Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes 5YL - the first year. Some thoughts...

It's been a long time and my memories may not be off, but what I remember from online chatter, interviews, blogs, etc over the years is that Giffen had become extremely ticked off at a person or persons at DC (not his fellow creators on the book) and had reached the last straw, so he decided to literally go out with a bang - blow up the Earth, mess with DCU continuity, etc as a "take that". Not the first or last time Giffen would do something like this in his career.

*raises hand meekly*

I liked it actually lol....I thought they did a good job of giving it emotional impact with the way the issue was formatted, and I actually kind of like that it was senseless and came out of nowhere - I wouldn't want to be inundated with that stuff all the time, but it's a story beat worth exploring I think because we're so accustomed to everything making narrative sense, and sometimes life just ain't like that.

Not having been aware at the time of Giffen's annoying tendency to scorch everything around him when he's done with it, I also really liked that it upended the status quo and at the same time kind of protected the Legion from having to be bound by a lot of 20th/21st century continuity by just removing the setting where that continuity lives altogether

And I thought the SW6 batch Legion started putting the New Earth setting to good use - I feel like if that series had continued we could have got some interesting stories out of the different domed cities and maybe even ended up with a Legion World earlier than we got it seeing how crucial Danielle was in keeping things together during Zero Hour

There was definitely contention between Team Superman and Team Legion in a lot of ways, by all accounts. Maybe this was part of reaction to that.


Oh, it's all good, raz! I wanted to make sure I put in the "this is my opinion" disclaimer earlier, as I know there are tons of folks who really dig this, and that is a-ok by me.

I think that story would have been fine for me if it had been built up more - it was pretty well told, but my reaction here is a combination of a number of things:

-Reading the lions share of the Legion stories to get to this point in a matter of months
-My dislike of deconstruction takes on stories generally - definitely one that goes for 40 issues (I have a similar reaction to the DnA reboot work - there's absolutely some good stuff there. But as SW6 Mon-El has said, I prefer stories about preventing Armageddon versus those of cleaning up after it).
-The massive retcon-pallooza that these guys were doing in this run was really starting to annoy me.


That's a really interesting point about removing the playing board itself, rather than the pieces, off the table. I hadn't looked at it that way, and I really appreciate that viewpoint.


That's an interesting comment as well. Not trying to invoke the "B" word here, but this is also an issue I have with the current continuity. Maybe I have an issue with domed cities from Earth.

And just as an addendum, I think another (personal) challenge I had while reading this is that, yes, shit happens, but we've collectively had a lot of shit happen over the last couple years, so reading this made me do a collective "no thanks".

I get the artistic angle they were going for here. It simply doesn't work for me where I am now.

respectful opposing viewpoints are always welcome, Raz

I do agree that the whole, New Earth / SW6 Legion bit did work: a new beginning for everyone involved.

Real life IS senseless sometimes, and people get taken by surprise all the time, so it was definitely unique and different.

That is a really good point actually, my taste for entertainment has changed a lot over the past few years on this hell planet lol...like during lockdown the only thing I could really stomach was light comedy and even now I'm just not really that into dark/heavy stuff unless they really knock it out of the ballpark creatively whereas I was very into my Nihilistic Young(ish) Person phase when this stuff was all fresh so it was much more in line with where I was at the time!

Yep - maybe I'm just catching the 5YL run at bad times in my own personal situation.

I also just listened to the LOSP podcast about this issue and the end of the Giffen era. He basically destroyed the earth because "no one was looking."

Giffen is definitely a curmudgeon and spent a lot of this time with the Legion angry. We did have the one DnA era issue that he did that was fairly light, but he was pretty destructive in New 52 as well.

The more I read, the more I'm reinforced about marketing based on the Creative Name on the Cover. Namely, if a particular creator is the marketing force behind a title, I think I'll be giving it some distance, as it then starts to become a personality movement. We obviously have a very recent example that should act as an object lesson (I won't say the name), but Giffen's behavior during the New 52 was reminiscent of his actions here. But in these cases, the marquee creators typically have a lot going on, and being spread so thin across multiple tasks waters down the net result of all. That what we have is as good as it is, is fairly remarkable and a testament to the collaborative relationship he had with the Bierbaums. I think we've seen the same with Johns and others. It's a risk, but DC needs to give more assignments to hungrier writers who want to make something interesting versus tempermentally blowing shit up.

I'd dropped the book for a couple of months somewhere in this year. Not for long enough, that I didn't manage to pick up the issues I missed off the shelf of the local comic shop. But it was quite a fall form those early issues.

Think back to any Adventure Comic you like with the Legion in it. Now imagine that instead of doing anything in that issue, the Leigon instead decided to just wait it out. And for the next threat, and the next. SW6 were the Adventure era Legion that did just that, while their adult counterparts had little remaining focus. With Giffen still involved, but with any semblance of their original plan in tatters, the plot moved incredibly slowly. IIRC the SW6 were later additions to the plot, thought up due to the ever shifting plans for series that were going to spin out of the main book. Was it to be a flashback book? Was it to be a reboot and so on... Our rereads thread reminded me of just how small the plot steps were. While now I had some knowledge as to why, it really didn't help, and shouldn't have happened to the book in the first place.

That was the case with The End issue. I've no problem with left field things happening. But knowing, at the time of the reread, that it was done as part of a huff...of space doesn't help. It got through editorial not because there was backing for such gutsy storytelling, but because Giffen's parting shot happened during an editorial turnover. Which is another indicator of just what a state things were in on the book.

re the whole destroying Earth in a huff part... good point... seems very petty!


I also generally prefer more hopeful stories... real life can be tough and depressing enough!

Yep - I was just hearing/reading about that. Carlson jammed it through as the back office had tried to shut down the issue completely, but doing that would wreck the issue pipeline for at least three months. So, I guess kudos to the balls on Giffen for doing that, but shame for putting Carlson in that position; its very disgruntled-employee vibe, and I'm honestly surprised Giffen didn't wreck his cred during all of this. But the Comics industry is very different from mine, so what do I know?

Also, according to the same accounts (thanks to M. Grabois on all of this, btw), the chum was in the water as early as issue 2-3. The tension between the Superman and Legion teams did not help anything from 1989 to today, and then, in the beginning of all of that, the entire LSH early run, if you zoom out and look at as much of the forest as we can see, was a horrific political working environment. Honestly, kudos to Keith, Tom and Mary and Al for surviving all of that for as long as they did. But because of it all, the overall work did suffer.

Legionnaires (or would it have been Omega Men?) was supposed to happen a lot earlier that it did, and there would have been the "light" Legion book alongside the "darker adult" Legion story at least a year earlier.

Goddamn DC editorial. Again.

Yeah, issue 3 and the wheels started to come off. What was supposed to be a 12 issue arc showing the Legion show its heroic brightness, by reforming from the wreckage of a darker galaxy, became a retroboot with 3 fill in issues. In the main down to an editorial stropfest.

Giffen had some form going way back to the '70s I think. I do have some sympathy with someone who sees his agreed plan wrecked, and who feels some responsibility for his team on the book. But the whole mess was avoidable, and allowing further episodes/issues to happen was also avoidable. Noone comes out of it with credits, except the rest of the team who tried to make the best of it. What happened in v4, didn't stop pretty much the same scenario being set up for the end of v7, though. We did get Lurel Gand and Kent Shakespeare out of it too.

Man, what a set of dick waving scenarios. The Superman team said "no Super X references" and Giffen & team took that to an extreme. Sin on both sides. Such bullshit,. And the victims? Us in 2022, dealing with at least five reboots later. OMG.

If anything is certain, its that this specific run - from LSH v4 issues 1-39, are the most impactful of the Legion into the future vs. maybe the Darkness Saga, Certainly it was the boulder thrown into the stream that altered the course of history.

Well, one could argue that the ultimate blame lies with COIE and the complete lack of a consistent plan for what the post-Crisis DC was going to be like. Rebooting Superman while trying to preserve the Legion's history intact was just awkward as could be.

One of the worst bits of this whole thing is that after prohibiting the Legion from using anything "Super" related, thus necessitating that the Legion team create an alternative to the pocket universe patch, the Superman team went ahead and used the pocket universe themselves! It was such a complete mess.

Yeah, this is true and compounded by the friction between the two camps. I tend to think that Giffen may have made some things harder than he needed to - they could have just gone along and just NOT MENTIONED Superboy for a while, but he took it upon himself to retcon all of that stuff. But some of it is interesting reading for sure.

Given how they could sometimes go for many months, or even a year or more, without hide nor hair of a Superpeep, I agree it might have been best to not jump to 'explain' things and just sort of let it ride out for a year or two, see where the terrain lay after the aftermath of Crisis had died down, and some of the effects started to be soft-unbooted, such as a new Supergirl series or the existence of 'Hypertime' to get around the removal of the alternate Earths or whatever.

There was no hurry, IMO, to 'explain away' the disappearance of Superboy, or even the death of Supergirl. The future has always been separated (in some cases by an 'iron curtain of time!') from events going on in 'the present,' and has been stronger for it, and any time it gets dragged into 'modern day events,' such as that ludicrous crossover where Laurel Kent suddenly remembers that she's a Manhunter 1000 years too late for it to be remotely relevant, for, like, no reason whatsoever, is just bad...

thinking back, that would have meant perhaps a delay in introducing Kent Shakespeare or Laurel Gand. Maybe we still would have gotten them eventually, of course...

My memories of timing can get confused when looking back 30-40 years later so I looked up when the Superman and Legion teams published their respective stories.

(I will use cover dates but we can assume that release dates were about three months earlier. For example COIE #12 has a cover date of March 1986 but I believe was released in November-December 1985.)

Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #315 - last appearance of Supergirl with the Legion - September 1984

Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 - Supergirl dies - October 1985

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 ends the multiverse - March 1986

The Man of Steel #1 - Superman retconned to never be Superboy - October 1986

The Man of Steel #5 - Bizzarro but john Byrne states that this was originally intended to be Mon-El until the later Superman/Legion crossover was planned. - December 1986

LSH v3 #37-38, Superman v2 #8, Action Comics v1 #591 - Pocket Universe Superboy revealed and dies - August-September 1987

Superman v2 #16 - first appearance of Matrix/Supergirl - April 1988

Superman v2 #22 - Superman executes the Kryptonian genocidal murderers in the Pocket Universe and brings Matrix back to New Earth - October 1988

LSH v4 #1 - Five Years Later story starts - November 1989

LSH v4 #4 - Mon-El punches out the Time Trapper destroying the pre-Crisis Legion history - February 1990

So the important points here are:
1) The original plan of Superman meeting Mon_El to fix up Legion history would have been published about 6 months after Crisis but this didn't happen.
2) The Pocket Universe fix was almost 18 months after the end of Crisis
3) Superman's further involvement in the Pocket Universe was another year after that.
4) FYL and its subsequent retcon of no Superman/boy etc was more than 3 1/2 years after Crisis and more than a year after Superman's last involvement with the Pocket Universe.

Obviously some plans were brewing well before publication, but even so the FYL retcon was years after Crisis and the Superman team was finished with the Pocket universe before LSH v4 started and thus before the "order" came down to remove Superman's presence. Admittedly the Superman team went on to explore the consequences of his actions in the Pocket Universe, as was appropriate with this being why Superman developed his ethics against killing as well as his self-imposed exile in space and his discovery of the Eradicator device which played an important role in his later resurrection after Doomsday. This is what Glorith refers to when she admits to the importance of the Pocket Universe in history.

Whether we like the choices the teams made back then (and the Pocket Universe "solution" was made by both teams) there was a considerable time over which it all occurred and whoever decided the no Superman/Legion interaction rule and how that was played out there was no use of the Pocket Universe by either team for at least a year before that.

EDIT: Just read through this and my comments come across as far more confrontational than I thought. Not my intention and I apologise. I was simply curious about how swiftly the changes had followed Crisis and whether the Superman teams Pocket Universe story had followed or preceded the FYL retcon. In both case I was surprised by the result.

WOW! Stile, this is FASCINATING. Thank you for taking the time to break this out chronologically. And no, you didn't come off as confrontational to me. Laying out the facts like this is good. It's making me realize that there is probably another layer beneath what has been told from the written and oral histories of the Legion from this time. Namely the perspective of the Superman team in all this when 5YL kicked off, as their "no Superman" mandate was what created a lot of complexities. I don't think we've heard a take from Byrne, or anyone from the Super-camp, on the Legion business - why would they even care? All we hear is what Giffen and Bierbaum have told us via their channels. (If there is one from the Super-camp, I'd love to hear it!)

The fact that the Pocket Universe was accepted by both camps is fascinating. It says there was some level of two-way communication about the status of Superboy when Levitz ran the book. Based on the observable evidence and accounts, this apparently broke down with Giffen. If he was running most of the show at this point, and was given orders to not use Superboy & co, it makes me wonder if he took it to an extreme, especially given the later Time & Time Again. Did this act give us the Gordian Knot of continuity that has made the backoffice scared of the Legion moving forward? Given that comics creators are typically reluctant to throw others actively under the bus (generally speaking) I doubt we will ever know the truth of the matter. But I find it interesting.

I agree, Set. Unless Supergirl was integral to the story of the reformed Legion (why would it be in the continuity?) why create Laural (although I do love the character). Why couldn't Mon-El have been from the pocket universe if that aspect was so bloody important?

This whole thing really seems like a petty spat between two creators that have left us with 4-5 reboots to where we are now. Superman still flies high monthly.

I wonder. Laurel, like I said above, I very much enjoyed, especially the younger Andromeda character.

Kent (and Devlin, and Celeste and yes, even Kono) never really did anything for me. Never understood why they were around, Morduverse or not. I'm 3/4 of the way towards Zero Hour and I still can't articulate the value of any of them versus who was around before, although at least Kono has a personality. (In fairness, so does Celeste)

The more I read v4 in line with what came before (and after for that matter), the more I think Giffen let his ego get ahead of him with this project. It's unfortunate.

mega applause for your research stile, wow! this is illuminating

Yeah, thanks for researching that, stile.

I was totally thinking the Matrix/Phantom Zone villain stuff was a couple of years later, after the 5YL began.

Likewise - I thought it was early 90s.

Chiming in to say thanks stile!

And also GL, I like most of the 5YL add-ons, but Devlin was never anything other than annoying lol

(Although having said that, some of those characters are really hard to adapt to any other setting too - Kono and Loomis in particular just don't really work unless your setting contains some level of cynicism that the Legion usually doesn't)

Thanks everyone. I appreciate the thanks and comments. It was an interesting exercise and surprised me as well as I mentioned.

I was collecting the Superman titles from Man of Steel right through this period and well in to the 90's so that was my primary viewpoint. I only started collecting Legion from 5YL, although I had read many of the earlier stories in Black&White reprints here in Australia, so I was familiar with the team and the dramatic change V4 introduced drove me to find out what had happened before. That was when I bought up back issues of V2 and V3, so my perspective on this period and the interaction of the two teams is probably a bit different.

It seems like there are 6 separate but connected events that we saw happening that brought us to the change in V4 and different people were involved in each decision.

1) Killing Supergirl in COIE. I remember reading Marv Wolfman(?) writing about how it changed from a History volume to a transformation story and how they took the list of changes to the top DC editor (my memory says Jeanette Kahn but DC wiki says Dick Giordano) who pushed them to do more, so the decision to kill off Supergirl involved Wolfman and Perez but also Giordano at least.
2) Making Superman never Superboy. Byrne has acknowledged this as his concept (as well as stating that he later regretted it) but once again it was signed off at higher levels. (While Byrne gets most of the credit/blame for the Superman reboot it has been acknowledged that several others were involved such as Wolfman, Ordway etc. It thanks to Wolfman that we have Cat Grant, Emil Hamilton, and Ordway is credited with the Luthor businessman concept.)
3) Pocket Universe Legion/Superboy resolution. Comments I have read do not attribute the idea to any one person but both teams commented on the "bigger" story relevant to both properties, suggesting high involvement of both sides.
4) Supergirl/Matrix Superman-execution plot. Again Byrne seems to be the push behind this revisit to PU even though Matrix first brief appearance was by Wolfman suggesting all the Superman team.
5) LSH 5YL. This is primarily Giffen's idea and I believe he pulled in the Bierbaums, although again Levitz spoke positively about the change beforehand in the last letters pages of v3.
6) Glorithverse Valor retcon. There seems to have been enough to state that the insistence on a break came from the Superman side (at least according to Giffen and Bierbaums) but exactly who and whether it was writers or editorial or even higher up I don't know, and the execution came from Giffen.

At the time I enjoyed each of the changes, finding the exploration of the differences and consequences quite interesting. Looking back it does seem to have been the start of the pattern of rebooting Legion every few years rather than working within new limitations, a "disease" that was perhaps contagious enough for the rest of the DC Universe to catch.

For myself 5YL was fascinating reading at the time but looking back and comparing to other good periods, it ... dragged, and was less than it could have been. It also made significant enough changes that it was hard to backup from, hence the End of an Era and the Reboot. There has been some discussion regarding recent changes in X-Men about the importance of writers "putting the toys away when they are finished" i.e. leaving the "franchise" in a state where new writers can pickup without difficulty and carry on. We all like drama and excitement but we also like consistency and stability. Balancing those is the real challenge for a creative team.