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Originally posted by Chemical King:
German comic books have gone through a history of translating Super hero names - "Light Lass" in german meaning "Leichtes Mädchen" which is a nickname for a hooker.

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Now this would be an interesting reboot.

My LegionRoadmap.com

Mid 60's Spinner rack attacks at the local drug store with my 25 cent allowance. Two books and tax.

Mostly I'd get anything that started with "House of" or had witches on the cover or FFour (The Thing was my big brother). I loved the 25 cent giants and felt special to be a able to buy one (but I had to turn in a pop bottle to pay the tax)! I know I continued to buy comics into the early 70's because I remember seeing Swamp Thing for the first time and going ga ga (wish I'd kept that one!). Silver Surfer was also a favorite.

My First Adventure

You could look at the cover of ADV346 and not grap it (looking over shoulder to see if cashier was going to tell me they're for buying, not reading). Ferro Lad was my new friend and Queen Projectra I saved from many monsters! Legion instantly became my favorite. As my mighty income permitted, I dug through the rack for some back issues. The stories I remember most were Traitor, Computo, Nardo, and Suneater. I do not recall anything after Suneater so I suspect I either gave it up in sadness or the drug store stopped carrying ADV. and I thought the book just stopped. I didn't really get the "big picture."

Zzzzziiiiiipppppppppppppp "1989"

I'm bumming around Cairne, Australia with my Dutch GF and I see..... a spinner rack! (Got to get me one of these before I die). So I spin it, looking at familiar titles and I see a pink bikini . I read the title.

This is also the first time I ever heard of a "comic shop."

Much to my GF's chagrin (she let me know this clearly), I spent the next two months traveling around Australia and the US looking for comic shops and back issues. Imagine a 32 year old guy with a GF who's a GYMNAST!!!, spending evenings with comic books spread out over the bed. sigh.

Still reading?

She eventually caved and even bought some for me. Unfortunately, the relationship was not meant to be. Before we were done traveling I had most of the ADV after 340 and some before. All Actions, Superboys, and everything after that.

I continued to collect up to about the end of DnA. I have the first WaK trade.

I wonder what the Dutch GF's up to?

From: East Toledo | Registered: Jul 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Hi Dain, nice to meet a fellow European here.

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Hi Chem. Nice meeting you too.
Thank you for explaining those names for me. I guess Winzwanda was translated this way as a nice alliteration.
It was the same in Greece in the 60s. Back then, there was a weekly comic book series with alternating titles. "Diaplanetika", "Dynamika", "Paraxena" and "Ekpliktika" which reprinted Mystery in Space, Action/Superman, Strange Adventures and Unexpected respectively.

They had translated Adam Strange as Adam Paraxenos, Superman as Hyperanthropos and Batman as Nykteridas. Justice League of America was "To Syndikato tis Nemeseos" meaning "The Syndicate of Nemesis" a name I hated (along with Nykteridas that simply meant He-bat).

A funny coincindece though is the translation of "Alanna", Adam's girlfriend. They called her "Alanka" that sounded Slavic and vaguely exotic, because Alanna in Greek slang means either a barren, empty lot, a very promiscuous and immoral woman, or.....a hooker!

Those wonderful comics (as well as Little Lulu and Mickey Mouse)are very much sought after and expensive collectors' items today.
They were the first American comics I ever read, in Greek of course, around 1968. Each week I travelled to the planet Rann of the star-sun Alpha Centauri where Adam Paraxenos met his beloved Alanka and saved Rann using his mind and resourcefullness instead of a super-power like Hyperanthropos, Gyneka-Thauma (Wonder Woman), Prasinos Fanos (Green Lantern) etc.
I was secretly in love with Alanka. Older boys at school whispered among themselves about what Alanka and Adam "do" when we don't see them, but that stuff was hidden in shadows for me at the age of 6 or 7. Those super-heroes seemed so grown-up to me. Heck, even those 11-year old boys were grown up as far I was concerned.

Then Ι read this Supergirl story. She asked for help from a group of heroes from the future. They seemed younger than other super-heroes, the art was wonderful and the idea that each came from a different world amd had a special power amazed me.

I managed to find a few issues with Legion stories and that's how I met Saturn Girl, Sun Boy, Cosmic Boy, Bouncing Boy and Brainiac 5 (whose name remained untranslated, thank heaven! Years later in one story in another magazine they translated his name as Eksypnakias which means Smarmy wise-guy!) I loved the Legion. I played with friends at being Legionnaires, dreamed about them at night, in my bleak room in a bleak neighborhood of downtown Athens.

All those stories were reprints from before the Adventure era, so I had no idea there were more. Little did I know at that time that American Comics were already distributed in Greece since the early 50s. Little did I know that there were stacks of them in used book stores.

Fast forward a few years. It's 1972. 10 years old and having had maybe 10 lessons of English. I go to a thriftshop to trade some Mickey Mouse comics for a couple of Diaplanetika issues. There's nothing new so I trade my comics for an issue of Action Comics in English, my first original American comic.
The back story is a futuristic adventure. I understand a few words here and there, especially "Chemical", "King" and "Violet". No recognition. It took 30 years to finally find that comic again.

Fast forward a few years. It's Friday, May 16 1975. School's out at 2 p.m. I've been buying a few American comics from foreign press newsstands in downtown Athens. Iron Man, a couple of X-men.
My English is much better and can easily understand 40% of the text without having to search in a dictionary.
Stores close at 2.30, there's nothing new in the local newsstand so I decide to run to the American Bookstore 2 Km away. I get there at 2.25.
The clerk gives me a dirty look as I look at the spinner rack. Don't have much time.
A blue-yellow-red cover catches my eye. I don't notice the title, only the art (I still don't). A gorgeous platinum-haired girl dressed in a fiery red costume is lying on a table, a powerful young man dressed in a futuristic costume tries to do something while a younger version of Superman, but older than the Superboy I knew, is bursting thru a wall. I browse the interior quickly,it's a futuristic story. The clerk is getting impatient, I buy the magazine and return home.

The smell of late spring wafts thru my window from the big park just opposite the street. A new home, new and better neighborhood.
I start reading without having paid any attention to the magazine title, yet!
I like the story and the art is fabulous. Then...something in the back of my mind starts tingling. Where have I seen this green guy before?
Who's this incredibly sexy blonde in the pink costume? Her name is Imra. The green guy calls her Saturn Girl...Saturn is the planet Kronos, the ringed planet...the tingling gets more intense...a warm sensation in my chest gets hotter and hotter...the blonde calls the green guy Brainiac 5....the tingling and the hot sensation start to combine and an incredible realisation is taking form....my whole self is involved in this....for the first time I look at the title of the magazine, and suddenly everything explodes!!!!
It's Superboy starring The Legion of Super-Heroes #209!! The Legion...Leyeona ton Hyper-eroon.
It's my Legion of Super-Heroes. Grown up, sensual, addictive, beautiful, a window into the future, my future, their future, my Legion!!!
And there were more characters than I had ever imagined in a glorious future. The Legion was bigger and better than anything I had known before.



I've felt such joy and happiness a few times in my life after that, but that moment defined a big part of who I am. It literally changed my life in the most profound yet tangible ways.
My love for the Legion led me not only to study English literature -to become a teacher of foreign languages - but also philosophy, linguistics, astronomy, sociology, psychology and art.

In the next few years I was going on my monthly rounds of the center of Athens trying to locate new and maybe older issues of the SLSH. I still remember how I felt and where I bought many of those early Legion issues from. Sometimes I bought them in languages I didn't understand like German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and once even in a black-and-white edition in Arabic.

I started creating my own characters, artlessly but in full enthusiasm sketching them in notebooks and even school books if I happened to be absent-minded during "Homeric Syntax and Grammar" class!
Once I even drew a semi-naked Dream Girl on a Latin pop-quiz in class without even realising it! The teacher gave me a "10". "Zero for the quiz and 20 for the sketch", he said jokingly. Well, at least I got a passing mark.

The mid-80s brought a "dark age" when almost no comics were imported in Greece because of extremely harsh taxes the new government implemented on anything it considered - in a totally arbitrary way - "frivolities". Each imported comic - with the exception of some Marvels - would cost the equivalent of $10 today.
There were entire years, once 3 years in a row, that I had read no new Legion book. I managed to get back issues from friends who went to Australia, from my brother in Germany and when I felt strong enough I even faced "Customs", that 9-headed monster that would keep back issue orders for 6 months trying to discourage imports!
It was really a dark time and I'm glad it's over now.

The 80s and 90s are another story though and this is getting to be a novel, not a road map. I hope I haven't bored you too much.

Today there are about 15 comic shops in the Athens metropolitan area that's home to almost 4,5 million people, a giant warehouse with hundreds of thousands of back issues, we have a real Comics Con - with a focus on American Comics - each year. We also have the Net that brought so many of us together and where we can get any comicbook we want. Greece is part of the European Union and no one has the power anymore to arbitrarily decide what is "frivolous" and what isn't or what we'll read...

I'm sorry this turned out so big but I really wanted to share it with you people.

[ March 21, 2007, 06:57 PM: Message edited by: Dain ]

From: Somewhere in the Multiverse | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by stephbarton:
The issue dealt with Superboy thinking he was Ultra Boy posing as Reflecto, yeah, I'm still not sure I get it.

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LOL, yeah as a kid I also bought this in one of those cheap comics stacks. I read it a few times (I was like 10). And kept saying "so who the heck is Reflecto???"

Thankfully he became his own person over in v4 annual #1...a rejected applicant. It answered the the 10 year old's question...even if it was a retcon.

From: Tampa | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Michael Grabois:
This thread is 4 years old, by the way.

My first comics were off the spinner rack at the local 7-11 in Edison, NJ. My first Legion issue, Superboy 212 (Legion of Super-Rejects), was a few months after I read my first comic (Superman 276 with Captain Thunder). My second issue was Adventure 346, the first part of the Adult Legion story, which I picked up at a garage sale. I couldn't figure out why they were older in the 1960s and teens in the 1970s!

I eventually picked up back issues and by around 220 or so I was buying each issue on the stands. Somewhere around the 250's-260's I got a subscription, but that sucked because the comics came later than on the newsstand and often in worse shape. I've bought every issue since then.

Somewhere in the early 90s I developed my "anal retentive" checklist and with the internet I was able to find more obscure issues and artifacts.

I have a nearly complete Legion run - missing just 7 Adventure issues (I have 247), 11 Action issues (mostly the cameo appearances), 7 Superman issues, most of the Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane issues, and a handful of other scattered stories. I've read almost all of them via reprints, though, but it's the thrill of the chase that's fun to.

Oh, and it was about 10 years before I got to read the second part of the Adult Legion story, via the reprint in the DC Super-Stars issue.

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Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Ultra Jorge:

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Originally posted by stephbarton:
The issue dealt with Superboy thinking he was Ultra Boy posing as Reflecto, yeah, I'm still not sure I get it.

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LOL, yeah as a kid I also bought this in one of those cheap comics stacks. I read it a few times (I was like 10). And kept saying "so who the heck is Reflecto???"

Thankfully he became his own person over in v4 annual #1...a rejected applicant. It answered the the 10 year old's question...even if it was a retcon.

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From: Liberty City | Registered: Jul 2003  |  IP: Logged |