Legion of Super-Heroes v9 #1 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About: The 31st century is a time in which civilization is kind of falling apart. Superheroes have been illegal for a long time. Enforcers called "Persuaders" are throwing their weight around everywhere. And bazillionaire R.J. Brande has just been killed on a public street, with a Legion L symbol painted on the wall above his body. Private detective Brainiac 5 decides to investigate this, assisted by his bodyguard Tenzil Kem. They discover that Brande was researching superpowers, possibly in relation to something called "Legion", and that his killer seems to be a man named Mekt Ranzz. Meanwhile, Mekt's hero-worshipping younger brother Garth is trying to start his superheroic career as Lightning Lad, although his sister Ayla thinks it's a dumb idea. Rokk Krinn is a sports superstar on Braal, but he's having some hard times, and Imra Ardeen is a telepath princess on Titan, uncomfortable with her role and picking up some strange thoughts from somewhere.

Review: One of the things I have come to believe after reviewing these comics for this long is, first issues are easy. I'm not saying you or I could do it, but if you've got a premise or a vision or a pitch for a comic series, the execution is never going to look as good as it does in the first issue and the first story. So I was expecting this comic to be good, and so it is.

Writer Joshua Williamson's approach to this issue is to not try to do too much. He starts us off with only a few Legionnaires. Already that puts him one ahead of Brian Michael Bendis at this same stage: we're spending more time with fewer characters, and getting to know them. Furthermore, the stories that they're part of are small ones. We're working our way up to the big epics, learning the characters and the world while we're at it.

There are plenty of comparisons available to previous versions of the Legion. Williamson's no-superheroes law is similar to the premise of Mark Waid's threeboot setup, only simpler, on the one hand, and more audience-friendly on the other. The gradual introduction of the characters resembles what was done with the reboot Legion early on. None of this is a criticism. There was a lot done right in earlier Legion comics, and it would be a shame not to learn from it. Certainly this comic book doesn't feel like just a retread.

In last month's Superman: 1000 Annual, or whatever its plaguy name was, we saw Brainiac assign Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman, the task of making sure that the Legion didn't become a problem in this world. And in this issue, we have R.J. Brande assassinated by... Mekt Ranzz using the Legion symbol? We can sort of mentally fill in how this might work. Henshaw puts together his own secret "Legion", full of bad actors, to fill the space of a real Legion and prevent them from coming together, and Mekt is one of his recruits. Maybe Henshaw even has Brainiac's knowledge of Legion history to inform his efforts. This suggests that whoever else is in on this with Mekt will be people we've heard of before. Anyway, this is also similar to how the threeboot treated Mekt and his "Wanderers"; an older, lower-profile supergroup with fewer scruples than the Legion. Now that I say it, it's also similar to Mekt in the animated series.

I like the Brainiac 5 we're getting here. Actually they're calling him "Brainiac One of Five", but I'm not going to use that until I know what it means. I miss the blond hair, but I do like that a) he is able to work with Tenzil, and b) he is on task rather than not wanting to be bothered by any of this.

My overall evaluation of the comic book? Well, it's a good start. It's an intriguing read with a lot of nice touches and seems to lay a solid foundation for whatever is to come. I have a qualm about the possibility that this Legion will end up being tangled in continuity with the other Legions, but then, maybe it won't. And, one last thing? I'd like to see a villain in this story. I'd like to see the Legionnaires, once they get their ducks in a row, fighting someone other than "society" or "the Peacemaker force" (but not, please, straight to "Brainiac and the forces of continuity").

See you in a month! I already can't wait.

Art: 142 panels / 30 pages = 4.7 panels/page. Two double-page spreads, one arrangement of 7 panels across 2 pages.

 How many panels are there on page 1? I can't figure it out. Somewhere between 4 and 18. I'll say 10. There are a few pages like this... Hayden Sherman is not making this easy for me. That's good! They're trying stuff.

I'm not sure yet how to characterize Sherman's art. I'll work on it. They render the Legionnaires very much as kids; they look quite young. They're also pretty androgynous, which seems to be a deliberate choice, and it's one I like. Cheerful? Is that the word I want? It's true, anyway. But there's more to it than that. In some ways the characters look more like illustrations than comic-book characters (complimentary).

I don't usually talk about the lettering, but this time I need to. The typeface changes when the characters are shouting, and during Lightning Lad's action scene, and that's an interesting effect... but the way Titanians' telepathy is rendered is beautiful and wonderful! I'm still figuring out how to read it, exactly. Should letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou or Hayden Sherman get the credit for it?

Membership Notes: Well, there's no Legion yet--or, rather, maybe there is, but it's not our Legion if so--but the viewpoint characters we're following around are the kids we recognize as Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Brainiac 5, and Matter-Eater Lad. In addition, we see Lightning Lass and Magno (not that I think Magno is more than a walk-on at least at the moment), and get hints that we might be soon meeting Triplicate Girl.

Superman 2026 Annual: Year One Thousand #1 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

I'm writing this paragraph on Monday, July 27th. I haven't seen any of the previews for this comic. But I'm going to make a prediction here, which is that, as far as the fiveboot Legion is concerned, you don't have to know anything about what happens in this issue. We'll see!

Now that I've read it...

No, some of this is going to come into play. After the events of DC KO, Superman has a lot of extra cosmic power. He uses it to set the timestream straight and make it so that all versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes are still possible and still exist, including at least some of Darkseid's Omega Legion, who are now very very sorry for what they've done, but are also captives of Brainiac One Million, who has also captured all of the other Legionful futures. Brainiac 1.0x10^6 also wants to hijack a different future, newly created by Superman somehow. Right now it has no superheroes, and he assigns Cyborg Superman, of all people, to prevent a Legion from forming. One must assume that the new Legion in the upcoming series will have to deal with this.

Review:

Well, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be a comic in which blocks were rearranged. I kind of wish it had been a bit more than that, though.

How is it as a Superman comic? That is the name on the cover, after all. I guess it's good enough. The throughline of the story is that Superman keeps wanting to do one more thing before he finally goes home to Lois and the 21st century, and in the end, as he says, his past saves him from his preoccupation with the future and he does go home. That's a story, contained in this one issue, even if there are lots of competing distractions (the Infinite Man! Pandora! The Hourman with the emphasized jowl lines!) keeping us from seeing it. But it's pretty weak. If I was a Superman fan who didn't care about the Legion, I'd advise myself to skip this one and pick up the storyline in Action #1100.

But, as you all know and as fate would have it, I do care about the Legion, so let's look at that. I think we can conclude that DC will simply never kill off all Legions except for the one they want to move forward with. They didn't during Infinite Crisis, they didn't during Final Crisis, and now they didn't during DC KO. Nor should they! If they did, it would just be a countdown until someone brought 'em back anyway. But I think we would like to see a resolution for some of the issues surrounding all these Legions. I do want Legion comics: I want them to be about futuristic superheroes inspired by Superman, having optimistic science fiction adventures. I don't want them to be about kicking DC continuity around the block one more time. If there must be a reboot, then get it over with and just give us some good comics. Don't linger on the meta stuff. Nobody likes it!

No, for those of us who are fond of all the past versions of the Legion, we got it underlined for us three times that they're still around and not going anywhere. "Long live all the Legions...", "...every version deserved to live...", "all Legions are now possible." It's very nice. I don't know if it's any way to run comic book continuity, but that's their problem.

I was hoping the new Legion would get off to a clean start. And maybe they will. But this comic seems to be suggesting that they won't.

One interesting thing. There's no explanation in this comic of why the Legion of Super-Heroes is such a big deal. The closest anybody gets is Brainiac 1.0x10^6, who says they were inspired by Superman. Are we just supposed to know? Or is Joshua Williamson saving that material for the actual Legion comic? I do think there should have been something about it, though. I have it on good authority that every comic book is someone's first.

As Brian Hyland once said, see you in September! (At the latest. I may post other stuff before that.)

Notes:

We can see some tubes in Brainiac 1.0x10^6's lab with past versions of the Legion in them: Silver Age, Five Years Later, retroboot, reboot, threeboot, and fourboot. And I guess we have to include the Omega Legion too. Will they see any use? Who knows?

How many of us recognized the Infinite Man from his silhouette on page 10? Although I did wonder if it might be Superman himself, with his new hat. But I guess if that had been it they would have tried to match it more exactly.

The Time Trapper has now been a rogue Controller, the personification of entropy, Cosmic Boy, Superboy-Prime, Doomsday, and Superman. I've checked the schedule, and your turn is Tuesday the 18th. Bring snacks.

There's a preview of LSH v9 #1, just the first three pages, and according to the Interlac on the second page, the city we see is "Superlopolis". I wonder if that's correct.

I would like us all to get away from this habit of distinguishing parallel worlds by what superheroes are in them. Are superheroes that important? What about the world with no shrimp, or the world with nothing but shrimp? There must be some other stuff going on.

Art: 175 panels/38 pages = 4.6 panels/page. Two splash pages, five combined pages.

The art is done by Eddy Barrows and Yasmine Putri, but I'm not a hundred percent how it was split up. According to the credits, there are two stories in this comic, but where does one end and the other start? I guess the Barrows one ends when Superman is rescued by the time bubble, and the Putri one starts on the next page with Lightning Lad. They're both pretty good. Putri makes Hourman look kindly, which has got to be a tough assignment. It's a very water-coloury style, which I always like. Barrows also gets paintery with some of his panels, to good effect, although his characters sometimes get a bit Gary Frank around the eyes.

Look, Nah, No Hands

 Recently had an exchange on Bluesky with a chap who said, in relation to the current political situation in the United States, "We need the Legion!" To which my response was, if I remember right, "No, we need the Authority!" Maybe I don't have the Authority analyzed quite right here, but my point was that Donald Trump doesn't make a great Legion of Super-Heroes villain specifically.

It's true that the LSH has brought down corrupt politicians in the past. There was the story in the Baxter run, about Universo's pet president. There was the reboot sequence where Cosmic Boy outsmarts President Chu and ends her regime. Still, I would say that the first is really a story about the Legion versus Universo, and I would say that the second is a long-running subplot.

But! There was a Legion story in which the world faced immense political corruption, violent revolution and even more violent reprisals, isolation from traditional allies, and ecological disaster. This was the Terra Mosaic story in the Five Years Later era (written by Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum). Basically, the Dominion had infiltrated Earth's government and installed its own puppets, to Earth's great detriment, and various Legion-related characters got involved with the resistance to this government in different ways.

When the conflict between the government and resistance boiled over into a full-on war, the United Planets calls in the Legion to go in and help. And the Legion, uncharacteristically, refuses. They say, no, Earth has to win this fight itself. Earth is fighting for its own soul. Of course the Legion could intervene and turn a victory over to the people of Earth, but it was the people of Earth who let the Dominion take over in the first place, who accepted their influence, and now it's the people of Earth who have to throw it off.

This brings to my mind Lex Luthor's complaint about Superman, that Superman's presence makes the Earth dependent on him and unable to achieve the greatness that they otherwise could. I don't think Luthor is correct, because I don't think Superman does make the Earth dependent on him... but if 30th-century Earth slid into brutal tyranny of their own weakness, they would be dependent on the Legion if they needed the Legion to pull them out of it. And, note, most of the Legionnaires at the time were no more Earthlings than Superman is.

Similarly in 2026 reality. It wasn't Universo who inflicted Donald Trump on the world. We, collectively, did that ourselves. I'm as prone as anyone to imagining how the Legion of Super-Heroes, or Superman, or Light Yagami, might use their abilities to bail us out of this widening gyre, but we'd still be the same people at the end of it, and if we got ourselves in trouble once, we'd do it again. We've got to fix it ourselves, and we've got to learn, and we've got to change, and we've got to teach our children wisdom.

It's a Bad Codename, Though. Did He Call Himself That?

A while ago one of my intrepid correspondents asked if I'd do an article on the Composite Superman. I said sure why not. (Blithely.) I soon ran into trouble with that: I don't have any Composite Superman stories in my possession, and for all I know I've never read any. But I'm not going to let that stop me.

Some of Superman's villains have this background of being just a normal sort of guy who randomly gets superpowers and becomes an enemy of Superman because reasons. The Composite Superman is one such. And I don't really need to address most of his deal (although he's got a pretty good look! Half Superman, half Batman, but with green skin! Why does he look like that? Shut up, that's why), but the thing that makes him on-topic for this blog is that he gets the powers of pretty much the entire Legion of Super-Heroes, and uses them to fight Superman, Batman, and Robin.

A Superman villain with the powers of the Legion is, on one level, a neat idea. (In the sense of, the Legion is very powerful as a group, and someone with all their powers would be a worthy adversary for Superman.) It's also a lazy idea. (In the sense of, instead of coming up with a new idea for a villain's abilities, we could just borrow from these characters over here!) And, my main point, it's also dismissive of the Legion.

The Legion of Super-Heroes are more than a long list of code names, real names, home planets, and superpowers. They're characters, with individual histories and personalities, who have existed in a context for a long time, and are not just ore to be mined for someone else's story. For the World's Finest writers to ignore all of that and copy the powers down into their new throwaway supervillain speaks to the role and status of the Legion in DC continuity.

For that matter, it also undercuts the Legion's theme of teamwork, since the Composite Superman has all the powers in one person. He doesn't need to act as a teammate.

And that's what I have to say about the Composite Superman.

I don't want to make too big a deal of it. It's a small deal.

Except that it's been over a decade since DC stopped publishing stories about the retroboot Legion (although there was a brief period during which Brian Michael Bendis did whatever that was he thought he was doing), and during that time DC showed that the Legion really wasn't a priority for them, so, whatever size deal it is, it's disheartening. Legion World turns its lonely eyes to Joshua Williamson.

Everybody Stand Back. I've Lost My Emerald Contact Lens of Ekron

So I figured, let's try something. Pick out a Legion of Super-Heroes comic at random and see what's in it that I can write some kind of article about. So I reached into the stacks and pulled out Legionnaires #42. It's got Kinetix on the cover, in her kitty-cat look, being blasted by Mysa the Hag. Power... ...And Loss! (Written by Stern and McCraw; art by the Moys and Carani.)

Okay. Let's see what's going on in here. Title is "When Strikes the Sorceress!"

Basically, Mysa had previously sent Kinetix out to get the Emerald Eye of Ekron for her, but Kinetix failed to do that, and now Mysa wants to punish her, so Mysa brought a Legion cruiser containing Kinetix, her family, Live Wire, Triad, XS, and Invisible Kid to the Sorcerer's World. (Admirably limited dramatis personae!) There's a confrontation, and some fighting, and eventually Kinetix, her mother, and Mysa have an argument about some fantasy BS that ends with Kinetix being returned to her original form and powers, and everyone being magically sent home.

One thing I noticed about this issue, and the first part of the reboot in general, is that, there are a lot of women wielding power recklessly. In this story, Mysa, Kinetix, and Kinetix's mother Azra do eventually resolve their situation, but only after Mysa abducts seven people into considerable danger. Kinetix's own desire for power is always portrayed as a flaw. Elsewhere in this run, Saturn Girl's powers are always being policed in one way or another. Phantom Girl's mother and President Chu are both ruthless politicians. Shrinking Violet's tenure as Legion leader is compromised by her takeover by the Emerald Eye (itself a female-associated artifact). Andromeda's career as a Legionnaire is almost completely negated by her hateful ideas!

Meanwhile, there's no such negative association with male authorities like R.J. Brande or... well, actually, yes there is with Leland McCauley. So it doesn't all go one way.

The other thing about this comic is that it's got some chewy superpowered tactics to discuss. I love this stuff. Anytime you've got a team of superheroes and a problem, I want to try to work out what they can do to solve it. For instance:

- Mysa attacks the Legion with lightning, and Live Wire absorbs it harmlessly, astonishing her. "This cannot be!" Do some homework, Mysa

- Invisible Kid goes invisible immediately on their arrival, so Mysa doesn't even know he's there in the first place. He's therefore able to get Kinetix's family out of immediate danger. This is the thing about illusion powers: they work best when your opponent has no idea that they're facing illusion powers. Maybe he shouldn't call himself "Invisible Kid"!

- Mysa imprisons the Legionnaires in magical bonds, which XS tries to vibrate her way out of, but there's something else they could have done: what if Triad had reunited to a single (imprisoned) self, and then retriplicated? Would she then have two selves free? I think it was worth a shot

Things like this are important for teams like the Legion, where each individual hero is primarily a team member and not a solo hero. They need to know how to work the combinations to be effective; otherwise, you've just got a bunch of specialized hammers looking for specialized nails.

So that's what I got out of it. Good comic!

The Legionnaires: the Walk-Ons

Entropy Kid; Radius Lad; X-Ray Girl. Created by Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan Sook.

Bendis and Sook's fourboot Legion of Super-Heroes had, among its qualities, a large cast of characters that left many characters underdefined. I can't guarantee that every well-established Legionnaire actually got a line of dialogue over the course of the series.

Among the characters who were shortchanged were three who did nothing more than show up in crowd scenes. There's nothing in the text of the comics that tells us anything about them, but there they were, and some information has leaked out anyway. (I remember there was all kinds of speculation about who the skeleton was in the green containment suit! "Could be Chemical King! Or Infectious Lass!") Here they are.

It seems that Ryan Sook did reveal something about their superpowers, at least. X-Ray Girl can make things transparent at a touch. Radius Lad can receive and utter any broadcast signal in the galaxy, and this can be more or less useful depending on the nature of the signal. And Entropy Kid can control the rate of decay of matter. So there you have it.

Will we ever get to see these Legionnaires in action? At the moment you'd have to say it's not likely. I don't mind them existing, though; my philosophy in these matters is 'more is better'. Especially since they're obviously nonhuman; there's been too little of that in Legion comics.

Listen to Me

 Sorry for not posting more. I don't mean to not post stuff here. But it's just so easy.

Anyway, I recently appeared on the Legion of Substitute Podcasters: Tomorrow's Heroes Today podcast, discussing issue #9 of the Threeboot. Give it a listen if you're of a mind to. This may not be the best link for it, but any podcatcher you use ought to be able to set you right if it doesn't work for you.

Take care!

Time Beacons: My Time Travel Nexus Articles

In 2019-2020 I wrote a series of articles for the Time Travel Nexus website. I didn't stop so much as the website stopped updating; their newest article was posted in early 2021 and I haven't heard from them at all. The website's mission was to highlight fictional depictions of time travel, so my articles, in turn, looked at Legion of Super-Heroes stories from the perspective of what we could learn about time travel as shown in those comics. I called the series "Time Beacons", for partially obvious reasons. Might I continue writing them and posting them here? The last article is a satisfying stopping point, but certainly there's more material out there that I had been planning to cover! No promises, but I might come back to it a little bit.

Anyway, I wrote a total of ten articles for TTN, and I'm proud of them, and if you'd care to check them out yourself, this is them:

Time Beacons 1: The Legion of Super-Heroes (Adventure #247)

Time Beacons 2: The Fatal Five / The Doomed Legionnaire (Adventure #352-353)

Time Beacons 3: The Adult Legion / The War of the Legions (Adventure #354-355)

Time Beacons 4: Mordru the Merciless / The Devil's Jury (Adventure #369-370)

Time Beacons 5: The Hero Who Hated the Legion (S&LSH #216)

Time Beacons 6: We Can't Escape the Trap in Time (S&LSH #223)

Time Beacons 7: The Infinite Man Who Conquered the Legion  (S&LSH #233)

Time Beacons 8: The Great Darkness (LSHv2 #290-294)

Time Beacons 9: The Origin of the Universe File (LSHv2 #295)

Time Beacons 10: The Future Is Forever (LSHv2 #300)

Enjoy! And don't forget I'm also writing a fantasy story on my other site. It's going well!

The Legionnaires: Toyman

Toyman, aka Winn Schott, aka Winslow Schott Jr., aka Computer Lad, of 21st-century Earth. Created by a bunch of TV writers drawing upon various pre-existing Toyman characters created by lots of people.

This whole time there's been a character missing from my All Time Legion Roster page, and nobody's complained to me about it! Here's a character who joined the Legion five years ago, our time, and it's taken me this long to recognize it, and never a word from any of you on the subject. I give you one job.

Winn is a character from the Supergirl tv show. I watched the first few seasons of it, but eventually I just kind of fell away from the Arrowverse altogether. So I may not know all the things I know about this guy.

At the start he was a guy who worked with Supergirl's secret identity, Kara Danvers, at a big media corporation. He was sort of their IT expert, and he had an unreciprocated crush on Kara, which sometimes led him to engage in some crummy behaviour. Combine this with his backstory as the son of the supervillain Toyman, and you'll understand if I say that I was leery about what kinds of storylines he'd eventually get involved in. But it didn't happen: what happened instead was that he eventually did a kind of exchange-student thing with Brainiac 5, where Brainy hung out in the present day for a while and Winn went to the future and joined the Legion.

We don't have, I think, a whole lot of detail on what Winn did as a Legionnaire, but his qualifications were that he was just really good with technology. And... I dunno what I think of that. This 21st-century guy is better, a lot better, at using 31st-century technology than 31st-century people? That sounds like some nonsense to me. But a) I do think that people's raw smarts don't increase over a thousand years, and b) he is the Toyman's son. So... sure? Still seems like a dumb idea to me, but I think we can all agree that there'd be a lot fewer Legionnaires on the historical list if "seems like a dumb idea" was disqualifying.

One detail: apparently Winn marries Ayla Ranzz while in the future, and they have a daughter. I don't think Ayla is treated well in these televisual adaptations. But whatever, the show's called Supergirl; this is all details.

(Probably should also note that there's a long and occasionally proud tradition of the Legion interacting with the descendants of Superman villains, and sometimes even making them Legionnaires. Brainiac 5 of course, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.)

Anyway, welcome to the blog, Winn. You earned it. You got into the Legion of Super-Heroes, and, as Sherwood Kiraly would say, that's a lot harder than getting into the phone book.

Legion of Super-Heroes (animated feature, 2023) Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Supergirl, freshly arrived on Earth, is having trouble fitting in with the Justice League because she's not used to using superpowers and misses the high-tech life on Krypton. Superman has the bright idea of sending her to the future, which is also high-tech, and she can train at Legion Academy. This doesn't go really well but Supergirl and the other Academy students redeem themselves when the Dark Circle try to steal the Miracle Machine and only the students can stop them.

This fits into the continuity of DC's direct-to-video features in some way that seems important but I don't know anything about.

Review:

Not sure what the best way is to come at this review. This feature was not a great one for longtime LSH veteran fans. We know too much and have too many expectations that get thwarted. But it's much better for new fans, and that's obviously a good quality to have.

Look what we've got. First of all, we've got Supergirl. Everybody kind of knows Supergirl, and if they don't, they get a good introduction to her anyway. Then we find that she's going to be our key into the 31st century, just like Superboy was in the Silver Age comics. That's smart; she, as a contemporary character, is going to have similar questions to what we would if we visited the future.

Second we've got the Legion Academy. This allows us to meet Legion characters in small doses, and the classes give us a lot of useful exposition about what the Legion of Super-Heroes actually is and does. It also gives us a sense of how special it is to be a Legionnaire and what an accomplishment it is to become one.

We also get a lot of longtime Legion storytelling beats, sometimes in ways that don't feel right, but nothing that isn't fair play. For instance:

I know it seems weird to see longtime Legionnaires like Phantom Girl, Invisible Kid, Triplicate Girl, and Dawnstar as Academy students, bemoaning how their weak powers mean they'll never become Legionnaires. But angsting over one's weak powers has been a Legion trope for most of their history. Angsting over whether one will become a Legionnaire has been a Legion trope for most of their history.

There's a part where one character turns traitor, and it's not a character who we're used to seeing do that kind of thing, and I imagine there's a lot of fumfuring out there about it... but it was set up very well indeed, and having a Legionnaire turn traitor has been a Legion trope for most of their history.

Stealing the Miracle Machine? We've seen that before. Brainiac 5 being a prickly outsider who doesn't think he belongs on the team? We've seen that before. One-third of Triplicate Girl getting killed? Seen it before.

So this is all fine. It's a perfectly reasonable introduction story for the Legion, with some good moments for Supergirl and Brainiac 5, and a good final villain (whom, I'll say it first, I would be perfectly happy to have this be the canonical leader of the Dark Circle). If they want to do any more Legion features, which I hope they do, they've got a good foundation to build on.

But there is a thing I don't like here, and I'll tell you what it is:

There aren't a lot of just people in this feature.

When Kara is wandering the mall at the beginning, there are a few citizens also there, including the security guard and the other girls and the building owner. But the place looks pretty empty other than them. Then, in the 31st century, I don't think we meet anybody other than Legionnaires, Academy students, and villains. This is important! What are superheroes for if not to protect regular people? They're an important part of the story. If it's just superhumans versus superhumans... then that turns it into an entirely different genre, and not one that I'm much interested in.

I understand that this would make it a lot more work to animate. Fine. I don't care. Try. Do something. Otherwise we have the premise of superheroes without the fantasy of superheroes, and that's not a good combination. (See this article for more on this.)

Notes:

- is Shadow Lass ever going to be allowed to have her own powers in animation? I remember in JLU she had some kind of pink ray, and then in this she had grasping tendrils and some kind of teleportation (right?)

- new name for "Arms-Fall-Off Boy". Also, if his power works as seen here, that's actually a pretty good street-level power. It's not a joke. The joke is if his arm just falls off and then he has to pick it up and whang people with it

- Dawnstar has an enthusiastic friendly personality here, miles away from her 1970s aloofness. Which... I'm okay with that. The aloofness was kind of an ethnic stereotype in the first place

Art:

The art of this feature was generally very good. The style they're using didn't always work for me, as in the initial race between Kara and her mother on Krypton. (Another point about that opening sequence. Those are some Chuck-Jones-Bugs-Bunny-ass-looking clouds. Not a criticism.) But sometimes it was very attractive. Making Brainy bald was an interesting choice; in general I didn't like it, but they did a good job on his facial expressions, especially in the second half, and the bald worked well with that.

A note on the sound (something that never comes up when I'm reviewing a comic book!): the sound effect of Bouncing Boy bouncing was really good.

We should note, of course, that the designs of the individual Legionnaires tended to be recent designs: Ryan Sook costumes, where available.

Membership Notes:

Boy are there ever a lot of Legionnaires shown here! I'll let someone else count 'em up. Is that Lori Morning I saw there at the end in one of her H-Dial identities? The big question for me here is, does Arms-Fall-Off Boy now count as a full Legionnaire? I'm inclined to say no, because we haven't had a story yet where he *acts* as a Legionnaire, but it's an argument...

A Farm in the Country Where He Can Run and Play

I've pointed out before how, for a while, the Legion of Super-Heroes was the franchise that DC Comics used for a lot of their experiments with long-form storytelling. The story of Lightning Lad's death and resurrection, for example, took place over nine months, which was rare in the 1960s. Earthwar, Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Great Darkness Saga... they were all unusually long stories for their time. Even the Five Years Later series was very experimental, very un-episodic, and very long.

That's not really what it's for anymore.

The Legion has been rebooted enough times that DC must have had to think, many times, about just what you can do, narratively, with this group of superheroes. One thing they've settled on, many times, is that the Legion is not, basically, a concept of a team of futuristic teenagers who were inspired by the legend of Superman. The Legion is the set of characters created in the 1950s through 1980s who live in the future and belong to a team that was inspired by the legend of Superman.

This is where DC and I don't exactly see eye-to-eye, because I think they might have been better served to be true to the concept, at times, even at the expense of familiar characters. If each reboot had introduced a whole new roster of Legionnaires, designed for the times in which they were published and brought into the comic book gradually. They didn't do that. Every time the Legion has been founded, it's been founded by Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy. They've had to go back to the late '50s, early '60s, for their starting point.

This often works against efforts to make the Legion a team that's diverse enough to be 31st-century-realistic. That's not my point, but I did want to mention it.

My point is, it's hard for this not to lead to nostalgia. It's hard for writers to have to go back to the comics of their youth for characters and not get the message that the point of it all is the going back.

Let's look at the last few times a new writer started on the Legion, long-term.

2003: Mark Waid, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, rebooted the team to a lineup of characters that matched the Silver Age team

2005: Geoff Johns, a veteran comic-book writer, brought back a lightly edited 1980s Legion for use in his comic books, and used them as supporting characters for Superman

2006: Jim Shooter, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, took over Waid's team and did some stories where he worked out some old grudges and gratitudes from earlier in his career

2009: Geoff Johns, whose retroboot Legion is the only one left standing, puts the Legion in some extremely nostalgic stories in Adventure Comics. But he quickly loses interest

2010: Paul Levitz, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, takes over Johns's Legion for a few years. Toward the end, he brings in Keith Giffen as artist and co-writer, a veteran comic-book creator who had written and drawn the Legion in the past

2019: Brian Michael Bendis, a veteran comic-book writer, starts a new series with a Legion lineup that draws heavily from '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s characters, but not '90s, '00s, or '10s

Here's what I think DC's idea of the Legion is now. I think their idea is that it's where veteran writers can take their nostalgia out for a walk.

That's certainly what Geoff Johns was doing. I wouldn't dare to imagine what Shooter thought he was doing. Waid and Levitz and Bendis, on the other hand... I think all of them were actually trying to do good stuff, to bring some vision to the title. (Some with more success than others.) But I don't think that's why DC gave them the job. I think DC gave them the job because they were proven veterans who loved the Legion from long ago. And I don't think that bodes well for who gets to write the Legion next.

All-Time Legion Roster

I try to keep a master list of Legionnaires on this site. It's surprisingly difficult to decide just what kind of list it should be, but, anyway, here's this one. Please let me know if there's anything I got straight wrong or any detail I left out that's too major to be left out. Also, when I was listing continuities, I typically didn't mention "animated" unless it was specifically informative to do so.

Legionnaire	Also	Continuities	Creators & Notes
Atmos	Marak Russen of Xanthu	orig, 2b	Levitz, Larocque
Blok	Blok of Dryad	orig, 4b	Conway, Staton
Blood Claw	Blood Claw of Khundia	orig (5YL)	the Bierbaums, Immonen
Bouncing Boy	Charles Foster Taine of Earth	all but 3b	Siegel, Mooney
Brainiac 5	Querl Dox of Colu; also 5, Brainiac 5.1	all	Siegel, Mooney
Calamity King	E. Davis Ester of Touston	orig	Hamilton, Swan
Catspaw	April Dumaka of Earth	orig: 5YL	Bierbaums, Sprouse
Celeste	Celeste Rockfish of Earth; also Celeste McCauley, Neon	orig: 5YL	Giffen, Bierbaums, Gordon
Chameleon Boy	Reep Daggle of Durla; sometimes just Chameleon	all	Siegel, Mooney
Chameleon Girl	Yera Allon of Durla	orig	Levitz, Giffen
Chemical Kid	Hadru Jamik of Phlon	orig: retro	Levitz, Jimenez
Chemical King	Condo Arlik of Phlon	orig, 2b	Shooter, Swan
Chlorophyll Kid	Ral Benem of Mardru; also Plant Lad	orig, 3b	Hamilton, Forte
Color Kid	Ulu Vakk of Lupra	orig	Hamilton, Swan, Jeff Greenberg
Colossal Boy	Gim Allon of Earth; also Leviathan, Micro Lad	all	Siegel, Mooney
Comet Queen	Grava of Extal Colony (Quaal III)	orig	Levitz, Giffen
Computo	Danielle Foccart of Earth, or just Computo	orig (esp. SW6) and 4b	Levitz, Giffen
Cosmic Boy	Rokk Krinn of Braal; also Polestar	all	Binder, Plastino
Crystal Kid	Bobb Kohan of Earth	orig	Conway, Ditko, Robert Cohen
Dawnstar	Dawnstar Gr'Ell of Starhaven, or just Dawnstar	orig, 4b	Levitz, Grell
Devlin	Devlin O'Ryan of Xanthu	orig (5YL)	Giffen, Bierbaums
Dr. Fate	?	4b only	Bendis, Sook (orig Dr. Fate created by Gardner Fox & Howard Sherman)
Dragonmage	Xao Jin of Earth	orig (SW6)	Bierbaums, Sprouse
Dragonwing	Marya Pai of Earth	orig (retro)	Levitz, Jimenez
Dream Boy	Rol Purtha of Naltor	3b	Waid, Kitson
Dream Girl	Nura Nal of Naltor; also Nura Schnappin, Dreamer	all	Hamilton, Forte
Earth-Man	Kirt Niedrigh of Earth; also Zoraz, Absorbency Boy	orig	Bates, Grell
Echo	Myke-4 Astor of Khundish Calish-Aetia	orig	Shooter, Swan
Element Lad	Jan Arrah of Trom; also Alchemist	all	Hamilton, Forte
Entropy Kid	?	4b only	Bendis, Sook; pink and purple uniform, alien, long skull; name revealed on Reddit
Ferro Lad	Andrew Nolan of Earth; also Ferro	all but 3b	Shooter, Moldoff
Fire Lad	Staq Mavlen of Shwar	orig	Hamilton, Forte
Firefist	Firefist of Khundia	orig (5YL)	Bierbaums, Immonen
Flederweb	Flederweb of Aetia	orig (5YL)	Bierbaums, Immonen
Gates	Ti'julk M'rasz of Vyrga	2b, orig (retro)	McCraw, Moder, Waid
Gazelle	Giselle Smith of Triton	3b	Shooter, Manapul
Gear	I.Z.O.R. of Linsner	2b	McCraw, Peyer, Kolins
Glorith	Glorith of Baaldur and/or Zerox	orig (retro)... only?	Siegel, Forte, but also Levitz, Jimenez
Gold Lantern	Kala Lour	4b only	Bendis, Sook
Harmonia	Harmonia Li of Earth	orig (retro)	Levitz, Cinar
Impulse	Kent Shakespeare of Earth	orig (5YL)	Giffen, Bierbaums, Gordon
Infectious Lass	Drura Sehpt of Somahtur	orig, 2b	Bates, Cockrum
Invisible Kid	Lyle Norg of Earth	orig, 2b, 3b	Siegel, Mooney
Invisible Kid II	Jacques Foccart of Earth or Kit-Son; also Evanesce, Invisible Gentleman	orig, 2b, 4b, animated	Levitz, Giffen
Karate Kid	Val Armorr of Earth	all	Shooter, Moldoff
Karate Kid II	Myg of Lythyl	orig	Levitz, Lightle
Kid Quantum	James Cullen of Antares or of Xanthu	orig (5YL), 2b	Bierbaums, David A. Williams
Kid Quantum II	Jazmin Cullen of Xanthu	2b	McCraw, Peyer, Moder
Kinetix	Zoe Saugin of Aleph	2b	McCraw, Moder, Waid
Kono	Brita An'nan of Sklar	orig, 2b	Giffen, Bierbaums, Gordon
Laurel	Laurel Gand of Daxam or of Ricklef II, also Andromeda, Sister Andromeda	orig (5YL), 2b	Giffen, Bierbaums, Gordon, James Ricklef, Arne Starkey
Lightning Lad	Garth Ranzz of Winath; also Live Wire	all	Binder, Plastino
Lightning Lass	Ayla Ranzz of Winath; also Light Lass, Gossamer, Pulse, Spark	all	Hamilton, Forte
Magnetic Kid	Pol Krinn of Braal	orig	Hamilton, Forte
Magno	Dyrk Magz of Braal	2b	McCraw, Stern, Moy
Matter-Eater Lad	Tenzil Kem of Bismoll	all	Siegel, Forte
Mon-El	Lar Gand of Daxam or New Krypton; also M'Onel, Valor	all	Bernstein, Papp
Monster Boy	Arune Singh of Tor-Etto	4b	Bendis, Sook
Monstress	Candi Pyponte-Le Parc III of Xanthu	2b	McCraw, Peyer, Moder
Nemesis Kid	Hart Druiter of Myar	orig, 3b, animated (Legionnaire only in animated continuity)	Shooter, Moldoff
Night Girl	Lydda Jath of Kathoon	orig, 2b	Hamilton, Forte
Nightwind	Berta Haris of Earth	orig, 2b	Conway, Ditko, Robert Harris
Phantom Girl	Tinya Wazzo of Bgtzl; also Apparition	all	Siegel, Mooney
Polar Boy	Brek Bannin of Tharr	orig, 2b, 3b	Hamilton, Forte
Porcupine Pete	Peter Dursin of Earth	orig	Bates, Cockrum
Princess Projectra	Wilimena Morgana Daergina Annaxandra Projectra Velorya Vauxhall of Orando; also Queen Projectra, Projectra, Sensor Girl, Sensor	all	Shooter, Moldoff
Quislet	(unpronounceable glyph) of Teall	orig	Levitz, Lightle
Radius Lad	?	4b	Bendis, Sook
Reflecto	Stig Ah of Rimbor	orig	Shooter
Saturn Girl	Imra Ardeen of Titan; also Imra Ardeen Ranzz	all	Binder, Plastino
Shadow Lass	Tasmia Mallor of Talok VIII; also Umbra	all	Shooter, Swan
Shikari	Shikari Lonestar of the Kwai	2b	Abnett, Lanning, Coipel
Shrinking Violet	Salu Digby of Imsk; also Atom Girl, LeViathan, Virus	all	Siegel, Mooney
Soultaker	?	only appeared in Doomsday Clock	Johns, Frank
Spider Girl	Sussa Paka of Taltar; also Wave	orig, 2b	Siegel, Forte, Jim Tillery
Star Boy	Thom Kallor of Xanthu; also Starman	all	Binder, Papp
Stone Boy	Dag Wentim of Zwen	orig	Hamilton, Forte
Storm Boy	Myke Chypurz	orig	Siegel, Forte
Sun Boy	Dirk Morgna of Earth; also Inferno	all	Siegel, Mooney
Superboy	Kal-El of Krypton, Clark Kent of Earth, Superman	orig	Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster; by special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family
Superboy II	Connor Kent of Earth, Kon-El	2b	Kesel, Grummett
Superboy III	Jon Kent of Earth; also Superman	4b	Jurgens
Supergirl	Kara Zor-El of Krypton	orig, 3b	Binder, Plastino
Superman-X	Kell-El of Earth	animated	team of TV writers led by Michael Jelenic
Tellus	Ganglios of Hykraius	orig	Levitz, Lightle
Thunder	CeCe Beck of Binderaan	2b	Ordway, Manley
Timber Wolf	Brin Londo of Zuun (or Rimbor); also Furball	all	Hamilton, Forte
Thorn	Rose Forrest of Earth	4b	Kanigher, Andru. Officially the Legion's liaison to the UP; not necessarily a regular Legionnaire
Toyman	Winslow "Winn" Schott Jr. of 21st-century Earth, also Computer Lad	Arrowverse only	that's a complicated question
Triplicate Girl	Luornu Durgo of Cargg (also Carggg); also Triad, Duo Damsel, Una, Duplicate Girl, Duplicate Damsel	all	Siegel, Mooney
Tyroc	Troy Stewart of Earth (Marzal)	orig	Bates, Grell
Ultra Boy	Jo Nah of Rimbor	all	Siegel, Swan
Veilmist	Veilmist of Khundia	orig (5YL)	Bierbaums, Immonen
Visi-Lad	Visi-Lad of Earth	orig	Levitz, Larocque
White Witch	Mysa Nal or Xola Aq of Naltor or Zerox; also Jewel	all	Bridwell, Swan
Wildfire	Drake Burroughs of Earth; also Erg-1, NRG, Jahr-Drake Ningle (Blast-Off) combined with Randall Burroughs (Atom'X) of Xanthu	all	Bates, Cockrum
X-Ray Girl	?	4b	Bendis, Sook; green-suited skeleton; name revealed on Reddit
XS	Jenni Ognats of Aarok	2b, orig (retro)	McCraw, Moy

Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes #6 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

We open on Vandal Savage as the sheriff in an Old West town. Everyone's scared of him. He's got Batman locked up in the hoosegow; apparently he's keeping him around to taunt him with how the world he knows doesn't exist anymore. While this is going on a couple of deputies bring in Jonah Hex, who Savage regards as a sort of seed of the Age of Heroes; Savage kills Hex unceremoniously. But then it turns out Batman isn't Batman. It's Chameleon Boy in disguise. And Savage is surrounded by Legionnaires and JLAers. Because all of this--since sometime last issue--has been taking place inside the Gold Lantern ring, and they've just been letting Savage think he's won because they're trying to collect a complete confession from him for the benefit of the Elders of Oa. Savage resists a little but eventually the Elders remove him from this reality and name Gold Lantern the new leader of the Gold Lantern Corps, which he is to go build. There's a bit of celebration and the Legion prepares to send the League home, and we get one last view of Savage, in some other dimension, being helped up at the side of the road by Jonah Hex.

Review:

Well, that was a legit ending. No complaints on that basis. It's an ending that made sense and was based on things that were emphasized throughout the story. And Brainiac 5 is given an excellent squelch line on Vandal Savage, so that was satisfying.

But...

If you think about what all happened in these six issues... it's not a lot. This story could have fit into one or two comics. And even then it'd be an understated kind of story.

And that would be fine if something other than plot was happening in all those comics. But really it wasn't. A lot of churn. Some little fun character moments. Really a lot of time and space was taken up by the large unwieldy cast of characters being a large unwieldy cast of characters.

(Thought experiment. Pick Brainy, Gold Lantern, and two other Legionnaires. Now pick four JLAers. Now replot the story with just those eight heroes. Think of everything you'd be able to do!)

One problem with Legion reboots is that they don't often produce classic stories in volume. The reboot was good for about five years and then great for three or four; that's the high-water mark. Waid and Kitson produced a couple of years of flawed but high-quality threeboot comics before turning it over to others. There were almost no good Legion comics in the retroboot. And now the fourboot... it's hardly even gotten started! We don't know these characters at all, and they haven't *done* anything!

I'm very disappointed. I'm glad to have Legion comics, but why are we getting Legion comics with such obvious flaws?

I'll give Bendis and Sook credit for this much: they've left the Legion in a good place. It's an interesting-looking team with a solid foundation of mythology and information and another creative team ought to be able to pick it up and do just about anything with it. I hope we see it happen.

Bah.

There was a time on this blog when I said that we were in a golden age of Legion comics and I hoped we were all appreciating it. I hope we all appreciated it.

Anyway! I'm not going anywhere; see you next time we have something to talk about!

Art: 98 panels/22 pages = 4.5 panels/page. 3 splash pages; 1 double-page spread; 2 cases of multiple panels spread across 2 pages.

I hope Scott Godlewski gets work on the strength of this series, because he's been quite impressive. Look at how he renders Jonah Hex on the last page. He's not just some fill-in artist; he portrays Hex with a great deal of assurance and an awareness of how much detail is needed. I've seen any number of fill-in artists who simply could not do that with anything like competence.

I haven't seen much in Legion comics for a long time that I thought was much good to read... but some of the art has been spectacular. Godlewski. Sook's been very good. Perez. Francis Portela. Gus Storms. Riley Rossmo. And I'm definitely leaving people out who oughtn't be left out.

Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes #5 Review

 What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The Justice League and the Legion of Super-Heroes put their heads together and things get a little tense while discussing Gold Lantern. The dark rift... eats everything? I think?... but not before Triplicate Girl and Batman figure out that Vandal Savage is behind it all, in some way related to the Legion of Doom's headquarters. Apparently Savage was trying to destroy the Age(s) of Heroes, and seems to think that he's accomplished that.

Review:

My copy of the comic has two covers and I didn't even have to pay any extra for it. Plus factor for me!

I haven't read whatever comics it was that established the Legion of Doom's headquarters as something that made sense to be involved in this story. It's touched on a little bit in the issue but not in any way that actually clears anything up. In this context it just seems arbitrary and pointless.

Five issues gone by and we finally have a villain. Hey, no rush. And Vandal Savage is a good villain for this crossover! Sort of! I mean, he's no match for about two-thirds of these characters in a one-on-one fight, but other than that he's perfect. But why'd it take so long to bring him in?

This series is more overinflated than a cheap bag of chips, is why. I can't think of a reason the first five issues couldn't have been boiled down to one. If you're reading this before you've bought your copy, please take this into account!

So we've got one issue left for the JLA and the LSH to defeat Savage... assuming that it happens in this series and not in Dark Crisis or whatever. I wonder if there'll be time to explain just what Savage's plan is. I mean, I get the motivation: removing the Age of Heroes so his great enemies won't be around to defeat him. That part makes perfect sense. And, also, is thematically appropriate for this era of the Legion! I like how this fits in. Is Savage going to turn out to be the anti-Rose?

What I don't get, and this is not a complaint, is a) how he's doing that, and b) what the situation is going to be like once he's done it. He's just going to remove some eras from the timeline? Does that work?

I don't think there's time for this miniseries to turn out to be worthwhile. There's just been so much fluff so far; Bendis can't make up for all of that in one issue. But a good final issue can at least make it... how shall I put it... notable.

Are you hearing all this speculation that Discovery is going to shut down DC Comics by the end of the year? It would be horrible, of course, if it happened. But can you imagine if this series was the last Legion of Super-Heroes series ever? Gross.

Art: 111 panels/22 pages = 5.0 panels/page. 3 splash pages, 4 double-page spreads containing, respectively, 3, 5, 10, and 8 panels each. Two twelve-panel pages!

If there's one good thing about this series, it's that it introduced us--well, those of us who didn't already know about him, as I didn't--to Scott Godlewski. He's just been very, very good for five issues. Look at his Vandal Savage on the last page, panel 3; very expressive. One qualm: there are a couple of panels on pages 17-18 that just show more of this darkness, and I'm not sure what we're supposed to get from them. They don't seem to be showing us anything.

Also, I'm not sure about Godlewski's Blok. Doesn't look bad, or anything, but... something's hitting me weird about it.

Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes #4 Review

 What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The big dark rift in the sky continues to get worse as the Legion of Super-Heroes and the Justice League all try to figure out where and when they are. Eventually Computo figures out how to bring everyone together (in the 21st century) as the rift covers the whole sky. There is a suggestion that the Legion is to blame for the rift because of their reckless time travel.

Review:

It's not like there's nothing of interest here. Gold Lantern meets Alan Scott in the 1930s, and it's kind of cool, for one thing. Batman and Rose get reacquainted, but nothing really comes of it. It's a mildly diverting read. But if anything's important here, we're only going to know it in retrospect. I don't have much to say about this comic book!

I'm glad we're getting Legion comics every so often, but getting these comics is a lot like not getting comics. Man, I hope Bendis does something cool in #5 or #6 that makes me go, "Ahhh... that changes everything! I have to go back and reread the whole run now!" That's likely, right?

Art: 98 panels/22 pages = 4.5 panels/page. 3 splash pages, double-page arrangements of 4 panels, 12 panels, 7 panels, and 8 panels.

I like Godlewski's style. I wonder where DC's been hiding him. He draws a good Bouncing Boy. Also, I like the coloring of the Alan Scott pages; very noir. I wish he had a more interesting story to draw.

That's Some Catch, That Catch-52

 Writer Jared Yates Sexton, whom I like, had a Substack post, and accompanying Twitter thread, a while ago about how today's political struggles aren't just about the present but also about our ideas of the past and the future. They are here and here; go read it and then come back here and we'll finish up. And stick around, because I think I've found something profound to say about superheroes in this one!

The thing that struck me about it that made me want to comment on it here, of course, is that it deals with the future. And around here, anything that has to do with the future might have to do with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Specifically. DC Comics is presenting us with a vision of the future in its (increasingly infrequent) Legion comics. What goes into that, and what comes out of it?

Despite that DC is owned by a Giant Corporation, I don't really think that the portrayal of the future in its comics was developed to serve any kind of corporate agenda. That would require a whole lot more competence and attention to detail than I've seen out of them in recent years. No, I think we can safely place the credit and/or blame on the various LSH writers over the years who've thought up what the future of a superhero world would be like.

And that's what it is: the future of a superhero world. Not the future of our world, because we don't live in a superhero world, and that's something we ought to be thankful for. So when we're thinking of the Legion's 31st century, we should keep that in mind. We don't want our world to be like this. We, regular humans, should have our own ideas for what we want to have happen and be working towards those.

One example. DC has, by now, given us a loose timeline for what kinds of things we ought to expect. There's a Great Disaster coming up, for one thing, and the Legion's generally more pleasant future, with its dozens of teenaged champions, only some time after that.

No matter what we do!

Well, then, there's no point in doing anything! Right? It'll be fine.

So that's one problem.

Another problem, which I don't want to not mention, but has been discussed plenty in other places, is how early Legion stories would give us a future with no Black people in it, and, when they first tried to fix that, made things even worse.

And, last, let's look at what happens in the Legion's future. (The superhero present must resemble the real-life present in at least some ways; the superhero future can look like anything.) Look at the various catastrophes that have befallen the 30th and 31st centuries: we've seen planetsworth of carnage and destruction caused by Mordru, the Time Trapper, Glorith, Computo, Darkseid, Ra's al Ghul... By superpowered individuals, is the point I'm trying to make. The cosmology of the Five Years Later era says it out loud: the fate of reality is a struggle between the Time Trapper (later Glorith) and Mordru, and the Legionnaires can only hope to keep them in stalemate.

I think I'm correct in saying that this kind of situation, in which reality is the battleground of supermen and everyone else are just faceless pawns and nameless victims, is a world of fascism. I'll go further: the basic idea of superheroes itself is fascist. (I'm not the first person to say so.) Superheroes have come a long way since they were first created, but the premise remains the same.

Let's sum up the premise of superheroes this way. Society has problems that it is powerless to solve. These problems are personified in some people who are up to no good and must be stopped. But the people of the society, including their official representatives, are powerless to do anything about it. The only person who is free to act is the superhero: an unusual person who a) has the will to take action against evil despite social convention, and b) has some kind of special abilities lifting their capabilities above the common person. Typically there's one more subtle ability that this unusual superhero person has: they can accurately identify the evil enemy.

That's all very fascist. Go ahead and compare that to the kinds of things that far-right groups claim to think about themselves; it's a good match. (At one time, the stereotypical superhero was a rich white guy; that's not nearly as true anymore. That part has gotten better.)

But here's the thing: if you know me at all, you know that I am not about to condemn the superhero genre. I love it, have for a long time, expect to continue for another long time. So there is a catch. (If we're feeling playful about it, we can call it Catch-52.) I propose

The First Hypothesis of Suprmetrics: A genre is a premise plus a fantasy.

I'll give you a second to take that in.

So, we laid out the premise of the superhero genre a few paragraphs ago. But the superhero fantasy is this: superheroes can be trusted with their power and will never abuse it. And the reason why I love the superhero genre is that the superhero premise is redeemed by the superhero fantasy.

Look, for the superhero genre to be fascist, it would have to not matter whether superheroes were benevolent or malevolent, whether the average person could count on them or not. But it does matter. It's the key to the whole thing. And I don't think this is well enough understood. I saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a while ago. And there were a lot of things about it that bugged me. (Click through to this article I wrote about Saturn Girl if you want to know why in detail.) Basically it comes down to, I prefer the Scarlet Witch as a superhero.

Or take The Boys. I've never watched (or read) The Boys; it doesn't sound like a good time to me. But it sounds to me like--any setup where superheroes all have to work for the government sounds like--the writers don't accept the fantasy of superheroes and are trying to write about just the premise.

I am not arguing that any of this is extendable to the real world. I am certainly not arguing that anyone who seems to be arguing in favour of some part of the fascist premise of superheroes is redeemed by the fantasy of superheroes. It's just the opposite, most likely. I do think that that's how it should work on the screen and on the page... but we should have different standards once we close the cover.

--

I invite comments! I wrote this fast and I may have overlooked something that should not go without saying, or been wrong in some other way.

Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes #3 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

While the rift is threatening the 21st and 31st centuries, Batman remembers that a Justice League villain named Epoch warned the League about Gold Lantern, telling them to destroy "it" if they ever found it. The rift subsides, but some Legionnaires and JLAers are scattered in time:

• Brainiac 5, Naomi, and Mon-El in Kamandi's future
• Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy in the Batman Beyond future
• Aquaman and Ultra Boy in prehistory
• Gold Lantern in some kind of Metropolis with airships and, still, the rift
• everybody else in the 31st century dealing with the Science Police; Chameleon Boy has just called his mom for help

Review:

Now that's something a little more like it. First, and most important, breaking up the crowd and focusing on smaller groups give the individual characters a chance to shine. That's something Legion comics have needed ever since Brian Michael Bendis took over as writer.

Second, almost as important, is Ultra Boy's insistence that there's someone behind this giant rift. That's the kind of thing you don't put in a comic book unless you plan to make it pay off. Usually. Whether it's true or not, at least we're thinking about it, and it's creating tension. Some malefactor weaponizing a rift is a lot more interesting than a naturally occurring rift.

Third, the choice of some of the temporal destinations for our heroes suggests that this might all tie in to Rose's adventures in LSH: Millennium. And that's something that needs some followup. Is Rose around? Some of the JLAers almost certainly know her; I'd like to see that encounter. Don't take your eyes off Rose, true believers; in some ways she's the secret protagonist of the fourboot.

Okay, well, this series might be picking up a bit. We might get a few chucks in before it's over. I don't have a lot of hope that the whole thing is going to turn out to be worth it, but there may be some points of interest raised.

Art: 95 panels/23 pages = 4.1 panels/page. 1 splash page, 2 double-page spreads, 1 case of 2 panels spread over 2 pages.

Thing I don't really care for in this comic book is the muted colour palette. Nothing ever gets really bright.

Godlewski continues to hold up his end of the bargain. This issue is a little light on the panel count (with an extra page!) but then, 7 of them are used up by only 5 panels put together. Look at... try the last panel on page 18; that's one that jumped out at me. But they're all good. I also particularly like the way he renders Computo.

Justice League Vs. The Legion of Super-Heroes #2 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Everyone who disappeared last issue just went to the 31st century. We get some of Gold Lantern's backstory and some interacting between the Legion of Super-Heroes and the Justice League. Then there's a rift.

Review:

Called it!

I'd like to propose a new Legionnaire. His name would be Rift Lad, and his power would be to seal rifts. He'd never be short of work. (Yes, his power would be adaptable enough to seal zoo cages.)

It does seem like there was an effort made this issue to really let us get to know some of these characters. I appreciate it. After all this time, too many of them are ciphers, or hidden behind Brian Michael Bendis's signature bantery dialogue voice, or a combination of the two. But it seems unbalanced to pay attention to some characters when there are so many other characters around.

The plot was advanced by exactly one step this issue: our heroes are now fighting a rift mostly from the 31st century. And I know we also got some good art and some character stuff. But, ideally, in a comic book, you'd get art and character stuff and action and plot. Is it too much to ask? Bendis is not a beginner here. We had a whole year off of this title and two months since last issue.

I don't know where the Legion would be without Bendis. Waiting for Geoff Johns to get off the dime? It's not clear to me. Certainly it seems like it's entirely Bendis's franchise now. If he left it, would DC find another writer, or just cancel it? But... when the fourboot started, it had some very promising ingredients. Years later, it's still just ingredients. I'll stick with it, but the recipe is not currently working.

Art: 101 panels/22 pages = 4.6 panels/page; 1 splash page, 1 case of 5 panels spread over 2 pages.

That's more than twice as many panels as last issue! Interesting. Godlewski's the artist again, and his style is still fitting very well into Ryan Sook's 31st century. Check out page 10, panel 1; how many artists have had the chance to take a swing at a panel like that? I liked it. Scott Godlewski is holding up his end of the bargain.

Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes #1 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About: 

The Legion fights a space monster, successfully, and then a weird darkness thing happens which causes one of Triplicate Girl's selves to disappear. They later tell the United Planets that it's a manifestation of something Brainiac 5 is calling the "Great Darkness". Superboy puts them in touch with the Justice League, in the 21st century, who are also dealing with something similar. The Legion travels back in time to meet with them, and another weird darkness thing happens that causes everyone except Gold Lantern to disappear. 

Review: 

One of the things I've learned in my decade-and-change of writing this blog is that first issues, first stories, are easier than subsequent stories. Setting stuff up is easier than keeping it rolling. Introducing things is always entertaining; using stuff that has been introduced has to be made entertaining. 

For this reason I've been waiting for Brian Michael Bendis's fourboot to get to the point where it's left the introductory stage behind and is just telling Legion stories. But the old fox is too wily for me: through use of the two Millennium issues, the v8 issues, Future State, and now JLvLSH, he keeps pushing that into the future. 

So what can I say about it? It's a decent introduction to whatever we're doing here. Large likeable cast, vague menace, interesting details about Triplicate Girl, more teasing about Gold Lantern.

Do we think the Great Darkness is Darkseid again? I kinda do and I kinda don't. Honestly, the way it's being presented here, it seems like it's going to be some kind of rift. Wouldn't that be great? I only read this comic book for the rifts. 

What I'd actually like to do is wait until the damn thing is over and then review it all at once. But I'm not going to do that. I know this is a short review. But there really ain't a lot of moving parts to this comic, sports fans. 

Art: 50 panels/22 pages = 2.3 panels/page. 2 splash pages, 5 double-page spreads, 1 case of multiple panels being spread over two pages. 

Our artist this time is Scott Godlewski. Godlewski isn't Ryan Sook, but he seems adept at working in Sook's 31st century. For the artistic strengths and weaknesses of this issue, check out pages 6-7. It's pretty. But it's also a double splash page. One of five. Five! There are only fifty panels in this whole issue. That is not a lot!

If I Cannot Bring You Comfort

 It is the Christmas season, for those who observe, which signals the end of the year as measured by the Gregorian calendar, and as such it is time for us to take stock of our time which is ending, and our time which is about to begin. We can start with the Legion of Super-Heroes (remember the Legion? It's a blog about the Legion) and then move on to other matters.

We already knew that 2022 would see the Legion appear in... a miniseries? an arc?... called Justice League vs the Legion of Super-Heroes, which will, apparently, be about both Gold Lantern and the Great Darkness. I'm not super nuts about the only Legion series being a limited run like this, but it's more than we've got now, and, at least, it's part of Brian Michael Bendis's vision for the team.

Speaking of Bendis, in his newsletter (click here for the whole thing) he announced that he's working on developing an animated Legion of Super-Heroes series for HBO Max. The series will be aimed at grownups and will feature his fourboot Legion. Some points:

- this is, of course, very positive news

- the odds that this TV show actually gets made are not great. Not because of any failing of Bendis's or the Legion's or HBO Max's. Just basically because most TV shows don't make it to air

- the previous LSH TV show, the two-season cartoon on Fox Kids, was a respectable success, and its influence on its young viewers will someday be of tangible benefit to the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise; this TV show, if it makes it, could do similarly

- the process of taking comic-book stories and turning them into TV is likely to accentuate Bendis's strengths as a Legion writer and mitigate his weaknesses

- I've long been of the opinion that any successful translation of the Legion to TV must be animated, not live-action, so I think they've made the right decision here

My big takeaway from both of these impending Legion stories is that the LSH does have a future, and I'm aware that that sounds like a joke but in this case it isn't, and that I hope we can all be around to see it.

And while we're all on that... I hope you can all be vaccinated up to your maximum available amount of protection, and can keep yourselves safe from the coronavirus in all the other ways. Ironically--which is the word we use when we don't want to say "ridiculously"--the coronavirus is the least, and most tractable, of the major problems facing the world in general and us in particular. It's no coincidence that all of these problems--I'll list "climate change" and "fascism" as the big two, but there are more--are exacerbated by being denied, promoted, defended, and/or sponsored by a loose but cooperative network of groups and entities whose interest is not in the future but in making the present as bad as possible.

I hope, in 2022, that we (I am definitely including myself in this hope) can do all we can to be part of the solutions and not part of the problems, and that we're wise enough to choose the right ways to do that.

I haven't been writing much on Legion Abstract recently. This is partly because there haven't been any Legion comics to write about. Maybe I'll chip in another article or two here or there. Certainly I'll review JLAvLSH when it comes out. I don't believe in permanent goodbyes on the internet, and this isn't even a temporary one, but if you need to see it in print: I'll never close down this blog as long as I'm alive (although it may sometimes be less active than other times). I have, however, started writing a couple of other projects, and I'll tell you more about them if and when they become something.

And I'll end this post with this, which strikes me as also to be appropriate for an end-of-the-year summary.

Over the last couple of years, I've started coming out to my friends and family and other people as agender. This isn't exactly a new thing. No need to share the specific details, but all my life I've had a very distant relationship with masculinity, and recently I've come to understand that it's because masculinity wasn't actually a thing that was for me at all.

Why am I telling you this? You don't really need to know it, and I don't really need you to know it. It doesn't make a difference to my Legion opinions that I'm neither dude nor chick. But I do have a couple of reasons.

First, I've always understood that the value of coming out is in its effect on other people: first, people who haven't come out themselves can see more people they can identify with and become comfortable with the idea that people like them belong in the world, which they do. Second, people hostile to LGBTQ+ people will increasingly get the (accurate) sense that they are outnumbered, and will be more likely to change their opinions or at least shut up about them if they don't change them. Both of which are worthwhile goals.

Plus... I'm white, and male-passing, and in a sense I've not been subject to transphobia my whole life. See, "agender" is a subcategory of "trans" in this sense: I was assigned the gender of "male" at birth, and have now said that that is not my gender. That's trans. It's true that the word "trans" has connotations that don't really resonate with my experience, but that's neither here nor there. So I don't reject the label.

But while I can look back on the considerable amount of bullying that I experienced much earlier in my life and say that, in retrospect, it was partly based on being a precocious agender kid, I didn't know that at the time. They called me "gay" (and other related terms), sure, but as far as I knew, they were just wrong about that. (Also, being gay and being agender are not at all the same thing, but that's a nuance that would have been lost on these kids.) So in my mind, I wasn't being picked on because of something that I was that wasn't hurting them, and therefore I didn't beat myself up for being it, and so was spared one specific kind of damage. In retrospect, they were clearly picking up on something about me, but since I had no idea, there's a level on which it doesn't count.

But there are any number of trans people out there for whom that's not true. They've had to deal with a lot of static while knowing what it was the whole time. So what I'm intending here is to stand with them.

(FAQ: Are you changing your pronouns? Nah; I've had about fifty years of getting used to he/him. But if you want to refer to me as she/her or they/them, that's okay too. I'd a lot rather be called "she" than "Matt".)

There's still a lot I don't know about this topic. There's still a lot I don't understand about myself. I'm no expert. (And a lot of the answers one finds boil down to, "it's different for everybody! You get to decide for yourself!" Great. Thanks. I'm sure that's right. But it's no help.) Having said that, if anyone is coping with something similar and thinks it would help to kick it around with me, please let me know; I'm happy to do what I can.

So my last thought here is, let's all be ourselves in 2022. And let's all get to work. Tired as we all are, there's a lot that needs to be done. The truth is somewhere here.