Or - “Proof That Where Goeth The Legion, There Goeth The DCU.”

Over the last few years, the family of Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman, have come forward with a fascinating claim, with which faithful Spoilerites are probably quite familiar.  The gist of it all is that when Jerry and Joe Shuster sold Superman to National Periodical Publications, (now known as DC Comics) they were royally hosed, a fact that seems pretty obvious since DC had made millions upon millions of dollars after only a few years of the character’s stories, while Jerry & Joe were paid a pittance for the rights.  Add to that a claim that Jerry pitched a series chronicling the adventures of Superman when he was a boy while NOT under contract to DC, had the proposal turned down, went to war, then returned to find DC using his idea, and mamushkah!  You gotcherself a lawsuit.  What this boils down to is a question over whether DC can legally use the name and character of Superboy Tom Welling, making DC ignore him for the most part.  Of course, old-school Legion fans have ‘been there, done that,’ seeing as how WE got to see a world without a Tom over a decade ago.  At that time, Keith Giffen and company had just relaunched the LSH title in a new volume, with a darker and more adult approach, an approach that the Superman offices apparently didn’t care for.  Keith was told that Mr. Welling (then known as John Hames Newton) could no longer appear in the stories, in any aspect, a difficult prospect for a team that was so inextricably tied to him from their very first appearance.  The answer was as simple as it was interesting: they reset the continuity, and changed the very nature of the Legion in so doing.  But as with the Crisis on Infinite Earths a few years earlier, the universe created a replacement, and so was born the legend of Impulse.  It’s a very Silver Age tale of a young medical student from New Rochelle, his strange accident and his rise to greatness…  This is your Major Spoilers Hero History of the Legionnaire once called Impulse of Earth… Kent Shakespeare!

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