LSH Reread, part fifteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 48-53 and Annual # 4, 1988)

Major developments:

*The four conspirator Legionnaires - Brainy, Saturn Girl, Duo Damsel and Mon-El - have to move more quickly as they are being suspected. Mon-El, implausibly but hey! comics, brings a dwarf star to Earth to power a device of Brainy's. This goes disastrously wrong and nearly kills millions. Tellus, Magnetic Kid, and Sensor Girl have figured out they're up to something. Magnetic Kid confronts Brainy but is rebuffed.
*Starfinger plans to send a pulse wave through space attuned to the Legionnaires' flight rings. He receives a sample ring from a mysterious "Doctor Hazeg," whom the in-disguise Cham recognizes as actually Colossal Boy. Starfinger later sees through the deception when he realizes Hazeg's identity.
*The conspirators fess up in part: they're attempting to break the time barrier and avenge Superboy's death by destroying the Time Trapper. The rest of the team agrees that's a good idea, but they don't know that the four have sworn to kill the entity or die trying, and that they firmly intend to do it alone. Brainy begins to despair that the time barrier cannot be broken, but he's encouraged by the strange reappearance of their presumed-dead friend Rond Vidar. They use the Infinite Man's power over time to burst the barrier and attack the Trapper.
*So things go straight to hell: Everybody's ready to leave and kick some entropic ass at the end of time, but Brainy has powered the device to only take the four of them. Somehow Rond Vidar comes along as well, revealing his secret when they reach Time's End to battle the Trapper: he's got a Green Lantern ring. The battle is still pathetically one-sided: the Trapper injures Saturn Girl after her attempt to attack his mind, he kills Luorno's second body, and even after Mon-El punches the Trapper through a dying star and smashes a planet (!) into him, the Trapper shrugs off the attacks and wounds Mon-El so grievously that, even when this series ends the following year, he still has not recovered. Brainy's secret weapon is to reincarnate the Infinite Man: the personification of constant, ceaseless rebirth goes to war with the personification of entropy and death, and the two vanish back to the very beginning of time, where the Trapper's very existence creates a paradox. Both beings may be destroyed, but the costs are pretty high.
*Using the Infinite Man in this fashion means the death of its human host, Jaxon Rugarth. Polar Boy charges Brainiac 5 with violating the Legion constitution's guideline against taking life. The trial splits the team, some of whom agree that Rugarth's mind had been destroyed years before when he became the Infinite Man in the first place. The final vote is 11-7 in favor of acquittal with several abstains. Brainy bequeaths Luorno his force field belt before resigning, Shady takes an extended leave of absence looking for medical help for Mon-El, his invunerable body shredded by the Trapper, and the White Witch was so infuriated by Brainiac 5 that she abruptly left without discussion or explanation. The team, to put it simply, is in shambles.
*While her lover is unconscious, Shady prays to her gods and ancestors for his life, and "binds" herself to him in devotion, a ritual similar to marriage, which involves her cutting off part of one of her fingers.
*Ayla, Pol, and Tellus take a mission to Pol's home planet of Braal, which has been beset by earthquakes. These are caused by a Gil'dishpan called Hywyndr. Ayla flirts pretty heavily with Pol, who I believe is about ten or eleven years younger than she.
*Starfinger reveals himself to his prisoner Colossal Boy as Char Burrane, the first criminal who Gim apprehended after getting his super powers. The Espionage Squad, Dawnstar, and the Science Police raid his headquarters and capture him.
*Dream Girl finally has that fling with Atmos in a short backup story. Garry Leach draws it. That man never got enough work.
*Greg LaRocque leaves the book after a run that started a little dry but improved so much over time. He's replaced by returning artist, and co-plotter, Keith Giffen with issue # 50.

Oh, sweet merciful heavens, Giffen's back and he's remembered how to draw.

There has been speculation over the years about sales figures for the book. The numbers that are posted monthly - to some controversy - at sites like The Beat don't stretch back as far as the late eighties, so it's anecdotal research. Still, the smart money's on LSH losing at least a third of its audience when it moved off the newsstands and into comic shops only as a Baxter-only title, and rising only briefly with 1987's "Death of Superboy" four-part crossover. This allegedly didn't hold, and sales continued deteriorating.

From my own experience buying these as back issues, pretty much everything between issues 20 and 50, along with the overprinted # 2 through 6 and excepting # 37 and # 38, came from quarter bins. There was next to no back issue market for LSH in the 1990s. That said, the final thirteen issues were much more difficult to source. They didn't cost me any more than cover price, but the price tags of several different comic shops around Atlanta and Athens on my issues confirm that I had to look around quite a lot for them. The conclusion that I draw is that, after the Time Trapper story, comic shops found reason to cut their orders, massively. This probably came around the same time as a notable atrophy in the collectibles hobby, along with DC flooding the market with short-lived and forgotten miniseries. The ad pages of LSH during this period are like a roll of dishonor, with title after title that nobody bought. We remember the standouts and forget all the failures. In 1988, DC seemed to have a pile of them, and it probably made sense for retailers to try three copies of something new and cut three copies of the slumping Legion.

That's entirely speculative, but I think that's what sets the stage for Giffen's return and his unbelievably fantastic new style. It won't last very long, and, within years, it'll be buried by the "Five Years Later" run with its nine-panel grid and focus on random background objects, but for a few months in 1988, Giffen is absolutely masterful. He's again visually defining characters by their hair, something that both Steve Lightle and Greg LaRocque had let slip, and not their costumes. In fact, it's here that many of the Legionnaires quit dressing in costumes entirely. One of his first moves is to retire both Phantom Girl's and Dawnstar's Cockrum- or Grell- designed 1970s peek-a-boo suits, which I think are the last of the sexy-ladies Frederick's of Hollywood-by-way-of Logan's Run costumes from that period to stick around. Now, not only is her hair graying - perhaps a fashion choice - but she's wearing a red jacket. I really like this idea; it breaks the characters further away from defined "superhero" image and costume and allows them to dress like actual people.

But before we get to Giffen, there are two long-running plots that need to be resolved. The Starfinger story is by far the less satisfying of the two. He's just a laughably shallow and unbelievable villain, and his gigantic, super-powerful criminal empire just does not make any sense. Worse, it turns out that he just happened upon the source of his power, the mindless genies Starlight and Starbright. There's a brief moment of interest in watching the lesser-powered members of the Espionage Squad finally defeat him, but it's all an unsatisfying bore.

On the other hand, there's the Time Trapper story. Holy moly.

There's a great suggestion in the letters page that this whole "conspiracy" thing is really just gearing up to an elaborate surprise birthday party. If only. Levitz, LaRocque and guest artist Pat Broderick really sold the heck out of this ongoing story, and once Giffen returns, it's work by people at the top of their game. It's the nature of superhero fiction to sell the idea of heroes battling against insurmountable odds, but this story pulls it off like very, very few others. The most remarkable moment is the brave idea of sidelining Saturn Girl almost immediately. Over the previous few years, she had been spotlighted as the most strong-willed and surprisingly powerful of all the Legionnaires, particularly when she defeated Universo, and so watching her fall here is an incredible shock.

The death of Duo Damsel's second body is, similarly, driven home by the emphasis placed shortly before on what death means to her species. She explains that she effectively "died" several years previously when one of her three selves had been killed by Computo and has been either living on borrowed time or living a lie, which is hardly the sort of thing that you'd think her husband would wish to know.

Issue 50, and the amazing trial coda that follows it in # 51, is arguably the pinnacle of the book. I might be proven wrong over the next two reread chapters, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting Giffen's artwork again, but the impression that I have always felt was that this masterpiece simply wasn't going to be topped. "Life and Death at the End of Time" is absolutely one of the best single issues of any superhero comic, especially in the way that it upends the status quo and leaves the last year of the book with the team in shambles, trying to come to grips with what the hell just happened.

For those who enjoy the lighter side of the 30th Century, however, there is the amusement of watching Ayla make what's apparently one last attempt at heterosexuality with her fumbling flirting with the oblivious Pol. The fans in the letters pages have suggested that the founding trio are pushing thirty and Pol is at most maybe seventeen. That's okay, kid. If my older brother's best friend's twin sister had started coming onto me when I was seventeen, I'd probably have been clueless myself.

LSH Reread, part four

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2, Annual # 2 and 304-309, 1983-84)

Major developments:

*Projectra and Karate Kid get hitched. They're the third pair of Legionnaires to marry, we're told, and they formally resign from the team to rule the planet Orando as Queen and Prince Consort.
*Shvaughn Erin and Element Lad have deduced that the Shrinking Violet we've been watching for months is an impostor. The real Salu Digby has been abducted by terrorists from her home planet of Imsk. The "Vi" who has - in an almost big a surprise as the abduction - married Colossal Boy is a Durlan actress named Yera. The biggest surprise comes with the revelation that Colossal Boy intends to stay married to her, and, sorry, Queen Projectra, but it turns out y'all're the fourth Legionnaire wedding after all.
*Dawnstar breaks things off with Wildfire and takes a leave of absence from the team.
*Element Lad is elected team leader.
*Garth and Imra announce that they're going to have a baby.
*Two ultra-powerful beings, The Prophet and Omen, show up and start yelling at everybody.
*Keith Giffen buys a bunch of José Muñoz comics and studies them very, very closely.


This run of LSH is one that I'll always remember, because it goes from a huge high, and the peak of my teenage fandom, to the first of the three really big stumbling blocks that had me walking away from the comic. It's amazing, in retrospect, how quickly this happened, but that's teenagers for you. Within ten months of deciding I would be a fan for life, the quality of the book fell off a cliff between issues # 306 and # 307. It would recover, but only after I abandoned it.

But first up, there's Dave Gibbons. He illustrated the second annual, which is really a silly story in which five Legionnaires get lost in time and get into a scrap with Durlans posing as Greek gods, and I had not loved artwork so much since the passing of Dick Dillin, who had illustrated all those wonderful Justice League of America comics that I enjoyed as a child. Soon, I would find Gibbons' artwork in Marvel's American-sized reprints of the very fun Doctor Who comic, and then Watchmen, and then all of the stories that he'd done for 2000 AD. This was my introduction to his work, and I was amazed by it.

But the big deal here is the story about Vi. In the three previous chapters of this reread, I've made sure not to refer to Violet as Salu Digby, because she was abducted by terrorists from her home planet of Imsk, and a Durlan actress named Yera was sent to impersonate her in the Legion. She fell in love with Colossal Boy, which was a dream come true for him, as he'd been crushing on Salu for a few years and was pleased that she finally reciprocated. Now, it must be said that Yera agreeing to marry Gim in the first place is just about the height of thoughtlessness and crappy behavior, but I think it's really interesting that creators Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen decided to keep them together. Gim, heart-on-his-sleeve sensitive guy that he is, forgives Yera for the deception, accepting that she personally had nothing to do with Salu's kidnapping and was oblivious to her incarceration. Yera offers to annul the marriage since she came into it with false pretenses, but he accepts her as she is.

As tough as some of that is to swallow, I'm glad that Levitz and Giffen stuck with it, because it allowed them to explore some new character quirks. He therefore becomes half of the third Legionnaire marriage, and the only one to a spouse who isn't also a superhero. Also, since his mother is Earth's president, and since there are considerable biases among humanity against Durlans, that opens some interesting political avenues. There will also be the business of how Salu, once she recovers and rejoins the team, feels about Yera and her old buddy Colossal Boy.

Issue # 306 is a flashback-filled story looking at Star Boy's history. The flashbacks are drawn, with reliable energy, by old hand Curt Swan, while the framing is drawn by Giffen and Mahlstedt in what would be the last example of the style for which Giffen was known. It's a great story, too. Basically, it's Star Boy kicking back with Wildfire to watch the election returns come in, and hoping that Dream Girl will lose so that she'll have time to pay attention to him again. (This issue was mentioned by comedian John Hodgman in a USA Today interview just last week. Thanks to Matt for the heads-up!)

Everything changed, and, to my mind, in a terrible way, with # 307. Thirteen year-olds aren't known for being able to express much in the way of art criticism - in fact, forty year-olds are pretty often awful with it, too - but all I knew then was that, suddenly, Giffen's art looked like it fell off a cliff. There are, certainly, interesting panel layouts, but faces became elongated and sloppy, anatomy was all over the map, the camera angles were utterly bizarre, and there's a sense of energy and movement that, combined with how weird everybody looks and how incredibly thick the inking is - surely Mahlstedt wasn't responsible for these figures?! - gives the whole comic a sense of being rushed, wildly.

It doesn't help that the four-part story, "Omen and the Prophet," suffers for two big reasons. First, episodes two and three are shorter than usual. Part two is 14 pages, with George Tuska doing a much more competent job with a nine-page story in which Gim and Yera meet his mother, and part three is 13 pages, with Pat Broderick again turning in a much more professional looking job with ten pages about Projectra and Karate Kid. It really, really feels like Giffen was falling over deadlines and not leaving Mahlstedt time to ink anything. To be fair, Giffen had been extraordinarily busy, what with his LSH commitments and also launching another DC title, The Omega Men, and his son being born, which can be a huge crunch. But this is nevertheless really slapdash work, and the story is a complete bore as well, with a barely-coherent plot about overpowered loudmouths yelling a lot.

As if Giffen's work was not aggravating enough on its own, it soon transpired that the artist had been appropriating and swiping the comics of an Argentinian cartoonist named José Muñoz. The Comics Journal, in its February 1986 issue, called Giffen out on how flagrantly he was pilfering from Muñoz, doing much to derail his previously fan-favorite career, and giving his reputation a black eye that took decades to recover.

By that time, I'd already dropped LSH. I remember looking over some recent back issues in 1986 and a friend told me about the swiping. I shrugged it off, but was a little pleased to understand just why the artwork in my previously-favorite comic had turned so awful. More on the story behind that in our next installment.

LSH Reread, part one

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2, # 284-289 and Annual No. 1, 1982)

So I told myself that as soon as I finished rereading Rex Stout, I would reread Paul Levitz's seminal 1980s run on Legion of Super-Heroes. I also told myself that I wasn't going to blog about them, and I also told myself that I wasn't going to give DC Comics any more entries here, after they decided to publish that unbelievably shitty Before Watchmen series. I contradict myself sometimes.

A little background information to explain what came before: Legion of Super-Heroes is a long-running concept at DC which, in the hands of deeply inept editorial policies, has become, over time, the poster child for All That's Wrong With Comics Today. Over the last twenty years, the storyline has been abruptly halted and restarted from scratch at least four times, abandoning all that came before and trying to get it right, and then allowing continuity porn czar Geoff Johns to rewrite all of these disparate stories into one crossover narrative. And long before that, it was the poster child for All That Was Wrong With Comics in the Early 1960s. But between these two bookends of shame, this really did feel like something special and memorable.

Here's how things started: Back in the late 1950s, when children's comics were actually suitable for children and weren't filled with images like (as Matthew Brady described it recently) something out of a Herschel Gordon Lewis film, DC was publishing a title called Superboy. This explained that Young Clark Kent, after diligently filling his role as the class nerd, finishing his homework, and doing all his chores like a good teenage boy should, would have fun adventures. Often, he'd fly a thousand years in the future and hang out with some other superpowered kids his age. These were teens who had been reminded by a kindly benefactor that, once upon a time, the young Superboy did his civic duty and rescued cats from trees and saved Smallville from bank robbers. The Legion of Super-Heroes (LSH) - and there really was a Legion of them, to the point that even comic book fans would sometimes shy away from reading it, fearing the rumors that there were too many characters - was a zero-imagination superhero "club," with a clubhouse and byzantine rules and bylaws.

The stories and the artwork were perfunctory and mundane, even by the low standards of the period. I'd say that they have aged terribly, but that's being unduly generous to suggest that they were any good in the first place. DC Comics were drafted by unimaginative old men with no vision and no wish to consider what the world of the 2960s might actually be like. You know what the LSH did? They saved Spaceville from space bank robbers, basically. Management remained baffled that, across town at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the original Bullpen were creating comic books that anybody over the age of seven might want to read.

Mercifully, a teenager named Jim Shooter, who would become one of the most important figures in the industry and medium in the late 1970s and 1980s, figured that the way into the business was to break in via the DC Comic that needed the most help. Catching a DC editor on a rare occasion where that man gave a flip about new talent, Shooter sold the company on some of his (comparatively) much more complex and intricate stories, and soon, this high schooler from Pittsburgh was dragging Legion of Super-Heroes kicking and screaming into the mid-1960s. Shooter drew actual relationships and individual characterization into this enormous cast of characters while at the same time crafting more complicated science fiction storylines that suggested the writer had actually read a book more recent than Rocket Man Sam. These are still clunky and not always satisfying, but a huge leap forward.

By the late 1960s, Legion of Super-Heroes was the regular feature in DC's long-running anthology Adventure Comics, and had one of comics' most vocal and organized fan bases. The combination of inter-character drama and unpredictable SF melodrama had hundreds of fans interacting via amateur, mimeograph fanzines and some of the earliest examples of comic book fanfic. LSH fans were predominantly female, reflecting the fact that the cast was about 50% female, far more than any other superhero group. The writers often didn't know what to do with the girls, and, especially in the mid-1970s when artist Dave Cockrum redesigned the costumes to give everybody a glam rock/disco makeover, the boobalicious, plunging necklines and bikinis didn't initially look like this was a female-friendly comic, until you saw all the bare male skin on display as well. Colossal Boy, Tyroc and Star Boy were showing off as much skin as the ladies, and that's before Cosmic Boy started strutting around in some barely-there black leather thing that left most readers wondering where his friend, probably on all fours with a ball gag, had got to. The difference is that embarrassed artists and readers got the fellows covered up in time. It's only girls in comic books who need to wear bathing suits and boots, you know.

There are still flaws, considering the standards and expectations of the time. Sexuality is always straight - you had to leave it to the fanficcers to insist that the tragic, girlfriend-free Element Lad was gay, and fans had decided that Ayla and Vi would eventually ditch their boyfriends and hook up decades before the official book allowed hints of it. (That's an early example of what we'd now term fanon, actually.) The future's also overwhelmingly white. Well, blue, green, and orange, too, because humanoid aliens in the 30th Century come in all sorts of primary colors, but certainly not very black. When the team finally got, briefly, a black member, it was the astonishingly racist Tyroc, who was everything that a separatist afraid of Black Panthers could dream of. He wasn't around for very long.

So in 1974, Legion of Super-Heroes got co-billing with Superboy in his own book, starting with # 197. After # 258 (1979), Superboy went off to his own, Smallville-set comic book, and Legion of Super-Heroes kept the numbering. The Legion of the 1970s was uneven but always entertaining. It was also dangerous: back in the days when a death in a funnybook actually meant something and stuck, three members of the cast were killed in action, their sacrifices always remembered by all the surviving heroes. Paul Levitz had been one of several rotating writers who came to the title during this period, most memorably during a lengthy storyline (by the standards of the day, a positive epic at five whole issues) in the #240s called "Earthwar."

Levitz was succeeded by other old hands, with veterans like Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway taking turns as scripter before Levitz returned for the February 1982 issue, # 284. Conway had overseen a long storyline that involved a mysterious hero called Reflecto, an old villain called Grimbor, and some really silly space pirates and wrapped all these up for Levitz to start reasonably fresh.

And now that I've said all that, I am certain that none of these entries will end up as long as the introduction. I decided, at whim, to read the book in batches of seven issues, not realizing that this would mean that part one of the reread would bring us right up to the debut of "The Great Darkness Saga," a celebrated story that starts in issue # 290, for part two. The initial creative team is Levitz with art by Pat Broderick and Bruce Patterson, but it's short-lived. The house ads in the book inform me that Broderick left to draw Firestorm later in 1982. Levitz uses the old DC standard of a "backup story" to help advance his subplots. # 285 sees Keith Giffen and Larry Mahlstedt teamed up on art duties for the first time in an 8-page backup story that focuses on Nura Nal (Dream Girl); they would become the main artists very shortly. Giffen inked by Patterson is very good; Giffen inked by Mahlstedt is sublime - one of my favorites penciller/inker combos in American comics.

I like the way that Levitz starts things off by acknowledging that this is a title where the cast is always in transition. His run begins with Chuck Taine (Bouncing Boy) in quiet contemplation in the headquarters room called the Hall of Heroes, where the three dead Legionnaires are remembered. He and his wife Luorno had married in a 1974 story, setting up one of those silly old bylaws, that you can't be married and remain a Legionnaire. So they became "reservists" to be called upon in emergencies. This amuses me because it reflects that old ethos that you can stay in a kid club until you're an adult, and that's just how people wanted the world to work in the kids' comics of the 1950s. The latest emergency passed, they return to retirement, where they're training kids in a Legion Academy. Comic book time doesn't equal real world time - especially when you're writing a comic set in the 30th Century - but it always seemed to me like the kids in that Academy stayed "enrolled" there for a really long time.

The second married couple were Garth and Imra, but they revised that dumb ol' rule so they - two of the three founding members - could still play with the rest of the kids. By this time, most of the Legionnaires are in their early twenties. There's no reason to hamstring themselves with dumb ol' rules they insisted upon when they were fifteen. One of those dumb ol' rules, though, was that there would be an annual selection for team leader. Here's where Levitz does fumble the comic book time / real world divide. Tradition had held that the creative team polled the readers for their choice for leader and wrote accordingly. The fans really loved this and played along, but with the characters squabbling and campaigning for about three issues a year, it does get old fast, and since there is virtually no break in the ongoing subplots, it always feels like there have only been maybe ten or eleven weeks in the narrative since the last election.

Another very dumb ol' rule that comes back to haunt the characters is that Cham is the leader of a team of "plumbers" called the Legion Espionage Squad, and he's answerable to nobody when he's on a mission. This has big ramifications in the last half of these stories, as one of his hotheaded missions ends with five of the characters stranded on a frozen asteroid waiting for help. Now, relationships between the characters are critically important, and here's where Levitz really transitions this book away from traditional superhero stuff in space into a proper SF soap opera. Colossal Boy, who gave up his '70s skintastic costume for something with sleeves and pants, and Violet, who's still stuck in her cleavagetastic green thing and is supposed to be dating a minor character we almost never see, start getting close while stuck out here. And Imra has the very bad luck to give a familial embrace to her sister-in-law's boyfriend just as the sister-in-law shows up to rescue them. OOPS.

At least Imra retires her lavender bathing suit while stuck on the frozen planet, finding one of her more sensible, warmer, old costumes in a trunk of their crashed spaceship.

The sci-fi stuff works very well even if the dialogue never does. To Levitz's considerable credit, only the willfully stubborn could possibly be confused by any of this or who the characters are, because they refer to each other by name constantly, and address their feelings to the reader by way of lengthy thought balloon monologues. Whenever they use a super power for the first time in an issue, they announce what they're doing, and if their power has a limitation, a narration box explains it. So yes, these are dense and wordy comics, and that's what makes the genuine dialogue stumbles really stand out. That is, once you accept that this is going to be a clunky and graceless pile of talky stories, the worst of it stands out like a sore thumb. At one point, an alien Khund actually says: "Did not your squad leader drill you in the importance of disabling Nullport?" The team's wealthy benefactor, who had been revealed shortly before this run to be Cham's father (soap opera!) has a favorite expression, "By Ymir!" and, in issue # 286, he uses it about seventeen times. Characters always refer to their sweetie as "my love." The standard "I have been knocked unconscious" shout is "AYEEEIIII" - never an exclamation point, strangely - and green-skinned Brainy is always in a bad mood.

As far as team transitions go, this run sees Karate Kid and Projectra, two of Jim Shooter's sillier ideas, retiring from active duty. Karate Kid's power was, apparently, super-karate, and Projectra, recipient of another of the '70s most ridiculously silly skintastic costumes, could make people see illusions. This always struck me as not very effective and relied on writers to force it to work via contrivance. Once the bad guys knew that Projectra was among the Legionnaires that they were fighting, then any dragons or weird monsters that showed up were probably not going to be real. She never did proper fight-ending illusions like making the bad guys think that their arm had been severed at the elbow, did she? Anyway, Projectra was the princess and heir to the throne of Orando, a gimmicky medieval planet a whole lot like Peladon in Doctor Who, and dozens of others, and when her father dies, there's the expected power struggle because Jeckie isn't traditional enough and has allied herself with progressive aliens who don't act like King Arthur. So they stay behind and, in the extra-length Annual # 1, an expansive 41-page story, we're introduced to the team's first non-embarrassing, non-racist black member, Jacques Foccart, who takes the mantle of the second Invisible Kid in honor of the first, who had died.

The Annual also introduces a major supporting member, a redhaired Science Police officer named Shvaughn Erin, liaison between the team and the government/military, who will end up dating Element Lad. There would be an active voice within fandom who really hated this woman, because they'd decided that Element Lad was gay. Some years after Levitz left LSH, and, with the exception of his decades-later coda that would be published around 2009, the story concluded as far as I was concerned, some fans got to become writers and retconned Shvaughn as a guy who took female hormones. Not in my reading, guys.

Another new supporting player who shows up in this first batch of Levitz's run is a cranky alien doctor with the suitably alien name of "Dr. Gym'll." This guy confused the dickens out of me when I was in middle school and first reading these stories, because I thought that his name was "Dr. Gym," and characters were referring to him with grammatically incorrect contractions. "Dr. Gym'll says that you should..." read to me like "Dr. Gym will says that you should..." and I wondered why the editor didn't fix mistakes like that.

These were genuinely good fun, and I'm looking forward to the next batch of seven in a couple of weeks. Probably won't write quite this much though. I don't plan to, anyway.