Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes #9 (Spoilers)

And in other wolf news today:
Norwegian Boy Scares Off Wolves With Creed

EDE- I agree the brooding, doubts-about-his-humanity angle is/was the most interesting thing about Timber Wolf. I lost much interest in him as the team's mental deficient wolf-boy.

I seem to recall the face chance in S/LSH #197 was something Brin did to himself, so he'd look less like the folks he did not feel like he fit in with. Today, we might make that plot device analogous to a troubled teen cutting on himself.

Oddly, in the current boot, I like Brin as he is seeming more self-assured. I almost want him to grow a pencil-mustache so he'll look more like his Errol Flynnish Adult Legion self. That, of course, swings the pendulum way from one side to the other, so I guess I don't know what I want.

I too have often thought it would have been a kick if Brin had been the android, and, early in the reboot, before he appeared, I recall writing some fanfic to that effect.

Yep.

Costume and all. I especially liked the dramatic look it acquired when thrown mostly into shadow. Thumbs up also for his interactions w/Wolf. My favorite part of the issue, actually.

Despite the slim, slim amount of story, I did enjoy this issue quite a lot. Very happy to get at least a little more insight into what Durla is like at the moment.

Is shrinking down to microscopic size really an effective means of escape? Sure they may be out of sight but how far is it at that scale to the nearest doorway?

I've always maintained that there should be an upper and lower size limit to a Durlan's capabilities. Say, no smaller than a mouse or larger than an elephant for example. Otherwise, the suspension of disbelief as to where all that body mass is supposed to go/come from is stretched a little thin, imho.

Yes.

Failing that, I'd like some kind of hand-wave along the lines of: Brande picked these particular Durlans to work for him precisely because they had exceptional abilities beyond what you'd normally expect to find from the majority of the species.

Also, what's the point of having Vi and Gim on the team, if Cham can do what they do?

That, too, EDE. Violet would still likely feel more at home in the micro-verse than Cham would. Why in blazes should she be on leave if the team knows they're facing foes who can shrink to that degree?

(Yeah, I know. Because It's In The Script™)

The pace of the main story is a bit slow, but issue #9 had some interesting moments. The artwork and coloring on the Durla scenes was top notch. It was interesting to see Chameleon Boy grow back the ripped uniform. The insults that Brainiac 5 hurled at the Durlans were a bit juvenile for someone with a 12th level intelligence.

The interactions between Brin and Troy were handled well. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a friendship that will continue to be explored. Brin needs somebody new to pal around with now that Blok is off with Mysa. Troy never got enough panel time in early incarnations for us to ever get a feel for the relationships he had developed with other members. There was a hint of a friendship between him and Shadow Lass in his exit story. It would be interesting to see that followed up on now, in light of their respective relationships with Earth Man.

The image of Tellus at the bottom of page 13 was striking. Again, it was enhanced by a nice color job.

I had originally added a number of examples from posts on this thread, of how he can't win here. His addressing our questioning and dislike of Brande's accent was one but I included others.
Then, I thought I was being too cranky or something, so I erased them.

I think that even without the examples, though, people should know that it's a fairly valid observation, sometimes.

Yes, I thought about that too.
Vi's power really only works because she has the flight ring. Again, I agree.
In Tepper's books on kids with various superpowers, the shapeshifters had to add to their mass by ingesting things, depending on what they shifted to, or release mass, which they tried to do out of sight.
Ugh.

The point being, getting bigger or smaller wasn't instintanious, but rather took time which extended according to how big, especially, that they could get.

Shifters who were more energy based might be able to shift quicker since they might actually be more holographic in nature, I think.

I also think that most or all, Durlans should not be able to get too big or small because that's more of a copying of Vi's or Gim's powers, which they're not supposed to be able to do.
It's one of the reason's that I could never really buy or enjoy Yera's supposed taking over of Vi's position in the Legion.

The Atom and Ant-Man, etc. seem to get away with this sort of nonsense all the time.

"Watch me shrink to the size of a paramecium! And now I'll go over to that machine on the other side of the room and sneak inside and crawl around and find some circuits and bust them up!"

<Six weeks later.>

Huff, huff, huff, "Almost there! Just gotta climb up this cable, which, from my perspective, is a mile long..."

In theory, the shapeshifters actual cells might be inflatable, kept compressed and 'dehydrated' at it's core when not in use, and when it needs to expand dramatically in size, it 'inhales' with it's entire body and puffs up, sucking in surrounding air to expand these cells, like ten billion tiny balloons, all at once, causing what, on the outside, appears to be a sudden change to a twenty foot tall tentacle monster.

The cells would have to be very elastic, and surprisingly tough, more like the cell walls of plant cells than the cell membranes of animal cells (and yet incredibly permeable, like animal cells, perhaps changing from one state to the other really fast, just as the outer membrane of an egg cell transitions from permeable to 'closed for business' the second that first sperm cell contacts it).

Being able to fill the cells with something more durable and weighty, like water, would make for an even sturdy 'giant form,' although, in the process of expelling this mass later, and contracting, the shapeshifter would be expelling a massive wave of water from it's 'pores' as it shrinks. With a bit of training, the shapeshifter could even learn to expel this water in a slightly slower aerosolized vapor, rather than a torrent, making it appear that it has 'dissapeared in a cloud of smoke' or pulled a vampire stunt and 'turned into mist.' (It's now much reduced form would escape during the visual concealment provided by said vapor, completing the illusion of 'teleporting' or 'turning to mist.')

Still, there's only so much compacting that could go on. Even if a cell could be 'dehydrated' and packed up to take only a few percent of it's regular size and mass, like some dried up husk of a 5000 year old kernel of maize waiting for moisture to bloom back into life, the shapeshifter couldn't get much smaller than a rat, and in that form would be unable to think much more than rat-thoughts, as the vast majority of it's brain cells would be dehydrated and packed away with the rest of it's mass...

It's possible, though, that like the maize kernal above, that these dehydrated cells could be shed and left somewhere. A shapeshifter of this sort in a hostile environment might hide for weeks, storing up nutrients to produce cells, then packing them away in caches all over the local area, so that he can locate them in a hurry and assimilate them to use to drastically expand his size (or replace mass that has been blown off of him by energy weapons, or that he has had to abandon to escape a situation by shrinking to small size and shedding excess mass, perhaps even in the form of a 'corpse' to fool his attackers into thinking that they've killed him).

Using 31st century technology, which has been demonstrated as having extradimensional storage devices (perhaps using Bgtzln tech?), he could even carry packets on his belt (or inside his body!) that contain hundreds or thousands of pounds of his own tissue and / or the 'filler' (water, air, whatever) he uses to expand his cells, stored away for when he needs it, and into which he can shed it when he is done using it.

The Durlan shapeshifting thing can be rationalized with a dash of pseudo-science and some logical connections to the rest of the setting (using Bgtzln tech to store mass 'off-site' for ease of transport, for instance).

It's the sort of thing that Waid probably would have devoted an issue to, what with his explorations of Naltor and Cargg and 'Big City' and Colu, but he never got around to developing Cham / Durla.

The Atom's mass apparently shifts to another dimension when he shrinks. (citation needed)

It is possible that a Durlan's natural form is vaporous, (rather than, say, an orange humanoid, or writhing mass of slimy tentacles and eyeballs) but they need at least miniscule solidity in order to maintain conscious interaction with the universe.

Or maybe the law of conservation of mass-energy don't apply in the Earth-Overse.

Or maybe its all Quantum and Dark Matter and hand-waving.

We know from Cham that they are cold-blooded and born from eggs. They were probably reptilian or amphibian, but all that radiation killed off a majority of their population and the survivors did seriously mutate.

The good thing in this issue : no Earth Man.
The bad thing : No female legionnaires (except the comatose Dawnstar).

The thing that puzzles me about Durlans:

If their shapechanging works by scanning/copying other things, then where the heck does their standard "offworld" form come from? Is there some species that actually looks like that that they are copying? Or how does it work?

I assumed the standard form was meant to copy/echo the one they had before the Six-Minute War. Didn't we see as much recently when Cham and the others went back to "our" present to stop Brainiac's plan?

Wasn't there something about the form being 'assigned' them by the UP? Maybe in SECRETS OF THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES?

As I recall, at one point there were numerous different Durlan forms corresponding to different tribes (hence the "Chameleon Men" from that old Supergirl story were retconned into a tribe of Durlans).

Also of note: Chameleon Chief, who is *not* a Durlan, but uses a Durlan-esque form.

There's a pretty good book about the periodic table called The Disappearing Spoon. I remember one passage about some element, I forget which, that mysteriously gains and losses mass when iteracts with other elements. I remember thinking of Cham when I read it, wondering if Durlan life might be based on that element rather than carbon. I'll have to see if I can find the relevant passage again.

As for Durlan's standard forms, I too recall that each tribe was supposed to have its own standard form, and that Chameleon Boy's usual appearance was a UP mandated standard form, designed to be humanoid enough so as not to incite panic but distinct enough to mark a person as Durlan as a warning to others, much like the reboot Saturn badge worn by Titans.

Is that Sheri Tepper? Which of her books were about kids with superpowers? I haven't read anything of hers in quite awhile.

[snip]

Oh, I wanna' read this! Is it accessible to those of us who haven't seen a periodic table since, oh, about 1983?

Well, I enjoyed the issue, more for the character interaction than the plot, although the plot is becomeing more intriguing. It's not the first time Paul has worked with on the question of Durla, and how and if can or should be "saved." I like that Durla is an odd man out among the UP, that those differences are exacerbated by the Durlans being cold blooded, egg-laying shapeshifters. I like the mistrust and prejudice and between the Durlans and the Legionnaires. I like that Brande, in his well-meaning hubris, was trying to "fix" Durla, and so far all it's achieved is the murder of UP delegates. And I do look forward to seeing how and if the story resolves. Having said all that, I'd take the plot as vehicle to throw interesting people together, and seeing Brainy and Cham and Tyroc and T Wolf chew the fat was the highlight for me.

That would make perfect sense to me. Most 'fixed-form sentients' would find it disturbing that a Durlan could appear to be anyone or anything, and, I could see it being illegal to commit fraud or to misrepresent oneself as being a member of another species.

For that reason alone, there might be a few 'approved' Durlan forms, for travel off-world, which other UP citizens would never mistake for a member of another species. (Like orange antennae-headed humanoid or green tentacle-monster in purple robes, for instance).

The Durlan ambassador could be arguing before the council to approve a few new forms, saying that it's as unreasonable for the UP to restrict natural shapeshifters to only a couple of approved forms as it would be for a race with a limited visual spectrum to forbid others to see any color other than red in their presence.

The arguments could get heated, with delegates insisting that adding too many approved forms would create an unrealistic burden on other citizens to be able to remember them all, with the Durlan countering that they shouldn't have to remember them all, since there's no reason they should specifically know they are talking to a Durlan, unless it's because they want to be prejudiced against them. It's not like the average UP citizen can visually tell if they are talking to a Titanian, or a Braalian, or a Carggite, for instance, so why should the Durlans be required to wear a scarlet letter?

Politics! Racial profiling! Fraud! Fifth Column paranoia! Oh, the drama!