Slightly Misplaced Comics Heroes Case Files #4: Tyroc

This may not end well.

I’ve never been much of a fan of DC’s Legion of Superheroes.  I couldn’t begin to tell you why.  I do enjoy DC’s black-and-white reprints of various older books.  The Showcase Presents series gives the reader usually around 500 pages or so of old stories for a low price, and are a good way for the fan of Silver Age silliness to find the old stuff without breaking the bank.  This was how I was able to write columns in this series on both Captain Carrot and the Unknown Soldier.  But I have limits, and one of them is old Superman stories where Superman often saves the day using deception.  The reader will think Superman is in a bind of some kind (never a physical one), only to discover he was aware of the problem the whole time and had already beaten it and was just waiting for the end of the story to tell everyone.  My one attempt at a Legion Showcase was done by Superman’s writers and artists and the stories were about the same level of jumping out at the reader and shouting, “Psyche!”  But the Legion lasted a good long time, and has been rebooted tons of times since then.  One of the legendary runs was by writer Paul Levitz, who wrote the book for 15 years and during that time he managed to include every member of the Legion at some point, even the dead ones using flashbacks.

The one exception was Tyroc.

Why The X-Men Suck At Their Jobs

Lots of pouches here. It was the 90s.

The X-Men were created for two primary reasons.  One was because Stan Lee needed another superhero team and was feeling kind of lazy, so he threw up his hands and said, “You know what?  They were just born that way!”  The other was as a at-times heavy-handed anti-racism allegory.  The year was 1963, and the Civil Rights Movement was heating things up across the country.  Younger readers of comic books could be taught a lesson on tolerance, and comics were a good medium for that, so here were the X-Men, mutants who were feared and hated by non-mutants for the crime of being born different.  But the X-Men were good and defended regular folks against the evil mutants of the world, in an attempt to prove that not all mutants were evil.

Even given the sliding scale of Marvel time, where everything outside Captain America and the Invaders’ exploits during World War II depicted in a Marvel Comic (barring the upcoming Secret Wars) has taken place over a roughly 12 year time period, the X-Men really suck at their task of promoting tolerance.