THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES ADVENT CALENDAR - DAY ONE
Your Humble Editor is taking the month of December off to recharge his batteries and prepare new Gone&Forgotten material for 2015 – but the site itself won’t be taking a break! Every day for the next three weeks, you’ll be able to open a new entry on your 2014 Gone&Forgotten Legion of Super-Heroes Advent Calendar (because they debuted in Adventure Comics, get it?). Relive the most gone and forgotten moments of the premiere teenage super-frat of the far future, beginning with…
Adventure Comics vol.1 No.247 (April 1958)
“Why … uh … I just do my job!”
No sooner does the Boy of Steel, Clark S.Superboy Esquire, long for teenage fellowship to ease the singular superheroic burden of his dual identity than three teens from the 30th Century show up on his doorstep. With their names written on the front of the jerkins like the slowest kids at Summer Camp, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy – whose “magnetic eyes of super-power” sound like a real menace at the knife shop in the mall – take Superboy on a whirlwind tour of the future, including far-flung ice cream shops carrying all the flavors of the imagination (NINE of them!) and substandard quality control conditions at nearby robot factories.
After an unnecessary hazing ritual, Superboy is made a full-fledged member of the group with which his name would one day become synonymous. Now let’s all get badges that say “Super Hero Club” on them!
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| That's actually a futuristic "space-tattoo". |
“Why … uh … I just do my job!”
No sooner does the Boy of Steel, Clark S.Superboy Esquire, long for teenage fellowship to ease the singular superheroic burden of his dual identity than three teens from the 30th Century show up on his doorstep. With their names written on the front of the jerkins like the slowest kids at Summer Camp, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy – whose “magnetic eyes of super-power” sound like a real menace at the knife shop in the mall – take Superboy on a whirlwind tour of the future, including far-flung ice cream shops carrying all the flavors of the imagination (NINE of them!) and substandard quality control conditions at nearby robot factories.
After an unnecessary hazing ritual, Superboy is made a full-fledged member of the group with which his name would one day become synonymous. Now let’s all get badges that say “Super Hero Club” on them!
Comments
But then came writer Jim Shooter, an actual teenager who turned out to be far more interested in seeing the team be a team fighting villain teams rather than playing endless internal games of "Do you like me? Circle Yes or No." During his tenure, Legion kept its readership (around 500,000 an issue, unthinkable today) in a period when all other titles were plummeting, so I guess he read the zeitgeist right.