Long Live the Legion

Legion of Super-Heroes v5 #13 This is it! The final battle! Legion versus Terror Firma and Lemnos! Dream Girl is dead! Atom Girl (Shrinking Violet) has returned! Three Legionnaires are fighting 10,000 soldiers! Cosmic Boy has taken over the intergalactic communication system the United Planets have been using and is broadcasting his own message of resistance and rebellion! Oh, and we get another amazingly good cover! Our creative team this issue - writer Mark Waid, layout artist Barry Kitson, and inker Mick Gray. We begin on Lemnos' planetoid... or headquarters... Karate Kid, Ultra Boy, and Brin Londo (who we know as Timber Wolf) are fighting their way through 10,000 of Lemnos' soldiers. Terror Firma, minus their critically-injured leader, Elysion, are ready to kill as many Legionnaires as they can. The soldiers have orders to storm the transmatter gates and begin their assaults on the different U.P. planets. But the gates are flickering. What can that mean? It turns out, it me...

Legion of Super-Heroes v5 #11 Blood running down large logos is never a good thing in the Legion universe. Just ask Karate Kid. The regular creative team is back: Mark Waid writing, Barry Kitson on pencils, and Mick Gray on inks. Is there a reason why we're changing inkers so often? Legion HQ is destroyed. The Flight Rings can no longer communicate with each other, so the two teams trying to convince Dormir and Ttrxl can't find out how the other is doing. Destroyed comic books are strewn throughout the wreckage. Dream Girl lies there, dead, while Invisible Kid and Brainiac 5 stand in shock. For the first time this series, every Legionnaire gets a bubble explaining who they are, where they're from, and what powers they have. That's including Brin Londo, who's not actually on the team. For reasons only known to him, Brainy places his force-field projector on Dream Girl's body, protecting her. Invisible Kid begs him to keep it, knowing they need to go and face Ely...

Legion of Super-Heroes v5 #9 Where did we leave off? Oh right, everyone on the Legion is acting like a jerk and they're splitting into two teams. One follows Cosmic Boy and the other follows Brainiac 5. Not sure why you'd follow either, but since I'm not an underager, things in this book make less sense to me. Actually, that's a good aside - if anyone reading this was a teenager when they first read this series, did the young versus old plot line work? Did the book accurately reflect what it was like to be a teenager? Did any of this work for you? We begin with Legionnaire staring down Legionnaire and the crowd of "Legionnaires" congregated around the HQ are starting to leave. Everyone knows about the fight and everyone's taking sides. Invisible Kid shows up to stop a fight and they accuse him of being the one Legionnaire who's been playing both sides against the other. He let Cosmic Boy into Brainy's lab and then told Brainy what happened. Lyle ru...

Legion of Super-Heroes v5 #7 First of all, thanks to any of my readers who checked out the new podcast I'm doing with JimboFett - we got far more listeners than I imagined we'd get at the beginning and it's been a blast doing them so everything's golden right now. Since I'm in such a good mood, this review will be super easy to do... as long as writer Mark Waid and artist Barry Kitson don't make me hate another Legionnaire. Or blow up another planet. Let's begin, shall we? Brainiac 5 is on exposition duty this time, so while he's hooked up to some sort of super computer he's telling us everything that's been happening (Orando's destroyed, the U.P. is in trouble). Invisible Kid is transcribing his notes into a computer and causes a short - the formulas caused a fatal error that ends up displaying this horrible message: "Colu is next." The Legion takes a space ship (why no transmatter?) to Colu and Brainy explains to Light Lass how ...