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 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.

Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 4

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 (DC, 2011).



Every so often, reading Legion of Super-Heroes in this period (1968-1972), you get some real gems, but they sure can be ugly. This latest edition in the Showcase Presents series collects another 500 pages of LSH action and futuristic melodrama, and most of it's pretty entertaining, but it's not very easy on the eyes. I was reminded of a 1993 newspaper review of a twenty year-old Doctor Who serial, dusted off and run in prime time on BBC1, which summed up just how dated the garish, glam rock production was by noting "Sometimes, Doctor Who doesn't time travel well at all."

That's certainly true about the late '60s Legion. DC Comics, in the period, was confused and frustrated and throwing everything at the wall, desperate for something to stick. Sometimes they found something that really worked well; giving teenage writer Jim Shooter a crack at humanizing the characters and bringing a vital, modern energy to the old-fashioned plotting was among the best things that corporation did that whole decade. But then they shot themselves in the foot by letting some guy with the awesomely rock-n-roll name of J. Winslow Mortimer illustrate some of them. Eventually, Jack Abel is brought in to ink this artist's work and made it look competent, but until Abel arrived, DC was publishing some of the ugliest, blockiest, dullest, sloppiest artwork imaginable. Here's a rare example of me speaking against the Showcase series' black-and-white reproduction: My own collection of old comics where these originally appeared had long told me that these were ugly comics. Stripped of color, they are revealed as flat, unimaginative and hurried as a Whitman coloring book.

In this period, the Legion is still hamstrung simply by virtue of DC being DC. There's a good two-part story about several Legionnaires learning that they have been fatally poisoned, and you can really feel that unreal, Silver Age attempt at pathos. Characters want to tell their parents farewell, but they end up standing around stoically, weeping a silent tear and not saying anything, but thinking a gigantic thought balloon choked full of long sentences of what they wished they could say. On the other hand, Shooter does make progress in giving characters more human motives. Duo Damsel's unrequited love for Superboy is never really heart-wrenching, but it means well and feels real. Karate Kid's decision to spend his dying days tracking down the Fatal Five and bringing them to justice is the sort of thing that DC Comics just never did before Shooter. It was too aggressive, too proactive a tactic for such a reactionary publisher.

The whole book is like this, taking baby steps towards becoming energetic and lively and slipping away from the (sorry) Silver Age shackles. E. Nelson Bridwell contributes some pretty good scripts before Cary Bates drags the property kicking and screaming into the 1970s with some really fun stories and great characterization, and the drab Mortimer / Abel team eventually gives way to Dave Cockrum, who, finally, seems to have a desire to make the 30th Century look futuristic. The last 60-odd pages of this book are really fun, and I'm left feeling quite hungry for the fifth volume, which should be full of the stories that I grew up reading and loving. Recommended with reservations.