My Favourite Year

This instalment of my Legion blog series looks at the comic at the height of its popularity nearly thirty florgin' years ago!
By the very early 80s, just as I was about to undertake an Arts and Social Studies course at University ( that's right- I had absolutely no career plan!), I was buying the monthly Marvel and DC comics in regular chain stores like John Menzies and RS McColl. Back issues and other rarities were arriving via mail order or from specialist retailers like the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh or Futureshock in Glasgow.
 The fanzine above certainly arrived in the mail from the States and contained some ropey artwork; a piece of prose fiction; and short articles on the Legionnaires including a very 70s piece about their astrological signs, peppered with snippets from Jim Shooter's rather off-colour 1976 fan-letter musings on their personalities (you can see it it all its icky glory here- http://interlac.us/legionnaires.html).
For the everyday LSH fan , everything you ever needed to know had been published here, in one of the very earliest mini-series:

Though both these items give a flavour of the popularity of the LSH in the early 80s, that status was about to become oh-so-much higher. The new DC, presided over by artist-editor Dick Giordano. the man who'd launched Bat Lash, Deadman and other critically acclaimed titles in the 60s, would experiment with a number of new and not-so-new formats, such as the digest size, where these new(ish) costumes debuted:

My ...eyes!! Blok, Shady and Wolf fare worst.

Adventure Comics enjoyed a landmark anniversary in this format:

The Annual format also returned- this time, without reprint material and introducing new versions of old characters:

I think it was rather clever to include the new  Invisible Kid as a viewpoint for the new readers who were coming aboard - readers who were already fans of the X-Men and the hugely successful New Teen Titans. Keith Giffen's style with its costume redesigns, witty cameos, holograms and Interlac graffiti was intricate and exciting but the annual was just the beginning.
I went on holiday with my mum and brother to London in July 1982. Come On Eileen was on the radio every five minutes, on its way to a four-week-run at Number One. Classic Dr. Who story The Curse of Peladon was being repeated ( Peter Davison having just completed his first and most popular season on tv that winter). We went to see Evita (didn't like it) and Wrath of Khan (really liked it!). There were IRA bombings in Hyde Park  and Regents Park which killed eight soldiers on ceremonial duties so the atmosphere was tense and paranoid. Nonetheless, I dragged my family across the city to Forbidden Planet and Comics Showcase, where I bought this:

The Great Darkness saga incorporated Kirby's New Gods into the 30th Century and the climax presented cameos for characters not seen since the 60s, including adult Legionnaire Quantum Queen, delineated in Kirby-crackle.
Toward the end of the year, I attended my first-ever comic mart, held in the function suite of what is now the Eurohostel on Clyde Street, but back then was a fairly anonymous, modern hotel. I went with my school-friend Graham Sim, who lived in Hamilton. The objective was my first graphic novel:

 I also picked up a few old issues of Action and SLSH but one back issue had eluded me until it turned up the following week, as I recall it now, in a role-playing games shop in Candleriggs, where the Dhabba reaturant now stands:

My Holy Grail comic

I didn't have the money for it at the time (probably a couple of quid in those days) and asked the guy to hold on to it for the next day. Fortunately, he did. For the anniversary 30th issue of SLSH, Levitz, Giffen and  a bevy of Legion artists resolved the Adult Legion storyline and the "death" of Shadow Woman:

That early 80s period was probably the apogee of my time as a hobbyist or collector. Comic Marts in the City Halls or the Mitchell Library and every month, New Teen Titans, Batman and the Outsiders, All-Star Squadron and its spin-off Infinity Inc., Byrne's FF and Alpha Flight, Alan Moore's Captain Britain, the X-Men and the New Mutants. Graham got me the Legion poster for Xmas or my bithday and I had it pinned to my first bedsit wall, along with Morrissey and with Sienkiewicz's New Mutants Primal Scream:

Such was the success of the LSH that it moved to being printed on the new Baxter paper stock, just like the Titans:

I can hear Frankie's  Xmas hit "The Power of Love". Fact.

I could happily post the cover of every Giffen issue but this one marked the start of another multi-part storyline, which would see the departure of the artist and one of his least-favourite characters (ironically, one of my favourites), Karate Kid.

Giffen was replaced by Steve Lightle, whom I took a long time to warm to, even though he designed some intriguing new additions to the Legion:

By now, I had almost completed my degree at University and moved to a rented room in Kent Road, hoping to be swept up in the post-Postcard scene and dreaming of being James Dean- but largely just drinking cappucinos with Roy Moller in the Equi Cafe:

After graduation, I had drifted into the idea of becoming an actor, having taken part in some student drama shows. But I had no real idea how I was going to do it and was taking my washing home by bus from Anderston Bus Station to Chapelton once a week.
1985-1986 saw radical changes in DC comics with the 12-issue Crisis in the DC Universe and John Byrne's eventual revamp of Superman, as per last month's blogs. The rather stiff and pedantic "modernisation" of Superman and the shock-value death of Supergirl had huge ramifications for the Legion. Nearly thirty years of stories had been invalidated because neither super-cousin had participated in them.
The Sensor Girl storyline teased us with a possible loophole for Kara' s survival - but the regal mystery legionnaire turned out to be Projectra. We did briefly get an eighty-per-cent Female Five out of it though:

I was buying my comics from AKA in the Virginia Galleries, next to Dr. Jive's. It was the brassy, yuppie-fied mid-80s, all Springsteen and wine bars. I'd had my first full-time job, a Community Program where we indexed back issues of the Glasgow Herald on big, chunky computers. I went back to uni do a post-graduate course in Information Management, was bored stupid, skipped classes and acted in more student plays.

DC found a way to incorporate a Superboy into the LSH with the Pocket Universe storyline-then killed him off:

Apart from the odd respite- Curt Swan's Colossal Boy issue, for example- I never cared for Greg Larocque's artwork in this period and the subplots semed to stretch out month afer month. Levitz only rarely created new(ish) villains- like Starfinger, below. Pretty much like the modern Legion, then...

 I really don't like Wildfire's knock-off Human Torch image!

Having returned home to Chapelton briefly in 87, I moved up to a basement flat in Hyndland, behind a ballet school. The next couple of years was a frustrating, disappointing time, living on the dole but beginning to get involved with Glasgow Arts Centre's adult drama group.

Round about the time of the Glasgow Garden Festival, Marvel Comics had been having something of a resurgence, while DC was tying itself in knots trying to decide what episodes of its tangled continuity had actually "happened". This mini-series tried to sort out the Legion's history:

It also provided a few tasters of what was to come; after lengthy storylines featuring Universo, the Time Trapper and the Infinite Man, Giffen was back and he pioneered the jackets, pouches and gloves costume design that would define the superhero look for the first half of the next decade:

Little did I know how much of a change Giffen's return would instigate. In the next few months, the 30th Century world would be ravaged by chaotic magic and the LSH would enter its most dense and despairing period of storytelling of its publishing history.

Next: Saturn Returns

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