Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

Today, I thought I'd take a look at one of the most fascinating relationships of the 1980s, the love between Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass, a love that the cultural situation of the 1980s and early 1990s led to being mostly in subtext and innuendo, which was still a lot more than most other gay relationships were given at the time.

Our story begins in 1986. Shrinking Violet (Salu Digby) and Lightning Lass (Ayla Ranzz) had both been longtime members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, but they also had both undergone a whole lot of trauma over the years. Violet had a long time relationship with the superhero, Duplicate Boy, of the Heroes of Lallor, while Lightning Lass (then called Light Lass, because she had gravity powers) had one of the more notable relationships in the Legion with Timber Wolf. They got a lot more "air time" than Violet and Duplicate Boy's long distance relationship. However, eventually Light Lass wanted to leave the Legion and Timber Wolf did not, so they broke up. She was off of the team for a few years of our time, living the live on her home planet of Winath, where clothing was very much optional. Anyhow, when the Legion was launched into their own Direct Market Only series in 1984, the opening storyline involved the Legion of Super-Villains getting together and Light Lass was captured and her evil older brother forced her lightning powers to return (conveniently, her twin brother, Lightning Lad, had retired from the Legion and so there wasn't an issue of duplicate powers anymore). She rejoined the Legion. Meanwhile, Shrinking Violet seemed to break up with Duplicate Boy and then marry Colossal Boy. It turned out, though, that this Violet was an impostor, as a Durlan named Yera had taken Violet's place. The real Violet was in a sensory tank this whole time. She was freed, but she was changed a lot by her experiences.

Okay, so you have two characters, neither of whom is seeing anyone romantically, who both went through some major changes in their lives. Paul Levitz decided to show how the characters were now a lot alike in Legion of Super-Heroes #22 (art by Greg LaRocque and Mike DeCarlo)...

Remember, we're talking 1986 here. We're a year before John Byrne introduced Maggie Sawyer in the pages of his Superman reboot and even Maggie Sawyer, one of the most explicitly gay characters introduced in a DC superhero comic, was still mostly subtextually gay, so this was a big deal here.

Their bonding experiences continued in the next issue...

Then, the following issue had a confrontation between Timber Wolf and Lightning Lass where she makes it clear that they are through...

But then a funny thing happened. The Violet/Lightning Lass relationship never really progressed.

We see that they are still close, like when they're coming back from partying in Legion of Super-Heroes #30...

And Violet makes some vague comments about how she learned from her mistakes in dating Duplicate Boy in Legion #37...

But they're mostly apart for most of these next few years. This leads to a fascinating scene in Legion of Super-Heroes #56 where Lightning Lass effectively throws herself at Magnetic Lad, the younger brother of Cosmic Boy, and when that falls flat, she has an awkward run-in with Shrinking Violet...

That was it for their relationship in this series. However, Keith Giffen was about to relaunch the Legion with a new series set five years later with scripters Tom and Mary Bierbaum, longtime Legion fans who believed that Violet and Lightning Lass should be together. Now their relationship took a leap forward, but even then, a lot of it was still left as subtext...

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Legion of Super-Heroes #1 saw Shrinking Violet dishonorably discharged from her planet's military due to her unwillingness to stop complaining about some wartime atrocities that they committed in their war with Cosmic Boy's planet. She returns to Ayla and their letters certainly suggest a romantic relationship...

As does their time together on Ayla's home planet of Winath...

Eventually, they help re-form the Legion (and Vi and Cosmic Boy work out their differences from the war). They're clearly close during all of this time, but it is still subtext, like in Legion #16, when Cosmic Boy (Rokk Krinn) tells her that he knows Ayla would like her to not be put into harm's way...

And then we would get these scenes filled with innuendo, like in Legion #20, when Vi gets a new leg...

Perhaps the most explicit scene that we would ever get with the two characters occurred in Legion of Super-Heroes #39, an issue after the Earth has been destroyed...

As you can see, they were written like a couple who had been together for a long time, but it was fascinating to see how the era still led to them keeping it awfully vague. By the way, around this time, younger versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes had been found. They were essentially time clones of the Legion, left in stasis for years. They formed their own team and there were younger versions of Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass, although the other Shrinking Violet was from the time when she was still pretty mild-mannered, so she was quite shocked by her older self.

In a short-lived new direction for the Legion, the team all had their ages messed with, so Ayla was suddenly a young woman again, and Vi obviously was freaked out...

Finally, in Legion of Super-Heroes #61, due to Zero Hour, this whole era of the Legion was wiped out from continuity. Both versions of Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass said goodbye to each other as they were wiped from continuity (STILL no kiss between the two, by the way).

Okay, so the Legion was then rebooted in a brand-new continuity and the relationship between the two heroes was gone.

Years later, the original Legion (before the "Five Years Later" story) was brought back into continuity through some Multiversal shenanigans.

They got their own series again and in Legion of Super-Heroes #6, it seems that Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass are a couple in this continuity again...

It is made a bit more explicit in Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1 (with Keith Giffen and Paul Levitz re-united), where they are on vacation together when they run afoul of the new Emerald Empress and Shrinking Violet risks her life to save the day and we at least get a "Sweetie"...

The Legion is in a bit of a state of limbo for now, so we'll see when they get back together if the Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet relationship continues. Maybe we'll even...GASP...see a KISS between them?!

Thst's it for this installment! If anyone else has an interesting piece of comic book history that they'd like to see featured in the future, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!