Week of 23 June 2010

(SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers. Don't read it before you've read the comic.)

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #2 (8/10) 
"The Day After Titanfall" 

ROLL CALL:


Brainiac 5, Cosmic Boy, Chameleon Boy, Colossal Boy, Dawnstar, Dream Girl, Earth-Man, Gates, Invisible Kid (Jacques), Lightning Lad, Lightning Lass, Mon-El, Phantom Girl, Saturn Girl, Shadow Lass, Sun Boy, Tyroc, Ultra Boy, Wildfire, also Saturn Queen
HONORARY MENTION: R.J. Brande (image only), Superboy (Kal) (variant cover only)

CUTE BOYS: Brainy, Dirk, Garth (looking somewhat haggard), Gim, Jacques (if he would only get rid of that stupid goatee), Jo, Mon, Rokk, Tyroc [I don't feel I know him well enough to call him "Troy." I think the appropriate word would be "Sir."]

Two covers. The variant one has a nice picture of Superboy (Kal) and Krypto with the Legion Clubhouse in the background, and a logo clearly inspired by the old "Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes" logo.

A good follow-up issue after the series started with such a bang.

Brainy and a team of heavy-hitters clear rubble from Titan's destruction from traffic lanes, until Saturn Queen turns up. She's there to see the destroyed Titan in person (it was, after all, her home planet), but she takes time out to take over the minds of Brainy and the others, most notably poor Ultra Boy. She sends him to Earth to destroy Legion Headquarters, but eventually Phantom Girl stops him.

Gates takes Dream Girl and Dawnstar to Naltor to ask the Naltorians to harbor some Titanian refugees until they can be resettled. Meanwhile on Earth, Cosmic Boy sends a team to quell incipient race riots where Earth supremacists are protesting the arrival of refugees from Titan.

Saturn Girl, in her time bubble, returns to the point when the twins disappeared, and gets an image from their minds that may help her find them. On Winath, Lightning Lad interrupts his investigation of Mekt's birth to go after Imra and the boys.

While all this is going in, Earth-Man is learning more about his Green Lantern ring, whose existence he has kept hidden from the Legion.

Whew!

BITS OF LEGIONNAIRE BUSINESS:

Tyroc is back (and looking terribly butch). Dream Girl is back. If you're keeping count (and who isn't?), this completes the roster of the eight Legionnaires listed in L3W as missing. Chameleon Boy Element Lad, Matter-Eater Lad, Quislet, Sensor Girl, and Tellus were on Espionage Squad duty in the 21st century.

Tyroc explains that he is "fully recovered from Earth-Man's power-sucking tube." As sexy as that sounds, it probably just means Tyroc has been recovering since Superman & the LSH.

Dream Girl's absence (she was last seen in the Lightning Saga) and the reason for her return are unexplained. The teaser page in Adventure #1/504 showed her in the 21st century, bound into some kind of machine, repeating "The dream will die" over and over while Conner and Mon-El burst in upon her. In the background some monitor screens (or perhaps windows) showed futuristic cityscapes and planets.

Here's my guess: Dreamy was supposed to play some part in the Last Stand of New Krypton storyline. I'm guessing that she was going to be a prisoner on Brainiac's ship; that the images of planets and cities behind her related to the bottled cities and their future worlds; and that "The dream will die" referred to Brainiac's plan to kill Superman.

So why didn't Dreamy wind up in that storyline? It's almost as if some incompetent writer didn't read his notes carefully enough, or read them and then totally forgot to put Dreamy in, or just had his tiny little mind overloaded by too many characters and too many pointless pages. In Brande's name, let us all hope that this incompetent writer never gets his mitts on the Legion again....

Mon-El seems to indicate that he and Shadow Lass have broken up. I dearly hope this isn't permanent, because they've been one of the most stable Legion couples. The last time we saw them, in L3W, they seemed happy enough. What happened? Did Shady catch Mon and Sodam Yat in bed together and get all pissy about it? That hardly seems likely; Shady hasn't minded all the other boys that Mon has fooled around with. Maybe because Mon and Sodam are both Daxamites?

ADDITION (24 June 2010): I just caught this. That incipient riot, where the xenophobic people of Earth were protesting the arrival of refugees from Titan? Yeah, it's "Painted Desert Camp." And where's the Painted Desert? You got it: Arizona.

And what's going on in Arizona in the present day? Xenophobes protesting the presence of people who share 99% of their genes.

Political commentary in a Legion comic? Who'd'a thunk it? Refreshing, isn't it?

(The protesters carry a n Interlac sign that says "Go Home." Considering that the Titanians' home was destroyed, it's a pretty stupid sign.)

(Also, notice that the Medi-center at Painted Desert Camp bears both the Red Cross and Crescent. A nice multicultural touch. Do I sense the hand of our favorite Turkish artist?)

CHRONICLER'S ERRORS?:

Saturn Girl's "time sphere" is now a "time bubble." It was always "time bubble" before. Geoff Johns says "time sphere," Paul Levitz says "time bubble." Let's call the whole thing off.

Chameleon Boy says that Earth Humans and Titanians share 99% of their genes. In Last Stand of New Krypton, Titan was settled in the 21st century by an alien telepathic race called Lanothians. Perhaps in the ensuing thousand years, there has been an enormous amount of interbreeding between Humans and Lanothians/Titanians...but enough to share 99% of their genes? Perhaps there is some other explanation. A thousand years is a long time....

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