Legionnaires #9 - 16, Annual #1

Welcome back to the race to the end. Before I get into these week's issues, I wanted to talk about something that I've been pondering over for a while.

Time.

More specifically, how to display time in a comic book.

I'm going to reference one of the greatest books ever written on comics and how they work: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. If you haven't read it, go and get a copy and enjoy. It will change the way you view comics forever.

He devotes an entire chapter on time and how comics can show the passage of time in so many different ways, from panel size, to placement, to cutting a single picture into smaller pictures, to how a panel can be a different amount of time, depending on what's inside.

I mentioned two weeks ago how Tom and Mary Bierbaum seemed to have a problem with handling time in these comics and I wanted to expand a bit. They weren't struggling with panel size, or what's inside - they were struggling with the internal consistency of how long things take whenever they change scenes.

Let me give you an example from some of the issues I'm writing about this week.

A group of Legionnaires fly down to Acapulco to stop a food riot in progress. While there, Live Wire gets angry at the crowd and lashes out, getting ready to blast the people with his powers. Cosmic Boy steps in front of the blast and takes the full shot of lightning. He goes down, not breathing, and needs immediate medical attention.

Here's where things start to fall apart.

One of the toughest things to do in any visual medium is jump from one connected scene to another and maintain time consistency. Let's use the Cosmic Boy blast to illustrate.

Cosmic Boy is lying there, dead. The Legionnaires call for help and Ultra Boy flies Brainiac 5 to the rescue almost immediately, saying that he's never flown that fast before. Now because they've never actually established how close the Acapulco dome is to the Metropolis dome, or how easy it is to pass through the gates to each dome, I'll let this go.

Brainy saves Rokk and Ultra Boy flies the injured Legionnaire to the hospital with Imra following close behind. Garth joins them, leaving the rest of the Legionnaires to handle the riot. This is where the time problems occur.

At the riots, Brainy has discovered another boy who is dead and needs to be rescued. So he hooks him up to his device that sends a massive amount of pink lightning through his body. But the boy doesn't come to.

In the hospital, Imra is anxiously waiting to find out what will happen to Rokk, who's now in surgery to help him. So let's just say at least 15 to 20 minutes have passed (and I'm picking the smallest number imaginable) for them to get to the hospital, get him prepped and into surgery, and have enough time to agonize about Garth being an idiot.

But back at the riots, no time has passed. The boy is still unconscious. Brainy is still trying to figure out how to save him. They zap him again and suddenly the Legionnaires lose their regular colors, become rainbow-colored, and are completely defenseless.

Back to the hospital, where Rokk is still in surgery and Imra enters his mind to help him. In the time it took to get from the start of the surgery to this point, the following has happened:

• Inferno has tried to take a date to the Paris dome and started fighting with the chains around the gate. Then he was called back to headquarters and left.
• Five Legionnaires fought the Khunds, rescued Kid Quantum, defeated the Khunds, saved the Protys, flew back to New Earth, put Kid Quantum up for Legion membership, and saw him get accepted and officially made a member
• Another group of Legionnaires (including Kid Quantum) get debriefed on everything bad happening in Paris, fly to the dome, enter, and begin fighting with the citizens within
• Oh, and Invisible Kid has just gone to Acapulco to discover what happened to the other Legionnaires
• And in this time, the blasted Legionnaires are still just lying there, on the ground, rainbow-colored, and no one has done anything to help them

So by my guess, that surgery has taken about... two, three days?? And the other Legionnaires have been incapacitated for that long??

I honestly think that maintaining consistent timelines and understanding who's doing what and when might be one of the hardest jobs of any writer. You tend to get excited with all the ideas and plot points you want to develop and explore. But you have to constantly keep everything consistent and logical. Once you break these time rules, your stories become muddled and confusing to the reader.

And that's where we are with the Legionnaires.

Legionnaires 11 - Kid Quantum is back and no one cares...

More conjecture here, but I'm guessing that the Bierbaums already knew the book was being rebooted by this point and they asked the editors for the opportunity to wrap everything up before they were done. Or, they tried to stretch out their issues for as long as they could and turned issues 9 through 15 into one long, continued stretch of stories so they couldn't get fired before they were ready to go.

I never thought I would say this, but I actually liked, for the most part, what they did here. They used every team member effectively, they added more back story to Dragonmage and Catspaw and showed they were great additions to the team, they introduced the "Aliens go Home" story line that has continued though almost every reboot of the Legion, and they actually made me care even a little bit about what was going on with Kid Quantum. So all successes.

There are numerous stories weaving through these six issues and I'll try to recap most of it.

First, we get the resolution (or kind of a resolution) to the whole Kid Quantum/Proty/Soul of Antares story that was started over in the regular Legion book. I say kind of because they still never really explained why the Dominators or Khunds cared about any of this, aside from just trying to suck the power out of Kid Quantum. Or maybe that was it?? I guess I'm asking too much to have villains actually have a slightly complicated goal or think even one step past their initial plan.

Matter-Eater Lad, Shrinking Violet, Dragonmage, and Catspaw are shipwrecked on a strange planet and run into their greatest wishes come alive. These wishes turn out to be Protys (Proties?) who want them to stay so they can help them fight the Khunds.

In learning what Catspaw wishes for (a boy she has a crush on) and Dragonmage wants (respect from his teacher), and the problems they dealt with before, we get some insight into their backgrounds. I was more interested in Catspaw, just because her background was slightly less cliched than Dragonmage's. The fact that she still carried a torch for someone who betrayed her makes me wish we got more of that before the reboot. Here's a Legionnaire with a tragic back story that makes her different from everyone else.

But what I kept wondering about was how M-E Lad and Violet didn't have a clue who the Protys are. One of my biggest complaints about this book and Legion is that they seem to have thrown everything out that happened one year before. So these characters are no longer the SW6 Legion, with all their memories and personalities. They're now some weird rebooted characters who call back on their experience whenever it's convenient but don't seem to actually remember any of those experiences.

To make my case, here is a little bit of research I did: According to Tom Bierbaum's blog, his favorite all-time Legion story was Adventure Comics #350, which seems to be the time the SW6 Legionnaires came from. No Star Boy, Dream Girl, or Bouncing Boy. Ferro Lad is still alive. The team is still innocent and camaraderie is good. It makes sense based on what we see when the SW6 team is revealed.

So when did Proty first appear? Adventure Comics #308, more than three years earlier. So M-E Lad and Violet would know what Protys are. But they don't. He describes them as mashed potatoes. Would it have been so hard for the two experienced Legionnaires to know and then explain who they are to the newbies?

Anyway, they discover Kid Quantum is being held by the Khunds and a Dominator, rescue him, and bring him back to Legion HQ. Due to him being the Soul of Antares, Kid Quantum is now a teenager again (or, since he's a Proty, he just shapeshifted to look younger) and has all of his powers for real, not from artificial means like before. They immediately make him a Legionnaire.

This is really the only "good" appearance of the male version of Kid Quantum, so enjoy this tiny run of success. He's kinda become the Legion's version of Thunderbird, in that he's kinda become more valuable as a dead hero and a cautionary tale.

Legionnaires 9 - Is it possible to make Live Wire less sympathetic?

The other big storyline, which really drags through these six issues, is the food riot in Acapulco and the aftermath... kinda...

Two critical things happen here. The first, the aforementioned Live Wire blasting Cosmic Boy and essentially killing him. We get to see a worried Saturn Girl take care of Cosmic Boy in the hospital, rip Live Wire apart for being so dangerous and uncaring, and it really felt for most of these issues that we were headed to a couple of possible endings:

• Live Wire gets suspended by or kicked out of the Legion
• Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy declare their love for each other
• Saturn Girl breaks up with Live Wire
• Cosmic Boy ends his friendship with Live Wire

You won't be surprised in the slightest that none of those things happen. Because this is the Bierbaums and jerks never face any repercussions for their actions, when everything is wrapped up, Saturn Girl and Live Wire are back together and Cosmic Boy blames himself for getting hurt.

I think I've mentioned this before, but for this story to make any sense at all, you've got to show why these characters are willing to put up with Garth's actions. Show that he treats Imra like a princess and takes care of her better than anyone else. Show that the lightning blast was a mistake and Garth was actually aiming at a threat instead of a bunch of innocent people. Heck, give Garth even one redeeming quality.

Instead, he's a violent, immature monster who attacks without thinking, stalks Imra when she doesn't want to see him, and blames everyone else for his mistakes. And both Imra and his sister, Ayla, spend issue 15 making sure he knows that they will always take care of him and coddle him and his horrible behavior. It's like watching an abusive relationship unfold.

At this point, I'd rather have the Emerald Empress on the team.

Legionnaires 12 - Welcome to Paris

The third big storyline revolves around the new, fascist government in Paris. An Archduke has illegally taken over the dome and locked out all outsiders. He has also focused on turning all the Earthlings living there against any aliens, which leads to public executions.

So the Legionnaires head off Paris to figure out what's going on, stop the violence, and bring down the Archduke. Between the heightened violence, the public burnings, and the Dominator with superpowers, this is the story that feels the most like something that belongs in the 5YL books. It's dark and harsh and the artwork reflects that.

Unfortunately, it is completely undercut by the returning villain and the resolution.

The villain? Grimbor. You know, the guy who literally showed up in Legion 51. I reviewed it last week. Normally, I would make some comment about how this is the surest sign that two editorial teams aren't communicating. But it's the same editors. And it's literal months apart. And no one thought, "Hey Grimbor just got arrested on Quarantine trying to break his daughter out of prison, so maybe we shouldn't use him on New Earth... or, at the very least, explain how he got there??"

The resolution, that the Paris dome was paying Sklarian pirates to steal grain so they were able to arrest the Archduke and wrap everything up with a nice, little bow, was just too simple and easy. I know that this is their last issue, and the Bierbaums didn't want to leave any dangling stories, but it was just too neat. And I hate neat. And they've shown they don't care about tying up loose ends, so why do it now?

To be honest, why care at all? It's all going away in a few months, so why not blow something else up?

Some random thoughts about these six issues:

• I swore I wasn't going to write another M-E Lad rant but all I could keep thinking as I was reading these books was, "Stop trying to make Matter Eater Lad happen. He's not going to happen."
• Is it some sort of Legion tradition to always choose the worst possible option when sending a team out on a mission? I mean, you need one Legionnaire to accompany Kono and go undercover to infiltrate Sklarian pirates. So who does Computo pick M-E Lad? They need to infect him with some disease so he turns female (why not use ProFem?), color his skin, and rely on literally the worst team member when it comes to being sneaky, quiet, or responsible. They could have picked a random person off the street and had a better chance for success. Or, you know, any of the female members...
• My one defense of the editorial misses here is because I imagine they were busy dealing with a rotating group of artists, some of which couldn't even finish one issue. In these six issues, we saw Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, Brian Stelfreeze, Stuart Immonen, Chris Gardner, Frank Fosco, and Jeff Moy. Some are good. Some are... not...
• Catspaw shows how little she cares about her teammates, or just her inability to remember names, by calling them "Dragon-Guy, Mouth-Boy, and Little Violet." Its these little touches that I love in comics.
• I know that I keep going back to this, but how old is Inferno supposed to be here? 16? 17? And when he flirts with Sadi, someone he calls "sir" (and I do love the non-gendered titles of respect), it's portrayed as completely normal and when they start making out later, something acceptable and understandable. Isn't she an adult? Isn't this illegal? I know that the age of consent laws, especially around working, tend to skew young in the Legion, but I can't help but think this is just creepy and wrong.
• We see, I believe, one of the first moments where Luornu's different selves have different personalities (and Tri-Jitsu, I think). They had hinted at it before but when one flirts with Leviathan, much to the shock of the other two, it's a great little moment that they build on with the reboots. I really like this take but it does raise one big question: Do all three of Luornu's selves love Chuck or just one of them?
• In the double-standard department, Kono brags to some of the female Legionnaires that she took pictures of Cham in the shower. They laugh and think it's great. Then when M-E Lad reveals that he took photos of Kono when she was in the shower, they all freak out and rip him apart. What's worse is that, at the end of the scene, I have no idea where the writers stand on this. Was Kono wrong, even though they played her love of taking nude photos of all the male Legionnaires as comedy? Or was M-E Lad wrong, because... reasons?? These are plot points that really haven't aged well and I can't imagine anyone writing this today. Which is good.
• In the missed opportunities department, I loved when the young, super-powered Dominator showed up. I would have loved to see more of this character, especially dealing with the hatred against her people and her desire to make up for the damage caused by them.

Legionnaires 16

You know, once you recognize the gratuitous butt shots designed for the lonely teenage boys, you can't unsee them.

Mark Waid takes over as series writer for this issue and we finally tie the book into all the craziness that's been happening over in the Legion and Valor (which we'll talk about a little later). Well, they try to. But once again, they don't really care if anything makes any sense or if we've seen any of these plot points before.

The time flashes occur, changing the time line and both Star Boy and Dream Girl arrive as team members. Star Boy gets a new costume and a horrible haircut and Dream Girl gets... over exposed... wow, was that new costume ever inappropriate.

The rest of the team finds that their memories are getting shakier and shakier (insert joke about everyone forgetting the first 40 issues of the Legion 5YL), wondering what's going on with Valor.

Also, apparently Invisible Kid has been working with Rond Vidar to uncover all of these time variations. We haven't seen them work together, and there was no reference to any of this before this issue, but just trust the creative team. It's been happening.

If you thought that was confusing, it's then revealed that only Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Live Wire are noticing all of the time changes. No one else on the team (except Invisible Kid, for no reason at all) recognizes the changes. So the original trio of Legionnaires decide the best thing to do is grab a time bubble and head into the past. Or future. Unclear what the plan is.

Oh, they've never mentioned time bubbles before this, so any new readers to this book would be very confused by what's going on? Don't worry about that either.

Look, I get that they're just trying, finally, to connect this book to the time issues in the other two books, but this was a really ham-handed attempt to do it. At this point, I'm fairly certain both editorial and creative have just given up and are only trying to get this book out on time so the End of an Era will match with Zero Hour.

Legionnaires Annual 1 - welcome to Came... Avalon!

This is another Elseworld book that I probably enjoyed more because of the Arthurian ties than any actual good story. It's a retelling of the King Arthur myth with Cosmic Boy as Arthur, Saturn Girl as Guinevere, and Live Wire as Lancelot.

The entire team fights against the Dark Circle, dress as knights, and battle with each other over which side to support: Rokk or Garth. In the end, they all come together, win the day, and save the galaxy.

It's a nice, fluff book that's enjoyable for what it is and I'd have to say I enjoyed reading it more than anything else I slogged through this week.

They have two artists for this book who I really like: Paul Pelletier and Jeff Moy. Even though their styles aren't perfect matches, the book holds together very well and I think they're both great pencillers.

Valor 18 - Do you think George Perez knew his take on the Pieta was going to be homaged this often?

Some people were asking whether I was going to take a look at Valor, as it's wrapping up as well. I really didn't want to because all of my memories of Valor are that they're horrible, but the completest in me couldn't say no. I started with issue 12, the start of Mark Waid's run, with the hope that there'd be something worth checking out.

I have to admit, I enjoyed these books more than I did the Legion of Super-Heroes, but I still don't know if I'd recommend them to anyone.

So issue 13 is where we first see the tie-in to the Legionnaires being confused by Valor disappearing from their history. So that makes more sense when it's tied into Legionnaires 16. Basically, everything that happens from issues 13 and on happens within Legionnaires 16. So Valor readers were, I guess, just waiting for the other books to catch up?

To save everyone from reading through these, Waid has basically turned this into a Legionnaires comic starring Valor and he's trying to wrap up and make sense of all the time travel, the different Valors, and why things aren't working properly anymore. Once again, I just don't understand why we have such different version of the Legionnaires, or why Waid's doing this in the Valor book instead of the Legionnaires one. Why keep the Bierbaums on Legionnaires to tell stories that do absolutely nothing for the upcoming End of an Era, and why have multiple Legionnaires showing up in these two different books, doing completely different things?

The artwork by Colleen Doran is gorgeous - she might be the only person who really understands that she's drawing teenagers. Her facial expressions are excellent and really capture the feelings of the characters.

Mark Waid's story is about as deep of a deep dive into Legion and DC history as there can be. He's trying his best to wrap everything up and explain the paradox that is Valor. He also pulls the future, SW6 Valor back into play after killing off the original Valor. Some of this really reads as if Waid was dead set on making everything make sense, to his perspective, regardless of whether these stories needed to be told. Unfortunately, he lost the concept of actually telling a good story that was accessible to all of the readers.

I just keep going back to a point I made earlier here - why do any of this? Why attempt to "fix" the Legion and Valor timeline when you're just going to throw everything out during Zero Hour? Why have the Legionnaires book so completely separate from the Legion and Valor? Why care so much about continuity now when you've shown, time and again, that you don't care about it? We constantly rip the Bierbaums for writing fan fic, but this really feels like Waid is doing the exact same thing.

 

I'm not going to lie - I'm very happy that I made it though all of these books with my sanity still intact. None of these were great reads. None of them should be collected or shared with anyone. I'm fairly certain that none of the talented people who worked on these books (and there are a lot of them) put these books up on their list of accomplishments.

There is an element of sadness that this is how 36 years of Legion history ends.

 

Next week is the End of an Era. It's the end of the first version of the Legion (until Geoff Johns brings it back), leading into the Zero Hour reboot. Once again, I'm going to try to be positive... we'll see how that works...