Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Re-Reading the Legion: Archives #4

(See the previous threads on Archives #3, Archives #2 and Archives #1 and feel free to add in your two cents on those stories. It's NEVER too late! )

For the next few weeks we'll be reading the stories from LSH Archives #4, with a discussion of a single new story every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Archives #4 covers Adventure #329-336, Superboy #124, Adventure #337-338, Superboy #125, and Adventure #339--in that order.

LOTS to look forward to including Dynamo Boy, the LSV, Starfinger, Insect Queen, Kid Psycho, two-parters (!) and the one, the only Super Moby Dick...of SPACE!!!!


First up? Adventure #329: "The Bizarro Legion"!!!

Some primo Legion stories in this volume. I think writer Edmond Hamilton started to hit his stride at this time. Can't wait to dive in!

OK, it's midnight in my time zone and I'm not the least bit tired, so I'll dive right in:

Adv. 329

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a fan of the Bizarros. Their humor, I think, works best with pre-adolescents and, really, Mr. Mxy is more fun since he is deliberately menacing while the Bizarros are just screwed up.

Because it focuses on the Bizarros, this story is serviceable and competent, but not particularly memorable. What is most grating is that Siegel spends two pages telling us how screwed up things are on Bizarro World. We're treated to entries in a Bizarro dictionary, a statue of the great Bizarro hero Benny Dick Arnold, and an alarm clock that goes off when it's time to go to bed. Okay, we get it. The Bizarros do things opposite of us regular humans. But Superboy has already explained this, so the two-page exposition was unnecessary.

The premise of this story is as follows: a 30th century Bizarro Superboy shows up without explanation and, after being rejected by the Legion (for which he is grateful), he uses the flawed duplicator ray to create duplicates of the Legion. (It's not clear how many Legion Bizarros he creates--only five are seen initially, but more appear as the story requires.) The "Legion of Stupor-Bizarros" then goes about creating emergencies instead of solving them as the regular Legion would. This leads to a showdown on the square Bizarro World in which the Bizarros too easily take the entire Legion captive and then are tricked into disbanding by some slight of hand performed by Superboy, Saturn Girl, and Element Lad (the latter two proving they make an effective team by saving the day two issues in a row).

This story is played for laughs, but it isn't that funny. However, since the Legion has already met Luthor and a Mxyzptlk descendent, I guess it was inevitable that they would meet another recurring Superboy adversary, the Bizarros. Like the Luthor tale in 325, this one is largely forgettable, but it is more satisfying since the Legionnaires have to work for their victory and sweat it out instead of manipulating the villain from the Phantom Zone.

As a plus, though, we are once again treated to Jim Mooney's naturalistic artwork. I wish he had drawn more of these stories.

Two other things of note:
-- The flight rings are at last introduced early on, but they play no role in the rest of the story.
-- Likewise, the dangling Time Trapper plot thread is mentioned but not advanced.

Not a great story, not a bad one. Just a solid average tale.

The ending where Superboy and Element Lad fool the Bizaroos seems unsatisfying, somehow. I find it silly that none of the other Legionnaires seemed to guess that it was Jan who transmuted the coal.

The Bizarros are so absurd thar I can't help but laugh a little (Biz Saturn Girl drawing what's in Bizarro's head, oh boy). I just find it a bit worrisome that there was no final resolution for the Bizarros - they leave, but is there really anything stopping them from coming back?

I also find it a bit jarring that more Bizaroos inexplicably appear as the story requires. Oh well, why not right?

As I recall, this story was written in response to readers' requests for a team-up between the Legion (who began regularly appearing in Adventure in #300) and the Bizarros (whose own regular feature had been replaced by the Legion).

Agree! Having read ahead a bit, I'm delighted at how strong so many of these stories are.

Adventure #329

Here at last is one I definitely have not read before. We only recently got this issue in the last few years. Cool!

Throughout most of my comic book reading life I've found Bizarro and company pretty unenjoyable (I even started a thread on it here somewhere). The Bizarro Reboot story is what I consider the absolute nadir of the entire reboot and I was so disappointed when it came out. It's only within the last few years that I've come to see the feature in a different light, mainly thanks to LW's Rhino, who rightly explained that its nothing more than absurdist comedy--when done in that way it works; when applied to different types of stories it usually fails.

Regardless, a Bizarro Legion was bound to happen. Though the LSH replaced the series in Adventure, it remained a hugely popular feature in the Superman books. By now it was slightly on the decline, though it had a few more stories to go before the concept went away entirely. Though Bizarro is a classic Otto Binder creation (building on past themes of his in Captain Marvel and his sci-fi work), its Siegel who liked to use him the most.

Love the continuing nod to the Time Trapper!

And I'd love to learn more about this untold tale of Vanishing World!

Even better: flight rings! So this is where they show up! I'd never read this before!

Once Bizarro shows up, it becomes a strait up Bizarro tale with little of Re Legion in part 1. There are some amusing parts but even 5-6 pages of this is too much. Though I could see someone like Giffen having a field day with crying hyena. And Imra drawing a brain to see what's in their heads is pretty hilarious!

In part 2, the alien reacting to the destruction of Paradise Planet is too much! Hates them? Wishes they drop dead? Bah! He deserved being picked on for harboring all those ill thoughts!

The ending to the story is surprisingly satisfying. A classic Siegel ingenious solution with the proper pacing of a showdown.

I think I actually like this story! While not my favorite, its certainly the best Bizarro story I've read so far. And keeping in mind its a comedy, it kind of works.

Bonus letters page review: Mort reveals many readers didn't get the cloud emblem on Ayla's costume so they changed it.

Major bonus "Know Your Legionnaires"! This one page excerpt, which may have inspired all the TMK excerpts, provides a plethora of information! First names, home planets, origins, firmly establishing the Espionage Squad, even the origin of Vril Dox and Brainiac I. Someone should definitely repost it.

Actually, Jan's use of his power in the resolution was a bit of a head scratcher to me. I've always figured his power was to change one element into a different element. Here, he's able to change one aspect (diamond) of the element carbon into another aspect (coal) of the same element . I'm not saying that I'm correct in that's not how Jan's power works, but it's the way I've always understood it to work. In fact, the way it is shown here reminds me more of how Condo's power works.

So based largely on my confusion about the resolution, right or wrong, I felt pretty unsatisfied by the story, even taking it for the kind of silly story it was supposed to be. Kind of an unearned deus ex machina ending with his power being misused.

The interesting idea to that would be, I suppose, if he had to transmute it to something else (silicon, say) and only in the process of changing it back could he turn it into diamond.

[Probably not in practice though - that idea would work with a "pure" implementation of his powers, but the moment he gets to form more complex substances than just plain elements, the "pure" form pretty much goes out of the window.]


I dunno... if Chemical King's power was just to speed up and slow down reactions, he'd need the (sustained) help of Star Boy (probably Sun Boy too) to turn graphite into diamond, since that could never happen at standard temperature & pressure no matter how long you waited (especially if you want a "gem" rather than industrial diamond powder!).

There's a caption on page 3, panel 2 of the second part that explains, "returning to his own planet, Bizarro-Superboy busily creates additional Bizarro-Legionnaires...", so the appearance of more of them IS explained, albeit not listing which Legionnaires or how many.

This just goes to show that Condo's power is just that difficult to explain! However, I don't think any of the changes he makes should be contingent on other factors (such as temperature and pressure) being present, or he'd be unable to do anything by himself---or at least not in the vitually instantaneous manner in which the changes are presented.

Again, I don't know that Condo could cause diamonds to turn into coal, but it would be more plausible with his powers than with how Jan's are traditionally depicted.

^Good catch about the caption explaining the additional Bizarro Legionnaires, Lardy. I've found myself skimming over most the captions in these stories as few contain useful information.

^Good call, also, about how Jan's powers are depicted in these stories. The powers of most Legionnaires have been tailored to fit whatever the story needs pretty much throughout the Adventure run so far that I just rolled with it.

Interesting that such an important part of Legion lore as the flight ring is introduced here in a throwaway panel without so much as a subsequent panel of one of them flying under its power and thinking, "gee, this flight ring is swell!" or something. Oh well, at least Garth mentions how 'cumbersome' the flight belts were in comparison.

Flight Belts? Cumbersome? Oh, Garth, it wasn't that long ago you were wearing a jet-pack, you spoiled brat!

The flight belts would be a bit harder to use, though. IF someone cut it off while the wearer was in flight... flight rings at least seem more secure and are harder to remove.

As Postboot Wildfire would say, "Huh. Point."



I'm reminded of one late Adventure-era story where the Legion fights some elemental humanoids. Jan transmutes some of them into magnetic lodestone, water, and tissue paper (and I think even sand). I remember thinking that he shouldn't be able to do that, unless he affects multiple elements at once and in the correct combinations; but that certainly seems like a terribly advanced application of his powers. Granted, he was exhausted at the end of that story, but it wasn't clear whether it was from pushing his powers in ways he hadn't before, or just because of the sheer number of times he used it.

I think that, in terms of characters with ill-designed powers, Element Lad's probably up there. Even besides the energy implications (which would be slightly churlish, with the likes of Superman/boy around), it's a very complex power - basically, quantum telekinesis. Remember what Kinetix originally did, manipulating metal into snakes and stuff. That, but throwing around billions of subatomic particles at the same time in super-precise ways (not least to prevent any of them escaping as radioactivity and harming those nearby!).

And on your list, once you get past that initial complexity... water and sand are fairly simple compounds (dihydrogen monoxide and silicon dioxide - the latter of which has a similar structure to diamond), but tissue paper is a step up in molecular complexity - it's made of cellulose, a mix of long, complex carbohydrate molecules layered in a very specific way. Even if you make exactly the right proportions of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, get their arrangement wrong and you can have anything from an explosive mix of hydrocarbons & oxygen, to sugar, to the wrong sort of paper!

As for magnetic materials, you're getting back into sub-atomic precision of a whole new level, where you must not just get the number and arrangement of particles correct, but also their spin.

It's ridiculously complex stuff for a character rarely portrayed as the brightest bulb in the box. At least the original concept for Firestorm had an expert working full-time on this stuff in the back of his head and "banned" him from manipulating organic molecules (which are some of the most complex), and even then it stretched credulity.

Legionnaires 55 provided a good example of what you said. Element Lad accidentally caused an explosion while playing around with elements that could form explosive mixtures. With your explanation above, even with Brainy coaching Jan via telepathic link from Imra, he shouldn't have been able to affect such complex changes in the middle of a war zone, and while he was exhausted.. It would have been far more believable for him to have just changed one element in the humanoids' makeup to mess them up.

Actually, I think the opposite in a way. He's unlikely to be fully aware, consciously, of the complexity of what he's doing, after all, and doing something like your suggestion - e.g. isolating the oxygen in someone's lungs - is damn complex too, still moreso when it's buried below or mixed in with flesh.

I think the way his powers "should" work is that he can make anything, even super-conplex stuff... with enough practice. And that while once he's perfected something it's easy, learning new stuff to that point is NOT easy, and his bag of tricks is actually very limited as a result - he can't transmute reliably *from* something he's never tried to change, and he can't transmute *to* anything without careful study of the substance followed by practice (i.e., no improvising any new substances on-the-spot any more than you could design a working plane with pencil, paper and a couple of hours!).

The reason I say he shouldn't have been able to do that in the war zone was because he'd never encountered said humanoids before, and Brainy had only been able to give him their chemical formula a short time before. I agree with you on the whole "practice" thing, as it was mentioned quite a few times in the Postboot that Jan had an easier time transmuting elements that he'd practiced before.

The power to 'just' transmute elements, such as turning all the free oxygen in the area to nitrogen, and therefore causing anyone not wearing a transsuit or having similar life-support options, to keel over, or to turn the nitrogen in the air into titanium (imprisoning everyone in the area in a foamed titanium aerogel) is *crazy* powerful.

I would very much prefer to leave it at that, and not give Element Lad even more crazy power (that will, if his current power is any indication, never be used to it's full potential by the writers anyway...) to create complex compounds, or affect the dozens and dozens of different elements in an organic life form in some bewilderingly complex manner that would require *trillions* of minute calculations to perform, and would quite possibly be beyond even Brainiac Fives ability to calculate.

Some immortal reboot Jan who has had millennia to practice his powers can maybe get away with that sort of thing, but classic Jan is already crazy powerful, IMO, and lacking only intelligent writing.

I'm really not sure a chemical formula - even a structural one, rather than a simple H2O-type formula - would do him much good. It's like Kid Quantum II - she didn't know how her power worked, she just knew that by thinking in a certain way, time slowed down in an area. And, similarly, I don't see how much good a mindlink with Brainiac 5 would do - he would know what was needed, but not how to make it with Jan's powers. Imagine a potter being told how to make a pot by a chemist who had only ever analysed the final result, not the process or raw material, and you should get the idea!

Jan should probably be able to "analyse" stuff (in a similar way to Chameleon scanning stuff to copy later) as the first step on the process of learning, but not in such a way that he would automatically know the chemical structure, except with reference to having learned it already. So he might know what pure graphite "feels like" when he scans it, and from that be able to tell when he encounters it, as opposed to something carbon-like, but if you toss him a new plastic he wouldn't be able to draw the structural chemical formula on a diagram!


I'd go further than that though - there was a hint of it early on, with the suggestion that only Tarn & Jan Arrah knew how to make tarnium for R.J., but I'd carry that through further. Why should he know how to make X, Y and Z? Why would the Trommites have practised knockout gas or whatever?

There are some interesting possibilities that have never really been explored - he could affect pressure pretty simply in a closed system like a spaceship by "condensing" air onto surfaces as metal or vice-versa, for instance...


There's not enough mass in the air, even if you take in everything, to make any sort of metal structure. Remember just how light air is - where a litre of titanium is 4.5kg, a litre of air is ~0.00123kg! And that an atom of titanium is over three times heavier than an atom of nitrogen to boot, meaning that 1 mol of nitrogen would make only 0.293mol of titanium, so you'd have even less to work with than that comparison suggests.

In the event you could transmute the air in an attempt to make such an aerogel, there would be *so* little titanium that it wouldn't imprison anyone unless they succumbed to simple hypoxia almost immediately. More likely, you would create titanium dust so fine that anyone who breathed it in would be at risk of something like silicosis!

[And, yes, Polar Boy - or Iceman, FTM - creating any sort of ice sculpture without an immediate source of *liquid* water is entirely ridiculous too!]

I think the Brainy mindlink would have worked in the sense that Brainy could have helped him recognize the elements comprising the humanoids - assuming they were elements Jan had already encountered. And I recall several instances both Preboot and Postboot where Jan mentions needing to "get a sense of what he has to change"; once in LSH 121 when he and Zoe were battling the Emerald Eye, and another time there during the story I mentioned. So I think you're right, in that he only needs to know the chemical formula inasmuch as it helps him identify the elements. So Brainy's role would be to help Jan identify the elements, but not guide him through the actual transmutation process.