Bronze Age Legion Writers

 

The Legion of Super Writers Part 2

by Emsley Wyatt

As we profiled in the first part of this article, the Legion of Super-Heroes had a group of talented men guiding their destinies from their very beginning: Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, and Jim Shooter. After the Legion of Super-Heroes were unceremoniously kicked out of Adventure Comics in 1969, then-writer Jim Shooter left the series. He has said that economically he needed to write 17-page stories, and that he could literally not afford to write the 8-page back-ups. 

Although it is said that the Bronze Age begins a few years after this, with the decommissioning of the Legion from Adventure Comics and the near simultaneous loss of Jim Shooter, this seemed like a good breaking off point.  

Regardless of when he started, the Legion writer of record when the Bronze Age began was Cary Bates, born in 1948 (exact date not publicly shared). 

Bates had a long career in comics, mostly with Superman and Flash. He did a couple dozen Legion stories but most were one-offs, with little in the way of contribution to long-term Legion lore.  However, he did help create Legionnaires Tyroc and Wildfire, as well as future-member Absorbency Boy, aka Earth Man.  He also created the concept of Legion clones, which factored in greatly during the 5YL series.  But, hey, even the Legion of Super Writers needs a Bouncing Boy.  Don't take this as a knock on Bates.  He's done some inspired work, just not during his run on The Legion.  It was clearly, for him, just another assignment.  Not so for the next Legion writer.

Tyroc takes on Absorbency Boy (from Superboy 218)

That next writer was Paul Levitz. (10/21/1956-). He handled the Legion twice, once from 1976-1978 and again from 1981-1989. 

Like Shooter before him, Levitz grew up as a consumer of the medium he later came to create.  This distinguished them from the earlier generation of writers, who had come to comics from or as an adjunct to, writing in other media.  Indeed, Levitz has stated that the Legion's run in Adventure was the first comic series that he collected as a reader.  His obvious love for, and knowledge of, the series stood him in good stead as a writer for the series.  In an interview with Comics Feature magazine (No. 15, January '81) Levitz stated: “I know the characters.  I know the four thousand stupid worlds we've established across the galaxy, which ones have three-toed people, which one has the beast-men, and which one is the unexplored where they have super-technology and weapons no one's ever seen before.”

Levitz also spoke of the difficulty of the Legion series for the artists, simply because of the fact that everything you see has to be made up from scratch.  Superman you can show flying over a city.  Batman you can show punching somebody.  But with the Legion you have a large cast and might have to draw a lightning beast from Korbal.  Can't exactly look that one up in the encyclopedia.

Reading that interview and the chapter on Levitz in Teenagers From the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes (Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, 2008)give one a real insight into Levitz's creative process.  Levitz also drew inspiration from Roy Thomas' run on The Avengers, going so far as to “reverse engineer” Thomas' stories to figure out for himself how those stories were developed.  

When the Legion premiered in the Fifties, the prevailing format for comic stories was short and self-contained. Continuity was, to put it mildly, de-emphasized. As reader tastes changed and, perhaps more to the point, distribution became more reliable, two part stories became more prevalent.  By the time Levitz arrived on the scene, multi-issue arcs were more the norm. 

Like a chess-player thinking several moves ahead, Levitz would think about eight issues ahead, with a column on a chart representing each issue.  Individual issues were plotted vertically, while ongoing subplots were developed horizontally.  Then the elements of each issue, plot and subplots, were rearranged for best dramatic impact.  Consider the subplot of Shrinking Violet, being abducted and replaced by Yera at some point during the Espionage Squad mission to the Khund homeworld. That particular subplot went on for over a year before coming to full fruition.  Or Darkseid's final threat to the Legion, which was not being fully realized until almost four years later with the revelation that Validus was the time-displaced offspring of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl.

Just as Shooter was the master of the two-part story, Levitz mastered the multi-issue arc.  Think of the Earthwar series, or the Magic Wars, or “Who is Sensor Girl?” and, of course, Levitz's magnum opus, “The Great Darkness Saga”.

The Kryptonian cousins pummel Darkseid 
(Legion of Super-Heroes 294)

Levitz ended his run with the Legion with the August, 1989 issue, although he did return to the series for an occasional story.  He retired from DC comics at the end of 2020.

During the period between Levitz's stints as Legion writer the series was helmed by Gerry Conway. (09/10/1952-)

Conway is best known for his work at Marvel, where he had a long run on Amazing Spider-man, penning the “Death of Gwen Stacy” storyline.  He also co-created the proto-typical anti-hero The Punisher and wrote the first Superman/Spider-man crossover comic.

His work on the Legion, however, was, in my opinion at least, less than stellar.  Still, it did have some  high points.  He authored the “Dark Man” story arc, and the story in which Superboy parts company with the Legion (for a while, anyway).  He created the Legionnaire Blok, but Blok always struck me as a rip-off of The Hulk.  I mean, really, could a character be more like The Hulk?  What?  Monstress?  OK, I see your point.  Oh, and he also started off the “Reflecto” storyline before passing it off to Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz.

What I said earlier about Cary Bates viewing the Legion as just another assignment seems also to be true of Conway. Referencing Paul Levitz's introduction to Before the Darkness, the collection of these works, Levitz made clear that Conway didn't necessarily want to script the LSH, but he was a good soldier and script the books he did.

Following Levitz's second run, we come to the last writer of the original Legion, Keith Giffen (11/30/1952-).

Giffen was the writer who created the “Five Years Later” run. (Typically abbreviated as “5YL”.)

Among Legion fans it is said that you either love Giffen's run on the book or hate it. Ever the contrarian, I have to confess that I'm somewhat ambivalent about it. Within the five-year time jump the Legion had disbanded, and Earth had come under the control of  the Dominators. Using such a setting, Giffen knocked from under the Legion two of its principal supports: namely, the idyllic future (well, as idyllic as a future could be when you have to worry about invasion by the Dark Circle or the Khunds or having Validus rampage down main street); and its composition as one of only a few all-teen super-teams.  

It is extremely hard to separate Giffen's writing from his art on the book.  For one thing, to me all his characters look alike.  Well, the male characters all look like each other, with half-finished and chiseled features, and the female characters all look like they've had collagen injections.  It's hard to follow sometimes when you can't tell who's talking to whom.  If it weren't for the costumes...........wait, he got rid of the costumes, too.  Oh, well, at least you can still pick out Chameleon Boy and Brainiac 5.  Giffen also was overly wedded to the nine panel grid layout which, in my opinion, gave the book an incongruously "retro" look.  Not really appropriate for a story line with a futuristic setting.

Still, if there were one word I would apply to the Giffen run, it would be audacious.  He obliterated the moon, the Earth, and entire timelines willy-nilly. But in the end, he didn't just put all the toys back in the box. Through the use of the “SW-6” clones, he restored the youthful Legion in its entirety (well, except for Superboy and Supergirl), even resurrecting long dead members such as Ferro Lad and the original Invisible Kid. This made it possible for later writers to take the series back to its roots.  Not a bad conclusion.

And speaking of conclusions, this concludes my overview on the writers of the original Legion of Super-Heroes.  Just as the original Legion was known for its teamwork, so too was the Legion of Super-Writers.  Only their teamwork took place across time.  Each built on what had come before and each left a base for future writers to build on.  Others not named in this series made their contributions too, most notably Roy Thomas and E. Nelson Bridwell.  Binder set the stage, Siegel made that stage part of a larger world, Hamilton made that world part of a larger universe, Shooter populated that universe with living, breathing characters, Levitz gave those characters suitable adventures, and Giffen took those characters into adulthood. So, when you read a later story of the Legion such as Legion Lost or even the recent Bendis-Sook series, take a moment and remember those who made it all possible: The Legion of Super-Writers. Heroes all.

To order Teenagers From the Future for yourself visit the Sequart Research & Literacy Organization home-page.