Legion Lost #13 Review
What Happened That You Have to Know About: Some kind of space warrior, Lord Daggor, with his dragon Thraxx, notices the Earth and decides to go kill it on behalf of his Conqueror Supreme, because that's how he rolls. Tellus senses him coming and Wildfire goes to meet him, but Daggor is too tough and chases Wildfire back to Earth.
Meanwhile, we get a flashback to Yera's 31st-century memories of being sent on this mission. She's been spying on the Legion for Echo; apparently she's not the only one; Tyroc and Wildfire are destined to die in the present day;
Also, a time bubble shows up with Captain Adym of the Science Police, and Harvest senses it. Adym wants the Legion to help fix some kind of timestream event, or that's his story, anyway.
Review:
First-issue syndrome, of course, but that wasn't a bad comic at all. Still doesn't taste like the Legion, but it does seem like something. This is a good starting point for what I'd say could be a good story if I didn't know it had Superboy, Harvest, and the Ravagers in it.
That was a very organic use of Gates's personality on page 19. It's one thing to have him randomly snarking off about fascism and stuff, but here it's relevant, appropriate, and intelligent for him to be questioning Adym. Said it before and I'll say it again: DeFalco is the second-best Gates writer we've had.
I continue to resist all attempts to have Wildfire be a faster flier than Dawnstar. He doesn't want her to come along because she'll slow him down? Whatever. Flying fast is Dawnstar's whole thing; he should be the one who slows her down.
I hope everyone caught Tellus's Obi-Wan-like detection of the destruction of Alderaan on page 2.
And then on page 4 Tyroc says that the Legionnaires still have a responsibility to safeguard the galaxy while they're in the past. Hey, look: if it's okay with Tyroc it's okay with me, but I might have thought there'd be a problem with changing history and stuff. I fully understand that from a narrative point of view you can't just have the Legionnaires hanging out trying not to disturb anything every issue. I'm just saying that, uh, well, what about the time paradoxes? You know.
Art: 71 panels/20 pages = 3.6 panels/page. 4 double-page spreads of 4, 1, 5, and 4 panels, plus 1 splash page.
Shockingly low panel count for a comic book in which so much happens. That's Pete Woods for you, I suppose, although he's going to kill me with these humanoid depictions of Tellus. Seriously, has someone told Legion artists to draw Tellus this way? They're going to give him a belly button next, or a mullet.
Labels: Comic Book Reviews, Legion of Super-Heroes
posted by Matthew E @ 7:04 PM
14 Comments:
On Wildfire being able to "fly faster" without Dawnstar, I don't think that's what they're trying to do--I think it's Wildfire avoiding her because he knows that his suit could go at any point, and since they're in this point in time without a viable suit, he might as well be dead to her and everyone else.
Well, yes, they are certainly doing that, but they're trying to do it by making Wildfire faster than Dawny; I'm not sure there's any other way to interpret that part.
I have to admit, the whole idea of there being spies within the Legion, or more importantly, spies who haven't been long discovered, irks me somewhat. It destroys some of the sense of trust and harmony the Legion should have.
That part doesn't bother me so much. Depends on how well done it is. There have been enough Legion traitors in the past that all this secret-agenda stuff is fine. Especially since they don't seem to be making the characters less sympathetic. Like Yera in this issue, for instance.
It's offical;LEGION LOST ends with issue #16.Good news or bad?
As always, it depends. Does Levitz get the characters back? What's he gonna do with 'em? What of the next few issues? Et cetera.
It's a damn sight better issue than the last few, can't help thinking is where it should have been by #7 or #8.
There was still so much silly writing in it. The whole scene with Wildfire meeting the big-bad: '...Somehow I can hear this guy in my head!' 'Y-your dragoln talks?' Maybe in his angst Drake forgot he had a telepathic non-humanoid team-mate at the start of the book.
Brin talking about going into witness protection doesn't make sense, unless it was meant to be a flashback and it's revealed he was asked to try out for the Legion by Adym
Yera's story doesn't stack up unless she was asked to join the Imskian plan to kidnap Violet. This disappoints me as it strips out the more heroic aspect to that storyline.
The logic jump on the faceplate 'Do you recognize this'sequence: "Is it a 23rdC fruit platter? A Canadian Rollerball mask from the 2947 desert season? How many guesses do I get? This is a fun game!"
All these plot = action moments didn't really draw everything into a coherent story. It did remind me that in 11 & 12 we had a bunch of dessicated corpses show up at the med centre. From context it was assumed Alastor had burned them out with his body-swapping but it's not addressed at all, which is the norm for DeFalco's writing here rather than an abberation.
All I hope for now is that Harvest isn't Quislet but is in fact Adym, that Tellus or Gates don't turn out to be evil traitors and when the book ends it doesn't permanently ruin a group of characters that deserved far better.
I like your point about the telepathy. I could fanwank it away pretty easily but that's what I'd be doing.
Wildfire's faceplate, though, no; she should recognize that by now.
And I don't think we're going to get any evil traitors.
This felt *more* like a Legion story than most we have had in this run. We got non-Earth action. We got some established characterization consistency. And we got some use of continuity.
I don't think that Adym's influence on Yera goes back pre-Imsk. What it does, though, is to explain why she actually joined the Legion during the pre-Johns unknown period (pJup?) rather than staying as a supporting character.
Tyroc probably isn't much worried about time paradoxes, since he knows that he, at least, is fated to die in the 21st century (allegedly). It's not a time paradox if it's supposed to happen. That said, fine, you're convinced that you'll be dying here, that doesn't mean to have to doom the other six to stay with you.
Adym as Harvest does seem the obvious connection. (I think we should give him a last name, though. Adym Aduzzan has a nice ring, don't you think?)
I still don't like the Yera thing and will, soon I hope, post something to explain why in more detail.
As for Adym, I couldn't help seizing on the appellation "Captain Adym". Man, I hope that's coincidental.
I still cant bear Yera, even after all these years. Who on earth would buy that crazy story that she was helping out that Imsk group and Violet by taking her place in the LSH back then?
Why didnt she ask why they wanted her to impersonate someone else in the first place, never mind whatever happened to the real Salu.
Never trusted her to begin with.
On a more positive note...Keith Giffen is back as LSH artist!!!!
I dunno. I like her. Or I like her in Levitz's hands, anyway. Plus she was fine in her 5YL appearances. Hard to like anybody too much in this series because so much about how they're being portrayed is not clear.
I'm with Matthew. Reading this, I wonder if DeFalco even read Levitz's comics when he introduced Yera. She's now a spy instead of an actress. She's working for a human agency...even though the humans just had a showdown with the Durlans and before that the humans were xenophobic. Now she and Gim are broken up.....
Ah, well, it's like a lot of these retroboot changes. You can put together a plausible narrative for how it happened, but it's still retrograde character development. Like when Johns implied that Lightning Lass and Timber Wolf were a couple again. Yera was introduced as a spy, or working with spies anyway, then she was an actress... but now she's back to being a spy. No thanks.
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