When I heard SeqArt was publishing a book of critical essays about the Legion of Super-Heroes, my first thought was I gotta get that, followed narrowly by Great Rao, I wish I’d submitted.
A wondrous Silver Age misfit, the Legion is a group of teenaged superheroes based 1,000 years in the future, inspired by the exploits of their greatest icon, Superboy. Over the decades they’ve been in existence, they’ve had members join, die, marry, create horrifying robot psychopaths, distort time and space, made Superboy and Supergirl cry by lying to them, and in one sad episode, kill their ex-girlfriend’s newest paramour with a tree branch imbued with hyper-gravity.
In other words, the Legion are awesome, and probably even closer to traditional soap opera than other comics due to the cast of dozens of teenagers—most titled (power) + (gender appellation), i.e., Lightning Lad, Triplicate Girl, Element Lad, Phantom Girl—who used their real names (in all their future glory—Garth Ranzz, Jo Nah, Brin Londo), and who fell in love with each other, and betrayed each other, and fought menaces so powerful that they had to go back in time to bring Superboy to help.
Teenagers from the Future expounds upon the fascinating corners of the Legion, with scholarly and serious insight. Some entries are heavy on story analysis—such as Richard Bensam’s highly interesting examination of the self-knowing storytelling techniques in “The Perfect Storm: The Death and Resurrection of Lightning Lad”—but the strongest ones are grounded in critical theory concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Unlike super teams of the time, or those now, the Legion often had tons of women—there was none of this “kill off the Invisible Girl, please,” infection with Legionnaires—the fans voted for who would lead the team, and over the years multiple women took the top spot. This is not to say that adventures of the years weren’t grounded in sexism or stereotype (such as the ’68 tale where the female Legionnaires attack the men, brainwashed by a suspiciously short-haired woman into chanting “Hooray! Down with men!”), but John G. Hemry makes a compelling case for diversity in “Liberating the Future: Women in the Early Legion.” As he noted, even grounded in a culture of sexism and discrimination, “the female characters in the Legion . . . seriously rocked,” and argued that “creating stories about girls in the future led the writers—the teenage Jim Shooter, in particular . . . to imagine female characters who were often equal to their male counterparts.” I’d argue that in many cases they surpassed them, despite being assigned dubious motivation, as John notes (such as having to rescue a boy not out of heroic compulsion, but girlish crush).
What the Legion made up for in gender diversity it failed utterly in terms of race. The future of the Legion, notes Jae Bryson, was all-white. After “18 years into its existence, the Legion finally had its first black character,” the clearly blaxploitation-based Tyroc, who embodied “nearly every stereotype a white person could have about an African-American.” Jae loved him nonetheless, because now the Legion could be black, too—although frustration set in when the writers clearly had no idea how to handle him, and he was banished to a Brigadoon-like city of, well, just black people.
As Jae notes, by his calculation there have been 128 Legionnaires (a number subjective to each fan—I think mine’s around the 100 mark)—but only nine have been African-American, or seven percent. That’s a shoddy record for any hero team, especially one grounded in the utopian values of the future. Moreover, many of those nine had stereotypical “urges” issues—they couldn’t stand authority, couldn’t control their violent or sexual tendencies. And most of the nine were simply retconned characters who were made black after decades of being white—like turning on Days of Our Lives one day and finding out that John Black was really named Jean, and he was from Oaxaca. Yet Jae ends positively, noting that the excellent (and sadly now-canceled) Legion cartoon has two African-Americans, Tyroc and Star Boy.
In other words—the past is what it is. The Legion is about the future, and we can change that. I’d like to add that in our timeline, President Lad is no longer a white guy, while in the previous iterations of story he always was. Jae’s most compelling point is that the shifting storylines and malleable tales of the Legion can reflect society’s own changing attitudes, and for that, it can be wonderful.
The book is loaded with wonderful essays—who could pass up Scipio Garling discussing the inherited heritage of teamwork viewed through the JSA or JLA? Or Invincible Chris Sims talking about how the Legion were a bunch of jerks to each other, because they’re teenagers, and teenagers are jerks?—and at least in one instance compelled me to purchase a newer run of the Legion. Matthew Elmsie has two essays grounded in generational theory and evolution as the Legion has been “rebooted” to reach new audiences, with some character names changed to be more current (if I told you that Lightning Lad was updated to “Live Wire,” for instance, I bet you could guess the time when. Hint: it is extreme ). Both of these compelled me to read the later incarnations, which I’d spurned after the Levitz and Giffen Legions I’d loved had gone by the wayside (although examined with grace and love by Timothy Callahan and Julian Darius). And I liked them. Not as much as the coverless Adventures my best friend inherited from his dad when we were kids, or the glossy Direct market Levitz-penned issues, illuminated as they were with wondrous art by Steve Lightle, but I liked them.
The highlight of Teenagers from the Future has to be Alan Williams’ meditation on “Pulling Back the Curtain: Gender Identity and Homosexuality in the Legion.” While women where showcased, blacks barely snuck in, and listen—don’t even talk about being gay in the Legion. That was the path of the Legion for decades, although its dedicated fanbase endlessly speculated about Element Lad (he did have a pink costume, after all—and, well, so did Cosmic Boy, but we all know that Rokk Krinn was a magno-ball champ back on Braal, and one of the Founders can’t be gay—right?) and other Legionnaires.
For me, and as Alan details, non-heterosexuality began to truly appear in 1989. While I was only 14, even I picked up on how Shrinking Violent and Light Lass had begun to act around each other, something the writers had been delicately inferring since 1986. By ’91 it seemed clear that they shared an apartment together, and perhaps a life. The best part of all this is that it seemed normal. Yet even after fan firestorms over the inferences, the writers refused to confirm or deny.
The Legion fanbase—known most notably by its fanzine Interlac, named for the future language standard for the United Planets (which for many years I could read, more or less, without a key)—has an unusually close relationship with Legion creators, and Alan does a fantastic job of combing back issues, letters between fans and creators, interviews, and message boards to present his stories of the closeted Legion. It forms a compelling bridge between the known text and inferences and the intentions of the creators.
None of that is necessary when discussing the story of Element Lad and Science Police Officer Shvaughn Erin. Jan and Shvaughn had long been shown as a couple—he’s a Legionnaire, she’s police, although since ’64 Jan had been described as “out of his element” around girls—and long considered gay by the writers and artists. As Keith Giffen put it in 1988, “he’s gay, big deal! . . . Colossal Boy’s Jewish, so what? . . . I would think that by the 30th century homophobia is sort of looked back upon as a quaint aberration of human nature.” Despite this, Jan had been shoehorned into a typical heteronormative relationship with a woman.
Until 1992. When the girl’s supply of the “ProFem” drug—a gender reversal pharmaceutical that acts as a non-surgical gender transformer—runs out, and Shvaughn reveals that he’s really Sean. Immediately, Jan reveals that “anything we ever shared physically . . . it was in spite of the ProFem, not because of it . . . !” Sean had only taken the drug to become female to woo Element Lad, who he assumed was heterosexual. He didn’t want to be a woman, but masqueraded as one for the sake of desire.
The story was barraged by criticism from all sides. The homophobes didn’t want a gay Legionnaire (and let’s be honest, one of the problems is that Element Lad is so powerful—one of the potentially strongest members of the Legion). Some in the pro-gay community were disappointed by the strangeness of it all. While genderswapping in the future should be completely tolerated, as now, it should be because the person wants to become the other gender—not because he’s trying to lure another person into bed. And the fact that the gay Element Lad stayed with a woman instead of a man—it’s just all broken.
As Alan notes, folks were frustrated because it was “such a clumsy way to suggest that in the 30th century, the way to deal with a same-sex crush is to simply switch genders so that the relationship becomes an apparently heterosexual one.”
I’ve always taken a different tack, maybe one up the middle: that while it was a completely insane thing to do to win somebody else’s heart, it actually worked. And the best thing was, the dude not only accepted it, he said that the real you was better than what you were pretending.
Whoa, wait, this was supposed to be a review of the book—not a digression into how I feel about the Legion, or what I love about it, or the stories, or the characters. All that is inseparable from Teenagers from the Future, though—and if you’re a Legion fan, or into critical theory about pop culture, you need to read this book. You’re going to learn things you never knew before about the Legion, you’re going to think some of the writers are nuts, you’re going to think some are hilarious, and you’re going to get to spend several hours thinking about the Legion in a whole new way. Worth thirty bucks? Worth fifty.
Tags: Jim Shooter, Klordny Fest, Legion of Superheroes, SeqArt
Man! I am doubly excited about reading this now. Thanks for giving me this volume of delights! Also looking forward to those DnA Legions . . .
Also, this:
Glad you liked it! Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving the book such a great write-up. Simply gorgeous!
Congratulations! You and Callahan and Professor Fury are bringing to bear all the awareness one would bring to a fine novel. This is the way I always hoped to see comix treated. Actually, it was inevitable. No art form ever starts trashy and stays trashy. Somebody gets an itch to do more. Good minds will not rest. The comix creators HAVE to respond with more thoughtful work.
I am so proud I was able to contribute to this book.