Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes #1 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The Legion of Super-Heroes team up with Batman and Robin to fight Universo and Egghead in the 1960s and the 2060s.

Review:

I know that this has been out for a while on Comixology. I'm not on Comixology; I read this for the first time yesterday.

It was okay. Cheap-and-cheerful done-in-one superhero story. It worked 75 years ago and it works now. The Allreds are obviously proficient with the material, and gamely try to grapple with futuristic teen slang. I can see myself reading this again.

One little problem I had with the story... why exactly was Projectra disguising herself as Phantom Girl? Did they explain that and I missed it?

Can't help but notice that DC's choice of crossovers for the LSH have included, in recent years, the 1960s Star Trek lineup, the Atomic Knights (a 1960s comic), the Batman and Robin from the 1960s TV show, and Bugs Bunny, whose adventures ran originally from the 1940s through the 1960s. I don't like it. The Legion was not made for nostalgia.

Any LSH news from San Diego?

Art: 125 panels/20 pages = 6.25 panels/page. No splash pages! (Note that the Bugs Bunny/LSH comic had ten more pages than this, and fewer panels!)

The Allreds handle all the creative stuff in this comic, and I have to say I'm not a big fan of the art style. It's, uh... I dunno. Simple? Flat? It's clear and effective and I thoroughly admire how much they pack into a page, but the way it looks just doesn't appeal to me. The specific features that stand out to me as me particularly not liking them are Batman's lips and the lines in his cheeks.

Note that there are a lot of little circular panels, presumably a thematic echo of the two villains of the story; that's cool.

Roster Notes: The lineup featured here is a very mid-sixties one. 1966, probably! (I'm not going to check that to see if it's right or not.) Shadow Lass is cited as the newest member, and as we all know, Shady and Ferro Lad were never teammates in the Silver Age LSH stories. The comic book addresses this, though, describing Ferro Lad's death in the Sun-Eater as a "time-branch" created by the Time Trapper that the Legion has already dealt with. I bring this up not because there's any real reason to scrutinize the continuity of a one-off novelty comic like this one, but because I'm wondering if DC might adopt this approach to continuity in regular Legion comics. It could be very useful.