Legion Lost #16 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

There's more fighting, and more extraneous stuff with Harvest and Captain Adym and Superboy and all those malarkeys. The doomsday device gets set off, but Gates teleports it away, possibly sacrificing some kind of alternate time-travel version of himself to do so, and simultaneously defeating Daggor and Thraxx. Wildfire gets his old good containment suit back. Apparently Daggor summoned his master right there at the end, and the Legionnaires don't end up going home.

Review:

I'm worried that we're not done with this nonsense yet. The Legionnaires are still in the present day! Is DeFalco going to use them in his other titles? Because I ain't buying 'em, I'll tell you that right now. I put up with this action for sixteen issues and I'm done with it now. Seriously though: does anybody think that Tellus is a good present-day character?

The main problem with this issue is that it isn't really an issue of Legion Lost. Or only partly. Too much time is spent dealing with Superboy and Harvest and all the intrigue surrounding them and their associated characters. And I honestly don't see what the point is of that. Who's meant to be reading this comic, anyway? Legion fans? Harvest fans?

See, what I wanted out of this series was to read about Legion of Super-Heroes characters trapped in a difficult and complex situation. There were hints of that, but no more than hints, because neither Nicieza nor DeFalco really had a good handle on the Legion and both wanted to spend time on other stuff that wasn't very interesting.

I'll have more to say soon summing up the series as a whole.

That one line of Gates's this issue, where he tells himself to keep an eye on Timber Wolf... I guess, as far as DeFalco is concerned, Gates and Timber Wolf are particularly close friends? I like to think that I'm a good enough reader that I would have picked up on it if they'd done a better job establishing it.

Tyroc's strange destiny doesn't seem to come to anything. Wildfire's either. Really I don't think any of the subplots do. Did nobody tell DeFalco that this was going to be the last issue?

Anyway. This was neither a particularly good issue nor a particularly final issue. Whatever redemption this series might have gotten, it didn't get. Failure all around.

Oh well: we still have Legion of Super-Heroes, which is pleasant and competent and may be about to do something interesting. Looking forward to it!

Cripes! I forgot to pick up the latest issue of Action with the reboot Legion in it. Oh well; I'll get it next week.

Art: 73 panels/20 pages = 3.7 panels/page. 3 splash pages; 1 two-page spread of 5 panels.

Andres Guinaldo on art again, denying us a last look at Pete Woods in these pages. He does okay. That one splash page of the reunited Dawnstar and Wildfire at the end is probably intended to be a crowdpleaser, and probably is, to the extent that any crowd will ever see it.