Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Legion of Super-Heroes #2 - SPOILERS

Great second issue. Series is going into the exactly right direction. Kudos to Mister Levitz, yeah, he still has it!

Reading the Previews info I thought the Earth Man storyline was dumb, but it's rather great, cool idea! And the xenophobes rioting against the poor dispossessed fugitives? Makes my heart beat faster, love to hate those scumbags! I always kind of like those xenophobia storyline, cause I fear that, no matter how many milenia will pass, it's rather realistic that humankind will always be afraid of people who are different. Man has not evolved since the medieval ages - and I fear he won't until 3010 as well...

DID mankind 'evolve' in the middle ages?
One theory is that the climate had a mini-warming cycle for a few hundred years.
That meant that people didn't have to struggle constantly to eat/survive so Maslow's principles kicked in.
I haven't heard of any significant changes in the humans of that time from anyone before them.
Is there something?

Anyway, Gates has always had a limited amount of 'carrying' abilitie with his gates, hasn't he?
Maybe if he can port between distant solar systems now, he could just port whole planets from system to system, too?!

I finally read # 2 last night. I found it a big improvement on # 1. I'm not exactly jumping for joy but I am certainly happier than I've been since Shooter's first few issues of the 3boot.

Just read it last night. This book is somehow really out of sync with my once-monthly CBS visit, or I'm really out of sync with the Legion's new schedule!

I did NOT enjoy the whole issue as much as #1, mainly because this didn't feel like a story, with a beginning, middle and end like #1 did, and I'm just an old curmudgeon who thinks that is important. Here are my most vivid random impressions:

* I thought Levitz's expository dialogue (not to be confused with SUPPOSITORY dialogue) was very clunky in #2, while I found it deft in #1. I formed that impression from the preview (the Titan debris scene) and it stayed with me as I read the whole issue.

* I'm annoyed that Saturn Queen doesn't SEEM to have even a HINT of a larger agenda. She drops by the old homestead to confirm it's kaput, and just decides to single-handedly attack the Legion in their HQ? Is she impulsive that way? It just seems quite random, and ultimately done only to demonstrate that Ultra Boy's love for Phantom Girl is stronger than Titanian telepathy. Was that really the only reason? Couldn't we have some hint (other than the Nemesis Kid mention) of a larger LSV objective?

* How...interesting that Mon-El is talking to UB about getting dumped (although Jo brought it up), while Shadow Lass and Phantom Girl don't say boo about it, even though they have been close friends, as couples, in the past. What up with that? Are we showing the boys to be gossipy EMO types and the women to be tough warriors? Plus, wouldn't you want to confirm (for any new readers out there) that the person who dumped Mon-El, mentioned at the beginning, is the character seen later with Phantom Girl? Seems like a missed opportunity.

* And on the subject of Shady, why is she green, or teal, or whatever? Weren't the Talokian nomads she fought in the 1980s that greenish blue? Did she convert or something? Is it a change of life thing? Turn teal, dump your super-hot super-powerful boyfriend?

* So I guess the whole Dream Girl in peril in the 21C is now a lost tale of the LSH? Or did I miss something? And is Star Boy/Man back in the 31C or not? Good to see Gates and his kvetching, though. I really liked Dawnstar's teleport sickness too. A small, nice touch.

* Jacques!!!!!! Nice look to him, too. Wonder if he and Tyroc did rock/paper/scissors to see who had to be the bald black guy on the team?

* So Cosmic Boy is clearly the Leader?

* I found the characterization of Earth Man interesting (EarthGov is humans, so I do what they tell me to do), but not really in keeping with the megalomania that Johns gave him. Unless there is some other, higher power behind the xenophobia thing. And I don't necessarily mean a super villain, but some official political policy/sanction for Earth Man's actions during the Action Comics story. Was it ever revealed WHO planted the evidence in the Fortress of Solitude that Superman was human? Did Prime/Time Trapper do it?

* For some reason, the "painted desert" refugee center made me think of the World War II Japanese American internments. Don't really know why. Manzanar (the most infamouse camp) was in California, and Painted Desert is in Arizona.

I admit I have yet to read the entire thread, so I apologize if somebody else already has suggested this, but IMHO, Tyroc doesn't need air in space, he only needs air in his transuit.

There may be something to that. It could help to explain how some Terrains can get locked in nuclear reactors or ingest super-plastic fluid and get super-powers instead of getting dead.

That would allow him to scream, certainly. And so long as his powers remain the pseudo-magical ability to scream and 'stuff happens,' he's all good.

If he were Marvel's Banshee, his power would be no more useful in a transsuit in space than a stinky fart. It would travel to the edge of the suit, and then stop, because the air particles that are conducting the sonic vibration would be trapped in the suit with him. Indeed, the full force of one of the Banshee's sonic screams would either blow the suit apart from the inside, or reverberate around inside the suit, affecting only him.

Without particles to conduct the vibrations, sound and heat do not exist (which is why space, despite having a bunch of stars just hanging around burning like a million constantly exploding nuclear bombs, is both silent and cold, as the sound of all those burbling cauldrons of nuclear fury and the heat they produce can't propogate through vacuum). They aren't 'things' or 'energy,' so much as properties of matter. No matter to vibrate / oscillate / agitate, and Banshee's pretty much a guy in a spacesuit.

[The comparison is muddled by the number of characters who, like Tyroc, use screams to activate other powers. Banshee's flight requires him to scream, but is 'psionic' and doesn't use sonic vibrations to lift him, 'cause if it did, he'd be pounding the ground beneath him like a jackhammer as he flew, crushing everything between him and the ground, and causing ridonkulous amounts of property damage. So he'd be able to fly in space just fine, even if his scream never left his suit. Black Bolt's powers are even more unclear. Sometimes it's sonic, sometimes it's just triggered by his vocalizations. Generally, the only rule about Black Bolt is that his power works however the writer wants it to. It's sonic when Dazzler needs to absorb it. It's raw destructive power triggered by a vocalization when he needs to blow up a ship in space. ]

I'm watching an episode of Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole where he's talking about how, on the quantum level, a change to one sub-atomic particle can trigger a similar change to an otherwise unrelated "twin" particle. Simply saying that Tyroc's powers operate on the quantum level might easily explain how vibrating the air particles in his transuit can vibrate sub-atomic particles in an asteroid, making it go POW!

Indeed. There was never any pretense that he had 'sonic powers' back in the day. He screamed and stuff teleported or caught on fire or went intangible. It was all more like reality manipulation, or magic spells.

Quantum stuff could work on two levels;

On the 'sci-fi Star Trek technobabble' side, his screams could tear holes in spacetime, and cause improbable things that have happened in other quantum realities to happen in this universe. Sort of a 'bleed' thing, where if there was any universe where this item had mysteriously exploded, he could 'bring it here' and affect the item in this universe. That would fit with a comic book universe that's already established the presence of a bunch of adjacent universes, alternate timelines, hypertime, etc. and allow him a Scarlet Witch-type power of doing pretty much whatever the heck he wanted to do, as long as he knew the right 'scream frequency' (spell, dimensional coordinates, whatEVER) for that particular effect.

On the harder science side, and skipping all of the other stuff and just going with 'sonic powers that work in space' angle he could quantum entangle himself with the target of his 'scream,' and then conduct the vibrations of his sonic assault directly to the target object. His own body would begin resonating at a frequency that would shake the item apart, and he'd conduct the force of the vibrations along a quantum corridor, not through real space, eliminating the need for any sort of conducive medium connecting him to the target.

A logical outgrowth of this second option would be for him to retain all of this energy within himself, instead of creating a 'corridor' to channel it away into another thing, possibly making himself appear superhumanly strong and / or invulnerable (to kinetic force, in particular, although probably also to extremes of temperature).

In a way, it would mimic that old Black Bolt trick of channeling all of his energy into his 'master blow' that could knock out the Thing or whatever. Through his internal vibrational manipulations, he'd be absorbing impact and redirecting it into his own fists, kind of like a version of Sebastian Shaw or 'Strong Guy' from the X-verse. (Man, all my examples are from Marvel!)

yeah it was Prime trapper.

Humans were advancing socially and technologically during this period, esp. in Arab and Chinese cultures. In Europe people were evolving biologically, as they were gathering in large towns and cities they were building resistance to diseases, among other things.

As far a xenophobia goes, I think most modern people would be shocked at how non-xenophobic most Europeans of the Middle Ages actually were. You have a huge legacy of multi-national, multi-cultural empires strectching back at least to the Romans which still had a strong influence on European culture thoughout most of the medieval period. It's primarily with the rise of the modern nation-state that the kind of group identity that's necessary for racism as we know it today really solidifies.

Can I just say that I kind of like "Prime-Time Trapper" as a phrase and a name? And if someone came up with it before me, I happily cede creative licenst to you. I might even use it as a LW alias if I didn't dislike the character so much!

Oh, and appropos of not much, I was thinking again about Titan the other day, especially Cham's line about Titanians sharing 99% of genes with earth humans. This gets back to the whole question of the 21C Mon-El/Legion seeding mission and the "Lanothians" versus Levitz insisting that Titan is an earth colony. I imagine since he's Paul Levitz, he can ignore whatever prior stories he wants, even if they are really, really recent. But there's a nice, time-tested solution to the problem -- At some point in the next millenium, earth humans settled on Titan with the Lanothians. Perhaps they wre fleeing earth in a war-like period. Perhaps they were telepaths experiencing discrimination or exploitation on earth. And they sought refuge with the Lanothians, who took them in and helped them develop their telepathy. At some point, the Lanothians moved on, for whatever reason -- evolution, recreation of their homeworld, inter-breeding with the humans, whatever -- leaving the earth human colonists as the residents of Titan. Long story short, problem solved.

BTW, I seem to recall that we never actually SAW the Lanothians, right? So, one could go one step farther and posit that the Lanothians were methane breathers (makes sense to live on Titan) and eventually resettled to Hykraius, from whence Tellus hails. All the more reason why Tellus was part of the 21C squad!