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Exceptional Recycling in Legion Stories

In the Silver Age, many remarkable traits attached to the Superman franchise, which then spread among Supergirl stories, Superboy stories, Lois Lane stories, Jimmy Olsen stories, and, of course, Superman stories. Between Superman, Superboy, and Supergirl stories, however, it seems as if editors decided that a) these readerships did not overlap and b) these readerships turned over in something like three-year cycles.

How else might we explain things like the strange relationship between Halk Kar of Thoron and Mon-El of Daxam, characters who repeated, in most significant details, identical stories (discussed here)? In the fifties and sixties, comics did not enjoy the self-conscious and history-conscious readership typical of comics in 2000 AD; comics recycled stories to get an issue out the door without too much work.

Across the aisle with the upstart Marvel Comics, one could see recurring events like the Thing of the Fantastic Four run amok and turned against his friends about once every three years until the seventies. Stan Lee explained such recurring stories with the understanding publishers had of their market in the sixties: They expected a youngish market to age out of interest in comics on something like a three-year cycle. Perhaps, in DC's case, its editors during the sixties acted on similar premises; but for whatever reason, one could see episodes of considerable self-cannibalism in stories pertaining to Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise.

One culminating example features the same elements recurring in a tale of Superboy's initiation into the Legion of Super-Heroes, a tale DC would retell with substantial particulars unchanged, for Supergirl a few years later. When stories seem so similar, with some sequences repeating verbatim between stories, although close together in time, we should suspect cutting corners. Few Legion stories, indeed, separated these doppelgangers; and this helps define the Superboy - Superman - Supergirl cell of the Superman franchise as particularly inclined to story replication.

The Secret Identity Bit

A writer could grab the attention of readers in a story of Silver Age vintage with a number of plotline tools that we might call a storytelling toolkit. Frequently the writer imposed scenes that somehow undermined a superhero's secret identity, either by revealing the secret or making it appear patently false. Most frequently, however, writers opted for exposure, with the most blunt approach involving some figure blurting out a hero's secret like over-the-fence gossip.

Following the sequence of Legion of Super-Heroes stories as presented in the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives volumes, Superboy's first encounter with the Legion follows this form, with a group of heretofore unknown teenagers shooting off their fool mouths about Superboy and Clark Kent, as if revealing such a secret involved no more extreme consequences than a sister telling her friends that her brother keeps really rank nudie magazines under his bed. Three times strangers acknowledged Superboy's secret, with Superboy becoming more baffled at each iteration.

Supergirl, not too many years later, enjoyed a similar, almost identical experience, though the story grew a bit in the retelling. Rather than simply accosting her in the streets - a disturbing enough experience - the Legionnaires give her a nod and a wink and mention her secret identity in the middle of events that might have forced her to change identities but for the presence of a convenient teenaged hero from the 30th century.

The different details, however, shouldn't confound the fundamental identity of the two stories. In each tale, a similar set of three teenagers appear - in one case, screened for gender - and razz the protagonist about his or her secret identity, then reveal themselves as Legionnaires (Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy for Superboy; Saturn Girl, Phantom Girl, and Triplicate Girl for Supergirl).

The Ice Cream Parlor Scene

At some point in each story the Legionnaires decide to stop razzing their probationaries by making jokes about their all-important secret identities. Never mind that one could see such concern as misplaced - if the people they knew hadn't figured them for Kryptonians, in spite of years of unlikely coincidences, we must assume that some unnamed superpower made each of these heroes unrecognizable outside of their working clothes (and a prize - mainly the warm feeling one gets in catching another's oversight - to her or to him who knows what explanation traditionally explains why no one ever seems to figure out that behind the Clark Kent glasses and Linda Danvers wig lies a Super-somebody).

Given that the grownups of the early sixties preferred to edify than describe, and given that they felt a soda shop (a mostly-extinct business that sold no intoxicants over the counter) represented the best kind of place for teenagers to converge, both heroes found themselves in similar surroundings, mouthing similar lines. One may wonder: If, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries places like Baskin-Robbins can maintain an inventory of thirty-one flavors, why would the consumers of a millennium later satisfy themselves with only nine?

Also, consider that the product we call ice cream may not exist in a thousand years. One suspects that all foodstuffs of that age will derive from tofu, rice, soy, or lentils, and will taste bad, and will still cause health problems, but laws will prohibit mentioning either drawback because ideology will claim neither problem exists. However, the writers of the early sixties had the good fortune to have to resort to their imaginations to project the future; little would they know of a later age when human beings increasingly sought to compel their fellows to eat precisely what, and how much, and how often, and when.

Back to the ice cream parlor subject, though - compare both panels and note the similarities. One sees a preowned story here. Perhaps a philosophy of "If it worked once, it will work again" prevailed here; perhaps Stan Lee's (abandoned) dictum that comics tended to turn over readerships in three-year cycles suggested that writers should save some effort by recycling stories that often, even when such refurbishment took a quite literal form.

The Ultimate Rejection

Though the minutae differ, once again, these stories take the same tack - in each case, the Legion initially flunk our heroes out of their initial membership applications. In a way, this implicates both stories as definitely originating in the Silver Age (or in later, derivative periods), since the superhero-who-fails served many times as one of the attention-getting gimmicks of the period.

One sees more variation in the shared theme here. Superboy, in his rejection scene, has just failed in a series of tests of ability presented by the Legion founders, but all turns out for the better, since his rejection proves no more than a hoax. The Legionnaires, it seems, had rigged the contests against Superboy such that each presented a moral quandary: Should he pass his membership test or should he help people at risk from simultaneous events. In each case, Superboy opted to do the moral thing rather than the self-serving thing.

Supergirl fails her application on other grounds altogether. Some force inherent in time travel - scientists may someday describe it as a temporal plot device - causes her to age to maturity while in the future of one thousand years hence (or, perhaps, the inevitable chunk of red Kryptonite played a role). One might note that her passing her initiation would present a problem, since Superboy and Supergirl lived in different times and having them both in the Legion would expose Superboy to the risk of finding things out about Superman. However, so many time-traveling stories exposed Superboy to people from Superman's time that he must have known everything already. Superboy met Jimmy Olsen, Robin, the adult Luthor, and probably everyone else from the world of his grownup version in the years between 1960 and Crisis on Infinite Earths. However, we need not offer excessive criticism to writers who choose to err on the side of caution.

In both cases, furthermore, the hero(es) became full members in good standing in the Legion of Super-Heroes and found various contrived methods of avoiding the kind of temporal pollution likely when a Supergirl from 1961 occasionally encounters a Superboy of 1940-something. As these year marks shifted, and the exact birthdates and early decades of DC's superheroes became vaguer and more incomprehensible, and, of course, as time travel stories made every superhero from every period of DC's multi-era mythos meet every other hero, the problem of contamination became largely academic, however urgently later stories might twist things in an attempt to preclude such contamination.

Implications about the Market

That DC would iterate this story suggests something about the comics readership of a previous generation. Consider, for the sake of argument, what might happen if a major superhero comics publisher attempted the same thing today.

If the writer cannibalized someone else's story (ever, perhaps, under editorial fiat to do so), we might expect some publication like The Comics Journal to do a scathing expose on the event. If a writer rehashed his own work, we might expect a torrent of letters to the title(s) in question talking about how said writer had lost it, and how, although his material might have excelled in the seventies, it does nothing for anyone today.

An aggressively critical readership that watches comics for years exists today. Some small portion of this watchful readership, furthermore, actively polices comics, releasing salvos of protest when something like this happens. The intent of the writers no longer matters; the target readership becomes irrelevant. If editors intended to entertain eleven-year-olds with a story about Supergirl time traveling, such intent must take a back seat to the principles that move today's superhero comics editorial ethos.

At the time, however, different principles moved comics, and consumers did not deem themselves editors-in-the-field. As a result, lapses like this occurred (more than once); but comics could also proceed in a much less self-conscious fashion, worrying more about entertainment than with posturing or the compliance with the unwritten codes of the cult of cool.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 210. Completed 25-DEC-2000.