I was a fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes up until about the time everyone became a fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes. That was when the strip got a little too complex for my tastes. I'm sure it was fine for what it was but I could never quite keep track of who was who…a problem I later learned I shared with several folks who wrote or drew the strip. When I was offered the chance to become one of the former, I surveyed the high volume of unread issues in my collection and realized that since Legion fans demanded tight continuity, I'd have to read and absorb every one of those comics just to write my first story. And that, dear friend, explains why I never wrote the Legion of Super-Heroes. Still, I enjoyed most of The Legion Companion, a good, new book that primarily consists of interviews with darn near everyone who ever worked on the comic and is still around to interview…plus there are some posthumous interviews, as well. If you're at all interested in the Legion, you'll want this book, end of review.
Well, I should add one thing since I suspect we'll hear more about this. One of the interviews is with the gent who drew the first Legion story, Al Plastino. Mr. Plastino was a long-time artist for the Superman comics. He was generally the second-string artist and he did a lot of swiping and emulation of whoever was then the first-string guy. When he signed on in the late forties, it was Wayne Boring but by the sixties, it was Curt Swan, and in-between, Plastino did a long, slow morph from aping one to the other. Around '71, he got out of comics and applied his flair for mimicry to newspaper strips, carrying on several by replicating the style of a departed artist. At one point, the list almost included Peanuts.
It is common knowledge that Charles Schulz never used ghosts or assistants during his (almost) half-century drawing Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Less well known is that at one point, someone at the syndicate commissioned Plastino, who was replicating other strips for them, to ghost a couple weeks of Peanuts. They never saw print in newspapers, and rumor has it that Schulz was furious that they were even done. In the interview, Plastino says they were done when Schulz had his heart bypass operation, just in case he took longer to recover than anticipated. I'm not sure this is so. Schulz had that operation in '81 and I'm pretty sure I heard about Plastino doing the pages well before then. Anyway, the Legion Companion has small reproductions of a couple of them and they look like pretty close replicas, closer than most of the MAD Magazine simulations. And as I said, we may hear more about this.
One other thing about the Legion. Neither this book nor Bill Schelly's fine book on Otto Binder (discussed here) tells the story of how that strip came to be, quite the way I heard it. I'm not saying they're wrong but in the next week or so, when I get the time, I'll write up the version that was related to me by someone in a unique position to investigate the matter. Watch this space. And in the meantime, you can order The Legion Companion and most of the other books I'm recommending these days over at the TwoMorrows website…where soon, they will be taking advance orders for my next book from them, Superheroes In My Pants. Can't wait.