It's a Ranzz family reunion... again... and we go back to Korbal... again... we look at Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #25 & 26

Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #25

To recap everything that's been going on (by the way, I do this as much for myself as for all of you... this book drops subplots like they're on fire):

• Sun Boy and his group of former murderous criminals have been blipped out of the universe
• Brainiac 5 still has Lemnos, the villain who led those criminals, locked up somewhere
• A new group of villains, made up of one who creates sonic waves when he farts, a Titanian who's almost as powerful as Saturn Girl, a bunch of giants (like Micro Lad) from Big City, Nemesis Kid, and Tarik (we don't know if he's mute yet), have about to attack the Legion HQ on Earth and no one saw it coming... you would think, even if was a transmatter jump, there'd be some sort of early warning system...
• That same group of villains broke into a museum in Kandor to steal the Phantom Zone projector, even though there's absolutely no reason they would have a clue it existed
• The Legion grabbed the projector, brought it to Earth, and are trying to get Mon-El out safely
• Saturn Girl and Phantom Girl have merged minds to communicate with the ghostly Mon-El
• Supergirl is making Legionnaires fall in love with her because she is emitting waves that make their stomachs queasy... that's what love means to me too, just don't tell my wife...
• Shadow Lass and Lightning Lad want to be the new Legion leader and the election is coming soon
• One of Triplicate Girl's personalities is dating Element Lad
• Brainiac 5 failed in bringing Dream Girl back from the dead but he is talking to her ghost... shades of Apparition in the Reboot Legion
• Light Lass is suffering from massive personality changes and Karate Kid helps everyone except himself

Did I miss anything? Whew...

Creator continuity continues from last issue as, once again, this story is brought to you by writer Mark Waid, penciller Barry Kitson, and inker Mick Gray.

We begin at Legion HQ, where everyone is ignoring that there's an attack coming and Dream Boy (I don't want to explain this one) is flying around, trying to find some Kryptonite.

Projectra is unable to help boost the defense shield because Plant Lad, the super-powered teenager Triplicate Girl found underground has wrapped her and... someone I can't identify... in vines and is shutting down said shield. It's Chlorophyll Kid, of course, and he's a bad guy.

Outside, the massive number of villains have arrived to attack. Speaking of characters turning to evil, the White Witch uses her powers to keep the Legionnaires within the HQ stuck in groups of two and three. They're all so distracted by playing chess, reading comics, and, in the case of Chameleon, losing their structural integrity, they have no idea what's going on. Actually, Cham is the only one who realizes they're under attack for... reasons??

Jeyra, the Titanian telepath who is great at exposition, brags that they've taken Earth without throwing a single punch. So no threat from the S.P.s again, right?

And in a cool change, the Roll Call page shows the villains, not the Legionnaires, this time. They're the Wanderers! We also have Micro Lass (points to the villains for respecting their teammate enough to call her by her chosen name), Polar Boy, Inferno, Grav, and Thoom. No Nemesis Kid. Or Tarik.

We're suddenly in a dream - Brainiac 5 is surrounded by ruins and he's talking to Dream Girl. She's showing him what's going to happen to Metropolis. He criticizes Dream Boy in his usual snarky way and then snaps back to reality.

I'm actually now going to take my criticism for this inane story line in a different direction. Why would Dream Girl put up with Brainy? I mean, if you're dead and you want to talk to someone, why would you pick this horrible excuse for a sentient being? They've already revealed that she wasn't in love with him when she died. Why be there?

The lab is surrounded by White Witch's magic walls and some other Legionnaires, Supergirl, Cosmic Boy, and Phantom Girl, are trying to get out. Saturn Girl is still staring off into space, communicating with Mon-El.

Lightning Lad and Light Lass have figured out something's going on and after they realize their powers can't affect the barriers, Ayla disappears. As does Ultra Boy, Karate Kid, and Star Boy. And yep, none of them had figured out something bad was happening. Always great to show that most of your super team are blissfully unaware of their surroundings. Because if you're going to tell me that some can spot the walls and others can't, it's just telling me that the others are pretty clueless.

Back to the Lab, and they start talking about Mon-El. We find out that he's been stuck there for 1,000 years to keep him from dying from lead poisoning. And, of course, Brainy has figured out a serum to save him (and yeah, that makes no sense at all) but he doesn't have access to a key ingredient... which is when we see Dream Boy holding a container of something.

Elsewhere, we find out why the four Legionnaires were teleported out of the HQ - the Wanderers want to recruit them. Ultra Boy is about to start fighting when Light Lass stops him, telling him to listen to the leader. She says she knows him.

The leader, wearing a hood to keep his identity secret (please don't be Mekt...), tells the story of how the U.P. put together a Black Ops team that was sent to investigate the Dominators. They fought, and everyone except him died, with no backup from the U.P. 

Because he couldn't trust the U.P., he came back and formed his own team to stop the Dominator attack on Earth. This team needs to be able to take orders and that's why they grabbed these four Legionnaires - they are the most likely to follow him.

And yep... it's Mekt. (Please don't retell their origin story...)

Back in Brainy's Lab, they bring Mon-El out of the Phantom Zone and, since someone wearing a big red 'S' put him into the Zone, he punches Supergirl first.

They just let the two of them fight while Brainy creates an antitoxin. Why let them fight? Two super-powered beings, crashing through the HQ, may be able to take down the force fields. Which they do.

The team reunites, figures out what's been going on, and Brainy creates the antitoxin with the Kryptonite Dream Boy got out of the arsenal... which he should've known about because he put it there when they got it to take care of Supergirl when they went to Kandor.

Am I the only one who's paying attention to these stories?

The Legion grabs Mon-El and forces the serum into his mouth. He soon gets back to his feet, shaky, and promises to help because, well, they just saved his life.

And then he suddenly disappears, teleporting to join Mekt and the Wanderers. Mekt tells Mon-El that he's in charge of the 31st Century and this story is definitely to be continued.

So, once again, Brainy solves everything without really having to work at it and the story moves at a breakneck speed without worrying if it actually makes any sense. Almost all the villains that were important parts of the past stories (Nemesis Kid, perhaps) disappear because Mekt is here...

 

Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #26

We start with Plant Lad (I think), telling some people who are towering over him that he's not scared of them. No one's afraid of the Legion - that's why someone was able to recruit him to do the dirty work the Legion couldn't do.

Timber Wolf (I think) grabs him, demanding answers. Plant Lad tells him that the boss doesn't want the Legion dead, he wants them out of the way.

At the same time, Supergirl leads a group of Legionnaires through Metropolis, looking for the missing four. Using her Super-vision, she spots them and, even though they draw them away from a building, flies directly into the building to confront the kidnappers.

Lightning Lad sparks up, threatening to cook them if they don't surrender. Mekt reveals himself, telling them it's time for a Ranzz family reunion. Ayla is standing right beside him, staring at her twin brother.

You may wonder why I wrote "I think" twice. Quite simply, they give the reader nothing to show who these people are. Plant Lad showed up for one panel last issue and was in the background. I don't remember the last time I saw Timber Wolf... I'm guessing solely by the sideburns. I get writing for the trades, and I get not wanting to slow things down with exposition to keep the story moving, but wow... they're not even trying to make any of this make sense. I'm reading two books a week and I'm forgetting some of these characters. Imagine if you're reading one a month...

Back to the action: We learn that Ayla is on Mekt's side, along with Mon-El. Mekt tricked the Legion into releasing him because Brainiac 5 was the only sentient smart enough to do it. I still have no idea how Mekt tricked them to go to Kandor, or how he knew about the Phantom Zone projector, but since there were legends, that was good enough.

Saturn Girl reads Mekt's mind and reveals that he's not a threat. He recruited soldiers from the Legion, not leaders, for the fight that's coming. Jeyra enters Mon-El's and Supergirl's mind to give them coordinates to see the threat.

It's the robot rebellion, growing stronger in MegaTokyo. They're going to lead an uprising and hand the Earth over to the Dominators. Cosmic Boy wants a scouting report before he agrees to follow Mekt's lead, so he sends Mon-El, Supergirl, Ultra Boy, and Brainiac 5 to take a look. To no surprise, Mon-El has adjusted quickly and, in his haste to see MegaTokyo, he flies directly through the floor. Of a huge building...

While Cosmic Boy and Mekt leave to talk, both having their minds cloaked by their respective telepaths, Ayla reveals to the rest of the Wanderers the secret of Mekt Ranzz...

Please no lightning beasts... again...

The four scouts are literally flying through the center of the Earth to get to Japan. Why? Because Mon-El wants to feel something. So I guess all that talk of haste, with Mekt saying they haven't the time, was irrelevant.

The important reveal - Mon-El says that he'll meet Supergirl again after she returns back to her own time.

Back to the Ranzz family reunion and we learn about the first accident, where they crashed on Korbal and got zapped by the locals. Mekt was the only one to wake up - he got the twins back on the ship and brought them back to Winath. Then he left before his siblings recovered. Ayla also makes reference to a second accident, the one that changed her powers... something I'd want to read about more, to be honest.

In MegaTokyo, the three powerful Legionnaires make short work of the robots. Brainy calls Cosmic Boy, saying that Mekt's intel must be faulty. They're not stronger than any other robot group.

Which is when a gigantic Dominator robot awakens, moving towards the surface, and starts destroying everything around it. And when I say gigantic, I mean bigger than buildings gigantic.

Ayla continues talking to the Wanderers, revealing that Mekt, since he was born without a twin, has a death wish. He's not fighting for glory, he's leading a suicide mission.

Back in MegaTokyo, Mon-El, Supergirl, and Ultra Boy quickly discover that the Dominator robot isn't that strong. In fact, it's virtually hollow and has no defense systems. It wasn't built for combat - it's a delivery system.

It releases a bright red burst of something. They guess at what it could be and Brainiac 5 reveals that it's worse than anything they could imagine - and they've already lost the fight.

Very much to be continued...

Something just occurred to me as I was reading this regarding Saturn Girl. When she's "speaking" telepathically, does everyone hear her or just the person she's directly communicating with? There were moments when she was in a crowd but was speaking as if only Lightning Lad or Cosmic Boy could hear her. And since we can't "read" Jeyra's thoughts, does this mean she limits who she's communicating with? And if so, how are we supposed to know who she's "talking" to?

Regarding this story, and I hate to say this, but I'm enjoying this comic much more now that they've stopped beating the "underager versus adult" subplot to death and they actually feel more like a Legion. They are still massive plot holes everywhere and both Waid and Kitson don't seem to care if what they're writing or drawing makes sense, but at least they're moving towards something far more interesting than we've seen in a while.

But I always enjoy a good battle against the Dominators.

Also, as much as I complain about having to see yet another Ranzz origin story, I do kinda like this new Mekt take. In a perfect world, I think it would be great to just see him as an older brother who doesn't want anything to do with his younger siblings, leading the Wanderers, and just an ass, not a full-fledged villain. But I know that's probably not where they're going, so I can't get too hopeful.

I also kinda hope the White Witch becomes a Legionnaire after this story, but I'm not hopeful about that either. She's in her Bronze Age look, so Waid will ditch her asap.

 

Our next Legionnaire in the spotlight... Computo II!!

 

 

The first thing I have to say about Computo is, quite simply, that whoever thought it was a good idea to name a character after one of the Legion's worst villains, and the one who killed one of Luornu's bodies, made a horrible choice. Wouldn't someone, anyone, sit her down and tell her not to do it?

The second thing is that Danielle Foccart was one of the best characters in 5YL and one of the only characters I cared about in the Legionnaires book. I don't know why the Bierbaums decided to make her likable and not, say Live Wire or Sun Boy, but they did. She was the older sister to the team and, along with Cham, provided maturity and thought to the stories.

For most of her existence, she was the immobile character who Brainy first infected with Computo and then spent a large amount of time trying to cure. She was a subplot, with only a name and a problem. She could've easily been shuffled into the background never to be seen again.

But, she was yet another person experimented on by the Dominators and she ended up being able to control computers and communicate with them mentally. It was a great, old-school Legion superpower. It wasn't flashy and she wouldn't have been the best person to help in a fight, but she proved her worth again and again and was key at the end of the run.

Even better, she's been shown to be a member of the team in both Justice League United and Convergence, so maybe she's got a future. I'm not sure how Lyle Norg is a Legionnaire at the same time as Danielle, but I've never accused all of these reboots of making sense, have I?

 

Please let me know what you think about either this issue or Computo herself. And out latest podcast just came out today, so please check out our spotlight on Cosmic Boy!

Until next week - Long Live the Legion!