Kids of Tomorrow got No Respect!

I think one of the things I like most about the early Legion is their total lack of respect for anyone. They'll travel back in time ten thousand years in order to invite their greatest hero to join their club, and then play a practical joke on him and make him cry.


They cross centuries again to invite Supergirl and then refuse to take her because while following their directions she accidentally gets a dose of red kryptonite that makes her look too old, even though A) she hasn't actually aged, she just looks slightly different (visually she just appears slightly taller and to be wearing lipstick), and b) it's a temporary effect that will wear off in a couple of hours.


So it's hardly surprising that when you see what appears to be a continuity error, such as them telling Supergirl that they are the children of the legionnaires that met Superboy, it's easy to read it as them just having a laugh at Supergirl's expense.

The bastards.

The Legion again

(I hadn't been planning to write much more about the early Legion adventures, but these Showcase volumes are so full of daft ideas that I can't help wanting to share the fun.

But first, a correction. In my previous article I said Shrinking Violet and Triplicate Girl weren't introduced until Adventure #300. In fact they, and Bouncing Boy first appear in a Supergirl story in Action #276 that, more than any other appearance, has all the hallmarks of a stealth pilot, as it features the most complete version of the Legion prior to their own series.

In this story we are told that the Legion has revised its policy of only allowing one new member per year to allowing one boy and one girl per year (1). Applicants shown include Brainiac 5, Sun Boy, Bouncing Boy, and Shrinking Violet. Since all of them are members by Adventure #300, the Legion series must take place at least two years later, assuming that these guys were taken on their second or third attempts, over other applicants that hadn't already been rejected (2)(3).

Other highlights of this story include Saturn Girl fooling Supergirl into not recognising her by wearing a mask, even though she is in full costume and has demonstrated her powers; the whole "super-girlfriends" routine which is ripe for innuendo by someone with a smuttier mind than I, and Supergirl's demonstration of power for her membership application, which involves destroying hugely important archeological sites by burrowing down to cherrypick a couple of choice items that made the archeoligist in me wince, and my experience is limited to watching the odd episode of Time Team; and how convenient is it that a kryptonite meteor just happens to fall out of the sky right on top of Supergirl just in time for Brainiac 5 to demonstrate his cleverness and self-sacrifice by slapping his force field belt on her and tuning it to fit her personally in less time than it takes for her to get out of the way of it. Anyone would think he had arranged it on purpose...

I feel a bit sad for poor Shrinking Violet here. I mean here she is, she's got as far through the Legion application process as having a placard with her own name on it, and then at the last minute she has to go up against someone who is related to the most famous hero in history that inspired the Legion in the first place, and who they have traveled back in time to personally invite. It must be particularly galling when Supergirl bogs off as soon as she's inducted and hardly ever turns up for meetings(4). She doesn't even get to be one of Supergirl's super-girlfriends.

Notes.

1) which makes you wonder how they end up with a 3:1 male/female ratio.
2) In Adventure #301 we find that Bouncing Boy was rejected once.
3) However, since there are no new female legionnaires between this and Adventure #300 I can only guess that Sun Boy reapplied in drag.
4) Talk about nepotism...

It's in the name

The Legion of Superheroes has always had something of a reputation for sexual equality, and now with the publication of the Legion Showcase collection we get the opportunity to see their earliest appearances, and a somewhat different picture emerges. Basically, unless you were Saturn Girl, the preferred trait for a female legionnaire seems to be the ability to fade into the background and keep quiet.

When the Legion first appeared, the name was really a bit of a stretch. Only Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad were in any way identified or got speaking parts, with a few backs of heads to suggest the Legion had more than three members. In most subsequent appearances a couple of new members would be introduced, although they never got to do much, until the Legion finally got their own series in Adventure #300.

This comic introduces two new female members, even if they don't appear in the story: Triplicate Girl is on the cover and a statue of Shrinking Violet is shown among other Legionnaire statues on the first page(1).

Shrinking Violet's first actual appearance is Adventure #301 where she appears in two panels, filling out group shots. She continues to stand at the back and say nothing for some time, except #305, where she gets to speak briefly. I can only guess this was because Star Boy was out sick and Lightning Lad was dead that day so she had to fill in, as she doesn't get to speak again until #310, where, for the first time in ten issues, she gets to use her powers. And then dies.

This being the Silver Age, she, and everyone else who dies is fit and healthy again by the end of the story. Over the next 20 issues Violet gets to use her powers twice more, to little effect, and it's not until #324 that she gets any individual attention, falling for Duplicate Boy, who conveniently leaves at the end of the story.

Phantom Girl gets it even worse. She is the first female legionaire introduced (2), appearing briefly in #290 for one panel (3). In #301 we find she is off on a distant planet on a vital door opening mission, which keeps her absent until #313. In fact she's not even listed as a legionaire, absent or otherwise, for twelve issues. She then vanishes again until #316, where she finally gets to speak, and even takes an active role in the story. She's next seen in #319 filling out the crowd scenes, and succumbs to a weapon that only affects her because she's not the star of the story.

Thereafter she appears semi-regularly, filling out the cast and occasionally getting to participate in the plot, but a lot of the time the writer hardly seems to notice she's there, which means that the contrived ending to Adventure #325 could have been avoided if he'd only remembered the power she'd demonstrated two issues earlier.

And then there's the names: Phantom Girl - A girl with a power to make herself so inconsequential that she's entirely forgotten for years at a time, and Shrinking Violet - the shy one with the power to make herself so small that nobody even notices she's present. I bet if Camouflage Girl (the girl with the ability to blend entirely into the background) had applied for membership they would have snapped her up because she would have fitted right in.


Notes.

1) Why the team have statues of themselves is not explained.
2) other than Saturn Girl.
3) two if you count the splash page, which is the same image

Justice once

Showcase Presents The Justice League of America volume #1.

I wanted to compare the treatment of Aqualad and Wonder Girl in Teen Titans with their adult counterparts in early Justice League, but it took me a while to work up the energy to read the Justice League Showcase collection. Gardner Fox is not my favourite silver age writer, and if there was ever a poll of DC's all time most annoying character, you can bet that Snapper Carr would be a contender.

On the other hand I am surprised how much I warmed up to Bob Haney after a few issues of Teen Titans, and I can hardly believe I didn't like Robert Kanigher when I first encountered his work, so maybe some intense study of early JLA would help me find the fun a third time.

500 pages later I am still not much of a fan of Gardner Fox, but the volume wasn't quite the chore I had expected, and Snapper Carr doesn't appear enough to be more than an irritant. The plots are formulaic and dumb, but provide enough entertainment, often for the wrong reasons, that you don't completely glaze over.

As with the Batman volume, the stories often suffer from the "Schwartz cover" effect. That is, editor Julius Schwartz commissions an exciting cover and then hands it to the writer to tell a story around, but then doesn't seem to care how the cover image is shoehorned in. The result often being that the cover scene is a ludicrously contrived moment in an otherwise unrelated plot. Which is disappointing, as the covers, often very intruiging or exciting, promise so much, but deliver so little.

The cover to JLA #1, for example: an alien plays a strange boardgame against the Flash, with the rest of the team at stake. Except that in the story the entire thing is fixed and it's just an excuse for the alien to transport them all away which he could have done anyway as they were already within his power.

But back to my original motivation for reading the book. How does Gardner Fox's treatment of Wonder Woman and Aquaman compare to Bob Haney's use of their counterparts in Teen Titans?

Aquaman is less obviously useless because of the nature of the stories. Where Teen Titans is given a realistic setting, the JLA are usually thrown into a fantasy landscape, so tailoring part of it to suit Fishguy is less blatant. Plus the formula plot usually involves each member of the team being transported to an environment designed specifically for them, either on another planet or an alternate dimension.

Wonder Woman is not singled out in any way. There is even less characterisation in JLA than there is in Teen Titans, which hardly seems possible, but it's true. There are no distinguishing voices, and many of the team are differentiated by a single ability: Aquaman talks to fish, Wonder Woman has a rope, Flash runs fast, Green Arrow shoots stuff. These characteristics are applied to every possible situation. Green Arrow can't put handcuffs on a subdued villain without using a handcuff arrow, Aquaman can't make a cup of tea without the assistance of his fishy friends. Beyond that their abilities are a bit vague.

In Post-Crisis/Pre-Infinite Crisis Wonder Woman was retconned out of being a founder member of the JLA, which is little ironic when you read the original comics, where you find that she was the only one of the big three who put in serious time on the team. On the occasions when Superman and Batman actually do show up, they often find excuses to disappear for the bulk of the story.

It gets so bad that even the villains start to notice.

The Other Amazons

In 1942 Wonder Woman arrived in the U.S.A. from Paradise Island as the representative of the Amazon nation to help with America's war effort. Fifteen years later Action Comics #235 featured a story in which Lois Lane is shipwrecked on a desert island and meets another, lost tribe of Amazons.


It's probably just as well she hadn't arrived at the original Amazon homeland.


Superman blunders in as usual to bail Lois out of trouble but in doing so breaks local laws that forbid any man to set foot on the island. Luckily the consequenses seem rather less dire than if he had made the same mistake on Paradise Island, but Amazon queen Elsha declares that by their law he must be sold as a slave. Superman smugly goes along with this for a laugh, and with no real respect for another culture, believing that no chains can hold him, but he has quite forgotten that this is a period where kryptonite can turn up anywhere, and guess what his chains are made of?

And yet the kryptonite fails to affect Supes, so he allows events to unfold while he tries to work out what is preventing the kryptonite from hurting him. The Amazon queen holds a ceremonial auction to sell the super-slave. It is clearly ceremonial since she gets to be auctioneer and also to bid, using funds from the royal treasury, which one assumes would also be the beneficiary of any profits from the sale, so she is basically selling to herself. But Lois fails to understand the ceremonial nature of the event and attempts to destablize the local economy by introducing vast quantities of american money into the country in order to influence the situation.

In an attempt to stave off this foreign imperialism Elsha ends centuries of tradition by declaring emancipation. But there still remains an ancient law relating to male trespass that the queen desperately attempts to enforce, which decrees that the offender will be married to the first woman who can give him a task he cannot perform.
After graciously allowing Lois and her friends to set tasks Elsha once again shows the entirely ceremonial nature of these laws that Superman and Lois have so completely failed to grasp, setting him the task of making her a commoner. The solution to this task is in plain view, but rather than responding with the symbolic gesture that is clearly called for here, Superman acts entirely selfishly and completely destroys her royal emblem of authority, rather than symbolically "losing" it as is all that is required. Thus the culture is destablised further as the legal authority is removed from power due to Superman's blundering self-centred attitude.

And yet his own hubris defeats him, for once Supes has destroyed the crown it becomes apparent that it was this that was counteracting the effects of the kryptonite, and he is so pissed that he immediately leaves the civilisation he has wrecked, never thinking to ask if there was any more where that came from.

And that's the last we hear of the alternative Amazons. Superman never bothers to mention to his fellow Justice League member that he's found a lost offshoot of her race reduced to its last few members, struggling to preserve their ancient ways on a nearby island. But then he's probably just embarrassed about the damage he has done to another culture in pursuit of personal interests.