Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes #7 (Preview & Spoilers)

^ Ken - I'm not looking at this issue from a who assaulted who according to section 313 of the Criminal Code angle.

I'm talking about who I, as a reader, can accept seeing being the victim of that assault from a Legionnaire. Attempted murderer and successful jerk, Earth Man - yes. Science policeman just trying to do his job - no.

Also, comparing assault in comics to real world notions of the crime and police corruption is a ridiculous analagy IMO.

Heroes assault other characters (usually villains) in practically every issue of every comic ever! Trying to eradicate that, or bog it down with portrayals of punishment for every time they do it, would practically kill off the whole super-hero genre.

You make a good point googoomuck. It's possible Cosmic Boy (and the others') douchey behaviour is a hangover from the way (some of) the science police treated them in that Action Comics arc.

If it's temporary and doesn't become the permanent portrayal of the Legion and SPs interactions then I can buy that. Paul really needs to give us a throw-away line explaining that though or as I mentioned before, the Legion are the ones who will keep coming off worse IMO.

Durlan spies:

Dream Girl: Her fake can't copy her hair correctly. needs lesson from Cham.

Shadow Lass: she'll be upset when she gets free because her friends did not notice or rescue her. "What? you guys think i'd really get with THAT?"

probably got dumped by Mon because of soem creepy behavior like her trying to convince him to knock over a 7-11.

Timber Wolf: suspiciously NOT super-agile.

anybody else?

Something else else that really irritated me. If you look at the Legion headquarters on the last page of the first story, it is totally different from the the same headquarters on the first page of the second story. These guys are paid a lot of money, you would think they could show some consistency.

I never noticed that before! LOL What a great observation SA Lad.
Shows you that these creators are doing their thing in different cities, countries, whatever, but sometimes the editor is out to lunch.

I am of the female persuasion. I'm a Brainy fan, of course I am.

I think Dream Girl is possibly a Durlan because not only is her hair coloured wrong the only point of the scene seemed to be drawing attention to it.

As for her sex kitten poses that goes way back. In fact during the election in Great Darkness she pulls a pose as she says she's running. If that is a Durlan, at least they have the mannerisms down.

And a science police officer shot at Supergirl in the Annual. This seems to be threaded throughout the new continuity.

I thought they were just playing up Dream Girl's vanity. And yes, her sexy poses go way back, but that doesn't mean that I liked them then either.


P.S. I never knew you were female either! Anymore female fans that want to stand up and be counted?

All the speculation on Nura being the Durlan spy.... I think she is merely a red herring. I think that Cham is the spy and that Yera will be acused of being the spy and have to prove her innocence. If Nura or Shady does turn out to be the spy then it is the worst case of heavy-handed foreshadowing ever.

P.S. Is it possible that the 'leave my hair alone' line was from Levitz because of the frequent miscoloring?

It's possible that Nura's change of hair color is not a coloring mistake, but an intentional change. It's not a change I support, but it has been consistent enough that I don't think it is a mistake. Dirk has also had a change of hair color - which works much better.

Oh, there's no "might" about it.

:rolleyes:

Maybe you "often slap your own kind harder." Some of us try to behave a little more maturely, even when we think certain characters aren't being written as well as they could be.

[snip]

I keep wondering about that myself. It feels like a wasted opportunity, because it could provide some insight into both characters, but so far it's only being played for shock and/or theatrics.

Maybe there'll be a plausible explanation at some point. It would be nice to see.

[snip]

I can't believe Cham's eyebrows, myself. Dude needs to fire his stylist, pronto.

Actually starting considering that Dreamy was an impostor long before that for two reasons:

1) Panel from ADVENTURE #1 (Realize that Levitz might not be held to John's original plotlines, but a good story twist is a good story twist).

2)The fact that Starman has not returned yet, and Thom, himself, described his final instructions from R.J. Brande as "to find the beauty..."

Y'know Cham was capable of detecting the difference between cloned beings--could he also detect fellow Durlans?

Has Dream Girl used her powers in any issue so far? I just paged through LSH 1-7 & I don't see her using them in any of those issues. I just skimmed through them so it's possible I missed something. Shady used her powers in #2. So I'm thinking that Dream Girl will accuse Cham of being an imposter & fulfill the High Seers prediction.

decent issue, liked the Tyroc got some major panel time, it was kinda weird seeing Cos giving T-wolf the positive reinforcement nudge with the "trust your intuitionTimber Wolf..." line. like as if T-Wolf were a new member and Cos was training him on a team mission.
really would've wished when Mon-el faced off with Earthman, after he took him into orbit he would've thrown him into the moon or better yet the sun, nothing like a 93,000,000 mile flight back to Earth even at super speed to humble the most arrogant of of A-holes.
loved that Mon showed him that sure you can copy my powers, but you surely lack the experience to use them.
and it was kinda arrogant of E-man saying i can take you easy when he had Mon banished the the Phantom Zone instead of Keeping him in stasis like the other Legionnaires.
and if there are any Red Dwarf fans out there did you notice a certain ship made a cameo in the 2nd feature when Brany & Cham were landing on Naltor?

Wow, I'm almost catching up in my Legion reading to review and participate in the boards again. Hurray! I enjoyed this issue. Maybe it's wishful projection, but I bought the Great Darkness HC at the same time, and there is some quality to these stories that remind me of those pre-GD stories in the HC. Interlocking, character-building, small stories that establish a new, more solid status quo for the Legion, in advance of something really big.

This issue gaves us lots more Tyroc, some of the BEST Timber Wolf scenes since 1982!!!, some Sun Boy/Polar Boy fun, some Dream Girl intrigue, some Mon-El/Earth Man/Shadow Lass drama, some very good Brainiac 5 exploration. What's not to like here?

I want to address to address the Shadow Lass/Earth Man/Mon-El thing, because it is really fascinating and f-ed up, isn't it? First, Shady. Shady has really only had 2 periods of character development (in this version) and that's her first few appearances in Adventure by Shooter, and the mid-80s stuff on Talok with her brother, the tribal stuff, and the wedding finger stuff. If you go back to who Shady was originally, she was the warrior protector of a tribal people attracted to whichever male seemed the most powerful at the time. First it was Brainiac 5, then Superboy, and then Mon-El (which happened in the original Mordru story?) Levitz has clearly chosen to go back to that original portrayal. You can argue with that decision, but you have to provide a better alternative that fits her history, I think.

Now, viewing Tasmia in that light, you see that the real problem here is Mon-El. His characterization makes her behavior almost inevitable. Mon has always had this problem as a character, and it's been addressed in different ways by different creative teams in all the boots. Is he a natural successor to Superman?--strong, confident, optimistic, self-sacrificing, indefatigable?--all the qualities that Shady would want in a warrior mate? Or is he a brooding, antisocial, contemplative scholar, irreparably scarred by 1,000 years in the Phantom Zone? The more Mon-El behaves like this, the more likely Shady is to run off to the arms of a less ambivalently Alpha Male, and say what you want about Earth Man, he indeed all Alpha.

And what of Earth Man shagging an alien? Well, there's certainly LOTS of precedent for this dichotomy, isn't there? It could be the variant of the whore/Madonna complex that you see with some bigoted men. Look at Strom Thurmond, who was an avowed segregationist for much of his life, revealed in the end as having a daughter by an African American woman. Or, more charitably, maybe Shady is Earth Man's route to a less species-based view of sentients. While they are different species, Earth Man has a lot more in common with Shady, from a personality stand point, than with a pacifist, vegetarian Buddhist human.

One thing I think we can be certain of is that Levitz is going to play this out over the long run. That's what he DOES with these things. I'm looking forward to see how he resolves the fundamental conflict in Mon-El's characterization.

Why does everyone keep saying Shady had a thing for Superboy? She was introduced in Adv. 365, first shown to have a crush on Brainy in Adv. 366, absent in Adv. 367, still shown to be crushing on Brainy in Adv. 368, and "sunk her hooks into Mon-El just like that" in Adv. 369. So where does this Superboy period come in? Was there a flashback somewhere that I missed?

I missed it too.
sigh

And Shadow Lass was never shown as a great warrior although she was called the Shadow Champion'.

Her origin story showed her as an orphan who didn't know about her background as shadow champion.
And she has no brother, only her cousin Grev.
Her only other relative in this boot was her old uncle who was sort of her guardian.

She had no early training as a 'warrior' in the original boot.
Nor were we ever shown that she had any great training as a warrior in the original boot.
If she has, show me where and when because there's nothing in her origian about training.

She's only ever physically fought the Empress, once, with a fist, and the Memory Priestess and I think that was a fist, too, if we saw anything at all.

Umbra was the warrior and she only ever was interested in Lar (and perhaps Brainy a little curing LOST.)

Prime Shady was the promisquious one who joined violence with sex as a 'warrior'.

This is Shady whom Lar carried around in his arms most of the time.

And this is the new Lar, the one with a future that Cham promised him to sustain him in the Zone, and Christopher to protect from Zod, at least for awhile.

And if Levitz is going to leave out the Proty soul in Garth, he's got to leave out the Eltro soul in Lar.

Lar doesn't have the same weaknesses that he had before, neither is Tasmia some incredibly trained warrior.

Not in THIS boot.

Sometimes it gets hard to separate the characterisations by 'boot. I often end up just thinking that Shadow Lass is like Umbra was, or Colossal Boy like Leviathan, etc.

That said, I think you made a good post up there, doublechinner, and I agree that that is the angle Paul is coming at the Tasmia/Kirt/Lar triangle from. And so far, I can buy it.

I have a different read on the Earth Man/ Shady deal. I reckon E- Man has to take so much Viagra that EVERY woman he sees looks blue. I don't think he knows what he's done. Of course that doesn't explain HER behaviour...

I still continue thinking that Tasmia and Lar has a secret plan to discover Earth Man's plans. The break of them is a shammed, also for his companions in order that it seems more real.

Well, Yera fooled him for months the first time (including in isolated, close quarters during the whole frozen asteroid thing), so I would say "no".

Yep. It's a good thing that post-Silver Age authors pretty much ignored that ability of Cham's, even though I guess it was canon at one time that he could sense other shape-shifters. It tends to put the brakes on a lot of stories when characters are TOO powerful, especially in team books.

As it is, I don't like the idea that Durlans can duplicate organisms as small as germs (which I think was implied as possible in The Great Ten). Again, that's too much power to hand one character in what's supposed to be a team book.

All good points, but I think the weight of backstory (even discounting the other 'boots), is that Shady is the Shadow Champion of a tribal society. Plus, it's not clear that there's another female character in the Legion at the moment that fills that role. And as for Mon-El, the fact that he's been portrayed by Levitz so far as brooding and mopey suggests that is still an element of his personality. I'm not arguing that Eltro is part of the story (or should be).

Where in the canon does it say Cham can detect other shapeshifters? I missed that too apparently.