Legion of Super-Heroes Five Years Later Omnibus Vol. 2

Legion of Super Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus

by Mary Bierbaum, Tom Bierbaum, Ty Templeton

It's the Legion of Super-Heroes like you've never seen them before, as the heroes of the 30th-century continue one of their boldest and most controversial eras!
 

As DC's 30th century super-team, the Legion of Super-Heroes had always stood as a shining example of futuristic optimism--but that changed in 1989 with a new Legion of Super-Heroes series that brought the timeline forward five years. In this even further future, the United Planets became a darker place, with familiar characters changed and the Earth overtaken by alien invaders--and the team reunited to take on these dangerous new threats.

Now this bold and controversial part of DC history is finally collected in a second omnibus edition, from the creative team of DC legend Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum!
 
Includes L.E.G.I.O.N. #69-70. Legion of Super-Heroes #40-61, Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #4, Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #5, Legionnaires #1-18, Legionnaires Annual #1, , Valor #20-23, and Who's Who Update 1993 #1.

Genres: Comics, Dc Comics, Superheroes, Science Fiction

1328 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2022

Reviews

[Tom French · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Compliment Sandwich Review:

I love the LEGIONNAIRES, whether the original SW6 batch, or the post-Zero Hour reboot. I love the Chris Sprouse designs, so sleek and clean, so unifying, yet allowing for individual distinction. Honestly, it's the best the Legion has ever looked. (Although I DO like the current 2020 Bendis gang, their look, anyway. I dig all the diversity of life-forms, but that's another review.) Even the 90's haircuts don't bother me all that much. As far as the stories go, they're fine. Tom & Mary Bierbaum have a nostalgia and respect for the characters that's evident in the writing -- they manage to capture the Legion's childlike wonder and spirit. Everything with the young Legion works great!

The "Adult" Legion, on the other hand, well...

If we learn nothing else from the "Five Years Later" series post-Giffen, it's that the Legion was not meant to be adults, or "grim and gritty" -- it clearly only works as a Super Hero club for youths. (Not unlike the X-Men, but that's also an argument for another time.) Yeah, Giffen gave us 36 wonderful issues of "Adult Legion", a convoluted, difficult, ever-changing storyline that was for me, challenging, fun reading -- but I knew all the trivia. Woe be to the reader who doesn't. But once Giffen left, the Adult Legion got seriously weird. Changing uniforms, code names, old-man Brainy, all that -- it was a whole lot of "What the f---?"

I think there was this mindset of "Legion purists have LEGIONNAIRES, so we'll just go there with the Adult Legion”... and they did. And it was terrible. I ended up dropping the title in the 90's, so I was actually looking forward to this Omnibus, to read those stories and see if there was a payoff to all of it.

There wasn't.

Instead, they clearly saw ZERO HOUR as a way to get out of their own mess, so they aimed everything at that event, a chance to reset the clock once again (which should've been done years before this) and give us ANOTHER Legion reboot. This Omnibus ends with the beginning of ZERO HOUR. There have been another twenty or so Crisis' in the DC Universe since then, so nobody may even remember this iteration.

I said I was going to write a compliment sandwich, so I'll end with discussing the incredible art by Stuart Immonem, Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, and Jeff Moy that made these subpar stories beautiful to look at. Buy this book for the art -- gloss over the words -- you won't feel so badly then.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

5YL Vol. 2 is unfortunately the story of how one of the best-ever Legion runs became one of the worst.

We pick up shortly after the departure of Giffen, and his cohort of the Bierbaums are taking over. And, they do a decent job on the main Legion title. It's somewhat repetitive in its plot lines, with none of the amazing innovation of Giffen, but nonethless it feels like the 5YL Legion.

Unfortunately, Tom McCraw takes over toward the middle of the volume and he just trashes the 5YL Legion. He randomly ages and deages most of them and gives them laughably bad new costumes and code names. We then get a fairly dull Legion-on-the-run storyline that perhaps would be OK if any of the characters were recognizable as Legionnaires, but they're pretty much not.

Meanwhile, we also get the Legionnaires comic spotlighting the SW6 batch. The conceit is pretty good, especially with its focus on New Earth, but the Bierbaums just can't tell a coherent story. This one is decompressed and hard to follow and feels largely unimportant. After some interesting play with the Fatal Five at the start, it quickly becomes a mess.

Mark Waid does his best with what he's given in End of an Era. He knows everything has devolved into a mess and the only chance is to reboot the Legion, and he does a pretty good job with that, retconning the origins of the SW6 into something much less interesting than the original SW6 plot and much more interesting for the Zero Hour story.

And then all was white (again).

The next take on the innocent young Legionnaires is fortunately much better than this one, and hopefully we'll get more of those collections soon (or even better, omnibuses like this).

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

As nearly everyone has said, some positives here, but definitely a mixed bag overall. The Bierbaums crank out some decently nostalgic, but not terribly memorable scripts for both titles, then Tom McCraw takes over Legion and drives it hard into ground. Mark Waid manages a fairly good finale, setting up the (first) reboot era. I forget sometimes that he ended and started TWO reboots.

Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes and Jeff Moy make this one of the best *looking* incarnations of the Legion even when the stories are just sort of there.

[Invervegas · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the strong start of the first book, this seemed to splinter and become more dilute as the various heroes go in different directions. Art became a bit shabby as well. There is a moment of poignancy in #40 which I won’t spoil but is probably the saving grace of the book, giving it some credibility in my eyes

[John Geddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite as good as the first omnibus, largely because it got caught up in the Zero Hour ‘closing down the universe’ before the reboot, but still very nuanced, well plotted and drawn. It’s still one of my favorites.

[Jody Banman · Rating 1 out of 5]

This series is a microcosm of 90's era DC Comics, it starts bad and gradually gets worse, it reminds me of why I went from being obsessed with comic books to ceasing to buy them entirely. As the writing and art duties change hands the story and art devolve to the point that this was really difficult to finish, and that's rare for me with comics. There are points where you can see that the issues ran so late that multiple panels on multiple pages had incomplete coloring, a lot of white portions that stand out glaringly. It's weird that they felt this entire series was worth reprinting but they didn't think it was worth fixing that.

[Thomas Rankin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second half of the Five Years Later era is definitely weaker than the first. The Bierbaums do a good job filling in after Giffen’s departure, but as soon as they leave the book begins to fall apart. With no real direction anymore, DC used Zero Hour to completely reboot the Legion. Most of the characters meet an unsatisfying end, with the book ending on an extremely bittersweet note.