LSH 5YL #25-32, Annual #3 - We're about to get really controversial here...

This was the hardest reread I've done so far because we're getting into some very controversial topics. I'm just going to put this here first and let you decide whether you want to continue:

We're going to be talking about gay and transgender characters later on. If you think it's a good idea to spout anything homophobic or transphobic in the comments, please don't bother and just stop reading now. If you're easily offended by any of these topics, please stop reading now.

Also, as a middle-aged straight man, I can't even come close to empathizing with what a gay or transgender person has gone or is going through, and I'm never going to claim that I can. I'm going to try my best and hope that I don't offend anyone. Fingers crossed, let's begin.

LSH #32 (actually, tragedy doesn't strike the Legion of Super-Heroes, it strikes the SW6 Legionnaires, who are the more important group, right?)

This is going to be slightly different from how my previous rereads looked as, to be honest, I have less interest in talking about the actual story line that's going through these nine issues and more interest in talking about individual plot points and decisions.

Here's the quick recap of the nine issues, which is the beginning of the Terra Mosaic:

• The Dominators are clamping down on the Earth, trying to destroy the resistance, and calling in all their armies from around the universe. They're making mistake after mistake and their only solutions are violence and more violence.
• One part of the resistance, made up of the good Subs + Jacques, Tenzil, and Troy, are trying their best to overthrow the Dominion while saving as many lives as they can.
• The other part, made up of Universo, his evil minions, and the Dark Circle, want to remove the Dominion so they can fill the power vacuum and take over the Earth. They don't care who they kill, as long as they win.
• The Legion (the old version) and the UP do pretty much nothing to help anyone. Well, Rokk sent Bounty to Earth to... I'm guessing kill the President... and wants to stay covert. (On an aside, do you think this Bounty and the Bounty that first showed up in Superboy #234 to hunt the Composite Legionnaire are the same personality? Or should I have realized that years ago?)
• The Legion gets attacked by the Dominator android B.I.O.N., gets their collective butts kicked because they forget that teamwork is actually a good idea, and are saved by Rokk and Kono.
• The Legion (the SW6 version) are stuck on Earth and have to become jaded and dark very quickly. They start doing more and more morally ambiguous actions just to survive.
• In the final issue, one of Universo's soldiers, Grinn, sets off the self-destruct devices in every Dominator chamber around the world, killing SW6 Legionnaires Chameleon Boy, Karate Kid, and Princess Projectra. Is it too soon to say "Giffen may be the first person in the history of comics to kill the same character twice"??

Jason Pearson takes over as the regular artist and he does an amazing job. Yes, he occasionally gets too cartoony, but his style really fits the dark tone of the series and his facial expressions are top notch. He's a great replacement for Keith Giffen (more comments about his passing at the end), who's still doing plots and breakdowns, and gets better and more confident with each issue. I've commented before that I've been confused by some of the artistic choices. This one really works.

LSH #25

Let's talk about the SW6 Legionnaires.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my idea that there are two Legions. To summarize:

• The first Legion, the Silver Age Legion that runs from 1958 -1974 and in the 5YL Legion, is one of odd powers and weird, funny characters. It's innocent teenagers fighting against bad guys and it embraces characters like Bouncing Boy and Matter-Eater Lad. I would now expand that to include the Zero Hour Legion as well.
• The second Legion, from 1974 - 1989 plus the 2007 relaunch, is one built on strength and is more mature and adult. The 'weak' Legionnaires have no place and are replaced by powerhouses. Weird characters are played for laughs.

Depending on what Legion was your first, that's the Legion you prefer. So if you grew up reading the old Adventure Comics and love the days in the upside-down rocket ship, I would imagine that you also love all the old references to those comics in the 5YL Legion.

If you grew up on the Paul Levitz Legion, then you probably spent most of the 5YL later Legion wondering when characters like Wildfire and Dawnstar were going to show up... oops... and what Brin did to make the writers hate him.

The writers of the 5YL Legion, Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum, are obviously first Legion lovers. They know the history and know the old stories. They love the days where everyone was running around with their names written across their chests. They have favorite characters, such as Supergirl and Cosmic Boy, who were at their strongest in the 1960's. And they have characters they don't really care for, such as Dream Girl, who didn't really get used properly until after 1974. She was a pretty face in the 60's. She was a team leader, and a good one, in the 80's.

This is pure speculation, but I imagine that they always wished they could write their favorite characters. I remember when I was younger (much younger), I wished I could write the Legion, but the Legion that was my favorite. I didn't want to write these older, hardened Legionnaires of 5YL. And I didn't want to write the teenagers in the Zero Hour reboot. I wanted to write the second Legion. I wanted to play with the toys Levitz crafted.

So creating the SW6 Legionnaires was their way to write the characters they grew up with and "play with the toys they wanted to play with". I believe that I read that the creative team had the SW6 Legionnaires planned from the very beginning of the series and they always knew this is what the book was leading up to. They also took it one step further to confirm that the SW6 Legion is the "real" one and the Legionnaires we've been reading about since 1970 were the clones.

What's crazy about this to me is that DC Comics went along with it.

Just imagine if, when the New Titans sales were really lagging after artist Tom Grummett left the book and writer Marv Wolfman was obviously spinning his wheels, a new creative team pitched the idea of bringing the Titans, one of DC's most successful titles, back to their beginnings. Nightwing would be Robin again. Starfire, Cyborg, and Raven would be gone. We'd have Speedy and Aqualad and Wonder Girl. All the character growth and progress would be gone.

You'd think that team is insane. You'd talk about how many readers, current readers, grew up with the Titans. How they were the best-selling book in the 80's. You'd say that the readers would never go for it. And if they were crazy enough to mention clones, imagine the backlash to saying that Nightwing was the clone and this younger Robin was the real one.

That's what's happening here with the Legion. Forget about all the fans of the second Legion who grew up with these characters. They don't matter. What matters is the first Legion. They're the focus of the Terra Mosaic story. They're the heroes. The older Legionnaires... they're about to be destroyed.

LSH #28

Jerk Superheroes

During the 70's, we started to see the rise of jerk superheroes. These are the heroes who are the contrarians, the ones who argue with whoever is the leader, the ones who treat their teammates like they're annoyances, and the ones who do things that aren't, as previously defined, heroic. From Wolverine to Green Arrow to Hawkeye, writers were trying to take their characters in different directions and create conflicts to make for more drama. They learned from such popular heroes as Han Solo that the audience loves a good jerk character.

The Legion had three jerks in the 70's: Sun Boy, Timber Wolf, and Wildfire. They took a couple of throwaway lines from a few comics in the early 70's and turned Sun Boy into a womanizer. They embraced the lone wolf aspect of Timber Wolf's personality and made him sullen and short-tempered. And they wanted a powerful hero who could stand up to Superboy, so every issue saw Wildfire argue and, usually, incorrectly attack the star of the book. I was going to add Cosmic Boy to this list, for him slapping Light Lass when she begged him to help save her brother, but I don't think they were trying to make him a jerk - I just think the writers had no problem with rampant misogyny.

Gone were the vanilla characters from the Silver Age. No longer was the dialogue interchangeable between the different Legionnaires. Now we had conflict. We had characters with personalities. We had inter-team conflict. We had more mature conversations.

As the team entered the 80's, Timber Wolf underwent a personality change after his facial surgery and Wildfire was the smart-ass who hid a softer side that cared about everyone. They were no longer jerks but solid teammates.

Except Sun Boy. Dirk Morgna just continued being a womanizing jerk who was too cocky, too confident, and couldn't believe anyone else would want to be in a committed relationship. He was still a hero and still attractive to the female characters (see Gi Gi Cusimano, Laurel Kent, and Shrinking Violet). But he had his flaws. Just like Phantom Girl could be a little catty, Mon-El a little distant, Blok a little slow, and Dream Girl a little (lot..) flirtatious. None of them were perfect.

But at their hearts, at their cores, they were heroes, flaws and all.

This issue removed all of that. In issue #28, Dirk is a shallow, sex-obsessed narcissist who only cares about himself due to the emotional abuse of his father. He needs to be the winner, the best of the group, and doesn't care how he achieves that. As the team falls apart around him, he only cares about how it affects him and believes that everyone is betraying him. With the end of the Legion, he's the hero who fell the furthest, joining the Dominion so he can stay rich and powerful and pretend to have sex with his old teammates.

Even with the flashbacks, showing the horrible lessons he's learned from his father, the book never lets you forget that this is a terrible person at his core. Sun Boy is a villain now and he's always been one. The Legion was the act - this is the real him.

And if you thought he was going to redeem himself, they undercut that as well, focusing on the pathetic man in the ill-fitting costume standing in the rain and getting booed instead of him attempting to save lives when the power spheres exploded.

Yes, one could argue that this is a great example of the creative team subverting expectations. The readers expect Dirk to redeem himself and rejoin the Legion. Instead, we know his powers are literally burning him up alive and his final days are torture. Color Kid can't even put him out of his misery. He must suffer for what he's done.

For anyone who liked Sun Boy in past stories, this issue is a complete kick in the gut.

LSH #31

To be perfectly honest, this is the issue that I was tempted to skip just to avoid the tough writing that's going to follow. I think I can safely say that this issue, of all the books in the 5YL series, is the one that caused the most readers to drop their copies into their laps and go "What?"

First, let me praise some of the great parts of this book. Colleen Doran and Curt Swan's artwork is top-notch. They handle the emotional and personal moments brilliantly. You can feel the pain and sadness. Some of the elements (no pun intended) of the story are great - I love the subplot of the SW6 Element Lad dealing with the possibility that he might have killed someone. The Trommite story that runs through the story is a perfect touch. But...

Some background: among Legion fan groups and message boards there was always the rumor or belief that Element Lad was gay. After all, he wore a pink costume and had curly, blond hair. These rumors continued for years until Paul Levitz established Jan's romantic relationship with SP Officer Shvaughn Erin.

But since the 5YL stories are steeped in fandom's theories and rumors, they decided to make Jan gay.

In 2023, writing this comic would be fairly straightforward. Jan would sit Shvaughn down, tell her that he's been thinking a lot about who he is and simply tell her that he's gay. Done and done.

But in 1992, when this issue came out, there were many other pressures at play. Heroes couldn't just come out and say they're gay. It needed to be couched in vague language. Yes, you could have gay characters in Vertigo comics and they could be clearly out, but superheroes didn't have that freedom. Even in an adult version of the Legion, taking place in the 30th Century (where I hope they're far more progressive than we are), they couldn't just be direct.

So this convoluted story was written.

Shvaughn is actually a man named Sean who has been taking this drug called ProFem that turned him into her. But with all the chaos on Earth, she couldn't get the drug anymore and was beginning to change back. She didn't want Jan to see her change and she apologized for lying to him.

Jan told her that he didn't care whether it was Shvaughn or Sean - their relationship would be the same because of their emotional connection, not a physical one. But she refused, saying that this wasn't true and she couldn't stay with him because of all the lies.

I may be wrong, but I think that makes Jan Bi, correct? Not a common term in 1992, especially in superhero comics, but common today. Did they think that, since Shvaughn was born a man and simply pretending to be a woman, that made Jan completely gay? Wouldn't the more logical take be that Shvaughn is, for all intents and purposes, a woman when she takes the ProFem. I mean, this drug completely changes her physical attributes. I'm assuming that she and Jan had sex before - heterosexual sex. So he's Bi, right?

What made this worse was the way they handled Sean after this. Even when ProFem was available again, he chose not to take it, comfortable in his own body. So Sean's not transgender, right? He was a gay man pretending to be a woman to date Jan? I mean, that's the stunning reveal of this, right? Am I crazy? He lived his entire life in a woman's body just to be with Jan and not because he was actually born a woman in a man's body.

Every time I read this issue I end up just befuddled by all the choices that went into this book. They could have done something simple, poignant, and heartfelt. Instead, they created a convoluted mess that doesn't work at all.

Oh, and on a complete aside, if something like ProFem, or ProMasc, existed in the real world, I would want everyone to spend at least one week of their lives living as the other gender. Think of the empathy we'd all develop if we saw, even for just a week, how much each gender struggles in this world.

Annual #3

If you thought they did Sun Boy dirty...

The first part of the Annual shows pencillers Rob Haynes and Ian Montgomery trying their best to copy Giffen's style as our heroes gather around Brin's deathbed and reminisce. I'm honestly not too sure why they have Celeste there - she has no connection to Brin at all and just seems to be there to have someone to get offended by the bad jokes. Luckily for our hero, Gemini shows up and takes Brin away... somewhere.

Which leads to the second part, which is a preview of the new Timber Wolf mini-series that DC is launching. They're back in the 20th Century and Timber Wolf has a completely new look. From what I understand, DC was desperate to have a Wolverine knock-off at this time and figured, "Why not use the character who Wolverine was based on?" I really like Joe Phillips' art here, but the story is pretty pedestrian. We'll see more of this next week.

The final chapter tells the story of all the Legionnaires gathering on Winath for Imra and Garth's twins' christening. I'm tempted to point out that they're having a big party while Earth literally burns, but at least they're consistent in their desire to keep the older Legion out of the main story line. I'm also tempted to point out that the Legion didn't hesitate to send in the troops to save Orando from a Khund invasion but have no desire to possibly get hurt saving Jacques and Troy and the Subs on Earth.

It's also weird that this chapter obviously takes place before the first and second ones - I think they were saving this one to the end because they knew no one would care what happens after some of the shocking twists.

I know they've shown this before, but this is really the first time that the topless world of Winath is on full display. Penciller Brandon Peterson (I was wrong last week when I said Annual 2 was his last Legion work - apologies) does his best with correct angles and strategically-placed leis, but it just ends up becoming gratuitous by the end of the story. Look, if want to draw topless female characters, just draw nipples. No one's going to die if they see a comic book nipple. But if you can't do it, then maybe come up with a better story idea.

I'm going to mention the insane story choices as they go, most of which seem to be done just so they can either piss off the readers or tear apart Legionnaires they can't stand:

• Nura Nal shows up, overweight and drawn like she's in her 50's, with a boy toy, sorry assistant, keeping her company. She also barely shows any interest in how her sister Mysa, the one who was tortured by Mordru, is doing.
• As the female Legionnaires swim topless in a separate area, Cham and Loomis are staring at them through binoculars... on a world where almost every woman walks around topless... they're perverts...
• They reveal that Jo occasionally visits Nura on Naltor, with the insinuation they've been sleeping together.
• One of the guests is Gim Allon, SP Captain, who's from Earth... I guess he doesn't really care that his home planet is under siege, that millions of people are dying, and that the people he grew up with may be among the dead. A party with old friends is far more important.
• The men aren't the only perverts - Yera, Nura, Projectra, and Tasmia are spying on the men as well.
• Thom is balding and overweight, married to the owner of the Batball team he manages. A Batball manager, which is something he never showed any interest in during any part of the Legion. Not, I don't know, working on Xanthu and helping people?
• Tellus supports the Dark Circle, trying to convince Projectra... who watched them wreck her planet. Really? That's what they brought him back for? The character who was always incredibly careful to not offend anyone? The character who can read minds and see just how upset Projectra would be by the conversation?
• A drunken Luornu hitting on Gim, which leads to them hooking up in a lake. Man, they really hate Chuck, don't they? They hint at her having multiple personalities, but that wasn't ever really discussed, if ever, for decades. They both cheat on their respective spouses while they're in the same general area. Geez...
• And when some of the Legionnaires discuss whether Gim did cheat on his wife with Luornu, they argue that it's not Luornu, but his wife Yera, a Durlan, pretending to be Luornu. Is that better? Would you want to imagine that someone you grew up with has his shape-shifting wife pretend to be you when they have sex? Is that worse? You do see how that's worse, right?
• The big one: Garth isn't actually Garth. He's Proty-1. The mind of Proty, which entered when he "saved" Garth when the lightning struck him years and years ago. He's been living as Garth for 20 years.

It's issues like this where I really get lost as to the actual timeline of the Legion. When volume 3 ended, everything acted like they were in their mid-to-late 20's. Now, five years later, they're all in their late 30's. Or, for Nura, early 50's.

I was so shocked when they actually had Vi and Yera speak, with the former apologizing for being so nasty to her. It was a great little scene and showed the character growth of Vi. Sadly, this was undercut by the fact that we all knew that Yera's husband had just cheated on her... Or she had possibly pretended to be Vi while having sex with her husband.

Look, I know that you're trying to make the team more mature and tell some adult stories, but this entire story seemed to be more about character assassination and soap opera antics. It's like they were creating a ton of subplots but we know that they're never going to pay off. It's like they just wanted to destroy any honor and dignity these characters might have had.

Regarding the Garth reveal. Again, why do this? They kinda hint at the fact that Imra, who's the most powerful telepath in the galaxy, has to know the truth and doesn't care. But none of this makes any sense. Was she so desperate to have Garth back from the dead that she ignored every sign? Was this done just to explain how Garth, post-death, was a slightly different character than before? By that logic, half the Legion are Protys.

 

I know that the Terra Mosaic is considered one of the best Legion stories of all time, but these first eight issues plus the annual just aren't doing it yet. It's too disjointed, they're trying way too hard to justify all the time they're spending with the SW6 Legion and the Subs, and they're spending too much time destroying the older Legion. Most of this just makes me shake my head.

 

There have been many tributes and comments about Keith Giffen after his passing and I just wanted to add in mine. He is one of the greatest storytellers in comics history and one of the best breakdown artists ever. From the Legion, to Justice League, to L.E.G.I.O.N., to Ambush Bug, to Lobo, to Blue Beetle, to Midnighter, to everything he did with J.M. DeMatteis, his work has been varied, insanely creative, and spellbinding. Even when I don't like the ideas, I'm still amazed by what he's done. I think it's a sign of how talented he was that we have such visceral reactions to his work, whether we like it or not. I'd rather be that type of creator than someone who never garners any reaction.