September 1962: Time-Traveling Titanic Teenagers

In September 1962, DC marked the 300^th issue of Adventure Comics by cover-featuring a team that had begun as almost an afterthought.

Every decade has had its superhero teams — the Justice Society and the All-Winners Squad in the 1940s, the Justice League, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers in the 1960s, the Defenders in the 1970s.

But superheroes were eclipsed in the 1950s, in part because such garish figures didn’t quite fit with a war-weary, nervously conformist American society. Yet the 1950s too had its superhero teams, though stripped-down, muted and shoved into the background in keeping with the spirit of the times.

So you had the World’s Finest trio of Superman, Batman and Robin and two other bands that were probably intended to be one-shot plot devices, but which took on lives of their own.

One was The Batmen of All Nations (Detective Comics 215, Jan. 1955), consisting of the Masked Manhunter’s imitators from around the world, and the other debuted in Adventure Comics 247 (April 1958).

It’s safe to assume that writer Otto Binder, artist Al Plastino and editor Mort Weisinger didn’t know quite what they’d created in The Legion of Super Heroes, a club of teenagers who time-travel back to Smallville to recruit their inspiration, Superboy.

The concept had weird angles that weren’t particularly promising. Why should the super heroes all be teenagers? And why should they each be restricted to a single power — or, as would be the case with several members, the entire virtually omnipotent array of Kryptonian powers?

Yet hidden within the concept were elements that would give it serious legs.

Like the Harry Potter novels 40 years later, the series would combine the fantasy appeal of super powers with the plot-churning drama of high school cliques and romances. The team returned in Adventure Comics 267 (Dec. 1959), and then again and again.  Even if the situations were fantastic, the emotions had to be familiar to the feature’s young readers.