LSH 2010 Reread, part five

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 14-16 and vol. 7 # 1, Adventure Comics # 528-529, and Legion Lost vol. 2 # 1, 2011)

Major developments:

*Punch, blast, punch, kick... issue 14 is just another fight scene. Thom is restored to sanity, and Saturn Queen sacrifices Atta in order to get a little blue being - the same one that Dawnstar has been looking for since part three of this reread - to provide her with the location of the next planet of immortals.
*To prevent the heroes from sending any reservists or the like to further interfere with her schemes, Saturn Queen sends her old ally Cosmic King to attack the Legion Academy. He kills the trainee Variable Lad.
*Another fatality: Kirt, the villain-turned-hero Earth-Man, absorbs all of the Green Lantern energy and duplicates all of the Legionnaires' powers to further absorb and blast back the blue energy from the unnamed blue enemy, killing himself in the process.
*There is then a break of a few weeks. A team of seven Legionnaires - Dawnstar, Gates, Tellus, Timber Wolf, Tyroc, and Wildfire, along with Yera (Gim's wife, who was apparently a Legionnaire) - gets trapped in the 21st Century when their time machine is destroyed. They may be carrying a dangerous plague. Thanks to the "Flashpoint" incident, timelines are all scrambled and the 21st Century is no longer accessible. The seven are presumed dead (and, at the conclusion of issue 1 of Legion Lost, it really does look like Gates and Yera are dead), and, mourning his wife, Gim quits the team.
*With eight down on the active roster, Star Boy - his sanity restored - signs back up, and Mon-El calls up the Academy members Chemical Kid, Comet Queen, Dragonwing, and Glorith. Also, Professor Exposition from the previous chapters has shown herself to have elemental powers and she joins the team as Harmonia. This is all backstory dumped into issue one of volume seven, part of DC's "New 52" initiative to give new readers a simple and easy to understand jump-on starting point.
*What also happens in issue one is that Cham, Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl take two of the new kids - Dragonwing and Chemical Kid - on a mission to find out why a United Planets base is sending secret signals to the Dominators, and find there's a Daxamite working with them. That's where I jumped off.


And... wow, what a hugely disappointing disaster this was in the end. I thought that perhaps I just misremembered it as being scattershot and uninvolving, but no, it really is a massive stinkbomb.

So the situation in 2011 was, as they say on Facebook, complicated. I should explain that I was getting my comics once every five or six weeks from Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens, the best comic shop in the USA, about seventy-ish miles away. I had also, after years and years of getting fed up with the comic book distribution company, Diamond, screwing up my orders of 2000 AD, elected to go digital early in 2011 and my trips to Athens became less frequent.

At the same time, DC Comics was doing its umpteenth "start again" rejigging of its continuity, this time starting from one of those forty-six episode crossover events called "Flashpoint." This would lead to the umpteenth endpoint of the DC Universe and a brand new continuity rising from its ashes, this time called "The New 52" and intended to be new reader-friendly, with every single title starting from scratch, except for Legion, which was a thousand years in the future and didn't need to do that. It would certainly mean, however, brand new continuity hiccups any time anybody wanted to mention Superboy.

Frankly, I am old and tired and sick of DC Comics doing this.

It also meant the cancellation of Adventure Comics, which didn't bother me much. After seven months of flashback stories, it had switched to telling tales of the Legion Academy which were remarkably skippable. It would be replaced by Legion Lost in which seven superheroes were trapped in our time, written not by Paul Levitz but by Fabian Nicieza.

And around this time, we started to get word of Before Watchmen, in which the corporation that owns the property that should have reverted to its creators, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, many years ago hired a bunch of scabs and ringers to tell new stories. I consider this series just about the basest, stupidest, and most unethical, immoral, and mercenary thing that they could have done. I am perfectly happy to no longer give any money to that company in any way. It's not as though DC Comics has any kind of admirable track record of doing the right thing, but Before Watchmen was the final straw for me. For a publisher of superhero comic books, they are, flatly, the bad guys.

So, no longer needing to drive to Athens and no longer wishing to purchase books from DC, I asked Bizarro Wuxtry to end my subscriptions, and they did, one month before both books ended. I picked up the final issues of each from a shop in Marietta to close out the collections and read the end of the story. Then, curiosity overpowered ethics and I went by another store and bought issue one of the seventh volume of LSH. This book tells us that some Legionnaires were killed - having read the advance press, I knew that they were actually in their own book - but it doesn't even tell us who. For that, readers had to buy Legion Lost # 1. That's a terrific way to start a brand new funnybook for brand new readers. Entry-level launches! And oh, look, Professor Exposition and all the awful new characters from the Legion Academy - plus Comet Queen, who I didn't like thirty years ago - are all members now! This is why you should never let curiosity overpower your sense of morality. You will always be unhappy with that decision.

Really, honestly, this stinks.

What's almost as bad is that the big battle with the LSV, which started out so promising, just coasts and whimpers to a conclusion. I can only speculate, but it feels like Levitz was told that the title would end with # 16 and that he needed to wrap everything up, but at the same time not introduce any new plots or storylines. So if the early issues of Levitz's 2010 run suffered from too many things happening in too many places to too many characters, the last four have a different problem: it's just one incredibly long and boring fight scene. The concept of the immortal world of wisdom is badly underdeveloped, and I looked twice but I never saw a name for Saturn Queen's strange blue energy friend. He knows Dyogene and the power of the Green Lanterns, so I wonder whether he's one of those Blue Lanterns that I read about? It's all badly unclear.

At least Kirt Niedrich dies. It was a very poor decision to center the stories around him in the first place. It's best that this era of the Legion, despite some good artwork and a better-than-expected middle period, ended with him. It was badly planned, rushed, and disappointing, especially the ending.

Legion Lost was canceled after 17 issues. Legion of Super-Heroes continues on and has hit 21 issues at the time of writing.

---

Thanks for reading that recap, everybody. Come back later this week for the first of at least eleven chapters of another Reread covering the 1994 relaunch. It's much better. Much.

LSH 2010 Reread, part four

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 11-13, Legion of Super-Villains # 1 and Adventure Comics # 525-527, 2011)

Major developments:

*Saturn Queen arranges for her removal from prison and surrounds herself with new allies. Her previously nebulous goal is clarified: the villain now worships anarchy and chaos and plans to destroy civilization. She has a particular hatred for the "false dharma" preached by planets of immortals, such as Oa and the Rock of Eternity, which the villains destroy. One of the original LSVers, Micro Lad of the planet Imsk, is murdered by a newcomer called Akka for questioning Saturn Queen.
*Star Boy has been in the 21st Century, driven somewhat insane by way of his... well, Brainy "explains" that his uniform is connected to the multiverse, or something.
*Cosmic Boy concludes that the Legion Academy's "seniors," Lamprey and Power Boy, are not Legion material. Coulda told him that thirty years ago and spent pages and time on characters we cared about, really.


I'm going to tell myself that, no matter what happened to end this title prior to the "New 52" launch - about which, more next time - Paul Levitz at least began plotting this run of stories before the word came down that DC management was about to do something dumb again. I believe this is true because the new LSV story just starts out awesome. It starts like Levitz had a big and wonderful, fantastic plan for an epic adventure.

Now, speaking of adventure, the set-concurrently stories in Adventure Comics remain just as inessential as ever, but they do reveal that Rokk and Lydda split up at some point during the "Wilderness Years." Also, the character of XS, from the 1994-2004 iteration of the Legion, finally shows up. Levitz seems as baffled as I am as to why in the world anybody would leave her entire universe and go move into some parallel world and has had no idea what to do with her. The team doesn't seem to need her - they have super-speedsters already. So, rather than finding a way to incorporate her into a group that's got too many characters anyway, he's just had her hang out, in costume, on some nice island somewhere, making mosaic artwork and thinking about her future. At least the artwork by Jeffrey Moy, who had drawn the character many times in the 1994-04 period, is really good.

As for Star Boy, I don't know how to explain this. I understand from Wikipedia that... actually, no, I read the Wikipedia entry about Thom and did not understand more than about six words of it. Basically, I guess, since we last saw him, he's been in the 21st Century doing secret weird stuff on behalf of the Brainiac Fives of three universes, who made him a suit that's a map of the multiverse, and he's the reincarnation of Scalphunter who was in the Kingdom Come story and got stuck in the Source Wall and was in the Justice Society and some other nonsense. Jesus wept.

But setting aside that hiccup for a minute, the LSV story begins really well. The special, and issues # 11 and 12 are just terrific, and get the adventure off to a great start. Then something strange happens. Issue # 13 does not advance the plot at all. It's just a long fight scene with no character or plot development. It feels exactly like management and editorial told Levitz that he had to keep this story going an extra month, beyond what he planned, because issue # 16 would be the final issue of the title before another relaunch, and that the final episode of this storyline needed to be there.

I have a bad feeling that this will prove to be somewhat troublesome when we wrap up this reread, next time.

LSH 2010 Reread, part three

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 8-10, Annual # 1 and Adventure Comics # 522-524, 2011)

Major developments:

*The Legionnaires capture three of the Durlan conspirators.
*Mon-El is elected team leader. Before anybody gets word to him, he defeats the murderous Sun Killer, who attempts to rescue Saturn Queen on her way to prison.
*The planet Orando has returned to our universe. There, the Emerald Eye of Ekron takes a new Empress, an insane girl named Falyce who was fleeing from one of the planet's criminal feudal lords. A small team of Legionnaires defeats Falyce, and Jeckie remains behind on Orando again.
*Blok and Mysa Nal, who has become the Black Witch, have been training a teen magician named Glorith on the Sorceror's World. They enroll her in the Legion Academy, where several familiar faces (Power Boy, Comet Queen, Lamprey) and some new kids (Dragonwing, Chemical Kid, Gravity Kid, Variable Lad) are learning their powers.
*Wait... Gim's wife Yera is in the Legion now? When the heck did that happen? Anyway, she's on board when the last of the Durlan conspirators is apprehended.
*The underclassmen at the Academy join Chemical Kid in swiping a training cruiser and returning to his homeworld, where his trillionaire father had been abducted by the supervillain Black Mace.


I suppose that in the first of these Reread chapters, I should have clarified that RJ Brande, the super-rich Durlan industrialist who decided to shape-change into the body of an ageing and overweight human and got stuck, memorized as many Yiddish-American words as possible, fathered Chameleon Boy, financed and bankrolled the Legion, and basically spent about a decade as one of the book's regular players, got himself killed sometime in the Wilderness Years. The Durlan terrorists who venerate his name took their anger out on another regular player, Science Police Chief Zendak, before their gang is finally captured by the Legionnaires.

So, with two of the supporting cast gone, Levitz apparently decided that many more were needed. Now, I honestly never cared all that much for the old visits to the Legion Academy, and didn't care for those characters. It seems like a badly broken concept anyway. How many years in comic time have passed since we first met Power Boy, Nightwind and Lamprey? Six or seven? They've been running drills under Bouncing Boy's tutelage for an awfully long time. And yet here they still are, doing training exercises in the Danger Room - er, that is, the gym - their underdeveloped selves still hoping to be called up to the majors.

Phil Jimenez is the new artist for Adventure Comics as the Legion Academy becomes that book's main feature. I think he's a completely terrific artist - I've enjoyed him since volume two of The Invisibles - and he really nails all the characters who make it into this book. (Speaking of which, here's another Wilderness Years change: Last I saw Luorno, she was down from three bodies to one. Now she can split into limitless duplicates. Wikipedia informs me that this was revealed in the final issue of the forgettable Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds miniseries, which makes sense. I can just imagine writer Geoff "All the action figures in the bathtub" Johns screaming "She can make a MILLION BILLION duplicates of herself!!") Anyway, while the art is completely wonderful, the story is as unnecessary as can be. Ten issues in and the title is still surprising and baffling readers - Where is Thom? What's happened to Mysa? Why is Yera a Legionnaire now? - and badly needing some kind of supplements to provide some background to help things out. I suggest that Adventure should have continued with flashback adventures, but "Wilderness Years" flashbacks rather than "early days of the team" stories. Alternately, simple spotlight issues like Levitz and Giffen used to do in the 1980s would have been terrific. Dumping another half-dozen new characters on us - and making them the leads! - was not the right answer.

Compounding this problem, the head boy of this new gang is Chemical Kid, who has similar powers to the long dead, and rarely used, Legionnaire Condo Arlik, Chemical King. I admit that I always liked that character, but I'm not sure why. He had the interesting power of Element Lad-lite. He could not transmute elements, but he could change chemical reactions, causing metals to rust or power pack energy to deplete. So apparently Chemical Kid's rich dad also thought that was a neat power and paid scientists to screw with his son's genetics so that he could do it, too. Of course. Never mind his eyebrow-raising origin, the character is a complete jerk and a blowhard, and it's just not entertaining watching him. Brainiac 5 had the sense to be written sympathetically for decades before writers started making him amusingly sarcastic and nasty. You've got to earn reader loyalty.

Lastly, a few words about the annual, which sees Levitz reteamed with Keith Giffen. I've said before that I really admire Giffen for his ability to keep changing his style, and this work is incredibly interesting. It is very, very Jack Kirby. The planet Orando and its inhabitants look just like some minor fiefdom on Apokalips, with big hats and strange beasts of burden and ruined castles. Vi, as befits somebody who decided years ago that nobody was going to imprison her again, has been working out and now has the muscle mass of Big Barda. It's a fascinating evolution in his style. The story's really good, too.

LSH 2010 Reread, part two

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 5-7 and Adventure Comics # 518-521, 2010)

Major developments:

*Dyogene attempts to make Professor Exposition, one of the three who caused the Titan-destroying disaster at the Time Institute, the new Green Lantern, but she turns it down.
*On Earth, a xenophobe militia group attacks the Titan refugees and overwhelms the Legionnaires assisting them. The team is saved by Kirt, who leads most of the rest of the team into action.
*In a very surprising development, Science Police Chief Zendak, a very old supporting player, is assassinated by a cell of Durlan insurgents.
*In an even more surprising development, Kirt gives up his xeno principles to bed Shady.
*The Durlan terrorists begin assassinating United Planets councilors, but their species is quickly deduced by a small team of Legionnaires: Cos, Timber Wolf, Ultra Boy and Tyroc capture one of them.
*Mon asks Kirt what the devil he's doing in bed with his ex. Kirt threatens him and Mon throws him into outer space. When he returns, Shady lets Kirt know that Mon may have won the fight, but Kirt has won the prize.
*Dyogene offers the Green Lantern ring to Mon-El, who accepts it. He takes a uniform and begins new duties which will restrict his Legion activities, and has a short goodbye with Shady, where it's revealed that he had spent some additional time in the Phantom Zone.
*Adventure Comics # 515-520 had told flashback tales of the younger Legion; from # 521, the book continues the present-day story, effectively providing a new episode every second week.


If Paul Levitz's first few issues back on Legion felt like he was juggling far too many things - Saturn Queen? Servants of Darkness? Wha? - then, four months in, things have settled down comfortably. The heroes are still spread out and dealing with things, but the focus is narrowing and the storylines are folding back into something more interesting and coherent. That's not to say that they're completely successful, but at least, with the conclusion of the xenophobia story, there is less happening to fewer people, and it resonates a little bit more.

But the big problem that I have with some of this run is that less is happening in each individual issue. # 5 is a remarkable example. If I may be allowed a moment of intense cynicism, I have occasionally heard that comic book artists enjoy drawing splash pages, as they can make better money selling their original artwork. With that in mind, I'm forced to wonder whether the creators agreed to make things easier on the financial front, because the fight scenes in this book between some of the heroes and the xenophobe Earth army are ridiculous. There's an entire page, just three panels, of Sun Boy fighting back against a huge energy wave. Another page is a splash of Sensor Girl observing the army entering the refugee camp. Suddenly, the reason for the character's new boob window in her new costume is obvious: her cleavage is right in the center of the page.

Adventure # 521 is drawn by new artist Geraldo Borges, who takes over from Kevin Sharpe, who'd been handling that title's flashback stories. This issue features the first real emotional gut punch of the series, as Mon-El and Shadow Lass finally talk, all too briefly, about their breakup and the future. She tells him that he had grown emotionally cold, and "left her" after he returned from the Phantom Zone. I suspect this is how they handled the problem of his grievous injury at the hands of the Time Trapper, leaving him safely in limbo in the Zone for several months until somebody figured out a way to heal him. It probably would have been better had Shady accompanied him into the Zone... but then again, we see very clearly in LSH # 7 that she still has all her fingers. Back in vol. 3, we had the huge and shocking surprise that Shady had forced a marriage on the helpless Mon-El using her race's tradition of "binding," which includes self-mutilation. It is possible that this was one of the changes undone by the continuity revision. Or, heck, maybe not, this is 31st century sci-fi, and maybe she grew a new finger from a vat or something.

I love the twist of Mon-El, possibly already the most powerful humanoid in the galaxy, suddenly getting a power ring. It does mean, madly, that he retires his classic and brilliantly designed costume for some ugly black and green thing, but man, that opens up all kinds of story possibilities.

LSH 2010 Reread, part one

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 1-4 and Adventure Comics # 515-517, 2010)

Since we last saw our heroes in "The Magic Wars":

*It has been a couple of eventful years. At some point after Jeckie's time as team leader, there was another massive wave of time distortion, and the whole bit with Superboy dying is erased from history.
*A human-supremacist called Kirt Niedrigh, with powers similar to Lallor's Duplicate Boy except he needs a superpowered being close by to absorb and reproduce, has led a failed coup and attempt to get all aliens off Earth. In the wake of the disaster, the Time Institute has relocated to Saturn's moon, Titan. Earthgov was ready to kick the LSH offworld as well.
*The team met up with parallel universe versions of themselves. Apparently, the characters of Gates and XS from the 1994-2004 incarnation of the Legion decided that they liked this universe better than theirs, and stuck around here.
*Tyroc has returned to the team after several years away and a haircut. Quislet either also found a new ship and came back, or the late-in-the-series destruction of his little ship was retconned away.
*Polar Boy lost a hand.
*Mon-El recovered from his injuries, but he and Shady have ended their relationship.
*Blok and Mysa are on an extended leave of absence together, I think. Mysa is no longer practicing white magic, and is now the Black Witch.
*Everybody's costumes have been redesigned. For the ladies, 1970s boob windows are back in a big way and Shady's wearing her underwear in public again. Jeckie has gone from one of the best costumes in all of comics to what might well be the worst. Artist Yildiray Cinar really, really likes drawing boobies. Dawnstar's are unbelievable.

Major developments in the present:

*Earthgov has demanded the LSH accept Kirt as a member, to make a public example that Earthers can work smoothly with offworlders, and make peace stick. Brainy offers him a flight ring that also acts as a limiter, or leash.
*The Time Institute has developed a remote viewer, immediately tunes it in to the beginning of history, which, according to DC Universe lore, nobody's allowed to witness. (Levitz already covered this weird rule in the early days of his 1980s run.) This sparks a series of disasters on Titan, and wakes up the dead planet Oa to get another Green Lantern ring out there to deal with it. Oa generates a being called Dyogene to find a new Lantern. He chooses Kirt.
*Titan is destroyed in a huge explosion after most of the population is evacuated. Saturn Queen returns home to find the Legionnaires moving debris from the space lanes and seeing evacuation liners away. She takes over Ultra Boy's mind for no better reason than just to cause trouble, and is apprehended by a small group of heroes.
*Niedrigh only lasts a single mission as a Green Lantern before deciding that he doesn't wish to be a slave to a band of metal and long-dead aliens, especially when they're commanding him to fly across space to rescue mosquitos from a change in their atmosphere.
*Imra and Garth, joined by Ayla, fly to the planet Avalon after their children are abducted. They find that the medieval planet has elected to worship Darkseid, and rescue the kids from a new Servant of Darkness, who collapses into dust.


Well, these are... okay.

So, it's been twenty years and change since Paul Levitz wrote the Legion, and, honestly, you can tell that he's been away from comic book scripting. Over the years, he had been working in a management position for the company, and also providing extremely entertaining interview copy, and, occasionally, even kindly writing letters to aggravated customers of DC Comics who found the binding of some of their collected editions falling apart. Ahem. (Thanks, Paul.) On the one hand, he kept Warner Brothers from cynically exploiting Alan Moore's Watchmen for more than two decades, on the other, he joined the sixty-million other residents of Alan Moore's enemies' list when he vetoed a genuine period advertisement in the backmatter of Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He created the Huntress back when there was a point to that character, and he wrote a hundred-odd really good issues of a really good comic. On the average, he's definitely one of the good guys.

That doesn't mean that he gets a free pass.

(Plus, now that he isn't protecting Watchmen any longer, we get the stupidity in 2011 that'll put the final nail in me buying anything new from that company.)

Look, a lot of this is not his fault. In between the end of "The Magic Wars" and "The Scream Heard 'Cross the Universe," an bonus-length 39-page opener, DC Comics was the home of more petty, stupid, greedy, selfish office politics than Initech on a good day. Only the prize wasn't TPS Reports, it was an ongoing continuity of beloved fictional characters being used in tugs-of-war between demented dorks insistent on using characters their way. Some of this turned out to be surprisingly good - James Robinson's Starman, Grant Morrison's JLA, the '94 LSH - but most of it was petty and silly.

Now, what arguably should have happened, once some sensible heads prevailed, was that somebody should have started up the story about one week after "The Magic Wars" and gone from that point. But the restart actually rolls back to the Time Trapper's creation of a pocket universe and its Superboy, and wipes that out, and rolls forward to incorporate characters from the 1994-2004 relaunch. These are explained as heroes from a parallel universe who, for reasons that only make sense to that story's writer (2008), decided that they liked this 31st Century better than the one they were in, and hopped over here. This is probably because that story's writer wanted to have a few more characters in the "real" Legion, or something, and Gates and XS were not invented until after the 1994 relaunch. (XS, however, does not appear in these, or the next several issues either. I only know from Wikipedia that she's supposed to be around somewhere.)

So we're, perhaps, a couple of years after "The Magic Wars" and Levitz is getting used to the particular and eccentric language of comic books again. It's clunky. You won't believe the three scientists from the Time Institute. Their names are, I believe, Dr. Exposition, Professor Exposition, and Research Assistant Exposition. And there's worse. Levitz has frequently shown trouble juggling parallel plots that seem to take place over different periods of time; read the collected edition of The Huntress and tell me how many days of work Helena Wayne misses over the course of that continuous run of eight-page episodes, or, better yet, read the 1986 LSH story "The Universo Project" and tell me how many weeks Wildfire and Tellus's group was underwater while Brainy and Saturn Girl's group was on that prison planet.

I mention this because the destruction of Titan, and its aftermath, makes no sense whatever. This is apparently an instantaneous, galaxy-wide refugee crisis, but so many things are happening at once that the ramifications and the resettling on Earth and on Naltor, which feel, from the resentment and response of Earth's xenophobic minority, to be taking place over the course of weeks, versus the day or so that Kirt Niedrich spends as Green Lantern, versus the short period of time that Garth and Imra are chasing their stolen children. It all feels very rushed and very much like a first draft pressed into quick service. And what the heck does Saturn Queen want?

Honestly, these are okay, but far too much is happening, most of it of little consequence, without any time to slow down and focus on anybody's characters or their relationships. In fact, the principal character in this story seems to be the one that nobody, anywhere, likes: Kirt. I guess I see the motive: our heroes, whether you're a returning reader or a brand new one, have a lot of history and background, and, thanks to all those office politics and stops and restarts and rewriting, we're never going to get to know all of it. So Kirt, unlikeable and obnoxious, becomes the audience identification character.

But let's talk about the artwork. It is competent. It's arguably better than Greg LaRocque's was when he started, and he improved radically and quickly into one of LSH's very best. But there's no flair and no oomph. Cinar - assisted by Francis Portela on subsequent issues in a really close match for his style - does have a few solid tricks, like using hair and facial structure in such a good way that, even without the costumes, it is easy to tell the characters apart. A recent DC Comics innovation is the use of subtitling captions whenever each new character shows up. It works really well, and only the deliberately obtuse would have trouble following the action. But still, I don't like the reliance on splash pages instead of dense and meticulously laid-out action scenes. It looks for all the world like much more could be happening in each issue, but only the minimum is being depicted. Very few pages use a denser grid of six or more panels, and the result, after the comparatively expansive, extra-sized opening issue, is that too much flies by too quickly. The read isn't very satisfying. It leaves me intrigued but hungry.

As for the costumes, I am not sure whether Cinar is to blame for all the new designs, or whether one of the previous "wilderness years" artists like Gary Frank or George Perez inflicted them on us, but the women's costumes are a horrifying, retrograde step back. Admittedly, Dawnstar was almost always about ready to flop out of her top, and her new Power Girl boob window is not that much of a change, but now that just about every lady in the Legion is back to looking like the Frederick's catalogs in the 1970s, you've got to wonder when all the fellows are going to start wearing Magic Mike gear as well. Good grief.

LSH Reread, part seventeen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 60-63, 1989)

Major developments:

*After ten months of beautiful artwork, Keith Giffen begins the experimentation that would typify the next volume of LSH comics. These final four issues of volume three are mostly divided into nine-panel grids, with the "camera" often giving us extreme close-ups of faces or random background objects. More on this below.
*Jeckie and Timber Wolf are elected leader and deputy leader. Polar Boy takes this as a vote of no confidence in his abilities and is pretty upset about it.
*A hydra attacks the Aegean Sea, the weather goes completely wild, fire and water elementals are seen everywhere, and the laws of physics keep changing.
*An emissary from the Sorceror's World warns Projectra: "After millennia of trusting science, it may turn on you. Magic's day of return may not be far off... if come, all laws of your science failing shall be."
*For several panicked hours, Earth is in pretty bad shape as technology fails a populace that cannot survive without it. Jeckie uses her skills, and the visitors from the Sorceror's World, to pull information about the laws of physics from Sun Boy's mind and restore power to the planet.
*As Earth recovers, the disintegration of science spreads into space. Shady and Mon-El's ship loses power, and with it goes the life support that is keeping him alive...
*Some big angry bruiser, revealed as The Archmage, who's been chained up for centuries underground is freed from bondage. He seals the Sorceror's World behind a spellbound barrier that requires a life to open. It cannot be unlocked without a willing sacrifice. Magnetic Kid gives his life to unlock the planet and start the final battle.
*Dream Girl and Brainiac 5 join their friends while the galaxy's other heroes try and save their planets from destruction as technology continues failing. The only heroes whose powers have much effect on the Archmage are Sun Boy and Wildfire.
*The White Witch - who has not forgiven Brainy for taking Jaxon Rugarth's life - tries to stand ground and defend the Sorceror's World from the Archmage while her colleagues in magic escape to another plane of existence. All of this has been building to the Archmage getting enough power and energy to destroy the planet, eon-old punishment for imprisoning him millenniums before. The White Witch resists until a spirit - possibly Amethyst of Gemworld? - convinces her to stand down. The heroes escape and the Sorceror's World is blasted into dust, and the Archmage realizes, too late, that he was bound to this world as well and fades from existence.
*Mon-El's fate is left unrevealed.


Before I get too backhanded about Keith Giffen's artwork, let me praise him, however faintly this sounds, for his willingness to experiment and mix up his style. As far as I'm concerned, he's right up there with Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, and Kev Walker for simply being unpredictable and regularly, radically, confounding our expectations. Plus, when Giffen's on fire, as he especially was when inked by Mahlstedt around the time of "The Great Darkness Saga," and with his latest look over the course of issues # 50 -59, he's just about the best artist working in American comics in the 1980s.

But then there's this shit.

The nine-panel grid, as inked by Al Gordon, is ugly and confining, and I cannot stand to look at it. Things improve massively when Mike DeCarlo takes over finishing work in the final two issues, as DeCarlo has a much looser hand. That said, he still can't salvage the layouts. For example, Rokk's reaction, in the final issue, to hearing of his brother's death just flops on the page, although the space considerations - far too much happens in these last 27 pages, especially on Xanthu - and Paul Levitz's leaden dialogue in this critical scene doesn't help it.

For what it's worth, Gordon is more in sync with Giffen's sensibilities, and, to be fair, Giffen had been leaning toward angular and blocky for some months anyway. The Emerald Empress, for example, was downright criminally sexy apart from these strange, gigantic, tire-like lips that have been showing up on everybody's faces lately, while their chins begin to firm and calcify. Gordon's incredibly rigid line, when compared to DeCarlo's, is a better match for this, but I simply can't stand the result. Everybody is ugly, and there are at least three panels per issue where I simply have no idea what I'm supposed to be looking at.

At this stage, the nine-panel grid, which would dominate the look of the book in volume four, is still in its infancy. In principle, at least, I kind of like how it's used here. The scenes with our heroes (the world of science) are shown with nine-panel grids and white borders, and the cutaway scenes with the Archmage nearing his breakout (the world of magic) are shown in six-panel grids with black borders. It's very clever despite being ugly, and as the scale and the scope of the story grows - billions are trying to evacuate stricken worlds - the tiny little panel isn't enough, and the merciless, immovable, impassionate grid hems in the scale to the point that we're left with passing dialogue to tell us how bad things are, because there is no room in the artwork to show us.

I hate this art so much.

And speaking of no room, Dream Girl suddenly realizes, at the bottom of page six of issue # 63, that she's been living on Xanthu and sleeping with Atmos because he's been using a will-controlling power that we did not know of before this to dominate her own will. She correctly recognizes, in thought, "He raped my mind" (for starters), but there's just no space in the story to consider the ramifications of this. It's settled at the bottom of page seven with a sock to the jaw. And now, that's enough of the subplots, back to the action!

In other words, none of this is the epic that it should have been. It just needs a little more room to breathe - a double-sized final issue might possibly have done it - and to consider what it presents. So many vital subplots are briefly acknowledged, and old faces like a couple of the Subs and the Heroes of Lallor get a little more screen time, but it feels like lip service. Mon-El's injury is left completely unresolved, Dreamy and Thom don't share a word, the White Witch and Brainy don't actually discuss the decision that destroyed their friendship, and so on. All of these lingering plotlines are left to Giffen and his new collaborators to handle. And how they did those is another story, and one that I'll only briefly acknowledge in the next installment.

As for the glory days of Levitz's work in the 1980s, this is where it ends. It was worse than I remembered it in places, and a good deal better than I remembered it in others, which was always a pleasant surprise. It didn't end well, but it was a magnificent ride getting there. I don't have any hesitation in calling it one of the very best superhero comics of its decade. Long live the Legion!

Sorta makes me wonder how well things went when Levitz returned to the book, actually...

LSH Reread, part sixteen

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 54-59, 1988-89)

Major developments:

*The team's morale is low and so is the active membership. Seven heroes are missing or on leave when a Khund calling himself The Glow attacks the prison world of labyrinth, freeing dozens of dangerous prisoners on his quest to release the Emerald Empress.
*Meanwhile, the White Witch looks to be returning to Earth, Dream Girl is having second thoughts about her fling with Atmos, Brainiac 5 has put the LSH completely behind him, and Blok has stumbled into a trap and is held prisoner by a strange reptilian "inquisitor" and his odd, short, blue associate - slash - servant. The inquisitor wants to learn the secret of Blok's long life (he is a silicon-based lifeform). They also abduct Shady and the very badly wounded Mon-El, who are still searching for medical help. Blok's body contorts and he grows and changes again - what had previously seemed like artistic fancy is established as his rocky body actually growing - and they escape back to Earth.
*Lightning Lass makes one more play for Pol, who finally figures out what she's after and gets spooked that this older woman is throwing himself at him. Violet makes herself available to Ayla for another of her "talks," only to have Ayla, who's probably still in denial about her sexuality, bite Vi's head off. They apologize and walk off together. Just as well Pol shot her down; that wasn't going anywhere.
*The "inquisitor" is revealed to be in the employ of the Empress, who murders him for his failure and kills dozens on her quest for immortality.
*The Empress and the Eye are slowly turning into a gestalt entity. Quislet attempts to possess the Eye and is baffled that he fails. The Eye destroys Quislet's ship, forcing the weird being to promptly say farewell to his friends and pop back to his home dimension of Teall.
*The Empress begs Sensor Girl for death, and for help in freeing herself from the Eye. After some hesitation, Jeckie uses her power to hide the Empress; the Eye cannot possess what it cannot sense. But in a stunning twist, we learn that the Empress is decades older than we thought, and that the Eye had been keeping her young and beautiful. She ages instantly into dust at Jeckie's feet.


Apparently, to read some fans tell it, this run of LSH is supposed to feel like an afterthought, and a loss of time on my end isn't going to counter that impression. It's actually really good, although I do wish that Levitz and Giffen had done something with Mon-El and Shady instead of leaving the couple in effective limbo for so long. It could have been tragic and stunning to have Shady force the decision and send them both into the Phantom Zone, for instance, for however long it would take for medical science to find a solution to how Mon-El's body could be repaired.

Anyway, this run of six issues is built around disasters and trying to find closure in the wake of the battle against the Time Trapper. It's actually kind of sad when Pol finally realizes that Ayla's been coming onto him and rebuffs her, but it gives Ayla/Vi fans as much resolution as they were going to get in 1988. It's even sadder when Quislet's ship is disintegrated by the Emerald Eye, leaving the weird little energy being from another dimension no choice but to quickly thank his friends for all the fun and pop out of our world entirely.

I love the way that Giffen draws Tellus immediately after Quislet goes. There's this one little panel of Tellus fruitlessly calling out to him, asking for his friend to come back. It is the saddest thing ever.

But it's the final fate of the Empress that really impressed me the most this time through. I can't believe that I forgot about this. Comic book supervillains never get to go out this cool. Three years previously, Levitz and artist Greg LaRocque had turned the Empress from a villain who was rarely depicted as all that threatening into one of the greats. She goes out in style, with a huge body count and a final revelation about her own age before disintegrating into dust. Those final few pages between her and Sensor Girl are completely amazing.

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.

LSH Reread, part nine

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 # 324-325, vol. 3 # 13-16, and Annual # 1, 1985)

Major developments:

*The Kryptonian Dev-Em is captured and cloned by the Dark Circle. It is revealed that their entire region of space is populated by clones of five people.
*Officer Gigi Cusimano's short fling with Sun Boy has become both fodder for the gossip columnists and not entirely good-natured putdowns from Chief Zendak. It looks like she's taking up with Dev-Em after the Dark Circle's threat is nullified.
*Timber Wolf, along with Karate Kid's sensei, arrives on the sadistic planet Lythyl to fulfill his old friend's last request: to literally plant a seed in the planet which will eventually lead to the downfall of the corruption that runs it.
*Violet comes on strong to Sun Boy. Nobody in the galaxy predicted this. They later attend Graym's christening as a couple. Vi gives Yera a totally uncalled-for stinkeye before the service.
*Five new Legionnaires are inducted: Magnetic Kid (Cosmic Boy's younger brother), longtime Substitute Hero Polar Boy, the non-humanoids Tellus and Quislet, and the mysterious Sensor Girl, whose identity is unrevealed but comes with a strong recommendation from Saturn Girl.
*The five new members are immediately abducted in a trap by Dr. Regulus in another bid for revenge against Sun Boy.
*Following an attempt on Laurel Kent's life, the team discovers an unusual conspiracy. Kent, a student at the team's training academy, is a descendant of Superman. Brainiac 5 notes similar recent attempts, some successful, to kill the descendants of 20th Century heroes, including the Flash and Hawkman, and deduces that one of the Justice League's old enemies has been waiting in cryo-sleep for ten centuries and sending robots to periodically attack the families of the old heroes.
*Speaking of the 20th Century, Brainiac 5 mourns the 1000-year anniversary of Supergirl's death. He'd been crushing on her for years, of course, but it wasn't until her death in the pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths # 7 that month that readers learned what he'd always known: the time of her inevitable death.


Some background scientist observes that Brainiac 5 mourning his longtime crush, Supergirl, makes as much sense as grieving over the death of Helen of Troy. She's not quite right, but it's an interesting observation. In one sense, this is the point where LSH starts to take an inevitable slide, trapped as it is by the ironclad rule of DC Universe continuity. This is a shame, because here's a great run of comics, with the anchor point being the arrival of five new Legionnaires, the most to join the team at one time in... maybe ever?

Paul Levitz is going to spend the next few years trying to figure out what to do with Magnetic Kid, who is Cosmic Boy's younger brother. Polar Boy is an interesting case. When he and the rest of the original Substitute Heroes were devised, his snow-and-ice power was made to seem silly and useless. Then Jack Kirby and Stan Lee came along, invented Iceman of the Uncanny X-Men, and made those powers practical. So everybody kind of had to admit that there was no reason for him to have been relegated to the Subs.

The team gets its first two non-humanoid-shaped members with Quislet, a small energy being who zips around in a baseball-sized "spaceship," and Tellus, a big, lumbering, telepathic whale-walrus dude whose real name, magically, is Ganglios. Tellus is his(?) superhero name. And then there's Sensor Girl.

Some of this requires a little bit of hand-waving, what with all the Science Police / EarthGov / United Planets security clearance and everything, but while the active Legionnaires are considering whom to induct among all their applicants, Saturn Girl steps in and asks everybody to do her a favor. Vote in this mystery chick with blonde hair and a mask and what is, while very much a 1980s costume - measure her shoulder pads sometime - one of the absolute best superhero costumes ever. Whoever she is, she looks awesome. Decades later, once the continuity was kind of reset to sort of shortly after the end of volume three and this Legion was revived, some artist, Yildray Cinar, maybe, decided to redesign this classic costume and created instead the ugliest eyesore in comics. It was a shame. No, Sensor Girl, properly dressed in big shoulder pads, gloves, boots, cape and full-faced mask, her powers unexplained and her origins a deliberate mystery, is an absolute classic character. The next several months of people trying to figure out who the heck she is and what her powers actually are... this is a tremendously good subplot, and all kinds of fun.

But the Supergirl tragedy helps feed into this mystery. In time, Brainiac 5 will start to wonder whether the girl he loved has somehow escaped her death and is hiding out in the 30th Century. What really happened is much more mundane and real-world and will, in time, have huge ramifications for the title.

I kind of doubt anybody reading this doesn't know this already, but basically, in the mid-1980s, some very boring person at DC Comics concluded that their funnybooks were too confusing and too full of parallel universes and they should start over, if not from scratch, then close enough to it. They'd discard decades of baggage and unpopular continuity and make some big changes that should probably never have been changed, inspiring a few breath-holding child readers who would, one day, grow up to write comics, to swear that one day, if they ever had the chance, they would, in turn, "fix" all these unpopular and unnecessary "fixes" that DC was inflicting upon its characters and stories. One of these "fixes" was getting rid of Supergirl.

The Girl of Steel had first been devised in the 1950s, and despite a very troubled publishing history, she had been a huge success in merchandising and toy sales, and even had a 1984 feature film do some small business. But in the new "fix," Superman would truly be the last son of Krypton; its only survivor. He'd have no cousins, and no Bottle City of Kandor with a million shrunken Kryptonians living in his Fortress of Solitude. Supergirl had to go, leaving a dozen writers, as talented and as far afield as Peter David and Evan Dorkin, spending the last thirty years coming up with new versions of the character to keep the trademark alive and selling T-shirts while not letting Superman have any girl cousins. For a few years, there was a Supergirl in a white T-shirt, and for a few years, there was a purple blob who shapeshifted into the trademarked look, and for a few years, there was a Supergirl with firey angel wings, and, of course, all that anybody remembers is that "Supergirl is Superman's cousin."

But it's one thing to have Brainiac 5 mourn the girlfriend he never could really have on the thousandth anniversary of her death at the hands of the evil Anti-Monitor. It's about to be quite another to have him mourn somebody who... never existed?

The breath-holding children who write comics for DC today and seem to want everything to be like it was in the late '70s and early '80s, only, you know, more violent and bloodthirsty and unreadable, will sadly be shown, as this Reread unfolds, to have something of a point.

LSH Reread, part eight

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 # 321-322, vol. 3 # 9-12, and Legion of Substitute Heroes Special # 1, 1985)

Major developments:

*Dawnstar and Brainiac Five crash-land on a primitive planet with religious issues.
*Dev-Em, a descendant of Krypton who's been a very minor supporting character, inflitrates the Dark Circle on behest of some police organization.
*The missing five Legionnaires return home. Vi confronts Yera, declining to forgive her for impersonating her, but establishing an awkward peace - I guess - between them.
*Element Lad and Shvaughn have their smooching interrupted by a Legion mission to thwart some alien thieves in Hong Kong.
*Cosmic Boy takes a leave of absence. Shortly afterward, he and the other founders, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad, formally tender their resignations to make way for new blood on the team.
*Timber Wolf agrees to undertake a dangerous and mysterious mission on his own as a bequest in Karate Kid's will.
*The team protects the three candidates for Earth's presidency from Khund assassins; Invisible Kid accidentally kills one of the attackers. Mojil Desai is elected the planet's new president.
*Element Lad is re-elected team leader.
*Prefiguring his late 80s/early 90s work on Justice League during its long "bwa-ha-ha" phase, Keith Giffen pencils and plots a Legion of Substitute Heroes special that plays the team as mostly ineffective and goofy, but they nevertheless save the planet Bismoll from the oh-so-1970s villain Pulsar Stargrave, somehow.


It's interesting to see just how little is happening during this period of the comic, but how incredibly entertaining it all is. There are fights and explosions and super-powered stuff, but the draws are the character interaction and the artwork. Steve Lightle's stuff is - and I know, I keep saying this - just so damn good.

I have to say, though, that while the proper book(s) are reliable and engaging and keep me caring about the characters, it's what Keith Giffen does with the Substitute Heroes Special that really warrants comment. This book is hilarious. It is actually a follow-up to an issue of DC Comics Presents from about two years previously. My copy has gone into hiding, but it had been a longtime favorite.

In that story, the then-new character of Ambush Bug had hopped on Superman's back just as he was traveling on some mission to the 50th Century. He stops in Metropolis in the 2980s, hoping the LSH could hold onto Bug for him, but they were out of town and he leaves him instead with the Subs. They are depicted as utterly incompetent, well-meaning goofballs, and they lose him. The book's a complete riot, and includes an amazing exchange between the Bug and the Subs' newest member, the unfortunate Infectious Lass. She is sent to distract Ambush Bug using her "feminine wiles," which works for about the half-second that makes up Bug's attention span. He, who has spent the entire escapade thinking he's at an amusement park, asks her what she does, having already been tickled by the Subs' various and ridiculous powers. "I make people sick," she says. "I'm sure you do, honey," he replies. I've loved Infectious Lass ever since.

In the special, the Subs and Gigi strike out for the planet Bismoll, where former LSHer Matter-Eater Lad has entered politics, and which has been invaded by Pulsar Stargrave - what a name! - and his disco fashion sense. Chlorophyll Kid has gained about a hundred pounds since we last saw him, and Infectious Lass has unwittingly passed along some gender reversal germs to Color Kid, and Matter-Eater Lad bites off Pulsar's nose. (It must've been the season for it; Ace Garp bit off Jago Kain's nose in 2000 AD around the same time.)

The book ends with Polar Boy coming to the sad realization that his team really is a band of incompetent boobs, and, in a final panel, realizes that their time has passed. In what would become a Giffen hallmark - this really does prefigure much of his work on Justice League a few years in the future - this could-be-touching epiphany is nothing more than a throwaway joke in the final panel.

The other really important moment is that the three founders all retire. While this has been telegraphed and hinted at for many months, it's still a surprising development. They'd been the core and the heart of things for so long that it would have been an inconceivable development just a couple of years before. Their story is far from over - in fact, there's a Legionnaires 3 miniseries about them that I don't own - and the books probably can't really exist without them, but it's a reminder that nothing's really all that safe in the 30th Century.

LSH Reread, part seven

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 # 317-320 and vol. 3 # 6-8, 1984-1985)

Major developments:

*It turns out that the Lyle Norg that got spit out from the Dream Dimension back in # 310 was not actually Lyle, but a "demon" taking advantage of the Negaton Bomb to... errr... enter our universe, sit in a room and mope for months, take Invisible Kid and Wildfire back to his dimension, and then cackle and threaten and use phrases like "you'll rue the day" before our two heroes return home. A subplot worth every last page, that one.
*Shady's cousin Grev, infiltrating a rebel cult on their home planet of Talok VII, runs afoul of the Legion's old foe the Persuader, and a dangerous Talokian villain named Lady Memory.
*Lady Memory's touch drives Mon-El temporarily mad with his ten centuries of quasi-life in the Phantom Zone suddenly remembered. Superboy helps him snap out of it.
*Ayla and her criminal brother Mekt are sent back to their home world of Winath by the weird, villainous Zymyr. Mekt is turned over to the Science Police; Ayla, her lightning powers restored, returns to Earth to rejoin the LSH, although not her former boyfriend Timber Wolf.
*The five members who are missing in Limbo (Chameleon Boy, Element Lad, Phantom Lass, Shrinking Violet, and Ultra Boy) find themselves on an automated planet used by the alien Controllers to build Sun-Eaters. They destroy the planet, and take a detour to the pages of DC Comics Presents # 80 on their way home.
*Steve Lightle takes over as regular penciler of the Volume Three titles, with Terry Shoemaker, Dan Jurgens, and George Tuska alternating in Volume Two. Lightle is an unsung hero who never gets enough praise from fandom.


In earlier chunks of this story, I'd said that my impression had always been that the Tales title felt like the work of the B-team, and this bears it out. The "Death Trip" story that wraps up the cul-de-sac subplot about Lyle Norg - surprise! He was really a demon! - is just Paul Levitz (and Mindy Newell) on autopilot. It does not feel like the culmination of a storyline that was first suggested a year and a half previously; it feels like he and Keith Giffen came up with a twist ending for issue #310 at the end of a wild all-night plotting session, and, months later, the indelible evidence of their craziness apparent for all the world to see, had absolutely no idea what in the world to do next.

Coming on the heels of the LSV epic in the Baxter book, everything feels similarly hungover, like the creators are looking for what to do next. I think that Levitz will quickly recover and work wonders with the small spaces in between the epics, but perhaps spreading the cast and events over two completely separate titles a month which can only blow kisses at each other is wearing, especially when much of the plot revolves around the cast either being split up, or back at headquarters and worried because so many people are missing.

It's a weird set of comics, because only the first is really stupid, but all of the rest feel like marking time and moving characters around from place to place. They're not bad, but not particularly engaging, either. They're leagues better than the Legion had been in the "Omen and the Prophet" days just eight or so months previously, but "they're inoffensive" is hardly a compelling reason to tune in. Better things are coming.