Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #19 Review

Second-last issue. It's starting to look like DC's not going to keep this title going despite our best efforts. Still, never say die! It's not too late to send DC a letter asking them to change their minds. The address:

DC Comics
1700 Broadway
New York, NY
USA 10019
Attn: Dan DiDio, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor

One might think that I'd start up a similar campaign for the similarly cancelled Legion of Super-Heroes. I'm not going to. LSH31C is a much simpler proposition: does DC want to keep it going, or not? If they do, taking sales and everything else into account, then that's what they'll do. It's an act of will on their part.

LSH, though, is all mixed up with issues of continuity and which version do we want to use and who's the regular writer and how does the Legion fit into the DC universe as a whole. If I thought DC could just decide to keep LSH going, I'd write them a letter asking them to. But I think it doesn't work like that. I think one of these two things is true: a) DC has a plan for the Legion and nothing we say will move them off that plan, or b) DC has no plan for the Legion and nothing we say will give them that plan. Either way, they're going to have to move at their own speed.

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The Scavengers again! Those guys never learn. Booster Gold is also around. He helps the Legion fight the Scavengers, but he's also working with them to pay off his father's gambling debts. In the end he has to chase a Scavenger back through time and is stranded in the 21st century, where, according to some historical files Brainiac 5 shows the rest of the Legion, he becomes a famous superhero.

Review:

The single most common kind of issue this title has had is the perfectly-acceptable-one-shot-highlighting-some-other-aspect-of-the-DC-universe by the team of J. Torres and Alex Serra. And this is another one.

I had to look at the art twice in this comic. At first I thought it wasn't Serra's best work, but then, when I really checked it out, I found that it was fine. Some of the backgrounds were kinda sparse and I'm not nuts about how he portrayed Dawnstar, but it was fine.

One thing that disappointed me was that it's not really a Legion story. It's a Booster Gold story and the Legion are just there to help fight Scavengers. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but we have so few Legion comic books left before the Blackout of 2009 begins that I am loath to give one up. And Booster has his own comic.

Can anyone else see a parallel here between Booster Gold and Lightning Lad? The story didn't go out of its way to draw attention to it, but: both are athletes (remember the Space Olympics episode of the cartoon?), both are Type A personalities, both can be hard to get along with because of their me-first attitudes, both have sisters (both of whom are mentioned in this issue). The difference: Booster is a failure who is trying to redeem himself through superheroism, while Garth is a superhero.

Notes:
- "Scavengers scatter!" The opposite of "Avengers assemble"?
- "Data valet". That's what he is, all right.
- the Legionnaires have a coed locker room? The future!
- Serra is using the newer, flattened-out model for Skeets. Anybody else think Skeets looked better when he was rounder?

Membership Notes:

We get our first look at animated-Legion Dawnstar, for one thing. For another, the Legion-flashback scenes in the background of Booster's time travel adventure show us not only the LSH31C debut of Ayla Ranzz (if I recall correctly), but also the only (I assume we aren’t going to get another next issue) comic-book appearance of Superman-X.