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[Written on New Year's Day 2002]
Happy New Year, everyone! In celebration of the start of a new calendar year, here is a look back at DC calendars past in which the Legion appeared.
First up, 1976. The Bicentennial Year was celebrated by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano in the Super DC Calendar 1976, original price $4.95. January's picture is the classic shot of the Legion flying, with Lightning Lad carrying a banner. Featuring Superboy and 22 Legionnaires -- chronologically between "Superboy" 201 and 225, since Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel (resigned in issue 200) and Dawnstar (joined in issue 226) are not present -- the picture was reprinted as the cover of the paperback book published by Tempo Books, and probably inspired the cover of LSH v4 #80 in 1996 by Alan Davis. See my Bits o' Legionnaire Business page for a side-by-side comparison of the two.
Also of note in this calendar were the listings of birthdays of various DC characters. The full list is at http://www.geocities.com/the_time_trust_2000/calendar.htm and you can see the other month's pictures at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/6680/RACDU/DC1976.html. Of importance are the Legionnaires' birthdays as shown in the calendar. Interestingly, these same dates were used in the 2995 Legion Sourcebook from Mayfair, written by the Bierbaums in 1992.
JANUARY
The next year, DC published the 1977 Super DC Calendar, featuring "Super-Heroes vs. Super-Villains in the Year's Most Monumental Battles". This time the art was by the feature's regular artists (Delbo/Colletta on Wonder Woman, Chua/Giacoia on Batman, Fradon on Plastic Man, etc.) with good guys vs. bad guys at the site of famous monuments (Times Square on New Years, Eiffel Tower, Mt. Rushmore, etc.) on the top and the month with pertinent hero-specific events on the bottom. The Legion gets the two-page centerfold with art by Mike Grell, showing the Legion vs. the Fatal Five near the ruins of a curiously-shrunken Statue of Liberty, partially reprinted on the back cover with extra text.
I already covered the 1978 DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters in my first column.
That was it for the company-wide DC Calendars of the late 70's (you can still get character-specific ones today), but in late 1987 DC issued a promo poster calendar for 1988. This one features a giant 12x8 grid of covers published between 1985 and 1987 as the top 3/4 of the poster, and a calendar on the bottom quarter. The Legion appears on the covers of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" 12, "Who's Who in the DC Universe" 20 (Saturn Girl and Saturn Queen on the cover), "Superman (v2)" (post-Crisis Superman vs. the post-Crisis LSH) 8, "Action Comics" 591 (post-Crisis Superman vs. the post-Crisis LSH and the Pocket Universe Superboy), "Legends" 1, "LSH (v3)" 44 (Universo Project part 3), "LSH (v3)" Annual 2 (Cos and Night Girl with the new Subs), and "Crisis on Infinite Earths" 1. This one is pretty much for the anal retentive collector only.
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