Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes LSH #23 Preview and Review [SPOILERS!]

How interesting that it ranked higher than some other DC titles that are in no danger of "cancellation due to low sales".

Maybe because of Kevin Maguire...maybe because of the 'final issue' status...

Or maybe DC made (yet another) bone-headed mistake.

Or all three?

But, I hear you ask, "Reboot, what's that done to the sales graph?" Join me over in the "Legion sales still sliding" thread to find out

[Here's a hint: The dead cat didn't bounce. It was the lowest-selling issue of Levitz's entire tenure.]


Don't believe that. Any New 52 titles lower than Legion (exc. reorders/second prints!) will get cut in the next round.

Can't help but feel that the next few Legion issues would have focused on Phantom Girl and her predicament. Paul Levitz made her the star in the six issue Secret Origins run, and I bet he had something good in mind for her here.

Tharok referring to her as the 'only one who could stop him' or whatever hints at that.

The Secret Origins appearance gave her the Kitty Pryde power of disrupting machinery she passed through, so it's possible that she would be able to phase through Tharok and disrupt his new energy form (and his connection to whatever quark-relay-disrupting-tech he's using).

On the one hand, I would have preferred her to come back and save the day.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea that she has been retconned to have Kitty Pryde's powers, just as Timber Wolf has been retconned to be more like Wolverine, when these characters predate those X-folk. (Ditto Titansfall, with Imra seeming to use telekinesis, as if she was a blonde Jean Grey.)

On the gripping hand, no amount of Tinya coming back and saving the day would have excused the atrocious treatment of her freaking out after Dirk's death and complaining how it made her look bad as a leader, and then giving up and phasing away. There's just no coming back from that, and I don't blame the character of Tinya at all, since it was stone cold terrible writing.

If this is how Paul deals with characters he doesn't like becoming leader, I should have voted for someone I loathe, assuming there was such a Legionnaire. (Perhaps Atmos?)

Re the phasing/disruption powers, I don't mind if Tinya was written tpo have DEVELOPED the powers through training. IIRC, in the Action story where the Legionnaires fight Earth-Man and his Justice League, Tinya hurts Earth-Man by phasing her arm through him - not something I've seen her do before. Postboot Tinya could also disrupt machinery if she wished.

Her crying and phasing away was complete and utter character assassination. The Tinya we know and love would have tried to help the aliens living on the Giant, no matter that they did eat Dirk's corpse. I completely agree with you that her saving the day would not have erased that at all.

That might have been palatable (and seemed less like Levitz had just plain forgotten that the Legionnaires were not in fact exactly like the X-Men who had come later), and yet, in the Secret Origins story, she's talking about how she can do that in her first appearance (talking to those three secret intelligence people). It seemed to be intended as 'always was' in this nu/old/whatever boot.

I'd prefer, before adding new powers (or new aspects to an old power), a character be shown using the power they have creatively. Even the Threeboot, few people's favorite, mentioned that she could phase into someone and solidify just enough of herself to 'punch them in the kidney.' That sounds pretty darn effective, and it would represent training and skill and clever use of her own power, not a brand new sub-power.



Yeah. There was just no defense for that entire bit. Tinya was completely out of character, and Invisible Jacques having to try and talk her down while she's having her bout of hysteria and selfishness was just painfully bad characterization.

The whole thing made little sense, like entirely too much of this past few years attempts at storytelling. Those little aliens had an entire town built out of wood and thatch, despite there being no trees or plants on the giant (and presumably being the descendants of crashed spacefaring aliens!). Some of the aliens somehow got behind the Legionnaires to grab Dirk's body, hustled right past them carrying it like a grisly football trophy, and then ahead of them to their town, and then ate it, faster than the Legionnaires could get from the ship to their town, despite moving in that direction with other aliens. Did Phantom Girl's nervous breakdown take that long? And did it distract her teammates enough that they failed to see the little aliens walking right by them with Sun Boy's body?

Eh. In my head, assuming this ever happened, the other Legionnaires didn't notice that the bones were not human, and that the tattered bits of Sun Boy's shirt had been left near the burn-pile to be disposed off after little alien witch doctors absconded with his not-quite-dead body and began trying to fix him up... He'll wake up shirtless, with a teensy little bump on his forehead, surrounded by not-incredibly-hot nurses offering him their local specialty, braised rack of looks-human-but-isn't-ribs, wondering what happened after the cruiser crashed.

I agree with you on the "natural development of a power" rather than magically gaining new powers. One of the most satisfying moments Preboot was when Polar Boy showed he had gained enough control over his power to join the Legion

And I am already adopting YOUR version of events as my own personal canon. So Dirk is alive, just lost in space!

I'll add another - when Thom was buried alive in the rubble of Legion HQ, he had the presence of mind to use his powers on himself. He's still alive, just buried in the rubble until someone can find him.

Ta-da!

If this Thom is supposed to be the same Thom who was back in the 21st century with the JSA recently (which he very much seemed to be, since he had to be de-crazified and stuff), then he should be able to manipulate gravity like he did with the JSA, not just 'draw mass from the stars to make things super-heavy,' allowing him to slow the falling debris, or even whip up a wormhole to 'fall' away from the falling debris and appear somewhere else...

After the nuBoot, Thom's history in the 21st century (and presence in the JSA of Earth 1) has been rebooted out of existence, and yet, he was still handicapped from those events, so I really have no idea how much or little of that continuities changes were still 'sticking' with him.

I'm rarely a fan of comic book characters dying, but the deaths of Dirk and Thom, in particular, were just shock value deaths. Neither of them died like Ferro Lad or Karate Kid, making a difference or saving a world or whatever. They died like chumps, and, more or less, off-panel (as did that dupe of Luornu's). It seems pretty cheap to present a death purely for shock value, and then wuss out and not even show it / leave it unclear. If it's all cheap sensationalism, at least own up to the sensationalism and *show it.* (And not leave fans wondering for months if Thom survived somehow.)

Just sloppy.

Yes, deaths can be shocking and senseless and leave all sorts of things unsaid and unresolved, but that's real life, not a narrative that's being scripted as a serial storyline. Truth is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction *is supposed to make sense.* Attempting to bring that sort of 'gritty realism' into a comic book isn't 'edgy' (and, arguably, never was), it's a narrative failure as a writer.

If we wanted tales of shocking un-scripted events that don't make any sense and lack any sort of deeper meaning or narrative structure or consistent characterization or deliberate plotting or satisfying conclusion, that's what the news is for.

Plus, when the characters who die are heroes/main characters of the series, and the series isn't meant to be a satire/parody/humor series, it's just plain disrespectful to kill characters that way!

Word! None of these alleged deaths, be it Thom, Dirk or Tinya, was written in a way that would make it noteworthy - like, for example, Ferro Lad or Karate Kid. Well, of course Karate Kid weas suddenly alive again. Still don't know why that was but hey, it was just one further element to not take these last few issues for serious at all. It was rather like a bad dream, which was a pity cause at the beginning of the last storyline, I really thought this could be interesting...

One take on PG's running away is that when she did it she may have thought it was a chance of saving the local inhabitants. At the point she phased away her team was gone and the destruction she seemed to be centered on getting her.

Okay, sorry to re-hash a ten day old sub-thread, but I'd been too busy to reply until now, but I just HAVE to say this, and here is better than saying it to the wall or my cat:

The LSH was SOOOOooo easy to cash in on, and cash in on big, it isn't even funny!!!!

1) Super-heroes are wildly popular now, at an all-time maximum popularity, though it remains to be seen if they saturate.

2) This was 1000 years in the future...anything you could do for "Star Trek" you could do for the LSH ... infinite stories available from that alone.

3) Tween/teen angst and romance.... How popular was/is Twilight? Harry Potter? Hunger Games? The WB? The LSH should have been/could have been right there!!

4) Supplementing all of the above, as already brought up, LOTS of characters to play with to accentuate #3 and #2.

Unfortunately, the original poster had sort of a point... they *appeared* to run out of stories... inex-fragging-plicably!!!

Pathetic! Short-sighted! Incompetent! The Legion should be a veritable goldmine, it could be way more popular than anything out there if done right!

But DC never gave it a chance for this. Measured it only in the context of the comic-buying community.

Well, DC can @%$@^&#$ my @#$&#*&@% !!! I hope they all get fired and wind up homeless and have to eat &#^@&@ out of gutter!

Well, at least the ones responsible for the decision to cancel, anyway.

and BTW ... I, for one, think we should not go so gently into that good night.

The problem with DC 'running out of stories' for the Legion is, IMO, a factor of there not being a lot of writers working for DC who *want* to write the Legion, or a book set 1000 years in the future, with such a dense cast and even denser set of supporting characters and supporting mythology, and those few that do, are older and / or somewhat burned out on the Legion.

Like most people who've written Legion fanfic, I've noticed that one paralyzing 'problem' with writing for the Legion is that there's just so darn many stories to be told, that you get overwhelmed just trying to focus on one.

Almost every Legionnaire has stories left untold. Think of how many times Batman or Spider-Man or Iron Man's starting origins have been retold, and tweaked, and made fresh and new again. Tired of stories about Universo or the Fatal Five and feel that maybe they have been overused? You must be *crazy* tired of stories about the Joker or Lex Luthor, who have been trotted back out and re-used *dozens* of more times (without DC feeling like they've 'run out of Joker stories' or 'run out of Luthor stories')!

What do we *really* know about Bgtzl? Is it a small pocket dimension like Marzal or Themiscrya, an entire 'counter-Earth,' or an entire solar system / galaxy / *universe* unto itself?

What do we really know about the source of Shadow Lass's powers? Is there a hungry dark entity at the center of Talokk VIII that Shady is feeding everytime she uses her powers to 'negate' light? Does the use of her powers instead actually transfer energy from her present location to the heart of her homeworld, helping to sustain the reactions that keep it warm (in the same disproportionate way that, in the DCU, enough sunlight to power a watch can allow a Kryptonian to lift a battleship)?

Are there Atlanteans and Amazons and Thanagarians and Tamaraneans and Spider Guilders in the future, and, much more importantly, are they *wildly* different than they were in the 20th and 21st centuries (unlike the Khunds and Dominators and Daxamites, who seem to have been frozen in stasis for 1000 years, and unable to develop or change or grow in any way)?

Why is Rimbor the way it is? Is it the UP equivalent of China's 'free economic zones' or Hong Kong, allowed to kind of go it's own way because, if there's going to be a black market 'hell,' it might as well be on Rimbor and not spread across every world of the UP? Or is Rimbor not actually a member world, just a world that happens to reside smack dab in the middle of a bunch of other UP signatory worlds, and is, like some Caribbean islands or reservation casinos, sort of a tax haven and place to go to enjoy stuff you can't legally get on your home planet?

'No stories left to tell' is crazytalk. We know almost nothing about the history of Starhaven, or why some of them have wings, and we've had fifty consecutive stories about an eccentric rich dude who dresses up like a Bat and punches people, sometimes with a half-dozen titles devoted to that same character every month.

DC will 'run out of stories to tell' about Batman and Gotham *decades* before they 'run out of stories to tell' about the dozens of Legionnaires and their rich and mostly undeveloped background universe.

Overall, it was a decent respectful send off for this run, considering it was unplanned.

It’s often a comics trend to tear everything down, in place of more subtle conflict, in an attempt to show what the characters stand for. Although the Legion usually manages to give some hope along with the destruction, it wouldn’t be the first time that a creative move or a cancellation has simply left readers with nothing more than the destruction of characters they like.

In this run we’ve seen Morgna & Kallor die and Wazzo act strangely out of character. Considering it’s the last issue, it’s a little bit surprising to say that Kallor’s body was in it’s grave.

But death doesn’t hold you back in comics. Just ask Val Armorr. Back yet again, and probably already counting down to a future Giffen death plot. Except I can’t imagine it being anything less than Projectra’s illusion powers, working in the same way as Saturn Girl did when she created a phantom Phantom Girl back in Abnett & Lanning’s run.

The quark relay disaster also reminded me of a few of DnA’s threats. But then, they had reminded me of the aftermath of Levitz’s Magic Wars. Destruction and hope.

With too may loose plot threads to deal with, the last issue salvage operation is done in broad strokes – Durgo & Taine, Nal, Jeckie and Val and the founding three.

Each of the farewell pages is heavy with awareness of the fickleness of DC mandates and their infinity of retcons, reboots and shifting desperate crisis events in the quest for dwindling sales. For Nura Nal it’s a dream. For Taine & Durgo it’s multiple worlds and for Projectra it’s that sinking feeling of changing realities.

Saturn Girl repeats for all of the above in the closing pages. It’s a shame a whole page was spent showing Taine bounce around with a bit of shirt. A panel or two would have been fine. It would cemented the Legion in Earth-2 just as much and would have allowed for some closure for more of the cast.

But perhaps that extra emphasis was needed to make it clear that this was a Legion that could stay intact without a complete reboot. Levitz drawing a protective circle in the multiverse.

It’s already been posted that having Levitz has also left thing much as they were at the end of his earlier run. Technology fails, Mon-El near death and the Legion having to rally to beat their foes. But where that last run left what looked to bring heroes back from their worlds to united Legion, this one breaks the group apart.

We get Earth in ruins, but a driven Brainiac 5 revealing a glimpse of what future issues might have brought. Hope and destruction. Already his plans have gone awry. Interestingly the man with endless contingencies is left pleading with others to bring his plans back. Not even Brainiac can cope with cancellation.

Maguire’s art was lovely as always. By the time I read the issue he had already been booted from the Legion’s replacement title in one of those endless shifts of DC mandate.

Hopefully, it won’t be too long before they shift again and the real Legion makes it’s return.

-LLL

“When the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.” -- William Beeb

This is how I feel about the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Fortunately, at DC, another heaven and another earth passes about every ten years.


Still, I doubt that I will be around to see it.

Hopefully, that's because you just won't be reading DC. Rather than because you're crossing the globe in your secret space station, where you lie in an iron lung reading the Legion to preserve your failing health.

That would be an acceptable explanation. Too bad Levitz didn't make it explicit!

In any case, the Legion will be kept alive whether or not it is being published

In an earlier issue, when being chased around by a Daxamite, Phantom Girl just phased into the ground. While both events aren't quite how I see her reacting, I don't know why she just didn't phase into the Giant.

That thought randomly occurred to me the other day! Given how single-minded it was being and how the Legionnaires seem to be more blasé about killing these days, it might even have been a way to make it dig through itself to get her and end the threat!

Did Phantom Girl not have some sort of disruption thing, a la Kitty Pryde, shown in one version? Not one I'm keen on actually, since it's such a clear swipe

(unless someone shows an old Adventure issue where it happens. Like the one that shows her enhanced powers to be making others Phantoms)

But yeah, at the very least take herself and possibly the locals out of harms way. Perhaps learn a bit about what makes the thing tick - perhaps find how Tharok is controlling it. That sort of thing.

Ooh, that's genius, right there! I could see that occurring to her as she's phasing to get away from it. "This creature is so single-minded that it's willing to tear itself apart to get to me... Which gives me an idea!"



In the recent Adventure retelling of the Legion's first days, she told the intelligence overseers working for the UP that she could probably phase through and disrupt their door, if she wanted to, and, *I think* she was shown using her power to disrupt a robot later in the same revamp.

Also, not a fan. She's Tinya, not Kitty Pryde. There are plenty of ways a person able to become fully or selectively intangible, move interspatially, and even enter the Phantom Zone (and therefore move at great speed across normal space invisibly and incorporeally), could be super-useful, without having to borrow Kitty's very specific and not at all intangibility-related power to disrupt machinery.

I'd avoid tapping into the old 'fourth-dimensional' well, 'though, because Tinya's never been artistically depicted as moving *around* objects in a fourth dimension, but always been showing ghosting through them intangibly. (Plus, if Tinya was fourth-dimensional, she'd likely be ridiculously super-strong and invulnerable, as well, since three-dimensional matter and beings would be super-flimsy sheets of tissue paper, to her!)

A 4D character might be an awesomely powerful and, compared to all the Krypto-clones, unique hero, but I'm not sure I'd want to change Tinya that much. (That would have been a great change-up for the Threeboot, 'though!)

I will chime in on the Tinya =/= Kitty Pryde thing. It's just kind of lazy, the same way Timber Wolf is now Wolverine-Lite and Blok is just the Thing (wanting to be "normal" so he can shag Mysa).

Nor am I a fan of Tinya having 4D strength, but 4D perceptions would be okay! Not to the occasionally plot-breaking extent of Sensor Girl, but maybe just having an awareness of things around her and internally that nobody (except Brainy & maybe Dreamy or Imra) quite understands, because it's not x-ray vision or penetra-vision, but something they can't define in a 3D world. It would explain how she always knows how to disable any kind of technology she phases through when she's never really shown any engineering/technical aptitude, and it would explain how she can navigate through solid objects (which further differentiates her from Kitty, who has been shown to be travelling blind whenever she phases through something light can't penetrate).

I agree completely regarding Sensor Girl. For someone not in the main group she appears to the UP council to show them live events of what's happening to Brainy & Dream Girl at the talons of the Domninion. It pretty much allows the others to save the day.

Then again, to take the Promethean Giant from Tharok's control. Saving the day there, although not in time for Phantom Girl to stay around.

I'm still not sure I'm quite up to date on how many Karate Kid's there have been and how many have been resurrected. Who's the Kid at the Academy that Projectra was mooning over?

I don't think it was ever clear whether that was a new person, a reincarnation or a projection of her subconscious. Given the alteration to her powers, and the nebulous squiffy powers that come with 'seen through the illusion of...' could result in (such as 'I have seen through the illusion of death' or 'I have seen through the illusion that is linear time') it could even have been a real Val, somehow snatched away from the moment of his death, or plucked from an alternate timeline or parallel dimension or something.

The funky thing about Projectra's old powers, is that, if she could make an illusion of fire that felt hot to the viewers, either by affecting their minds to feel pain and heat (as the Threeboot Projectra did) or perhaps by generating at least a little bit of heat the same way she seems to be able to generate light and sound (in a more 'creates holograms' sense of non-psychic illusion), then she could create an 'illusion' of Val that would be almost as effective as the real Val, since everybody punched by illusion Val would *feel* like they'd been punched. He wouldn't be able to lift anything significant, or throw people around with judo, but should be able to 'cause pain' or create the sensation of impact, to distract foes and perhaps even incapacitate foes who would normally be vulnerable to his human level strength and martial arts pressure points stuff.

A surreal sort of retcon might be that Val *never existed,* and was a creation of Projectra all the time, and that the Shooter Four were actually always the 'Shooter Three,' with Projectra unconsciously (at first) projecting him. Under her influence, Superboy threw himself around, at Val's tryouts, and other times when Val seemed to physically interact with others, it was all in their heads!

In any event, I don't know enough about how classic Projectra's illusions worked. If they were purely psychic (like Threeboot Projectra), then that sort of thing would be quite do-able. If she instead creates holographic constructs of light and sound (and force?), then it works very differently, and she'd have to 'ramp up' to being able to create hard-light constructs of a sort (which would be a logical development, since she's already manifesting and manipulating both energy and matter just to create light and sound), to make a physically effective 'illusory person.'