Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes LSH #10 (Preview/Spoilers)

I kind of liked the fact that the Durlans were simply after money and not revenge. Made it all actually a little more twisted. And I know it seemed a little bit of a rushed ending, but Levitz doesn't just always tie things neatly up. We'll see more about all this, and that's good.

I hope Phantom Girl gets something interesting to do soon besides hang out in immaterial form.

Always good to see Yera. She's much more interesting than her dull husband.

I hate the way Tellus is being drawn.

And yes, Dawnstar shouldn't have flown off in her underwear without back-up, but that's pretty consistent with her personality. When she's tracking someone she seems pretty focused.

Tellus, Dr. Gymll (sp?) and Gates need to be researched by the artists and fixed in their appearance soon. The Dream Girl hair issue can be annoying...but at least it's a coloring issue, not an artists mistake.

I just got this yesterday and I have one question. Reep addresses his aunt as "Ra'esha". Is that a Durlan title ("aunt" or "mother") or is it supposed to be her name? I also thought her name was Ji.

I'd say your guess is as good as anyone else's.

So, I finally got around to get this issue.

Auntie Ra'esha's big plan was to steal Brande's money and the terrorist Durlan assassin revenge thing was just cover for her cash-grab?

Huh. I think I liked this storyline better when it was called Die Hard. Hans Gruber was a more compelling character and cooler 'exceptional thief' than Auntie Ra'esha. (Then again, if Alan Rickman played Auntie Ra'esha, I'd probably change my tune. Dude can act.)

Now I'm all curious as to what Brande's 'Long Plan' actually was. Pheebs is dead, so he's not telling. Auntie Ra'esha and any other surviving Durlans likely know, but they won't be enacting it, since they'll be in jail (and apparently wanted to steal his money and spend it on fancy hats, rather than pursue his agenda).

It *seemed* like the Durlan leader-type Cham was talking to on Durla might have known what the Long Plan was, but he doesn't seem terribly inclined to share information with 'race-traitor' Reep.

I wonder if Cham, or we readers, will ever know what Brande's 'Long Plan' was, or if it will ever come to pass, now that those chosen to set it in motion are all either dead or headed for jail...

I may have taken my daft pills today, but I don't really get what the Durlan plan was? Cham's aunt seemed to be ticked off that the money wasn't going to Durla, but isn't that exactly what WAS happening?

I am glad it's all over anyway...for a Durlan-oriented plot, there wasn't really a great deal of focus on Cham and Yera (Yera seemed to have been thrown in at the last minute just to show she's still around tbh, the story could have proceeded exactly the same way if she wasn't present). It also wasn't visually very exciting - the actual stuff on Durla was really nicely presented, but I couldn't help but compare the fight scene between Cham and his aunt unfavorably with Cham's fight scene on Durla a zillion years ago (especially considering that he mentioned that trip in this issue, and there was a visual reference to it with him becoming a hummingbird again).

Hoping things pick up with the LSV stuff that's coming up...I really think Levitz is at his best when he's working with a more collaborative artist than he has with Yildiray. The entire run of the main Legion title doesn't compare at all to his one issue of Academy with Phil Jiminez. It's hard to believe they're even both written by the same person!

Who's making those nowadays, Pfizer? Whoever it is I really wish that they'd stop giving free samples to politicians.

Yeah, I wasn't nuts about this issue, either. It looked nice but it didn't really grab me.

Since we had no real insight or look back at whatever kind of relationship Cham had with his aunt before (aside from one silent panel in Adventure where they're seeing Brande off Durla, if that counts), there was no real frame of reference and nothing much to feel any interest in.

It's always been a recurrent theme with Levitz that the only really "good" Durlans would invariably be the acculturated, assimilated variety like Cham and Yera. There was no room in this reality for anyone to find compromise between extreme xenophobia and wholesale integration while still remaining sympathetic or good in the reader's eyes. But this POV is so exaggerated now that it's not just disappointing to me. It's genuinely distasteful.

The Durlan version of xenophobic isolationism is certainly portrayed differently than Earth-Man's version of xenophobic isolationism.

The bit where another Durlan tears Reep's shirt, saying that it violates sumptuary laws, makes it seem to me like Durlan 'tradition' requires them all to wear nothing but those tattered purple cloaks, as if the entire planet is trapped in a thousand year cycle of mourning for something, and to wear anything else is disrespectful or 'above one's station' or overproud / materialistic or something. It's not hard to see some sort of burqa / hajib parallel to that, where some members of a culture appear more worked up about superficial matters of dress than with actual reflection upon the actions, words and nature of the person in question.

If I squint real hard and look for it, there's a sense of 'they deserve their situation / are backwards' in the way the Durlans have been presented which reminds me of a 'lazy foreigners / innately inferior / unready for democracy' sort of argument. But, since I'm really having to stretch for that, I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume that it wasn't intended. (Plus the story was written well before the 'unready for democracy' meme was brought back into the headlines again by the Egypt thing, so that's obviously current events coloring my re-reading of the scene.)

I didn't have to stretch far at all to find it, Set.

But to each their own. It's the kind of thing I wouldn't have thought twice about a couple of decades ago. But my politics are a lot more, uh, jaundiced than they were back in those days.

IIRC Ji was among the Legionnaire parents kidnapped by Dagon the Avenger, and later had a heartfelt reunion with R.J. and Cham in the final pages of SOLSH#3.

Seemed quite fond of Reep and R.J. at the time, and Cham openly proclaimed he would always consider her to be his "Mother" not "Aunt".

Durla seems to have been portrayed similarly in all of the boots, we can't really attribute their 'world view' to current events, I think.
However, perhaps originally they were set up along stereotypical lines.

If you look beyond that, I think that a group of beings who have caused their own destruction and disfigurement might have a couple of reactions that we see on Durla, that would explain what we're seeing.

1. The robes hide their 'disgrace' amd disfigurement so that they can live with themselves and the consequences of their actions.
2. Their attitude towards other arrainment has become 'law' in nature because it reinforces their decision to wear the robe/hide their guilt and departure from the norm immediately identifies anyone challenging the current cultural denials.

To me, this approach is very different then the reasons for women in our Arab countries to wear the 'robes'.


Yes, but, unfortunately, this is the retroboot and a lot of what used to be established isn't any more.
(That's great information though, thanks!)
sigh

I'd love to see some of those pages posted if you have them available, Korbal.

Unfortunately, what Candle said below is correct. We don't know whether any of that background is still in force, do we? To really have any meaning in the current continuity, it would've been nice to have Levitz throw a few more bones. It would have made for a better story, IMHO.

Brace yourself. The artwork in those stories is none too pretty.

We definitely should've seen more of the aunt/mother in this story. Maybe there will be some followup where Cham visits her in the clink or something.

hmmm... I found this about her:
Ji Daggle, his aunt, who he had, for a long time, believed to be his mother. She was not sick with Yorggian fever, but Cham seldom saw her since she so seldom left Durla in general. While he was a Legionnaire, she only left three times: once to attend Cham's Legion induction (Legion of Super-Heroes (2nd series) # 39), once at the summoning of Dagon the Avenger, who pretended to be her son (nephew) to lure her to Earth and kidnap her for ransom (Legion of Super-Heroes (1st series) # 263-264), and once when R. J. was suffering a relapse of Yorggian fever, which led to Chameleon Boy's finding out the truth about his parentage (Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes # 3).

Sorry, don't have them handy--that's a task better suited to Nightcrawler. Here's a link to Ji Daggle's last appearance from the LSH Who's Who.
http://www.legionworld.net/images/Profiles/WhoWhoLegion/WWLSH7p12.jpg

She is just in the background in the induction story, not really good enough image to even tell if it is her (and if it is supposed to be her, she is bald like Yera originally was). In the Dagon story she has the purplish hair and an outfit that could pass for Saturn Girl's pink bikini. Same hair, different clothes at the end of the Secrets story.

That should be the worst thing I have to deal with this month.

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We definitely should've seen more of the aunt/mother in this story. Maybe there will be some followup where Cham visits her in the clink or something.

That would be nice: Some reasoning as to how she was essentially the dude's only parent for all those years, and yet he managed to turn out like he did.

[snip]

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Originally posted by Iam Legion:
hmmm... I found this about her:
Ji Daggle, his aunt, who he had, for a long time, believed to be his mother. She was not sick with Yorggian fever, but Cham seldom saw her since she so seldom left Durla in general. While he was a Legionnaire, she only left three times: once to attend Cham's Legion induction (Legion of Super-Heroes (2nd series) # 39)...

Yeah, and that's a problem with having alterations of continuity after the fact. I presume that when these early stories took place, Durla wasn't thought of as the isolationist place that later writers like Levitz depicted. Alter the environment and it alters the character's personality, sometimes radically.

But I could be wrong.

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Originally posted by Korbal:
Sorry, don't have them handy--that's a task better suited to Nightcrawler. Here's a link to Ji Daggle's last appearance from the LSH Who's Who.
http://www.legionworld.net/images/Profiles/WhoWhoLegion/WWLSH7p12.jpg

Thanks! I remember seeing that in EDE's old thread about everyone's parents, but I'd forgotten it until now.

And that is why they should only do it when absolutely nescessary and then think of the consequences and be respectful of what has gone before instead of lazily altering history and characters to fit their 'great new idea for a story'.

I don't think of the alterations themselves as a problem. No author wants to work on a project where they can't leave their own mark. Big-company comics are a communal thing and I don't expect every author to see every character exactly the same way as his or her predecessor did.

But it's a problem now because the changes seem so rapid and relentless compared to the pace at which they used to happen. Also, the space restrictions due to shrunken page lengths and more emphasis on great, big pretty panels make it hard for us to get the kind of backstory and "show, not tell" that we need to make this stuff really work.

I think that cleome's hit it on the head here.

I'm a fan of change that makes the setting more interesting. The 'just like earth, but with orange antennaed shapechanger people' classic age Durla, with gleaming cities and high-tech people wearing one piece jumpsuits is wildly divergent from the later depiction of it as a blasted radioactive ruin inhabited by raggedy-cloaked xenophobic green tentacle monsters, but I'm good with that change, because it might make Durla a smaller more restrictive place, but it makes the United Planets a bigger more diverse place, where not every UP world is 'earth with orange people' or 'earth with blue people.'

So that's a change that I liked, because it made the story of Cham going back to Durla to regain his powers, etc. more compelling.

Kindly Aunti Ji becoming 'will kill for faster access to money that I was already being given anyway' Aunti Ra'esha hasn't impressed me quite so much. The payoff wasn't there, to justify the nature of the change, IMO.

The original Wolfman/Perez 'Who is Donna Troy' changed Wonder Girl's past, and told a darn good story in the process. It added some characters and concepts to the story and some depth to the character of Donna Troy.

The 'she's a Manhunter' reveal changed Laurel Kent's past, and did not succeed in telling an awesome story in the process. Instead of adding anything, it only subtracted from the story and made the narrative smaller.

TL;DR - Good change is good. Bad change is bad.

As far as classic depictions of Durla, we find out as early as Adventure #350 that Cham's purpose in joining the Legion was because his race "seldom mingle with humans of other planets, because ordinary people are often suspicious of these aliens with their shape-changing abilities", and he wants to earn the respect of other races for both himself and his people.

The problem I have is that each subsequent story about Durla seems to justify prejudices against them. If I were living in the 31st century, I think I'd be pretty suspicious of these nasty buggers by now as well.

I read the #10.
Good to see Yera in action for first time in this tittle.
Though it would prefer seeing Luornu back in the main team.
Cosmic Boy says in the Annual : I Thought Legion was supposead to mean an endless horde...
Then, I want it...

Duplicate Girl, Bouncing Boy, Matter-Eater Lad, Black Witch, Blok, Night Girl,XS, Infectious Lass.

I know ...Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, Mon-El, Projectra, Star Boy and Karate Kid...
They return soon.

And all new old characters like ...Kid Quantum or maybe Quantum Queen, Veilmist, Reflex, Laurel Gand.

And this way we would have one real LEGION of Super-heroes.

Right up to the 'future' storyline from the Post ZeroHour Legion where they turn out to be planet killers and the 2 members of Wildfire's Legion are traitors.

I am a fan of change that grows organicly out of the past and current storylines and results in a great story. I hate lazily changing/ignoring the past history just to tell a story the way the current writer wants it to be (I think Johns is still the most guilty of this, but Levitz is rapidly catching up). If it was a spectacularly good story then I might forgive it, otherwise not so much. I am also not fond of 'change for change sake' (Killing Brande, Leland and Karate Kid 2 in Lo3W is a good example of this), but I still find this preferable to totally changing the past history of a character, group or title just for covinience sake of the writer that is too lazy to make the story work with the history they have to work with. Also, I am ok with the original 'Retcon' that was a merely a reveal of something that happened off pannel that adds to the reality of the situation but does not blantantly contradict what was experienced by the the characterss or reader in the original story (such as the sappy but acceptable Phoenix as a seperate entity that copied rather than possessed Jean from the X-men comics) rather than as an outright rewrite of their history.