Has anyone read
Legion of 3 Worlds? Is it any good?
I ask because, well...
I'm an old school geek. I grew up reading reprints of Silver Age stories in the little DC Digests (whose shoddy reproduction standards I'm sure contributed to my degrading eyesight). In particular I collected many, many Legion of Super-Heroes digests.
I loved the pre-Crisis Legion with much love. They were more than just a super-team; they were friends. They had super-powers. They were girlfriend-boyfriend, many of them. It was a little like a soap opera sometimes, but that was okay - that's life, it has drama. And they had a continuity they stuck with - couples got together and broke up, people died (and more importantly stayed dead), characters left and came back.
It will come as a surprise to some of you (particularly those of you who complain about my busy social calendar) that I was a pretty lonely kid. I was shy and the only kids on the block my age were the girl I had a crush on and the bully. Not exactly friend material for a shy chubby kid. I retreated into the world of the 30th century, where Superboy (another shy kid, at least in his guise as young Clark) had dozens of friends. ("And they all could fly," Superman said in the recent Lightning Saga, a line that moved me to unexpected and somewhat confusing tears.)
Crisis on Infinite Earths changed the Legion. The John Byrne reboot of Superman didn't have a Superboy, so how could the Legion have taken their inspiration from him? The Legion as I remembered it couldn't exist. Giffen's version of the older Legion was interesting - a kind of Man in the Iron Mask revisiting of characters I considered childhood friends. But then they introduced the younger Legion, who might have been clones but it turned out they were the originals and had been held in stasis while the clones went on and lived their lives for them. Except for one thing - the younger Legion didn't act anything like the original Legion they were supposed to be. It was like a fanfic of the Legion I'd grown up with. I lost interest in a hurry.
Don't get me started about the "Threeboot" version.
But then came The Lightning Saga, in which Superman invites the Justice League into the Fortress of Solitude and shows them the statues he'd made of his childhood friends, the Legion.
(At this point I had a bit of an Annie Wilkes moment. In Stephen King's Misery, the psychotic ex-nurse relates how as a child she'd been to the movies and saw in a serialized story how the hero had narrowly averted death the week before by jumping from the runaway coach, and had FREAKED RIGHT OUT in the theatre because "That didn't happen!" My reaction to seeing Superman's statues was similar - I was shaking my head as though in utter denial, because I had accepted that the friends I'd known and loved from my childhood had been erased. They couldn't exist, because they never had. Of course, that was before I'd learned that Superboy-Prime (dumb name) had weakened the bonds of reality during the Infinite Crisis and allowed New Earth's reality to be altered, ie, Jason Todd not dying, etc. Not a bad retcon, but not a good one, either. Anyhow, I digress.)
So the Legion had existed all along, thanks to Superboy-Prime (though it's unclear whether or not New Earth's Superman had ever been Superboy himself). And then they released Superman and the Legion of Superheroes. And then Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes. Neither of which I read because frankly after Infinite Crisis I was pretty much done with DC.
Or so I thought.
And finally, Final Crisis. And Legion of 3 Worlds. And my relentless morbid sense of curiosity is getting the better of me. And Legion of 3 Worlds was drawn by George Perez.
So: Anyone read it? Is it any good?
