) was Delsol’s final issue. “While I was penciling the Starslayer series, I began to work in the advertising field. It was a field that paid much better. I was young, comics were something I’d always wanted to do, but the reality for me was that I had expenses that comics couldn’t adequately cover,” Delsol recalls.
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The Truman Show Timothy Truman, with writer John Ostrander, attracted notice during his brief Starslayer art stint. Signed double-page spread from issue #17 (June 1984), courtesy of Heritage.
After Delsol left the series, artist Tim Truman became the penciler. Grell tells BACK ISSUE, “Tim Truman impressed me with his art talent. He captured the book perfectly.” Other artists followed Truman on the series: first, Hilary Barta, who began his tenure by finishing Truman’s breakdowns before taking over the penciler duties completely with #26 (Mar. 1985), then Jon Eddings, who started in issue #31 (Aug. 1985) and penciled the series until it ended. Grell not only gave up art chores on the title but he also stopped writing the series as well. With issue #9, John Ostrander became the series’ new writer. Even though the guiding force of the series was gone, the book didn’t lose any of its excitement. Ostrander was given free rein on the book as far as Grell was concerned. Grell had faith not in just in Ostrander’s writing ability but in his understanding of the Starslayer series and its characters. Although a relative newcomer to comic-book writing at the time, Ostander proved to be the perfect person to continue Starslayer. “Mike Gold and John Ostrander were buddies from the theater in Chicago,” Grell explains. “Mike suggested John for Starslayer. John impressed me with his intelligence and wit. I thought he would be a good fit for the series, and I was right. We talked about the book and John had a great handle on the characters. He took the book in different directions than I would have gone, but I had told the story I wanted to tell and I was fine with handing the book over.” Ostrander started his run on the series by continuing the course set by Grell, but soon made the book his own. Ostrander added new crew members to the Jolly Roger such as Pappy and Hambleton. Although he used the Directors of Earth as adversaries, Ostrander also gave the Jolly Roger’s crew new antagonists including Aristo and Crayne. Ostrander gave Torin probably his greatest adversary in the villainous Morgana and her associate Mad Thom McKuen. He also brought the Starslayer series into the shared universe of First Comics via the pan-dimensional city of Cynosure. Much like Grell had turned the book from one originally planned as an adventure series to one that emphasized characterization, Ostrander provided readers with the same thing in his time on the series, showing his considerable skills for developing even the secondary characters. This talent would serve him well during his run on DC Comics’ Suicide Squad. While Delsol felt that he wasn’t able to put his artistic mark on the series as much as he wanted to, he did enjoy working with Ostrander. The illustrator exclaims, “Working with John Ostrander was fabulous!
We worked in a method then called the ‘Marvel Style.’ John provided an outline and some dialogue for emphasis of a scene, and once I was done with the pencils, he wrote the dialogue for each page along with sound effects he thought would be pertinent. I always enjoyed working with him this way. Later projects I worked on outside of First Comics did not use this way of working and, I felt were somewhat stifling creatively.” Issue #34 (Nov. 1985) was the last issue published by First Comics. In an editorial from that issue, Ostrander provided readers with the reason that the series was ending. Ostrander wrote, “We’ve had FIVE pencilers on Starslayer—Mike Grell, Lenin Delsol, Timothy Truman, Hilary Barta, and Jon Eddings—[they] are talented artists and each have brought something to Starslayer, but five pencilers over 34 issues are three too many. As a newcomer, Jon Eddings was a gamble. We felt he had the talent, but if Jon didn’t work out, we knew we’d have to cancel the book. Starslayer couldn’t handle another change of artist. To make a long story short, Jon didn’t work out. This is the last issue of Starslayer.” Much like Mike Grell wrapped up his original Starslayer storyline in issue #6 but provided room for the series to progress if the opportunity arose, Ostrander did the same thing with the last issue of the series. This was to be the last new issue of Starslayer for over a decade.
VALIANT COMICS
By the time Grell was ready to continue his saga, he was forced to find a new company to publish his space epic. First Comics had stopped publishing new material in 1991. In 1989 former Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and businessman Steven Massarsky formed Voyager Communications. Valiant Comics was an imprint of Voyager. Valiant published titles featuring its own characters such as Rai and Harbinger as well as titles featuring characters they had licensed from Western Publishing (published under their Gold Key
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TM & © Mike Grell.
TM & © Mike Grell.
Heads Up! Torin, Tamara, and SAM are headed for trouble on Grell’s cover to Valiant/ Windjammer’s Starslayer: The Director’s Cut #4 (July 1995). Courtesy of Heritage. TM & © Mike Grell.
Comics imprint) including Solar, Man of the Atom and Magnus, Robot Fighter. Video-game developer Acclaim Entertainment bought Voyager Communications in 1994 and continued to publish comics under the Valiant name. In 1995, Mike Grell returned to the universe of Starslayer, this time with Valiant. Valiant (under its “Windjammer” imprint) would reprint Mike Grell’s original Pacific issues, with a new framing sequence, as Starslayer: The Director’s Cut. This time, Grell wasn’t publishing a whole new series but adding to what had been published previously. The original six issues were expanded into eight issues. The first and last issues contained new material that worked as a framing sequence. Issues #2 through 7 contained issues #1 through 6 of the Pacific Comics series, respectively. All the issues featured new cover artwork. “Torin was supposed to be the central focus of the book, but the more involved I became with the concept the more I realized Tamara was the main character,” Grell states. “She knows everything that is going on. She was tasked with finding a warrior in the time stream. She knew about the nature of the pieces and what would happen to Earth if she completed her mission. The Director’s Cut enabled
me to emphasize the importance of Tamara. This was done with a new framing sequence. This helped the story to be line with what I had envisioned.” A collected edition of The Director’s Cut was published by Dark Horse Comics in 2017. The original Pacific issues and the Director’s Cut issues are the only ones that have seen a reprint. According to Grell, “There won’t be any reprints of the First stuff unless something drastically changes with First. There are unresolved issues. There is far more likely to be new material.”
THE FUTURE OF STARSLAYER
Although a new Starslayer comic hasn’t appeared in many years, that hasn’t stopped Mike Grell from trying to get new Starslayer material out to fans. He is even looking to expand the Starslayer property beyond comic books. “I’ve written some screen treatments for both movies and television,” Grell tells BACK ISSUE. “I think a TV series would work best. The story would be told in two timelines. The first is with Torin during the Roman invasion of Britain. Torin would be involved in trying to unite the different tribes. During that time Britain was made up of several warring tribes that didn’t get along very well. They weren’t united. Torin would try to unite them against the invading force. This part would have a big battle but also build up the character of Torin. This would help to emphasize his choice between going back to his family and staying in the future later in the series when it moved to the future.”
STARSLAYER’S LEGACY
While Starslayer offered readers a rip-roaring spaceopera adventure, the series was more than that. Mike Grell’s ability to move Starslayer from one publisher to another without losing any quality in the process helped show readers and comic-book companies the future of comics. More independent publishers would enter the publishing world, offering creators the chance to not only have their comics published but to share in the financial rewards by having ownership of their creations. David Scroggy remarks, “Starslayer continued with First Comics after its Pacific Comics run. Mike Grell had a relationship with some at First, and he brought the title to them. To me it was like one of the first ‘free agent’ team shifts that we saw in comics—very common today (how many publishers has Groo had?), and healthy for creator rights. I think I can say that everyone involved was very proud of the Pacific Comics publications, as well as the creator-ownership model, the upgrades in format Pacific pioneered, and the new talent (many of them considered superstars today) and characters that we introduced to the comics audience.” Creators such as Todd McFarlane, Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis, Robert Kirkman, and many others have benefitted creatively and financially from the path that Grell tread. Grell states, “I’m proud of what myself and the others did at Pacific and First. The comic-book landscape wouldn’t be the same if we hadn’t tried something new and different.” The author would like to thank Lenin Delsol, Peter B. Gillis, Mike Grell, and David Scroggy for their invaluable assistance with this article. ED LUTE is an educator, geek, and freelancer writer who loves writing about comic-book history. In addition to his articles for BACK ISSUE, his work has appeared in TwoMorrows’ The Jack Kirby Collector. He lives in southern New Jersey with his family.
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While Mike Grell’s Starslayer was an outstanding sci-fi comic-book it was a fascination with the early work of H. P. Lovecraft. To those series, there was another aspect of the book that elevated it beyond I added a pile of German Romanticism, and there you go.” How did Black Flame end up in Starslayer? According to Gillis, some of its contemporaries. Almost all of the issues had backup tales by a variety of talented creators. These backups featured “First chose to put the strip there. a plethora of exceptional ideas and concepts that would go onto I had proposed it to them, and they their own level of popularity both in comics and other media. liked it, but they were very careful While the first issue didn’t contain a backup story, the second about putting new books on the issue made up for it with Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer, the story schedule. They were very aware that of stunt pilot Cliff Secord, who found a jetpack that enabled him other alternative publishers were to fly 200 m.p.h. Set in Los Angeles in 1938, The Rocketeer had a suffering from promising books but Golden Age feel to it which not only fit within the timeline of the not delivering them. First had the story but also within the comic itself, giving it a charm it may not advertising [slogan] ‘Count On It!’— have had if it had been set in another time period. The Rocketeer which was really aimed at retailers. appeared in issue #2 (Apr. 1982) and 3 (June 1982) before being So backup series were always part of moved to the anthology title Pacific Presents #1 (Oct. 1982) and 2 the strategy, in order to relieve the (Apr. 1983), and later—like Starslayer—hopped to other publishers. pressure on the producers of the main The Rocketeer was a fun series that was a throwback to the Saturday series. I was writing Warp for them, but matinee movie serials and spawned a 1991 Walt Disney movie. also writing the backup strip Outrider. Grell tells BACK ISSUE, “The only backup story that I approved After Mike Saenz and I created Shatter, or had any involvement with was The Rocketeer. I got to see it became a backup in Jon Sable.” what Dave Stevens was doing with the series and I loved it. Prior to Starslayer, Black Flame first appeared as a backup in First I told everyone I could that it deserved its own book. I was glad Comics’ MARS series. Gillis tells BACK ISSUE, “Starslayer was having that it started in Starslayer. I loved the movie. It was one deadline problems, and Marc Wheatley and Marc Hempel of the best comic-book movie adaptions ever.” were doing fine on MARS. So moving [Black Flame] to Starslayer gave its team more breathing space to get Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier’s Groo the the book out, and MARS got more story pages— Wanderer was the next series to appear as a backup which they wanted.” feature in Starslayer. Groo was a parody of Black Flame was even given a distinction that sword-and-sorcery titles such as Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian. The series was plotted and illustrated no other Starslayer backup series received— by Aragonés, while Evanier wrote the dialogue. an entire issue of Starslayer was turned over to it. First used Black Flame in issue #27 (Apr. 1985), Groo had previously made his debut as a backup tale in Eclipse Comics’ Destroyer Duck #1 (May 1982) with the cover copy of Starslayer Presents Black Flame. before moving on to Starslayer for his second “It was deadline problems,” Gills recalls. “John appearance. Groo would receive his own series at [Ostrander] and Hilary [Barta] were behind schedule, several publishers including Marvel Comics under and Tom [Sutton], Don [Lomax], and I were well peter b. gillis its Epic Comics imprint. Groo was featured in ahead. I knew about the situation and said that Thomson200/Wikimedia Commons. we could take a couple of BF episodes, add a few a preview ad in Starslayer #4 (Aug. 1982) before pages to tie them together, and they’d have an issue ready to go— appearing in a five-pager in Starslayer #5 (Nov. 1982). Donner Beck’s Machine: A Cautionary Tale appeared as the and we’d still be ahead of schedule. And that would give Starslayer backup feature in issue #6 (Apr. 1983). This one-off story, proper a month to catch up. I envisioned Black Flame as its own written by D. C. Deely and Craig Ballad with art by Deely, book, especially as it dealt with such wild ideas, but both Tom and told the tale of a butcher who slaughtered his customers but I were professionals, and doing it in short episodes made the strip all that more intense. But I had made no secret that I wanted it to had a grisly fate awaiting him. Once Grell moved Starslayer to First Comics, the backup have its own book, and that would give the strip more visibility. tales continued. “After First’s revival, I did a Black Flame graphic novel which was John Ostrander and Timothy Truman’s Grimjack was the about 90 pages long, with Kelley Jones and Alex Niño (each getting second-longest-running backup feature in Starslayer. Grimjack was one universe apiece),” Gillis says, “and it benefitted from having that popular and quickly graduated to its own series, which would stretching room. (It’s still on sale, by the way. You should buy a copy.)” last 81 issues. Grimjack was the tale of John Gaunt, a mercenary Gillis shares one final Black Flame-related story: “I can tell you who worked out of Munden’s Bar in Cynosure. The Grimjack that Tom Sutton loved to talk on the phone at one in the morning. backup began in issue #10 (Nov. 1983) and would remain I was not as much of a night owl as he was, but I loved our discussions. until issue #17 (June 1984). John Gaunt even guest-starred in When Starslayer and the Black Flame went under, First got Tom to the main feature in Starslayer #18 (July 1984). draw Grimjack. When I was down at the First offices, John Ostrander After Grimjack was given its own series, writer Peter B. Gillis looked at me and said (I thought, a little bit haggardly), ‘I’ll have and artist Tom Sutton’s Black Flame series was added as the you know that I’m getting the phone calls now.’” backup in issue #20 (Sept. 1984) and became the longestrunning backup feature in Starslayer. Gillis tells BACK ISSUE, [Editor’s note: For BACK ISSUE’s previous coverage of these series, “Briefly, It came out of my fevered desire to work with Tom see BI #47 for The Rocketeer (featuring the final Dave Stevens Sutton, who was one of the truly wild talents in comics. Added to interview), BI #11 for Groo the Wanderer, and BI #9 for Grimjack.] Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41
Black Flame © Peter B. Gillis.
BACKING UP THE STARSLAYER
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homas Powers
For those of us who were reading THOMAS POWERS: Mike, could you Mike Baron’s dystopian rock ’n’ roll, please share how you came up with the concept for Sonic Disruptors? science-fiction comic Sonic Disruptors in 1987–1988, a great shock occurred MIKE BARON: First came the name. when issue #8 never arrived on It just sounded great. The idea of a pirate radio station orbiting Earth the stands since DC Comics had mike baron pulled the creative plug on this is a natural, inspired by pirate radio Facebook. 12-issue maxiseries. Thus, like Gerry stations that used to broadcast Conway, Roy Thomas, and George Pérez’s JLA/ across the border from Mexico (Wolfman Jack) and Avengers and John Byrne and Terry Austin’s The pirate radio stations on ships off the coast of Britain. Last Galactus Story in Epic Magazine before it, POWERS: That last part sounds like the plot of Baron’s Sonic Disruptors languishes in the annals Richard Curtis’ 2009 film, Pirate Radio. Have you seen of frustratingly unfinished 1980s comic stories. it? If so, then did you notice any thematic similarities Fortunately, Mr. Baron was kind enough to grant in the film to Sonic Disruptors? me an interview via email that provides his insight BARON: No, but I have always meant to. I will dial it up. on the kinetic world of Sonic Disruptors, its tragic POWERS: What was your writing process like for cancellation, and the comic’s potential awesome this comic? return in the form of Ethyl. BARON: In those days, my writing wasn’t very scientific. – Thomas Powers I would sit down with a pen and a blank page and
For Those About to Rock Cover and title page from Sonic Disruptors #1 (Dec. 1987). Story by Mike Baron, art by Barry Crain and John Nyberg. All scans accompanying this article are courtesy of Amanda Powers. TM & © DC Comics.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 43
Unfinished Composition The Crain/Nyberg covers to Sonic Disruptors #2–7. Note the ironic imagery on #7’s cover, which was fated to be the book’s last despite its conception as a 12-issue series. TM & © DC Comics.
44 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
imagine a compelling opening scene. Then I would proceed like an inchworm, panel-to-panel, always asking myself, “What happens next?” That’s the essential question in all fiction. “What happens next?” By proceeding like a blind man with a cane, it forced me to make each panel count. Of course, I was also thinking about the middle and the end and the dynamics of the story. The story must never remain static, or there is no story. POWERS: As you crafted this story that’s quite a dynamic one, how did you collaborate with artist Barry Crain and interface with editor Mike Gold? BARON: Barry is a great artist, did a wonderful job, and I would work with him again. And Mike is a great editor who gave me free rein. I would be happy to work with him again. Alas, Mike is retired. POWERS: Why is Sheik Rattle Enroll your lead character? BARON: The story demands that the rebel in the sky is the protagonist. POWERS: And he’s a deejay playing outlaw rock. On the subject of rock ’n’ roll, how did it shape this book? BARON: Well it’s a love letter to rock ’n’ roll, and, of course, the Sheik was patterned on Frank Zappa, whom I respect. I saw Zappa once in Eau Claire with Flo and Eddie. What a tight band that was! Zappa left behind a huge body of music. You Are What You Is is my favorite album of his, a double record, of course, as were most of his records. He recorded constantly. POWERS: You also introduce the Republic of Rock in issue #2 (Jan. 1988). How did you come up with the idea of an island where outlaw musicians could come together? BARON: Thomas, I don’t know! These things just come to me. Just kidding. The music of my youth was filled with politics, anthems, and dreams of a better world. Particularly, Jefferson Airplane’s album After Bathing at Baxter’s, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Mothers of Invention. POWERS: In issue #5 (May 1988), the Republic of Rock is also the setting of a raucous battle of futuristic rebel bands. What were your thoughts behind this competition that you called the Gross Out Contest? BARON: That’s an idea I’ve had for a long time, and I wrote it up as a short story. Unfortunately, it was too gross to reproduce. I doubt I even have a copy. I might do it again. It’s a funny idea, inspired by real life. It’s also another idea I’ve been dragging like a trailer throughout my career, inspired by bands like the Fugs, the Stranglers, and, of course, Ozzy Osbourne, who famously ate a bat onstage. POWERS: That’s pretty cool. Moving on to the outer-space aspect of Sonic Disruptors, what influenced your concept of the Little Bopper, the orbiting pirate radio station from which the rebels broadcast their forbidden rock ’n’ roll? BARON: Outlaw radio station as a satellite. Of course, today it would need some kind of defense system, because many governments would be trying to knock it out of the sky. Can’t have unregulated news, y’know. Might reflect badly on the ruling parties. POWERS: Concerning Cannabis Superiosis (or “Green Bopper”), the giant marijuana plant we see growing inside Little Bopper in issue #2 on page 3, how did your stance on drugs (i.e., decriminalization/ legalization issues) influence your writing of the book? BARON: I have always supported decriminalization of marijuana. I live in Colorado now, where it is legal. I have always written high. I still do—although to my shock, I find that I don’t need to get high to write. The writing remains the same. It’s just easier when I’m stoned. As for harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, I just don’t know. I have libertarian tendencies, but I’ve seen the harm those drugs can do. It’s one of those areas of human activity that slips snakelike between messy human nature and dry policy. Where those drugs are easy to get, you have disaster. Like San Francisco. POWERS: Also around this time (1987), how did your political views at the time affect how you wrote the character that is President General Nuke Oosterhaus? BARON: My politics were jejune and scattered, but the story itself channels every leftist trope imaginable. It practically wrote itself. Nuke is an amalgam of the fantasy authoritarian fascist you’ll find in any Third World country.
POWERS: Sticking with this political theme, in light of the 2016 presidential election, how does your idea of the General overthrowing the democratically elected female president play out today? And did you have any plot plans for the deposed president? BARON: Well the sad truth is, I was making it up as I went along, and when the series was cancelled, I had no clear end in sight, except that there would be general revolution and dancing in the streets. I resurrected Sonic Disruptors for a series I wrote called Ethyl, with artist Lee Oaks. But we never found a publisher. I wrote it about ten years ago, and already it’s hopelessly outdated. Little Bopper and the Sheik were central characters as they guided the rebels against a totalitarian government. POWERS: What then shaped your depiction of the General’s reaction to media with which he does not agree? (e.g., In issue #1, Dec. 1987, he shoots at TV screens that depict images he does not like such as Happy the Wonder Clown on page 16 and a “Deodorizerant” commercial on page 23?) Equally, how does this characterization now play out for you in relation to President Trump’s position on “fake news”? BARON: Every dictator strives to silence critics. However, in light of The Mueller Report, there is no question that the so-called “media” is not dedicated to objective reporting, but to pushing a narrative. The purpose of a comic is to entertain. It is not to push an agenda or a narrative. POWERS: You likewise commented on the media with the character of the Reverend, who is bisexual and is about to shoot heroin in issue #6 (June 1988), so how did your stance on televised evangelism affect his characterization? BARON: I was inspired by some hypocrites I saw on television trying to soak down their congregations while living in 10,000-square-foot houses and driving Lamborghinis. You know who I mean. There’s an old rock ’n’ roll song: “I don’t give a damn about a Creflo Dollar… spend it fast as I can...” POWERS: Taking into consideration that Sonic Disruptors depicts Sheik Rattle Enroll allying himself with the lively Chinese characters of Comrades Charles Kong and Lau Lo Fang, I was wondering how your perception of Communist China influenced your portrayal of the People’s Republic in this comic? BARON: The China of Sonic Disruptors is a fantasy, owing more to the dreams of idealists than historical fact. In reality, China is one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth and was so when I wrote that story. The reason I depicted China as benevolent is simple. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In all fairness, we used a Chinese printer for Q-Ball, and they did a great job. POWERS: Can we talk now about some of your other Sonic Disruptors characters? Why is Kate Straight, the female lead, so “straight-edge” when it comes to her feelings on Cannabis Superiosis, but also later apparently delusional in terms of her belief that Louise and Otis are her parents? BARON: That’s a little bit of magical realism. The scene where her parents pretend not to know who she is—they’re either droll or insane. In a story that features the Republic of Rock and orbital pirate radio stations, I was free to indulge my whimsy. POWERS: What are your thoughts on Billy Bob Beau Geste and his Cajun Croissants, which we see comically depicted in issue #3 (Feb. 1988)? BARON: Billy Bob embraces whatever he likes. His very name is risible! He is appropriating redneck culture! Just joshin’, hoss, as “cultural appropriation” is the
fantasy of disturbed individuals. Without “cultural appropriation,” Shakespeare would never have written Othello. Alexander Dumas, who was half Haitian, never would have written The Three Musketeers. There’s some Little Richard in Billy Bob. As for the Cajun Croissants, I’ve always been fascinated with fast food joints. They run through my fiction. In my current novel, Florida Man, Gary Duba, who is Florida Man, attempts to open a chain of restaurants that serve iguana. They’re called the Lizard Lounge. He gets the idea from a food truck called Lizard on a Stick. Y’all know where that came from, right? POWERS: I’m not sure, so I’ll leave that one for our BACK ISSUE readers to figure out! There’s also Dante, who later betrays Sheik. What kind of villain does he represent? BARON: Dante is an off-the-shelf cookie-cutter bad guy.
General Motors (His Mouth) The state of the nation, according to President General Nuke Oosterhaus. From Sonic Disruptors #1. TM & © DC Comics.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45
Jam Island (top) Sheik Rattle Enroll arrives on the Republic of Rock. From issue #2 (bottom) Fuzzbuster! The shapeshifter’s rockin’ transformations have Sheik all shook up in Sonic Disruptors #7 (July 1988), fated to be the series’ last issue. TM & © DC Comics.
POWERS: I’m also curious about Fuzzbuster, whom we see shapeshifting into famous people in issue #7 (July 1988). BARON: Fuzzbuster is composed of quick-change bio-organic material not unlike Silly Putty. He’s a riff on artificial life, or digital recreations, if you wish. Modern computer-generated images can do pretty much anything these days. They could recreate Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to star in a new movie, legal issues notwithstanding. You look at modern video games. Fuzzbuster is an autonomous representation of this idea. POWERS: All of these characters are fascinating to me, which is why I’ve always been disappointed that DC abruptly cancelled Sonic Disruptors with issue #7. As the comic’s writer/creator, what were your feelings at that time? BARON: A mixture of failure and relief. As I said, I didn’t have an ending in mind. That would never happen today. My writing process has changed drastically. You have to understand, I’m about a million words beyond Sonic Disruptors these days, but it’s a vital idea, one that is more relevant now than ever, and I would happily revisit it if I thought I had a chance of getting it published. POWERS: Could you please share your plans for issues #8–12 and/or how you would finish the book today? The next issue blurb for issue #8 reads, “Next Month: The Pajama Game.” BARON: As I recall, the United States was in the grip of a loose-fisted tyranny, or oligarchy, with the government trying to control what we hear, think, and say. Things never change. In Ethyl, Sheik Rattle Enroll urged citizens to use their clunky old computer monitors—there are millions clogging landfills everywhere—as the ammunition in catapults. The Sheik offered a download on how to build a catapult, and rebels everywhere used them to bombard repressive authorities with this junk. Technology has moved so fast that, of course, today’s computer monitors wouldn’t hurt a fly. But I would elaborate on that theme of mass resistance and emphasize counter-programming. TOM POWERS teaches English at Montgomery County Community College, which is located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Gender and the Quest in British Science Fiction Television: An Analysis of Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Red Dwarf and Torchwood (McFarland, 2016).
46 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
ETHYL I have a medical marijuana (MMJ) license. Shocker, huh? Two years ago, the MMJ office switched to an all-digital format that required those seeking to reapply to cross a THOMAS POWERS: Could you please tell BACK ISSUE readers bewildering minefield of roadblocks, passwords, user names, about Ethyl? and secret questions. For years previously, I submitted my MIKE BARON: Ethyl is a meditation on rapidly changing culture application by mail and received my license promptly by mail. and technology, in which a one-world government serves a Last year, with the new “user friendly” registration website, it ruling international elite by subjugating ordinary people to took me six months to renew my license. It was impenetrable. Draconian rule. It’s a meditation on Orwell’s warning: “If you I called dozens of times. Finally, six months after my initial want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a application, some kind soul called me human face—forever.” Centralized and talked me through it. planning never works, and the If you have an issue with the IRS, ambitious drones who fill its slots do so fuggedaboutit. You have to hire a lawyer to gain power over others. It’s also a riff and go broke to even get their attention. on conventional wisdom. Many people The same is true with unreasonable think petroleum-based power, and restrictions on private property. It’s automobiles in particular, represent illegal to “harvest rainwater” on your some existential threat to life. own property in four states. Families Historically, petroleum-based power who have ranched for generations and automobiles have been among the suddenly found their stock ponds greatest boons to human prosperity subject to bizarre EPA rules and became and freedom in history. The modern criminals on their own land. These are automobile releases negligible symptomatic of central, one-size-fits-all pollutants. Freedom means getting in planning. Ethyl is a cry against it. your car and driving when and where POWERS: So far, what has been you like. Ethyl deals with a world where your collaborative process with artist an international elite has banned private Lee Oaks? transportation for the masses, while BARON: Lee’s an amazing artist. they themselves swank about from He pretty much nailed my script, climate conference to climate but my scripts are pretty detailed. conference in air-conditioned limousines POWERS: What inspired you to return and private jets. T’was ever thus. to the world of Sonic Disruptors with POWERS: Who are your lead characters? this series? BARON: KO and Stacy are the type BARON: I don’t choose my stories; they of rugged individualists who built choose me. In this case, it was because America. That’s why they have refused Ethyl sample page, courtesy of Mike Baron. © Mike Baron. of a movement to discourage private to let the government chip them. transportation and force everybody into mass transit, as they have The genius of the Founding Fathers was to put the individual in Europe. Well, this is America. That sh*t don’t wash over here. before the state. Individual rights, as enshrined in the POWERS: Why do pirate radio satellite Big Bopper and the Constitution, is unique in world history. character of Sheik Rattle Enroll return from Sonic Disruptors? Like most normal people, KO and Stacy just want to be left alone to live their lives. They respect others and expect BARON: Sheik Rattle Enroll and Little Bopper are features in Ethyl, helping to guide the resistance. Only in this version, others to respect them. In order to get respect, you have the enemy is not this government or that government but one to give respect. world government as exemplified by the United Nations. Government is a necessary evil. Ideally, it represents the POWERS: Why did you want to continue with these elements interests of society without trampling individual rights. from the original comic? We need some sort of oversight to prevent people from murdering their neighbors or dumping raw sewage into public BARON: One reason was to finish the story. I ran out of steam with Sonic Disruptors. Again, that wouldn’t happen today. bodies of water. Hence, the need for government. As always, When I approach a story today, I write a complete outline, so I it’s a matter of degree. To what degree should an all-powerful know the beginning, the middle, and the end. I always leave state exercise control over its citizens? Life is messy and does wiggle room. I have to surprise myself before I surprise the not always fit the templates we cut out for ourselves. reader, and any good writer must be flexible. Characters come I favor a limited government imbued with common sense. alive, turn around, and surprise you. Once that happens, There must be room for officials to recognize exceptions to you know you’re on the right track. every rule, to show compassion, and when appropriate, POWERS: Do you want to run Ethyl on a crowdfunding platform? toughen up. My own experience is that local government BARON: Cross my palm with silver. I find those scripts jejune. works best. If I have an issue, I call my city government and I’m not sure I’d revisit that material. It’s too polemic. The writer’s speak to a real person who is more often than not, helpful. first duty is to entertain. Second, show, don’t tell. Third, be original. When you move up to state government, forget it. The following conversation with Mike Baron discusses Ethyl, a still possible six-issue follow-up series to Sonic Disruptors.
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Five Years Later... the Legion of Super-Heroes has disbanded. Five Years Later... United Planets (U.P.) members Braal and Imsk are at war. Five Years Later… in Legion of Super-Heroes (LSH) vol. 4 #1 (Nov. 1989), the new creative team of Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum, and Al Gordon forged a narrative direction distinctly different from the colorful utopian future of the previous series, which ended three months prior. This new Legion of Super-Heroes, with its nine-panels-per-page structure, subdued color pallete, and dystopian tone, was closer in texture to Watchmen than to Superboy. Starting in 2009, Tom Bierbaum committed his recollections of writing the Legion of Super-Heroes to his online blog, “It’s OK, I’m a Senator,” a quote from Tenzil Kem, the former Matter-Eater Lad, in LSH (v4) #13 (Nov. 1990). Tom and Mary (T&M) Bierbaum were given “dialogue” and “story assist” credit for most of their time writing with Keith Giffen, who earned “story and pencils” credits. “Keith and we spent several hours on the phone mapping out his plans for the universe and what had happened in the five-year gap, so that he and we felt like we knew where we were going and could write something that would tie together over the long haul,” Bierbaum reported on his online blog. Inker Al Gordon also received “story assist” credits. “I was intimately involved in the book from ‘before the beginning,’ even before T&M were approached,” Gordon tells BACK ISSUE. “Keith and I were helping Paul [Levitz] finish his long run as writer on the Legion (third series), and he had asked Keith, since Keith’s last DC contribution was such a hit ([the Justice League series from 1987,] which I also worked on), what he wanted to do next, and Keith said, ‘the Legion.’ Paul sighed and approved it. Then for eight months tom bierbaum or a year, Keith and I would chat on the phone about what we wanted to do with the Legion. At some point Facebook. Keith told me he found these two writers who were a team (and married) and that they knew more about the Legion than any sentient entity in the galaxy, and T&M came on board. “At one point in the gestation, Keith said we all needed to create two characters each,” Gordon recalls, “and I created Celeste Rockfish and Kent Shakespeare,” who first appear in LSH #6 (Apr. 1990) and 12 (Oct. 1990), respectively. “Keith did Vrykos,” the vampire, who first appeared in LSH #3 (Jan. 1990) and was supposed to become a Legionnaire, “and Ivy,” the little girl who speaks to plants, who also appeared first in issue #12, and never did become a Legionnaire, “and T&M created Devlin O’Ryan,” cub reporter also in issue #6, “and Kono,” in #2 (Dec. 1989). “I love Kono,” Gordon adds. “We felt cursed. Utterly cursed,” inaugural LSH editor Mark Waid tells BACK ISSUE. Printing errors delayed the first issue by one week, and there was a particular problem with the LSH promotional material drawn by Giffen. “We produced a four-page black-and-white advertising flyer for comics stores to generate interest before issue #1 came out, but when it was shipped, it had been folded inside-out, so all anyone saw looking at it was a bunch of building rubble. Who on Earth is going to pick that up and say, ‘That looks interesting’? That was wasted money.” “I remember our poor editor, Mark Waid, getting questioned by us about every little edit he made on this issue,” Tom Bierbaum reported. “We labored over every word and really didn’t want to change a thing.” The story is told in a dense nine-panel-grid format with flashbacks to the Legion’s past freely intermingled with news events and nightmares, characters identified almost covertly, unattributed snippets of conversation, and blood spattered and pitch-black panels. It was an aggressive storytelling technique that demanded the full attention of the reader.
Not Your Father’s LSH
by J i m
Ford
Detail from the startling opening page to Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #1 (Nov. 1989), where provocateur Keith Giffen and his creative cadre began to slowly reveal what had happened since we last saw the Legion. TM & © DC Comics.
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“I think this one issue had the most planning and deliberation of any comic we ever worked on, and in a positive sense,” Bierbaum wrote. “This one was labored over because we were all about as enthusiastic as could be about launching this new take on the Legion universe... Overall, I can see how people both thought this was a very confusing comic and also a very good comic. It’s very challenging, but it’s also really exciting to see the Legion universe thrown up in the air so radically and with such ambition.” Three text pages accompany issue #1 and text pages continued as a feature until they were largely phased out after issue LSH #35 (Nov. 1992). The Bierbaums set dates to the events of the Legion’s past, imagined from a starting point of this series that takes place in 2994 and counting backwards, with the Legion being founded in 2973. The first text page details the great economic collapse of the United Planets in October 2989. The second is a call by the Earth President to dismantle the Legion of Super-Heroes on April 13, 2990. The final text page is the official letter by Legion Leader Brek Bannin, formerly the hero Polar Boy, announcing the disbanding of the Legion of Super-Heroes on July 6, 2992. “It was really interesting to write the text pages during this run of the Legion,” Bierbaum wrote. “I don’t know if it worked the same way for a lot of readers, but to us, it really gave the universe a feeling of authenticity to see these documents representing different voices and points of view and giving some real insight into who to believe and who not to believe in this universe. And boy, after ten years as a reporter for the Orange County News and Variety, it was really an enjoyable change of pace to write a news story where I could make everything up.” Mentioned, almost in passing, is “Black Dawn,” a tragedy that befell the Legion during the five-year gap that is one of the untold stories of this series. “In a nutshell, [Legion villain] Dr. Regulus went insane and was going to cause the sun to go off in a nova-like explosion,” Bierbaum reported. “Wildfire saves the day and sacrifices himself.” Part of this story would be told by the next creative team of writer Tom McCraw and pencilers Stuart Immonen and Christopher Taylor, in LSH #52 (Late Nov. 1993). The 2995: Legion of Super-Heroes Sourcebook (Mayfair Games, 1992), written by Tom and Mary Bierbaum, contains further details on “Black Dawn,” and other events that occurred during the five-year gap. “Keith immediately worked Mary’s character, Kono, into a key role,” Bierbaum wrote about LSH #2 (Dec. 1989). “Some people saw her as an intended replacement for Tinya (Phantom for no particular reason... I regretted Girl) Wazzo, but that was never our losing Blok less than I’d have regretted a intention. Mary thought of an interesting lot of other characters that might have power that happened to have some bitten the dust in that story.” similarities to Tinya’s and I think Keith just Mon-El is haunted by voices in LSH keith giffen coincidentally put her on Rimbor as a #4 (Feb. 1990). “There was a story Facebook. shady Sklarian pirate-type. She was a where Mon-El died,” in Action Comics natural for Jo’s band of smugglers.” Jo Nah, the former #384 (Jan. 1970), Bierbaum noted, “but was brought Ultra Boy, falsified a criminal past in Adventure Comics #316 back to life by one of his descendants, Eltro Gand, (Jan. 1964). “And her uppity feminist point of view worked who sacrificed himself and resurrected Mon-El with a well with Jo, a very formidable male but also someone who device similar to the one that revived Lightning Lad years earlier,” in Adventure Comics #312 (Sept. 1963). had no trouble getting along with very assertive women.” Roxxas, the raving mad butcher who killed the “A prominent member of early Legion fandom, Margie inhabitants of the planet Trom, leaving Element Lad Spears, had theorized in an old Legion Outpost fanzine,” the sole survivor of his race in Adventure Comics #307 from issue #5 (Fall 1973), reprinted in the Best of the (Apr. 1963), kills Legionnaire Blok in LSH #3 (Jan. 1990). Legion Outpost (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2004), “that these “I think a lot of people, myself included, didn’t particularly devices didn’t actually revive anyone, they just put like the idea of killing off Blok... I had a fondness for someone else’s life and soul into the body of the recently the guy who was originally introduced as a villain” deceased. Keith liked that idea, so we went for it.” [in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (SLSH) #253 The Time Trapper, creator of the Pocket Universe that (July 1979)] “and just kind of glommed onto the group birthed Superboy, also haunted Mon-El. “I think the
Legionnaires Three House ad page from the problem-ridden Legion promo flyer. Art by Giffen and Gordon. Scan courtesy of Jim Ford. TM & © DC Comics.
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Legion No More From its dystopian cover to its nine-panel grid storytelling, LSH #1 presented a very different take on DC’s future team than readers had previously experienced. TM & © DC Comics.
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original plan was to indeed kill off the Time Trapper, but in the middle of that issue, the edict came down that we could no longer use Superman references in the Legion,” Bierbaum wrote. As Mark Waid tells BACK ISSUE, “Apparently, when John Byrne rebooted Superman in [Man of Steel #1 (Oct. 1986)] and retroactively changed Legion history so there was no Superboy or Supergirl, Paul Levitz was either not paying attention (hard to believe), or he had some plan (more likely). Regardless, by the time John got his momentum going, it was spectacularly clear that John and Paul had never had an agreement about this and that they were two bullet trains racing towards a head-on collision. “When Paul was writing Legion, of course, no one from the Superman office dared try to order him to comply to John’s Superman continuity... but once Paul was gone and I thus had no shield, the gloves were off and we got manhandled pretty brutally. We were told in no uncertain terms that Paul’s ‘Pocket Universe’ fix was never to be referred to again,” Waid said, citing the infamous storyline from Superman vol. 2 #8 (Aug. 1987), Action Comics #591 (Aug. 1987), and LSH vol. 3 #37–38 (Aug.–Sept. 1987). “We were ordered to eliminate any references ever, ever, ever, ever, ever to anything Kryptonian... Even Laurel Kent was off-limits to us... [We were] ordered to change Mon-El’s very name—the decree was that he couldn’t be an ‘El’ anymore, even though there were a million ways we could have explained how he came by the last name ‘El’ without touching Superman and thus this was, of all the stupid and petty edicts we got, the stupidest and pettiest. As a young editor, of course, I had absolutely zero clout and leverage to fight back, but that left us in a horrible position—it’s really impossible to build on Legion history at all after gutting so much of it and nullifying it.” “The basic situation we were dealing with is one we inherited,” Superman writer Dan Jurgens tells BACK ISSUE, when asked about the request made to the LSH team not to include Kryptonian references. “When John Byrne came from Marvel to DC in order to relaunch Superman, we basically eliminated Superman’s history of being Superboy. In redefining Superman’s origin story and saying that Clark didn’t become Superman until he was an adult, the chance for him to have interacted with the Legion was lost. “Those who followed John on the Superman titles decided to maintain that concept. We felt that it was the fairest thing we could do on behalf of all the new readers who started reading the Superman titles based on what John had and others had done. “So, as much as anything, it wasn’t my decision as much as it was DC’s decision,” Jurgens concludes. “That left us with a few logical options,” Bierbaum reported. “We could have just never touched on any Legion history that related to Superboy... Keith’s reaction to this was to suggest we just find an interesting way to take Superboy out of the history... We had all kinds of ideas, some of them pretty good, that involved the Legion’s history, so we opted to come up with a story that took Superboy out of the continuity and made the history once again accessible to the Legion creative team. “We made the decision,” in LSH vol. 4 #5 (Mar. 1990), “questionable in retrospect, to break apart Legion history, take Superboy out, and then re-assemble the pieces with Valor in his place,” Bierbaum wrote. Valor took the place of Mon-El and the place of Superboy as the inspiration for the Legion. “So when the Time Trapper died, all his machinations collapsed with him and the timeline went back to its original course, before the Time Trapper started pulling strings,” creating the Pocket Universe and Superboy, switching Legion founder R. J. Brande in time with Tinya Wazzo, in L.E.G.I.O.N. ’89 #9 (Nov. 1989). “Suddenly, the Mordru-dominated universe (the ‘real’ original timeline, according to our story) re-asserted itself. Thus, the struggle to re-create Time Trapper’s manipulations as exactly as possible (Valor replaces Superboy, Glorith [whose only appearance was in Adventure Comics #338 (Nov. 1965)] assumes the powers of the Time Trapper, and once again we see R. J. Brande is pulled into the 30th Century and exchanged for Tinya) and put the timeline back together as close to the original Legion timeline as possible. “The idea was ours,” Bierbaum clarifies, “and we were supposed to get the plotting credit on this issue, but through an apparent mix-up, the plot credit went, as usual, to Keith. Certainly to an extent, that was
just, since it was Keith who took our cool idea and turned it into a fascinating story with a great deal of tension.” LSH #6 (Apr. 1990) continues the story from issue #3, but in a new timeline stripped of all Kryptonian references. “Back in probably late 1989, Mary and I were visiting friends Arnie Starkey and James Ricklef,” Bierbaum recalled. “As a big fan of Supergirl, Arnie immediately observed that the new timeline would need someone to fill that historical role, something that I think had not at all occurred to any of us. With that Arnie, James, Mary, and I started kicking around ideas for who this new Supergirl might be. We wanted the character to have some familial bond with the hero taking over the Superboy role in the new timeline, Mon-El/Lar Gand/Valor, and thus Laurel Gand was created... We called Keith and told him the idea and my recollection is that he immediately loved it. “Keith really kind of charted her personality with how he used her... and we quickly built on his lead. Laurel immediately developed as a character who was passionate, sometimes too impulsive for her own good, monumentally noble and heroic and really proud to be a Legionnaire... Keith warned us about the thong he’d put her in, which didn’t seem like a big deal to us,” Bierbaum noted. “This version of the Legion was pushing the limits of comics at the time in terms of language, themes, and violence, and was showing lots of skin in lots of situations, so this seemed consistent with the tone of the book. It proved to be somewhat of a jolt for some readers.” LSH #8–9 (June–July 1990) are the first of several fill-in issues written solely by Tom and Mary Bierbaum, with these issues penciled by Chris Sprouse and Paris Cullins, respectively. Sprouse drew himself and his fiancée into issue #8, page 18, panel 4. Giffen provided framing sequences in each issue. “Michael Eury had just come on board as editor in place of Mark Waid,” with issue #6, “and with all the complaints circulating about how complicated and confusing the series was, Michael and Keith thought a retelling of the origin was a good idea,” Bierbaum wrote, “but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea. It seemed to me like the story… [had] been told many times and each telling looked and felt different than the previous one… What I preferred to do was find angles on the origin that hadn’t been touched on and that had more direct relevance to the 2995 Legion story we were telling right then in the new series. At the start of Keith’s run, we’d found Cham [the former Chameleon Boy] running his father’s company, Brande Industries, being assisted by Marla Latham,” who first appeared in Superboy #98 (July 1962), “the guy who’d been R. J. Brande’s assistant over the years. I wanted to tell the Legion origin through Marla’s eyes and lay some more groundwork about R. J. Brande, since about ten years earlier Brande had been retroactively revealed to be a Durlan,” in Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes #3 (Mar. 1981), “and a year earlier had been retroactively revealed to be a 20th Century Durlan,” in L.E.G.I.O.N. ’89 #9, “so the story we came up with spent almost no time on the actual story of the three kids saving R. J. Brande. “We tried to give Laurel an origin that contained elements of the Supergirl history but that were clearly her own,” Bierbaum continued. “While this seemed like the obvious way to go, we probably would have done ourselves a big favor by just doing a completely new story. Michael and Keith weren’t very pleased when our script included countless references to the early Supergirl appearances as reference for the artist,” notably, Supergirl’s first failed tryout with the Legion in Action Comics #267 (Aug. 1960), and her successful second tryout from Action Comics #276 (May 1961). “Michael and Keith didn’t want the story to look like a juvenile comic of the late ’50s/early ’60s.”
The action climaxes in LSH #10 (Aug. 1990), following the storyline from issue #7 (May 1990) as Roxxas travels to the planet Winath to kill the large group of former Legionnaires gathered there. Garth Ranzz and his wife Imra Ardeen Ranzz (the former Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl), Rokk Krinn (the now-powerless Cosmic Boy), Ayla Ranzz (once Lightning Lass) and Vi (the former Shrinking Violet), Mysa Nal the White Witch, Brainiac 5, Furball (who was once Timber Wolf), Jan Arrah (the former Element Lad), Cham, and Jo Nah are all joined by Kono, Celeste Rockfish, Devlin O’Ryan, and Bounty, a new character created by Gordon. “For me, the highlight of this issue is the depiction of Roxxas,” Bierbaum wrote. “Keith really got a handle on the character by this time and our dialogue followed through effectively enough that he really comes across as an utterly ruthless killer who’s completely off his rocker and, in a twisted way, pretty funny. I think the direction the character took may have really pivoted on a chance comment I made when Keith
Read All About It Text pages like this McCauley Omnicom helped readers learn more about the series’ backstory. Text by Tom and Mary Bierbaum. From LSH #1. TM & © DC Comics.
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Dark Future (left) His bright Christmas-hued uniform may be absent, but that’s Jo Nah—Ultra Boy— battling on the cover of LSH #2 (Dec. 1989). (right) Legionnaire Blok meets a grisly demise at the hands of the devilish Roxxas in issue #3. Covers by Giffen and Gordon. TM & © DC Comics.
was proposing some major power for Roxxas, and I replied with little Century (to have him create the Legion). But why switch him with enthusiasm and said I envisioned him as someone who was enormously Tinya? Well, if the Trapper discovered Jo’s key role in thwarting his dangerous but not because of a particular physical power. While it was grand schemes, what better way to punish Jo than to take from him off the mark as to what I was really trying to express, I finished the the one person who meant more to him than life itself? “The story really fit together well and included all kinds of neat tie-ins thought by saying, ‘...like the Joker,’ and I think that planted the seed to Legion history,” the murder of An Ryd in SLSH #239 (May 1978), for what Keith’s Roxxas became.” The Bierbaums’ next solo story was in LSH #11 (Sept. 1990), and the events leading to the insane Brainiac 5 unleashing Omega against with pencil art by Craig Brasfield, and Giffen supplying two pages of plot the universe in SLSH #250–251 (Apr.–May 1979) being among the bits of and art. Bierbaum recalled, “This [humorous] take on Tenzil (Matter-Eater Legion business revealed “that, for the most part, never violated what was Lad) Kem goes back to 1972, when my brother Carl found some reprint in print, just added lots of completely unanticipated motivations and materials about the Legion and he and I got very interested in the group. subtext to those events,” all told from the perspective of a universe where Glorith replaced the Time Trapper and Valor replaced Superboy. I certainly found Tenzil’s power to be a little silly and the codename ‘Matter-Eater Lad’ a great bit of deadpan humor. And then when we were brought on board to dialogue Keith’s Legion, THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES Keith had a relatively serious storyline in mind for Tenzil A new storyline, “The Legion of Super-Heroes,” marks the reunification of the team. Celeste Rockfish, who was after the five-year gap. When I asked if we could instead badly injured in the battle with Roxxas in issue #10, lies in do a humorous version of Tenzil, Keith liked the idea the infirmary in issue #12. A green glow that has been and was very willing to let us run with it. tracking her since issue #7 comes to light as a Green “The whole creation of the Pocket Universe preLantern ring. “She was more than ‘healed’ by the ring’s dated us, of course,” Bierbaum wrote, “but one thing power,” Gordon, who created Celeste, tells BACK ISSUE. that interested us about the whole matter was why the Time Trapper created the Pocket Universe and the whole “In my mind, the GL energy was alive… sorta… and it had, existence of Superboy. Why was this a logical thing in a way, ‘befriended’ her, causing ‘it’ to be imprinted to her that would play into the goals of the Time Trapper?” like a baby goose right after she’d found the ring in the desert a few years before. She’s supposed to have been LSH Annual #1 (1990) reveals the answer in this ambitious al gordon recounting of Legion lore by the Bierbaums, with art by wearing the ring around her neck like a high school ring, Dougie Braithwaite. “We were asked to start trying to and its energy completely entered her as its new vessel Facebook. when she was about to die. The GL energy immediately come up with some wild ideas for Legion origins and we started kicking around ways to restore some real formidability to the Jo Nah started replacing her organic ‘pieces’ with its own energy, to house her of earlier Legion stories. We came up with a story where Jo had tumbled mind and heart and soul. The (not-so) perfect amalgam of GL energy and onto the Time Trapper’s Pocket Universe machinations and realized he could an actual organic lifeform. And, as with my favorite characters, she has never let anyone else know, because the Trapper would have the rest of no idea how powerful she is… and she certainly has little control of it.” all time to figure out who was responsible for thwarting his designs. Another of Gordon’s characters, Kent Shakespeare, a former Legionnaire “That seemed to fit perfectly with the Tinya Wazzo/R. J. Brande named Impulse who joined during the five-year gap, was linked to Superman switch,” Bierbaum continued. “The Trapper’s plot was to create the Legion before the editorial edict not to use Kryptonian references came down. as a device to weaken Mordru and prevent his otherwise inevitable rise “We’d had Kent approved by the Superman guys,” Gordon says, (“Under the to conquer the universe and crush all opposition, including the Trapper. bizarre condition that he was a descendant not of Clark Kent’s, but of So the Trapper had a strong motive for bringing Brande to the 30th Jimmy Olsen’s,” adds Waid). “And as I remember, [Superman group editor 52 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
Mike] Carlin even liked the character and the origin idea,” which was never revealed in the series, but few details confirmed by Gordon have come out on a fan website. “The virus that infected Kent Shakespeare was supposed to be an ancient Kryptonian virus, captured and put away by Superman for testing in the 20th Century. A thousand years later, the virus is stored at Metropolis University, and someone lets it out,” the Legion Wiki reported, at www.legionwiki.com. “With Dan Raspler’s arrival as the book’s third editor [in issue #13], I think there was some attempt to address ‘all the confusion’ and that’s why this issue turned into a ‘State of the Universe’ issue,” Bierbaum reported. “The ‘State of the Universe’ approach also allowed us to tease the Glorith/Time Trapper scene on the cover, creating a little more sizzle to the overall presentation of #13. Our story that unfolded back in Legion #4–5 was a fairly tidy way to take all Kryptonian elements out of the Legion’s history and get everything back on track with ‘replacement pieces.’ It all worked great, except we never addressed the fact that a key Superman story featured the old Legion and Time Trapper,” the “Pocket Universe” storyline, “and logically that story now never took place... As was to be expected, there was no willingness on the part of the Superman creators to explain or alter Superman’s storyline to accommodate our problems (nor should there have been). So we were instructed to change around our explanation with a Glorith/Time Trapper scene... that muddled things to the point where even we didn’t understand what was supposed to have happened.” Bierbaum continued, “It was unpleasant to accept this attachment to what had been a pretty clean concept behind a powerful story. I doggedly tried to word the scene to maintain as much of the clarity and simplicity of the original storyline as possible, but was rewritten to the point where I no longer quite understood exactly how Glorith’s timeline held together, how the Pocket Universe fit in, and what was the importance of the events in the Pocket Universe to any new timeline.” Tenzil Kem returned in solo action with LSH #14 (Jan. 1991), this time with Giffen conspiring with a “story assist” and “penciler” credit. “This is probably one of my favorite issues of our Legion days,” Bierbaum wrote. “I really enjoyed doing Tenzil Kem, and this was the one time we got to collaborate with Keith on a full Tenzil story. Really, throughout our time as comic-book writers, most of the instances when our stories really connected came when we were teamed up with a penciler who was really experienced and put a lot of him or herself into the project.” Penciler Brandon Peterson takes the lead artist role with Giffen providing framing sequences in LSH #15–17 (Feb.–Apr. 1991). “This was an interesting stretch of issues,” Bierbaum posted. “For reasons I don’t really recall, it was decided we needed to do a full three-issue fill-in story to either help Keith catch up or to give Keith a break or some other reason.” Actually, Giffen had quit the series, as he said in an interview in The Legion Companion (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2003): “No, no, no. That was, ‘Oh, my God, he’s gone.’ I came back in time to do the covers. I walked off of that book many times. Most of the time it was just a one- or two-day walk off, but that one lasted a bit. It didn’t even come down to supporting the book. It was just... It was like being pecked to death by ducks. It got to the point where it just got ridiculous. Everything I did was being second-guessed.” Tom Bierbaum tells BACK ISSUE, “We suspected that there were things developing behind the scenes that we weren’t being clued in on and in retrospect, that’s almost certainly true. With the change in editors, Mary and I sensed we were on pretty thin ice at that time in terms of our position on the team, and were very fortunate to have Keith fighting pretty fiercely in our corner through this stretch.” Peterson penciled LSH #18 (May 1991) and Annual #2 (1991), with four pages penciled by Giffen, who does not share a plotting credit on the Annual. “[Issue #18] does a good job of filling in what’s going on in a lot of the U.P. worlds in the 2995 universe,” Bierbaum wrote. “It also gives a good look at our version of the Dark Circle, which I liked a lot. In our run, the Dark Circle was a combination of a cult religion on distressed worlds, an established state religion on a ‘circle’ of five founding worlds, and a secret society of conspirators within the mainstream U.P. The basic message of this Dark Circle was in opposition to the ‘light’ of reason and intellectualism and worship of the ‘darkness’ of what you ‘feel in your soul.’” Bierbaum also noted, “I personally liked our Valor quite a bit. He was a good guy, truly heroic, pretty wise, and very mindful of the responsibilities that came with his powers and legend.” LSH #19 (June 1991) is “the issue where ‘we blew up the Moon,’” Bierbaum recalls, “but the actual destruction of the Moon came in an issue of [Adventures of] Superman where the Man of Steel was being hurled across time and ended up having a battle with an insane Dev-Em on the Moon,” issue #478 (May 1991). Dev-Em, the Knave from Krypton introduced in Adventure Comics #287 (June 1961), was now retroactively a Daxamite in the new timeline. “I wanted to do a story that featured three different eras of the Legion,” Superman writer and one-time LSH artist Dan Jurgens tells BACK ISSUE, referring to Adventures of Superman #476–478 (Mar.–May 1991). “Think of it as the Jim Shooter/Curt Swan versions (young kids), the Cary Bates/Dave Cockrum/Mike Grell versions (now young adults), and the Five Years Later versions. But I was challenged by editorial to come up with something big at the end. “I gave Keith Giffen a call and we started kicking around different ideas and came up with destroying the Moon. At one point, we even discussed blowing up Earth, which would remove it as home of the U.P., but we backed off that. Though I do remember Keith being excited by the story possibilities, it’s one of those things that probably would have gone too far. “Quite honestly, that’s a typical Keith Giffen scenario. Of the many story discussions I’ve had with him over the years, we often took things too far and then worked our way back. It’s a very valid way to work. “The ‘Time and Time Again’ story was one of my absolute favorites,” Jurgens adds. “I had a great time doing it. One of the highlights for me during my run on Superman.”
Super-Brothers (top) A somber Mon-El, cover featured on LSH vol. 4 #4 (Feb. 1990). (bottom) Things looked much cheerier on Steve Lightle’s cover to LSH vol. 3 #27 (Aug. 1987), but the issue’s “Pocket Universe” fix for broken Legion continuity created many problems for the LSH creative team. TM & © DC Comics.
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Something Old, Something New (left) Legion #8 (June 1990) retold the group’s origin, under this split cover by (left side) Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson and (right) Keith Giffen and Al Gordon. (right) Glorith puppets Ultra Boy on the Adam Hughes/ Al Gordon cover to LSH Annual #1 (1990). TM & © DC Comics.
Ultimately, Jurgens felt it necessary to address Legion Something very ‘Human,’ but also with legend-like continuity within the pages of Adventures of Superman. interactions and ‘quiet’ consequences. “It was just one of my way-too-many ideas, and Keith Superman remembered meeting the Legion, and he had to remember meeting Superboy, confirming that Superboy and [returning editor Michael] Eury really liked it… and it was a member of the Legion if only for a short time, was an opportunity for them to let me write something solo. and that the “Pocket Universe” storyline did occur in Keith was the Father Confessor of our group. He was always Superman continuity. That story set the foundation for the very critical of ideas, but also very enthralled, energetic, and pivotal story in Superman vol. 2 #22 (Oct. 1988), positive. He really busted my ass to make sure I fleshed when Superman killed three Phantom Zone out ideas in great detail. And to this day, I still villains in the Time Trapper’s Pocket Universe. really appreciate that, and I seriously owe Keith. In a particular bit of irony, Superboy had “I spun a lot of the ideas I’d had working to be inserted into the very timeline on Legion, into the book I wrote and inked,” that was created to eliminate him. with penciler Jerry Ordway, “for Image “The Quiet Darkness” storyline Comics, WildStar: Sky Zero,” Gordon says about the four-issue series from Mar.– in LSH #21–24 (Aug.–Dec. 1991) was written by inker Al Gordon and penciled Nov. 1993. “Which, if you haven’t read, by Giffen, with back pages by Giffen and you love the Legion, you’re likely to notice some very strange continuity.” and the Bierbaums. Penciler Jason “The Adventures of B.I.O.N., Defender Pearson began his run on the series, working over Giffen’s layouts in the of Humankind,” a three-page segment back pages of issue #22. Darkseid, in the back pages of #24, was written dan jurgens whose last 30th Century appearance by colorist and future Legion writer was in LSH vol. 3 Annual #2 (Oct. 1986), Tom McCraw. “B.I.O.N. was the only © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. uses identical twins Aria and her character I created during the Bierbaum brother Coda, called Sacred Twins in mythology, in an run,” McCraw tells BACK ISSUE. “The whole creative effort to complete the Life Equation, or Gemini Matrix. team was given the opportunity to create some new “I’m a big Joe Campbell fan,” Gordon tells BACK ISSUE, adversaries for the Legion to conflict with. Truth be told, referring to the mythologist known for his journey B.I.O.N. was a cheat. He was modeled after Amazo from of the archetypal hero, “and I wanted to do an Justice League, who I always thought he was a cool villain adventure story that had (quietly) mythic proportions. that could handle a team all at once.”
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1990’s Legion of Super-Heroes Postcards, with art by Giffen and Gordon and colors by McCraw. 1) Rokk Krinn. 2) Reep Daggle. 3) Jo Nah. 4) Kono. 5) Laurel Gand. 6) Timber Wolf. 7) Celeste. 8) Devlin O’Ryan. 9) Bounty. 10) Jan Arrah. 11) Ayla Ranzz. 12) Shrinking Violet. 13) Mysa. 14) Kent Shakespeare. 15) Brainiac 5. TM & © DC Comics.
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BATCH SW6 LEGIONNAIRES
Bad Moon Rising (top left) Dev-Em vs. the Metropolis Marvel, on the cover of Adventures of Superman #478 (May 1991). Cover by Dan Jurgens and Art Thibert. (top right) Bye-bye, Moon, in LSH #19 (June 1991). Cover by Giffen and Gordon. (bottom) House ad for “The Quiet Darkness,” the sequel to “The Great Darkness Saga.” Art by Giffen and Gordon. Scan courtesy of Jim Ford. TM & © DC Comics.
Legion of Super-Heroes #25 (Jan. 1992) actually begins with a teaser page from the previous issue by penciler Dusty Abell. The shadowy figures that have been lurking in the Metropolis underground since issue #21 finally come out into the light in the final page of issue #24, and are revealed to be… the Legion of Super-Heroes! They are the Batch SW6 Legionnaires, supposedly clones of a much younger version of the Legion, taken from a time 17 years in the past in Adventure Comics #349 (Oct. 1966). In an interview with www.ComicBookSyndicate.com, Legionnaires artist Chris Spouse recalled his early involvement with the Batch SW6 Legionnaires: “I was a fan of Legion. They were about to do a reboot—even before they called them a ‘reboots,’ and believe it or not, but DC was nervous about doing a reboot because they didn’t know how a reboot would be accepted. They were going to reboot the Legion and they asked me to do it. We even had a Who’s Who piece published that had all that info,” in Who’s Who in the DC Universe #16 (Feb. 1992). “It was a reboot thing. “Then DC said, ‘No, no, no reboots, that’s going to freak people out—just work it into the continuity,’ so we had to scratch all those plans,” Spouse continued. “We had come up with new names. We had all these designs that they’d paid for. They didn’t want to waste the work, so they had Keith Giffen go away and come up with an idea... He came up with the idea that the Legion in the books that were going currently would find a batch of people in stasis tanks, and young Legionnaires would come out of them and that would be our team eventually. So they started that a few months early in the regular Legion book before they spun it off into Legionnaires. There was going to be this debate whether the young kids were clones, which seemed like the obvious answer, or whether the older people not in the uniforms were clones. Since it’s out of continuity, I’ll say it now—I’ve said it before in interviews—basically ours were the real ones. They’d been kept in stasis by the Dominators, I believe. They were the real Legionnaires. The older people were going to find out they were clones and because it was an older, serious Legion, they could have identity crises and things like that,” Spouse said. “But I think Keith left the books before they could do that and they abandoned the idea.” “My guys, what was left of them,” Giffen said in the Legion Companion interview regarding his unfulfilled plans for the veteran Legion, “would wander off to another solar system where they would become the last bastion of law and order before the unknown, and they would call themselves the Omega Men, and we’d revive that team.” Editor Michael Eury added, “My original plan was to do the young Legion reboot in a new title called Adventures of the Legion. But the Crisis was still too current, and although other series were straying from it we were told to keep the newly revised continuity.” “The one thing I am most proud of was convincing Eury to go forward with the Legionnaires’ uniformed look,” colorist Tom McCraw told BACK ISSUE. “Chris Sprouse had done a concept drawing of Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in suits all based off of Garth’s mid-torso white stripe. Eury wasn’t fully convinced, but I loved it! I went home and worked up color sketches for the three founders, along with versions for Triplicate Girl, Vi, Invisible Kid, Ultra Boy, and Brainiac 5. The striped theme, belt buckle, and pouches screamed ‘Team!’” tom m ccraw The Batch SW6 Legionnaires continued Facebook. to play a role in the veteran Legion stories until they claimed their own series following LSH #41 (Mar. 1993), in a story drawn by both Stuart Immomen and Spouse. Many of the Legionnaires acquired new codenames and new costumes in that story, which led directly into Legionnaires #1 (Apr. 1993), written by the Bierbaums and penciled by Spouse. Finally, in LSH #53 (Jan. 1994), the creative team of writer McCraw and artist Immomen revealed the Batch SW6 Legionnaires were displaced in time by the Time Trapper, a story revealed in greater detail in Valor #23 (Sept. 1994). “I wasn’t crazy about the SW6 members being clones; it seemed to weaken them,” McCraw informs BACK ISSUE. “Making them time-removed gave more strength to their character.”
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THE TERRA MOSAIC
“We officially began Keith’s third story arc, ‘The Terra Mosaic,’” in LSH #26 (Feb. 1992), Bierbaum reported, with Michael Eury returning as editor [after a stint in DC management as assistant to Editorial Director Dick Giordano—ed.]. “Keith realized he was juggling so many balls at once that the story he was going to be telling over the next dozen or so issues was certainly going to be a mosaic.” “Keith started Legion #1 with a full-page star field and the caption ‘Five Years Later…’” Bierbaum recalled, “and eventually decided that was the title of his first arc, which extended until about #13, when the Legion had truly reformed and the next arc was dubbed ‘The Legion of Super-Heroes.’ Now, about a dozen issues after that, it was time to focus on the rebellion to overthrow Earthgov and its secret Dominator masters, in what would be the stretch run of Keith’s time on the book.” The Dominators, who first appeared in Adventure Comics #361 (Oct. 1967), had tried to take over Earth during the 20th Century in Invasion! #1–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1988), written in part by Giffen. Artist Jason Pearson continued to complete finished pencils over Giffen’s breakdowns until LSH #30 (June 1992), and occasionally received “story assist” credits. The assassin Monica Sade, a character Pearson created, makes her first appearance in LSH #29 (May 1992). LSH #28 (Apr. 1992) was “a very grim story, probably the single grimmest storyline in the whole Giffen/Bierbaum/Gordon run,” Bierbaum wrote. Dirk Morgna, the former Sun Boy, was dying, sealed away in a Dominator chamber, a victim of the Metropolis powersphere explosion in issue #19. “I think a lot of people assumed this was primarily Keith’s issue and he told us people ‘congratulated’ him on the story and he took some pleasure in pointing out that his participation was pretty much limited to laying out the issue based on the very detailed plot Mary and I wrote... One reason the issue may feel very ‘Giffenesque’ is that it’s told almost completely in the nine-panel grid. It’s an example of why I really liked to write for the grid, even more so when we were plotting—you can communicate a tremendous amount of content in the grid,” Bierbaum wrote. “Keith also deserves credit (or blame in some people’s mind) for the basic Dirk storyline—we took the general events that had happened off-panel in Keith’s mind and turned it into this unorthodox issue. Keith certainly came up with the idea of making Dirk an Earthgov spokesman, making Circe the temptress who lured him into that tangled web, having Dirk gradually get disillusioned with the corruption of Earthgov and finally having his power go haywire with the explosion of the Metropolis powersphere. “I wasn’t especially enthusiastic about what was done to Dirk over our run,” Bierbaum concluded. “I’d probably have preferred to not have any of the old guard heroes fall from grace and suffer so intensely. But it really felt to me as if someone was going to have to go down a path like this, given the overall storyline, and that Dirk was as logical a candidate as any.” In LSH #31 (July 1992), drawn by guest artists Colleen Doran and Curt Swan, Jan Arrah finds his way to the apartment of Shvaughn Erin, a woman he has known since her first appearance in SLSH #241 (July 1978). “Of all the controversial things that occurred during the Giffen/Bierbaum/ Gordon years of the Legion, this issue was probably the single most controversial,” according to Bierbaum. Shvaughn is suffering the effects of withdrawal from Profem, a drug that turned the male Sean Erin into the female Shvaughn Erin. “As you might guess, the issue got a lot of response. Most of it was positive, but there was certainly a lot of negativity,” Bierbaum reported. “I’ve got to say I think it was a pretty excellent story that stands the test of time and may have been a little ahead of its time.” Tom Bierbaum gives credit for the idea to Al Gordon, but the reason may not be what you might think. “Really, it had nothing to do with Jan,”
Gordon tells BACK ISSUE. “It was, What could we do the most to piss off Dirk? We thought of him as a bird dog—a slut—and that was it. Shvaughn, the girl of his dreams, was a boy. “Keith and I had talked at length about the conceptions, preconceptions, and supposed ‘misconceptions’ of these characters,” Gordon adds. “Keith and I were thinking about Jan being, at the very least, bisexual…. I told Keith that we should do Jan ‘beyond being bisexual,’ in fact ‘beyond sexual identity’ of any sort. Basically, that he was a very Cosmic Monk of sorts and somewhat beyond anything as trivial as actual sex. That seems to be part of all this.” Gordon returned as writer in LSH Annual #3 (1992), joined by pencil artists Rob Haynes, Ian Montgomery (an alias used by Giffen filling in to meet the deadline), and Joe Phillips for a prelude to the Timber Wolf miniseries. “I did the intro to Timber Wolf in the Legion Annual,” in this sequel to “The Quiet Darkness,” “and kicked Timber Wolf and Aria back in time to 20th Century Earth then-present (because it’s one of Aria’s favorite times and places),” Gordon explains. That story continued as a Special Preview in issue #34, reprinting pages from Timber Wolf #1 (Nov. 1992), which ran for five issues through March 1993. Gordon had plans for a Timber Wolf continuing series. “Then I was going to send Brainy, Jo, Ivy, and Kent back to find them, and then do a book called Point Force with an Elvis who had faked his own death and then became the Point Man for Point Force. [The series would have] included all of those characters (and my other Legion creation for the Timber Wolf mini, Thrust) except Brainy, who somehow makes it back alone to the Legion’s time.” Chapter Three of the Annual was written solely by the Bierbaums and penciled by Brandon Peterson, who returns on his second LSH Annual. “The story’s actual genesis came from our earlier editor, Dan Raspler, who one day came up with a half-kidding/half-serious
Send in the Clones Devlin O’Ryan is shocked to encounter… the teenage Legion of Super-Heroes! But who’s real, the kid or the adult Legion? From LSH #25 (Jan. 1991), written by the Bierbaums and penciled by Dusty Abell, with Brad Vancata inks. TM & © DC Comics.
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suggestion that we should do an issue sometime where the characters “It’s funny that because we now had two Legions to work with, just sit around talking about what all has gone on in our complicated I wasn’t too upset that Keith killed off these three Legionnaires,” universe and get the readers up to date on all the characters Bierbaum added. “I don’t think we yet knew that we were that hadn’t yet been touched on,” Bierbaum wrote. “Dan was going to use the SW6ers in the Legionnaires book so there wasn’t a sense of losing them for that.” so tired of the eternal stream of letters asking, ‘What happened David A. Williams provided the pencil art for LSH #33 to Wildfire?’ and ‘When are we going to see Dream Girl?’ (Sept. 1992), with Sprouse teasing three Batch SW6 that he wondered if we could address all those questions in one great orgy of exposition. Legionnaire pages in a Bierbaum fill-in issue exploring “Down the stretch of the story, we learn Garth’s the origin of a new Legionnaire Kid Quantum. “The open secret—that he’s actually held the ‘mind’ of Proty I plot thread our Kid Quantum story helped address is for the last 20 years, ever since the killed-in-action the unexplained meetings R. J. Brande had with a group Lightning Lad was ‘revived’ at the apparent cost of of Protys back during Paul Levitz’s years on the book,” Proty I’s life,” in the aforementioned Adventure Comics in LSH vol. 3 #17 (Dec. 1985), “and then the disappearance #312. Margie Spears had presented the idea that Proty of Brande... And the reason why Kid Quantum emerged had replaced Garth’s life force with its own in her in this timeline rather than the original Legion timearticle in Legion Outpost #5. “I think the idea of this line had to do with an obsession that Glorith had chris sprouse twist on the old life-transferring technology started with the Protean creatures of Antares II, hoping to as a discussion of the Mon-El plotline,” Bierbaum enslave them into becoming her race of brainwashed Facebook. recalled, “but I explained its shape-shifting slaves.” implication for Garth/Proty and The “Terra Mosaic” storyline Keith loved the idea.” continues with Pearson returning Jason Pearson returned as as pencil artist for three issues artist for LSH #32 (Aug. 1992) in from LSH #34 (Oct. 1992) to a story that saw the death of three the conclusion in 36 (Late of the Batch SW6 Legionnaires Nov. 1992). “The most powerful in what was to become known plotline in this issue is probably in the fan press as Giffen’s hat the grimmest moment of the trick. “That was the whole deal,” entire series,” Bierbaum wrote, Giffen said in an interview for as issue #36 sees the final death The Legion Companion. “When of Dirk Morgna. “It’s a very we did the Earth war, every bleak conclusion to a very bleak Legionnaire’s name was going storyline, and one I didn’t relish to be put into a hat, and I think at all. It felt genuine and honest five were going to be pulled, and to me, though, and a meaningful they would die. It was the way commentary on corruption and to do it fairly. I had my favorites, the steep cost of cooperating with those who wield power and everyone had their favorites. amorally.” I figured this was the best [way Also in issue #36, Brainiac to do it]. Now, those characters that were critical to ongoing 5 discovers Bounty is the storylines would not make it former Legionnaire Dawnstar. into the hat, but there were “Before T&M were on the characters [who would].” book, Keith and I were chatting Perhaps not surprisingly, Karate about who were our fave-rave Kid, Giffen’s least favorite Legion folks. At some point, Legionnaire, his love interest Keith went all ka-wazy and Princess Projectra, and Chameleon started quietly ranting that he Boy, who had a counterpart hated Dawnstar with a passion,” central to the veteran Legion, Gordon reveals. “He was livid were picked from the hat. and he said he wanted to ‘just “I hate [Karate Kid],” kill her off horribly.’ I said, Giffen said during a 2008 ‘Well, if you want to see her suffer, killing her off doesn’t New York Comic-Con panel. do anything. Why don’t you “I agreed to stay on the Legion just make her life miserable?’ as long as I did if Paul would let— would kill Karate Kid.” I could hear Keith’s sinister Why does Giffen hate smile over the phone and he Karate Kid? said, ‘Great. That’s your job “Why not?” Giffen answered. now,’ so I invented the Bounty “Okay. Okay, just put the two entity. I figured since Dawnstar words together, ‘super-karate.’” was conscious the entire time Bounty was ‘occupying’ her body, that it would be devastating to her—akin to being raped... Young Legionnaires Over the next year I had come up with a story arc that I really loved. The arc would end with Bounty exiting Dawnstar’s body and leaving LSH founders Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad her an emotional wreck and quite suicidal.” (soon to be Live Wire), by Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon, Gordon planned to end the storyline with Dawnstar receiving help. With communications crossed, “Kent Shakespeare is now from Who’s Who in the DC Universe #16 (Feb. 1992). dealing with this desperate person whose voice he doesn’t recognize, Scan courtesy of Jim Ford. and feels he can’t hang up on her because of her condition. He’s a desperately compassionate person. The connection is so bad neither TM & © DC Comics. 58 • BACK ISSUE • Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue
of them figure out who they’re talking with and Kent very slowly, over the course of an issue or maybe more, talks her off the ledge.” LSH #37 (Early Dec. 1992) is the baseball issue, written by the Bierbaums and drawn by June Brigman. “Keith had come up with the idea that Thom (Star Boy) Kallor had moved on to coaching,” Bierbaum wrote, “and while Keith had given us a glimpse of Thom in a dystopian ‘rollerball’ kind of sport in [issue #3], we opted to violate what was established in that one panel and show Thom coaching a version of baseball that was about 90% unchanged from the sport we know in the 20th Century... And there was a clear depiction back in the Shooter/Swan days of a ‘Galaxy Series’ between the Metropolis Metros and the Naltor Dreamers [mentioned in Adventure Comics #366 (Mar. 1968)], and I felt like it was appropriate to extrapolate a sport in the spirit of the Swan-drawn Legion if we were going to pick up on that reference.” In an unexpected turn of events in issue #38, drawn again by Pearson, the liberation of the planet Earth from the Dominion is a hollow victory, as the planet itself is destroyed. “Keith had been planning this event for a long time,” Bierbaum reported. “And in this era of reboots and continuity do-overs, it probably doesn’t seem like that big a deal, but at the time, we regarded this as literally the end of the ‘real’ Earth of the DC Universe.” This issue also marks the end of Keith Giffen’s tenure as plotter and creative force. Bierbaum wrote, “With Keith’s departure, the tone of the book inevitably changed, and depending on one’s taste, that might have been a positive or a negative. I think most people, regardless of taste, would acknowledge that Keith was a stronger plotter than we were, but some people may have felt the book moved in a direction they were happier with. It was certainly made clear to us that a more commercial, more mainstream approach was considered to be what the book needed.”
Tom and Mary Bierbaum assumed sole writing roles with LSH #39 (Jan. 1993), which was originally scheduled to be a double-sized issue as announced in the letters column of issue #34, but personnel changes forced the breakup of individual story sections into their own standard sized issues. Artist Jason Pearson had left the series, and new penciler Stuart Immonen would continue the run through issue #50. While Giffen had left the series, story pages he completed earlier grace an issue one last time. LSH #42 (Apr. 1993) was a tryout piece for Stuart Immomen, who used the nine-panel grid to great effect, and for plotter Tom McCraw as well. “I had never liked that Triplicate Girl, later Duo Damsel, was treated as a sacrificial character,” McCraw tells BACK ISSUE. “Losing one body was bad, but the second one really irked me. Killing off characters for no real reason is in my mind weak, and the loss of Duo Damsel was lame. Michael Eury told me he was looking for some fill-in story ideas, so I went home and worked out an issue to bring her back.”
Hot Topic The story of Dirk Morgna—that’s Sun Boy to you traditionalists— was told in issue #28 (Apr. 1992). Art by Jason Pearson and Gordon. TM & © DC Comics.
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New Kid on the Block Meet the forgotten Legionnaire, Kid Quantum, in (center) LSH #33 (Sept. 1992). Cover by Pearson and Karl Story. (below) This Bierbaums-written sidebar appeared inside. TM & © DC Comics.
MORDRU ARISES
“The ‘Mordru Arises’ story arc... was more or less our attempt to tell a really strong multi-issue tale at a time when we knew we were probably not going to remain on the book unless we somehow blew everyone away,” according to Bierbaum. LSH #43 (May 1993) through 48 (Oct 1993) is the final climactic storyline of the Bierbaums’ run as Mordru the Merciless raises the dead as his army. “In retrospect, we’d probably have been better advised to tell a number of shorter stories with all kinds of attention-grabbing twists and turns over the six issues we used for this story, but at the time, it felt like the best way to try and rise up to the challenge was to tell one big story with a lot of cool elements.” In what could be seen is a sequel to the Amethyst #1–4 (Nov. 1987–Feb. 1988) miniseries plotted by Keith Giffen, Mysa Nal (the White Witch) attacks Mordru, possessed by the vengeful spirit of Amethyst, who buried Mordru alive for a thousand years. “Through the fight, Mordru keeps stirring memories in Mysa of the torture he subjected his former wife to during their abusive marriage, pushing Mysa into a deeper and deeper rage. I remember our editor, KC Carlson,” who took over with issue #43, “saying some had questioned whether the fight was too long and the scenes of Mordru’s abuse of Mysa too graphic. I couldn’t really disagree, I found those scenes painful to plot and dialogue, and would have liked to have come up with a more artful and brief way to establish what Mysa had been through at Mordru’s hands.” The Khunds forge an uneasy alliance with the Legion. “The Khunds insist that the Legion accept into their ranks four new Khundish members: battlesuit-wearing Firefist; the beautiful, ‘docile’ teleporter Veilmist; the hulking, metal-claw-wielding Blood Claw; and the winged, wall-crawling Fleiderweb,” Bierbaum recalled. “Had we survived on the book, we’d have preferred to keep Veilmist and Fleiderweb in the Legion for at least a little while. I imagine we’d have had Veilmist learn from the U.P. women how to ‘grow up’ and start looking out for herself, instead of manipulating the guys to get her way. That would have allowed us to write her out and just leave her in the supporting cast. “It was definitely not our intention to ‘bring back’ Firefist,” Bierbaum continued. “The part of #48 that showed him being ‘re-assembled’ was plotted completely without our participation or approval. The first we knew of it, the pages showed up for us to dialogue. To be fair, the idea of Firefist ‘rising from the crypt’ and living on to oppose our heroes is a darn good one, but I certainly wish they’d have allowed our story to end as we intended and brought Firefist back in a month or two. The way they did it, in two pages they undid a great deal of what we took six issues to accomplish, and they didn’t even let our story conclude before they started unravelling it.
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“There are those who questioned our use of Mordru, building him into this colossal force, destined to conquer the universe unless epic counter forces could be marshalled to oppose him. Certainly that’s a stretch based on the character’s previous depictions. I think two things steered us in this direction, the first being that in his initial, definitive appearance, Mordru really was about as formidable a foe as the Legion had ever faced. Jim Shooter strove to really make you feel like this guy was way beyond your average Legion villain when he showed the few remaining Legionnaires fleeing through time rather than face him directly,” during his first appearance in Adventure Comics #369 (June 1968). “And the other inspiration was [Jim] Shooter’s Pulsar Stargrave story back in the 1970s,” the aborted storyline from SLSH #224 (Feb. 1977), “which started out to be a story about Brainiac 5’s villainous father trying to force the Legion to aid him as the only means of stopping Mordru from conquering the universe… That idea was exciting to me, and it has stuck with me ever since.” LSH Annual #4 (1993) returns Timber Wolf to the 30th Century in a story written by an uncredited Al Gordon, with additional sequences by the Bierbaums, and drawn by Immonen, Joe Phillips, Darryl Banks, Christopher Taylor, and Nick Napolitano. LSH #49 (Nov. 1993) was the finale of the Tenzil Kem trilogy, as Bierbaum added, “About a year earlier, they had Stuart Immonen audition for the regular Legion penciling job by having him draw some pages of a fill-in Tenzil story we’d plotted. Stuart did a beautiful job on about the first six pages of that plot and that helped him land the Legion assignment. So roughly a year later, as our run on the book was ending, they figured they should make use of those pages and it would have been pretty awkward to have anyone but us dialogue the story that we’d plotted, so it made sense for them to press this Tenzil story into service with our one remaining issue.” Pencil artist Darryl Banks provided the remainder of the story’s pages. The first chapter of LSH #50 (Late Nov. 1993) was the Bierbaums’ final story, with art by Darryl Banks. Tom Bierbaum was asked what it felt like as a Legion fan to actually get to write the Legion. “The quick, simple answer was that it was a blast, the most fun thing I’ve ever done professionally. It was just amazing… It was an incredible high to be able to contribute to the history of the Legion and be able to put our stamp on some of the characters (especially Tenzil) or build on some of the characterizations that meant so much to us… I feel some pride that we were able to work on a rare comic that so often celebrated ethical, civilized behavior and took a critical eye to brutality, whether it was initiated by the good guys or the bad guys.” The Bierbaums continued on as writers for the Legionnaire series until Legionnaires #15 (June 1994).
END OF AN ERA
Colorist Tom McCraw took over as writer with the second chapter of issue #50, drawn by regular series artist Stuart Immonen, who wrote and drew a three-page story “The Brainiac Adventures.” Pencil artist Christopher Taylor filled in for Immonen in LSH #51 (Early Dec. 1993) and LSH #57 (May 1994), and completed pages of issue #52. “I had suggested what I would do with the Legion, if given the chance,” McCraw informs BACK ISSUE. “I didn’t know at the time I would be replacing Tom and Mary. I just thought the Legion needed to be something like it used to be, a more recognizable team of heroes. I felt very uncomfortable in the beginning following Tom and Mary Bierbaum on the title. I knew them well and considered them good people to know. They didn’t take me replacing them very well, even though I tried to explain to them it was never my intention nor my decision.” As the new writer McCraw set about making the series more conventional. He brought back characters Wildfire, whose destruction was hinted at during “Black Dawn,” and Ivy, the little girl who speaks to plants. “I wasn’t given any specific direction to head,” McCraw says, “I knew I had to wrap up some plots in the book that were not addressed yet and to head in my own direction.” Jo Nah found the gangland boss who had ordered his death in issue #2. Celeste Rockfish demonstrated her green energy power, a plot threads left dangling from issue #12. “I wanted the Legion to be a team that was working together, fighting adversaries and handling galaxy-wide crises. A lot of the former members were spread out everywhere in the U.P., several of them serving their own needs and no longer really a Legion member. I wanted to get the Legion back to what it was, for them to be a working hero-team again.” McCraw gave the veteran Legionnaires codenames and distinctive costumes. Rokk Krinn, the former Cosmic Boy, regained his powers and became Polestar. Wildfire wore new armor and called himself NRG. Sussa Paka, once Spider-Girl, took the name Wave, and one-time Ultra Boy, Jo Nah, became the Emerald Dragon. Ayla Ranzz, the former Lightning Lass, became Pulse. Vi became Virus. Brainiac 5 was simply “5.” Mysa Nal was Jewel. Timber Wolf once again became Furball, and Celeste Rockfish became a green energy being called Neon. LSH Annual #5 (1994) hosts a bevy of pencil artists, among them Immonen, Swan, Doran, Jose Marzan, Jr., Ron Boyd, Mark Farmer, Dave Cooper, Wade Von Grawbadger, Craig Hamilton, Jeff Moy, and Ted McKeever, who all shine in a fantasy story written by McCraw. Ominously, a house advertisement for Zero Hour appeared as early as issue #48. “I had actually had three issues written before any notice was given about Zero Hour to creative teams working on titles,” McCraw reveals. The company-wide crossover event Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4–0 (Sept. 1994) offered creative teams the opportunity to correct continuity inconsistencies that had arisen since 1985–1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths maxiseries reformed the DC Universe. “The current creative team at the time had already gotten together, in Canada, to plan our undercover saga,” the storyline that played out from LSH #54– 59 (Feb.–July 1994). “I had started to pull the team together, even though they were on the run in disguise. Then Zero Hour entered the picture and things had to get pushed to the side. [The undercover saga] was supposed to go a lot longer and be more complex than it was. We salvaged what we could while I started thinning out doppelgänger members. “I know I didn’t write issues that will go down in Legion history as memorable, but I gave it a good try,” McCraw adds. The decision was made to end the Legion of Super-Heroes as it existed and start over with Zero Hour. “Rebooting the Legion wasn’t an easy decision,” McCraw tells BACK ISSUE. “Mark Waid [now a writer], editor KC Carlson, and I debated it for a long time. But truth be told, the Legion was a mess. The removal of the Superboy legacy crippled the Legion that a major foundation was built upon. There were several patch jobs attempted, but their history was now a mess.”
Big Bang Theory (top) Keith Giffen went out with a bang in issue #38 (late Dec. 1992), taking the future Earth with him. Cover by Stuart Immonen and Ray McCarthy. (bottom) The issue was narrated by Devlin O’Ryan, via large illos by Pearson and Story and text by the Bierbaums. TM & © DC Comics.
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Khund Legion (left) Fearsome fighters enter the scene. From LSH #44 (June 1993). Story by the Bierbaums, art by Immonen and Ron Boyd. (right) Legion was one of the DC stalwarts to receive a major reboot in the “Zero Hour” crossover. House ad from Oct. 1993 DC titles scanned by Jim Ford. TM & © DC Comics.
The “End of an Era” Legion of Super-Heroes crossover event began in Legionnaires #17 (Aug. 1994) with the capture of Rokk Krinn by Glorith and Mordru. The event continued in Valor #22 (Aug. 1994), with the Rokk Krinn storyline picking up again in LSH #60 (Aug. 1994) in a story by McCraw and Waid. “End of an Era” continued in Legionnaires #18 (Sept. 1994) and Valor #23, where Rokk Krinn learns a devastating secret not revealed until the final issue LSH #61 (Sept. 1994) that he is destined to become the Time Trapper. “Oh, yeah, I do indeed,” McCraw responds enthusiastically when asked if he recalls the decision to make Rokk Krinn the Time Trapper. “I was having a plotting session with Mark Waid. I was real happy he was coming on the books [as co-writer for LSH and Legionnaires] to help out. Mark and I were good friends and we could easily bounce ideas off each other. I made an offhand comment about Rokk being the Time Trapper and Mark instantly loved it. I then conceptualized ‘The Library of Time,’ which aided in Rokk’s progression of changing his personality.” McCraw continued on as regular writer of the series after the reboot in LSH #0 (Oct. 1994). “The reboot gave the opportunity to retell the Legion history, minus any ‘super’ connections,” McCraw says. “We tried to be faithful to their origins while telling fresh and new stories.” “Like everyone who loves the Legion, I hated passionately that circumstances shoved us inexorably in
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the direction of ending Legion continuity with Zero Hour,” Waid told BACK ISSUE in a 2013 interview, “but I said it then and I’ll say it now—at the time, under those specific circumstances and under that specific editorial management, we really felt as if we had no choice. We spent, literally, dozens of hours over many, many weekends in Tom McCraw’s home office throwing ideas around to save/rescue Legion continuity—but between the Byrne Superman reboot, the subsequent removal of Supergirl, Superboy, Mon-El, Rond Vidar’s Green Lantern connections, and a dozen other smaller pieces of continuity that had been nuked by other offices—every idea we had was just us refurbishing on shifting sand. Ultimately, we elected to pull the trigger and try desperately to give a fitting, heroic end to the Legion we loved rather than let it continue to be beaten (continuity-wise) like a redheaded stepchild.” Thank you to Al Gordon, Mark Waid, Dan Jurgens, and Tom McCraw for their time. A special thank you to Tom Bierbaum for his generous contribution, without whom this article would not exist. For much more Legion Lore, visit “It’s OK, I’m a Senator,” at itsokimasenator.livejournal.com/. JIM FORD has been a Legion fan since before he could read. He is the proud father of two boys, Mason and Jack.
by M
ichael Eury
transcribed by Rose Rummel-Eury
Lightle’s Legionnaires These characters were intended to be among the cast of Legionnaires stationed at the Legion Outpost. “Superboy” was actually a new character named Neutron. Courtesy of Steve Lightle. Art © Steve Lightle. Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics.
With the fourth issue of the Baxter Legion, Giffen stepped away from It wasn’t the first time I was bowled over by a new Legion artist. I was a kid reading Superboy back in the early 1970s when an unknown plotting and penciling to plotting and layouts, with a new guy by the name artist named Dave Cockrum, along with his mentor, Murphy of Steve Lightle taking residence in the Legion Clubhouse as the Anderson, first illustrated a backup tale starring DC’s future series’ new penciler. Lightle’s art was a wild departure from Giffen’s team of teen heroes; Cockrum would soon re-popularize style, echoing some Curt Swan and Dave Cockrum nuances while standing firmly on its own with crisp rendering and the Legion of Super-Heroes feature and help it usurp the magazine’s pages from its titular star. I was also storytelling. Clearly, this was a guy who loved the Legion there when his Legion successor, Mike Grell, made a and had the artistic chops to pull off its cumbersome similar leap into becoming a fan-favorite. cast and extraterrestrial landscapes and hardware. Fast-forward to 1984, when Legion of Super-Heroes Steve’s stay on Legion of Super-Heroes was short-lived (formerly titled Superboy, then Superboy Starring the but influential. Soon he went on to draw a Doom Patrol Legion of Super-Heroes, then Superboy and the Legion of reboot, then went on to other projects including amazing Super-Heroes) launched a new #1 issue by its 1980s team cover work for both DC and Marvel. But when I assumed supreme, Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen, in DC’s glossy, the Legion editorial chair some 30 years ago (Yikes! Where flashy new “Baxter” paper format, available exclusively did the time go?!), still being a fan of Lightle’s Legion in the nascent direct-sales market (and by mail work I approached him about returning to DC’s future steve lightle subscriptions). The existing Legion comic, still available franchise. Our mutual plans weren’t realized for via traditional newsstand distribution, was renamed several reasons, but in this interview, conducted by Facebook. Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and for its first year telephone on September 3, 2019, we share with readers ran new LSH stories, then the next year began reprinting (under new the story of a Legion series that might have been… covers) the stories published the year prior in the Baxter Legion book. – Michael Eury Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 63
Honorary Legionnaire (top) Lightle in the 1980s. (bottom left) In his first Legion issue, #4 (Nov. 1984), Lightle was required to draw the death of Karate Kid—(bottom right) but Steve planned to return martial artist Val Armorr to action in his proposed Legionnaires book. Inks by Larry Mahstedt. TM & © DC Comics.
MICHAEL EURY: Let’s go back some 30 years, to 1990, 1991, where I, as a young editor at DC Comics, got the Legion of Super-Heroes assignment and we connected shortly after that. Let’s backtrack and figure out exactly when we met… or first talked. STEVE LIGHTLE: You remember talking to me at a convention—Chicago, right? EURY: That’s what I was thinking, but you have no recollection of that. LIGHTLE: I have no recollection of that meeting… EURY: …I’m glad I impressed you so much. [laughter] But we soon talked on the phone. LIGHTLE: I remember you saying that you had an idea for a Legion book and you wanted me to be the regular artist on it. I said I didn’t think I could do a regular monthly book again—I didn’t want to, and you said, “I’ve already got this great idea and I’ve spoken to Dan Jurgens about you and he alternating issues.” Somehow your first contact may have been with Dan. I’m just speculating because my memory is nothing to brag about at this moment. EURY: Well, we are talking about the minutiae of any given workday that happened some three decades ago. The timeline is probably more along the lines of 1991, instead of 1990, because it was around that time that I had re-inherited Legion after my first stint on it, since for a year I was in management at DC as Dick Giordano’s assistant. LIGHTLE: I think the first time you contacted me was when you had first gotten the Legion. I remember you quickly exiting that because you had other business to attend to and then you contacted me a year or so later when you had gotten back to the Legion. The specific project you’re talking about didn’t come to be until that second contact. EURY: Exactly. Keith Giffen’s “Five Years Later” version of the Legion was unfolding at that point, and I’ll give it kudos for being ambitious and being a hard-hitting, sci-fi vision of dystopia in DC’s future. Of course, some people, including people in the editorial office whose positions were higher than mine, felt that version strayed away from the utopia and the hopeful vision of the Legion. I was planning to produce some lighter Legion books that would complement Keith’s darker version. That’s where our paths would have crossed, because I wanted to work with you since I enjoyed your work with Paul Levitz on Legion in the 1980s. LIGHTLE: I had a great time on it, too. I have really fond memories of that. It was nice to contribute to something that I’d been a fan of since I was a little kid. I think that I probably saw the Legion before I was capable of reading it. Same thing with Doom Patrol and The Flash. These were books that I had seen before I was able to read and I was so enthused about what could be happening. I wanted to learn to read to find out what I was missing.
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EURY: Even with Doom Patrol? Doom Patrol was targeted to a slightly older reader. When I was a kid, it took me a number of years before I developed an appreciation for that concept—it was a little over my head. Maybe you were a smarter child than I. [laughter] LIGHTLE: I won’t make any claims to that. But, what happened was, I inherited a stack of books from my brother—he’s nine or ten years older than me, depending on what time of year you ask. [chuckles] He had a pile of books that I believe were given to him by his barber. Coverless copies—“Here’s some comics that were sitting around for kids to read.” He ended up snatching a bunch of those and bringing them home. So, I found these coverless comics in a short stack underneath his bed before I could read, and Doom Patrol and Adventure Comics—with the Legion, the Shooter/Swan era. They were all in there and Doom Patrol… I remember seeing them and was intrigued by the storytelling of the art because I couldn’t yet read. I saw one particular scene that stuck in my head: A child tugging at his mother’s coat sleeve and pointing at Negative Man covered in his bandages and saying, “Mommy, Mommy, the mummy,” or something like that. I didn’t know what he was saying, I just knew he was pointing at somebody with bandages on and his mother was aghast. You don’t point at somebody. Even without reading, I could tell what was going on, but I wanted to know why was he wearing bandages and why was he looking so forlorn. I don’t think at the age of three or four, “forlorn” was a part of my vocabulary, though. [laughter] The stories may have been over my head, but they conveyed things through the artwork that intrigued me. I also remember seeing photo montages that Jack Kirby would do as backgrounds of Fantastic Four and things like that I found intriguing. EURY: To circle back to our particular project, you had a take on doing a Legion series that I found novel, and it was inspired by, if I’m remembering correctly, the Legion letters column header. LIGHTLE: The “Legion Outpost.” There was never a literal Legion outpost in the storyline of the Adventure comics Legion. But the idea of it… maybe there was a place so distant from Earth that called for the Legion to have a presence. I thought, “Wouldn’t that be great if it was on the outskirts of the United Planets territory?” So, they encountered things maybe a little sketchier than on the utopian worlds of the United Planets. They would always be coming from that perspective, that inclusive, positive, “We’re building a better and brighter” attitude of the future that was present with the United Planets. EURY: I found that to be absolutely fascinating, because the inspiration was right there every time you read letters to the Legion. LIGHTLE: That happens with a lot of these books that have such incredible long histories. Certain little tidbits will just lie there and just germinate and wait for someone to discover them. Like with the Mon-El story where he became immune to the serum that Brainiac 5 had given him so that he could come out of the Phantom Zone. When we first discovered Mon-El, he had this horrible problem with lead, similar to kryptonite for Superman. He was becoming poisoned by exposure in our universe. Superman put him in the Phantom Zone. One thousand years later, Brainiac 5 pulled him out and said, “I’ve got this serum and it will
make you immune to this.” As happens in so many cases in the real world, our bodies build up immunities to medicines. What if that happened in the case of Mon-El? For me, it was something that sat there forever—no one noticed it. And, when it hit me—he’s becoming immune to the very medicine that makes it possible for him to be in our world! So they had to put him back in the Phantom Zone until they could correct this. Another aspect of Mon-El I felt was underutilized was, if you have someone that’s been in the Phantom Zone of the Silver Age, you can see out! You can’t touch anything in our universe, but you can watch history go by you. So civilizations can rise and fall in a thousand years, and he would be unable to do anything about it. EURY: …which to an altruistic figure like him, had to be agonizing at times. LIGHTLE: Exactly. It would torturous. Yet he came out of it a hero—it made him an incredibly heroic figure in that he somehow wasn’t broken by this devastating mental torture that he had been going through for a thousand years. He was trapped. It was the ultimate story of an innocent person suffering an unjust sentence.
Rough Stuff Lightle’s powerful pencils for the cover of Legion of Super-Heroes #8 (July 1985). Courtesy of the artist. (inset) The published version, with Larry Mahlstedt inks. TM & © DC Comics.
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He Ain’t Heavy, He’s Superboy’s Brother A 2000 sketch of Mon-El by Lightle, from the archives of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). TM & © DC Comics.
In this case, there was no crime, obviously, but he was put in prison with all the Phantom Zone criminals that Superman would have to occasionally fight whenever they broke out. They were a serious challenge to Superman for maybe an issue at a time. They were a challenge to Mon-El for a thousand years of captivity. EURY: I daresay that if the classic Mon-El story were playing out today, a contemporary writer would go along the lines of the “broken man” perspective character and have him as a flawed figure. But that’s always what made Superman and Superboy heroic—they rose above their personal baggage and presented a beacon of hope for the rest of us. LIGHTLE: Here’s the thing that may upset some people. I was never a Superman fan… never! He had it too easy—everything was given to him. He had these powers, he was better than everyone around him, rarely did he come up against anything that was a real threat to him. So I found it hard to identify with him. I couldn’t be Superman. I couldn’t be born on Krypton and be intrinsically superior… more intelligent and stronger and faster than everyone else in the world. That was never going to be me. So I couldn’t really relate to him. EURY: The guy even had a wrinkle-free suit that he could compress and put in his cape pouch! [laughter] LIGHTLE: That’s why Mon-El appealed to me so much. He had all those things that Superman had, but he also had this tortuous backstory. In essence, he knew what it was like to be a victim; he knew what it was like to be powerless.
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EURY: Let’s go back to Legion Outpost. Who were you thinking about as the core group? LIGHTLE: I remember going back and forth with you about that. I wanted Brainiac 5, for instance. You had already parsed him out to someone else—I think the Bierbaums were doing one of the books. Chris Sprouse… We should explain that situation, too. EURY: What ended up evolving into the book Legionnaires originally was going to be a series called Adventures of the Legion. It was going to feature a lighter look at the teenage Legionnaires—classic but reimagined for the 1990s in a soft reboot. Your book would have worked in tandem with that, particularly given its location of being out in the galaxies somewhere. LIGHTLE: That came from the idea that you had postulated to me, “Here, you’re going to do a number of Legionnaires and this other team of creators will be in charge of these other Legionnaires.” Both at the same time, and we had done that on the hardcover/ softcover version of the Legion before where Terry Shoemaker and Dan Jurgens were working on Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and I was working on the Legion of Super-Heroes. And, there were some potential complications when the characters would move from this title over to that other book and then come back and keeping track of all that—thank goodness Paul Levitz was writing both and had an idea of what was going on as he switched characters back and forth. But it did create some problems. I figured that we could head off some of those problems by taking my team and relocating them. They would stay in contact with the others, but they had their own purview. EURY: Managing the characters—that’s something the editor has to do, especially with a large ensemble cast like this. It’s a matter of dealing also with creative personalities when you’ve got a large cast, there will sometimes be two people wanting to use the same character and you’ll have to weigh it out and figure it out. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of who asks first! LIGHTLE: Right, I think that had already happened. I think they had already requested Brainiac 5 for their group. EURY: Sun Boy was one of your main Legion Outpost characters. LIGHTLE: Sun Boy was one of them. We had Sun Boy, we had Karate Kid—who’s always been a favorite of mine. My relationship to Karate Kid was complicated because as a reader I had always admired the character, yet my first opportunity to work on the Legion of Super-Heroes required me to draw the demise of Karate Kid! EURY: Welcome aboard! [chuckles] LIGHTLE: The opportunity to bring Karate Kid back into the mix was exciting. I chose him, and I picked Ferro Lad, because I thought he was a character that was unique in superhero history. He had this incredible presence. Even when he wasn’t physically there. It was the dramatic impact of Ferro Lad’s sacrifice. He was a character who selflessly sacrificed himself for the galaxy, for the universe. I knew that Dream Girl was a fun hero who provided interesting potential for stories and character development. I knew that I wanted more diversity on this team, including alien Legionnaires like Tellus or Quislet. You know I think one of the things that’s always been great about the Legion—in retrospect, it’s easy to look back to the 1960s and go, “There wasn’t very much diversity,” but comparing it to the Justice League or the Avengers, there was a great deal more diversity among the Legion. They came from different worlds, different races, and different backgrounds. They still all looked terribly like 1950s white, Anglo-Saxon…
Getting in The Spirit (left) The cover of Legion of SuperHeroes #8 (Mar. 1985) bypassed the book’s traditional logo as Lightle worked the feature’s name into the background art, à la Will Eisner’s The Spirit. (right) Timber Wolf’s on his own in Lightle’s LSH #13 (Aug. 1985) cover. Both inked by Larry Mahlstedt and colored by Anthony Tollin. TM & © DC Comics.
EURY: … kids who should be hanging out in Riverdale… LIGHTLE: Exactly. Unfortunately it took forever to get some racial representation, some equality amongst the races, but I think despite that fact, it had appeal to women, gay, and ethnic readers that felt like they were minorities and outsiders. They saw this as a place where they might be more accepted. There were more female characters in the Legion—you could find five or six. There was only one token female in most groups because it was assumed that in the 1960s, boys were the only readers and they weren’t interested in having girls in their superhero comics. EURY: Additionally, with the Legion, these were female members who rose to positions of leadership. They weren’t the token “damselsin-distress” female members of the team—they carried their weight equally with the male members. LIGHTLE: One of my frustrations with the old Legion—and we all grew up loving it—I don’t mean to be dissing it. But all the girls had that “point and then something happens” power. It wasn’t very physical. Dream Girl would dream it—and then tell people about it. Light Lass would point at it and it would float. Princess Projectra could make illusions appear. But there was very little physical power among the female members. The guys had the more physical powers. That’s why I was excited about getting Lightning Lass her powers back. I liked that this little waif of a girl could throw lightning bolts! EURY: Referring to the powers—“Shrinking Violet”! Even her name! That’s certainly a nonthreatening power. But if you really think about it, someone who can become miniature can become an incredible threat. LIGHTLE: Usually, that’s not what happens. Usually you wonder through the whole story why somebody doesn’t just step on them. [laughter] It’s kind of like Duo Damsel or Triplicate Girl. The funniest description I’ve ever heard of her powers is, “She has the power of three normal teenage girls!” [laughter] EURY: Who were the other characters at the Outpost? LIGHTLE: I always liked alien characters, so I wanted Chameleon Boy. I don’t know if I asked for him or was informed I couldn’t use him. But I definitely wanted Chameleon Boy and Brainiac 5, or Shadow Lass, but they weren’t available.
I had created some characters previously on the Legion, so I thought, “If I don’t use him, then nobody else is going to use him.” I wanted to revive Quislet and I thought, “If I bring in Tellus, too, it will be too obvious that I’m stacking the deck.” [chuckles] So I chose from among my two alien characters and picked Quislet. EURY: What did you have in mind for Quislet? LIGHTLE: Quislet, one thing I wanted to do with him on the team, when I first pitched the idea to Paul back in 1984, when bringing in alien-looking—that is, non-human—Legionnaires into the Legion, I had an idea for someone so non-human that he would be considered grotesque. Quislet looked like a worm. It had no shell, no legs, arms, had large eyes and visible organs—most of them sensory organs—and it was almost transparent. I thought, “This is hideous.” But I also thought that it suits its powers—Quislet influences its surroundings. You don’t need opposable thumbs—Quislet can make whatever is needed and animate it from the physical world around it. You don’t need a shell, if at any given moment, you can affect your environment with the power of your will. What I thought I was doing was developing a scientific reason for this Legionnaire’s physical appearance, but ultimately my reasoning led to what most readers were likely to consider a ridiculous-looking creature. I remember suddenly have an epiphany, “If I put this alien creature inside of a ship, which looks like a Giffen-designed, sleek, 30th-Century technology”—one of the great things that Giffen brought to Legion was a familiarity of design. Everything in the Legion’s technological arsenal seemed born of the same era, the same design concepts. I remember creating a little ship that I thought carried that design concept with it, and it was about the size of a football. This new character would be concealed in that. Quislet’s ship would provide a habitable environment. Everything needed for the survival of this alien species—a life-support system, basically, that would supply a familiar breathable atmosphere and also protect its physical form. The nature of Quislet’s power is to inhabit and manipulate inanimate objects, and it does this by sending his spirit-self or astral-self, depending upon the comic-book influence you come from [chuckles]. If you’re thinking Doctor Strange, you’re thinking “astral-self,” if it’s DC, you’re thinking more Negative Man—sending that negative spirit into things. I thought of it more or less as Quislet’s “soul-self,” its personality, its ethereal self—into physical
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Guardians of the Galaxy During Lightle’s run, more aliens peppered Legion’s pages. (top) Cover to LSH #14 (Sept. 1985), with Mahlstedt inks. (bottom) One year later, #14’s story was reprinted in Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #339 (Sept. 1986), with this Lightle cover. TM & © DC Comics.
objects. That would leave its physical body inert and unable to defend itself. So, Quislet’s in the ship and the ship has a purpose—it’s keeping Quislet’s physical body protected from the environment, keeping it alive while its spirit is occupied with other things. I really liked that concept of Quislet. But when I left the book, either Paul had forgotten the details, or maybe he disapproved of that concept and never told me. What he did to the story during the time I was no longer on the Legion, he wrote an origin story explaining that Quislet was really an energy-being—just the soul-self was all there was. It went back in the ship and inhabited the ship the way it inhabited other things. Why the ship was immune to decay, I don’t know. Normally Quislet inhabited things for a limited period of time depending on the atomic structure and other various factors—but eventually whatever Quislet inhabited would crumble to dust. EURY: That explanation borrows from another Legion character—Wildfire, who was essentially an ERG-1 energy entity that took shape and went inside a containment that looked human— in its original form. LIGHTLE: I was providing covers for the Legion book when Paul wrote that story. You see, after I stopped doing interiors I continued to be involved with the Legion off and on. I would frequently be asked to come back to the book as a regular artist and then usually would double down on my original reason for leaving—I didn’t think I could maintain the standards of quality that I wanted while on a monthly schedule. So when I came back as a cover artist and was doing the cover for this story, they sent me the origin of [Quislet] and I said, “This is all wrong!” [chuckles] I called Paul up and said, “Paul, this is redundant. You already have a sentient energy being—that’s Wildfire’s thing.” I guess that his thinking was that this gave Quislet and Wildfire a potential for involvement and in effect, Quislet became something to motivate a change in Wildfire’s story. For him that made sense from a storytelling standpoint. For me, we took an extremely original character and now he’s a redundancy. As I recall Paul said, “Are you coming back to the book?” I said, “Well, no.” He said, “Well, if you’re not coming back to the book, you have no say.” He said it as politely as he could, I guess. When you and I began talking about the Legion and me coming back to the Legion—I think Paul was retired from writing at that time—it was my chance to get Quislet back to being a physical entity inside of a ship. My great motivation was to bring one of the most alien Legionnaires back to its original intended course. EURY: Well, with Quislet’s ship—you sort of had the R2D2-cuteness factor. It looked robotic. LIGHTLE: [chuckles] That’s why I said it was an epiphany—when I first designed him as a worm, I knew that he would be the most hated Legionnaire… nobody’s going to be able to relate to him—I’ve taken it too far. Then, I thought I would put it inside this cute, little spaceship, and suddenly he’s the most loveable Legionnaire! [laughter] As long as you never know what’s inside. But regarding Quislet’s origin, I always thought the best thing was, “Let’s not frustrate anyone’s imagination.” When I was reading the Tarzan books, I would know in my mind what those characters looked like, so when I would see an illustration of what somebody came up with, it would disappoint me, “That’s not the guy.” The readers… they know better than we do what’s personally exciting to them. Readers may appreciate our creativity, but if you give them a chance to use their own imaginations then you allow them to be active participants in the creative process! So whenever you have a mystery, don’t screw it up by showing too much. You’ll only get a moment of, “Aw! Oh, my!”—a shock reaction. But when the surprise passes, the shocking can become mundane. It becomes familiar. I thought there were so many examples of that done in comics to the detriment of the characters—the Unknown Soldier, for one. He was in bandages and for years you never knew what was under the bandages. Bob Kanigher, his writer, I think he understood it and never wrote a story where you saw what was underneath. It was alluded to that he was horribly scarred. Eventually in the late 1970s, they did a story where his face was shown. Then, it reduced to a monster story. His face, the bandages falling off. He became a monster in a bandage. Before that, it had been a mystery. Whatever pathos you or sympathy you brought to it was based on what you believed was under the bandages. Negative Man of the Doom Patrol went around saying, “If Rita Farr ever saw what was under these bandages, she’d be appalled. She wouldn’t even talk to me.” Then they made the mistake of showing him looking in the mirror while taking the bandages off and he has transparent skin and you can see through his skin into his skull. It was kind of a weird visual, but suddenly it wasn’t as amazing to me as if I had been left to imagine what was under there. I wanted to do that kind of thing with Quislet; I wanted to have frequent references to the mystery of his true alien appearance. Even the character’s name is a reference to its mysterious nature. When Paul revealed that the little electric blip seen leaving the ship was actually what Quislet looked like—the soul-self—that removed all the mystery. I wanted to get back to the idea that there was something inside the ship that was very alien and the way you could relate to it was through its personality and the things it did. EURY: Let’s talk about a character you created for Legion Outpost: Allegra… which is a pharmaceutical name now. LIGHTLE: [chuckles] The thing is, today, everybody who has seen an advertisement for allergy medications snickers when they hear about Allegra! But before any of us had ever
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heard of this pharmaceutical product, we had came up with something that I thought and still think was inspired—the first Hispanic Legionnaire—Allegra! Where the name came from—I told my wife, Marianne, that I’ve got a character idea, a female descendant of Wally West, raised by the future versions of Barry Allen and Iris West. She’s going to be a super-speedster. I didn’t want to come up with a name like Flash Girl or Kid Kid Flash, so she said, well, “Allegro” is music played fast— or a rough translation of the music term, and I said, “That’s great! We’ll put an ‘a’ at the end because that trademarks it an feminizes it at the same time.” So, instead of Allegro, it’s Allegra. I love the idea of music played fast. Up-tempo, that worked perfectly for what I had in mind. Another aspect of Allegra that I was very excited about was that she was a young, brown-skinned Latina. Her name was Rheeta Morales and she was a direct descendant of the red-haired, lily-white Wally West. It was a subtle way to give us more diversity in the Legion while also making it very clear that the family tree of the Flash was racially integrated. When some Hispanic friends heard that I was working on a new Hispanic superhero they were excited—which just made me that much more certain that this was something that should have happened long ago. EURY: I recall you had an interesting, and now revolutionary, way of conveying super-speed as well. LIGHTLE: At that time, there was a familiar way that super-speedsters were portrayed. At DC, it was speed lines and after-images. Through the Silver Age and into the 1980s, you saw Flash running and there were those Carmine Infantino-esque after-images following him, which I always thought must be a pain in the butt to draw. “Great! More characters to draw in every panel!” [chuckles] And speed lines. At Marvel, they stuck with speed lines for their Quicksilver. Lightning has always been the motif for the Flashes going all the way back to Jay Garrick, on his shirt. So I thought, “What if, when she runs, she leaves a trail of lightning?” The idea was to come up with a distinctive way to visually set her apart from all other comic-book speedsters. You can excuse this by saying, “30th-Century technology, there’s something within the suit itself.” I’ve always liked the way of explaining things away—“Hey, it’s a thousand years in the future!” [chuckles] So this works now. Years before Flash and Kid Flash and Impulse and all those other heroes and villains that started leaving lightning trails, we had Allegra running and leaving a lightning trail. We also had—I say “we,” because I presented it to you and you gave it a nod—so you’re in this “we,” but my suggestion was that she was a descendant of Wally West. The backstory—I realized as we talked, we’re talking as two guys who’ve read comics forever so we know the backstories of all these characters. We know all the vagaries of their histories and that’s been overlooked for the last 20 or 30 years of comics. Backstories have changed; histories and characters have changed with every creative team comes a new approach and a new story behind each character. But when I was growing up and reading comics and I assume you, too, there was a great wealth of information that had been compiled for 30 or 40 years. The history of characters. One of the things we learned from a Flash story was at a certain point, Barry Allen and Iris Allen would go to the future in retirement. They were living in the 30th Century, I believe. That made them contemporaries of the Legion! We also have the Tornado Twins, characters tied to Barry Allen. What if a great-great-great granddaughter of Wally West came along and…
You have to understand my thinking about superspeed. If you have super-speed, nothing can hurt you. Doesn’t matter if they have a freeze gun. If a speedster perceives you the way you perceive a statue—static— at that level of speed, then you’ll never be able to surprise him. You’ll never be able to anticipate where he’s going to be. He’s going to see all that coming. I always thought that was a major flaw in all the super-speed stories. Really—how do speedsters who operate at such an accelerated rate ever see normal humans as any kind of threat?? How are they vulnerable at any point? It would be nice if it took effort on Allegra’s part to slow her metabolism down. What if it required concentration and serious effort to slow down to communicate at a human level? Then, whenever she’s like us, her metabolism is no longer like the Flash where she can see everything going on in slow motion. Allegra has to choose to become like us and when she does she makes herself vulnerable. Then she’s no longer operating at super-speed, unless she loses her concentration and the rubber band snaps her back.
Lightning Fast (top) Allegra was intended to be the Legionnaires’ super-speedster. (bottom) The artist would have employed lightning-energy effects for conveying Allegra’s super-speed, as has now become common in Flash-related comics and screen continuity. Scans courtesy of Steve Lightle. Allegra and Allegra art © Steve Lightle. Flash TM & © DC Comics.
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Something Borrowed, Something New (left) LSH #14, page 17, introducing Quislet. (right) From that same issue, the Legion’s new members, including Lightle creations Tellus and Quislet. A Levitz/Lightle/ Mahlstedt collaboration. TM & © DC Comics.
EURY: I’m also thinking that living with super-speed, how different it would be to slow down and do [slows down pace of voice] normal… things… with… the rest… of… us. LIGHTLE: I think it would be very frustrating for her. People always have these weird ideas about the comicbook speedsters: “Why would the Flash have a car? He can run super-fast.” I’m thinking, “Yes, he’s faster than you, but would you want to run everywhere?” EURY: Let the guy take a load off! LIGHTLE: Yeah, you’re running and you want to sit down. He should have a car. He needs a place to rest more than most of us, because his job requires constant physical exertion. At least to my knowledge, it’s never been addressed that he’s forced to run everywhere he goes! Most human athletes would die of exhaustion. EURY: One of the Silver Age Flash writers, or maybe it was editor Julie Schwartz, came up with the protective aura that Barry Allen had to help keep his body from deteriorating as he ran at those speeds… LIGHTLE: That stuff cracks me up. It’s 2019 and you look at the Flash TV show, where the Flash grabs somebody and, “Boom!” They’re gone. The fact that someone has suddenly been taken from standstill to thousands of miles an hour and then they come to a sudden stop—the only thing they ever do is go, “Oh!” or “Oh, boy!” Shaken-baby syndrome, anyone? Your insides should just be jelly! EURY: Or at least, you’d lose your lunch. Not to mention soiling your shorts!
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LIGHTLE: [laughs] My idea with Allegra was, what if we take a more scientific approach with super-speed? That just led me down a whole different path. I realized that a baby developing at super-speed would be impossible to raise. People who are not living at that accelerated rate of speed couldn’t possibly care for that child. Imagine a baby born and developing at super-speed. You can’t follow it. It would appear to be moving— it would be vibrating. When the baby kicks and throws a fuss, it’s going to be a whirlwind of motion. It would be impossible to look after that infant’s needs. So, I thought, “When Rheeta Morales was born, there would be this desperate need to find someone with a special knowledge of her problems.” Okay, she has a relative who can help. Okay, Flash can help. But, in the meantime, you still have this baby that nobody can feed, nobody can change, nobody can do anything with! If she’s sick, you can’t care for her. The only thing I could come up with, once again, was leaning heavily on 30th-Century technology and thinking, “What if you have a super-computer that could react in the same timeframe as this baby, so her basic needs were met?” They’d have to be in a secluded room and environment and cared for entirely by mechanics. I don’t mean road mechanics, car mechanics. Rather, with robotic arms, and that would be a very sterile environment. She would develop until Barry and Iris Allen came into the picture, she would be raised and taught. Imagine how fast a child at super-speed develops,
understanding language, that sort of thing. She would be like a Tarzan-like character in the wilderness, raised without instruction. Her first experiences would be in an environment governed by a super-computer that teaches her language and all the basic human functions and how to deal with them. EURY: That would be an artificial interpretation of human function, because without that social and personal connectivity, she probably would be—at least initially—kind of cold. LIGHTLE: Potentially, depending on the capability of 30th-Century technology to mimic human caring and basic human contact. Looking at our world today, it looks like science fiction compared to when we were children. Look at the DC characters. In the 20th Century, they already had technology beyond what we had, living in their science-fiction world. So, projecting that science-fiction world a thousand years in the future, I saw no wheels or glasses—all these things that are common today. No pipes, no cigarettes, because they are outdated already. Why would they still exist in the 30th Century? Then I’d see other artists and writers who had people adjusting their glasses or smoking pipes. [chuckles] Riding around in cars with wheels with them. I think [Legion villain] Computo had wheels when he was first created. EURY: He was about the size of a refrigerator, too. LIGHTLE: [chuckles] There are some incredible things that Curt Swan designed—sad that he has passed on— he had such incredible talent with expressing natural human things. He could make the most absurd things seem normal because of the people he drew. EURY: In retrospect, that makes it interesting that he was the Superman artist for so long, because he was an artist with a flair for the natural. LIGHTLE: He grounded that character. EURY: That’s to his credit, to enable us to better relate to this man-god. LIGHTLE: [Swan] worked the same magic with the Legion of Super-Heroes. All these characters running around from different planets who are capable of doing amazing things, and yet we can still relate to them because they seem so familiar to us.
EURY: Weren’t there a couple of other characters in your Legion Outpost proposal? LIGHTLE: There was Neutron, one of the new characters. One of the most interesting things about him was, he was going to march into the room in a Superboy costume and say, “I’m going to be calling myself Superboy!” And, they would be like, “What? You arrogant little cuss. What do you mean ‘Superboy’?” He was like, “Well, there’s a thing if you look back in the past and we’ve got this guy. We’ve got this imagery. It’s flawed, but it’s there, and it looks like this costume. There was a dude… there was a Superboy before us. He fought bad guys in the 20th Century, and so this is my tribute to the mythic Superboy that we don’t fully understand.” That was the thing I was thinking, “How do you preserve Superboy in the 30th Century and have it still motivate anyone?” Well, who says the 30th Century has to have such a flawless recorded history? Their understanding of history might have been incomplete. I remember thinking that there might have been a significant event that could have destroyed much of recorded history so that in the 30th Century, they were trying to unearth the truth of what happened during this period, and one of the things would be the myth of a Superboy. Even if there was no Superboy, it was my way of getting around that concept. Superboy’s been taken away from us. What if the whole thing is built on the idea of belief in this altruistic Superboy that never existed? What if they had mythologized the character of Superman into Superboy—he’d be somebody we could identify with! He’s one of us. Even if Superboy was outside of DC continuity at that point in time, we could still say, “They believe there was Superboy and that’s enough.” They still have this little spark of hope. Anyway, I remember Neutron was going to announce that he was the new Superboy. I wanted him to be a naive 13-year-old full of raw enthusiasm. Of course they’d say, “Aw, punk kid—you’re Superboy? No way! Now get a real costume and join us.” He was going to come in with the Superboy costume just to pay tribute to Superboy and then he’d have to take it off and get a regular costume. And his powers were nothing like Superboy’s.
LLL (Lovin’ Lightle’s Legion) (left) Brainy foresees doom for his beloved Kara on Steve Lightle’s cover for Legion #16 (Nov. 1985). (center) Steve’s interpretation of the tormented Mon-El, on the cover of LSH #23 (June 1986). (right) His enigmatic cover for the “Who is Sensor Girl?” story arc conclusion in issue #25. TM & © DC Comics.
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New Blood From the 1980s’ “Baxter” LSH era, Lightle’s rendition of Legion recruits Sensor Girl, Magnetic Kid, Quislet, Polar Boy, and Tellus. Courtesy of the artist. Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics.
EURY: That’s a fun nod to Superboy, but unfortunately it would’ve been impossible given the Superman office’s edict that Superboy and all things “Super” couldn’t be referenced in Legion at that time. Any other characters? LIGHTLE: We had Marla Latham. It occurs to me, I don’t think Marla had made more than two or three appearances in the all the history of the Legion, but it always intrigued me that when Ultra Boy was brought into the Legion, he had a mentor that dressed just like him and that introduced him to the team and was somehow connected to the team, and then nothing else was ever developed after that. I thought, “What if, in this futuristic world, he’s assigned to go oversee these kids in this outpost?” So you have kind of a chaperone in the Marla Latham character. Some people might say,
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“Oh, the Legion doesn’t need a chaperone,” which is part of the appeal of the Legion: These kids are doing it all by themselves, they’re not being led by the hand; they don’t have an adult superhero to save them or point them in a direction. But at the same time, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if this guy was assigned to this job? This wouldn’t have been the [long-established] 1990s or 1980s Legion being given an Outpost, this would be a new group of Legionnaires that had just formed and they were going to operate on the outskirts of the United Planets territories. There would be an element of distrust. “Can they handle it?” “Should they be allowed to have free rein?” “How much is U.P. beholden to these young kids?” EURY: What types of menaces and threats were you planning to introduce with the Outpost concept being on the cusp of the United Planets? You were free to use characters that were a part of continuity and also free to introduce new menaces that were not yet identified or previously in print. LIGHTLE: I always thought that being on the fringe of United Planets, with United Planets being a very safe and orderly environment, it’s the aberrations of the Legion they would see. Put them on the outskirts, and they would encounter these aberrations more often. EURY: Where exactly was the Outpost located? LIGHTLE: It was on Ventura, the planet that had Vegas as a template, with a long history of corruption and shady goings on and whatnot. EURY: Beyond the corruption, you have clientele from all ports of call who are ne’er-do-wells. LIGHTLE: …Outsiders. I thought there were lots of different possibilities. The slave trade that existed outside United Planets, where nothing like that could conceivably exist in the clean 30th Century of the Legion that we were familiar with. Trading in gems… I remember an old story about the concept of life gems. They were popular things people were wearing and ended up being living creatures, but not much was done. In those days, it would just be the end of the story. You’d go, “Oh, the life gem is actually a living thing!” But I thought, “What if you took that concept and treated it like the drug trade? What if these gems exist, and it’s a way of controlling people? Create a gem that has an aphrodisiac, or some kind of drug-compelling, emotional response, and is it a pathway to mind control, or to make you more susceptible to things? Ultimately, they’d have to shut down the known world from this threat that they didn’t realize was a threat. Somebody pointed out that when we were on the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 1980s, we didn’t introduce many bad guys. I don’t know if that is all Paul’s doing, or if some is on me as well. I know we talked about things. I know I was motivated by the characters— not the threat. “Well, they need to have something to do, but ultimately they’ll be able to thump it on the head and they’re done!” [chuckles] The real meat of the story was what’s going on with the characters, and it had that soap-opera style to it, which was one of the strengths of Paul Levitz’s writing in that era was that he took a very soap-opera approach to the relationship. He didn’t go into as great a depth as it could have, so now it’s funny, because the readers look back and they have interpreted these little hints and things. Whatever was vague in the comics, it was vague enough that they were able to interpret it in their own way. They brought their own stories and filled in the blanks. It’s just ingenious if you think about it. Paul was able to suggest differences in the characters’ personalities
without going into detail, and the reader would go, “Oh, I can relate to this. This is just like my girlfriend.” You have people years later who were just certain they knew what was going on in these people’s lives. To me, the stories that were interesting were motivated by characters. Sun Boy, as established during Levitz’s run, was considered a “playboy.” EURY: A “ladies’ man.” LIGHTLE: I remember writing a scene in which they were in a Ventura gambling casino, and he was surrounded by women, with all the ladies gathered around the blackjack table while Dirk (Sun Boy) Morgna is making a big show of gambling. He was the center of attention. Ventura would have its celebrities: “Here comes the Legion of Super-Heroes!” Sun Boy has all these ladies around and they are commenting that he loved the attention that fame got him. He loved the attention of the ladies who gathered around and he loved nothing more than to find beautiful women who could expose him to a world of luxury that he’d never seen before! [chuckles] Yeah, he was a jerk. But anyway, he was a handsome jerk and he got away with it. Then you had Allegra, and we talked a little bit about her powers and how we made them more scientifically accurate. Well, if she had to slow herself down with conscious effort—she has to slow her metabolism down to interact with us then she can— Boom!—appear in a scene, and that’s more or less how others are going to see her—she’s going to suddenly appear. She’s going to be like, “Guys, we gotta do this, we gotta go there,” she’s going to be so excited, “We’ve gotta do it together.” Then, if she gets more and more excited in a given scene, it evokes an emotional response in her, she subconsciously starts to revert to this “normal” behavior for her—the super-speed. So, she’ll slip gears, “Oh, no, everybody’s going in slo-mo again; I can’t stand SLO-MO!” I always liked the idea that she would come into a scene and motivate things, and then blip in and out— finding it difficult to stay in that slow-moving world they inhabit. She’s going to see things operating at super-speed most of the time—she’s going to see clues, suspicious people, things like that. She’ll then try to report back to the others. I remember a lot of little scenes like that. Dream Girl was the one I changed the most. I saw her as a young Marilyn Monroe type. She would see her role in the Legion as an opportunity to make herself famous and adored by millions. She kind of had a starlet kind of syndrome. EURY: Did she have a vision of herself as a celebrity? LIGHTLE: Yeah, I think it was all a part of her personality that she thought of herself as someone deserving or needing adoration. So she was always a little bit, I don’t want to say aloof, but she was thinking, “Of course, they’re going to be fawning over me!” [chuckles] This is what happens when you’re famous. I had a little bit of a twist with Ferro Lad as well. I’m trying to think if it was created entirely of whole cloth at the time or if I was playing off anything that existed prior to that, and I honestly can’t tell you which it was. I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Ferro Lad was being kind of prepared by his mother and grandmother for fame but he was deeply insecure— fearing that the public might reject him if they saw his hidden face. You understand that Ferro Lad had some manner of disfigurement—the nature of which was unclear in the 1960s—He had some kind of facial deformity and wore this helmet to cover it. He was being promoted as, “This is Ferro Lad, the new superhero in town,” and he was going to have a great deal of
insecurity feeling it was all just a put-on too artificial for him. He was a humble guy because he had been raised feeling inferior. I remember the first issue or so, some of the captions were actually him writing back home to an imagined little sister, saying, “This is what I’m seeing; this is what my new teammates are like; this is what they’re doing right now.” It was a great way to introduce Sun Boy and Dream Girl from a different perspective. More or less the “boy band” approach. They’d all been hired and sent off to do a job. They were all getting to know each other. EURY: Putting them into this world that is tawdry would provide temptation for weaker personalities to be led astray. LIGHTLE: The temptation of something like Sun Boy getting drawn into something maybe he shouldn’t get involved in. EURY: Somewhere along the way, we rebranded Legion Outpost as Legionnaires. I don’t remember the trigger for that. It might have been impressed upon me or suggested to me by someone else in the editorial pool that Legion Outpost wasn’t a strong enough name for a series. I do not recall. So Legionnaires was the name I was attaching to your series after the initial Legion Outpost pitch. LIGHTLE: I have no notes on that. I just know that it was Legion Outpost and after a while, it was
Ventura Highway Page 1 of Lightle’s plot for the unpublished Legionnaires #1, submitted to then-DC editor Michael Eury in the early 1990s. Courtesy of Steve Lightle. © Steve Lightle. Legion of Super-Heroes TM & © DC Comics.
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Legionnaire Ladies (left) Dream Girl, as imagined for the new series by Lightle. (right) Antares, while not mentioned in the interview, would have encountered the Outpost Legion in Steve’s series. Scans courtesy of Steve Lightle. Dream Girl TM & © DC Comics. Antares © Steve Lightle. Art © Steve Lightle.
Legionnaires. The concept didn’t change just because we changed the title. EURY: So you had produced some developmental material for Legionnaires, and right before Christmas 1991, you hear from me... LIGHTLE: You actually called me after hours. I think everybody else had gone home for the day, December 23rd, getting ready for the holidays, but you were staying behind, which wasn’t uncommon for you editorial types, working after hours. You decided to give me a call: “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ve gotten the go-ahead to go to artwork on this.” Up to this point, we’d only had design sketches, character drawings, and everything else was text, on a typewriter—that’s how long ago you know this was! [laughs] “The bad news is, they want a change and then we can go.” I said, “What’s the change?” You said, “It can’t be the original Legion. We’re not being allowed to reboot the original Legion.” This would’ve been the first reboot, which now it’s had many, but this would have been the first attempt to reboot. “These are clones of a dark, dystopian Keith Giffen characters—Tom and Mary Bierbaum characters—that is being published by DC. These are younger clones of those guys.” It wouldn’t have been the first time in my career that I would have made a snap judgment, but I said, “No, there’s no wiggle room, I have no interest in telling stories about clones.” I think I argued that the Wanderers had been given an attempt to be clones of Legion characters; clones of the original Wanderers, and it had bombed horribly. And Spider-Man, we had just found out about
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that time that a great deal of his history was a history of a clone, that the real Spider-Man was somewhere else and we had been watching the history of a clone and fan reaction to that was horrendous. He got married and all these things in the meantime and that was all getting brushed under the carpet, “Oh, that was just a clone!” Ha! Clones are done to death by now and people are having a clone reaction—it’s not the novelty from when we were kids and reading stories about clones. Clones now were, “Oh, God, not clones again!” [laughter] The idea it was going to be set in that dystopian world—that our characters were going to have to inhabit that same universe from Legion standpoint—was fatally flawed. I fall in the category of people who think as interesting as the individual merits of the “Five Years Later” stories as science fiction—as interesting as those stories were taken on the merits of the stories, they didn’t fit in the Legion. I think the Legion primarily is optimistic in its view of the future. That’s not me stating a preference of how I like my science fiction… I like Philip K. Dick novels and love that stuff with a dystopian future. I know there’s a lot you can do with storytelling—it’s just another avenue you can take when you’re telling a futuristic story, but I never thought it was right for the Legion. So the idea that they would be clones, but inhabit the same universe that had become this dark place, I didn’t think it was going to work. I thought it would be completely rejected by the fans. EURY: We’ll never know. The goal I had in mind was to bring some hope and light into that dark world with these characters. At the time, which was still just a few years after Crisis on Infinite Earths had altered DC continuity, it was also my job to editorially oblige that continuity. That was also the mission of the other book—the Adventures of the Legion book, as it would have been called. It was frustrating being the editor of the Legion at that time, and I know Mark Waid had a similar turn prior to me when they started the “Five Years Later” story. Forgetting that concept, anybody working on or editing Legion after John Byrne’s Man of Steel was left with… this great body where the heart had been ripped out, because the heart was the inspiration of Superboy, and when you remove something that vital—it’d be like making Bruce Wayne’s parents still alive. What would be his motivation to be Batman, then? There’s something fundamentally flawed there with the entire concept. I think it’s taken the Legion a long time to rebuild from that. Multiple reboots. There’s a new one that’s starting up as we speak. Hopefully it will click, because the characters and the concept are too good to lie dormant. LIGHTLE: The concept’s an incredible one. I think it’s almost an unpopular view of science fiction today but was popular in the 1950s—the great potential of the future! We have flying cars and everything is glistening and clean. All the possibilities for mankind will be achieved. We’re looking toward a great deal of accomplishments. We hadn’t made it to the Moon yet in the real world, but all things seemed to be possible. You had to have a great deal of faith in mankind that we were going to get there. We still had the hope we would get to the Moon and we will still get to space. I think the Legion was born out of that. There’s still some part of us that wants to believe there is a greater potential for good. Given both our political and social climates and state of the world today, it’s getting harder and harder to believe that we’re getting better and that things are improving and mankind is building something that will last forever. But you know what? It’s needed more now than ever.
by M
It’s an underwhelming tale involving pornography, serial-killer comics, a Goth-metal band, and the mercifully brief emergence of bottom-of-the-barrel “talent,” set amid the Great Comics Boom of the early 1990s…which inevitably culminated in the Great Comics Bust of 1993. I was just a guy who, since I could hold a crayon, dreamed of becoming a comic-book artist, but instead became a writer-designer for newspapers. Not a complaint. The work was good, and after all, I was no Ross Andru. But there I was in January 1993 at Jacob Javits Center in New York City, hawking my oh-so-cleverly-named Silver Age “spoof” comic book, Defective Comics. I was a guest at the booth of Comic Zone Productions, an indie publisher based in my home state of New Jersey, which honed a niche doing parody, pornographic, and serial-killer comic books that would make Estes Kefauver spin in his grave like a construction drill. (One, a bio of convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, featured a cover self-portrait of Gacy wearing a clown costume. Inside was an ad for Gacy’s original paintings, with sales benefiting his defense fund. You can’t make this stuff up.) Comic Zone was run by Rich Rankin, an artist who operated a comic shop of the same name. (Rankin was a prolific inker for DC and Marvel.) I had already illustrated two books for Comic Zone, both of them “adult” spoofs. I justified these sleazy ventures by comparing them to the
work of my hero, R. Crumb. “I’m not doing porn per se,” I convinced myself. “I’m doing explicit humor in the tradition of the underground comics of the ’60s and ’70s.” Still, since my byline appeared regularly in newspapers, I coined a non de plume especially for my newfound “blue” assignments: Mad Mark. When Rankin, to my eternal gratitude, greenlit my non-porn comic-book idea Defective Comics, I felt like an actress who paid her dues in X-rated films before finally landing a legitimate role. (Yeah, this was a less-enlightened time.) Meanwhile, back at the Javits show, Comic Zone was situated directly across from the theatrical Goth-metal band Gwar (who were pushing their own comic book). These guys were lunatics! They had an elaborate setup like something out of a Rob Zombie movie, and were decked out in full makeup and costume, loudly pontificating in character. A female Gwar member, with the charming moniker Slymenstra Hymen, wrapped a long chain around the throat of fellow member Techno Destructo, and took him for a walk, like a dog, on all fours. (In my recollection, the shirtless Mr. Destructo could have used a bit of Speed Stick.) Folks passing by at the con would slow down to gawk at this circus. As a result, the Comic Zone booth got some bonus eyeballs. Did I owe my next career development to Gwar?
a r k Vo g e r
From the Comic Zone to Your Happy Home Defective Comics Trading Cards boxed sets, foil packs, and point-of-purchase displays from 1993. (background) A montage of cards. © Mark Voger.
Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 75
GOOD SIGN
Defective Comics—which, in my heart of hearts, was more tribute than spoof—was a “flip” book with two covers. One was a DC spoof (The Lame and the Old #28), the other a Marvel spoof (The Spastic Four #1). I had the original art for both covers on display at our booth. People were laughing at them while walking by, which I took to be a good sign. Then a fella spotted them who was representing Connecticut-based Active Marketing International, publishers of the Hustler and Hustler II trading card series. (Was there no escape from porn?) Long story short, this gentleman and I began a discussion that led to Active Marketing’s release of Defective Comics Trading Cards, for which I illustrated 50 cover spoofs in the spirit of the classic Topps series Wacky Packages. I’d wanted to call the set Kooky Klassics and make all the cover parodies “vintage,” but Active Marketing insisted I do two-thirds vintage, one-third contemporary. As it turned out, they were right and I was wrong. Sure, the chronology of the set is lop-sided. But there’s no mistaking what era it was produced in. Defective Comics Trading Cards is firmly a creature of 1993. I drew parodies of the earliest comic books (Famous Funnies #1, Action Comics #1); hallmarks of the ’40s (All-American’s All Star Comics #3, Timely’s All Winners Comics #1) and ’50s (EC’s The Haunt of Fear #12 and Crime SuspenStories #22); and Silver Age milestones (DC’s Showcase #4, Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy #15). In the then-contemporary realm, I spoofed X-Force #1, Spawn #1, WildC.A.T.S #1, and Bloodshot #1. These were the caveman days, before Photoshop and Wacom tablets were in popular use, so I created the 50 illustrations the old-fashioned way. I penciled the art onto Bristol Board; delineated it in ink with a zero-width Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pen (a crutch from college); gently erased the pencil; colored in the art with Design brand markers; finished the inking using Rapidographs in various widths; shaded it with Berol brand Prismacolor and Verithin colored pencils; and added highlights via gouache applied with brush. (My wife, the photographer Kathy Voglesong, did uncredited coloring on certain cards.) Then I actually mailed, not emailed, the original artwork (yikes!) to Connecticut. Naturally, my aim was to make the spoofs look like the original covers at first glance (à la Wacky Packages). So I immersed myself in the styles of the old masters: Joe Shuster, Everett E. Hibbard, Alex Schomburg, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham “Ghastly” Ingels, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Mike Sekowsky, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Frank Frazetta. The visual gags were inspired by another hero, founding MAD artist Will Elder, who jam-packed his MAD and “Little Annie Fanny” panels with yuks. Admittedly, the humor in Defective wasn’t exactly Noel Coward; it was done in the nostalgic vein of MAD. But the humor got edgier when ridiculing the overblown, self-serious ’90s stuff, something I did with particular glee.
Famous Fans (top) Julius Schwartz with Defective Comics #1 in 2001 and Stan Lee with a copy in 1994. Photos by Kathy Voglesong. (center) 1993 Voger art of Julie, Stan, and Jack Kirby cameos from Defective #1, newly colorized. (bottom) Mark’s FF #1 spoof. © Mark Voger.
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This was a ton of work on a tight deadline. When stress set in, I’d reflect on Norman Saunders, the great pulpfiction cover artist whose exquisite acrylic paintings of Batman, Robin, and the Gotham City gang beautified Topps’ Batman trading card series of 1966. At the tender age of eight, I bought those cards, chewed the stale bubblegum, and fell in love, irrevocably, with Saunders’ art. Now, I was following in his footsteps. Well, not exactly, it turned out.
The FF Faces Front! (top) Panel parodying Marvel’s Fantastic Four #1, from Defective Comics, the comic book, #1. Art by Mark Voger, newly scanned from original art and colorized. First published in 1993. (bottom) A crazy quartet of trading cards spoofing landmark comic covers. © Mark Voger.
HUNGRY FOR CONTENT
Y’see, I wasn’t working so steadily in the medium because I was such a fabulous artist. During the ’90s boom, fly-by-night publishers were popping up to cash in, and they were hungry for content. This opened the floodgates for hundreds of “iffy” artists who had their brief day in the sun, and were never heard from again. (Although some accomplished artists got their start during this period. Eisner Award winner Michael Avon Oeming is a fellow Comic Zone alumnus.) Gimmicks, not necessarily quality, were all the rage during the boom: hologram covers, foil covers, variant covers, foldout covers, die-cut covers, polybagged premiums, superhero makeovers, “death of” issues, inter-publisher crossovers, unauthorized celebrity bios, celebrity-created properties, #1 issues, #0 issues, and, ahem, spoof books. Never fear, the guys at Active Marketing were on it. Defective Comics Trading Cards would be sold in complete boxed sets or individual eight-card foil packs, with each pack containing one foil card (in silver or gold) and a sweepstakes entry, plus randomly inserted Autograph Cards signed by me. Anything to create buzz. Still, the Active guys—anxious for Defective to be a hit— were fishing for one more gimmick, and they asked if I had any ideas. I cooked up two proposals. One was a double-sided puzzle. (I fondly recalled that Topps’ second Batman series of 1966 had puzzles on the card-backs.) That went nowhere. But Active was intrigued by my second idea. I proposed to draw original artwork on blank cards, which Active could randomly insert into the foil packs, kind of like Autograph Cards on steroids. At the time of my pitch, I christened the concept—as God is my witness—the “Sketch Card.” But this wasn’t uncanny prescience on my part. The term was a natural. It was just a logical, intuitive variation on the established term Autograph Card. (Disclosure: I’m aware that at least two other artists are purported to have created the Sketch Card. I objectively believe I was there first, but my story never got out. The clock is ticking—I’m 61 as I write this, and already, certain cognitive functions are noticeably waning—so I’m finally reporting my version of events. Of course, I’m open to further evidence and testimony. We now return to our narrative.) I made the insane suggestion that I draw 500 Sketch Cards. I further suggested that, to make the idea seem more “official,” Active should print up 500 cards on flat-white stock that are blank on one side, and on the other side are marked “Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a Defective Comics Sketch Card!” I would draw, sign, and number the 500 cards, and ship them back to Active for insertion. And that’s just what we did. Drawing 500 Sketch Cards—I decided that no two should be alike—was a trip in itself, a mad rush. Top-ofthe-head topics included Silver Age tableaus, classic-rock lyrics, pop-culture musings, and many scenes featuring Spikey, the Defective Comics mascot loosely based on the subterranean monster from Jack Kirby’s iconic Fantastic Four #1 cover. I’m guessing it took me about two weeks to complete the cards. Card #1/500 declared itself the “first ever Sketch Card in the universe!” The 500th card showed a skeleton at a drawing table, tossing a Sketch Card onto a tall pile and saying, “Done.” On instinct, I photocopied all 500 cards for posterity. Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 77
Sketchy Characters (top) Examples of the 500 Sketch Cards drawn by Mark Voger in 1993 for his Defective Comics Trading Cards series. No two were alike. (bottom) Sketch Card #1 and #500. © Mark Voger.
In tiny type on the foil-pack wrappers, buyers were told their odds for obtaining a Sketch Card within: one in 4,320 packs. I sent press releases hyping Defective to all the major publications in the comic-book “trades”—Comics Buyer’s Guide, Comic Shop News, Wizard, Comics Scene, etc.—but didn’t get a single bite. That was discouraging, but I recognized that in ’93, there was an unprecedented glut of product. The bubble had yet to burst, and the trades couldn’t possibly cover it all. (Besides, as a newspaper guy, I was often on the opposite side of the equation.) But I still have copies of those releases, which tout “an original concept entirely new to the world of trading cards, the Sketch Card.” After all that effort, I sat back and waited to become a superstar. C’mon—I had a comic book and a trading card series of the same name coming out, from two different publishers, yet. I was on fire, yo! Alas, poor Yorick, superstardom was not in the, um, cards. The distribution for Defective Comics Trading Cards seemed good; I saw the boxes and foil packs at stores and shows. The printing was gorgeous, and there were die-cut point-of-purchase display boxes. But if I remember correctly, Active was disappointed in the orders overall. Certainly, plans for a Defective II series were never again broached. Likewise, there was never a second issue of Defective Comics,the comic book.
TIPPING POINT
This probably had something to do with the aforementioned Bust of ’93. Halfway through the year, the appetite for gimmicky comic books and related ephemera reached a tipping point, and the industry had one of its periodic implosions. Those fly-by-night publishers were vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. Even the majors felt the pinch. This left many “speculators”—folks who bought comics in hopes of escalating resale value—sitting on boxes of unwanted books. Does anyone out there need a copy of Eclipso #1? I know a guy. At Javits that January, I remember feeling like a dude with a promising career in comics. By the June ’93 show at Javits, I couldn’t get arrested. I was not alone. Fellow low-rung creators, who had also been riding high in January, were in a growing state of panic, stumbling around trying to pitch stuff, with nobody listening. I remember hearing people say, ”What’s going on?” There was talk of declining sales and tighter standards
for soliciting product to stores and vendors. And there was no Comic Zone booth to sit at and pretend to be a famous comic-book artist. (Sigh) It was fun while it lasted. I faded back into a deserved obscurity. But within the ensuing ten years, friends started noticing Defective Comics Trading Cards popping up on eBay (where they’ve been ever since). Once a year or so, I’d get an email from a collector asking if I was “that” Mark Voger. Still later, I discovered that over the years, Sketch Cards had officially become a “thing.” I had no idea. I finally learned this when I was among artists invited to draw Sketch Cards for auctions benefiting the March of Dimes and Be a Superhero For Babies. (The organizers said DC and Marvel characters were fair game! I jumped at the chance, since I’ll probably go to my grave never drawing for either publishing giant. Silver Age nut that I am, I drew interlocking cards of DC’s Metal Men and Inferior Five, and swipes of favorite Kirby panels from old Marvel books.) I was heartened to see that the term Sketch Card stuck. But I’m under no illusion that it was literally carried over from Defective. Like I said: The term was just a natural. Recently, I had a series of email exchanges with a Sketch Card expert and collector who wishes to remain anonymous, so as not to inflate the cost of his future purchases. I respect his privacy, but will share some of his conclusions. According to this gentleman, other claimants to the Creator of the Sketch Card throne also set their origins in 1993, but the exact chronology remains elusive. In any case, he identifies Defective as, pure and simple, the first series to name, produce, and market the Sketch Card, which he considers the “big bang” of the format. Curiously, this person added that since 1993, only two out of the 500 Defective Comics Sketch Cards have turned up within the Sketch Card-collecting community. (I’ve heard from both owners.) While there are still thousands of unopened foil packs out there—I’m sitting on several hundred myself—I have no way of knowing whether Active inserted all 500 cards. But, by gum, I drew ’em. A few times over the years, collectors have mailed me full boxed Defective sets with return postage, requesting that I sign every card. I am only too happy to do so. It’s nice to be remembered for something you did a long time ago. Unless, of course, it’s for being a serial killer. MARK VOGER writes extensively about this period in his book The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics (TwoMorrows Publishing). Reach him at MarkVoger@gmail.com. Any further evidence or testimony collected will be posted on his blog at MarkVoger.com. And yes, he will sign your Defective Comics Trading Cards—as long as you include return postage.
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IN MEMORIAM
I wanted to let you know that Billy Davis, Sr., the photographer of those Superman: The Movie images published in BI #115, passed away. If there’s an opportunity to mention him in a future issue, both his family and I would appreciate it. Thanks! – Robert V. Conte Our condolences to the Davis family over the loss of their patriarch. If you missed BACK ISSUE #115, in its Back Talk column we shared four photographs Mr. Davis snapped on the streets of “Metropolis” (Manhattan) during the filming of Superman, showing Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, outside of the Daily Planet building. Courtesy of our own Jarrod Buttery, who wrote the in-depth Dreadstar article in BACK ISSUE #115, comes the following message from the one and only Jim Starlin: “You and the rest of the BACK ISSUE gang did a bang-up job on the Dreadstar article. Thanks for making Vanth and I look so cool. – Jim” Thank you, o’ cosmic one! We’re blushing!
DOUBLE SHOT
BI #115 (“Sci-Fi Superheroes”) was an excellent issue. What I like about BACK ISSUE is that it’s so well written, I’ll read articles about characters I don’t care about. I really enjoyed the profile on the Steve Ditko-drawn “Starman” (in Adventure Comics). Lots of fond memories of that title. BI #116 (“Superheroes vs. Monsters” was another fun-filled issue. I was just reading The Batcave Companion [the 2009 TwoMorrows book co-written by ye ed and BI cover designer Michael Kronenberg—ed.] and it reminded me of all of Batman’s spooky adventures in the 1970s, but BI #116 really drove the point (or stake) home. Loved the profile of Baron Blood. That character always scared the #$!@ out of me when I was a kid. – Michael W. Rickard II Michael, you’re right that BI’s pages are filled with well-written articles by knowledgeable, enthusiastic writers. I’m lucky to have such a talented creative pool.
HIDDEN “JEMMS”
Though Ed Lute, in “Jemm, Son of Saturn” (BI #115), writes: “[Jemm] would make one final appearance in one panel of [Crisis on Infinite Earths] #10 (Jan. 1986) before disappearing from the comics scene…”, Jemm also made a Conan © Conan Properties International, LLC. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
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FROM INFINITY AND BEYOND
later appearance in several issues of the potboiler series The DC Challenge (1985–1986). The Grand Comics Database can tell you which ones. – Mike W. Barr Leave it to our always-helpful old chum Mike Barr to bring to our attention this little-known appearance of DC’s Son of Saturn. Ye ed scrolled through the GCD (www.comics.org) listings for DC Challenge, and found Jemm listed as appearing in only one issue, #5 (Mar. 1986). A page featuring the character appears above. Art by Dave Gibbons and Mark Farmer, with script by… Mike W. Barr. Next issue: Conan and the Barbarians issue, celebrating the 50th anniversary of ROY THOMAS and BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Conan #1! DC’s Bronze Age Barbarian Boom, Top 50 Marvel Conan stories, Marvel’s Not-Quite Conans (from Kull to Skull), Arak: Son of Thunder, Warlord action figures, GRAY MORROW’s Edge of Chaos, and Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics. Roy Thomas headlines an all-star roster of spotlighted creators including KURT BUSIEK, ERNIE COLÓN, TOMAS GIORELLO, MIKE GRELL, VAL MAYERIK, RON RANDALL, TIMOTHY TRUMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, and many more. Featuring the never-before-published alternate cover for Marvel’s Conan #9, from 1971. Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in thirty! Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief Her oes of Tomorr ow Issue • BACK ISSUE • 79
THE RETRO COMICS EXPERIENCE!
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Edited by MICHAEL EURY, BACK ISSUE magazine celebrates comic books of the 1970s, 1980s, and today through recurring (and rotating) departments like “Pro2Pro” (dialogue between professionals), “BackStage Pass” (behind-the-scenes of comics-based media), “Greatest Stories Never Told” (spotlighting unrealized comics series or stories), and more!
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BATMAN MOVIE 30th ANNIVERSARY! Producer MICHAEL USLAN and screenwriter SAM HAMM interviewed, a chat with BILLY DEE WILLIAMS (who was almost Two-Face), plus DENNY O’NEIL and JERRY ORDWAY’s Batman movie adaptation, MINDY NEWELL’s Catwoman, GRANT MORRISON and DAVE McKEAN’s Arkham Asylum, MAX ALLAN COLLINS’ Batman newspaper strip, and JOEY CAVALIERI & JOE STATON’s Huntress!
BLACK SUPERHEROES OF THE 1970s! History of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire! A retrospective of artist BILLY GRAHAM, a TONY ISABELLA interview, Black Lightning, Black Panther in the UK, Black Goliath, the Teen Titans’ Mal and Bumblebee, DON McGREGOR and PAUL GULACY’s Sabre, and… Black Bomber (who?). Featuring TREVOR VON EEDEN, STEVE ENGLEHART, ROY THOMAS, & a BILLY GRAHAM cover!
SCI-FI SUPERHEROES! In-depth looks at JIM STARLIN’s Dreadstar and Company, and the dystopian lawman Judge Dredd. Also: Nova, GERRY CONWAY & MIKE VOSBURG’s Starman, PAUL LEVITZ & STEVE DITKO’s Starman, WALTER SIMONSON’s Justice Peace (from the pages of Thor), and GREG POTTER & GENE COLAN’s Jemm, Son of Saturn! With a Dreadstar and Company cover by STARLIN and ALAN WEISS!
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SUPERHEROES VS. MONSTERS! Monsters in Metropolis, Batman and the Horror Genre, DOUG MOENCH and KELLEY JONES’ Batman: Vampire, Marvel Scream-Up, Dracula and Godzilla vs. Marvel, DC/Dark Horse Hero/Monster crossovers, and a Baron Blood villain history. With CLAREMONT, CONWAY, DIXON, GIBBONS, GRELL, GULACY, JURGENS, THOMAS, WOLFMAN, and a cover by MICHAEL GOLDEN.
SUPERHERO STAND-INS! John Stewart as Green Lantern, James Rhodes as Iron Man, Beta Ray Bill as Thor, Captain America substitute U.S. Agent, new Batman Azrael, and Superman’s Hollywood proxy Gregory Reed! Featuring NEAL ADAMS, CARY BATES, DAVE GIBBONS, RON MARZ, DAVID MICHELINIE, DENNIS O’NEIL, WALTER SIMONSON, ROY THOMAS, and more, under a cover by SIMONSON.
GREATEST STORIES NEVER TOLD! ALEX GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ISSUE! A ROSS’ unrealized Fantastic Four reboot, galaxy of comics stars discuss Marvel’s whiteDC: The Lost 1970s, FRANK THORNE’s hot space team in the Guardians Interviews, unpublished Red Sonja, Fury Force, VON including TOM DeFALCO, KEITH GIFFEN, EEDEN’s Batman, GRELL’s Batman/Jon Sable, ROB LIEFELD, AL MILGROM, MARY CLAREMONT and SIM’s X-Men/Cerebus, SKRENES, ROGER STERN, JIM VALENTINO, SWAN and HANNIGAN’s Skull and Bones, and more. Plus: Star-Lord and Rocket AUGUSTYN and PAROBECK’s Target, PAUL Raccoon before the Guardians, with CHRIS KUPPERBERG’s Impact reboot, abandoned CLAREMONT and MIKE MIGNOLA. Cover Swamp Thing storylines, & more! ROSS cover. by JIM VALENTINO with inks by CHRIS IVY.
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RetroFan: The Pop Culture You Grew Up With! If you love Pop Culture of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, editor MICHAEL EURY’s latest magazine is just for you!
RETROFAN #11 (Now Bi-Monthly!)
Just in time for Halloween, RETROFAN #11 features interviews with Dark Shadows’ Quentin Collins, DAVID SELBY, and the niece of movie Frankenstein Glenn Strange, JULIE ANN REAMS. Plus: KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER, ROD SERLING retrospective, CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST, TV’s Adventures of Superman, Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen, QUISP and QUAKE cereals, the Drak Pak and the Monster Squad, scratch model customs, and more fun, fab features! Featuring columns by ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW! Edited by MICHAEL EURY. (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $9.95 • (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships September 2020
RETROFAN #6
RETROFAN #7
RETROFAN #8
RETROFAN #9
RETROFAN #10
Interviews with MeTV’s crazy creepster SVENGOOLIE and Eddie Munster himself, BUTCH PATRICK! Call on the original Saturday Morning GHOST BUSTERS, with BOB BURNS! Uncover the nutty NAUGAS! Plus: “My Life in the Twilight Zone,” “I Was a Teenage James Bond,” “My Letters to Famous People,” the ARCHIE-DOBIE GILLIS connection, Pinball Hall of Fame, Alien action figures, Rubik’s Cube & more!
With a JACLYN SMITH interview, as we reopen the Charlie’s Angels Casebook, and visit the Guinness World Records’ largest Charlie’s Angels collection. Plus: interview with LARRY STORCH, The Lone Ranger in Hollywood, The Dick Van Dyke Show, a vintage interview with Jonny Quest creator DOUG WILDEY, a visit to the Land of Oz, the ultra-rare Marvel World superhero playset, and more!
NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with the ’60s grooviest family band THE COWSILLS, and TV’s coolest mom JUNE LOCKHART! Mars Attacks!, MAD Magazine in the ’70s, Flintstones turn 60, Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, Honey West, Max Headroom, Popeye Picnic, the Smiley Face fad, & more! With MICHAEL EURY, ERNEST FARINO, ANDY MANGELS, WILL MURRAY, SCOTT SAAVEDRA, and SCOTT SHAW!
NOW BI-MONTHLY! Interviews with ’70s’ Captain America REB BROWN, and Captain Nice (and Knight Rider’s KITT) WILLIAM DANIELS with wife BONNIE BARTLETT! Plus: Coloring Books, Fall Previews for Saturday morning cartoons, The Cyclops movie, actors behind your favorite TV commercial characters, BENNY HILL, the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, 8-track tapes, and more!
NOW BI-MONTHLY! Celebrating fifty years of SHAFT, interviews with FAMILY AFFAIR’s KATHY GARVER and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’s GERI “FAKE JAN” REISCHL, ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH, rare GODZILLA merchandise, Spaghetti Westerns, Saturday morning cartoon preview specials, fake presidential candidates, Spider-Man/The Spider parallels, Stuckey’s, and more fun, fab features!
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RETROFAN #1
RETROFAN #2
RETROFAN #3
RETROFAN #4
RETROFAN #5
LOU FERRIGNO interview, The Phantom in Hollywood, Filmation’s STAR TREK CARTOON, “How I Met LON CHANEY, JR.”, goofy comic Zody the Mod Rob, Mego’s rare ELASTIC HULK toy, RetroTravel to Mount Airy, NC (the real-life Mayberry), interview with BETTY LYNN (“Thelma Lou” of THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW), TOM STEWART’s eclectic House of Collectibles, and MR. MICROPHONE!
Horror-hosts ZACHERLEY, VAMPIRA, SEYMOUR, MARVIN, and an interview with our cover-featured ELVIRA! THE GROOVIE GOOLIES, BEWITCHED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS! The long-buried Dinosaur Land amusement park! History of BEN COOPER HALLOWEEN COSTUMES, character lunchboxes, superhero VIEW-MASTERS, SINDY (the British Barbie), and more!
Interview with SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE director RICHARD DONNER, IRWIN ALLEN’s sci-fi universe, Saturday morning’s undersea adventures of Aquaman, horror and sci-fi zines of the Sixties and Seventies, Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper, RetroTravel to METROPOLIS, IL (home of the Superman Celebration), SEA-MONKEYS®, FUNNY FACE beverages, Superman/Batman memorabilia, & more!
Interviews with SHAZAM! TV show’s JOHN (Captain Marvel) DAVEY and MICHAEL (Billy Batson) Gray, the GREEN HORNET in Hollywood, remembering monster maker RAY HARRYHAUSEN, the way-out Santa Monica Pacific Ocean Amusement Park, a Star Trek Set Tour, SAM J. JONES on the Spirit movie pilot, British sci-fi TV classic THUNDERBIRDS, Casper & Richie Rich museum, the KING TUT fad, and more!
Interviews with MARK HAMILL & Greatest American Hero’s WILLIAM KATT! Blast off with JASON OF STAR COMMAND! Stop by the MUSEUM OF POPULAR CULTURE! Plus: “The First Time I Met Tarzan,” MAJOR MATT MASON, MOON LANDING MANIA, SNUFFY SMITH AT 100 with cartoonist JOHN ROSE, TV Dinners, Celebrity Crushes, and more fun, fab features!
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ALTER EGO #164
ALTER EGO #165
ALTER EGO #166
Spotlight on MIKE FRIEDRICH, DC/Marvel writer who jumpstarted the independent comics movement with Star*Reach! Art by NEAL ADAMS, GIL KANE, DICK DILLIN, IRV NOVICK, JOHN BUSCEMA, JIM STARLIN, HOWARD CHAYKIN, FRANK BRUNNER, et al.! Plus: MARK CARLSONGHOST on Rural Home Comics, FCA, and Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt! Justice League of America cover by NEAL ADAMS!
WILL MURRAY showcases original Marvel publisher (from 1939-1971) MARTIN GOODMAN, with artifacts by LEE, KIRBY, DITKO, ROMITA, MANEELY, BUSCEMA, EVERETT, BURGOS, GUSTAVSON, SCHOMBURG, COLAN, ADAMS, STERANKO, and many others! Plus FCA, Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt with more on PETE MORISI, JOHN BROOME, and a cover by DREW FRIEDMAN!
FAWCETT COLLECTORS OF AMERICA (FCA) Special, with spotlights on KURT SCHAFFENBERGER (Captain Marvel, Ibis the Invincible, Marvel Family, Lois Lane), and ALEX ROSS on his awesome painting of the super-heroes influenced by the original Captain Marvel! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT’s “Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt” on Superman editor MORT WEISINGER, JOHN BROOME, and more! Cover by SCHAFFENBERGER!
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KIRBY COLLECTOR #78
SILVER ANNIVERSARY ISSUE! How Kirby kickstarted the Silver Age and revamped Golden Age characters for the 1960s, the Silver Surfer’s influence, pivotal decisions (good and bad) Jack made throughout his comics career, Kirby pencil art gallery, MARK EVANIER and our regular columnists, a classic 1950s story, KIRBY/STEVE RUDE cover (and deluxe silver sleeve) and more! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (DELUXE EDITION w/ silver sleeve) $12.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Now shipping!
BACK ISSUE #121 BACK ISSUE #122 AMERICAN COMIC BOOK AMERICAN COMIC BOOK AND THE BARBARIANS! Celebrating Celebrates the 40TH ANNIVERSARY of CHRONICLES: 1940-44 CHRONICLES: The 1980s CONAN the 50th anniversary of ROY THOMAS and MARV WOLFMAN and GEORGE PÉREZ’s
KIRBY COLLECTOR #79
See “THE BIG PICTURE” of how Kirby fits into the grand scheme of things! His creations’ lasting legacy, how his work fights illiteracy, a RARE KIRBY INTERVIEW, inconsistencies in his 1960s MARVEL WORK, editorial changes in his comics, big concepts in OMAC, best DOUBLE-PAGE SPREADS, MARK EVANIER’s 2019 Kirby Tribute Panel, PENCIL ART GALLERY, and a new cover based on OMAC #1! (84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 • Ships Spring 2020
BACK ISSUE #123
Covers comics’ WWII GOLDEN AGE! EISNER’s Uncle Sam and work with IGER, SIMON & KIRBY’s Captain America, birth of Archie Andrews, “packagers” like HARRY A CHESLER, and how dozens of companies published the entire gamut of genres, from funny animas & crime to jungle & sci-fi adventures. By KURT MITCHELL with ROY THOMAS.
NEW PRINTING with corrections, better binding, & enhanced cover durability! KEITH DALLAS documents comics’ 1980s Reagan years: Rise and fall of JIM SHOOTER, FRANK MILLER as comic book superstar, DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, MOORE and GAIMAN’s British invasion, ECLIPSE, PACIFIC, FIRST, COMICO, DARK HORSE and more!
BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH’s Conan #1! The Bronze Age Barbarian Boom, Top 50 Marvel Conan stories, Marvel’s Not-Quite Conans (from Kull to Skull), Arak–Son of Thunder, Warlord action figures, GRAY MORROW’s Edge of Chaos, and Conan the Barbarian at Dark Horse Comics. With an unused WINDSOR-SMITH Conan #9 cover.
New Teen Titans, featuring a guest editorial by WOLFMAN and a PÉREZ tribute and art gallery! Plus: The New Teen Titans’ 40 GREATEST MOMENTS, the Titans in the media, hero histories of RAVEN, STARFIRE, and the PROTECTOR, and more! With a NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED PÉREZ TITANS COVER from 1981!
SUPERHERO ROMANCE ISSUE! Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark’s many loves, Star Sapphire history, Bronze Age weddings, DeFALCO/ STERN Johnny Storm/Alicia Pro2Pro interview, Elongated Man and Wife, May-December romances, Supergirl’s Secret Marriage, and… Aunt May and Doc Ock?? Featuring MIKE W. BARR, CARY BATES, STEVE ENGLEHART, BOB LAYTON, DENNY O’NEIL, and many more! Cover by DAVE GIBBONS.
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TwoMorrows. The Future of Comics History.
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive COMIC BOOK CREATOR #22 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #23 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #24 WORLD OF TWOMORROWS Raleigh, NC 27614 USA P. CRAIG RUSSELL career-spanning interview WENDY PINI discusses her days as Red Sonja TIMOTHY TRUMAN discusses his start at Celebrate our 25th anniversary with this 919-449-0344 (complete with photos and art gallery), an cosplayer, and 40+ years of ELFQUEST! Plus the Kubert School, Grimjack with writer retrospective by publisher JOHN MORROW almost completely unknown work by FRANK RICHARD PINI on their 48-year marriage and JOHN OSTRANDER, and current collaboand Comic Book Creator magazine’s E-mail: QUITELY (artist on All-Star Superman and The Authority), DERF BACKDERF’s forthcoming graphic novel commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, CAROL TYLER shares her prolific career, JOE SINNOTT discusses his Treasure Chest work, CRAIG YOE, and more!
creative partnership! SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! GIL KANE’s business partner LARRY KOSTER about their adventures together! PABLO MARCOS on his Marvel horror work, HEMBECK, and more!
rations with son Benjamin. SCOTT SHAW! talks about early San Diego Comic-Cons and friendship with JACK KIRBY, Captain Carrot, and Flintstones work! Also PATRICK McDONNELL’s favorite MUTTS comic book pastiches, letterer JANICE CHIANG profiled, HEMBECK, and more! TIM TRUMAN cover.
JON B. COOKE! Go behind-the-scenes with MICHAEL EURY, ROY THOMAS, GEORGE KHOURY, and a host of other TwoMorrows contributors! Introduction by MARK EVANIER, Foreword by ALEX ROSS, Afterword by PAUL LEVITZ, and a new cover by TOM McWEENEY!
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