Legion of Super-Heroes: Legacy of the Great Darkness saga

[Jon-El]

What I remember is that the story wasn’t hyped. I mean in contrast to the last time I read comics and the reader was being told “This one changed everything” , the Legion story just happened. As the story unfolded, I realized this was something big. It just nice to think I wasn’t told beforehand that this was a “ big” story. This was comics at it’s best for me. No multiple title crossover. Just a good solid story.

I loved stories where the entire Legion seemed threatened. Jim Starlin did a two parter a few years earlier that had similar magnitude. I can’t think of the name of the storyline. “The Darkness” story took it up a notch. The mystery with all the clues really had me hooked. One of my all time favorite reads.

[Johnny Thunders!]

The biggest legacy is that the book rewards obsessive comic book fans. The New Gods were largely forgotten and considered a failure for years upon end. The Great Darkness Saga helped fans reevaluate what may be Kirby's masterwork. I think the book works because Giffen and Levitz knew those characters and they had a feel for the type of book they were making. Teen Titans gets credit as being DC's Byrne and Claremont X-Men, but the Legion has it's claim. I think all those Giffen Levitz Legion stories promise layered story telling with great character dynamics and arcs. In the end, I think the Great Darkness Saga helped keep the New Gods alive.

[caj]

What I remember is that the story wasn’t hyped. I mean in contrast to the last time I read comics and the reader was being told “This one changed everything” , the Legion story just happened. As the story unfolded, I realized this was something big. It just nice to think I wasn’t told beforehand that this was a “ big” story. This was comics at it’s best for me. No multiple title crossover. Just a good solid story.

I loved stories where the entire Legion seemed threatened. Jim Starlin did a two parter a few years earlier that had similar magnitude. I can’t think of the name of the storyline. “The Darkness” story took it up a notch. The mystery with all the clues really had me hooked. One of my all time favorite reads.

Something else I loved about it - no major character dies. When you look back on some of the biggest, baddest, and best epic stories, very few end without some major hero or villain dying.

[kcekada]

This was the era of the New DC. I had stopped reading DC for several years with the rare exception Zatanna joining the Justice League and the finale of the Legion facing Mordru. Other than those stories, I was strictly a Marvel Zombie. The New Teen Titans is what got me finally buying DC regularly. So I would pick up Legion of Super-Heroes and page through it. I liked what Giffen was doing, but it wasn't until I paged through the Great Darkness Finales that I decide to buy the issue. So for me, the legacy was that I was once again buying a series that had once been my favorite (in the Cockrum days).

I think Titans remained my favorite with Legion in second place. Cockrum was doing X-Men again around this time, so while that lasted, Titans was number 2 and Legion was number 3. I really was disappointed when Giffen changed his style towards the end of his first run.

[kcekada]

Not to be a downer, but while I liked the Great Darkness Saga, I never could take it so seriously, because it was set a thousand years in the future. And Kirby's Fourth World story was in the present. And Jack Kirby was very much alive and well at the time it was published--so it was like some other person tacking a story onto the work of someone who hadn't even finished his magnum opus yet. I don't remember if it was ever explained how the one story could exist and not spoil the other story.

That's understandable. I wasn't very familiar with Kirby's Fourth World, so this was really my introduction to it.

[DrNewGod]

I agree with what Johnny Thunders! said about GD raising the fan appreciation of The New Gods in general, and Darkseid in particular. To add to that, in Darkseid, GD gave DC its first real comic-continuity-wide menace since Solomon Grundy took on the Justice Society in the late 1940s.

Marvel had long before figured out the value of villains that were bigger than any one title. Loki providing the Avengers with their inaugural antagonist is probably the first example, but several others followed that too-big-for-any-one-hero role: Dr. Doom, The Mandarin, the Skrulls, The Kingpin, Count Nefaria. Even Electro and The Sandman wound up migrating around the MU. It instantly made The Marvel Universe a real, coherent environment, rather than an isolated collection of pocket worlds.

As far as I can remember, up until GD, DC had stuck to the old practice of keeping everybody in their own corners, with occasional exceptions like The Injustice Gang, or Gorilla Grodd going after Superman, or Captain Boomerang tangling with Batman. But these were generally one-offs.

Brainiac appeared in Superman's books. Ras al Ghul was solely Batman's adversary. Circe contented herself with pestering Wonder Woman. Abracadabra only committed crimes in Flash's Central City. Brother Blood only troubled The New Teen Titans, etc. Any of these characters were tailor-made to be a wider threat, to have bigger ambitions, but it never happened.

Until Giffen and Levitz dusted off Darkseid and took him to the 30th Century.

It was still years after GD before DC began to let its villains be part of a wider DCU, rather than their proprietary enemies' pockets. Darkseid was the first.

[Zero Hunter]

Another thing the GDS did was showed just how powerful Darkseid really is. He took on the entire Legion and was winning. This is team with 3 or 4 Superman level members, and Darkseid was taking them all head on and not losing ground. Fighting the Legion is like fighting 3 Justice Leagues at once. It was not until the massive army of Daxamites were all freed that Darkseid aknowledged he had lost this fight. That is one of the biggest advantages of the Legions time in you can show villains being total monsters in way you can't with them in the modern time period.

[DrNewGod]

Another thing the GDS did was showed just how powerful Darkseid really is. He took on the entire Legion and was winning. This is team with 3 or 4 Superman level members, and Darkseid was taking them all head on and not losing ground. Fighting the Legion is like fighting 3 Justice Leagues at once. It was not until the massive army of Daxamites were all freed that Darkseid aknowledged he had lost this fight. That is one of the biggest advantages of the Legions time in you can show villains being total monsters in way you can't with them in the modern time period.

Agreed. Moreover, the stakes felt WAY higher than other comics (and they were) because this was a future setting, with no obligations to The World Outside Your Window. You also have to remember that this was before The Big Two got around to installing a revolving door on the afterlife in the name of IP availability. No matter how bad Darkseid was ripping it up, there was no guarantee that the conclusion would restore any kind of status quo.

I contrast that with The Trigon Story that launched The New Teen Titans direct-market second volume a couple of years later. As intense as it got, you just knew Planet Earth wasn't going to stay consumed by Trigon, and you just knew that Nightwing wasn't getting whacked, even if he was only a martial arts-acrobat/detective going head on with The Devil.

That atmosphere of "Oh ****! This could be serious!" loomed over every LoSH story that followed GD up until their reboot; especially the epic LSV arc. But all of them owed much of their power to GD's sheer scale of tension. Giffien and Levitz made it clear just how far they were willing to go.

[Sutekh]

I loved that it took something from the previous era, Darkseid, and built it forward into the Legion's future, without any sort of messy crossover nonsense (like in the horrid Manhunters event) or the later attempts to copy that success with other 20th century immortal villains transplanted into the future (R'as Al-Ghul). It, IMO, used the richness of the setting to it's advantage, and wasn't bogged down by continuity kerfluffles, or what was going on in some other book (or anyone else's future plans for Darkseid, since he was kind of a forgotten character, when they chose him as their Big Bad).

It amuses me that this arc started in 1982, and now, well over three decades later, Darkseid is still the gold standard villain for DC's biggest properties, and it was the Great Darkness Saga that put him on this trajectory.

It was also cool to see the Legion-verse pull out everything they had. The Subs were there. The Wanderers. The Heroes of Lallor. And twenty to thirty actual Legionnaires. Against a couple of million folks with the power of Superman (and, thankfully, none of his experience using those powers, and somewhat bogged down by being mind-controlled!). Yikes!

[Johnny Thunders!]

Looking back at what I wrote, I actually may just have been summarizing what I read in the introduction to the book or even paraphrasing what I have read on this site about the New Gods. At the time I was a kid, and I had only read a handful of Kirby New God Comics. I have no clue what they were thought of to the larger comic book fanbase. Of the New Gods comics I had read at the time, 1 of them was a Jimmy Olsen comic, 1 might have been a Mr. Miracle, and maybe 1 was an actual New Gods comic.

I remember those comics felt like a chore at the time. They were text heavy, I felt lost, and I looked at Kirby's art as primitive when compared to more "realistic" artists of the time. I honestly did not understand or know the New Gods Story at the time. Mr. Miracle had teamed up with Batman, The Flash had an adventure with Orion where he was gargantuan in size. I think I had read bits and pieces of the George Perez JLA books with Darkseid. Other than that, the New Gods were lost to me. Now I can't get enough of the original New Gods book. (I can't wait until the Ava Duvernay movie is a reality.)

It's funny how comics worked back then. I rarely got a complete run of anything and seemed to always luck into great JLA or Legion comics. Of course they were beat up. I remember getting that final battle issue of the Legion against Darkseid and just wishing I had read the rest of the story. Looking at the collected edition now, Giffen and Levitz were so good. Giffen is such a great artist. The Legion has so many great characters and that book does such a great job of making the whole team shine.

[caj]

Levitz's Legion is like a musician that rarely gets their own awards or recognition, but almost every musician that does gives them credit for showing them how it's done.

The run gets mentioned a lot because of Levitz's masterful handling of a large soap-opera ensemble in a comic and his unique plotting technique (the 'Levitz Paradigm') that's since been added to books on 'How to Write Comics'.
The Great Darkness Saga was what propelled the Legion into being one of DC's top comics in the '80s.

Yes, Levitz was amazing at juggling all the Legionnaires and their storylines.

He was also a great mystery builder. From 'who is the Master of Darkness?' to 'what's going on with Shrinking Violet?' to 'which Legionnaire did Dream Girl predict will die?' to 'who is Sensor Girl?' to 'what was Universo really up to with kidnapping four Legionnaires?' to 'who is in the Legion Conspiracy and what is their plan?'

[Jim Kelly]

I think it's important to point out that Paul Levitz started out in comic book fandom and as such had a keen interest in the Legion of Super-Heroes--which was one of the first franchises to foster a large fan following and groups dedicated to the long life of the Legion. So a lot of his work harkened back to earlier Legion stories. Many a classic Legion tale had also posed a mystery. Some of those mysteries were resolved in one or two issues, but other mysteries kept going for a long time.

And when Levitz and Giffen were doing their Legion, there was an ongoing effort to reprint every Legion story in the digests--especially in ADVENTURE COMICS (which was now a digest reprint book), with Paul Levitz writing text pieces for each Legion reprint in those books.

[CaptCleghorn]

Yes, Levitz was amazing at juggling all the Legionnaires and their storylines.

He was also a great mystery builder. From 'who is the Master of Darkness?' to 'what's going on with Shrinking Violet?' to 'which Legionnaire did Dream Girl predict will die?' to 'who is Sensor Girl?' to 'what was Universo really up to with kidnapping four Legionnaires?' to 'who is in the Legion Conspiracy and what is their plan?'

The aspect of Sensor Girl mystery I liked the best was the admission that one of the Legionnaires was right about the Sensor Girl mystery.

[caj]

The aspect of Sensor Girl mystery I liked the best was the admission that one of the Legionnaires was right about the Sensor Girl mystery.

And that it was Timber Wolf.

[caj]

I loved that it took something from the previous era, Darkseid, and built it forward into the Legion's future, without any sort of messy crossover nonsense (like in the horrid Manhunters event) or the later attempts to copy that success with other 20th century immortal villains transplanted into the future (R'as Al-Ghul). It, IMO, used the richness of the setting to it's advantage, and wasn't bogged down by continuity kerfluffles, or what was going on in some other book (or anyone else's future plans for Darkseid, since he was kind of a forgotten character, when they chose him as their Big Bad).

It amuses me that this arc started in 1982, and now, well over three decades later, Darkseid is still the gold standard villain for DC's biggest properties, and it was the Great Darkness Saga that put him on this trajectory.

It was also cool to see the Legion-verse pull out everything they had. The Subs were there. The Wanderers. The Heroes of Lallor. And twenty to thirty actual Legionnaires. Against a couple of million folks with the power of Superman (and, thankfully, none of his experience using those powers, and somewhat bogged down by being mind-controlled!). Yikes!

Great post. Agree with everything you said.