What Happened That You Have to Know About:
Well, it's a big fight against Rogol Zaar and Mordru and the Horraz, and the Legion wins. Dr. Fate and Mon-El come back.
Review:
I think we're supposed to understand this issue to be the end of our current storylines. Which is welcome. But I don't really feel like the menace of the various villains was developed particularly extensively. Really I'm not sure what it is we've been doing for twelve issues: what was all that time spent doing? I'd say that this series has been less than the sum of its parts except I'm not really sure what the parts were.
Saturn Girl tells us that Rogol Zaar was responsible for the destruction of Krypton, which prompted Jon Kent to create the United Planets, which created the Legion, which provoked Rogol Zaar to try to destroy New Krypton or whatever he was going for. According to Saturn Girl, it's a "circle". I don't see it like that. I see it as one troublemaker who won't go away. (Timely!)
Really it's an insulting and insidious idea: for this to be a circle, you have to give Rogol Zaar's desire to kill and destroy the same legitimacy as everyone else's desire to survive, prosper, and associate. So let's not do that.
At the end of the first twelve issues I have to say I'm disappointed in how this series has gone. I still like the roster and the costumes and concepts and the setting. There are a lot of good ingredients here. But it's like we skipped from the beginning of the story to the end without doing the middle.
And now we're going to jump ahead in time to see some canonical details of the future! Just in case there was more stuff we wanted to skip over.
I dunno... I like to have more to say about these comics in these reviews. But I have a hard time finding a lot to say about this issue.
Art: 85 panels/22 pages = 3.9 panels/page. 2 splash pages, 2 double-paged spreads.
Bit of a different look from Sook this time; check out his faces for Jon on page 2. Really the issue looks a little rushed, is what I *want* to say, but looking over the art closely makes me wonder why I want to say it. It isn't less detailed or less competent. I think it might be suggested to me by the panel arrangements. So that's interesting.
Also, a colouring note: check out Triplicate Girl on page 15. That's pretty cool. People who know: does this make optical sense? Does blue+cyan+magenta = black? Anyway I like it a lot.
Labels: Comic Book Reviews, Legion of Super-Heroes
posted by Matthew E @ 2:22 PM
4 Comments:
I might add the Golden Lantern subplot and maybe the Ultraboy-Dawnstar kiss at the end but I agree, not much to see here.
In terms of Bendis's work, 12 issues is typically the first full story. I'm still on a re-read of the whole series but having read the denouement, the pacing is one problem (among others).
I still believe that were it not for Bendis there would not be a Legion series. That might be truer now than it was mere months ago. Bendis's exclusive contract with DC is said to have expired which makes Bendis's future with DC a bit shakier than it might have otherwise been. What does this mean for the Legion? Who can say.
I tend not to track the relationships too closely, especially in runs like the threeboot and fourboot when they tend not to carry any weight, beyond a general mood of "these kids today with their hookups".
Would there be a Legion series without Bendis? I think there would eventually. DC was never going to leave it on the shelf forever. Now? Maybe not now.
RE: the colors - generally, yes, depending if CMY are projected (additive) or reflected (subtracted) light. If they are projected (such as a TV or LCD screen), they are additive to make white (as the intermediate steps from RGB). If CMY are printed (and, thus, reflecting light), they make black. The K in CMYK stands for Black, which is used as a separate ink color because so much of it is used, it would be much more complicated (and insanely expensive) to always be mixing those to make it, but you could.
That, BTW, is the same panel I was talking about earlier - Lournu looks to have 6 bodies in that scene, prior to her integrated black look. The last one even speaks in a purple work balloon. And Purple is also finishing the sentence that Black starts. So, it looks like there's something more than a merge going on there, but, regardless, it looks cool.
Thanks. I guess I should look at it again.
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