Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Re-Reading the Legion: Archives Vol. 10 (DAVE EFFING COCKRUM)

Triad was awesome compared to Preboot Lu.

Except for the hair. I never liked Triad's hair.

Yep, the postboot writers really knew how to write Triad and make her an interesting character and effective Legionnaire.

I agree that the gimmick value of Lu's split costume would compromise her effectiveness as a spy. However, the point will soon be moot.

He Who, when you say we don't have much longer, do you mean because she and Chuck get married and leave the team a few issues from now?

EDIT: Oh. Never mind. I just saw the edit you made to your post, which answers my question.

Yeah, my first stab at that sentence was not very direct.

No worries.

I'm not feeling so good right now. I hope you all don't mind if we talk about 193 for another day or two, until I feel up to writing and posting my review of 195.

No worries. Get well soon, Fanfie.

Thank you, He Who.

SUPERBOY 195

Wildfire -- love him or hate him (I love him), his first appearance, which may or may not have originally been planned as his last, is like a goodie bag of all the best things about the Legion of Super-Heroes. Here, Wildfire is certainly confident, but not in the over-the-top way his detractors point at in some of his lesser appearances. Besides, it's clear even from the beginning that the bravado is there to mask a sensitive soul with an inferiority complex. Cockrum does his best art yet, and as a bonus introduces more new costumes -- Colossal Boy with the headgear (my favorite look for him) and Phantom Girl with the pigtails and bell-bottoms. Bates is also at his best, giving his script tight construction, solid structure, and not an ounce of padding. At heart, the story is a disarmingly simple parable about self-sacrifice and the true nature of heroism. Ironically, the creators would soon no longer have to worry about making the tales short and sweet, because with the next issue, the Legion takes over the main feature, and one issue after that, they get their first full-length tale in eons. Good times.

Done in by a John Deere.

Was he originally intended to be a one-off or was this story written with more in mind? Anyone know?

I suppose we could check with the Legion Companion to see if Drake was intended to truly be a "One-Shot Hero," but it seems unlikely that this was so. For one, he is endowed with a dynamic and eye-catching costume that is too good to throw away. Second, he exhibits more personality than any of the Legionnaires have in some time.

Even if his return was pre-planned, "The One-Shot Hero" is indeed a very good story, arguably the best of the Bates/Cockrum backups. The singular focus is on Drake, a new hero who has overcome a terrible tragedy and decided to make the best of his new anti-matter body and powers by applying for the Legion. He is bold and sure of himself. Even so, he knows when he can't win; he doesn't beg the Legion to give him another chance.

Instead, he makes his own chance by stowing away on the Legion's cruiser. (How he managed to get past their security systems is best left to the imagination.) He then does everything a hero should do: He arrives just in the nick of time to save Colossal Boy, expends all of his energy in a powerful blast and (apparently) dies. The final wordless panel, showing his empty containment suit at the feet of the Legionnaires is one of the most powerful images in Legion history.

So, 195 is a wonderful Drake Burroughs/ERG-1 story.

As a Legion story, though, it's kind of meh. Once again, our heroes are reduced to supporting roles and easily defeated so Drake can shine. Sure, we can blame it on the restrictions of the nine-page format, but one would hope that these seasoned heroes would show us why they are seasoned heroes. They don't even battle the Fatal Five, after all, just a mindless, crop-eating machine abandoned by its captured creators.

(Here, again, Bates and Cockrum seem to have borrowed from Star Trek, as the Devourer has a lot it common with the Doomsday Machine from the ST episode of the same name.)

Bates, displaying his notorious lack of attention/interest in continuity, seems to have confused Chemical King's ability with Element Lad's. Mon-El, meawhile, shows how mean-spirited he can be as leader ("We can't accept that excuse!"). And whoever colored this story should have been sent to remedial Legion coloring school. Jeckie and Garth get the worst of it, but Mon's collar, Bouncing Boy's chest panels, and Condo's hair are also miscolored.

"The One-Shot Legionnaire" is a good story for what it is. Yet it has me wanting the Legionnaires to be more and do more. Fortunately, as we do these re-reads, we don't have much longer to wait.

Good points well-taken, He Who. Once again, as with the Sun Boy vs. Dr. Regulus story, I allowed the story's considerable surface charms blind me to its all-too-clear-in-hindsight flaws.

As I've said before, I love Drake, he's my favorite male Legionnaire, but I love him in the sense that if I were a guy, I'd be just like him (I feel similarly about the pre-Grell Ollie Queen). So for a story to present him in as best a light as possible is irresistible to me.

And it's funny you should mention the Devourer and its roots in Star Trek's Doomsday Machine, because it just so happens that there was a very similar machine in the Transformers episode "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 3". Whether it was inspired by the Legion or by Star Trek, I don't know for sure, but its design seemed to me to owe more to Cockrum's visualization.

I found a clip on YouTube with a brief glimpse of the machine:

To beat my favorite dead horse, the Legion animated television series used both Triplicate Girl and Bouncing Boy to great effect: their powers were visually interesting, and surprisingly impressive in combat. The same is true of Phantom Girl in her battle scenes.

Of course, it it did not hurt that the TV Legionnaires for some reason all apparently had Bugs-Bunny-class invulnerability.

As far as Wildfire goes, I do not believe at the inception his tragic romance with Dawnstar was even a glimmer in the writer's eye, which was, in my opinion, the defining component of his character.

And I liked Drake's original swiss-army-knife powers, although I understand why they were immediately revised upon his 'return-from-the-dead'. Look at how gimpy Asorbancy* Boy / Earth-Man** appeared trying to work with the team after he became a Legionnaire. (After appearing nigh-omnipotent solo.)

*The original Kirt Niedrigh could not even spell 'absorbency' properly.
** Niedrigh, by the way, is a German / Hungarian word meaning 'low', as in 'of low birth'.

Man I have a hard time staying on-topic.

In one of my personal Legion timelines, they had a happy ending...of sorts. Quislet never had to return to his home dimension, so Drake was able to permanently form himself a functioning body AND regulate his temperature. Drake and Dawny married and Dawny gave birth to twin daughters, Dorian and Daliah, who shared both their parents' powers and were near-omnipotent when they joined hands. Tragically, Dawny lost one of her wings in battle against Empress Tasmia of Talok VIII, who in this timeline had never joined the Legion, but it was replaced by a mechanical wing.

I wish they'd done more with Wildfire's feelings about being just energy apart from his relationship with Dawnstar. There were glimpses of introspection, but a lot of his character was given to bluster and outspokenness.

Phantom Girl in this story is very supportive of him, yet I don't recall that they developed a particular friendship later, which could have been interesting.

Wildfire is a true hero in this story and sacrifices himself. Was he certain at the time that he would be able to reassemble his energy and get back to a containment suit? In any event, he was taking a gamble. Of course, the reader only knew that he was dead/dissipated.

That he was able to enter another's body and control it is a power I don't think we ever saw again. That would have been a solution to the Dawny problem, if he had taken over Jhodan - a real soap opera could have followed.

I did check The Legion Companion, as HWW suggested, but Cockrum didn't say anything about the longer-term plan for ERG-1/Wildfire. He did say he didn't know they were going to name the character ERG-1 after his Starfire was rejected, and he was very upset with that name.

FC, I agree that Wildfire could have used some more moments of introspection, but at least we did get to see another side of him as the active Legionnaire most supportive of the Legion Academy students. In LSH v.2 #283, an issue which spotlighted him, Wildfire shared painful details about his origin with Nightwind, Lamprey, and Crystal Kid, and afterwards he thought to himself that as much as he might sass the other Legionnaires, he's grateful to have their companionship, or he'd have gone crazy a long time ago. Then, captions on the last page reveal that Lightning Lad overheard Wildfire's story and that the other Legionnaires already knew most of it through research. Wildfire also reveals to the reader that his greatest fear is that the other Legionnaires simply feel sorry for him, but the captions and Wildfire's banter with Lightning Lad show that there's mutual respect underneath.

When all was said and done, I think they landed on the best name.

I agree that "Wildfire" is the best name for the character. It conveys so much more than just his power. "Starfire" was a misnomer since his power didn't come from a star.

That said, I have a fondness for "ERG-1." An acronym sounds like something an engineer would think up. However, it probably should have been spelled E.R.G.-1 to make it clear that it was an acronym and not an indication that the speaker was in some sort of physical discomfort.

SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #197

The longest Legion installment in eons is also the best in eons. He Who already noted earlier in the thread about how we begin in the middle of the story, with intriguing flashbacks to offstage events involving the disastrous mission that Superboy and Timber Wolf went on which resulted in Brin's apparent death. Timber Wolf is revealed to be alive and well...or not so well. In a brilliant montage panel on Page 6, Cockrum illustrates the agony and confusion of being a brainwashed sleeper agent. The true villain turns out to be Tyr, a mohawked, crimson-fleshed, gun-handed creation of Cockrum's, one of several villains he designed and submitted for use in the Legion, and the only one who made the final cut. By this time, Cockrum was getting more involved in the plots and the scripts, to everyone's benefit. Not that he and Bates and Boltinoff always saw eye to eye -- Cockrum had a proto-Perez fondness for squeezing as many characters into a page as he could, while Bates was gun-shy about using more than four at a time; Boltinoff, surprisingly conservative for the editor of the wild original Doom Patrol run, tended to side with Bates on this issue. It would have been interesting to see how this dynamic would have produced in the long run, but sadly there's only a few more Cockrum issues to go. Let's enjoy them while we can.

Tyr/War World: What started out seemingly a run-of-the-mill bad guy took quite a surprising turn and led to one of my favorite Legion "first contact" stories.

One of the things that impressed me about the story writing was this obviously very physically dominating being, used subtlety and misdirection in his first attack, the brainwashing of Timberwolf.




Was it an acronym? I was under the assumption that it was referring to the erg measure of energy.

Superboy 193

It starts off well with futuristic Cockrum art. Interestingly the satellite is called “SOS” rather than “Spy”. There’s a feeling of an Espionage mission about most of the nicely done opening pages, including Brainy’s briefing and the threat of war on Pasnic. It’s capped by the new uniforms. Vi’s has an elaborate design and I’m reminded of George Perez’s pride at being able to design this sort of thing. Karate Kid’s collar looks to be a liability considering his skills.

I chuckled about the gravitational balance of the solar system. The Nights and Days seem to be something out of a 1930’s Amazing Stories mag. Stuck in their ways as sure as they are stuck in tidal locking. But the execution gets a little better.

There are two things I’ll remember from this story. Firstly, that Luornu’s costume was designed for this mission (perhaps indicating that the colours are reserved only for royalty by the two oppressive sides of the struggle) but never changed in colours beyond it.

Secondly, that King Jonn, later seen as benevolent was on the verge of condemning an inhabited solar system to death. Not because of ideological differences, but because he didn’t get along with the other monarch. He even has a remote detonator to ensure genocide. What. An. Idiot.

A nice move was to quickly introduce a wider, but not regularly seen, group of Legionnaires and then reduce that group to just the two for the mission.

But the story hinges on pretty much everything working out exactly as Brainy planned. Lu’s part worked (with Brainy having given her hypnotic devices - presumably on loan from the SP) allowing Cham’s part to work which in turn prevented catastrophe. It’s all a bit too convenient and simple and I struggled to get past the limited dualism of Pasnic.

Glad you've started catching up, Thoth. Good to see you back in this thread.



I daresay Cockrum was one of the most innovative costume designers that superhero comics have ever been blessed with, and that Perez, despite a handful of strong designs, never quite equalled him.

Nice to be back I started #193 last week, but got a couple of pages in and was feeling a bit >meh< (generally really).

I should say that I think I picked these issues up almost last out of all of the Legion. I've probably read some of these once before. I didn't recall this one much at all. I don't think I find Bates' writing as strong as some of the others on the Legion.

Not to compare Perez & Cockrum, but I think the Perez quote was around Scarlet Witch from that Avengers run you like so much Fickles. His point being that a number of artists prefer simpler, less fussy, designs.

Artists with the level of imagination and dedication of Cockrum are few and far between. Actually the Legion seems to find a few of them.