Sunday, October 14, 2012

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.

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