Monday, April 14, 2008

The Legionnaires: XS

XS, aka Jenni Ognats of Aarok. Created by Tom McCraw and Jeff Moy.

XS was the first all-new Legionnaire introduced in the reboot. She's the daughter of Dawn Allen and, I guess, some Aarokian guy named Mr. Ognats, which also makes her Barry Allen's granddaughter and Bart Allen's cousin. She was a prominent Legionnaire all through the reboot and even put in a quick cameo appearance at the end of the animated series, but hasn't appeared in the threeboot. This may be at least partly because DC has some key role in mind for her during the upcoming Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds miniseries.

XS's powers included the standard superspeed portfolio.

She's been one of my favourite Legionnaires. One thing I liked was in her first Legion mission, where the Legion had to fight a spiderlike space monster named Tangleweb. At the start of the fight, she freaked out and ran away. It's a perfectly sensible and natural thing to do, except that you can't do that if you're going to be a superhero. So she got hold of herself and ran back before anyone knew she'd been gone. She was still ashamed of herself, though, and almost quit before Cosmic Boy talked her into staying. What I liked was that she was a normal enough person that she did do the sensible natural thing. How many other superheroes have? Makes me think better of her.

When DnA took over the Legion, they decided to key Jenni's characterization by her powers. In their hands, she was mobile. She was always going.

So, when the Earth was Blighted and Jenni was part of the underground, trying to keep Earth's remaining humans safe:




Or, in Legion Worlds #4, when she was with Star Boy on Xanthu, running messages from the Xanthuan/Khundish resistance against Robotica:



An issue which featured a truly heroic scene, by the way, which would work equally well as Star Boy's signature moment; I'll have to find something else good for him:






Right.

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