Comics! Bottom’s Up in the Legion!

DC’s company-wide event “Convergence” continues, in which long-abandoned incarnations of their super-characters are temporarily given current issues again, in a kind of multi-part gift to the company’s older, more nostalgic readers. As a result, today’s trip to Boston’s wonderful Comicopia seemed like a flashback to visiting the same twenty or thirty years ago.

Longer than that, actually, in this case, at least for me – because of course the reason I showed up at the comics shop at all was because among this week’s “Convergence” titles was the first issue of something called “Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes.”

The issue’s set-up is the same as all the other “Convergence” titles: the city of Metropolis – in this case in the 30^th century – has been cut off from the outside world for a year by a mysterious dome, and all the super-powered beings inside the dome have been rendered powerless, most certainly including the 30^th century’s foremost super-team, the Legion of Super-Heroes. The team’s living inspiration, Superboy, was visiting them from the 20^th century when the dome went up and trapped him in the future, and as this issue opens, he’s giving televised pep-talks to the people of Metropolis, but he himself is feeling miserable, missing his home back in time, missing his parents, even, in the issue’s best line (the one that had my comics friends emailing me taunts as soon as they read it) missing his dog.

The team’s resident genius, 12th-level intellect Brainiac 5, has been working feverishly for a year to break through the dome, without success, and the rest of the team is coping as best they can with the loss of their powers – and the loss of their teammate Wildfire, who’s disappeared. As Superboy puts it, “As a being of pure energy, [he] was nothing but powers – so he just dissipated into thin air.”

This kind of thing bugs me, of course, and always has. The reason Wildfire dissipated was because there was no way to separate him from his super-powers, sure – but it always bugs me when writers (in this case, Stuart Moore) ignore the fact that lots of super-heroes are inseparable from their super-powers. Superboy may be powered by Earth’s sun and therefore powerless after a year cut off from it, but plenty of Legionnaires – Shrinking Violet, Triplicate Girl, Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, etc. – are born with their special abilities. There’s no more explanation in this issue as to how the big bad villain of “Convergence” could somehow delete those abilities than there is how he could put a dome over not just every super-hero in the multiverse but every super-hero at every time-period of every multiverse. If a bad guy is that powerful, why bother telling the story at all? And several times in this issue, Brainiac 5 complains about the limitations of his teammates’ lesser intellects – but his super-power IS his 12th-level brain – so shouldn’t it be deleted as well?

But I overlooked such quibbles in order to bask again in reading an adventure of Superboy and the Legion. Not a clone Superboy, not a retro-stupid Legion, but just the real thing – the flight rings, the Legion Clubhouse, the old familiar characters of the team. For some inexplicable reason, issue artist Gus Storms decided to draw many of those characters wearing what looks for all the world like the old Saturday Night Live spoof-product Oops I Crapped My Pants, but Stuart Moore does a fine job capturing what the Legion means to Superboy:

This whole place – the Legion – it used to be like a dream, a fantasy world. I could come here and fly around with kids just like me, then close my eyes and wake up back in Smallville, with Krypto barking at the chickens and the sun coming up, blood red over the haystacks.

And naturally, reading this issue – and considering the fact that when this limited run ends, I’ll likely never read another new comic book featuring Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes – my memory was filled with all the times I’ve read about this team, in all its incarnations, from the first time I encountered them on the spinner-rack at Trow’s Stationary. Those memories made this issue, flaws and all, one big smile for me to read – so I guess I’m one of those nostalgic older DC readers who’s getting regular weekly gifts from “Convergence.” I’ll take them while they last.