Week of 20 February 2013

This week there were two comics with Legion content.

Legion of Super-Heroes 17 (2013/04) is the start of the Fatal Five story. It's drawn by Keith Giffen, so of course everything looks ugly and squashed. And, of course, the panels are all done on a strict boring grid, mostly variations of six panels per page.

Levitz drops us directly into the middle of a confusing, hectic story with little background and less explanation of what's going on -- so it feels very Giffen-written as well.

Why would a good writer like Levitz do this to his readers? Well, because it's Levitz, there's good reason. The Legionnaires are confused and have no explanation of what's going on...and Levitz puts readers right in the same place.  We instantly feel what the Legionnaires are feeling.

This is a chancy strategy for a writer. If the hectic confusion goes on too long, readers will just throw up their arms and walk away from the story. (That's exactly what happened during Giffen's non-Levitz run on the Legion.)

However, this is Levitz. I have confidence that by the middle of the next issue, we'll start to have some explanations. Clues in this issue already point to an underlying sense of what's going on.

Bottom line: Potentially a great, suspenseful introduction to a major storyline, with some really ugly art.

Action Comics 17 (2013/04) was billed as the conclusion to Grant Morrison's storyline. Well, the story doesn't seem to come to any conclusion, it looks like it will be continued next issue.

I say "doesn't seem to" because I can never follow Morrison's storytelling. Final Crisis left me totally at sea -- I've read plot summaries that seem to make sense, but damned if I can find any of it in the actual comics.

So maybe the story concluded in this issue, and I just can't tell.

Anyway, the Morrison version of Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl bounce around in time a lot, talking about how they have to do something to keep Superman from dying and Universo taking over the world...but all they seem to do is keep arriving late for everything. (They also pester Clark Kent's landlady for the exact date the Kents died -- why the Legionnaires thought the landlady would know this, or why they didn't just look up the obituaries online, is unexplained.)

Week of 13 February 2013

I did not see any Legion content in comics this week.

I did get America's Got Powers #5 (of 6), which has been a long time coming but was worth waiting for. Cute teenage boys (some of them very large) with superpowers, government conspiracies, good vs. evil, not bad for a Legion off-week.

BTW, if you want an account on my Legion site (www.donsakers.com/lsh), leave a note here or send me an email. I'm getting lots of what look like spambots applying for accounts, and I don't want to miss any legitimate requests.

Week of 6 February 2013

I did not see any Legion content this week.

There's a new issue of Kevin Keller that's just sweet beyond words. I think I finally get the appeal of Archie comics. I assume that Kevin Keller is about the same romance/comedy mix as the other Archie titles, except the formula is so much more meaningful to me when it's gay boys rather than straight boys & girls.

Week of 30 January 2013

I did not see any Legion content in comics this week.

I did take the opportunity to re-read the entire run of  the recent Legion Lost title, and you know what? It's just as bad as I remember.

Okay, there are many reasons it was bad. There were too many ideas crammed into too few pages. Most of those ideas were obviously what I call "hey-wouldn't-it-be-cool" ideas, novelty for the sheer sake of novelty, without any thought of fitting into a larger narrative. Worse, most of these ideas were never followed up.

In addition, the title had two writers, who apparently never talked with one another about their conceptions of the series. The first guy at least seemed to have some idea of where he wanted to take the time-lost Legionnaires; the second guy just used the book as a companion title to Superboy and Ravagers, thus turning the Legionnaires into supporting characters in their own title.

All that aside, the most awful thing about this title is that everything constantly reset to zero. In the final analysis, nothing happened. The characters went through a series of apparent adventures -- at least three of them even died -- yet at the end, they were unscathed and unchanged. (All right, Gates was physically scarred and Tellus grew legs...but emotionally and psychologically, they were the same.) All the apparent sacrifices were pointless, because no one paid any cost.

As various critics have pointed out, the Legion is all about change. Characters grow, change, even die. There are real prices to be paid, and the characters are altered by their experiences. That's what makes the Hall of Heroes such a powerful image: the Legionnaires are aware of the prices they've all paid. That's what makes it worth while to follow convoluted Legion continuity: we understand the present Legionnaires by knowing what they've faced in the past.

In this day and age, a Legion series that goes 16 issues without anyone changing or paying a price is a series that's the opposite of everything the Legion means.

And that, in my opinion, is why Legion Lost was so bad.