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.)