I can still remember the day. I was hunting down an issue of Superboy at my local comic book store, the wonderful House of M Comics in Rotterdam. For some reason HoM had quite a large selection of Superboy issues and most of it was still complete. As I was flipping through the various issues I came across something called Superboy and The Legion of Super-Heroes. Confused I flipped back and forth and, sure enough, the numbers for this so called new title seemed to be an extension of the original Superboy. 

What was this?

During this period of my life I had been out of comics for quite a while and had just decided to jump back in. Part of the pleasure I was experiencing at the time was hunting down series and missing issues that were out of reach to me as a child, usually because of monetary constraints. Or because my love at the time was reserved for Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Which didn’t leave a lot of room for other titles. I decided to term this ‘revenge collecting.’ 

So standing in the comic book store in Rotterdam and seeing this issue in my hands sparked off a curiosity that became a raging fire. And because now I had the resources at my disposal why not extend this revenge collecting to LSH?

And that is when my journey into the world of LSH began.

It was not solely this series that I decided to collect, but for some reason I went for the third series that came out in DC’s so called prestige format in 1984. And this was quite a fortunate decision on my part because for the first twelve issues or so the creative time decided to reference previous issues in the entire LSH lore; ranging from Adventure Comics, Action Comics, and Superboy, effectively taking me through LSH’s greatest hits. It was also when Paul Levitz was still at his peak and his strategy in writing and world building was very welcoming for new readers (I’m sure we’ll get to this at some point).

When the dust finally settled from all this LSH collecting, I realized that I had ended up acquiring the entire Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes run. It was not on purpose nor was it intentional, it just came to be. Which if you ask any comic book collector this is usually a very happy happenstance indeed. I proceeded to take the entire collection off my shelf, put them in my special ‘to-read’ section and told myself that it would probably be a good idea to read all of these in order at some point. 

And there they sat for a very long time. Unread.

Until now. 

Because why not make a neat little project for 2024 and not only read all these issues in order but also actually blog about it? Wouldn’t that be fun?

So welcome dear reader to not only my personal website but also to its new incarnation and focus for this year: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes!

And I think it is quite fitting. When you look at those earlier Superboy issues they are quite blah and drab and not very exciting in many ways. Sure there are gems in the rough but those were few and far in between. Much like the posts on my website.

So when DC decided to wisely combine Superboy with the LSH, the result was absolute magic and created amazing, new possibilities for the title. So if it worked wonders for Superboy why not for me? 

The structure of this will become clear as we progress and will probably change (as these things usually do). What I have decided upon in the beginning is to write a weekly post on each issue, focusing on the following items:

1. The synopsis or rather what the particular issue is about
2. The creative team. What they did and how well they did it.
3. Context, which could prove quite exciting. How does this issue fit in with LSH lore as a whole? Were there any key moments?
4. The letters page. Part of the fun of LSH is its fandom, because there was a lot of it. ‘Was’ being the key word in this sentence because the fact that DC has not been able to capitalize and keep this rich lore effecitvely going is head-banging on the wall painful. Which deserves its own whole project all together
5. Do something quirky like put a spotlight on something or perhaps think up some silly award to give to a character. They do this in one of my favorite podcasts, The Bwah-Ha-Ha Podcast that examines the whole Justice League International era. At first I thought this was really silly but as I progressed through the episodes I decided it was quite clever. It creates consistency and there came a point when I was actually looking forward to this segment. Crazy I know. 

I will start with Superboy #195, which you might find this strange because it is before the title changed. I decided to start here because it was when the new intention for the series was first announced (in a very lackluster fashion I might add) and when Cary Bates and Dave Cockrum introduced an exciting new character, which ended up becoming quite an important one.

So with that until next week and of course, Long Live the Legion!