All New Collectors' Edition #C-55
All-New Collectors' Edition #C-55 is the formal wedding issue for Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad — two of the three founding Legionnaires — making it one of the most consequential character-status milestones in Legion history. The marriage triggered their mandatory resignation under Legion bylaws, fundamentally reshaping the team's roster. Published to mark the Legion's twentieth anniversary, the tabloid format let writer Paul Levitz and artist Mike Grell deploy a genuinely epic scale: a Time Trapper–altered timeline, a Legion-wide mobilization, and a political undercurrent rooted in 1978 Cold War anxieties, all of which foreshadowed the more ambitious storytelling that Levitz would bring to the series throughout the early 1980s. As the second and final all-new Legion treasury edition, it remains a one-of-a-kind artifact of DC's Bronze Age oversized publishing program — one that was never reprinted as a standalone comic and that went entirely undistributed in the United Kingdom.
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The issue was produced by the then-current regular creative team: Paul Levitz writing, Mike Grell penciling, and Vince Colletta inking the main story, with a secondary art chapter by James Sherman and Jack Abel. Joe Orlando served as editor and managing editor, with Levitz credited as editorial consultant. The book went on sale December 13, 1977, carrying a March 1978 cover date, and was part of DC's quarterly All-New Collectors' Edition line — a rebrand of the earlier Limited Collectors' Edition treasury series that shifted from reprints to all-new material. Levitz and Grell both appear as cameo figures in the wedding splash page, and the issue opens with a written dedication to foundational Legion writers Otto Binder and Ed Hamilton. Cover color separations were handled by Sol Harrison, with Adrienne Roy coloring the wraparound cover.
Trivia · 7 facts
- Titled 'The Millennium Massacre,' the story is an all-new 62-page tale — not a reprint — structured in four chapters, making it one of the longest single Legion stories published up to that point.
- Saturn Girl (Imra Ardeen) and Lightning Lad (Garth Ranzz), two of the Legion's three founding members, are married in this issue; under Legion law at the time, both were required to retire from active membership after the ceremony.
- The villain is the Time Trapper, revealed here to be a Controller, who escapes Probability Limbo and travels to 1978 to dissolve the United Nations and trigger centuries of galactic warfare — history that only Superboy, arriving from the past, can perceive as altered.
- Writer Paul Levitz and penciler Mike Grell both appear as cameo figures in the wedding splash page, an in-story acknowledgment of the creative team.
- The book includes an 8-page 'Origins and Powers of the Legionnaires' feature written by Levitz and illustrated by James Sherman and Jack Abel, serving as an early precursor to DC's later Who's Who series, plus a 2-page full-team pin-up by Grell and Colletta.
- The issue celebrates the Legion's twentieth anniversary (Adventure Comics #247, April 1958) and opens with a written dedication to founding Legion writers Otto Binder and Ed Hamilton.
- The story was collected alongside Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #234–240 and DC Super-Stars #17 in DC's Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 1 hardcover, its only substantial reprint appearance.