Legion of Super-Heroes: The Silver Age Vol. 1

Legion of Super Heroes: The Silver Age #1

by Otto Binder (writer), Edmond Hamilton (writer), Jerry Siegel (writer)

It started out as just another Superboy story--on the face of it, perhaps a bit more innovative than most, although it was published during one of the most creative periods in DC Comics history. It wound up changing the entire comics field.

The Legion of Super-Heroes was merely a clever title for a group of teenage superheroes (only three of whom were actually named) from the far future who went back in time to pay tribute to the greatest teenage superhero of them all--the Boy of Steel, Superboy. But the interest from comics fans was so great, the super-team was brought back time and time again, in the majority of Superman Family titles. Eventually, demand grew so strong that the Legion of Super-Heroes was awarded its own continuing series.

Legion of Super-Heroes: The Silver Age Vol. 1 collects stories from Adventure Comics #247, #267, #282, #290, #293, #300-310, Action Comics #267, #276, #287, #289, Superboy #86, #89, #98 and Superman #147.

Genres: Comics, Dc Comics, Superheroes, Comic Book, Graphic Novels, Superman

328 pages, Paperback

Published August 28, 2018

About the author

Otto Oscar Binder. Used these alternate names: Eando Binder (together with his brother Earl Binder -E and O Binder-), John Coleridge, Gordon A. Giles, Will Garth, Ian Francis Turek, Ione Frances Turek and Otto O. Binder.

Reviews

[Louie the Mustache Matos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved the Legion of Super-Heroes since the late 1970s, when they had their own comic book title called Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and have tried to keep up-to-date with the current state of the Legion. The less said about the current Legion, the better. Odd for me to see that the Legion was introduced in the late 1950s as really throwaway backup stories to the Superman and Supergirl titles. I was unaware of this and found it not just enlightening, but incredibly fortunate that the stories caught on. When coming across this collection of the early stories, I had to go through them slowly. Not because they were less than enjoyable, but because they were excessively repetitive. (The Legion was constantly adding to their stable of characters, so every other story was about new members joining.) The stories (mind you) were spaced out over the course of years. They were written and drawn by disparate artists and writers, so it's amazing the consistency of the quality. Clearly, the concept of them being a club of superpowered individuals in their teens resonated with people. Remember that Superboy, then Supergirl in the 50s were the only DC superheroes. There was an incredible loneliness in being so unique that they felt ostracized. Finding friendships with youth their own age that had similar values, responsibilities, and insecurities was enervating. That freshness of concept is overt in these stories. Some of the extraordinary early talents included not just Otto Binder, but also Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan, Al Plastino, and a personal favorite Sheldon Moldoff of Batman and EC fame. This is a classic because it created a paradigm, is exceptional, and for its longevity of more than 64 years.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big collection containing the first two-dozen tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, which originally appeared in 1958-1963 issues of Superboy, Superman, Action Comics, and Adventure Comics. There were a lot more words (!!!!and!exclamation!points!!!!) per page than one finds in contemporary comics, and they were aimed at a juvenile audience (they were generally known as "funny books"), so it's difficult to rank and compare them, but they're fun stories, do what they were intended to do, and I enjoyed them very much back in the day and it was fun revisiting them. The Legion started with three members, but one or two seemed to be added each issue. They had one nifty super-power each (not counting the Super folks), and several of the group seemed to me to prefigure various X-Men, both by power and character. The work of seven different artists is included (John Forte, George Papp, Jim Mooney, Curt Swan, Al Plastino, George Klein, and Sheldon Moldoff), and the characters' portrayals is remarkably consistent. There are two stories written by Otto Binder (including the "origin"), two by Robert Bernstein, the final five are by science fiction great Edmond Hamilton, and all of the rest were done by Jerry Siegel (and if you don't know that name....!) Being from the Eisenhower/Camelot era, there's nothing in the way of diverse representation, though a few girls were allowed to join the club. Supergirl was dissed in the pages of her own magazine in a story called "Supergirl's Greatest Challenge!", the introduction to which says: "Though she's as super-powerful as Superman, Supergirl is, after all, a mere girl." Ouch... one of the original three Legionnaires was Saturn Girl, who usually didn't get sexist discrimination, though a time or two she was excused from dangerous missions because of her gender. Anyway, the Legion solved problems and fought threats and monsters as much as super-criminals, though they sunk into silliness a time or two. For example, in "The Secret of Mon-El," Superboy sees a threat and says: "It's a jack-in-the-box-monster...probably left behind in a space wreck by a weird race of space people who made crazy toys! Let's destroy it! You take one head! I'll take the other! It'll be a regular double-header!" Another problem was the continuity... sometimes they're in the far-future twenty-first century, sometimes in the thirty-first, sometimes in the thirtieth... The editors weren't keeping their stories straight at all, thinking that the kids wouldn't notice and never dreaming that the stories would still be around in that mythical twenty-first century. It's easy to pick nits and/or single out nifty bits, but the whole point is to have some fun entertainment with bright colors and happy themes and no deep concentration required, which the Legion provided quite well through The Silver Age.

[Tom Ewing · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must have slogged through the first two thirds of this book piecemeal over a year; then whipped through the final dozen stories in a week. The turning point is the Legion’s graduation from a recurring hook for Superboy stories to the stars of their own feature. As Superboy guest stars they’re subject to the remorseless formula of Weisinger-era Super-tales - a disruptive event on the cover to lure the buyer in (“Gasp! That new arrival in Smallville has super-powers too!”), a sequence of unlikely events and super-feats and then a final act reveal. The Legion’s constant battery of new members, initiation tests etc provided a stream of set-ups for stories which read numbingly similar when collected together rather than spaced out over several years.

Fortunately, the fans liked the Legion enough for them to get their own strip, in which Superboy is confined to an occasional bit part. Even more fortunately, DC tapped Jerry Siegel, among others, to write it. Siegel’s mix of sentimentality, occasionally piercing psychology and completely batshit plotting is a weirdly productive fit with the Weisinger formula in which no loose ends are permitted. Repeatedly we find stories getting far weirder than they actually need to be.

Take “The End Of Sun Boy”, a story which sets up a surprisingly (for early 60s DC) adult story of power loss resulting from a crisis of confidence and ego (Sun Boy is forced to destroy his own statue on a mission and finds himself unable to ahem “spark up” afterwards). The story resolves it - but then has to spend two pages explaining an extremely minor plot hole by cavalierly declaring two characters to be robots sent out of the past who were unaware they were robots because a meteor shower had coincidentally damaged their memories in exactly the same way. Naturally.

Meanwhile the Legion’s cast was expanding (since Legion tryouts were a very easy and popular way to fill a page of two) and the vast roster allowed more leeway than usual - including a lead character dying and (despite constant teases) not being brought back, at least not in this volume. The way in which the Legion stoically get back to business as usual despite this both reads very strangely now but also, to be honest, anticipates superhero death across the 50+ years since. No surprise that a huge and theory-rich fandom arose to fill in the colossal psychological gaps in the stories here.

[Shane Stanis · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are definitely stories from another era. I imagine they would be a lot of fun as a kid in the 60s.

For today, it sits in a rough spot - probably too childish for teens/most adults, and dated (and maybe wordy) for kids. It’s also real real white.

Still the stories are fun, the mysteries are silly, and the space age art pops.

[Zack! Empire · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I'm giving this five stars, even though I did have some problems with it. I've always wanted to read more Legion, but I've never been sure where to start. This seemed like as good a place as any.
The book is Silver age in that it can feel a bit dated in some places, and a little silly. But, I've certainly read Silver age DC stories that were way worse. This book is more of the fun kind of silly than the annoying kind of silly. It also works well for the story since some of that silliness is things like a creature that has lighting for eyes, but it's an alien, so there is no reason it couldn't have that.
My big problem with this book is that the stories seem to repeat alot. The Legion only admits one new member a year, but most of the stories center around the introduction of a new member. The writing does it's best to change it up, but it's kind of the same every time.
Towards the end of the book we really get a sense of where the Legion seems to be heading, with them actually fighting villains and such. That was when it really picked up.
I'm excited to pick up a second volume, but DC doesn't seem like they are in a hurry to print up trade paperbacks of these Omnibus books. Honestly, I would consider buying those just to keep reading these stories.

[Nate]

These early Legion of Super-Heroes stories are pretty fun. Seeing members join, and watching these young, determined heroes work together is a joy. Around 20 Legionnaires are introduced across the 24 issues collected here (including the Legion of Substitute Heroes). The first half of the book is more focused on Superboy and Supergirl, with stories taken largely from Superboy and Action Comics. It isn’t until the “Tales” features in Adventure Comics that the Legion really takes center stage. I liked these better, because the characters get fleshed out. There’s a surprising amount of depth in these latter issues, too, and they’re generally more exciting.

[Brian Poole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legion of Super-Heroes: The Silver Age Volume One collects the earliest appearances of the enduring team in chronological order.

It started as a throwaway story idea: three super-powered teenagers from the future traveled back in time to invite Superboy (the teenaged version of flagship hero Superman and an enduring attraction for DC Comics) to join their club. After some good-natured hazing, the Teen of Steel was welcomed with open arms. Reader reactions were positive, so over the next couple of years, the Legion kept popping up as guest stars in a variety of Superman-related books, along the way inducting Superman’s teenaged cousin, Supergirl, as a part-time member, too. Turning up more and more frequently, the team finally graduated to its own ongoing feature in Adventure Comics in the Fall of 1962.

In many ways, the Legion and its somewhat haphazard course was emblematic of DC Comics in the Silver Age. They earned their stripes with fans via guest stints, until the publisher deemed there was sufficient engagement to support an ongoing feature. The Superman connection was critical, as the story had it that his legend endured far into the future, inspiring the teens of the Legion to heroism. The time travel element allowed the Legion to interact with Superboy and Superman both, as well as his cousin (still a teen during Superman’s adult years). The stories in The Silver Age Volume One bear all the charming and occasionally maddening hallmarks of DC’s Silver Age output.

The Legion franchise reflected DC’s attitude toward continuity at the time, which was a moving target at best. DC editorial was notorious for retro-constructing stories to match a striking cover image they’d already concocted. That meant that writers and artists frequently were forced to ignore established facts or find a way to massage events to support the cover concept without entirely throwing the basics out the window. That might mean, for example, that writers had a hard time remembering just how far in the future the Legion lived. At times, it was explicitly stated that the team came from a thousand years after the publication time. At other times, they were noted to be “from the 21st century,” only a few decades ahead of the setting for Superboy’s adventures (roughly the late ‘40s for stories published in the early ‘60s). Characterization was inconsistent. In one tale, Saturn Girl seized control of the team to set herself up for a potential suicide mission and spare her teammates; but only a few months later, still the putative team leader, she mutely accepted Brainiac 5’s dictum that she couldn’t volunteer for another dangerous mission because she was a girl. These early Legion stories also relied on tried and true plot devices of the DC stable of the time, including fantastic coincidences, smart characters being dumb or gullible, convenient turns of events that moved the plot along and the prevalence of deus ex machina moments to wrap up stories. And if all else failed, most issues ended with a figurative push of the “reset” button anyway.

One of the more daring stories for its day was the decision to kill off popular founding member Lightning Lad, who swooped into the suicide mission in Saturn Girl’s place. That was a decent example of observing the feature’s continuity, as the romantic feelings between the duo had been slowly bubbling to the surface. And unlike other stories (including one in this very collection) where a dramatic “death” was used to grab attention but was undone inside of a few pages, Lightning Lad’s demise lasted for quite some time, with frequent references to it in the stories that followed.

When it came to futurism, seeing Silver Age creators’ conception of what that might look like can be a charming experience for contemporary readers. Some elements could be head-scratching (the complete lack of minorities in the future, unless you counted orange-skinned Chameleon Boy or green-skinned Brainiac 5), and it would be a long time before creators learned that just slapping “astro” or some other futuristic sounding prefix onto words didn’t necessarily make an object feel like it came from ten centuries on.

The Legion was ahead of the curve in having several female members. Saturn Girl was a founder and was usually a strong, central part of the action. But other than the rarely appearing Supergirl, many of the other female members (Phantom Girl, Shrinking Violet and Triplicate Girl) were deployed more as background elements, used poorly and developed almost not at all. The long-term story took a gender-bending turn that was daring for the time, when Lightning Lad’s twin sister impersonated him and pretended he’d “come back from the dead” before the truth came out and she joined the team as Lightning Lass, who had a more visceral power than most of the other female members.

For a franchise known for its striking rogues gallery, these early Legion stories also featured few memorable villains. Superman’s arch-foe Lex Luthor figured in a couple of plots, and the collection does include the introductions of notable Legion menaces like the original Legion of Super-Villains (Lightning Lord, Cosmic King and Saturn Queen) and space pirate Roxxas. But apart from a couple of colorful one-off villains near the end of the run collected here, the Legion mostly faced a variety of evil scientists, would-be futuristic crooks and garish monsters that tended toward the generic.

For Legion fans, though, this is a vital glimpse into the team’s origins. Many of the mainstays of decades of stories started in this stretch, several of them getting nice spotlights. A lot of the team’s basics were laid out here, elements that might evolve over the years to come but would remain recognizably part of the franchise’s fabric (like leader elections and the team’s at times contentious relationship with Earth’s government). And while some of these tales can feel throwaway (Supergirl going on a cross-time rampage because she’s suddenly distraught that her unmarried cousin will die an unhappy bachelor?), there are some notable events. The Legion of Super-Villains would become a significant recurring threat for the heroes and Roxxas would be back to cause more mayhem. Mon-El’s introduction cast Superboy in an unflattering light, but the ongoing feature solved the issue of making him an ongoing part of the cast. The death of Lightning Lad was notable for how rare significant heroic fatalities were at the time and how long the series allowed the popular character to remain off the board. The foundations for the enduring Lightning Lad/Saturn Girl romance were given root here.

Numerous Silver Age luminaries worked on these stories, including names like Curt Swan, Otto Binder, Al Plastino, Jerry Siegel, Jim Mooney, Edmond Hamilton and John Forte. These creators innovated many of the elements that would make the Legion an ongoing favorite, many of which would evolve with the series over decades. The simpler, in many ways gentler, approach may seem quaint to modern readers, but there’s a disarming directness to a lot of the storytelling that has a certain appeal.

For serious fans, Legion of Super-Heroes: The Silver Age Volume One is a valuable look at the team’s origins.

[David Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

⚞ gulp! ⚟ These stories are totally campy and goofy! As you know, all of the characters have a horrible case of expositionite poisoning, which affects them like Kryptonite affects Superboy--except that instead of becoming weakened, they suddenly have the unavoidable urge to spout off random exposition that everyone around them already knows! And instead of being killed, it kills all tension!

They also incessantly narrate themselves, which means everything is a wall of text! I'll write most of this review in self-describing prose so the readers get the feel for it! I'll even add way more exclamation points than are merited by the story!

One--er--"highlight" is a Lex Luthor robot saying "well, since you are destroying me, I'll tell you everything!" Another is Superman becoming a real creepazoid about Supergirl, basically saying "I'd marry you if we weren't cousins! It's legal in some places on Earth! But I wouldn't do it, not because that's creepy, but because it's illegal on Krypton! Stupid arbitrary legal jurisdictions! Anyway, thanks for trying to set me up with historical figures and married women and playing into like a half dozen teen girl stereotypes." Plus, keep an eye out for Cosmic Boy sidelining Saturn Girl on one random mission because it's "too dangerous for a girl," even though she's been on a bunch already without so much as an objection!

Plot holes abound. Character motivations are almost as malleable and inconsistent as character powers. They return to the "impersonating a superhero" or the "spurned potential member vows revenge" story well way too many times.

And yet, it was very nostalgic. I read several of these when I was a kid, and rereading them reminded of a nerdy fourth grader hanging off the bed at a weird angle to read a Legion of Superheroes job. They're fun, sometimes because of the flaws but usually in spite of them.

[Mhorg · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite silver age super group

Yes the silver age was an age of innocence and goofiness. No science! No continuity! The legion when introduced was in the 21st century and later the 30th, where it remains to this day. But these are fun, enjoyable stories from an easier age. Where's volume two already!

[Sarospice · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 1962 DC really got the future right. The Legion are a bunch of millennials! They make statues of themselves, they judge others quickly, and if you don't agree you're instantly a hater. The best parts are how far the stories stretch to make such limited characters fit. I kinda loved everyone except the legion.

[Silas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a real slog to get through for me. The early stories that more strongly feature Superboy and Supergirl are incredibly wordy and slow-paced. That's Silver Age storytelling for you, I suppose, so I might have expected that, but it was beyond what I expected from other Silver Age comics I have read. It does improve over time to be a bit more engaging, but it takes a while, and it only improves so much. The middle portion of the book is still very slow in its pacing, and I gather there must be other Legion of Super Heroes comics happening contemporaneously, because characters just start showing up that I hadn't seen before without explanation. Luckily, I kind of knew about a bunch of them from the Legion Clubhouse podcast from Major Spoilers, so I could keep up (which was my main reason for giving these books a try). The stories start to get closer to engaging near the very end, but remain pretty light on character personality throughout. I don't feel like this era of this book is really for me, so I might not return to it.

[Jörg Schumacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of the first ever stories of the young superheroes in the future of Superboys world. Even for an old guy like me these stories laid in the past when I first read Legion of the Superheroes tales. I knew the most of the events but had never read them in their original form. In those first stories there was no continuity enforced. In one issue the Legion is 100 years in the future, the next it's 1000 years, who cares? In the stories around Supergirl and the Legion, the Legionaires were the children of the first group Superboy met. For me these inconsistencies increased the joy of discovering these early tales of some of my favourite heroes of the DC Universe. A happy start to my reading year.

[Marcos Muñoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los inicios de la Legión de Superhéroes son terriblemente infantiles, quedando esencialmente como secundarios o bromas hacia Superboy y Supergirl. Sin embargo, a medida que sus "Tales of the Legion" van cogiendo caracter propio en Adventure Comics asistimos al nacimiento de una Legión distinta, llena de aventura, posibilidades y drama; incluso muertes de personajes principales, algo insólito en los 60. Pese a que hay números de un machismo galopante, el conjunto de este tomo conforma una apasionante visión de los primeros años del supergrupo futurista de DC, y la sensación al terminarlo es de haber asistido a toda una transformación... y de querer más.

[J.R. Murdock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Many of these stories were great when I was a kid. As an adult, they just don't hold up. A couple good ones in this collection, but the storytelling and plot lines are rather weak over all.

It was a fun trip down memory lane, but that's about all I got from this.

[Dean · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoy it for what it is, but it is a very slow read. I'll jump to Jim Shooter's run next.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back to the very beginning...

It's interesting to see the LSH go from cute gimmick to 'Hey, we may have something here...?!'', and watch as the writers try to put the pieces together and maybe build something that'll last.

Alot of the early stories are goofy and lightweight, but it's fun realizing you're seeing the first appearances of everyone, the switch from gravity belts to flight rings, the Legion of super pets and Substitute heroes etc.

The first half can be a slog, but it has alot of fun moments and its's cool to see the future being built.