Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Justice League vs. The Legion of Super-Heroes #4 - Preview and Spoilers

Via AIPT and Comic Book Dispatch -

Brainy's word choice is interesting. "It is with great SHAME" implies he feels some fault for it.

Kamandi, of course! always nice to see him

I do like that they are split into smaller groups... gives a spotlight to some other characters. some of the characterizations are interesting, with Chuck being more aggressive, Val being more cautious, and Tasmia being more fatalistic.

LOL at Rose being all "I run this place". Nice touch having her and Batman recognize each other, and Batman also still wanting to find out why/how Rose is there.

Thanks for posting these photos Nighty. Looks great!

It does look great and we get some real action. Looking forward to this issue! (Maybe I'll get my Kamandi question answered: what happened to all the animals between his time and the 31st century?).

By god, it took four issues, but it looks like things are finally starting to happen! I'll take my good old time getting to it to read though, since they took their good old time delaying the thing.

Just read it on Kindle. In the olden days, these 4 issues would have been two maybe three pages...tops.

Alas, those were the old days... I'm sure I would enjoy a more tightly-plotted story with less decompression. but this is also why I prefer to wait a bit, rather than snapping every issue as it comes out.

Oh yeah this is a still a thing

I am so angry after reading this, I need to give it a couple days before I give this a review.

And this is the guy they are giving the potential TV show to?

I don't blame Bendis so much as I blame the people in charge at DC and Marvel, who think everything has to be a big six issue epic or big bloated crossover. Oh yeah, we do get 8 page slice-of-life stories in Superman Red and Blue or Batman Black and White, but those aren't really stories so much as character studies. Why can't we have more one or two part stories with a beginning, middle and end?

I blame the people who gave this to Bendis in the sense he was not suited to write the Legion at all.

So I blame Didio,

Justice League vs. The Legion of Super-Heroes #4

Released July 19, 2022
DC Comics, Color
22 Pages

The Gold Lantern Saga: Part 4

Brian Michael Bendis - Writer
Scott Godlewski - Art
Ryan Cody - Colors
Michael McAlister - Editor

Synopsis

Brainiac 5 sends a distress message out to anyone who will listen, while he, Mon-El, Naomi and Kamandi break into an old Leviathan facility and find Naomi's phone. In the 31st, Batman, Black Canary and the Legion try to figure out what's going on; some of the Legion start to lose hope but Batman gets them to refocus. Rose and Batman confer and the team retreats to safety.

We rejoin Gold Lantern and he encounters Alan Scott in the 40s where the Darkness also grows. A propeller plane accidentally flies into the darkness and is destroyed while the wreckage and pilot is sent into the 31st century. The Legion talks to the UP council on Daxam to plea to save Earth from the Darkness.

Colossal Boy wakes up at some indeterminate time in Metropolis splayed over several buildings and is revived by Wonder Woman and Dawnstar. They are soon contacted by Computo. Back in Kamandi's time, Brainy uses Naomi's phone and Mon-El's flight ring to create something when they are also contacted by Computo, as is every other time stranded group.

Everyone is pulled back to the 21st century with some changes - Black Adam is aged and Oliver is young. Batman asks if the Legion is responsible for the time problems, as does the Legion themselves as the Darkness takes over the sky.

Commentary

When reading this, I got the distinct impression that things were being drawn out for a page count quota or something. It just doesn't make sense that you have a story where, for the most part, people stand around talking while a threat grows in the distance. (Cue the castle storming scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Meanwhile, half of the combined team was scattered across time last issue, only to have them reunite in the 21st century, with only one of the teams maybe having done something of consequence. A *ton* of talking with little action. I had the exact same feeling when I was reading George R.R. Martin's "A Dance with Dragons" - an inflated tome filled with useless scenes that simply added to the word/page count.

The pages from last issue and this where smaller groups were scattered across time ended up being a waste. I was seriously thinking that we would get more interplay between the founders and Batman Beyond. Instead we get "I thought we wer going to do a whole team up!" Indeed, part of the reason I am not happy with this book, and the title overall, is that it is constantly hinting and promising things and then never delivering. I was looking forward to the characters DOING something in the past, but didn't get much at all.

To compare this in another way, I'm going to bring up Star Wars: The Last Jedi. My main criticism of that movie is that a whole third of the movie is dedicated to a plot that goes exactly nowhere - the Casino planet thread. If you remove that from the movie, nothing about the story changes the ending. Even though we are in issue 4, I'd wager to bet that the same goes for all of these time displacement scenes in this story. Their only purpose - save maybe the Kimandi scene - is just to have cool cameos. I'm sorry, but if I'm going to be giving you my money and my time for something that adds nothing, you won't be getting any more of either from me. The time scenes could have been reduced/condensed considerably - possibly enough to collapse issues 3 & 4 together, and that wastefulness does not sit well with me.

Add to all this the typical Bendis-speak and characters saying things or talking in ways that they never really would with pretty much any other writer and you have a disaster. I've decided that I've had enough and won't purchase, read or review the last two issues of this series; I'll read other reviews that are better written than mine by reviewers with a lot more patience than me and maybe catch them when they are available on the DC app in many, many months from now.

The ONLY saving grace for this book, as always, is Godlewski's art. But I need a good story that has pace every issue. At least in my threeboot reviews, while I don't like most of the characterizations, the stories have had some depth. This has neither. Even if you take the view of "this is meant to be a collected read," there is so little to advance this story in this chapter that it makes me question what the hell the editor was doing this whole time.

Some other thoughts:

Bad artist choice when Chuck saves the pilot. Its drawn so that he is bouncing off the story panel and the edge of the page instead of off an actual surface. That's typically not how his powers work. I'm assuming this was a Godlewski choice, since Bendis famously doesn't script to that level of detail.

What is the point of the scene when Batman & the Legion petition to the UP? Another scene where nothing happens.

Mon-El is a putz in this iteration. He's like the threeboot Ultra Boy here, and its horrible.

I'm assuming whatever Brainy is working on is a weapon to deal with the Darkness vs a way to get that home, since Computo did that. Otherwise, Brainy's work would be a waste of time, right? Seems a lot of effort for a dumb cell phone gag.

"What's happening?" asks Naomi. That should be the subtitle for this entire series.

When the teams reunite in the 21st, it seems we are missing several Legionnaires. No idea if that's intentional from a story or just the artist using the room on the page.

Grade: D-. Scott's art is too good for me to give it a complete fail, but there is barely a story in this issue to tell.

thanks for the review, GL. does not make me want to read it, sadly. I hate useless scenes, if my heroes split up I want each sub group to accomplish something of relevance to the plot! or at least, some nice character inter-play. does not seem like there was much of that.

I held my tongue when I saw the preview, but I did see a lot of talking on top of one another too - though I have to say it was not THAT bad this time. But coupled with not much happening...

also, why would the Legion think the Darkness was their fault?

and yes, this Mon-El is a lot like 3boot Jo... dislike them both. had enough of people like that in high school!

The song "She ain't pretty, she just looks that way" comes to mind....

No complaints about the art, but as everyone has remarked, where's the action? And typos, after all this delay, although I suppose the delay was in actual production, not editing.

Kamandi's time is just written off as "lost history", although I won't fault Bendis for not expanding on that; it would have been an unnecessary detour.

It's frustrating that this version of the Legion is so visually appealing but most of the characters feel undeveloped.

So, I just read it (finally) ..... I am holding off saying anything until I've read all 6 installments of this team up.
Might take another 6 - 8 months by the time the last 2 issues come out though! LOL

Well, strange as it may seem, I was starting to 'get' the banter pattern from the prior issues, and I had been able to compartmentalize that to a degree. And it was the preview, so I assumed that they were saving the real action to the back half of the book, like an expected cool interaction with Batman Beyond or something. But it just turned into a bunch of committee meetings with deus-ex-computo stepping in out of the blue.


Oh I guess I didn't mention this - when the Legion and Batman petition the UP council, Brande makes some comment about the Legion's continued abuse of the time stream (I guess in grabbing Jon & sending him back - whenever that happened...). Batman calls back to that scene and it makes the Legion self doubt, in that their time travels could have caused this.

Yes, one would think that the extra time would enable better editing.


I do have a feeling that something will come out of whatever it is that Brainy is tinkering with in that scene. But it begs the question - why not just move those three in time? The other time-stranded characters could have done something else that had a point, or never pulled out of the 31st at all...


Yes. I think decompression as a technique only works when you have long established characters. These Legionnaires are mostly unknowns given the new timeline and vastly different visualizations, so decompressing something that has no real pressure to begin with just leaves a flat story.

Are you reading via the app, Catonyx?

GL, no I usually read the actual classic comic format. What app are you referring to?

The DCU Infinite app. I'm not sure where you are globally, so you may not have access to it, but its the subscription app where you can read pretty much any DC comic ever created.

They release the new content, but most of it is available six months after the original release day, so this week even as issue 4 came out, issue 1 became available on the DCUI app. So I wasn't sure if you were talking about issue 4 or 1.

The way things are going, if issue 6 doesn't come out until November, that means the whole series won't be available to subscribers of the app until next May! A year and a half AFTER it started!!!

I was being very sacrastic by stating that it would be another 6 to 8 months for the last 2 installments to come out.

LOL! It still may at that!!!

I just read it and I have a fairly depressing thought - perhaps this is all going to end up as a mere prelude to DC's current Dark Crisis event. In other words the feeling that we have had of nothing happening is exactly what will be the result of the whole miniseries, as it is simply a setup for more of the event.

Maybe not on the other hand since in the event Batman, Aquaman and Wonder Woman are supposedly dead (yeah right) and Jon is trying to form a new JL which Black Adam (normal age and the sole survivor of the original JL) is very critical of. So the two stories don't fit together at all.

The joining together of two teams and then splitting up into mini teams is very reminiscent of the old pre-Crisis JLA adventures, both with JSA and by themselves - but nothing of significance happened before they are brought back together. Oh and I wonder what the UP leadership thinks of having the LEgion delegation just disappear on them as presumably happened when they were yanked (by Computo) back to the 21st Century with everyone else.

yeah, pamphlets.

Not just this series, but the Legion for some time now, since Bendis took over for sure, and I think even before that...

We get a monthly pamphlet.

Now, we could blame the writer, but even these pamphlets are being delayed. Further, the mechanism by which we get this thinned down story content per month while still justifying it as a full issue are all the repeated full-page scenes
(see #1, we get a full page of no-one but gold lantern there with dark dizzle sizzle, then the same scene with no sizzle), AND the many two-page splash pages - often with little to no dialogue, or "throw-away" dialogue.

I wonder if all this doesn't reflect some combination of labor shortage and/or comic teams unwilling or unable to put in as many hours.. . OR.. DC unwilling to PAY for as many hours?

Sure we bet "bigger" art, but well... okay, I am no artist (!!), but in the digital age, can't a giant page take as little time to draw as a single panel, but then you zoom? And certainly, a repeat full-page scene with a differnt effect has to be a single drraw with something
different overlayed digitally?... LIKEWISE, isn't a two page splash of a conversation far easier to draw than any action scene? Perhaps these are being written in to avoid even further delays because the artists are behind on drawing the actual "action" events - which, by the way, i find lately the visual depictions of action to be highly confusing as it is.

POINT IS - we get monthly "pamphlets", and STILL huge delays even with that (August solicitation still says August 09 for #6..., fat chance of that, I suspect!).

It all sounds like like a severe resourcing issue to me.. possibly due to under-funding? who knows.

And while Bendis(writer) being lazy and/or over-committed remains a possibility, what little i read of other comics (in fairness, not that much, but still) suggests to me that this "pamphlet" phenomenon is NOT necessarily unique to the Legion - am I wrong?

I desperately hope this is not going to be the case, but share your concern that it very well might be...