LSH 1994 reread, part ten

Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 # 93-95 and Legionnaires# 49-52, 1997)

Major developments:

*In the 20th Century, Andrew Nolan's brother Douglas, incarcerated in a home for mutants that is run by a corrupt thug, dies trying to escape. The LSH offers Andrew, as Ferro, a place on their team.
*Brainiac 5 starts a fight with the Metal Men after he mistakenly assumes that they are robots and attempts to use their "responsometer" computers in his time travel experiments, but they are actually (in this continuity) human intelligences in robotic form.
*Cos and Imra announce their engagement.
*In the 30th Century, the United Planets forms a gigantic task force of superheroes to attack Mordru, who is hunting for the Emerald Eye. The Eye and Mordru battle, and the hero Atom'x of Xanthu thinks he can blast them both away and rescue Violet, but Mordru murders him and drains all of his energy. Violet and the Eye merge into one being, Veye, and proposes to become Mordru's consort.
*Mysa and Kinetix abduct the Eye and the heroes attack in force. Vi is freed from the Eye, which vanishes into space, Mordru goes dormant and is sealed away as he had been before, and Mysa is revealed to be his daughter, de-aged to her early twenties. Another of the allied heroes, Blast-Off, is killed, and the Legion's Magno loses his powers. Vi ends up with additional ones: the Eye quasi-granted one of her wishes while she was helplessly in its power, and she can now grow to giant size as Gim Allon could.
*Monstress from the planet Xanthu joins the team.
*The creative team is as before: Tom McCraw, Tom Peyer, and Roger Stern writing, Lee Moder and Jeffrey Moy as principal artists. Mike Collins pencils LSH # 93. Issue # 94 features a whole pile of substitute artists, each contributing one or two pages. Among the names that I recognize from their other work that I have enjoyed, Phil Jimenez, Walt Simonson, and Val Semekis


Let's get the worst out of the way: these Metal Men stink. In 1994, DC had upgraded and rebooted a lot of older series. Some, like Legion and the James Robinson-Tony Harris Starman, came out bright and shiny and wonderful. Then there was the Dan Jurgens Metal Men miniseries, which killed off Gold, put Doc Magnus in an armored suit, and revealed that they were amnesiac humans all along. I loved the 1970s Metal Men as a kid. They'd always show up as oddball guest stars in things like The Brave & The Bold, and those big Showcase omnibus editions show that their original 1960s-1970s appearances were incredibly fun comics. This revamp is awful, and the Legion's continued association with the 20th Century DC Universe is really, really getting old as dirt at this point.

Happily, despite the feeling of fatigue and malaise that the last seven issues prompted, this is a mostly better run of comics, thanks in part to the really remarkable battle with Mordru, which is staged brilliantly, and also the decision to slow the narrative down for two issues afterward to deal with the ramifications of what happens next. I'm not kidding about the brilliant staging of the battle in issue 50. It's a textbook example of how to build up to a big superhero fight and make it matter. The outcome is in doubt all the way through, and there's just no way to guess how it's going to finish. It is also drawn beautifully. This Jeffrey Moy - if you don't like his work on Legion, you've just got no hope in the world.

I was honestly reminded of the big, mean smackdown in issue # 50 of Levitz's big run, when four of the heroes make a suicide run against the Time Trapper. This one has consequences, and while this doesn't have its antecedent's apocalyptic shock - there are, after all, far more heroes this time out - there are fatalities and long-lasting (if not permanent) injuries and big changes to the normal run of things.

Okay, so admittedly, the fatalities are members of the C-list cast, and the most grievous injury is to somebody equally on the periphery, and the Legionnaire most injured - Magno is depowered - is one of the newest three, whose power set duplicates Cosmic Boy's, but this is a book that has clearly shown that nobody is safe, and that if even Gim Allon can die in battle, then anybody can.

Heck, they're already threatening to have Cos and Imra get married!!

Volumes One of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind and Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind vol. 1 (Omnivistascope/Lulu, 2008) and Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson vol. 1 (Marvel, 2001).



The British small press scene is a pretty interesting one, with lots of very talented young creators working away in relative obscurity. It's a market that I don't know very much about, and that's entirely my fault: when I was very interested a few years back, I used neither credit cards nor PayPal, and now that I use both, I'm trying to limit the number of single issue comics in the house for cost, space and storage reasons. But when the complete run of Solar Wind and its companion homage anthologies Big War Comic and Sunny for Girls were announced in low-price bookshelf editions, I ran out of excuses.

I'll look at the second collection in a month or so. This first one compiles the first five issues of Solar Wind, with work by the likes of Al Ewing, Matt Timson, Paul Scott, who edited the work, along with several others, and it is a real treat. I read the first third of it over lunch and was laughing so hard that a lady at the next table said "That must be a funny book!" It sure is. Solar Wind is a tribute to British newspaper comics of the 70s, with a smart-aleck editor, awful advertisements for stamp collecting kits, and a whole pile of over-the top comics. So the lunch in question, at the nearby "Loafing Leprechaun" faux-Irish pub, with British soccer on television and Led Zeppelin's "D'yer'maker" in the background, was a good setting!

Even better, after the first issue, each Solar Wind is a "merger" issue, so Solar Wind absorbs some other, non-existant other comics, taking on some girls' comics (Zoe Biddle, Wheelchair Ballerina is the greatest thing ever), war comics, crunching hard-man action comics and horror comics. The humor ranges from playful and loving to mean-spirited and over-the-top, and it all works very well indeed. None of the strips run for more than four pages, so those rare jokes that fall flat don't linger for long, and they're more than matched by the very successful ones. It's triumphantly silly, a real winner from start to finish, and very highly recommended, especially at less than eleven bucks! Don't be stubborn and miss out on this like I did!

Read more about the Omnivistascope small press world, from which Solar Wind emerged, at their web site!



I featured this book on my old Weekly Comics Hype in March of last year. A reread has prompted the following observations:

1. It's so nice to be able to read old comics in a vacuum. There are occasional references to other Marvel comics, but what you get in this book are twelve chapters of absolute awesome, with no backstory needed. If you know that Thor is a superhero take on the Norse god of thunder, then you're good to go.

2. Simonson's pacing is very odd in places. There's a sequence in the early pages where the warrior Volstagg is relating a tale, but several days seem to pass in the "meanwhile" of the main story before he finishes.

3. "The Last Viking" story is just amazing. Much has been written about Simonson's run on Thor, but I think this brilliant story, full to bursting with heart and life, is often overlooked.

4. Is this the best American superhero book of the 1980s? It's certainly close. Unless I'm overlooking one, it's either this or Levitz/Giffen Legion.

5. There are now five volumes of Simonson Thor in Marvel's Visionaries line. The second and third are still pretty hard to come by, but a couple of months ago, the company promised that new editions would be in print soon.

(Originally posted May 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)