Legion Lost #9 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The Legionnaires and Teen Titans and possibly some other people have to fight someone named Harvest. Wildfire tries to beat him by detonating himself, but it doesn't work very well. Harvest is connected to an organization called Echo, as is Chameleon Girl, and Timber Wolf also seems to know something about it. Harvest says he sent for the Legion and they didn't come to the present day by accident. And the hypertaxis virus isn't such a big problem after all, which Tellus may have known already. Also there's some stuff going on with Rose Wilson and Caitlin Fairchild that I don't care about. Oh yeah, and also Gates finds a time bubble.

Review:

The good news is, I wasn't completely lost despite not having read part 2 of "The Culling". I suspect part of that is because the plot of the thing is on the see-Spot-run plan, but nevertheless, I was following everything okay. So that's fine.

This business of Chameleon Girl and Echo. I find it all very unlikely and I'm against it. Certainly I hope that this series isn't going to be about the tension that comes before the reveal of secret conspiracies by Legionnaires; that would lag. It goes against how the Legion is best portrayed. I mean, I know that "Legion traitor!" is supposed to be a common story element, but if you actually look at the record, all those Legion traitors are a) honest Legionnaires keeping a secret from the rest of the team for their own good, b) some guy who joins the team only to betray them in the same story, or c) an impostor. I don't think any of these apply here.

I suspect I'm going to do an instalment of The Legionnaires for Chameleon Girl next to explore this idea further.

As for the hypertaxis virus... was this the plan all along, that the virus was only a pretext for getting them back there, and it wasn't important itself anyway? It's okay for the story to move around like that, and rely on the quality of writing and art to carry the day in the absence of a unifying premise, but the writing has been nothing special and the art has been much closer to good than great. Could just be DeFalco switching from Nicieza's ideas to his own, in which case I hope he gets on with it; all we've had so far in this series is setup and distraction.

plok of A Trout in the Milk had a post in which he categorized the various runs of Fantastic Four into, and I paraphrase, Real FF, Very Good FF, Caretaker FF, and Bad FF. We could do the same thing for Legion runs, and I may do so in a separate post, but in the meantime let's just say that this series is, so far Bad LSH.

And I don't say that lightly. But we haven't even had a full dozen issues yet and there's already been a writer change, the Legionnaires haven't actually done anything, the writers have shown no particular facility with the characters, what premise there is is not one that's obviously a good one for the Legion in the first place, we've been derailed by a crossover, and Timber Wolf has fired his fingernails across the food court of a mall. It's regrettable.

But not irretrievable!

This could be turned around in a single issue. All it takes is one writer with a good idea for what to do with the series, and we're off to the races. Couldn't tell you if Tom DeFalco is that man, but just right now I'm not getting that vibe.

Notes:
- to me the Legionnaires' new white costumes resemble the new Fantastic Four costumes. Is white the new jacket?
- imagine if Harvest was Grinn
- but I'm worried that he's actually Quislet
- all this conspiracy stuff... is Paul Levitz expected to deal with that in his comic book?

Art: 82 panels/20 pages = 4.1 panels/page. 1 splash page, 1 double-page spread

Can I just point out that there are three logos on this cover? Legion Lost; The New 52; The Culling Part 3 of 4. Also, it may be churlish of me to mention it, but there are a whole lot of panels and pages in this issue that have either no, or basically no, background. That's not cool. I like the way Woods draws the characters, and he certainly does a good job with them here, but we need the rest of the world too. I mean, I don't really know where we are here. A cave in Antarctica? Nobody said this was going to be easy, Pete.