Legion of Super Heroes #2-10 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Mordru was starting to throw his weight around on the magical planet of Zarok, so the Legion went and fought him.

Review:

Boy, that was lame. It was a generic fantasy-magic story with a few incidental Legion details. The main character was the annoying little kid from one of the weaker episodes of the first season. Superman-X saves the day by casting a magic spell, of all things. And the fantasy elements of the story were strictly off-the-rack.

There were characters named 'Mordru' and 'the White Witch'. But they weren't characterized... at all, really.

Some of the Legionnaires had some nice moves in the uninteresting fights they had against some magical cannon fodder. That was good, I guess.

I read one comment about the episode to the effect that the White Witch's appearance made the whole episode worth it. My thoughts on that notion are, like hell it did. The White Witch wasn't much more than the artificial female voice that guides you through a phonemail tree; they could have called her Wonder Woman without changing the story at all. As long as Legion fans have such undiscriminating standards--i.e., that they'll accept anything that reproduces a surface detail of the original Legion--then we'll keep having stuff like this episode, or the Lightning Saga, foisted on us.

I mean, my approach for this blog is to look for the good in whatever treatments of the Legion come along. Usually I can find it; sometimes not. But I hope that it takes more than a familiar name or nostalgic costume to win my approval. It was a worthwhile episode because one of the one-half-dimensional semicharacters was named the White Witch? Please.

This has been a good series and it's only got a few episodes left. Let's hope they're more like the rest of the series than they are like this one.