In addition to the hundreds of trade paperbacks, graphic novels, and other comics with spines, the Comic Library has a few shelves of shortboxes full of traditional American comic book issues. We’ll occasionally dip into them to take a closer look; they’re full of oddities, nostalgia objects, out-of-print classics, and a smattering of pure pulp garbage. Today’s pick, LEGION, is a bit of each. Let’s talk about it.
The facts: LEGION spun out of DC’s 1988 Invasion! crossover/miniseries. The first volume ran for 70 issues; this writeup will go through #39. This first chunk of the series was mainly made by:
- Keith Giffen (plotter/layouts), probably known best at that time for his work on Legion of Super-Heroes and the comedy-focused Justice League International
- Alan Grant (plotter/scripter), writer of a ton of Judge Dredd and just starting what would be a long run on various Batman titles
- Barry Kitson (plotter/penciler/inker), also known at the time for 2000AD
Since it’s a mainstream superhero title, tons of others pitched in too: Kevin Maguire and Dan Brereton on covers, Gaspar on letters, Lovern Kindzierski on colors, Mike DeCarlo and Mark McKenna on inks, Jim Fern as an extended guest penciler, and many more.
Another strange note: LEGION changed its title every year by appending the year: it started as LEGION ’89 and ending as LEGION ’94. But I’m not gonna bother with the year.
Lastly, LEGION is ostensibly a Legion of Super-Heroes spinoff, LoSH is not required reading. Or rather, I didn’t read any of the concurrent LoSH comics, and I never felt lost or confused.
Covered in this writeup: Invasion! #1–2, LEGION #1–39, LEGION Annual #1–2, The Adventures of Superman Annual #2
The feelings: Remember what I said about not having to read Legion of Super-Heroes? The same is true about Invasion!. Almost everyone in LEGION #1 shows up in Invasion!, but it’s only for a few panels. Here’s what happens: Vril Dox, Garryn Bek, and some other unnamed aliens are in a “Starlag” owned by an evil alien alliance who are attacking Earth. The prisoners were offered by other worlds so that the alliance would leave them alone, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. But they escape, led by Dox. This is all summarized in the first few issues of LEGION.
(There’s also a small plot about some Daxamites, who are sort of off-brand Kryptonians, betraying the evil alliance to save Earth. This is low-key followed up later on in LEGION, but again, it’s summarized there.)
But Invasion! isn’t terrible, at least by company-wide crossover standards. It’s all pretty self-contained in the three issues. Each is 80 pages with no ads. It’s a good format for big, world-shaking event comics; it’s easy to map a beginning-middle-end to three issues, thereby avoiding the slump that comes in issues 2–5 (or 2–11 or whatever) of most line-wide event comics. There are also clear chapter and setting breaks, meaning they can use multiple artists to keep on schedule while lessening what could be a mid-issue shock by switching penciler.
Anyway, who’s Vril Dox? He’s a green-skinned genius from Colu, a planet of geniuses. Because this is a mainstream superhero comic, he had a Bad Dad™ and has ended up unable to trust anyone. Combining his genius and his distrust, he manipulates a dysfunctional group of escapees into going to his home planet, destroying the computer tyrants who enslaved his Bad Dad, and then starting a privatized, galaxy-wide law enforcement agency.
Dox (center) and company.
While Dox is ostensibly the protagonist of LEGION (or at least one of the prime members of the ensemble cast), he’s not a hero. But I don’t mean that in a fucked up Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones way. He’s confused and broken and unsocialized, but he’s rarely given the “noble asshole” spotlight common for today’s antiheroes. He’s a prime example of dismissive-avoidant attachment style: he’s deeply independent, defensive, and always thinks he’s right, and this is shown over and over to be hurtful and dangerous, but it’s also shown to descend logically from his treatment at the hands of Bad Dad and the computer tyrants. So what’s a law enforcement agency to do?
Once the characters and concept are introduced (handled in concise adventure in the first four issues), the book becomes more of a soap opera. There are simmering and overlapping plots about relationships, returning villains, and LEGION’s success and reputation, but the sci-fi setting also allows for quirky one-offs and character spotlights. This is all helped by the cohesion of the creative team: Alan Grant is present for all 39 issues, Barry Kitson is nearly always pencilling (apart from a few planned breaks), and Keith Giffen dips in and out of plotting, giving everything an even pacing. It’s something I wish more superhero comics did today.
Let’s look at the cast:
- The aforementioned Vril Dox, so scared of letting others in that he establishes a giant law enforcement agency.
- Second-in-command Lyrissa Mallor, a shadow-shooting planetary defender, compassionate mom, and proto-goth.
- Garryn Bek, an ex-cop turned cop-again; sort of a grumpy and self-righteous nerd who approaches pretty awful.
- The mysterious shape-changing Durlan, a meditative and tentacled mentor who’s been abused by Dox but still hangs around in a co-dependent way.
- Dryad, a big sexless rock alien who only finds out her gender later on.
- Stealth, a sort of lady Wolverine clumsily written as a Strong Female Character, i.e. she beats everyone up and has sex whenever she wants. It gets weird!
- Lobo, initially a mockery of tough and gnarly dudes (like Wolverine) who ends up being maybe the most popular member? Or at least the only one to get his own series.
Lots of characters float in and out of the series too. One neat thing is that the gender ratio stays pretty balanced, which is rare in mainstream adventure comics. And while there’s some attempt at progressive/cool sci-fi gender stuff (like Dryad’s people not having a gender until adulthood), it’s not all good. Stealth enters her species’s mating season, rapes and kills Dox (he gets better), and has his baby in one of the stranger single issues of the series, a sort of Alien-meets-Miracleman-#9 situation:
If, like me, you have trouble parsing this image, it’s two human legs hanging off a swollen, tentacled birth organ.
And then there’s Marij’n Bek. Garryn Bek married her for the sole purpose of getting close to her dad, a crimelord. When she’s first introduced, she’s an obese and tutting scientist who’s only kept around to heal Dox. People constantly mention her weight, and while it could be argued that it’s because there are assholes everywhere, even on alien planets, it mostly comes off as cruel. But Marij’n gets hold of the magical Emerald Eye, and in addition to letting her fly and shoot green beams, it also makes her skinny. And once she that happens, she immediately catches the eye of Captain Comet, “the first man of the future, born a hundred thousand years before his time,” a hottie with a genius IQ who can lift spaceships and read minds. It’s sad to see her go from trying to keep trashy Garryn Bek on a chain to making out with the ubermensch when the only change is in her appearance. (And while I can’t find an exact reference, I’m sure Comet says at some point that he would be crushing on Marij’n no matter what she looked like, but that statement is never tested.)
But it’s not all bad. The plotting is good, with the soap opera aspects balanced against more traditional sci-fi action. Within the three or so large arcs in this first chunk of the series, there’s a ton of romance, mystery, comedy, and drama, and none of the subplots are dragged on too long or left to dissipate. There are entire plotlines built around weed puns. The cynicism of Vril Dox is balanced with the beautiful purity of Billy Batson/Captain Marvel beating the shit out of Lobo.
Another nice thing: the central conceit of the team, law enforcement, isn’t presented as a singular or noble goal. Everyone has different reasons for being on the team and different ways of approaching law. Some are selfish, some are lost, some are noble, some are scared, some approach fascism (which is shown to be bad and not a required part of law enforcement, which I mean in a sci-fi/utopian sense, not in a present-day US sense). In another case of “crossovers done right,” LEGION Annual #2, as part of the Armageddon 2001 event, shows Dox his evilest future as a full-blown space fascist. Despite being tempted by the ultimate control and independence, Dox realizes the stakes and relents. (But don’t read the rest of Armageddon if you aren’t moved to.)
[Sidenote: Mike McKone is the penciler on this annual, and I’ve always been a fan of his work. What’s he been up to since his run on Amazing Spider-Man?]
Dox’s slow progression from aggressively independent toward considering the positive possibilities of being open, vulnerable, and interconnected is probably my favorite part of the series. There are no revelatory epiphanies for him; for each lesson he learns, each wrong he admits, he goes on to make another mistake. But the progress is there, and it’s shown without making him seem heroic. Surrounded by people who call him out and by those who are doing things the way he should be, the work is shown as his own—not a heroic undertaking but a requisite path to come back from the damage he’s done and the damage he’s suffered.
And a final nice thing for now: Barry Kitson! When the series begins, he’s a just-okay artist whose greatest strength is that it’s usually clear which character is doing and saying what (which is definitely an important skill that some superstar artists lack). By the final story arc in this chunk of issues, he’s become BARRY KITSON, clear storyteller, great pacer, dynamic drawer—all that and a bit of pizazz. And while his figures and faces can have a bit of samey-ness to them, his poses and clothing design keep any potential confusion at bay. It’s neat to see someone develop and get demonstrably better at something, and that seems less common these days, at least for pencilers.
So there it is. If you’re seeking an outer space soap opera alien cop comic, consider LEGION. Not sold? We’ll be covering the rest of the series in a future post.
Oh, and reading these single issues means you can find weird stuff in letters pages and ads:
Comic Book Library of Minneapolis 