I enjoyed the naivety of the Shooter issues, and later the creativity of Dave Cockrum's designs. However, the Legion feature rarely seemed to truly exploit its SF roots; it was mostly the Jetsons, only with superheroes. I was then hooked by the Great Darkness Saga, and the Levitz-Giffen team managed to keep me around for a good while. But as soon as Giffen left, it's as if the book was stuck in a repetitive and ultimately uninteresting pattern. I kept buying the odd book now and then to see how things were evolving, and wasn't thrilled.

Then came the 5YL concept, and I was hooked again -even more strongly than before. The novel-like type of storytelling, the rare idea of superheroes actually getting old (for real, not for some "imaginary story") and the political and sociological aspect of the first story arcs were absolutely engrossing. I particularly liked how elegantly continuity was rebooted, explaining why so many aliens were human-looking and superpowered. Unfortunately, the 5YL legion was also plagued by its own problems: an inappropriate devotion to fannish theories that ordinary readers knew nothing about, the unexplained snub suffered by major legionnaires like Wildfire, and ultimately a descent into depressing nihilism that made the title unpleasant. It's galling because several excellent subplots were simply dropped in favour of scenes in which our heroes mope and complain.

The post-zero hour and Archie Legion started with a sympathy deficit on my part, as I was pretty upset about DC rebooting the Legion title instead of fixing it. However, I grew to love its optimistic attitude and its very nice art (Jeffrey Moy was just perfect for such a title). That era even managed, eventually, to make me forget the original; it was a Legion I could accept as the new "real" one. It wasn't without problems, though: too many old storylines were revisited, and not always for the better. The new origin of Wildfire was a fosterclock, for example.

The DnA Legion was an extension of the Archie legion, and Legion of the Damned is probably my favourite arc ever (even surpassing the Great Darkness Saga). I think the impending cancellation of the Legion titles gave that arc a sense of urgency that made it feel even more significant; who knew if dead characters would ever come back, since we didn't even know if the title would be restarted or rebooted again? In any case, that arc plus the following Legion Lost were once again books that I had to read. But all good things must come to an end, and after the much hoped-for launch of The Legion, things went south. Concepts like Legion World and a rebuilt Earth were pretty good, but DnA apparently had no idea of how evolution works, making their first arc as nonsensical as the early ones involving Superboy pranking his friends by pretend-sinking American battleships. Then... ideas started drying up, and we got the kind of stories I hate -stories in which heroes are diminished for one reason or another. Depressing stuff I can get in real life, thank you very much!

After that, I stopped caring. I didn't see the point in making any emotional connection to characters that mattered so little to their corporate owners that they could be erased from continuity again and again, and waited to see how new incarnations would turn out. If readers said after a few years that the Legion of superheroes, version 4 or 5 or 6 was brilliant, I'd give it a try; if not, nostalia wouldn't be enough to bring me in. The same things happened with Conan, post-Marvel (and the Dark Horse version DID manage to win me over, unlike the most recent Marvel revival).