Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This (mostly) takes place during the Legion's early years (duh) but was written much later, during the so-called "deboot" era, when the continuity of the Legion was reset to circa 1989. Like a lot of stuff from this era of the Legion, I have to wonder who it's really for. Part of the marketing makes it seems like a way for new readers to get caught up (the back cover calls it "The Secret Origin of Superboy and the Legion!") but it also really requires you to already know your Legion history to comprehend it. I was very confused about the chronological placement of issue #516, for example, and only looking the book up on Cosmic Teams explained it was set much, much later than everything else here. There are bits of the stories that don't seem to go anywhere (a mysterious ghost in Legion HQ in #518, for example), and only by looking them up on-line did I realize they're there to foreshadow things that happened in comics published fifty years prior (the ghost is Mon-El, trapped in the Phantom Zone). In a lot of the stories, the Legion is after someone called Zaryan, and I didn't realize he was the guy who killed Lightning Lad until I got to the last issue; that would have made the foreshadowing work better, to be honest, because I couldn't figure out why were so focused on this seeming non-story. I know my Legion history pretty well, but my earliest Legion of Super-Heroes Archive is volume 3, meaning my knowledge really begins with Adventure #318, and so all this mucking about with the Legion's early days is pretty confusing.

Which is a shame, because there is some good stuff here: young Clark getting a time and place where he can just cut loose and have fun and not hide himself, but which also contains dark hints of his own future; the Legion coming back to Superboy's own time and having to goof around.

On the other hand, most of what is here is fragmentary and uninteresting, or plain misguided. I don't think adding a secret Saturn Girl/Cosmic Boy one-night stand is a very good idea; it all comes across as slightly skeevy. #518 isn't really a story, just hints at other stories, and thus provides no reward to the reader. #520's impact is muted by the fact it needs to be told as flashbacks in order to fit continuity. The story of R. J. Brande given here totally contradicts the history the character received in L.E.G.I.O.N. and the "Five Years Later" era of the Legion... which is totally fine, retcon away, but my rule of retcons is the new version must be at least as interesting as the old one, if not more... and this is considerably less interesting. The old Brande was fascinating; this one is a generic inspirational guy.

So, alas.

Nothing terribly new or exciting, but a fun nostalgic return to the Legion for me (although the tangled time/continuity is sure to be a mess). ( )