LSH Reread, part fifteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 48-53 and Annual # 4, 1988)

Major developments:

*The four conspirator Legionnaires - Brainy, Saturn Girl, Duo Damsel and Mon-El - have to move more quickly as they are being suspected. Mon-El, implausibly but hey! comics, brings a dwarf star to Earth to power a device of Brainy's. This goes disastrously wrong and nearly kills millions. Tellus, Magnetic Kid, and Sensor Girl have figured out they're up to something. Magnetic Kid confronts Brainy but is rebuffed.
*Starfinger plans to send a pulse wave through space attuned to the Legionnaires' flight rings. He receives a sample ring from a mysterious "Doctor Hazeg," whom the in-disguise Cham recognizes as actually Colossal Boy. Starfinger later sees through the deception when he realizes Hazeg's identity.
*The conspirators fess up in part: they're attempting to break the time barrier and avenge Superboy's death by destroying the Time Trapper. The rest of the team agrees that's a good idea, but they don't know that the four have sworn to kill the entity or die trying, and that they firmly intend to do it alone. Brainy begins to despair that the time barrier cannot be broken, but he's encouraged by the strange reappearance of their presumed-dead friend Rond Vidar. They use the Infinite Man's power over time to burst the barrier and attack the Trapper.
*So things go straight to hell: Everybody's ready to leave and kick some entropic ass at the end of time, but Brainy has powered the device to only take the four of them. Somehow Rond Vidar comes along as well, revealing his secret when they reach Time's End to battle the Trapper: he's got a Green Lantern ring. The battle is still pathetically one-sided: the Trapper injures Saturn Girl after her attempt to attack his mind, he kills Luorno's second body, and even after Mon-El punches the Trapper through a dying star and smashes a planet (!) into him, the Trapper shrugs off the attacks and wounds Mon-El so grievously that, even when this series ends the following year, he still has not recovered. Brainy's secret weapon is to reincarnate the Infinite Man: the personification of constant, ceaseless rebirth goes to war with the personification of entropy and death, and the two vanish back to the very beginning of time, where the Trapper's very existence creates a paradox. Both beings may be destroyed, but the costs are pretty high.
*Using the Infinite Man in this fashion means the death of its human host, Jaxon Rugarth. Polar Boy charges Brainiac 5 with violating the Legion constitution's guideline against taking life. The trial splits the team, some of whom agree that Rugarth's mind had been destroyed years before when he became the Infinite Man in the first place. The final vote is 11-7 in favor of acquittal with several abstains. Brainy bequeaths Luorno his force field belt before resigning, Shady takes an extended leave of absence looking for medical help for Mon-El, his invunerable body shredded by the Trapper, and the White Witch was so infuriated by Brainiac 5 that she abruptly left without discussion or explanation. The team, to put it simply, is in shambles.
*While her lover is unconscious, Shady prays to her gods and ancestors for his life, and "binds" herself to him in devotion, a ritual similar to marriage, which involves her cutting off part of one of her fingers.
*Ayla, Pol, and Tellus take a mission to Pol's home planet of Braal, which has been beset by earthquakes. These are caused by a Gil'dishpan called Hywyndr. Ayla flirts pretty heavily with Pol, who I believe is about ten or eleven years younger than she.
*Starfinger reveals himself to his prisoner Colossal Boy as Char Burrane, the first criminal who Gim apprehended after getting his super powers. The Espionage Squad, Dawnstar, and the Science Police raid his headquarters and capture him.
*Dream Girl finally has that fling with Atmos in a short backup story. Garry Leach draws it. That man never got enough work.
*Greg LaRocque leaves the book after a run that started a little dry but improved so much over time. He's replaced by returning artist, and co-plotter, Keith Giffen with issue # 50.

Oh, sweet merciful heavens, Giffen's back and he's remembered how to draw.

There has been speculation over the years about sales figures for the book. The numbers that are posted monthly - to some controversy - at sites like The Beat don't stretch back as far as the late eighties, so it's anecdotal research. Still, the smart money's on LSH losing at least a third of its audience when it moved off the newsstands and into comic shops only as a Baxter-only title, and rising only briefly with 1987's "Death of Superboy" four-part crossover. This allegedly didn't hold, and sales continued deteriorating.

From my own experience buying these as back issues, pretty much everything between issues 20 and 50, along with the overprinted # 2 through 6 and excepting # 37 and # 38, came from quarter bins. There was next to no back issue market for LSH in the 1990s. That said, the final thirteen issues were much more difficult to source. They didn't cost me any more than cover price, but the price tags of several different comic shops around Atlanta and Athens on my issues confirm that I had to look around quite a lot for them. The conclusion that I draw is that, after the Time Trapper story, comic shops found reason to cut their orders, massively. This probably came around the same time as a notable atrophy in the collectibles hobby, along with DC flooding the market with short-lived and forgotten miniseries. The ad pages of LSH during this period are like a roll of dishonor, with title after title that nobody bought. We remember the standouts and forget all the failures. In 1988, DC seemed to have a pile of them, and it probably made sense for retailers to try three copies of something new and cut three copies of the slumping Legion.

That's entirely speculative, but I think that's what sets the stage for Giffen's return and his unbelievably fantastic new style. It won't last very long, and, within years, it'll be buried by the "Five Years Later" run with its nine-panel grid and focus on random background objects, but for a few months in 1988, Giffen is absolutely masterful. He's again visually defining characters by their hair, something that both Steve Lightle and Greg LaRocque had let slip, and not their costumes. In fact, it's here that many of the Legionnaires quit dressing in costumes entirely. One of his first moves is to retire both Phantom Girl's and Dawnstar's Cockrum- or Grell- designed 1970s peek-a-boo suits, which I think are the last of the sexy-ladies Frederick's of Hollywood-by-way-of Logan's Run costumes from that period to stick around. Now, not only is her hair graying - perhaps a fashion choice - but she's wearing a red jacket. I really like this idea; it breaks the characters further away from defined "superhero" image and costume and allows them to dress like actual people.

But before we get to Giffen, there are two long-running plots that need to be resolved. The Starfinger story is by far the less satisfying of the two. He's just a laughably shallow and unbelievable villain, and his gigantic, super-powerful criminal empire just does not make any sense. Worse, it turns out that he just happened upon the source of his power, the mindless genies Starlight and Starbright. There's a brief moment of interest in watching the lesser-powered members of the Espionage Squad finally defeat him, but it's all an unsatisfying bore.

On the other hand, there's the Time Trapper story. Holy moly.

There's a great suggestion in the letters page that this whole "conspiracy" thing is really just gearing up to an elaborate surprise birthday party. If only. Levitz, LaRocque and guest artist Pat Broderick really sold the heck out of this ongoing story, and once Giffen returns, it's work by people at the top of their game. It's the nature of superhero fiction to sell the idea of heroes battling against insurmountable odds, but this story pulls it off like very, very few others. The most remarkable moment is the brave idea of sidelining Saturn Girl almost immediately. Over the previous few years, she had been spotlighted as the most strong-willed and surprisingly powerful of all the Legionnaires, particularly when she defeated Universo, and so watching her fall here is an incredible shock.

The death of Duo Damsel's second body is, similarly, driven home by the emphasis placed shortly before on what death means to her species. She explains that she effectively "died" several years previously when one of her three selves had been killed by Computo and has been either living on borrowed time or living a lie, which is hardly the sort of thing that you'd think her husband would wish to know.

Issue 50, and the amazing trial coda that follows it in # 51, is arguably the pinnacle of the book. I might be proven wrong over the next two reread chapters, and I'm really looking forward to revisiting Giffen's artwork again, but the impression that I have always felt was that this masterpiece simply wasn't going to be topped. "Life and Death at the End of Time" is absolutely one of the best single issues of any superhero comic, especially in the way that it upends the status quo and leaves the last year of the book with the team in shambles, trying to come to grips with what the hell just happened.

For those who enjoy the lighter side of the 30th Century, however, there is the amusement of watching Ayla make what's apparently one last attempt at heterosexuality with her fumbling flirting with the oblivious Pol. The fans in the letters pages have suggested that the founding trio are pushing thirty and Pol is at most maybe seventeen. That's okay, kid. If my older brother's best friend's twin sister had started coming onto me when I was seventeen, I'd probably have been clueless myself.

LSH Reread, part fourteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 41-47, 1987-1988)

Major developments:

*The Legion tracks their mysterious foe Starfinger to a satellite. They battle him, his army, and his strange "Bond girl" bodyguards Starlight and Starbright. Starfinger self-destructs the station after badly injuring Colossal Boy and is presumed to have been killed.
*Longtime supporting player Laurel Kent reveals that she is not actually a descendant of Superman at all, but one of the immortal robot Manhunters (as in "No man escapes the...").
*Cham signs out on one of his Espionage Squad missions.
*The weird anti-energy lifeforms from Quislet's home universe abduct him and Wildfire through a black hole and attempt to punish him for stealing his exploration/survival vessel, but they escape.
*The egotistical blowhard Atmos, from Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu, applies for membership in the team. Chuck and Luorno recommend him for the Academy; he brashly turns them down.
*Three weird (and ponderous) aliens called the Lords of Luck reveal that they have been manipulating events in Garth, Ayla, and Mekt's lives, including the accident that gave them their lightning powers. They arrange for Mekt's escape from prison. Garth recaptures him.
*Brainy has been at work in his lab, but it's revealed that he and three others are quietly working on something on their own. Mon-El, distant and cold to Shady, is likely among them. Tellus unwittingly learns that Saturn Girl is also involved, and he coins it a "conspiracy." He confides in both Magnetic Kid and in his former teacher Luorno, not realizing that she is the fourth conspirator.
*Over the course of several identities and assignments, Cham works his way up Starfinger's criminal organization, confirming that he has survived and is still working his schemes.


Here's another run of the comic that doesn't really invite a great deal of comment. These are mostly pretty solid comics, and have aged well, but nothing in them really stands out as transcendent, either.

Well, there is Starfinger, I suppose. Good grief. I somehow remembered him as a powerful and entertaining villain. He isn't. He's ridiculous. He doesn't even begin to appear as though he's a scheming, dangerous planner, but rather a spoiled child. He is prone to utterly childish temper tantrums and fits of ego, and his whole position of "how dare the Legion interfere with my plans?!" is the sort of thing that somebody who grew up in a vacuum and never heard of superheroes would take. The "killing his underlings who fail him" angle is so overplayed that he appears less like Darth Vader and more like the sort of boss that no criminal would bother working for. There's got to be an easier way to make a dishonest living than working for this lunatic in his carnival costume!

Worse, Paul Levitz makes one of his very few letters page mistakes with Starfinger. Now, for years, Levitz has been one of the most entertaining figures in all of comics fandom when replying to reader input. He's been thoughtful, humble, honest, and accepting of fan praise and of criticism. He's defended his work in a professional and tactful way, and accepted the blame when things didn't work as well as he'd hoped. Somehow, though, he let one clue too many slip through the net. If Starfinger doesn't turn out to be the criminal whom Colossal Boy had captured in issue # 39's flashback issue, I'll be very surprised, because Levitz darn near spells it right out in neon.

The oversized episode with the Luck Lords is published as LSH's 30th Anniversary issue. Like some previous collections along the same lines, it features guest work by artists from earlier days, including some fine work by Dave Cockrum. I remember this issue very fondly and very particularly, because, when I came back to LSH in the 1990s, I bought this back issue, along with thirteen or fourteen others, from the quarter bin at a shop in Athens, Georgia, and enjoyed the heck out of it. One of the other issues came from about three years into the controversial 1990s run spearheaded by fans-turned-pros Tom and Mary Bierbaum.

Anyway, this anniversary issue showed that three bizarre, all-seeing aliens called the Lords of Luck had overseen and manipulated every event in Garth Ranzz's life. The other issue, which I read the same evening, showed that the Lords blinked and missed the fairly major event of Garth actually staying dead; the Bierbaums decided to claim that Garth had never been resurrected, and that all this time it had been the shapeshifting Legion of Super-Pets blob Proty masquerading as Garth. Uh-huh. I understand that this, and some of the other, shall we say, eyebrow-raising retcons endorsed by the Bierbaums were subsequently erased from contemporary continuity and canon. GOOD.

LSH Reread, part thirteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 37-40 and Annual # 3, Superman vol. 2 # 8, and Action Comics # 591, 1987)

Major developments:

*Cosmic Boy and Night Girl have returned from a vacation in the 20th Century, only to find it radically altered from the history that they have known, without the Superboy of Smallville who inspired the formation of the LSH, and who later grew up to be Superman. In this iteration, Superman made his first public appearance in 1986, and was never active as a "Boy of Steel." They confronted an old and powerful enemy, the immortal and entropic Time Trapper, who warned them to never attempt to travel in time again.
*Ignoring this, Brainiac 5 leads a team that includes himself, Cos, Night Girl, Ultra Boy, Blok, Invisible Kid, Sun Boy and Mon-El back to Superboy's time of the 1960s. But their old friend betrays them, trapping Mon-El, Ultra Boy, Cos and Night Girl in stasis. The others use the time bubble to move forward in time...
*Brainy and the others find Superman in the late 1980s, but he has no memory of the LSH, and while he finds their story about his history and recent events intriguing - "like some crazy Twilight Zone version of my life" - they are all frozen in time by Superboy and his stasis ray.
*Superman breaks free from Superboy's stasis ray and pursues him back to the 1960s, while the Time Trapper explains to the audience what the heck is going on: he has taken advantage of a temporal anomaly - the LSH interacting with a universe that never existed - to create that universe itself from a sliver of time, one million years old. This "pocket universe" included a Superboy who donned a costume at the age of eight, inspired and later joined the LSH of the 30th Century. Each time the LSH, who are really from the future of the new-to-us Superman's universe (the "real one"), traveled back to visit Superboy, they were actually passing from our universe into this "pocket."
*The two Kryptonians fight. Superboy is actually a hell of a lot more powerful than the new-to-us Superman, but the older man's got the moral strength, and knows that whatever has gone on to make the Boy of Steel betray the Legion, his heart isn't in it. Superboy concedes; he's learned about the Time Trapper, after the incidents of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. The Trapper has demanded that the Legion be destroyed for his "pocket universe" to survive, and desperately hoped that Superman could find an answer. The Legion insists, however, that Superman remain in 1987. If he were to die in battle with the Trapper at the end of time, it really could unravel all of history.
*But the casualty of the battle is actually Superboy, who is mortally wounded while heroically powering one of the Trapper's devices and sending his adopted homeworld into safety somewhere else, ripping the pocket universe away from the Trapper's control and also away from the Crisis on Infinite Earths. His last feat of strength is flying the Legionnaires' bubble back through time to the correct 2987, and he dies in Mon-El's arms after asking his old "brother": "Take care of Earth for me... it -- it was the nicest home a boy could want..."
*SP Officer Gigi Cusimano spends an evening reminiscing about the days when she dated Colossal Boy before she accepts a promotion and commission to be chief of the SP attachment on Mars, which will probably make her unavailable for many more evenings with Sun Boy.
*Cos and Night Girl retire to her home planet of Kathoon. Finding evidence of a plot by the alien Dominators, they call for backup. With the LSH unavailable, Bouncing Boy, Comet Queen, and Myg - the new Karate Kid - come to assist. They decide to form a new group of Substitute Heroes.
*The criminal kingpin Starfinger finds a couple more of his extortion schemes halted by the Legion, and he has a great big temper tantrum.


I'll come back to Starfinger, who really is proving to be a disappointment, in the next chapter of this reread. This time out, we'll talk about Superboy.

DC Comics has stopped and restarted their continuity heaven knows how many times in the last thirty years, and never understood the lesson that writer and artist John Byrne taught them in 1986: you have to do a full, line-wide reboot for anything to make sense and not have huge plot holes. Byrne, along with George Perez, who rebooted Wonder Woman around the same time, were probably the only DC creators who did it right. They certainly didn't do it very well (coughByrneBigBardaSleezcough), but that's a separate argument.

Byrne perceived that one of the problems with Superman in the early 1980s was his enormous supporting cast of fellow Kryptonians and hangers-on. He was far too powerful, and in the unlikely event he did meet too great a challenge, he had a mob of cousins and parallel universe "brothers" and the entire city of Kandor to call for help - hardly the life of the "Last Son of Krypton." Byrne also dumped most of the dumber aspects of the character, apparently asking the very sensible question, "When was Superman ever stupid enough to tell people that he had a secret identity?" This new, streamlined Man of Steel made his public, costumed debut as an adult in 1986, after Clark Kent had a successful athletic and college career, arriving at the Daily Planet as a seasoned reporter with experience covering war zones for the wire services and only using his super powers, secretly, in emergencies. In short, Byrne made Superman readable for the first time in ages, and consigned the bumbling, foolish, No-Friends Clark to history.

But this new narrative sat awkwardly with most every other creator and editor in the comics. Historically, Superman always inspired all the other modern-day superheroes to get started, but, depending on who was writing what title, the Justice League and Batman might have been operating for years before his debut. Very little was making sense as, for example, the many Batman writers decided against restarting their character, because that would mean rebooting Robin back to a kid and forcing a reboot of DC's best-seller, Teen Titans, which featured Robin as a twenty-something hero named Nightwing.

And then there was Legion, which had about thirty years of history reliant on the idea that teenage Superboy had inspired the team and spent most of his teenage and - I guess - college days hanging out with them having adventures. As it had been DC's second-most popular title (sales had allegedly dropped by a fan-estimated third when it moved to the deluxe line with better paper, however, and Byrne's new Superman comics were outselling it by 1987), nobody wanted to reboot or restart LSH. The result was this phenomenally awkward four-part story, in which Levitz and his editorial team worked with John Byrne and his editorial team to explain the new, massive plot hole between the Superman comics published in 1987, which had no continuity or backstory, and the previous thirty years of Legion, which were choking in them.

I tried to explain the solution in the details above, and... it really is stupid. I'm not saying anybody could have done better, and certainly not me, and the presentation is marred by the Time Trapper's bizarre monologue, where he spends pages and pages explaining what the hell he had done to an audience consisting of the readers and nobody else, but this is the sort of inelegant and ridiculous solution to a problem that defines DC Comics in general. Later writers would keep grappling with this problem, leading to more and more continuity restarts, defining the comic, probably fairly, as the most overly complicated thing in funnybooks to follow.

Having said that... Levitz and artist Greg LaRocque do a pretty good job starting the four-part crossover, and John Byrne, accepting his tendency toward LOTS of monologue-choked thought balloons, actually does an exemplary job incorporating the characters into his middle episodes. It's so note-perfect - apart from the pages of the Time Trapper boasting about his plan - that it's completely remarkable, and not in a good way, that, one month later... well, just Google "john byrne big barda" and prepare for your mind to boggle. The offense is immortalized in an ad for that issue right at the end of episode three of this story.

But part four... well, this is something special. Tasked with saying farewell forever to the Boy of Steel, Levitz and LaRocque really rise to the occasion. Superboy's death really is just the saddest damn thing that ever happened in an American superhero funnybook, and if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye, something's downright wrong with you. Sure, he was the victim of some editorial or publisher's mandate, but that fabulous scene, our hero helpless in Mon-El's arms, is something else.

The funeral - the Legion has no way of returning their old friend's body to the Kents back in Smallville, who will never know what happened to their adoptive son, so they bury him with full honors on Shamballa - is kept to a single double-page splash, and there, almost small enough to miss, is a little clue as to what will happen soon. It's Duo Damsel, holding her husband and confiding that she really did love Superboy. Teamed with Polar Boy's resolve that one day soon, they'll see whether an immortal like the Time Trapper can die, it points the way to terrible decisions and real, ugly change.

LSH Reread, part twelve

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 30-36, 1987)

Major developments:

*Universo's pawns manipulate the most powerful Legionnaires into off-world assignments. Some of those who remain on Earth round up some restless lightning monsters, mindless natives of the planet Korbal, who have been let loose at the Niagara nuclear power plant.
*Brainiac 5 receives word that his old friend, longtime supporting player Rond Vidar, has died in the hospital. Vidar is Universo's son.
*Everyone on Earth falls asleep, and wakes up under Universo's control. Some days later, Saturn Girl awakens on a strange planet, finding Brainy, Dream Girl and Cham also present along with several other heroes, but all are amnesiac and patiently doing manual labor together.
*Universo is eventually defeated; Saturn Girl rejoins the team on active duty while her hubby takes care of the twins.
*Polar Boy is elected Legion leader.
*Cosmic Boy and Night Girl return from a vacation in the 20th Century with incredibly troubling and ominous news...


Now here's a weird period of the book. The Universo subplot has been building for about a year, and, in any other period, the resulting four-part story would be thought of as a real epic. It's helped by Greg LaRocque's artwork continuing to improve, visibly, with each month. After a rough start in 1985, he seemed to really work at it, and the results are often striking. Early in the story, Saturn Girl breaks one of her self-imposed rules and intrudes into Cham's, Brainy's, and Dream Girl's minds to break Universo's hypnotic control. Their mindscapes are brilliantly realized, and the story looks set to be a major game-changer.

And yet... it is wrapped up so quickly and so tidily that the whole story feels really forgettable. Perhaps this is not entirely Levitz's fault; as we'll see in the next recap, what happens next required a scheduling beast, since LSH was about to cross over into two other DC Universe titles, and since John Byrne, co-architect of those, was the big bear among DC's creators at the time.

It was a real interesting development to see Rond Vidar, one of the book's longest-serving supporting players, killed off. I don't suppose anybody was starting clubs or writing fanfic about the guy, but it really cements Universo as one of the most evil and awful enemies of the LSH, somebody who recognized that his own son, nice-guy that he is, was his Achilles heel, so he murders him.

Through this, and the months and months of planning and manipulation, Universo becomes one of the greatest threats in the history of the comic, and the villain who came closest to global domination - in fact, for a few weeks, he did control the Earth. It's a shame that the ending wraps everything up so incredibly quickly, especially after spending two issues breaking Saturn Girl and the other three out of his prison planet, and a shame that LaRocque didn't elect to update Universo's appearance to reflect his much more intriguing characterization. With his monocle, chrome dome, and Baddies-R-Us facial hair, he looks exactly like a kiddie TV version of a bad guy.

Another surprise here is how strange the pacing feels. A small team including Tellus, Quislet, Wildfire, and the White Witch is assigned to a mystery on Tellus's home world, another trap by Universo to get more of his enemies out of the way. It must be said that Levitz completely blows the timeline here. Saturn Girl's experiences (several days), Mon-El and Ultra Boy's experiences (maybe a day or two), and Tellus's team's experiences (maybe hours) simply do not line up, but the comic insists that they're happening simultaneously.

Element Lad resigns after blowing this case so badly, setting up another Legion election. In keeping with tradition, the readers have their say, and Polar Boy, of all people, is elected. This won't go well. Interestingly, a letter is printed suggesting that Levitz look into what became of the rest of Polar Boy's old Substitute Legion. It's neat and fun that the longtime C-lister is given the chance to shine, but I don't know that we ever did learn what became of the rest of the Subs, and whether they settled for being disbanded so abruptly. I guess we'll see over the next 27 or so issues whether that plot thread is mentioned.

But first, everything's got to fall completely and totally apart. I'm really looking forward to seeing this next story again.

LSH Reread, part eleven

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 24-29, Annual # 2, 1986)

Major developments:

*Suspicion over Sensor Girl's identity, and how the Empress had approached her, sets just about everybody on the team into arguments against each other.
*Quislet, probably out to cause trouble in the first place, finds Dream Girl out dancing with somebody who isn't her longtime boyfriend Thom.
*The Emerald Empress and the Persuader recruit criminals named Flare and Caress to join their new Fatal Five. Writer Paul Levitz plays up the possibility that Sensor Girl is the fifth member, but it surprisingly turns out to be Mentalla, a character whose membership bid was declined and who briefly joined the Legion Academy before vanishing.
*Sensor Girl turns out to be Projectra. Well, I was surprised as heck anyway. She concluded that her home planet of Orando's disasters were not due to the tradition vs. technology gap, but her own poor decisions, and... comic book hocus-pocus explanations, augmented powers, returned to our dimension, redemption, that sorta thing.
*Mentalla betrays the Fatal Five. The Empress kills her, and the heroes win out.
*The rulers of the Sorceror's World awaken Mordru, depower him, and give him the mind of a child so that he may have a second chance.
*Speaking of "mind of a child," Darkseid... for some reason... relents and un-curses Garth and Imra, and returns Validus to his correct point in time and form, as their baby, Graym's twin. This has got to be the least satisfying curse ever.
*Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu asks him to return home and help look for Atmos, the only other superhero from their planet, who has vanished. Science Police Chief Zendak adds that quite a few heroes and police officers, system-wide, are missing. Atmos can't be found; the Xanthu tribune asks Star Boy to stay. He abruptly resigns from the LSH and doesn't even bother telling Dream Girl. Their relationship has been falling apart for years anyway, but the speed at which she propositions Element Lad is still surprising.
*A new gangster called Starfinger shows up with a surprisingly large criminal extortion business, and, also, the silliest costume in space.


Paul Levitz, more than once in the 1980s, admitted in the letters column that he was not the best at creating villains, but even with that caveat, the unbelievably ridiculous Starfinger is a mess. He'll improve later on, but his first appearance - as a "Kingpin of Space" - is idiotic. It's impossible to believe anybody who so quickly kills his reliable operatives over imagined slights could ever build up such a large criminal empire. His outlandish and bizarre appearance doesn't help. Greg LaRocque has been improving massively on art chores during this period, and he's found quite a knack for drawing Dream Girl as sinfully curvy, but his design skills are still a little behind the curve. We only catch glimpses of the missing hero Atmos in issue # 28; when we meet him properly in the next batch, it'll look as though the artist forgot to draw parts of him.

Much more entertaining is the resolution to the Sensor Girl story. Levitz has obviously been having a ball leaving one obscure clue after another for several months as to her identity. The smackdown with the new Fatal Five is really entertaining, with our five heroes - Sensor Girl, Dream Girl, Colossal Boy, Tellus, and Polar Boy - really looking like they're not getting out of this one alive. Mentalla's betrayal seems like something straight out of an earlier, shallower, time, but her double-agent turn goes over really well. When she's killed, it's a real surprise.

While the main story in the comic is exciting and incredibly fun, especially Brainiac 5's latest turn as team detective, thinking on a higher plane than everyone else, the annual is a complete disaster. The only good thing about it is that Keith Giffen returns to provide artwork for the opening and closing segments. This gives it some artistic continuity with "The Great Darkness Saga" and the earlier "The Curse."

Sadly, Darkseid's big, evil curse turns out to be a completely damp and dull disappointment. Only a year after we learned that Validus was the twisted and weird monster formed, by his black Apokolips science-magic, from Garth and Imra's missing child, the big baddie... sort of changes his mind, kills his servant Ol-Vir instead, and returns Validus to humanoid childhood. I guess it explains why Validus was weird and uncontrollable - he was only ever about eight months old - but the baffling way Darkseid returns him to normality is crushingly dumb. Even Imra is confused and unhappy about it. A big BAH to that. Now let's see what Universo has been doing.

LSH Reread, part ten

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 17-23, 1985-1986)

Major developments:

*One of RJ Brande's business rivals, the jealous Leland McAuley, attempts to have Brande killed. The Legion foils the attempt, but Brande not only doesn't press charges, he laughs it off and tells the team he's going off on one of his oddball voyages of discovery again.
*The Crisis on Infinite Earths that's happening in the 20th Century starts screwing with the Legion's memories and history. A huge team apparently travels back in time to fight the Anti-Monitor, and the long-forgotten supporting character Kid Psycho is killed, but nobody can remember this after sending his remains to rest at Shamballa.
*Trying to figure out what the heck happened in the 20th Century, Brainiac 5 and the scientists at the Time Institute unwittingly release the old villain Infinite Man from his strange prison between times and universes.
*The Controller who had been growing a Sun-Eater back in #7-8 abducts the Legionnaires who had destroyed it to finish the task for which he had been growing it: destroy an artificial war-world called Tyrraz.
*Invisible Kid has his dangerous and unpredictable "teleportation" side effect power nullified.
*Brainiac 5 convinces himself that Sensor Girl is, somehow, his old flame Supergirl. The Emerald Empress, who arranges a prison break to headhunt some new blood for the Fatal Five, offers Sensor Girl a place in her team. In a calmly emphatic "no," Sensor Girl somehow shuts down the Emerald Eye of Ekron, which nobody's seen happen before.
*Gigi confirms that she's heard that Sun Boy and Salu are an item. Salu is still very hot-tempered when it comes to Durlans, prompting Cham to ask her to be a little more sensitive.
*Shady confides to Tinya that the serum that protects Mon-El from lead poisoning is becoming much less effective, requiring more frequent dosing. Mon-El nearly dies two issues later before Brainy finds a permanent immunity.
*In Really-Long-Game subplot news, the team's old enemy Universo is masquerading as Earth's vice president Vid-Gupta.
*Greg Larocque becomes the regular penciler. He's pretty good, but he's no Steve Lightle.


Well, if anybody was wondering where fandom got the idea that Salu and Ayla would end up the team's first lesbian couple, it's in this run of comics. There are more shared glances and heavy discussions about friendship than in a whole season of Rizzoli & Isles. Nothing's confirmed and nothing's formally stated - in fact, Salu's being seen in public with Sun Boy a whole lot, putting the team's resident playboy in the quite unexpected position of being her beard, I suppose - but the subtext is impossible to ignore.

And this is one of the reasons that fans love this era of comics, because the characterization is so very good. Salu is not the same "Shrinking Violet" that she was before she was abducted by the Imskian terrorists. She's cynical, she's mean, and she's really quick to jump in fists first. Of course, the standards of the day didn't allow Paul Levitz to be very overt with much of anything, but there's just enough here, particularly in her question, “I changed my whole life, Ayla. What about you?”, to launch a hundred fanfics.

Interestingly, I have never actually read an interview with Levitz where he was asked about his intentions here, but it's evident that some subsequent writers chose to follow in his footprints, regardless of whether he intended this to be text or subtext. I think that some of the later continuities and reboots kept them as a couple and some didn't, but gay fandom has claimed them regardless of what later writers and editors might have had in mind with "NEW" Violet/Atom Girl or "NEW" Ayla. When Levitz returned to LSH in 2010 and rebuilt something close to this original continuity, he resumed their relationship, and might have even finally made them an official-in-canon couple, although I don't recall whether he made it a centerpoint of any of his stories. (I dropped the book when "The New 52" launched, so I'm not sure what happened after that.)

In previous editions of this Reread, I'd explained that I dropped the book when it split in two and started Volume Three. Issue 21 was the first time I'd looked at the Legion for a very long time; I found this as a back issue in April 1987, a year after it was published, at a convention called, I think, PhoenixCon. That was a remarkable weekend; I went to the con with $40 and came home with more than $100 since sixteen year-old me spent the evenings mixing drinks and tending bar at the consuite. I remain amazed that I got away with the stuff that I did at that age. Anyway, I spent all of one dollar in the dealer's room. I had given up on LSH for the X-Men, and gave up on the X-Men for 2000 AD, and I've stuck with it ever since. I could only find three issues of those crummy Files Magazines about Doctor Who by John Peel - remember those awful things? - in a four-for-a-dollar bin, and picked up this one lone issue of LSH to make up the dollar. I read it, I liked it, but I didn't come back to it. Not for a long time.