The Legionnaires: Thanks for Playing

And then there were these yutzes who showed up just in time to get killed.

Firefist of Khundia. Created by Tom and Mary Bierbaum and Stuart Immonen.

Blood Claw of Khundia. Created by Tom and Mary Bierbaum and Stuart Immonen.

Late in the Five Years Later era, Mordru started causing trouble by resurrecting the dead and turning them loose on the universe. Things got so desperate that the Khunds made common cause with the United Planets, and, as a gesture of cooperation, sent four of their best people to become Legionnaires. Firefist and Blood Claw were two of them.

One might expect Khundish superheroes to be jerks, and in the case of these two guys, one would be right. They were obnoxious macho fighting machines. Firefist was some kind of cyborg, and Blood Claw had these claws. Neither of them came to a good end; Blood Claw was killed in battle (and became a zombie himself), and Firefist had the poor judgment to pick a fight with Devlin O'Ryan, despite Devlin's reluctance and warnings that it couldn't end well.

Sometimes you look at these short-term Legionnaires and think that they were worthwhile characters and isn't it a shame that we didn't see more of them. This isn't one of those times (although we actually did get a bit more of Firefist: the Khundish government managed to get his systems restarted in between his first death and Zero Hour. He wasn't any more interesting the second time around).