Adventure Comics 493
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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 5th and 6th appearances in that chronology.
Reprinted material
Original publication source is noted for each.
- Part 1 of the Secret Origin of the Challengers of the Unknown - new material
- Superboy hunted by "Lana Lang and the Legion of Super-Heroes" – Adventure Comics #282 (March, 1961)
- Aquaman asks "Is This My Foe?" – Aquaman #42 (November/December, 1968)
- Zatanna faces "A Nightmare Called Gorgonus" – Adventure Comics #419 (May, 1972)
- Supergirl welcomes "Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends" – Action Comics #276 (May, 1961)
- Captain Marvel confused by "The Twisted Powers" – Captain Marvel Adventures #50 (December, 1945)
- The Spectre evicted by "The Ghost of Ace Chance" – Showcase #64 (September/October, 1966)
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:
- Our chronological reprinting of the adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes rolls on this month with their fifth and sixth appearances. For those of you who wonder when the Legion series will begin being reprinted, have patience - it was their fourteenth story that headlined ADVENTURE COMICS #300 and launched them to greatness.
- Our first selection, "Lana Lang and the Legion of Super-Heroes" from ADVENTURE COMICS #282, March, 1961, is a curious case. Readers will note that Star Boy is really the only Legionnaire who appears, and he demonstrates powers very much unlike those he currently possesses (which, in fact, are the powers he's used in every other appearance he's ever made). A Simple explanation can be found by opening ADVENTURE COMICS #195, December, 1953 and looking at "Lana Lang's Romance on Mars" - almost the same story featuring a hero named Marsboy who gained powers identical to Superboy's from a strange comet.
- Then Superman family editor Mort Weisinger frequently "updated" old stories by polishing the scripts and giving them to new artists to work on, and this was the story behind Star Boy's debut. The introduction of the Legion to the story was almost accidental - just a way of working it into the Superman mythose more firmly. Interestingly Weisinger would do the same thing again only a few months later when Sun Boy was introduced in a story that updated another ADVENTURE story from the fifties.
- No one knows whether Weisinger did this to balance tight budgets, tight deadlines or both, or whether occasionally the writers themselves volunteered the updating. However, in the years before reprints became common and when collecting back issues was unknown, it seemed harmless.
- We never saw Zynthia, Star Boy's girl friend from this story ever again (her equivalent in the earlier story was Cytherea)... and as you probably know, he fell for Dream Girl the moment she joined the Legion.
- Our other selection, "Supergirl's Three Super-Girl Friends" from ACTION COMICS #276 (May, 1961) was a very important Legion story. Besides Supergirl and Brainiac Five joining the Legion (and developing crushes on each other), it featured the first appearances of Triplicate Girl (later known as Duo Damsel after Computo killed one of her three selves), Phantom Girl, Brainy, and "applicants" Shrinking Violet, Bouncing Boy and Sun Boy, all of whom apprenetly joined shortly thereafter.
- This story eliminated the previous Supergirl-Legion encounter's strange error of calling the Legionnaires "children" of the original team, although it added the new confusion of claiming that Legionnaires all had super-powers because their parents came from other worlds. It also purported that Legion try-outs were held but once a year, a rule carried over from Supergirl's first try-out but which vanished after this story.
- Costumes were settled into their permanent form by these two stories, and author Otto Binder, creator of the Legion, clearly had grown fond of his characters. But each new story Weisinger bought was clearly designed to add to the legends of the characters... they were not allowed "just" to star in stories. Maybe that was part of the magic that kept them alive...
- – Paul Levitz
