Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Re-reading the Threeboot

There was a lot packed into this issue. I agree that the soap opera elements were the weakest part of the story. Perhaps if I knew there were more than one issue to go in which relationships could be worked out with less agony, it wouldn't irk me as much.


She supposedly drew her powers from the spirit world, the dead of Orando wanting vengeance. It was also stated a few issues ago that she inherited secret powers when her father died - all of which leaves the field open to whatever the writer wants to do. What's going to stop her? I did find the contrast between her mental power (the back brain) and Imra's (the fore brain) pretty interesting, although I have no idea if it's legit. Brainy might have the same problem with Projectra, as a forebrain guy, although he dealt with those demons easily enough.


Yeah, where did that humility and regret come from? *choke* He must really love her. *sob*


Very squirmy, her putting the moves on him. She does look like retroboot Imra - I didn't pick up on that, and it adds an element of strangeness to the encounter. It might have been disarmed by Kin'thea saying something like "you remind me of my son who died in the Khund war".

Sizzle was well done as a new character, we got a good idea of what her powers could do.

My only quibble with the sensational art is Phantom Girl's depiction after getting the crap beat out of her. No bruises, no blood, no swelling; her uniform isn't even torn. She looked more like Sleeping Beauty.

This is one thing that annoys me when they do it in comics as well....I mean it's not like I want to see gore everywhere all the time, but when the narration describes how someone has been beaten to the point of death and then the picture is just someone having a nice nap with maybe a tear or two in their outfit, it's not great storytelling

I agree with both of you here. Set, I'm remembering it that way also, I think they intimate that she's getting the distilled powers of her world when we meet her strange followers, even though the illusion power inheritance was well defined. But I agree that it was badly written.

There you go - I'm not misremembering.


ROFL!!! Total callback to the old romance comics!


I guess its probably for the better that this got canned.


I was okay with this mostly, as the attack (which was well drawn) shows Tinya getting half her face clawed off, which I also thought was more of a Brin move. Still, you are correct in that she's shown laying in a pool of blood and none of it is on her uniform or body. They sure do clean up nice when they go to the infirmary!

Legion of Super Heroes v5 #50

Released January 28, 2009
DC Comics, Color
24 Pages

Hack The Infinity Net! - Enemy Manifest Conclusion

Justin Thyme - Writer
Ramon Bachs - Penciller
John Livesay - Inker
Jo Smith - Colorist
Mike Marts - Editor

Synopsis

Invasion! The intruders have begun a mass invasion of the UP with planets appearing in every major UP system, creating major problems. Many Legionnaires are deployed across the UP, leaving Brainy, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Atom Girl, Ultra Boy, Gazelle, and Star Boy left to defend Earth. They all get zapped (literally) into the Infinity Net, except for Invisible Kid who wants some enhancements to his avatar.

The Legionnaires appear in the virtual world, including a beefed up Lyle whom Gazelle fawns over. In moments they are swarmed by defenders. In the Net's HQ, the leaders of the aliens confer with the newly digitized Minister Lafong, who offers to act as a mediator. She then gives the backstory - they remade themselves digitally and eradicate life in the universe, except for what they like. She basically turns on the aliens, who are monitoring, then is deleted by the Magistrix. She also orders all UP data deleted as they begin to wipe out the UP.

Lyle asks Brainy to reset his avatar appearance just before the alien destroyers break into the lab and ravage the Legionnaire's bodies. Lyle's disguise reverts just in time so Brainy can hack into the Net to save the Legion and destabilize it and stop the invasion. Unfortunately the Legion is stuck due to their bodies being killed. One week later, their bodies regrown, the Legionnaires are transferred back into their bodies, including - surprise! - Dream Girl! And we're all invited to the wedding.

THE END.


Commentary

As one would expect with a story with a pseudonymn author, this issue is a bit of a mess that does its best to wrap up the main story that had been dragging out for 14 issues. The core story - the attack on the alien invaders - isn't too bad stripped down to its component parts, but there is so much added on to it in strange ways the entire issue gets muddled. The transference of the Legionnaires into the Infinity Net was a cool idea, and based on their smoking husks, I figured that they were killed by Brainiac going in, but then when the warrior avatars come in and ravage the lab, there's no doubt they are dead. But then things get weird. First the aliens are afraid of the Legion to the point of considering surrender, then turn around and easily start to overwhelm the Legion after the Minister is killed. The whole Lyle avatar I guess makes sense given his infatuation over Gizelle, but then her response makes zero sense and is completely out of character. Brainy & Lyle's hacking of the net was cool. The miraculous recovery of the Legionnaire bodies was bizarre, but not as strange as Nura coming back out of nowhere (she literally has no body) with her full powers.

Yikes.

So the longest running story bit was hastily thrown together, we get no resolution to the Projectra situation, or to Garth/Imra/Jo (although Garth does have his arm around her at one point), and we are missing a handful of Legionnaires. What. A. Mess. To add insult to injury, almost a fifth of this issue is devoted to pages of backstory. I get the "every comic is someone's first" deal, but devoting almost a quarter of this rush job for exposition seems like a waste.

Given that this was a last minute wrap issue, the art isn't as great as we've had the fill ins elsewhere in the run, but its better than the writing. With the exception of Gazelle. She barely looked like the character we saw earlier. The art isn't horrible, but it ain't great.

The good news? This train wreck of a run is over with. Yay.

A couple other notes:

I had to laugh at the Atom Girl fist pound.

Huh. Wildfire. Okay then.

I'm just splitting hairs here, but if they were one of the first sentients to evolve, their world would be at the galaxy's edge, not the center. The stars in the galaxy core are newer, and they spiral out as the galaxy spins, therefore the older civilizations would be way the hell out there.

what's with all the -ix suffixes? Imperatrix, Magistrix... come on, man.

Grade - D-. Not a complete fail, surprisingly enough. But bad enough.

I'll probably be posting final thoughts of the entire threeboot soon.

Oh, this last issue, so, so terrible. I vaguely recall that the arc was planned to end with issue 52. 'Cause that was a thing, back then.

But then Shooter got in another fight with his various bosses, and it all went to hell, and had to be wrapped up by someone else on short notice. (I'd heard somewhere that a previous issue, with pirates capturing a few Legionnaires, including Ayla (44?), was full of cheap shots at higher-ups he was feuding with, and that was pretty much the last straw, but I have no idea how true that was.)

Things got weird for me before this. Still have trouble with this avatar business.


Totally out of character! But then I thought, maybe she's being sarcastic and making fun of him. Probably not, but it would make more sense if this were a high school drama about the dorky kid in love with the cool girl who's baiting him.


This was in some ways the worst part of the issue for me. Such a good romance, then tragic, then strange but bittersweet, and it all gets presto-changeo'd into a happy ending. Felt like a cheat, like there should have been more story to bringing her back.


Was there any reveal about who actually wrote the story? The cheap shots in the pirate issue is curious - as an outsider, I didn't pick up on anything.

That sounds fascinating. I'd love to understand that. I wonder if it was just the names of the pirates or what they were doing?

It seems like hiring Shooter to do anything is as dangerous as hiring Giffen. They both come across as volatile and difficult to work with.

Right - from what we've seen of Gizelle, she's not the lovey dovey, fawnish type.


More in line with the kids attitudes generally in these issues as well, in addition to herself if she were being sarcastic.


Totally agreed. I'd honestly rather have seen a hasty resolution of the Projectra situation than that page. It was a cheat to bring Nura back as well as the killed Legionnaires. They could have been in the Net for years, but still alive.


I'd definitely love to hear more about this. There always seems to be behind the scenes drama with anything Legion.

If I'm not just wildly hallucinating these memories, I think Shooter had a blog type thing, at that time, and kind of bragged about it, which is not just a dick thing to do, but a dumb thing as well (maybe he'd already been fired by the time he bragged about the Ikilles thing? I don't recall the timing, any better than the rest of this hopefully-not-made-up- drama from my unreliable brain). It was, IIRC, called, unimaginatively, 'Shooterblog,' and Googling that these days will get you hip deep in stuff about school shooters or whatever, which is less fun.

I vaguely recall that the original plan, and even the advertising hype, for the end of this run, cut short, was for every Legionnaire to play a part, including the reservists like Sizzle and Turtle, but also Cosmic Boy, who would return from the future with some 'Knights Tempus' or something (IIRC?), a future group of heroes inspired by the Legion, the same way that the Legion was (at least in the original continuity) inspired by Superboy, so that Cosmic Boy would more or less be the 'Superboy' of the future-group, the famous dude from the past they went back in time and recruited.

Since it was never written, at least some of it may have overpromised and underdelivered, but it certainly sounded more interesting than the sloppy side of hash we got. I definitely remember the preview hype though about the big splashy finale and cast of everyone, and then, bam, book cancelled, sudden ending with barely a plip.

I found Shooter's blog. Its current address is jimshooter.com and if you go to the menu and click category number 08, Recent Work, you will find the Legion posts.

But do I WANT to go down that rabbit hole?

I went down the rabbit hole and it was worth the plunge. In part 3 of his Legion overview, he outlines how the series was intended to play out had he continued - considerably more detailed than the #50 quick wrap-up.

There are also some nuggets in parts 1 & 2, such as M'rissey was based on Paul Levitz, Invisible Kid would be turned into a female (his/her true self) after the avatar adventure. Shooter describes in the Q&A section how DiDio & Geoff Johns pulled the rug out from under him and he was forced to get rid of Val and Lu.

I figured I'll have to check this out.

But first, some final thoughts...

As I've mentioned several times prior, I came to the Threeboot in the 00s with a bit of a grudge, as I was playing catch up on the Legion after my second child was born, and I was resentful that DC had decided to get rid of "my" Legion. But the run was written by Mark Waid and had Barry Kitson's wonderful pencils, so I was drawn to it. At the time I liked it well enough; it was SOME kind of Legion, and the approach was right - introducing us to the characters a few at a time instead of a Bendis-like deluge of background characters that should have screen time - but there was something off that didn't sit well with me. I read through to around the time of the Supergirl introduction, but the variance of personality from the Reboot crew I had grown to love, combined with the constant "chip on a shoulder" attitude of the characters and their utopian dystopia, couldn't keep me hooked. When you combine this with the fact that the *real* Legion was appearing in JSA, JLA and elsewhere, it made up my mind to not bother with these imposters. Legion of Three Worlds was an interesting experiment, mainly for the Perez art, but in the end it wasn't really a Legion story, plus they got rid of my reboot once and for all there.

Combine that with an accelerating professional career at the time in addition to the new parent role, comics in general fell off my radar sometime mid-Threeboot. Over the years, I'd picked up the rest of the Threeboot run physically, mainly after Lo3W, and I'd flipped through them, but I'd never really read them to a deeper extent. Thus, after the OG Legion read through from last year, the Reboot Legion read through from the year before, and the Retro re-read from last summer, I felt it was a good time to face the Threeboot from front to back, good or bad.

Interestingly, the book is mostly good, but very uneven. Waid introduces us to the new versions of classic characters with what has been described by others as an "Ultimate" version of the team (whatever the hell that means), but basically it dumps us into a new reality with the Legion being around for few years. We never get an actual origin story, which I think hurts the title because you never really understand why the team unites and fights outside of the generic, and ultimately unworkable, guise of "teen rebellion." In what I'm pretty sure was a way to get actual teens to flock to the book, they were almost to a tee written in such a way that they had attitudes that most normal people wouldn't put up with so you end up with a team of generally unlikeable kids that are the saviors of the universe because they are the only group that doesn't kill people. This speaks to the failure of Waid to describe the new world as being so horrible that the teens had to rebel. I never saw anything in that universe that told me things were so horrible to require upheaval. I know many say, "teens rebel, and are horndogs, so this all makes sense." Well, maybe, but it just didn't work because you have to have likeable characters to connect to, and as a new parent in 2002-05 and an older one now, it never worked.

The changes to the core Legion characters are mostly superficial, but in some cases personalities that are amped up to 11. Rokk is a hyper-capable leader but gets mega stressed. Brainy is the ultimate schemer. Ayla is the sex pot. Jo, in an unfortunate bit or "realistic" ultimate casting, is the ultra-asshole jock that no one in their right mind would include as a team member. Some characterizations work better - Lyle is a sneak, Salu has chip on her shoulder for being perceived as small. In a ham-fisted attempt at diversity, Thom is cast as black, but that is it for diversity. The Threeboot didn't even leverage Ayla's oversexed nature to show her to be bisexual, so like the reboot, there is no LGBTQ representation, which is shameful in a team book where a prior version pioneered that in some ways for DC. But while the characters are shown as heroic, most of the time they aren't putting their best foot forward during interpersonal interactions both within and without the team.

It's an uphill battle to tell stories that connect in that kind of environment, but the amazing thing is that Waid is a good enough writer to pull it off. The stories are so well told and the art so good that the background setting of this universe kind of doesn't matter. The Terror Firma story was very interesting, leading to the destruction of Orando and the reveal of Atom Girl. The title softened a bit with the introduction of Supergirl, and we had yet more examples of the horrible personalities of the characters, with Ultra Boy being a general asshole and Shadow Lass bullying the people she's supposed to be protecting. However, after that the Dominator war kicks in and another great storyline is presented to us. This section was where I had stopped reading prior, and I wish I hadn't. My recollection is tossing this title after watching Shady shake down citizens, as I had had enough of the attitudes, and that was probably a mistake, as issues 20-30 were quite good.

At this point Waid, leaves the series. From what we're told, it was because of the Lightning Legion in the other DC books. This became a bad portent for two reasons - the Threeboot book started an inevitable decline, and it telegraphed the signature of Dan DiDio's tenure at DC - Keep on rebooting. I'm left to wonder where Waid would have taken things if not for DiDio's involvement and the Lightning Legion's presence. All that being said, the Tony Bedard interim run before Jim Shooter was actually a good read. Even though its main purpose was to rearrange some pieces on the board before Shooter could start, the stories themselves were compelling and brought in several classic characters, like Tenzil and Wildfire, and used them in very interesting ways.

So then we get to the Shooter tenure. Some interesting scifi concepts were introduced while keeping true to some of the tenets of the world Waid had defined and softening others, most thankfully the ‘adults v kids' setting. It starts out interesting, especially with the new snappy visuals from Francis Manapaul, but we end up with two storylines that started to become interesting, but ended up getting dragged out over a year. The Alien Destroyer story that kicked the Shooter run off should have lasted six issues before reaching a conclusion, while the more interesting story - the turning of Projectra into a villain - is dragged out so long that we never get the resolution to that thread. All the while, Shooter adds way too much soap opera padding into this; the overwhelming of Garth, the Legion's legal troubles that get suddenly waved away due to new character M'Rissey, and infamously the affair between Ultra Boy and Saturn Girl.

I'm going to pause here and set this as a separate thought, because it deserves attention. I'm not sure if the Legion writers in the early 2000s were trying to take Imra down a peg, but Shooter's writing of Imra echoed Abnett & Lanning's from a few years before - they needed to turn Imra into an emotional wreck in order to justify the actions that she took to hurt people, a character move that completely flies in the face of what happened before. Of course, a writer is allowed to do what they wish, but to a series reader, Shooter, like DnA before him, took a well written, logical and even keeled woman and turned her into a hysterical chump. It's a bad look, especially in 2022. And then to pair her up with Jo Nah, who had been portrayed as the team macho jerk was insult to injury. I'm sure had the title continued, Shooter would have made some silly mental sidestep to explain the behavior, but it didn't work in Legion Lost with the same two characters and it doesn't work here. Also in both cases, the situation is never truly resolved.

Unfortunately, the Tinya/Jo/Garth triangle, or whatever one may call it, is a major factor to me in defining the way this title ended, as is the rushed nature of the conclusion. The ending is so hastily done that I have to wonder about the politics of what went on in the DC offices. The comic book creative community is so small to where I don't think we'll ever hear the real story of what went down, but the fact remains that DiDio had a major influence on how this book has been handled, and it has not been good since he came on board to DC.

The Threeboot was an interesting experiment. Something done to combat the fact that the book seemed to be "impenetrable" to readers even after the zero hour reboot and the Abnett & Lanning run that was well promoted. I think Waid was mistaken there, but he's in a better position to make that call than I am. Would it have worked better if they had waited a year or two to reboot this versus a few months? Would it have worked better if they had just aged up the reboot team a year or two? All unknowable answers, but having an OG Legion in print concurrently certainly did not help things. That is the fault of DC's editorial board, who to this day remain the single biggest problem behind the Legion getting any real success since the heyday of the 1980s.

Is it worth the time to read? The run of this book from issue 1 to 36, the first three years of this title, are worth your time. The Shooter era simply is not due to the over reliance on soap opera tropes and the fact that there is no good resolution to the story. But the first 2/3 of the run are worth your time, whether you get this digitally or as a collected paperback. Some very good stories here. You may like the characters better than I did (at least I hope you do), as that means you'll enjoy it more than me, but even with my problems with the characters, I very much enjoyed reading this run 15 or so years later. Some individual issues work better than others, but the overall collection to issue 36 I think is worth your time to revisit if it's been a while, or read from the start if its new to you.

Thanks to everyone who read and participated in this journey, and even those who made comments on the original releases on this board from 2005-9. Your comments helped me realize I wasn't going crazy most of the time.

I only read that Q&A so far, as that did seem quite interesting.

Man, DiDio was an overall train wreck for DC, wasn't he? Seems like he had no idea what the hell was going on.

That said, it seems like Shooter had already planned for KK and TG to join Cos in the future, so he may be speaking out of both sides of his mouth there.

Also not sure I've seen much characterization that hints of Lyle ever having gender identity issues.

EDIT - I did read the sum up to issue 50. Not much really changed from the plot, just the quality of the writing and having Lyle come back as a girl (instead of Nura).

Great summary GL and I think my own feelings mirror yours pretty closely. The first 2/3 is still a good read even if a weird alternative take on what we are used to. The last 1/3 didn't appeal to me at the time and doesn't really appeal now. Moments of interest but nothing to keep me going.

I did try to take the Threeboot for what it was, even though I was a fan of the classic Legion.

But the writers, in wanting to switch things up, didn't seem to really think about that.

Examples:
A) In one issue, some meant-to-be flavor text says that the UP is voting on the admission of Daxam. A year later, a similar bit of world-building fluff states that Daxam was depopulated back in the Daxam-Trom war. Which is it? Did guilt-stricken people from Trom resettle the depopulated planet of the people they accidentally genocided generations ago with their transmutation weaponry (who knew lead poisoning was *incurably fatal, always?* Apparently not the Trommites...), as a sort of permanent penance / monument to the people they killed, and are there so many of them that this planetary memorial is now petitioning to join the UP? Did this entire Trom-Daxam genocidal war happen in the background over these twelve issues, and it never came up?

B) Tinya's powers and nature get an upgrade, with her supposedly not going intangible, so much as dual-manifesting in both Earth-space and Bgtzl-space, and sort of leaning her mass over in one direction or the other, appearing as a phantom in the other, so that she could be physically present in Earth, while chatting with someone else as a phantom in Bgtzl. But this would make her power difficult to use in places that were built up or spaces that were occupied (by people, vehicular traffic, mountains, buildings, whatever) in *both* spaces. Since we see that one location, where she's chatting with KK is the same as a room where she's breaking up with her Bgtzl boyfriend, that means she's in a building, surrounded by walls, in *both* universes, and therefore couldn't just phase to 'walk through walls' in either location, since there might be a wall in the other dimension too! It was a funky idea, that clearly the writer didn't put any thought into, because if he had, we'd have run into situations where Tinya's 'ways are blocked' which could be an interesting limitation on her powers, since it would be kind of arbitrary (and make her much less limited in space, or on other worlds, which might not be co-terminus with anything in Bgtzl-space, the way Earth is with her homeworld).

C) Shady, during the fight between Brainy and Cos's factions of Legionnaires, shoots Sun Boy in the stomach with darkness, and he doubles over like he's actually been hit by something. That's a suggestion that Threeboot Shady controls some sort of darkforce like Reboot Umbra, but in 49 other issues of this same damn book, she's just Lights Out Lass, like classic Shady, generating visible darkness, not 'punchy darkness.' And since Waid never felt like explaining *anybody's* powers, we'll probably never know if this was an art mistake or not. This was a whole new continuity. The writer got to decide if *this* Shadow Lass created darkness like Levitz Shady, manipulated darkforce like DnA Umbra, or something new and different like turned into shadows or summoned shadow demons or animated peoples powers to 'shadow puppet' them or whatever. And he did squat with that opportunity.

D) Sydney, Australia is now the new South Pole, after the Earth's magnetic poles drifted. Which means the new North Pole should be it's antipode, in the middle of the northern Atlantic Ocean, and Metropolis should now have the climate of northern Mongolia or Greenland, at best (and at least some of Europe and the US East coast should be fields of ice). Again, interesting concept, but zero follow-through.

And then there were ideas I kind of liked.

The Imskians, a population of shrunken people, having some sort of connection to the Coluans, because of something never really spoken aloud about the ancient Brainiac and his habit of shrinking populations of people? That was a neat tying-together of disparate elements.

'Micro Lad' being a member of a 'Big City' population that was turned into giants by Bizarro Brainiac? Too funny. Just ludicrous, and the sort of thing you'd expect out of the Silver Age, and since I'm not super-invested in Gim's old classic origin of a 'a meteor fell on me and I got powers?' I'm cool with it.

Timber Wolf was even more living up to his old 'Lone Wolf' moniker, not really being a recognized Legionnaire, but sometimes getting involved, on his own terms. That seemed appropriate to his personality.

Great comments, Set. I had considered the "Australia at the pole" item, as well as Colossal Boy, but the essay was getting long as it was!

But you're spot on. Another example was Element Lad - in issue 3 he's specifically given rails for his powers - whatever he transmutes changes back in a matter of minutes. But that's never addressed - AT ALL - outside of this issue.

You put it aptly - Interesting ideas, little to no follow through.

Thanks, Stile! Yeah, good storytelling tends to override a lot of problems in stories. But it all caught up to itself by the Shooter run.

Ooh, I had noticed the Element Lad thing, too, but forgot it! He's later transmuting something that's intended to last (a gift for someone? a support strut? I don't recall.) and there's no mention of 'oh yeah, that's totally going to disintegrate in 59 seconds...'

I sometimes chide writers for not consulting some sort of 'story bible' to get the facts around a character or setting or power consistent with past appearances (or at least explain away any changes!), but Waid, in this run, seemed to need a story bible just to not contradict *his own canon,* which, at this point, is like a dozen or so issues, and shouldn't be that hard! He's literally inventing the characters and powers and setting of this Threeboot, he doesn't have to 'get anyone right' based on what we fans might remember of their classic or Reboot continuities.

He *could* have given Shadow Lass the power to turn into shadows, or made Phantom Girl an actual ghost, all he had to do was be consistent *with his own canon.*

He kind of did the same with Chameleon. Dialogue telling us that his shapechanging is only form, not function, and then he turns into big critters and seems to have superhuman strength and durability, which sounds a whole lot like 'function' as well as 'form...'

100% on the bible idea. The lack of adherence to the rules bothered me too. (It was Jan on a date with one of the Luornus was the scene you were thinking of)

To his credit, at least Shooter did try to technobabble his way around it with regards to Cham, but it didn't really work that well.

The bible idea is good; I would have thought writers would have something like that when they create a character, maybe some do and some just wing it. I have to wonder if the letters column didn't play a role in story consistency in the past. People would call out writers on things that didn't make sense.

Cham is possibly the most inconsistent character in the Legion, any version. It's hard to explain how he does what he does and the form/function problem goes way back.

I'd forgotten about the migrating pole question and hadn't thought about the follow through on the north pole - one of those tidbits that tells us the future will be different, but is just dropped into a few panels.

Shadow Lass, definitely squandered opportunity - and she was off to a good start as a fully formed character with a homeworld under Waid.

Overall, I liked the threeboot although, like the rest of you, I didn't particularly warm up to the characters as I did with the original or reboot version. As GL pointed out, the characterization tended to be more extreme and the inconstant relationships didn't help.

Imra losing it in Legion Lost made more sense to me than her behaviour with Jo in these recent issues. Nevertheless, I agree that there is something about the character that incites some writers to put her in demeaning circumstances. She's too strong, confident and capable so we have to see a weakness? With Brainiac 5, his personality is his weakness, or he goes insane on occasion. With Imra, it's ice queen surrenders to lustful feelings.

I vaguely recall Levitz, in his last run, sort of hinting at some sort of mass-exchange going on when Cham shapeshifts into a larger or smaller form, but didn't really get into detail with it.

If there was one change I'd like to see in Cham, is his powers refined to not so explicitly allow him to do Shrinking Violet / Colossal Boy levels of size-changing. *Some* size-changing, sure, but not giants or tiny insects. Save that for the people whose *one* super-power is size-changing! OTOH, I also like scenes of him turning into a bug and going places with Violet, and think they make a cool team, so maybe it's fine where it is. It's not like the team already doesn't have folk with all the powers of several team-mates (like Mon-El, who kind of blows away Ultra Boy, Blok and Timber Wolf, and, thanks to heat vision, kind of can keep up with Lightning Lad/Lass and Sun Boy as well in the ranged zap category).


Coming from male writers, this constantly needing to bring the strong woman down thing is creepy, IMO.

I want to fanwank it and say that, as a telepath, she's constantly low-level receiving output from people around her, even if she blocks most of it consciously, and that being around a horndog like Jo wears her down and gets her thinking about sex all the time (since it's always on his mind, he's just putting out the sexy thoughts and she's stuck picking them up), but that doesn't fly, since if she got horny around horndogs, she'd have ended up in bed with Sun Boy ages ago.

I was curious about the Sydney/magnetic pole thing because if they said the magnetic poles shifted (which they do - North magnetic pole is currently drifting toward Russia at about 55 km per year) that has nothing to do with the Geographic North Pole which is the northern point of the axis about which the Earth rotates. The magnetic poles have shifted lots over time, even flipped, and are not always (nor currently) opposite each other. Geologists can tell by examining ferrite crystals laid down in rocks over the eons. If it is just the magnetic poles that shifted that would likely have no effect on the climate but if the geographic pole shifts that would make huge changes, not to mention earthquakes of the sort we have never experienced. About the only way I can imagine that happening would be by a collision with a planetary size body. An asteroid wouldn't do it, not even Ceres. Earth would not be survivable.

Looking back to issue #6 they actually talk around it, kind of. KK's comment is "You've never had a magnetic storm on your planet? The polar shift was brutal. You should see New Zealand."

So the words suggest they are talking about the magnetic poles shifting and then confusing that with the geographic poles but they don't actually say - so I guess it gets a pass. Just another fun scifi/fantasy setting.

Sorry about blathering on. Sometimes the science nerd in me gets triggered. This was no worse than Mon-El carrying a white dwarf star into Legion HQ during the Levitz conspiracy tale.

The Phantom Girl concept bothered me a bit more as it suggests she is always visible on both worlds. What about her private times like sex or even pooping?Fun crazy concept but a bit too crazy.

Still I was glad to see the experimentation and the Bizzarro Brainiac/Micro Lad idea was great fun.