Saturday, March 7, 2015

Legion Icons

Have you ever noticed in certain stories, when the Legionnaire is on monitor duty and looks up at the Mission Monitor Board, who or what the icons are that represent the membership of the Legion?

Here then are the icons associated with the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

I like how each of the Substitute Heroes have their own icons, too.



And as an example of how they are used, here is the Wheel of Terror from Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #1 by Keith Giffen. You will see each of the Legionnaires shown on the outer circle.
On the inner circle are four more that we can easily recognize as representing Bouncing Boy, Supergirl, Duo Damsel, and Light Lass.
You may notice on the top left the icon located between Karate Kid and White Witch. That must represent Princess Projectra. It appears to be a crown, but maybe that's an illusion...?

Here is an enlargement of the cover of Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #12 with each of the then-current 22 Legionnaires' icons. Art is by Steve Lightle, but I don't know if he also drew these, or if they were used from the Master List above.


You will notice that on the second (bottom) row there are two slight changes from the Master List. First, the third from the left is Dawnstar's "star" logo, but it is not quite as elongated as it is on the Master List. Secondly, the fourth from the right is a "bouncing" lightning symbol that must represent Lightning Lass.

After the last five members of the Bronze Age joined in LSH (v3) #15, we saw their icons being used during LSH (v3) #51 "The Trial of Brainiac 5." In that issue the mission monitor board itself was shown as the "tally-board" for the Legionnaires to vote either "Guility" or "Innocent" on whether what Brainiac 5 had done to The Infinite Man was murder or not.
You'll see that the newbies are all present....Polar Boy is at the top of the second column, with Quislet right below him after Saturn Girl. Underneath him (it?) is Tellus and Magnetic Kid. Sensor Girl's "S" is directly below White Witch in the third column.
The most interesting thing here is that Tellus' icon is a simplified version of what is listed on the Master List. This evidently represents the gem on his forehead.

4 comments:

  1. Projectra's symbol was definitely a crown. The same symbol used to be on the top of the boots of her red costume

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    1. Yes, that's right. I forgot that she had that flourish on her boots. Good catch, TomG!

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  2. Both Karate Kids have different symbols. I have to wonder why there weren't two for the Invisible Kids.

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  3. There's also two rows of MMB icons in book 2 of "History of the DC Universe" -- the gorgeous double-page spread by George Perez.

    There are some differences between Perez's symbols and those of Giffen & Lightle; as George was not the regular Legion artist any time after Keith "formalized" them, I give less weight to his interpretations than the others'.

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