Long live the old Legions: Getting the jokes after 30 years

The future is always unknown, but you can still find ancient slices of it in the back issue bins.

For a story set a thousand years in the future, I came into the Legion of Super-Heroes in the most backwards way possible - stumbling across an issue of the Five Years Later period that was absolutely incomprehensible, with characters I didn't know talking about a lot of shit I didn't understand.

Superhero comics are always accused of being too daunting for regular readers, but sometimes a bit of a challenge is welcome, and I fell hard for it. This was before we had the world on our phones, and it literally took me years to work out who the mighty Salu Digby was.

As a comic reader since I was 3, I had always been aware of the Legion, having read few of the Levitz/Broderick/Giffen period and some of the digests reprinting their exploits from their days of Adventure.

But the 5YL series was something different, with the goofy old silver age stories paying off in a very post-modern universe. There were weird depths in the misadventures of the original team, and the galaxy of broken characters they encountered.

I didn't get the vast majority of references or in-jokes and still find new ones every time I revisit that series, because I'm still catching up on the originals.

I always knew about the Super Moby Dick Of Outer Space story and its dire consequences for Lighning Lad, but I only just read the actual story this week, and it's shining new light on stories I read 30 years ago, which were published 30 years after the earlier tales first appeared. Some sort of circuit had been completed here.

And right now I'm also just slightly obsessed with the 70s stuff right now - the Cockrum/Grell issues, which I've been picking up, an issue at a time, from a local comic shop. Not just because it's the Legion at their absolute sexiest, but because of all the mini-adventures, with Chemcial King punching out some Skarlian pirates or something. Stories I've never seen reprinted, filling in the future knowledge.

We're a few years closer to that shining future of the United Planets, and I'm still a Legion kid - I always get one regular monthly superhero universe comic and it's currently the Bendis Legion, even though it's far from regular. I just like the optimism, (even when it gets really dark), and the costumes, and the sprawling cast, and all of it.

And I love having tiny parts of its sprawling mythology reveal themselves in new ways. Even after all these years, that unknown future can still surprise me.