It's hard to be ashamed of the things you love, but it's hard to love the things that make you ashamed. And that's where I stand on the Legion Of Super-Heroes. I have such a fondness for the Shooter/Swan, the Bates/Cockrum, and the Levitz/Giffen stories from the past. The first I loved as a child just because there were lots and lots and lots of flying people in them. The second I loved as an adolescent because it was an obvious and successful rescue job of a dying property I'd once loved, a rescue I could watch with fingers crossed and loud cheers. And the third I adored as I was struggling to become an adult, because it was clever and dense and full of the kind of trivia that only an old fan could spot, which made an old fan feel that his hours of reading and thinking hadn't been entirely wasted. It was innovative, for a super-hero comic, and epic in scale, and exciting, and I would count off the days until the next issue. (I recall reading one issue on Richmond railway station in the rain, having come all the way up the line from Ashford when I was plain broke just to get that one comic.)
But there comes a point for most comic books when the future catches up and they become redundant. The audience changes and the connections between characters and premise and the marketplace weaken. Then it's fingers-crossed and reinvent-us time. And the Legion has been being reinvented for almost 40 years now, with each new reboot seeming to come quicker than the one before, each reworking a more desperate attempt to make the old new and the commercially moribund popular again. The Legion at war! The Legion young again! The Legion lost in space! The Legion as a group of teenagers teaching older folks how to become daring again! As Alan Moore once said, each time the history of a property gets changed, the belief and involvement of the existing fans get worn away just that bit more. The gamble on the part of a publisher, therefore, is to create a significant new audience before losing so much of the old one that a rescue job can't happen.
Well, three cheers for Geoff Johns, who specialises in hauling up old characters, scraping off the layers of continuity-barnacles, and uncovering a reason to be that connects the old faces with the mass audience. When it first appeared, the Legion had three things going for it. The first was cape-colour and numbers: it delivered a team, and soon a nigh-on army, of costumed super-heroes to an audience that was still relatively deprived of capes and cowls. The second was its' future setting: a mixture of a standard science-fiction future with a Eisenhower-era sensibility, far off but comfortably familiar and reassuring. Thirdly, it fleshed out the Superman mythos in an emotional and useful fashion: the lonely Superboy, forever hiding his identity and unable to ever be himself with the folks of lil'old Smallville, suddenly had friends, super-powered teenagers like himself, that he could be himself with.
The first two of these selling points quickly faded in the very early years of the Legion. By the late 1960s, there were armies of super-heroes everywhere. The readership didn't have to seek out the future to loose themselves in the doings of a million pointing, pouting, proactive teenagers. Indeed, there were soon teams of teenagers in the present day, from The X-men to The Teen Titans. So one plank of the Legion's popularity was immediately gone. Then the future itself changed, and the audience's expectations of what was to come became more demanding, if not sophisticated, and with time, a great deal more pessimistic. The shiny, mainstream smalltown American future of The Legion got old, and got old fast. Not only did the audience stop finding the Norman-Rockwell future so enticing, but the future started leaking into the present-day competitors of the Legion. Soon every super-team had a space-ship. Nanobots? Genetic mutation? Black hole technology? Check, check, check. The future was now, and there was nothing that writers of the Legion could call upon to describe a future that wasn't already a commonplace in the comic-book present.
Full marks ,therefore, to Johns for focusing on the third selling point, then, the only one that still functions with an emotional heft, and sadly the one factor which DC Editorial has written out of the franchise for the past 24 years or so. The Legion is important because it stops Superboy being lonely. It's a clever concept, because Clark Kent doesn't engage our sympathies as much if he isn't somewhat alienated from the world around him. His loneliness triggers empathy and identification, an isolation which could could only be weakened by having a group of powerful friends hanging around the same streets and shops as him. But place those friends in the future, and they're close enough to visit, and a welcome source of community, but they're not so close that they make Smallville an entirely happy home for Superboy. And Johns nails this so effectively that it seems to evoke a past era which actually never existed, seems to call back memories of old comic books that were a pleasure to get lost in because they played out this concept consistently, in obvious ways. Except that the nostalgia Johns is summoning here is ersatz, because no Superboy comic ever succeeded in tapping this vein so explicitedly, so very precisely. Yes, the Legion gave Superboy an escape and friends, but this was often either hidden in the sub-text, or touched upon and then swiftly moved past. But it's actually the whole point of the Legion in John's tale, and as that, it's a brilliant trick, and it could yet save the Legion.
But there are still such problems with the Legion. Truly substantial problems. Take Superboy, or Superman, out of the Legion, and they're still just another gang of folks in costumes. They'll need something more to stand on their own when Kal-El isn't around. So Johns has sensibly tried to change the future instead, to give a second of the Legion's original winning premises a new spin. He's muddied up the future and taken the happy-ever-gloss out of the equation. (Which has been done before, of course, but not in this fashion.) Instead of a universe that's basically united, and united basically by a confederation of human colonies showing the rest of creation how to be as grand as we are, Johns gives us an Earth ruled by a racist elite and supported by a racist populace. The world turned upside down. And the Legion's reason to be is now to stand against this humans-first, and Terrans-first, racism, to set an examine of tolerance and multi-culturalism. It many ways, it's the opposite of the early Legion's world. It's more in keeping with the bleaker world-view of so much of modern day culture. It opens up a host of interesting conflicts and plot ideas to drive the Legion, saving it from standard soap-opera plots and policing-the-cosmos stories. When a 31st century police officer shots at Kal-El shouting, "That's not Superman. Superman wouldn't help aliens. He's for human rights. He's for us.!", Johns has the big blue declare the central premise of this new Legion series: "I'm for everyone." It's a lovely touch, but it's more than that. It's a simple slogan for an explicitly, and in some-quarters-unfashionable humanist ideology. Everybody counts. All discrimination is bad. We're all in this together and we're better for it.
Hurrah for Geoff Johns.
But, that damn elephant. That damn elephant in the room that's still obviously there, that won't leave even when the Legion is tooled up to be a rejection of the white ethnocentrisms of '50's America. I want to ignore it, I want the elephant to go away. But it won't. Everytime my eye moves across the page, in those micro-seconds between focuing on one panel and another, the truth of the Legion's visual identity undercuts everything that's being written and drawn, and I have to haul myself back into the narrative and pretend that I've not seen what I've seen. You know it, I know it, we all know it's there. It's grey and it weighs tons and it's got a big, long trunk. It's a bloody elephant.
Let's say the obvious. It's so obvious that some will feel it's not worth saying, because it's been said so many times before. But, then, it was true then, and it's true now. So, deep breath, hold our noses, jump ...
Just about everybody in The Legion is white. They're white. (And even when they're not white, they are often just white people with blue or green skin.) This is the 31st century, but the best and brightest of our young heroes are white. We all know that the future couldn't and shouldn't be that. Humankind has spread across the stars, but mainly it's the white folks that deserve the costumes and save us all again? The Legion is still predominantly caucassian. The long-standing campaigns by LSH fans to get more aliens into the Legion missed the point, I'd argue. Yes, more aliens would be a good idea. I loved Gates, was fond of Bloc. But before that, please can we have something that looks as if humanity had developed into a 31st century species containing all of us, race, colour, creed, sexuality, rather than into a bunch of basically white folks? For in the final showdown of the Superman And The Legion Of Super-Heroes graphic novel, Superman stands in the vanguard of a Legion dedicated to smashing the racist, specist Earth-Man, and of 20 Legionnaires we have 1 rock-creature alien, one alien human-like woman with antennae, one blue woman, one green man, one energy creature who used to be a white man, one black man, one American Indian, and 12 white folks. That means that 63% of this group-symbol of anti-racism are all one colour, and most of the rest were once either white or might as well be now. I know it's been said before and said so many times, but this can't be a statement of truth, justice and humanism. It's a statement of the opposite of that.
It's the elephant in the room. It's the same elephant that sits on the bridge of the Enterprise. It's a damn big bloody elephant. It gets in everywhere. And it was time, this time, for one great push to turn the elephant out of the room and free up the space he's been taking up for better things. Like fun, and adventure, and, oh yes, a humanist subtext as well as a humanist text. The attempts by DC to deal with race in the Legion were initially notoriously unsuccessfull. Mike Grell calls Tyroc, the token Black hero of the 1970s, "One of the most embarrassing super-heroes in the history of comics, I think." (Tyroc's origin revealed that the Black people of the future had all gone to live on an island and existed as a seperatist nation there. That's all of the Black people of the future. Not the members of The Nation Of Islam, for example, but all of them. And presumably those of mixed-race too. How many things wrong with that idea can we list before ennui sets in? Not to mention that there were presumably islands for all the other non-white races of the DC future too, and indeed, for those members of the caucasian race who aren't nordically pale.) The situation improved as time passed, starting with Invisable Kid II, and the quality of the representations of the non-white members of the Legion improved just as their numbers hardly did. And no amount of turning away, no amount of continuity twidling, no amount of pro-diversity and pro-equality story-telling can change this truth: that the Legion is an uncomfortable read with a very uncomfortable visual identity. And I speak as a man who loved this particular Johns and Frank graphic novel more than any other last year. Let me admit the truth here: it actually made me cry. And I don't cry often. It was like seeing my old friends again and discovering that everything was as fine as it'd once been. It was splendid.
You see, I do love the Legion, but it's hard to love something that makes you ashamed. You have to go away and hope that the thing you love gets itself together, comes to the decent decision, does the right thing. Not racial quotas, not mad political correctness. Just simple decency, the very thing the Legion always stood for. When the next reboot arrives, please let it begin with something akin to the following simple scene:Smallville. The nearly-recent past. Superboy in his early teens. Unloved by his schoolmates, a lonely Clark Kent wanders the countryside. Three fantastic unfamiliar figures appear. (1) Cosmic Boy, a Sikh from the future economic powerhouse of the Punjab, possessing magnetic powers: (2) Saturn Girl, a white young woman from the colony world of Titan, possessing telepathy: (3) Lightning Lad, a .... well, anything you want, an Esquimaux woman, a Japanese man, a whatever you want. Just, please, not all white. Not mostly white. Not white folks with blue or green skin. Please please, get the elephant out of the room, and let me slip back in round it as it leaves.
Because I love the Legion. Long live the Legion!
The "Superman And The Legion Of Super-Heroes" graphic novel by Johns and Frank was published in 2008 by DC and Titan Books. It's a beautiful book, produced with craft and love, and whatever problems I've mentioned shouldn't stop you hunting it out. You might just read it as you would a fine old Eisner "Spirit" tale, with its' troublesome representation of Ebony: carefully in the light of wider concerns. Beautiful stories, but there's work to do. (I read the book in 2009)
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