Adventure Comics #12 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About: Not a lot. Superboy spends some time with the Legion, doing superhero stuff and teenage stuff.

Review:

Kevin Sharpe is the penciller this issue. I didn't care for his work filling in for Barry Kitson in LSHv5, but his stuff looks a bit better here. Not great; he has a habit, for instance, of underdetailing figures that are supposed to be in the distance, and it can look pretty bad (for instance, see page 7). Sometimes his renderings work and sometimes they don't; compare Saturn Girl in the last panel of page 4 (good) with Saturn Girl on page 5 (not so good). Overall I'd give Sharpe a passing grade for this issue, but I don't think he's destined to become one of my favourites. Panel Count: 138/30 = 4.6 panels per page, over 30 pages. One single-panel page.

As for the story... I don't know. Maybe Levitz has something in mind for what he's going to do with this early-adventures-of-Superboy-and-the-Legion stuff. And maybe there's a demand for it; I see all kinds of people on message boards saying that they just can't figure out the Legion. My problem is that I've seen all this stuff before. On Smallville, in the Legion cartoon, in the Johns/Manapul issues of Adventure... it feels like very well-trodden ground.

But it doesn't feel like a Paul Levitz comic book, which is interesting in itself, because it clearly is a Paul Levitz comic book. Levitz, in other words, is stretching himself, which is all to the good. I just hope that there's something on its way that's more than background for the main Legion title. This was a pleasant read but not a compelling one. I'm sure I'll enjoy the next issue, but I'm not looking forward to it the way I'm looking forward to LSHv6 #2.

Notes:
- R.J. Brande's voice is way different from how we're used to him sounding under Levitz. Maybe he's supposed to sound more Durlan here? By damn!
- I'll give Sharpe the benefit of the doubt and say that it's the Legionnaires who have no idea where they're supposed to stand on a baseball field. Why isn't Luornu triplicated? They've got nine positions to cover!
- If I never see the Involuntary Heat Vision of Orgasm again, it'll be too soon
- I did kinda like seeing the Legion at a specific stage of their membership. No Ultra Boy, Mon-El, Shrinking Violet, or Sun Boy yet. Sometimes I wish we could see an adventure of one of the weirdo Legion rosters from the Five Year Gap, like when the team consisted of Colossal Boy, Invisible Kid II, Nightwind, and Polar Boy