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following the legion Mondays are days where I don't care about much except making up for some lost sleep and that is exactly what I did today. Not surprisingly three nights at work has a tendency to leave me a little drained and I am more than ready to start the weekend when the sun sets on Monday. Just knowing that I'll soon be free of the room filled with monitors and inane procedures is enough to make me relax. With cold rain still coming down this morning, falling asleep wasn't a problem and I was off to the world of dreams after a reading a few Legion of Super Heroes stories from thirty-one years ago. In those odd but endearing issues Dave Cockrum had brought the characters into the 1970's with some major costume revisions. Suddenly there were bellbottoms and cutouts in almost all of the uniforms and as hard as it might be to believe it looked good. They seemed modern and sexy, which definitely breathed some life back into the book. Now for me I didn't get introduced to the Legion until the very end of the 1970's, but those costumes were still in place and formed my first image of the Legion that has stayed with me through the decades. Here were these strange people from planets with even stranger sounding names. For being a comic book this might nor sound that out of place, but even today Legion is one of the few mainstream books with a science fiction theme to it. Not only is there a focus on science, but the book also boasts a huge cast of anywhere from fifteen to twenty characters in a single issue hence the word legion and not team. I have no idea why I picked them off the stand when I was nine years old or why I never got any more until years later, but those two issues of Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes were some of the oldest books in my collection until I delved into the world of online auctions and went back even further into the past. Something about Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lad had a big enough impact on me to seek out and then buy another hundred or so of the same title. Part of me had to know more about them without knowing that there was a long history behind these characters that went back to the 1950's. These two issues that I owned preceded the glory era of Paul Levitz and the more controversial era of Keith Giffen that removed all innocence from the book. On a different pop culture front, tomorrow is a big day for new releases. The latest album by Sarah McLachlan and season eight of the X-Files on DVD are both coming out in stores. I'm not sure which of the two I'll get first, but I've already added them to my Christmas list in case someone else would like to get them for me. |