Adventure Comics 498
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Contents
Background
Adventure Comics was the birthplace of the Legion and its longtime home. After almost 500 issues of publication, it became primarily a series of reprints. Featured each month was a chronological re-presentation of the Legion's earliest tales, two in each issue, beginning with their first appearance. This issue presents the 15th and 16th appearances in that chronology.
Reprinted Legion stories
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2nd reprint of The Secret Origin of Bouncing Boy! – Adventure Comics #301 - August 28, 1962 |
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2nd reprint of Sun-Boy's Lost Power! – Adventure Comics #302 - September 27, 1962 |
Other Stories in this Issue
This digest also contains additional stories with no Legion content, including:
- Plastic Man in "Carlton Canary" - Adventure Comics #467 (January, 1980)
- Aquaman in "Come the Revolution" – Aquaman #47 (September/October, 1969)
- Captain Marvel in "The World's Maddest Ghost" – Captain Marvel Adventures #138 (November, 1952)
- Sandman in "The Man Who Knew All the Answers" - Adventure Comics #74 (May, 1942)
- Mary Marvel in "The Thanksgiving Thieves" - Shazam! #10 (February, 1974)
- The Spectre in "The Spectre Means Death" – The Spectre #5 (July/August, 1968)
The Story Behind the Stories
The two Legion reprints included in each issue of the digest-sized Adventure Comics were the feature attraction. As an added bonus to Legion fans, a running commentary about that issue's reprinted Legion stories was provided each month by Paul Levitz, who was the writer of the Legion's current series while the Adventure digests were being produced. Years later, these commentaries are the primary point of interest (other than the reprinted stories themselves), so the full text is provided below:
- Last issue we brought you the first Legion story in their long-running series from ADVENTURE COMICS, and this issue we continue with our chronological reprinting of all the Legion epics with their second and third series appearances. In a way, both of the stories in this issue represent the beginning of a transition from the Legionnaires as guest-stars to heroes in their own right.
- "The Secret Origin of Bouncing Boy" is similar to the Legion's many guest-appearances in that it really only features one hero from the team. However, it's much more like the series would be in the future because it begins to establish the mythos of the world around the Legion. Inconsistencies still abound (the time is identified as the 21st century, not the 30th; only one Legionnaire is supposedly admitted each year yet we've seen on many occassions two or three join) but it all begins to come together.
- The use of hi-tech gimmicks, be they as old-fashioned as the "dupli-writing stylus," has remained a hallmark of the series, as had the "casting calls" for membership which portrayed known rejects for the first time in this story. Most importantly, we see the Mission Monitor Board in its first incarnation, and see members on their missions for the first time. In fact, the whole set-up story, the retelling of an origin to applicants, has been reused as recently as LEGION #283 for Wildfire's origin.
- (P.S.-the applicant at the far right in the last panel was Matter-Eater Lad, not yet in his final costume, who joined the Legion as their next member two issues later in a story we'll reprint next month.)
- Writer Jerry Siegel and artist John Forte, the team that did both these stories (and all of the first half-dozen series tales) went on to "Sun Boy's Lost Power", a much more developed Legion story. The emphasis in this story is much more on puzzle than action, but we do watch the team interact and get a better sense of their relationship to each other. The twelve/thirteen page format left very little room to use the team to its fullest, and they would see very little "action" for the next several months until the page length increased in #309.
- Common to these two stories, and most early Legion tales, is that each one taught us more about one or more of the characters. The 30th century was so obviously rich in imaginative concepts, origins, villains and technology, that only a fraction of it could be doled out each month without interfering with the stories. The writers therefore paced themselves, and went deeper and deeper into each element in turn... Mon-El in #300, Bouncing Boy in #301, Sun Boy in #302, and coming up next month, Matter-Eater Lad and Brainiac Five in #303 and Saturn Girl in #304, one of the all-time classic tales in Legion history.
- We'd learn more about the characters in time, too, even after they had their shot in the spotlight. Long-time Legion readers know that Doctor Zaxton Regulus was the man who locked Sun Boy into the reactor where he gained his powers, and that same Dr. Regulus returned to battle the Legion many times. But that was first revealed in ADVENTURE #348, so I guess we're getting ahead of ourselves.
- – Paul Levitz
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| Reprint |
| Adventure Comics #497 By continuity Adventure Comics #499
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| Adventure Comics #497 By series Adventure Comics #499
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| Legion of Super-Heroes v2 #297 By publication Legion of Super-Heroes v2 #298 |
