Legion of Super-Heroes #13 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The LSH and LSV continue fighting on Colu, with mixed results. The LSV tries to recruit Earth-Man. Saturn Queen fails to find the planet of wisdom and asks the Blue Space Urchin for help. In the end, the LSV warps away, and Harmonia Li seems to have some crazy idea involving Star Boy.

Review:

My first reaction here was, man, these Legionnaires really don't know how to fight. Look at Element Lad versus Immortus. Element Lad is supposed to be smart. He's fighting Immortus, who has a robot body of regenerating inertron. And Element Lad doesn't know what to do about that. I guess his trick with the oxygen and Willie Pete is cool and everything, but wouldn't you really want to just create more inertron? I guess it must be tough stuff to make, but you don't need much; just enough to lock up his joints and bearings. If his body's trying to make more inertron anyway, it should be easy for Jan. I thought of that right away and I'm neither a superhero nor a Trommite.

Look at Timber Wolf. He's trying to wake Earth-Man so Earth-Man can wake Brainy. Why not just try to wake Brainy himself? To be fair, he could have tried it off-screen, before we see him trying to wake Earth-Man. But since we don't see it, Timber Wolf looks like an idiot.

Or look at Shadow Lass. She's fighting Sun-Killer. If you're Shady and you're fighting a guy with light powers, wouldn't you try blasting him with your shadows? Might not work at all, I grant you, but then again it might work really well. They did beat Sun-Killer without my expert advice, of course, so who am I to complain.

Or look at Earth-Man. Hmm. Well, we don't actually see him react to Hunter's offer, so maybe he's going to turn out to be not so dumb after all. But if I'm him, I certainly let them think I'm going to go along with whatever they want. Spying on the super-telepathic Saturn Queen when your fellow Legionnaires already don't trust you is a tricky business, to be sure, but it's too good an opportunity to turn down.

My second reaction was that it's a lot of fighting and not much else; a very middle-of-the-story kind of issue. Which isn't actually true; we do get some motion on this and that. It's a rare Levitz issue that doesn't have some storyline beginning or ending, though, and this is one of them; maybe that's what I was thinking of.

I guess we've all seen the August solicits, so we know that a Legionnaire is set to die at the end of this LSV story. I have to say I'm a bit leery about this. I mean, by all means, have a character die if it makes the story better... but this death is being presented to us as just something that the Legion writer does every now and then, and maybe we should start a pool about which Legionnaire draws the black spot. Bleah.

Art: 99 panels/20 pages = 5.0 panels/page. One single-panel page. This issue didn't look typical of Cinar's stuff; I wonder how much of that is because of the inker (Glapion). In particular I wasn't so much on the last page, but I thought Quislet's transformations were particularly well done.