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! He's trying stuff.

I'm not sure yet how to characterize Sherman's art. I'll work on it. He renders 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.

News: Patreon

Happy New Year, all.

I've started a Patreon; it's at this link. There's already a short story there for subscribers, just to entice everybody to jump aboard.

If you've ever wondered how you can support this blog, you now have an answer. All the crucial Legion-related content that I write will still be posted here, but I wouldn't put it past myself to have the occasional non-crucial Legion article up on the Patreon, pour encourager les autres. Similarly, I'll still have most of my other stuff at matthewe.com, but I didn't create the Patreon page not to use it, if you see what I mean.

Obviously you're all wiping relieved sweat from your brows at the realization that my opinions will now be easier to encounter and broadcast. I understand. 

Anyway, it's an experiment. Let me know what's working for you and what isn't, or, really, anything that's on your mind about the relevant topics. More to come!

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.