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.

LSH Reread, part six

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 # 1-5, vol. 2 Annual # 3 and # 316, 1984)

Major developments:

*A very large group of the Legion's enemies forms. They call themselves the Legion of Super-Villains and each must swear a blood oath to kill one of the heroes or die themselves.
*While that calamity is getting started, some sorcerers decide to resurrect Mordru, but are stopped in time.
*Garth and Imra's baby is born. They are surprised that the boy is an only child, as Winathian men almost always father twins, and Imra swore that she felt the thoughts of a second child. Unbeknownst to them, Darkseid had used the universe-wide darkness of Mordru's attempted resurrection to steal the baby. He sends it back in time where the baby will grow into the powerful monster Validus, the member of the Fatal Five who had slain Lyle Norg.
*The villains teleport the planet Orando into a between-universes limbo.
*Karate Kid dies in combat with his old foe Nemesis Kid who is, in turn, executed by Projectra. The villains scattered, she decrees that it was wrong to try and modernize Orando, and leaves her friends to return to our universe, while they travel on, planning to never be seen again.
*Element Lad, Cham, Ultra Boy, Phantom Girl and Violet are trapped in limbo, trying to get home.
*Ayla Ranzz loses her gravity-nullifying powers and regains her lightning powers.
*Speaking of Lyle Norg, he's alive again and wants to return to the weird world where he had briefly been seen in # 299. Jacques Foccart agrees to take him.


This is a much better group of comics than LSH had seen for several months. It handles the split between the new volume and the old really gracelessly and awkwardly, and making room for a new annual certainly doesn't help, but these seven issues just about pull off the transition and tell a really epic adventure pretty well.

In their favor, Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen have clearly been reading Marvel's Uncanny X-Men and learned, from Chris Claremont, how to write villains. The clumsy moniker "Legion of Super-Villains" makes more sense to the readers than to many of these characters. Some of these old faces have only survived, awkwardly, into the 1980s because of the old fan demand to see recurring baddies. Radiation Roy, the most obvious example, is lost among them. He's a relic of the silly 1960s, when the Legion was called in by the police to stop space bank robberies, basically. This sort of "crooks do rotten things, by golly" perspective was long buried, and it looks like Levitz just doesn't want to use old characters like Roy, or Saturn Queen, or Cosmic King, all of whom have little to do in this adventure.

Now, Levitz and Giffen had already, in issue # 301, rehabilitated Lightning Lord from a bank robber who fires zap blasts, into something much more chilling and forceful. Here, he resembles Marvel's Magneto more than anybody else. He's lost in his rhetoric, brutal and hateful toward his sister Ayla, and believes that nature itself is speaking to him, reassuring him, via communication only he can hear. He's insane, but he's believably and coldly insane. Unfortunately, the LSV is so large, and features so many promising, newer characters like Zymyr, that the same rehabilitation can't be undertaken for all of the oldies with the space available. Hence, Roy doesn't get a personality upgrade; he's just the butt of a couple of jokes. Zymyr, incidentally, is a big purple tapeworm in a floating bubble. He's from a race with the quite ridiculous name of the Gil'Dishpan.

Structurally, though, this story barely hangs together. Because DC Comics, experimenting with this new shipping cycle of a direct market volume 3 and a newsstand market volume 2, can't be assured that everybody will be able to read all seven parts of this story, the annual and # 316 have to reference the big action in # 1-5 without relying upon them. These are side stories to the main action, and don't slot in as, say, "episode four of seven" like they might. There was one fumble that showed that I did not read them in the correct order. # 4 opens with a reference to Wildfire vanishing, which I thought the story would explain in a few pages. No, it happened toward the end of # 316, which I read after # 5. Not that it mattered much.

Okay, so it's not so much a seven-episode story as it is a five-episode story with two awkward additions bolted on. Even accepting that, it's still weird, because the villains' plot abruptly changes after issue # 2. It begins all dark and ominous about every member swearing a blood oath to kill a Legionnaire. This is mostly abandoned. Their real plot turns out to be to teleport the pain in the ass backwards planet Orando through limbo and to another universe, so all the baddies can be space bank robbers again, basically.

But I think that "Once a Villain..." - to give this story a name - has so many key moments of greatness that it's really easy to overlook the patchy overall plot. First up just has to be the arrival of Steve Lightle on art duties. Holy anna, is this guy ever a find. He takes over from Giffen after # 2 and the book instantly looks so much better. Giffen hit his absolute nadir in my book - even worse than the awful job on "Omen and the Prophet" - with the cover of # 2. This awkwardly-posed cover shows several of the villains attempting to look menacing, but since Giffen drew them with floppy circles on their shoulders instead of skulls with facial musculature, they look like a bunch of balloons on scarecrow bodies. The interior work is not much better. Lightle kicks things back the way LSH should look. He's a terrific artist who's never received his credit from fandom, frankly one of the best artists to ever work in the superhero genre. There are still some production problems, however. Colorist Carl Gafford's effects and things certainly look better on the whiter Baxter paper than on newsprint, but the downside is that the process shows off the flaws whenever a colored element is placed over otherwise black on the page. It's sort of like watching a super-hi-def digital remaster of Thunderbirds and wondering when they replaced those thin silver strings that hold up the puppets with big black cords.

And then things go completely wild when we get to Orando - poor, stupid, King Arthur Orando - and Nemesis Kid lays down the smack. Comics foretell heroes' deaths all the time, but what happens really is stunning. Back in the late 1960s, writer Jim Shooter had introduced four new Legionnaires in a very celebrated series of stories. Nemesis Kid, with his adaptation power to defeat any single opponent, was almost immediately outed as a traitor, and Ferro Lad died after seven issues. Karate Kid and Princess Projectra remained close while their fellow newcomers were lost. Karate Kid left the team for a solo series, set in the weird wild world of contemporary Earth during the days when Bruce Lee kung fu movies were all the rage, and Projectra, even when most of the guys and ladies in the team were showing off all that skin, was prancing around in a Frederick's of Hollywood outfit. Frankly, both characters were due for retirement. They didn't feel natural; they felt dated and ridiculous, so their happy ending and royal wedding should have been a sweet finale for them.

One year later, the planet is devastated by the villains and millions killed, and Karate Kid, beaten to the last inch of his life by Nemesis Kid, turns and dies heroically shutting down one of the engines that is driving Orando through limbo in a huge explosion. Projectra kills Nemesis Kid by breaking his neck. The villain's corpse is unburied and left to be kicked around by soldiers. What's left of Karate Kid's body is ceremoniously burnt on a funeral pyre, and Projectra gives a final farewell to her friends; Orando will remain in limbo or beyond. She had failed her people, and they want nothing to do with the United Planets or any outside world. Well, to put it mildly, holy shit.

This is so epic, and so amazing, that the dismissive problem of Lyle Norg still hanging around being ignored by everybody for seven months seems extremely weird. That, at least, will get addressed in the next batch of issues. Otherwise, "Once a Villain..." is certainly flawed but still really memorable, a powerful and gut-punching story full of excellent character moments and unexpected, jawdropping results. Most of the baddies get away, and five of our heroes look to be lost forever between dimensions. Especially with Lightle at work, it leaves me really anxious for what comes next.