Adventure Comics #521 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About: Dyogene reviews the Legionnaires to see who he wants to give the Green Lantern ring to, and settles on Mon-El, since he's the strongest. Mon-El departs the Legion for GL training.

A team of Legionnaires is in Africa, doing rescue work after an earthquake or something near the Olduvai Gorge. They find that it wasn't a regular quake; it was caused by something digging itself out of the ground real fast (causing some people nearby to die of fright) and flying off into space. Wildfire and Dawnstar pursue, but get casually blasted to semiconsciousness and the thing gets away.

Review:

I was wondering why, at this stage of the game, we were spending so much time on the Legionnaires helping out at another natural disaster, but the mystery behind the cause of the quake is certainly a worthwhile story. Since we've got a Green Lantern kind of thing going on, and the whatchamacallit seems to have some kind of fear abilities, it's natural to wonder if somehow we're dealing with Parallax here. I hope not; I'd rather see a new villain, if Levitz has one in him.

One story that's just waiting to be told is that of the failure of the 31st-century Green Lantern Corps to live up to its predecessors. Sodam Yat is a crybaby and I don't know what Dyogene's good for. I'm not worried about Mon-El not being heroic enough, but since when are GLs selected on the basis of personal power? I don't think this is going to end well. You remember the messed-up new oath from FC:L3W, right? This is trouble waiting to happen. (One interesting implication, though: Dyogene seems to think that Harmonia Li is right up there, power-wise, with Earth-Man and Mon-El.)

It sorta looks like Mon-El has won the election for Legion leader. Levitz is taking him off the team for a while in this issue; Levitz has said that the new leader is someone whose election is forcing Levitz to revise his plans frantically; Mon-El led the exit poll at the Legion Omnicom. Your own fault, Paul; if you weren't prepared to have him as leader you should have left him off the ballot.

What with Mon-El getting his new ring, and all, I checked his hands to see if he was also wearing his flight ring. He wasn't. So I looked through the rest of the comic to see if I figured that that meant anything, and I concluded that it didn't; flight rings aren't often visible on Legionnaires' hands throughout the issue. There are quite a few in the first couple of pages, as Element Lad and Invisible Kid and Sun Boy are fighting the fire, but that's about it. I think I only saw Dawnstar's once. I have a notion that the rings are only visible when the Legionnaires are actively using them to fly, and as a theory that might hold a bit of water. (The theory isn't about how the rings actually work, you understand; it's about how Borges decides whether to draw them or not.)

This was one of the better issues of this comic we've had. Not much to it, but what there was was fine, and I'll be happy to have the next issue come around.

Panel Count: 79 panels/20 pages = 4.0 panels/page; 4 single-panel pages. That's a pretty fast read. The art is by Borges and Alquiza this time around, and it's perfectly nice. I especially like the way Borges does Dawnstar's face.