LSH Reread, part four

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2, Annual # 2 and 304-309, 1983-84)

Major developments:

*Projectra and Karate Kid get hitched. They're the third pair of Legionnaires to marry, we're told, and they formally resign from the team to rule the planet Orando as Queen and Prince Consort.
*Shvaughn Erin and Element Lad have deduced that the Shrinking Violet we've been watching for months is an impostor. The real Salu Digby has been abducted by terrorists from her home planet of Imsk. The "Vi" who has - in an almost big a surprise as the abduction - married Colossal Boy is a Durlan actress named Yera. The biggest surprise comes with the revelation that Colossal Boy intends to stay married to her, and, sorry, Queen Projectra, but it turns out y'all're the fourth Legionnaire wedding after all.
*Dawnstar breaks things off with Wildfire and takes a leave of absence from the team.
*Element Lad is elected team leader.
*Garth and Imra announce that they're going to have a baby.
*Two ultra-powerful beings, The Prophet and Omen, show up and start yelling at everybody.
*Keith Giffen buys a bunch of José Muñoz comics and studies them very, very closely.


This run of LSH is one that I'll always remember, because it goes from a huge high, and the peak of my teenage fandom, to the first of the three really big stumbling blocks that had me walking away from the comic. It's amazing, in retrospect, how quickly this happened, but that's teenagers for you. Within ten months of deciding I would be a fan for life, the quality of the book fell off a cliff between issues # 306 and # 307. It would recover, but only after I abandoned it.

But first up, there's Dave Gibbons. He illustrated the second annual, which is really a silly story in which five Legionnaires get lost in time and get into a scrap with Durlans posing as Greek gods, and I had not loved artwork so much since the passing of Dick Dillin, who had illustrated all those wonderful Justice League of America comics that I enjoyed as a child. Soon, I would find Gibbons' artwork in Marvel's American-sized reprints of the very fun Doctor Who comic, and then Watchmen, and then all of the stories that he'd done for 2000 AD. This was my introduction to his work, and I was amazed by it.

But the big deal here is the story about Vi. In the three previous chapters of this reread, I've made sure not to refer to Violet as Salu Digby, because she was abducted by terrorists from her home planet of Imsk, and a Durlan actress named Yera was sent to impersonate her in the Legion. She fell in love with Colossal Boy, which was a dream come true for him, as he'd been crushing on Salu for a few years and was pleased that she finally reciprocated. Now, it must be said that Yera agreeing to marry Gim in the first place is just about the height of thoughtlessness and crappy behavior, but I think it's really interesting that creators Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen decided to keep them together. Gim, heart-on-his-sleeve sensitive guy that he is, forgives Yera for the deception, accepting that she personally had nothing to do with Salu's kidnapping and was oblivious to her incarceration. Yera offers to annul the marriage since she came into it with false pretenses, but he accepts her as she is.

As tough as some of that is to swallow, I'm glad that Levitz and Giffen stuck with it, because it allowed them to explore some new character quirks. He therefore becomes half of the third Legionnaire marriage, and the only one to a spouse who isn't also a superhero. Also, since his mother is Earth's president, and since there are considerable biases among humanity against Durlans, that opens some interesting political avenues. There will also be the business of how Salu, once she recovers and rejoins the team, feels about Yera and her old buddy Colossal Boy.

Issue # 306 is a flashback-filled story looking at Star Boy's history. The flashbacks are drawn, with reliable energy, by old hand Curt Swan, while the framing is drawn by Giffen and Mahlstedt in what would be the last example of the style for which Giffen was known. It's a great story, too. Basically, it's Star Boy kicking back with Wildfire to watch the election returns come in, and hoping that Dream Girl will lose so that she'll have time to pay attention to him again. (This issue was mentioned by comedian John Hodgman in a USA Today interview just last week. Thanks to Matt for the heads-up!)

Everything changed, and, to my mind, in a terrible way, with # 307. Thirteen year-olds aren't known for being able to express much in the way of art criticism - in fact, forty year-olds are pretty often awful with it, too - but all I knew then was that, suddenly, Giffen's art looked like it fell off a cliff. There are, certainly, interesting panel layouts, but faces became elongated and sloppy, anatomy was all over the map, the camera angles were utterly bizarre, and there's a sense of energy and movement that, combined with how weird everybody looks and how incredibly thick the inking is - surely Mahlstedt wasn't responsible for these figures?! - gives the whole comic a sense of being rushed, wildly.

It doesn't help that the four-part story, "Omen and the Prophet," suffers for two big reasons. First, episodes two and three are shorter than usual. Part two is 14 pages, with George Tuska doing a much more competent job with a nine-page story in which Gim and Yera meet his mother, and part three is 13 pages, with Pat Broderick again turning in a much more professional looking job with ten pages about Projectra and Karate Kid. It really, really feels like Giffen was falling over deadlines and not leaving Mahlstedt time to ink anything. To be fair, Giffen had been extraordinarily busy, what with his LSH commitments and also launching another DC title, The Omega Men, and his son being born, which can be a huge crunch. But this is nevertheless really slapdash work, and the story is a complete bore as well, with a barely-coherent plot about overpowered loudmouths yelling a lot.

As if Giffen's work was not aggravating enough on its own, it soon transpired that the artist had been appropriating and swiping the comics of an Argentinian cartoonist named José Muñoz. The Comics Journal, in its February 1986 issue, called Giffen out on how flagrantly he was pilfering from Muñoz, doing much to derail his previously fan-favorite career, and giving his reputation a black eye that took decades to recover.

By that time, I'd already dropped LSH. I remember looking over some recent back issues in 1986 and a friend told me about the swiping. I shrugged it off, but was a little pleased to understand just why the artwork in my previously-favorite comic had turned so awful. More on the story behind that in our next installment.

LSH Reread, part three

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2, # 297-303, 1983)

Major developments:

*Following events in the previous issues, Cosmic Boy's mother dies of radiation poisoning.
*Duplicate Boy calls out Colossal Boy for stealin' his honey, then decides Vi's not worth it and splits, leaving Earth.
*Chameleon Boy has lost his powers and decides to bond with his dad, quadrillionaire RJ Brande, who, not content with using "By Ymir" as an exclamation, also uses the words "fershlugginer" and, three times in one issue, "verdammt." Evidently, Durla is not an alien planet at all, but a neighborhood in Brooklyn that borders Potrzebie.
*Their swanky new headquarters is formally dedicated, and the Adult Legion story that foretold Shadow Lass's death is explained away as a possible future from an alternate reality.
*Karate Kid and Projectra announce that they're getting married.
*The Emerald Empress, previously depicted as the least effective villain among the Fatal Five, is redesigned as an incredible force of evil and bitchiness somewhere between Servalan from Blake's 7 and Joan Collins' character from Dynasty.
*Shvaughn Erin and Element Lad certainly look like they're dating to anybody not in denial about Element Lad's sexuality. We meet Shvaughn's roommate, Officer Gigi Cusimano, and Sun Boy instantly starts chatting her up.


When 12 year-old me first read LSH # 300, my mind was permanently blown. The frame story is set in the present, mostly around a few not-all-that-important events, but also at the Science Institute. You really have to handwave some magic storytelling stuff and pretend that it's science, but basically, Brainiac Five and his clever pals Rond Vidar and Professor Clicks-a-Lot are helping Andrew Nolan, the insane brother of the long-deceased Legionnaire Ferro Lad. Andrew has fantasy nightmares of the past or the future of alternate reality LSHs that show up on a video screen and keep him screaming in torment as heroes die ugly and awful deaths. Brainy's cure - and magic storytelling doesn't get more magical - is to twist the vertical hold knob and tune him into a happy alternate reality where Andrew, not insane, was welcomed into the team as Ferro Lad's replacement, whereupon Andrew sighs contentedly and, with a "pop," goes to live in that world. Okay, then.

But the nightmares are important, not the frame story. Illustrated by a who's who of LSH artists from the past, such as Howard Bender, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, and Dave Cockrum, most of these things are just incredibly ugly and violent. Sadly, I can't imagine them having much impact to a generation of comic readers inured to such things by the bloodthirsty bathtub fantasies of Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis and their ilk, but back when superheroes didn't get their brains blown out on-panel, or kill bad guys by breaking their necks, seeing it happen here was a complete jawdropper. I read and read and reread this story, and, many years later, when I needed a character to suffer a wild laser blast-through-the-chest death in one of the comics that I drew, I swiped Dave Cockrum's depiction of Tyroc's end.

I really like the way that Levitz and Giffen amp up the villains. Both Lightning Lord and Emerald Empress are shown to be incredibly powerful and uncontrollable. The unspoken effect of Lightning Lord's rampage is that Garth is probably every bit as dangerous and has the potential of being lethal to anybody around him, but, aware how anybody could be killed by his electricity, he deliberately reins himself far back.

I also like the way that they chose to depict Durla as an incredibly weird and alien environment. Chameleon Boy really suffered from his My Favorite Martian-era design in my book; real Durlans, about whom more in the next entry, typically choose to look quasi-humanoid in deference to everybody else, when they're really disgusting, slimy messes who live on a disgusting, slimy, messy planet.

There's lots more that I'm going to say - of course - about Colossal Boy and Vi in the next installment, but it is worth noting that the really awesome fight between Gim and Duplicate Boy is one of my favorites. Duplicate Boy is an interesting character. He's a distant supporting player in a different super-team, the Heroes of Lallor, who basically has every super power that you've ever heard of. (Grant Morrison later turned that idea on its head with a character who has every super power that you haven't heard of. As soon as you think of a power, she lost it.) There are always periods in comics where characters are made to be more impressive by being more awesome than everybody else by virtue of all the things they can do; we call these periods those occasions when comics are trying very hard to appeal to ten year-olds. So Duplicate Boy can duplicate all his opponents' powers, and gets to knock Gim all over the Himalayas by being as giant as him, while also as strong as Superboy. There is some great good-natured grumbling dialogue among the Legionnaires sent to break up their lovers' squabble over Vi, because nobody wants to take the kind of beating that Duplicate Boy can lash out, and certainly not for such a dumb reason. I love it.

It's an absolutely terrific run of comics, and has me anxious to see again what happens next.