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.

Legion of Super-Heroes # 5

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Legion of Super-Heroes # 5 (DC, 2010).



Paul Levitz's return to monthly comics, and the Legion of Super-Heroes that he made so memorable in the 1980s, continues. It's agreeable if not entirely satisfying. The dialogue is still a little clunky and while he's packing the episodes with unfolding subplots, he's still not using the pages available to him to their best advantage. There are thirty pages of story in each issue, but not one of them is used to capacity, with a ridiculous average of only 3.53 panels per page. That includes three splash pages and a double-page splash. I'll grant you one; it's conventional in American comics to open with a splash page, but there are just too many pages where nothing of consequence happens, including a dialogue-free page where Sun Boy defends himself, across three panels, from blaster fire while awaiting backup.

I'm not sure how much of this is Levitz, if he is specifying the breakdowns, giving his hard-worked artists a little less to draw and how much might be created by, if he's letting the artists take charge, the pencillers making the determination. Nevertheless, a $4 book with thirty pages should definitely present more than 105 panels. This is terrible value for money! Interestingly, DC announced this week that all of their $4 books, including LSH, will be dropping to 20 pages for $3 in January. I really hope this will mean, with ten fewer pages to draw a month, the artists can cram some more activity into them.

Regarding the artists, Yildiray Cinar and Francis Portela are credited with pencils, and Wayne Faucher and Portela with inks. Hi-Fi, which I imagine is a studio, is credited with colors. I'm honestly not certain who did what (perhaps Portela did the subplot back at headquarters with Cos, Brainy, Cham and Circadia Senius?), but the art, overall, is pretty basic modern superhero standard. There's nothing inspiring or very exciting here, but, apart from just putting too little material on the pages, nothing wrong either.

On a personal note, however, can I just state for the record how very, very much I hate Sensor Girl's current costume? It is the ugliest thing in the 31st Century. The original was a classic, and it's a shame that they've kept the mask and the color scheme for this hideous boob-window revamp of it. Okay, granted, Jeckie wore a boob-window before she picked the Sensor Girl costume, but seriously, you artists, more than half the ladies in the LSH are fit girls wearing boob-windows. I think we're all fine with Shady and Dawnstar spilling out; nobody's being a prude here, but can Jeckie put her cool, classic costume on again, please? Thank you.

If you're detecting some displeasure here, well, yes. It's an entertaining book for me, but it's clunky and disappointing in so many ways. I'm looking forward to rereading the stories so far - LSH, under Levitz, was always a very rereadable book - but what I'm really looking forward to is this series finally lifting off and giving me a fix that isn't fairly dependent on nostalgia. Not really recommended yet.

Legion of Super-Heroes # 1-2

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Legion of Super-Heroes # 1-2 (DC, 2010)



I'm not sure which famous quote to use to express how I feel about buying a new Legion of Super-Heroes comic again after so long. Something about just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in? Or how I just can't quit you? I know, it's an exhausted Daffy Duck, beaten down from constant delays and aggravations, saying "Okay, let's get this picture started!"

This isn't a situation that I can explain very briefly, but in the 1980s, as written by Paul Levitz, DC's Legion comic was a firm favorite, and I think it's still easily among the best American books of that decade. Levitz left in 1989 for a desk job at DC, and dozens of other writers have tinkered and tampered with the continuity of the SF adventure with no lasting appeal. Levitz, at last, has returned to the title, and I've very gladly placed a regular order for it again.

Levitz is apparently now working in a melange of previous Legion continuities, with characters from at least two prior iterations of the title. Even though these are issues #1-2, they follow up a couple of stories written by Geoff Johns in other books that establish this new status quo, leaving it to Levitz to iron out the kinks and ease readers into the new storyline. As with the best Legion stories, there's a hell of a lot going on with a hell of a lot of characters. There are three big plots at work here, but Levitz is an old master at managing stories this complex for new readers and making it seem fresh and welcoming.

Honestly, the result was not completely satisfying, but I was still pleased by the first issue and occasionally thrilled by the second. Perhaps after reading too many modern American comics, I'd forgotten how nice it feels to read a newly published story that's not afraid to use forgotten standbys like thought balloons (of a sort) and captions and proper chunks of dialogue where characters actually refer to each other by name so that the audience knows who the heck is who. I just finished reading a clutch of Brian Bendis comics for Marvel, about which more soon, and the new LSH might feel a little out of touch with modern convention, but also welcoming and genuinely fresh. Too many contemporary comics try to act like film storyboards and are afraid to use the medium's conventions to tell their tales, but Levitz does it right, and does it very well.

At any rate, while the first issue did feel just a little clunky, the second really ramped things up. There's rampant, alien-hating xenophobia on 31st-Century Earth, and the arrival of thousands of refugees from the destroyed moon of Titan has made matters worse, as has Earthgov's insistence that an alien-hating former enemy of the Legion's be given a place among their ranks if they want to continue operating on the planet. Meanwhile, the Titan-born villain Saturn Queen has taken over Ultra Boy's mind and used him as a weapon against the other Legionnaires. It's an expertly-managed blend of crazy politics and high-concept SF with the focus on team relationships and dynamics that fans love. As ever, Jo is totally Tinya's sub, although I was surprised that in this iteration, Mon-El and Shady have recently split. Don't break our hearts too much, Levitz!

Artist Yildiray Cinar's work is new to me, and it's not bad at all, but I can't swear that I was really inspired by it. It's certainly competent - at no point was I confused by the storytelling or baffled as to who any of the supporting characters were, which seems to have been a huge problem for DC lately - and it's at least as good as Steve Lightle's work in the mid-80s. I do hope Cinar can turn up the weirdness dial a little further in upcoming issues. Despite the property's quaint and charming origins and zero-thought 1950s visual design, the Legion's world is most appealing to me when it's light-years away from traditional superheroics. I'd like to see Gates, for instance, look more like a weird, freaky insect and less like a safe funny animal, for starters. In the meantime, is there any chance DC can book Amanda Conner for fill-ins to sub for Cinar once a year or so?

I think that Legion fans have been badly treated by the company for a really long time now, with storylines abandoned and reset to suit the whims of new creators, and a management that just seems out of touch and clueless. In a world of year-long commitments and creators who either jump ship or get pushed far too early and often, it might be foolhardy to be placing any trust in the new LSH at all. We've been burned so frequently that many fans, myself included, just stopped reading. In a perfect world, a Levitz-helmed LSH would run for years and years, and if an optimistic, perfect world isn't the dream behind the property, I don't know what is. Fingers firmly crossed, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this as an ongoing concern, knowing how we've been shafted in the past, but I'll keep reading with a nice smile and let you know how it's going.