Always in the basement with the Legion

For the first time in several years, I've got all my comics under the same roof. There is some good dry storage in the basement and that's where the bulk of them live now. About half the boxes in that space are pure comics - all the 2000ads, the BPRDs, the Justice Leagues, all the fun stuff. And all the Legion of Super-Heroes comics. All 269 of them.

While I grew up on the ironic cynicism of 2000ad, I always like the optimism of the future teens, and followed them for years. For such an easy concept, they can have surprisingly complex storylines, frequently gorgeous art, stellar design and the best costumes in modern superhero comics.

I need to hold onto a couple of hundred Legion comics, because they're everything to me, and I've had some nice moments of zen down in the basement in the past few weeks, going through all the Legion and seeing what I have actually got.

It's a wide mix, with very, very few of the post-2000 Legion comics sticking around. But this is what I need -

* Five Legion comics from the Adventure Comics era - Nothing incredibly early or important, and all in terrible condition, but they are something.

* Three issues of Valor - Because they are all tied into the end of the first generation of the Legion.

* Sixteen issues from the Grell/Cockrun era - Arguably the peak Legion era, not quite at the complications of later continuity, but the kids are older, and busting out their sexiness in some remarkable costume choices. I used to think they were the worst costumes of any Legion era, but they haven't actually dated so much, and all that skin and bellbottom pants still look groovy. 

* All three issues of Secrets of the Legion, two different Secret Files special, one crossover with Batman 66, and the immortal Subs special - While I've got all of these I'll ever need, there should have been a hundred issues of the Substitutes doing their thing.

* Three Who's Who and one issue of Legionnaires 3 - And I've been looking for the rest of those series forever.

* Twenty-six issues from volume three, the baxter era  - Almost all of them are from the start and end of this volume, where our man Giffen comes and goes, and odd issues like the one where Superboy dies, or Lauren Kent is a robot. I had such a crush on Lauren. (I also had massive crushes on Salu, Luornu, Tinya and Brin, because there was something for everybody in that sprawling cast)

* One Treasury comic, and three digests - The first way I came in to Legion history were through those dinky little digest reprints they put out in the early 1980s. There's a part of me that thinks they should all be like that, and another that thinks they should all be Treasury sized.

* One hundred and six slices of the v4 Legion - All the 5YL stuff, which is honestly some of the most complex and moving comics I've ever read in my life, and tonnes of the post-Zero Hour crew. I was reading that stuff when I first moved out of home, and I look at those covers and think of cold nights in cheap flats, and infinite possibilities. I can't get rid of any of that, although the issues after they all came back from the 20th century were not as essential

* 52 Legionnaires - See above, although there are least of the rebooted team on this side. One only needs so much Moy.

* Four issue of the Inferno mini-series from the mid-90s - There's really no excuse for holding onto this, except for the fact that Stuart Immonen was really, really good at drawing '90s teenagers.

* Twenty comics from the first great Giffen run, starting with the Great Darkness Saga - Part of the brilliant wave of glossy superheroics that crashed over the early 80s, with a far greater sophistication to the storytelling than ever before, with the solid writing of Paul Levitz. It took me years to get all these issues, but once I got the taste for Keith Giffen's Legion, I never lost it, no matter how crazy his art got. 

* All 22 issues of Bendis Legion comics - The most recent iteration of the future teen team didn't get a lot of love, but I really liked the slick art by Ryan Sook, and each issue felt like some kind of saturation, with so much going on, I'm still making vague attempts to figure out the plot. I've also been watching a lot of Robert Altman films lately, and I'm all the way here for the overlapping dialogue.

I also have about 30 post-New 52 Legion comics, but they are all in the pile of stuff to sell, because they didn't really give me anything new. 

So I don't know if I need any more Legion than this, I often get it mainly for the art - some Legion artists are deeply mediocre, and I don't really bother with them, and all those adolescents crushes have faded away.

But I'm always up for new Legion, done in some kind of style. All that optimism for a brighter future, it's got to be worth something, and it's the main reason I still have hundreds of these sproking comics.