The Shattered Prayer

How time flies! It’s been almost a month since I made my last Ladies of the Legion post. It is high time I started to get to some of the Lads of the Legion!

Coming up with a list of my favorite Legion guys is a bit harder than coming up with a list of my favorite Legion Ladies. For one thing, there are twice as many male Legionnaires as there are female Legionnaires. Ranking them therefore becomes much more difficult simply because there are so many to choose from. And because there are so many of them, it also becomes difficult to distinguish between some of the, ahem, lesser Legionnaires. I mean, does Matter-Eater Lad rank above or below Bouncing Boy?

It is also difficult to list the guys because at different times, I have liked different Legionnaires for different reasons. And sometimes, things found out later made me rethink some of the Lads. For example, three Legion Lads long have had hints and innuendos about their sexuality. The fact that they were rumoured to be gay or bisexual caused Invisible Kid, Chemical King, and Element Lad to rise in my estimation perhaps artificially. In creating this list, I’ve tried to be fair and keep their sexuality out of my mind, trying to think of the Legion as I did when I was first reading it, years ago, and rank them according to my childhood love of the characters.

But having acknowledged the difficulties, I still press on! So once again, some ground rules. This list only contains Legionnaires who joined pre-5 year gap. Even though there were some great additions post 5-year gap, like Kent Shakespeare, a sort of latter day replacement for the editorially banished Superboy, those people don’t make the cut. This list also ignores Legion Reservists, like Jimmy Olsen. Although Jimmy had several adventures with the Legion as Elastic Lad, these adventures were little more than plot devices in his own magazine. Jimmy didn’t really appear in the Legion’s own magazine at all.

In fact, even Superboy’s Pal and Legion Reservist Pete Ross made more appearances with the Legion in their own mags than Jimmy did. And Pete didn’t even have any powers! He was the only non-powered member of the Legion. Even fellow non-powered Reservist Rond Vidar was eventually revealed to be a member of the Green Lantern Corps. And he was apparently immune to his father, Universo’s Superhypnotism. And he could invent time bubbles while working at the Time Institute. Okay, so I guess Rond was pretty impressive. Pete, on the other hand, was let in to the Legion simply because he knew Superboy’s secret identity and didn’t tell anyone, not even Superboy! Well, that and he helped them defeat Mordru. (There are two things I love about the panel where Pete discovers Clark Kent is really Superboy. One, Pete is watching Superboy undress, and two, Clark apparently sleeps in dress shirt and dress pants, complete with belt!)

So Jimmy, Pete, Rond, and the final male reservist, Kid Psycho, whose power literally brought him one year closer to death every time he used it, do not make the list of favorite Legionnaires, mainly because they are only Reservists, not full fledged members, no matter how exciting their adventures may be. And poor Kid Psycho, not only did his power kill him, not only did he have the unfortunate super-hero name “Kid Psycho”, but also his real name was Gnill Opral. I guess if my name were Gnill Orpal, I might call myself Kid Psycho too.

So no Reservists and no post gappers. Then who does make the list?

Glad you asked! We’ll begin with the best Legionnaire of them all. Just like for the ladies of the Legion, my favorite male Legionnaire is actually my favorite for his role not only in the Legion, but outside of it as well. Number 1 is Superboy. Without Superboy there would be no Legion. Since the 1940s, Superboy had been the lead feature in Adventure comics. Fifty years ago, the Legion was a one shot in Adventure Comics 247 to give Superboy some Super Friends to play with. No one could ever have imagined how incredibly popular they would become. Superboy has come and gone in the Legion. He’s died, been replaced, been retconned out of the Legion and retconned back in. But in a real way, he is the Legion. So Superboy has a special place in the Legion and in my heart and is therefore number one.

With that out of the way, it is time to get to the Legion Lad countdown. And in the next post, that is exactly what I will do!

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