I fell behind myself but recently caught up to where you guys are on the backups. I'll need to catch up shortly with your commentaries on them and see if there's any thoughts I can add!
I'm sorry I haven't contributed to this thread so far. It's a combination of a rollercoaster life in recent weeks and...well...as I said before, I just don't like most of the pre-Cockrum backups that much.
I am still enjoying reading the reviews, though, and I especially appreciated the ones on the Banyo Fruit story (which I don't like -- I think it's a bit too obvious) and the Matter Eater Lad story (which I like -- for all its faults, the autobiographical elements that Shooter mixed in made Tenzil very sympathetic.)
Cobie, Fanfie, and Lardy, I'm glad you're checking in. I've missed your inputs (though I understood Fanfie was not a fan of this era and wouldn't be around much).
I look forward to you catching up, if you choose to do so.
This may seem a bit strange, but the simple fact is that I long ago gave up on finding all the Action issues that the Legion appeared in. There were just none to be found.
There is a reason for this that younger readers may not be aware of. With the exception of the Legion's run in Adventure, nobody wanted to collect any Mort Weisinger books back when they first came out. Seriously, they were considered about as collectable as Archie comics, probably because they were just as ubiquitous.
These were the books you passed down to your destructive little brother to keep him from getting his grubby mitts on your prized favorites. When your mom said you had to get rid of some comics, the Weisinger books were the first to go. Even the campiest Batman books were more collectable than Action, Superman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Superboy. Thus, even though the average Weisinger title outsold just about every other book on the stands, there are very few copies of those books still in existence.
So, when they started coming out with the Archive series, I just bided my time until they got to the Action run and picked up just that one book.
First comic books ever bought: A DC four-for-47-cents grab bag that included Adventure #331. The rest is history.
I bought most of my Action issues in the early '80s at Clint's Comics in Kansas City, MO. (Clint's is still in business.) The Action issues seemed quite plentiful at the time, though each issue cost an exorbitant $3.50 or so. (Those were the days . . .)
Shooter taps into universal teenage angst once again to explore another side of the Legionnaires we don't often see. The angst this time concerns the question, what if you are attracted to a girl who doesn't like "your kind" (whatever "your kind" is)? What if you could do something about it?
Continuing the plot thread from the Adventure run, Chameleon Boy is still pining away over Princess Elwinda when he is roped into escorting Princess Projectra to a weekend party hosted by heiress Janice Warren. Janice turns out to be the spitting image of Elwinda, and Cham gets to save her from blindness when she mishandles a light crystal she owns.
Unfortunately, Janice is turned off by Cham's orange skin, bald head, antennae, and pointed ears, so it looks like Cham is smitten for nothing. Undaunted, he transforms into a handsome, dark-haired earthman named "Dane Roberts" -- just the kind of earthman Janice likes. They hit it off, but Cham secretly feels low for deceiving her.
Enter the usual plot complication. Janice's valuable light cyrstal is stolen, and she and "Dane" deduce that a robot repairman must have taken it. When they confront the repairman, he threatens Janice with a "senili-ray" which will "age [her] 10,000 years in 30 seconds," turning her to dust. (Where do ordinary crooks get super-villain hardware such as this?)
To save his love, Cham must reveal who he is and defeat the bad guy. Fortunately, Janice realizes that having a boyfriend who can be "anything or anybody" isn't so bad, after all.
This story accomplishes what it set out to do. Unfortunately, it didn't have very high goals to begin with. The plot is bare bones and cliched, with the hero pretending he's something he's not, only to come clean when he has to, and, in doing so, he wins the love of the girl, anyway. It's the sort of plot that would have been trite even by Prime Time '60s TV standards.
And I'm troubled by the fact that Janice falls in love with Cham only because he can be "anything and anybody." How shallow can you get? Cham deserved better--and maybe he soon realized this. I don't think Janice ever appeared again, though she is mentioned as still dating Cham in the "Lore of the Legion" text piece in Superboy 202.
On the plus side, I like it that Jeckie helps Cham out twice, first by agreeing to go along with his Dane Roberts identity and then by helping him and Janice sneak past the police. In spite of her reservations, she wants to help her friend and teammate.
It's also nice to see Jeckie attending a party and hobnobbing with the young and wealthy, as a princess should. This gives a sense of her life outside the Legion. (The notion that she "must have" an escort rings true and reminds me of some of the rigid social expectations for the upper class on "Downton Abbey".)
It looks like Mon-El is getting some lovin'. Last issue, a fan asked how to pronounce his name. This issue, a fan praises 379 (not 179!) because Mon was featured. And next issue . . . more Mon!
A few thoughts on Act. 383. Dane always reminded me of Aqualad in this story, especially in the underwater dancing scene, where it appears to me that the 2 girls to the left of him are Jan and Jeckie with their hair miscolored. Carnivores obviously still ruled the world when this story was written as the guests order "cambeef" and "breast of flamebird". A couple of boots later, when some of the reboot Legion was trapped in this century they were shown to be disgusted by our carnivorous proclivities. It's fun to see Mortimer's rendition of several alien bird species. It would be fun to compare his alien animals to Forte's and Swan's from previous stories to see which ones seem the most anatomically plausible. It seems strange and silly that the Warrens have to have a separate teleporter for each guest room. That alone must cost a pretty penny. Why didn't Al the robot repairman just have the robot steal the jewel for him? It's too bad that Jeckie's power was compromised when they started showing her do the "strike a pose and point" thing to create an illusion. In her initial appearance all she had to do was concentrate to make one appear. When I first read this story as a kid, I balked at her making Jan and Cham "invisible" but then I realized she could just create an illusion of everything as it was, minus those 2 people. Cham mistakenly calls Janice Janet on page 10. It must be a strange feeling for Cham to change gender. Later iterations speculated on Durlans being bisexual, but back in the 60s of course, Cham's heterosexuality never wavers, even when he's in female form. Recall the scene in Adv. 303 when he threatens to clobber Cosmic Boy if he acts too lovey dovey when they posed as honeymooners. Does that mean he's a lesbian when he's in female form? Or transgender? Nice of Jan to proclaim that Cham cares for her "deeply" at the end. I guess that's that entitlement that rich people come to expect. The Octoid man remindes me of Marvel's Impossible Man.
Jim, I enjoyed Mortimer's winged creatures, too. They were quite imaginative.
I've never had a problem with Jeckie posing as she creates illusions. Doing so gives her something physical to do, particularly in crowd scenes of Legionnaires. It would be boring if she simply closed her eyes or stroked her temple to indicate she was concentrating.
Cham's ability to switch genders creates all sorts of interesting possibilities, particularly for a horny teenager.
Mr. Featherbottom, I suspect that the reason Cham broke up with her was because he got tired of being a hovercar one day, a disco ball the next, a rare and exotic bird the next, and so forth.
It would be boring if she simply closed her eyes or stroked her temple to indicate she was concentrating.
It works for Imra and Nura! I take your point, but I think it tips off the bad guy that it's just an illusion she's projecting when she points at thin air and monsters/cops/whatever instantly appear. I just think there's so much untapped potential for Jeckie that's never been explored. For instance, she could use her power to disguise herself as Sun Boy blasting flames at the bad guy and bluff him into surrendering. Or disguise herself as a huge monster crawling out of a crevice in the ground and send the invading aliens into panic-stricken flight, instead of standing there with her arms in the air and making a monster appear out of nowhere. Or making them think they were somewhere else entirely, like on the moon or in outer space or trapped in a box, etc. etc.
You raise an interesting point, not just related to Jeckie but to the Legionnaires in general. Since the public knows their powers, crooks should be able to easily anticipate what they can do.
Still, if a ring of fire appeared around me, and I could feel the heat, I would have to be very brave to test the theory that it is an illusion.
I never thought Jeckie needed her Sensor Girl power boost. She just needed more imaginitive writers to use her effectively.
That was pretty much why I hated her in pre-Sensor Girl days...she had such an awesome power and all she ever used it for was "ridiculous monster appears out of thin air"
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