Week of 1 June 2011

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

ADVENTURE 527 (2011/08)
"A Comet's Tale"


ROLL CALL:

Bouncing Boy, Brainiac 5, Chemical King, Cosmic Boy, Dawnstar, Duplicate Girl, Lightning Lad, Night Girl, Saturn Girl, Shadow Lass, Tellus, Timber Wolf, Ultra Boy, Chemical Kid, Comet Queen, Dragonwing, Glorith, Gravity Kid, Mandalla, Shadow Kid, Stone Boy, Variable Lad, Saturn Queen

CUTE BOYS: Brainy, Brin, Chemical Kid, Chuck, Condo, Garth, Gravity Kid, Jo, Rokk, Shadow Kid, Stone Boy

A recap of Comet Queen's origin story, followed by some updates on her more recent activities. Oddly, there's no mention of her time with Rokk, Lydda, Luornu, and Myg in the second Legion of Substitue Heroes.

Basically, she graduated from the Academy (along with Mandalla and Shadow Kid) and went into service with the Subs. (This looks to be after Superman & the LSH and possibly after L3W. After Titanfall, an encounter with Saturn Queen erased most of Grava's memories. With the help of Tellus, she regained many of her memories, and went back into the Academy to retrain.

I see that we're back to making fun of the Subs. I don't mind when they're treated with humor -- as in Superman & the LSH or in Straczynski's recent Brave & Bold two-parter...but to me, there's a basic nobility about the Subs that a lot of people miss. Sure, it takes courage for Ultra Boy or Wildfire to go up against evil supervillains -- and even more for Legionnaires like Invisible Kid or Shadow Lass -- but all the Legionnaires have their experience, training, and teamwork. For someone like Stone Boy or Comet Queen to go up against the big bad guys (which they have done, many times) takes enormously more courage.

Besides, the Subs are the team who produced Polar Boy and Night Girl, who certainly had the Right Stuff to become Legionnaires.

Anyway, it was good to see answers to some of the questions we had about Grava, and to have her star in a story. I've always liked her irrepressible optimism, her goofiness, and her unbounded confidence. Matching her with Chuck was brilliant -- the two have similar personalities. If anyone deserves to be part of the Legion, she does.

Perhaps Grava needs the same sort of transformation that's happened to Chuck: maturity, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. She needs to get over her crush on Chuck and find someone else to fall in love with and, maybe, marry.

Perhaps Glorith is the right girl for the job.
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