LSH 1994 Reread, part three

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 # 68-71, (but not Annual # 6), and Legionnaires # 25-28 (but not Annual #2), 1995)

Major developments:

*The Legionnaires defeat Tangleweb, who has been augmenting his intelligence by absorbing his victims' minds, but Andromeda's horrible attitude and phobias are not winning her any friends, even though she comes through in the end.
*A war criminal from Durla comes to Earth to hunt down Cham. He has the power to not just shape-shift, but to copy all the Legionnaires' powers. He calls himself the Composite Man. Shutting down the villain's brain is more than Imra can take; she is transferred to a psychiatric facility, catatonic.
*Kinetix, looking to increase her power or gain more through ancient artifacts, loses her abilities when she uncovers a star-shaped object that counteracts the effects of the first one that had originally given her superpowers.
*Jo and Tinya get to know each other a little better, and Jo's team, the Work Force, breaks up a criminal gang. These are revealed to be more members of the White Triangle, who resent the Work Force's owner, McCauley, selling arms to both themselves as well as to the people of other planets whom they detest.
*The White Triangle makes its move. Mostly racist Daxamites, they start murdering interspecies couples on Earth before destroying the stargates that allow interplanetary transport, and then wiping out the population of the planet Trom in a genocidal attack from space.
*Andromeda confesses that she's an unwitting White Triangle agent and, after Brainiac 5 gives her a new serum to make her immune to lead poisoning, she goes out for revenge on the Daxamite diplomats who maneuvered her into the Legion.
*The White Triangle attacks Earth, and I'm not sure how it ends because I didn't know that I needed Legionnaires Annual # 2 to finish the story. Blast.
*The basic creative team is as before: Mark Waid, Tom McCraw, and Tom Peyer writing, with Lee Moder and Jeffrey Moy the principal artists. Guest artists include Mike Collins and Joyce Chin.


Mark Waid finished out his co-writing and development of the Legion with this run of issues. They wrap up the first major subplots, culminating in a battle with the White Triangle. That will have big repercussions, which I'll look at in the next installment.

Beyond that... well, I apologize to anybody following along who's looking for any real insight from me into these issues, but I find analyzing them a little tough. They are rock-solid, very entertaining comics. As the team wrapped up their first year developing the new Legion, they could honestly say that they did even better than anybody reading would have guessed. The letters pages of both books were absent for several months, and when they returned, the editors had the right attitude and printed quite a few letters from older fans who were aggravated that DC Comics had closed the original Legion off and started fresh.

I would love to see a good reprint program for these comics, and not in any half-assed way, either. This book is every bit as good, if not better, than the wonderful Starman from the same period, and look at how beautifully DC spruced up those collections.

Well, I say that now, but looking ahead to the next batch of issues, I see that the very silly and badly dated '90s Superboy - you remember, the one with the really bad haircut and the Lennon spectacles - shows up for a three-issue guest star part. Gulp.

Anyway, my favorite moments involve the nascent formation of the Espionage Squad, with Invisible Kid, Apparition, Triad, Vi, and Chameleon basically doing their own thing regardless of what the leader-man tells them. It leads to the big cliffhanger about halfway through the run, when Vi comes back from Andromeda's room holding a White Triangle pendant. My least favorite moments were realizing that I needed two more issues to read the whole story. I don't own either of the 1995 Annuals. LSH Annual # 6 contains the story in which Kinetix loses her powers, and the whole shebang is wrapped up in Legionnaires Annual # 2. I ran by a couple of places in the 'burbs that still sell back issues and they didn't have copies of these issues. What an aggravation. Maybe I'll find them one day.

LSH 1994 Reread, part two

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 # 65-67 and Legionnaires# 21-24, 1995)

Major developments:

*Brande's competitor McCauley has formed a superhero team of his own. Live Wire finds a place there, along with the new characters Evolvo Lad, Inferno, Karate Kid, Spider Girl, and Ultra Boy, who we met in the previous issue and who introduced Live Wire to the others. McCauley's micromanagement in the field is undermining the group's effectiveness.
*The UP has asked the Legion to repair the power grid of a super-secure prison facility on an asteroid inside the sun of the planet Wakeet. The magnetic tunnel that allows travel to the prison and back broke down some years ago. Brainiac 5's people, the Coluans, agreed to build a new magnetic tunnel-bridge, but a criminal gang has just been waiting for the bridge to go up so that they can send cruisers in to free all the prisoners. The Legion, on site to make the repairs, and the Work Force, who had been tracking the criminals, are trapped on the surface with the prisoners.
*It's love at first sight when Jo and Tinya notice each other for the first time. Unfortunately, he's kind of dating Spider Girl.
*Three new heroes are drafted: Andromeda of the planet Daxam, Shrinking Violet of Imsk, and Kinetix of Aleph. Leviathan instantly starts crushing on Kinetix, and Brainy on Andromeda.
*Andromeda struggles to befriend the others, as, like many Daxamites, she was raised with xenophobic beliefs. She is off-duty with some of the others who witness a xeno-attack on an alien. She corners the perps, but recognizes a white triangle symbol worn by one and lets them "escape."
*This will come back to haunt her: just days later, one of Triad's three bodies is badly beaten and hospitalized by other members of this white triangle gang.
*In space, a group of Legionnaires is tracking Tangleweb (see Reread One), but the alien surprises them and captures Cos and Spark. They trail him back to what appears to be his home planet...


I am really, really liking these comics! They have aged incredibly well. Unburdened by continuity or tie-ins - so far - they just tell a really good story of adventure and melodrama in a fun, science fiction setting and they tell it really well.

Maybe this is just me trying to find a connection to hang an opinion on and make these things worth doing, but the conventional wisdom, for years, has been that Starman by James Robinson and Tony Harris had been by far the best thing, if not the only good thing, to come out of DC's 1994 Zero Hour crossover / revamp. And this isn't to knock Starman at all, because, apart from some occasionally clunky dialogue, it is a truly fantastic comic, and one that I repurchased in those amazing hardcover omnibus editions, but that comic really lives and breathes from the continuity of the comics of that time. It's a book that relishes its place in history, with the latest in a long line of heroes to use that name, and it is about family and generations and titles. For all of its triumphs, Starman is a book that probably means more to readers with a fond memory or two of all the rest of DC Comics' line of superhero books.

This Legion does not seem to care. It is off doing its own thing. I think that when it does begin interacting with DC continuity and history, it will have its first fumbles.

I really like how the creators are aware of what the original iteration of the Legion did, and how it is so confidently able to foil expectations. There's the early rumblings of a love triangle between Rokk, Garth, and Imra. (Rokk and Imra are wearing clunky "Virtual Reality" helmets, like a lot of speculative fiction written in the mid-1990s thought that we'd use in "the future." It's kind of charming.) When the team gets three new members, we're all set to see Gim Allon get a crush on Shrinking Violet, because that's what Colossal Boy did in the original iteration. But no, he looks right past her and sees the brand new character Kinetix and gets a goofy grin.

Andromeda is the really interesting character this time, though. See, a few years previously, the original iteration of the Legion had suffered from Superman's editorial office having a hissy fit about other comics using the Superman Family, and so the Legion team dealt with their tantrum by having a history-altering time-whatsit rewrite everybody's backstory and replace Supergirl, the longtime supporting player and reserve member, with a Daxamite super-blonde with the same power set. Andromeda had proven popular with the fans of the Legion between 1990-93, and while I have only faded memories of the character, I remember her as being a smiling and upbeat, friendly person, much like the old, popular Girl of Steel.

This time around, Andromeda completely confounds expectations because she's a surly bigot who's slowly learning to get used to other humanoids. She completely screws over her teammates on Earth by letting some criminals go after she recognizes the white triangle that one of them wears, and she could have ended the threat of Tangleweb immediately with a punch to its face, only she refuses to touch any other sentient, finding the concept of other races or species' skin revolting. This character has a long, long way to go. I'm forcing myself to wait in between batches of seven, and I'm really impatient to start the next ones.

(As with Reread part one, the stories are written by Mark Waid, Tom Peyer, and Tom McCraw, with terrific artwork spearheaded by Lee Moder and Jeffrey Moy. Fantastic stuff across the board.)

LSH 1994 Reread, part one

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 issue zero and # 62-64 and Legionnaires issue zero and # 19-20, 1994)

Major developments:

*Rokk Krinn, an athlete from the planet Braal with the native power to control magnetism, Imra Ardeen, a cadet police officer from Saturn's moon of Titan with the native power of telepathy, and Garth Ranzz, a runaway from the panel Winath who has the power to generate electricity, meet on a shuttle to Earth. They save the life of RJ Brande, one of the richest men in the universe thanks to his invention of stargate technology. The nascent United Planets is a fragile alliance, and he proposes that they join forces with his backing as a Legion of Super-Heroes as symbols to unite the many squabbling planets in the systems.
*The next assassination attempt comes when Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Live Wire are introduced to the diplomats. Tinya Wazzo of Bgtzl and Luorno Durgo of Cargg help the new heroes and are drafted to join them as Apparition and Triad. The UP and the public loves the kids. Their ranks are swiftly increased as new members are drafted to join them: Leviathan (Gim Allon) of Earth, Kid Quantum (James Cullum) of Xanthu, XS (Jenni Ognats) of Aarok, Chameleon (Reep Daggle) of Durla, Invisible Kid (Lyle Norg) of Earth, and Brainiac 5 (Querl Dox) of Colu, who initially ignores his draft.
*The team does not work well together. Chameleon does not speak Interlac, and only Invisible Kid can converse with him. The initial five mildly resents the draftees, especially when it's learned that the UP has decided that Leviathan, a Science Police officer, will be team leader. James Cullum, who uses a device housed in a belt to generate stasis fields, strongly resents being drafted at all, or taking orders. On their first mission together, Cullum is killed by an alien calling itself Tangleweb, who escapes.
*Brande shells out for a huge new headquarters for the team, which comes with its own chef in the cafeteria, a Bismollian named Tenzil Kem.
*Leland McCauley, Brande's most ruthless competitor, asks for the Legion's help. A criminal named Mano is killing his technicians on the moonbase. Mano wants vengeance after McCauley sold one warring faction on the planet of Angtu untested chemical weapons that ended up killing everybody.
*Winath drafts Garth's twin sister Ayla to be their formal representative in the Legion, replacing Garth, a runaway, who the UP President kicks off the team. Ayla takes the code name Spark. Garth agrees, grudgingly, that he's still a minor under Winath law and represents a possible PR nightmare and willingly leaves.
*A superpowered stranger who calls himself Ultra Boy and can use one of several different powers at a time tells Garth about a new opportunity for him. McCauley, impressed by the Legion, is assembling his own team...


Several chapters back, I explained briefly how DC decided to end the troubled Legion of Super-Heroes franchise in 1994 with its most audacious change to continuity, ever. The entire universe was wiped out, closing the doors for good during a silly crossover event called Zero Hour. When things returned to normal for the comic book world of the present day, it gave the editors the chance to relaunch a few titles and create several new ones, the most celebrated of which was certainly the extremely good Starman by James Robinson and Tony Harris.

But darned if Legion of Super-Heroes didn't also emerge from the Zero Hour debacle stronger than it had been in years. The editors decided to go in for the really audacious move of just starting clean and brand-new, despite, foolishly, the holdover numbering from the previous issues. The new Legion was being told across two issues, with a new installment published every other week. Initially, it was being written by a team of three, Mark Waid, Tom McCraw, and Tom Peyer, and a host of artists. The leads were Stuart Immonen, Jeffrey Moy, and Lee Moder, with lots of fill-in work. A typical issue (take LSH # 63) credits Waid and McCraw with story, and Moder for pencils on pages 1-15, Brian Apthorp for pages 16-20, and Scott Benefiel for pages 21-25, with inking by Ron Boyd on pages 1-13 and 21-25, and Tom Simmons on 14-20. This would settle down in 1995, but it's obvious that this team hit the ground running, and breathlessly at that.

Somehow, I guess because the writers are paying such close attention to characterization and motive, giving these teen draftees a reason to trust each other and provide an image of unity, it really works. The tension between Leviathan and Cos is short-lived but natural; the founding three are happy to welcome Apparition and Triad as members, but are surprised and baffled that the United Planets are instantly in their affairs and telling them who is in charge. Leviathan, with his police background, is simply told by the government that he is the leader. This does not last long. After a disastrous first mission, he asks Cos to be in charge again. This will set up considerable, and reasonable tension between the heroes and the government.

So far, the "history" of this group has strong similarities to the Legion that readers remember. It was a bold and brazen move to just cancel things and start again, but so far, the payoff is really good. I dismissed it when I first heard about it, enjoyed it when I gave it a fair shake a few years later, and think it's just terrific today. Very fun stuff!

Fantastic Four: Unthinkable

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 Fantastic Four: Unthinkable (Marvel, 2003)



I'd heard very good things about Mark Waid's three-year tenure as writer of Marvel's venerable Fantastic Four series, and that "Unthinkable," the second volume, was one of the wildest of all Dr. Doom stories, so I checked it out. Unthinkable is labeled volume two; as with the recent Daredevil stories that I read, it's a meaningless label. In this case, it's the second volume of Mark Waid-scripted stories, but how many volume twos do you reckon that a series that's run almost fifty years has managed under that sort of numbering?

Anyway, "Unthinkable" does indeed have a corker of a plot, in which Doom gets sick of losing to that accursed Reed Richards, who understands science better than he does, so he decides to attack the Fantastic Four with magic instead, embracing his gypsy heritage for the first time. (All gypsies in Marvel Comics are magical. It's something of a rule.) It's a good idea, and it's delivered with a whacking great moment when we learn that Reed and Sue's daughter, Valeria, is Doom's familiar. Waid and his artist, the late Mike Wieringo, knocked this scene out of the park with a brilliant cliffhanger to that issue.

Despite liking the idea behind the plot and one or two great moments, I really didn't enjoy this book very much, because the execution is really grim. There's an undercurrent of brutality and hatred in the early episodes that's deeply unpleasant. When Doom succeeds and captures his hated foes, it explodes onto the surface and just turns what could have been a wild, fun book into something repellent and nasty.

This tends to happen with me whenever comics veer too close to the realities of our world's ugly nature. Certainly, I can believe that a paranoid psychopath like Dr. Doom, operating in the real world, would take advantage of a victory to torture and abuse his prisoners, especially after being handed one humiliating defeat after another for years. I guess I just long for the good old days when the bad guy would just lock the heroes in a prison with some super-scientific power-neutralizer or something, because the alternative, shown here, makes for godawful reading.

The whole book is less a plot than a series of strung-together moments of physical and emotional cruelty. It's so heavy that it requires an epilogue to address the atrocities that Reed and Sue's son Franklin witnessed after he was abducted, and that issue's about the least pleasant affair I've read lately. It adds up to a huge, ugly burden, punctuated only by one or two script flourishes and the great way that Wieringo drew Ben Grimm. I really love Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four, and I like the work of a couple of other creators. These, however, can be buried at sea.

Essential Defenders Vol. 3 and JLA Vol. 9: Terror Incognita

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I loved The Defenders when I was a kid. This was a bizarre book which teamed kid-favorite the Hulk with a host of B- and C-listers. I had more than a third of the books in this collection of thirty issues, but the last time I read any of them was twenty years ago, so this sparked all kinds of half-memories and nostalgia. It's occasionally frustrating to see the various writers introduce ongoing subplots that they didn't get to finish before they were moved to another title, most notoriously a serial killing elf in Steve Gerber's fun run who shows up to gun down strangers with a big revolver. It's big fun until an overwritten and ponderous three-part story about demons by the otherwise reliable David Anthony Kraft which closes the collection, and it's frankly odd to see this motormouth villain called Lunatik who is the spiritual grandfather of DC's Ambush Bug. Recommended for readers familiar with 70s Marvel Comics.




I also loved JLA as a kid, and periodically indulge patches where I buy the damn thing no matter how awful it is. Every so often, I swap my singles at Wuxtry for a collected edition. This reprints a four-part story by Mark Waid about some evil aliens - "Pale Martians," if you must know - making their second bid for global control, and two one-off stories. It's really odd, the way the creators decided to make Plastic Man the "junior member" of the team of seven and write him as utterly annoying and disliked by half the team, and then acted surprised to learn that the fanboys didn't like him. The one-off where Plas improvises a bedtime story about Santa Claus being a member of the Justice League is occasionally funny, but overall this is superheroes by the numbers, unoriginal, dull and not recommended for anybody.

(Originally posted October 10, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)