Adventure Comics #522 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Some guy called Sun Killer tries to spring Saturn Queen from the ship taking her to Takron-Galtos. Mon-El shows up and stops him. Also some kind of blue space baby is there; Saturn Queen prays to him in her sleep, but he leaves when he sees Dyogene (who's there accompanying Mon-El). Dyogene and the blue space baby are apparently some kind of old enemies.

Dawnstar's still comatose on Medicus One and Dr. Gym'll says it doesn't look good. There's also something going on with Harmonia Li, who's on her way back to Earth.

Review:

Look at what Levitz has done here. With Dawnstar, I mean. The plot requires that the Legion not be able to find Mon-El, and that they not be able to find Chief Zendak. Therefore Dawnstar's powers can't be available to them. Therefore Dawnstar has to be in a coma.

This is the whole trouble with Dawny. Her powers are just too useful for her to be allowed to use them. DnA had it right when they made up Shikari: the power to find a place is a lot easier for a writer to cope with than the power to find a person.

Anyway, it's kind of clumsy, don't you think? Put her in a coma to patch a plot hole? Levitz shouldn't let me see him palming a card like that.

Adventure Comics continues to be neither fish nor fowl. This issue, while a complete comic book superhero story (don't get me wrong), seems like an appendix to the main LSH title. Maybe Adventure will get an identity of its own once the Legion Academy stuff starts; I hope so.

Anyway, while it was complete--Mon-El, in his first act as a Green Lantern, stops a prison break, and obviously needs a lot more training with the ring--it doesn't seem entirely standalone. If we only had two issues of Mon-El's initiation with the GLC, shouldn't they have taken us further into it? It feels like the start of something that's not going to be finished. Oh, and the stuff with Saturn Queen and her LSV is fine... but it's also something that's going to be resolved in the main LSH title, not this one.

Imagine if you were only collecting Adventure and not paying attention to anything else DC was doing. Do you think you'd find it a satisfying experience?

I feel like I'm dancing around the point. What was the meat of this issue? I guess it was Sun Killer himself. He seems like an interesting sort of a supervillain. He's motivated, he's got a clear sense of his limitations, he's got something intriguingly nonstandard about his powers (taking the light from the cold world of Orivan?), and he's very polite. I think Levitz has a keeper here. (Despite the fact that the Legion's had more sun-powered villains than any two superhero teams can use.)

Notes:
- Sun Killer is the latest in a long line of Japanese solar-themed supercharacters. Isn't it just as easy not to be stereotypical?
- Tellus has hands again in this issue.
- I'm not sure if Sun Killer is supposed to be the thing that launched itself out of the Olduvai Gorge last issue and took out Wildfire and Dawnstar. Somehow I think he isn't.
- Or maybe the space baby is the thing from Olduvai. I like that better.
- That's Sun Killer on the cover of the LSV special coming in March. I wonder if Cryo-King will also put in an appearance.

Panel Count: 84 panels/20 pages = 4.2 panels/page. One single-panel page. The art this month is provided by Geraldo Borges and Marlo Alquiza, and it looks okay. Not the best, but fine. I liked the Harmonia Li parts most of all.

Oh! Let me talk about the cover! I just realized something. The Legion symbol that's used on the cover? Circle, inside of which is a letter L, and in the crook of the L is a shooting star arcing down?

Has anybody ever speculated on just what that shooting star represents?

I put it to you that it represents a small rocket carrying the young Last Son of Krypton down to the surface of the Earth.