Superman #147 is the introduction of the Legion of Super-Villains, the natural opposite of the Legion of Super-Heroes. It's also one of the first comic covers historically to directly homage another, being a dark reflection of Adventure Comics #247, which introduced the Legion. It shows comics developing a visual language and oh shit we're running out of time welcome to the gutters!
Being a comic set 1000 years in the future, the Legion is constantly running afoul of the most dangerous consequence of time travel: narrative discontinuity. For example, the order in which the audience was introduced to new members of the Legion is not the order they joined. Triplicate Girl and Phantom Girl are considered the fourth and fifth Legionnaires to join, and Chameleon Boy is the sixth, but Chameleon Boy is introduced in 1960 and Triplicate Girl and Phantom Girl are introduced in 1961. These two stories are Supergirl's first and second tryouts for the team, yet she doesn't remember the other two girls in 1961 despite likely having seen them in 1960.
Then we have what's going on here, in Superman #147. Lex Luthor learned about the existence of the Legion of Super-Heroes back in the Superboy days,* and reasoned that there must also be a Legion of Super-Villains. Now, after at least a decade, Lex finally decides to call on them for help to get out of jail. He makes a transmission device that can contact the future, and gets the Legion of Super-Villains to free him from prison.
The LSV occupy a weird place in the timeline. The first time we see them, they arrive from farther in the future than we've seen before, at a time when the LOSH have all matured into adults. For a while they tried to do this thing where Superboy would interact with the legion as kids but Superman would interact with them as adults, but that was dropped relatively quickly because that would make things more confusing than they already are.
*Superboy #86, which we looked at last time.
Luthor and the LSV trap Superman in a kryptonite field and threaten to execute him, but at the last minute he's saved when the original three members of the Legion - Cosmic Boy, Saturn Queen, and Lightning Lad - now adults, show up and fight off their evil counterparts. Without meaning to spoil, let's just say that there would be future developments in the Legion storyline that make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Adult Legion to exist in this fashion. Not saying anything specific, except that one of them is absolutely going to die. Not going to name any names, except it's Lightning Lad.
Luthor only agrees to let Superman go if one of the three Legionnaires sacrifices themselves in his place. I'm kind of on the fence about this, because we all know there's nothing Lex Luthor wants more than to kill Superman, but he also knows having somebody die in his place will emotionally wreck him, so I'll give this one a pass. Superman asks for leave to do one super-feat in honor of Saturn Girl, and they just let him. Instead of punching all of them out as soon as they drop the forcefield, Superman instead grabs a big Raisin Bran scoop, scoops up a big spoonful of Saturn's rings, and deposits them around the planetoid the villains are using for a base.
Why did he do this? Good fucking question. It turns out that Saturn's Rings give off an energy field that turns off the criminal part of Saturnian brains. Once Superman puts a ring on it, Saturn Queen uses her mind powers to subdue the villains. I am not even going to dignify this with an attempt at a scientific explanation, we're just moving on.
The next Legion story is in Adventure Comics #290. The story introduces Sun Boy, who we had already met in in a previous story,* but he didn't really get to do anything. Sun Boy came back to the 20th century in order to retrieve the components of a weapon that the Legion had disassembled and hid in the past, in matching boxes that all had their names and faces on them. Stay with me on this, but this feels like too much effort. Like, if you hide them in the past, then when you get back to the future, they're still going to be where you hid them, assuming nobody dug them up in the past thousand years. The time travel aspect doesn't make it harder to find. If anything it gives people more time to have already found them. I don't... I don't know, time travel is complicated. I don't get it, chat.
There's also a B-Plot where some kid who looks exactly like Clark Kent shows up in town and begins impersonating him to his family and friends. This kind of thing happens a lot to the Kent household, for example, in 1953, Adventure Comics #191. I don't know how the Kents keep falling for this, it should be the easiest thing in the world to recognize when a person is not your son and doesn't have superpowers. It's amazing they kept the secret this long.
*Action Comics 276, which we also looked at last time.
You will not be surprised to learn that Sun Boy is an evil impostor who wants to use the weapon on Superboy, because this comic has been letting us read his thought balloons the whole time. Silver Age comics are always giving us glimpses into their characters' heads even when it would spoil a twist. The weapon he was after was a killer robot named Cyclops who had a ray gun that could reverse your moral compass. Somehow. I guess future science proved that people are just ontologically good and bad, so Tumblr was right all along.
Sun Boy has the robot go after Clark Kent, but it zaps the fake Clark Kent, turning him from a bad person into a good person, and I guess we're supposed to be okay with that. Just completely reverse this kid's free will. Superboy then melts the robot immediately with his heat vision, raising the question of why the Legion didn't just destroy it themselves instead of hiding them like Dragon Balls. Superboy then reveals that he knew Sun Boy was a fake the entire goddamn time because when they met, he didn't give the secret Legion of Super-Heroes handshake. Why did Superboy go along with this whole plan instead of sabotaging the weapon parts, or shoving him back in his time machine from the word go? Because then, dear chat, we wouldn't have a comic book.
The vibes on some of these legion comics are a bit looser and more playful than the Justice League comics we looked at, although personally it really hits its stride once we get to see the team acting as a whole. The Legion is really the first purpose-built superteam, as opposed to a group of existing heroes coming together like the Avengers or the JLA. The characters are designed to compliment each other and not overshadow anyone, and you can see the bones of everything from the original X-Men to the cast of My Hero Academia in the blueprints drawn up by the Legion stories. I genuinely hope this team gets some mainstream attention soon, and maybe DC editorial will stop rebooting their whole timeline every time there's a crisis. Until next time!
Run, you bastards. You have unleashed the wrath of a Superman
And this genie you have let out of the bottle will chase you to the ends of the earth. ANY earth!
Action Comics 583
