Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-seventh installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for part one of this installment's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

After a Legion Spectacular he wrote and laid out fell through, Jim Starlin refused to put his name on the reworked version of his story when it appeared in two issues of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes.

STATUS:

True

In 1976, Jim Starlin quit working for Marvel over a conflict with then-Editor-in-Chief Gerry Conway (although Starlin was then convinced by Conway's successor, Archie Goodwin, to return to wrap up the Warlock saga in the pages of two otherwise unrelated Marvel Annuals in 1977). Once that was finished, Starlin found out from his good friend, Al Milgrom (who had become an editor at DC) that Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes was open for pitches and so Starlin plotted and laid out a 34-page story for Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #239 (with the great Josef Rubinstein doing finishes and the similarly great Paul Levitz handling the script).

It is hard to exactly explain what "Murder Most Foul" was like to the readers of early 1978, when the comic book came out. The closest comparison I can think of is when Todd McFarlane brought in three of the most acclaimed writers in comics and Dave Sim to do four issues of Spawn in a row in late 1992 through early 1993. McFarlane wasn't even doing a bad job on Spawn as a writer, but when suddenly Alan Moore shows up, the difference is still really stark, ya know? And then Neil Gaiman in the next issue!

Similarly, when you go from an all-reprint issue of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes to an issue drawn by Jim Starlin involving Ultra Boy framed for murder? Readers must have had whiplash dealing with the sudden shift in tone in the series, with this brilliantly plotted and outright GRIM depiction of Ultra Boy going on the run after the Legion believed that he was a murderer (Starlin brought back a minor character, Legion of Super-Heroes' Senior Advisor, Marla Latham, and used him really well as Marla, who had a close friendship with Utra Boy, TOTALLY believes that Ultra Boy broke bad). In the end, Chameleon Boy clears Ultra Boy's name, but reveals that the killer actually IS someone very close to the Legion. In a kind of odd sequence, they ask him if he knows WHO and he says yes, but he won't reveal it just yet until he's positive. Doesn't that pretty much scream, "Hey, secret Legion killer, come kill me!"

The issue ends with a tease featuring the mystery killer...

At the time, the Legion stories were 34 pages long and DC was also experimenting with stories DOUBLE that length (well, close enough to double) as "Super Spectaculars" as part of their DC Special Series. DC Special Series #5 was a 62-page Superman story and DC Special Series #11 was a 63-page Flash story and so Starlin sat down and plotted out and laid out a 64-page resolution of the hooded villain mystery.

But then DC's Implosion occurred and the Spectacular line of books were canceled (DC Special Series became mostly a reprint title) and so instead, Paul Levitz was given the pages and told, in effect, "Do something with this." Levitz told my pal Glen Cadigan in TwoMorrows' The Legion Companion, "I recreated the story, we threw out a few pages, we had Joe Staton do a new splash page for the second part [and] ran it in an entirely different order with a somewhat different plot than what Jim intended..."

Here is that Joe Staton opening page for #251...

You might notice something odd about those credits (they are the same for #250). Yes, instead of Jim Starlin being credited as himself, he chose to take his name off of the project and go by Steve Apollo. It wasn't even JUST that Levitz essentially rewrote Starlin's stories and dropped a bunch of pages, but it was that Rubinstein was not available to finish the pages at the time and Starlin had specifically laid out the story with the intent of Rubinstein doing finishes, as Starlin knew Rubinstein's work so well that he knew that he trust that Rubinstein would finish it the way that Starlin intended it. Dave Hunt was a fine inker, but he was a lot different than Rubinstein and Starlin was not pleased about it. Starlin later sold off the nearly TWENTY unpublished pages that were not used. Collector Bryan Hawkins purchased one of the pages and then commissioned Josef Rubinstein to finish off Starlin's layouts to have at least that page look as how Starlin intended it to look...

The reveal remained the same, of course, as, again, Starlin had laid out the entire story already, so some beats were just obvious and could not be altered in Levitz's re-imagining of the plot and so it turned out that it was Brainiac Five who was the bad guy, having gone insane...

One of the weird things about the story being taken from Starlin's original plans is that, at the end of the comic, Brainiac Five successfully destroys the Miracle Machine (which he had used to create a powerful being known as Omega) by having Matter-Eater Lad eat it (which drives Matter Eater Lad insane). Brainiac saves the day only because he realizes that he went too far, as he wanted to RULE the cosmos, not DESTROY it, so the issue ends with Brainiac Five very much still insane...

I imagine that Starlin did not originally intend to leave the story off with Brainiac Five still insane, but I could be wrong.

Thanks to Glen Cadigan and Paul Levitz for the information and thanks to Bryan Hawkins for that amazing page!

CHECK OUT A MOVIE LEGENDS REVEALED!

In the latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was the Die Hard arcade game actually just a re-branded version of another Japanese video game?

PART THREE SOON!

Check back soon for part 3 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com