Thursday, December 4, 2014

THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES ADVENT CALENDAR - DAY FOUR

Subdued by the power of Kinbaku.

Superboy vol.1 No.221 (November 1976)
“That vile hag!”

In their 1970s incarnations, the chaste adolescents of the Legion stripped out of their name-branded pajama togs and into skin-bearing, hip-hugging, downright sexy short-shorts and bikini tops. While other branches of the DC Universe were embracing socially aware storylines about the environment and racial harmony, the Legion seemed to be the one corner where the sexual revolution gained any sort of traction.

Here, bare-chested leather daddy Grimbor – “The Chainsman” – wraps up a barely-dressed Shadow Lass in a restrictive, full-body gimp suit on behalf of his inamorata, the pert alien redhead Charma whose super-power causes men to worship her and women to try to murder her. All sorts of sex and violence blurring here in the future…

Surely there were many alien races in the 30th Century which failed to fit into either biological crèche, so I’m not sure how (for instance) a self-perpetuating asexual alien lifeform might've responded to Charma's either-or gender-divide of a super-power, but I’ll assume “indifference”.

3 comments:

Bram said...

OK — wait — some context? I mean, what's the storyline? This was, I'm pretty sure, before I was reading LSH regularly … but I remember this sequence …

BillyWitchDoctor said...

That story was an open catalog of Jim Shooter's bondage and woman-slapping fetishes right up to the final panel.

BillyWitchDoctor said...

@Bram, if you see this: Grimbor and Charma were working together to capture Legionnaires (ostensibly for ransom); Charma would subdue the guys--and use them to take out the women--and Grimy would show off his B&D "skills."

Upon the villains' defeat, it was revealed that all the while Grimbor was developing a rig that would bind Charma and nullify her power so he could keep her as his locked-up f#@k toy...so naturally, the "good" guys used it to imprison her. Jim! Jim, stop! Bad dog! Bad dog, Jim!

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