Comics Rainbow - Marvel's Legion of Monsters

Edited by Robert Beach

Well, it’s October: the Goosebumps movie is about to come out; Halloween is just around the corner, and I have a crippling addiction to ‘70s comic books. Let’s talk about Marvel's Legion of Monsters. As I’ve mentioned before, the ‘70s was a time of serious upheaval and horizontal expansion at both DC and Marvel. The young readers the companies had attracted over the Silver Age were growing up to be young adults with disposable income and a continued interest in comic books, a relative first for the medium. 

This ended up fueling a rush to diverse the story market with stuff beyond the straightforward superhero fair of the previous decade.  Marvel had always prided itself on creating stories and content that was beyond the boundaries of the superhero genre. Many of their core characters like the Fantastic Four or Thor sprung out of weird science and epic fantasy respectively. 

When it came time to diversify, they were ahead of the game on DC and came out of the gates strong with a whole slew of new, horror-based comics. This was right around the time the Comics Code, a self-imposed industry code of censorship, was losing its teeth, so the horror genre was finally getting its fangs back after being neutered for well over a decade. 

Marvel cranked out all sundry manner of demons, vampires, zombies, mummies and anything else they could come up with and, occasionally, they all teamed up to become the Legion of Monsters. Since then, the title has been resurrected multiple times for new monsters of the Marvel universe. So this is your full spectrum look at the Legion of Monsters in all their shades, shames, and successes.