We get the Titans back together, the promise of new Lanterns... oh, and some Legionnaires show up as well... We look at Legion of 3 Worlds #4 & 5

Legion of 3 Worlds #4

Let's go back to the wondrous days of 2009. Final Crisis is ripping through the DC universe. Writer Geoff Johns has brought back the Green Lantern Corps, turned them into a prominent DC book, and has been given the keys to the kingdom. Penciler George Perez is... well, he's on the Mount Rushmore for comic artists. In 2009, he showed that his artwork was just as stunning as it'd ever been. And inker Scott Koblish established himself as one of the best, able to work over anyone and elevate their pencils.

Let's recap, shall we? Superboy-Prime has been brought to the 31st Century by the Time Trapper and he's planning on destroying everything connected to Superman. This includes the Legion of Super-Heroes, who've brought Superman to the 31st Century to help them fight against Prime and the entire Legion of Super Villains. We've seen the return of two 21st Century heroes, Sodam Yat (a Daxamite Green Lantern) and Kid Flash (Bart Allen and XS' cousin). We've also seen the deaths of R.J. Brande, Myg, Rond Vidar, Threeboot Sun Boy, and tens of thousands of beings who worked on Takron Galtos.

We begin in the 21st Century, on Earth, where a bearded man is wandering through a cemetery, talking about tootsie pops, and carrying a shovel. Wow - the events of the Magog issue have come back into play! It's Starman (Boy to me)! Before he starts digging, he has to pull off his regular clothing, reveal his costume, and pull on his mask. Whose grave is he digging? Someone named "...Kent."

Back to the 31st Century, where the battle keeps going and Threeboot Element Lad doesn't have time to mourn Sun Boy. The heroes attack Mordru, who's nice enough to remind us that Superman has a weakness to magic. Luckily for the Legion, Kinetix is a mystic as well, so she attacks from behind. (I'll just point out that she lost all of her magic powers and, since she's still in her new form after the Earth evolved, she's got the wrong personality too)

Kid Flash jumps into the action, fresh from his revival last issue, and starts pummeling Superboy-Prime. I always love when superheroes return from the dead and immediately jump back into action without even the slightest fear of dying again. You would think it would give Bart a reason to pause, wouldn't you?

The lightning users start attacking Prime as well and OG Brainiac 5 reveals the final part of his plan. Remember the Lightning Saga? That was done to collect Bart Allen's youth so that he wouldn't die as he aged rapidly. Dream Girl, who's still missing, saw Bart's return in a dream and also saw Prime destroying the Earth. Who else is missing? Starman, who's got to complete the final part of Brainy's experiment.

Except Starman isn't missing - they know where he is. Well, we know where he is, right? And if Dream Girl is so important to the plan, why send her back to the past during the Lightning Saga? And what did they collect Bart's youth in? I don't remember Karate Kid carrying anything.

At this point I'm convinced that Brainy's going to conjure Omega again because every time he reveals any of this plan, I'm certain he's gone mad.

We get speed running in circles to send Prime flying up into the sky, the Emerald Eye just watches, and Prime smashes into the ground right beside what looks like the dead body of Brainiac 5 but is, in fact, his destroyed statue. No, why would we want any of this to be an easy read, right?

OG Brainy tells Gates and Light Lass that he needs them next and they're headed north.

The battle keeps going, Sodam Yat attacks Prime and then the Time Trapper shows up. The Trapper grabs Superman, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl and drags them to the end of time so that he can explain his plan and monologue like the villain he is. He's failed every time when he tries to destroy Superman or the Legion so he has a new plan - he's going to replace Superman. Why did he grab these four? So they can watch the fall of the Superman dynasty.

And then he blasts them. Hard. So maybe he wants to kill them and then make them watch?

Back to the battle and Prime is excited Superman's gone. Kinetix doesn't realize that Prime doesn't have a weakness to magic and is more than a little surprised when Prime blasts her with his heat vision... killing her. Her final words are, "Leviathan? Is that you?"

I'm starting to get the sense that Johns didn't actually read the reboot Legion, but just a recap of what happened. Or maybe someone drunkenly explained it to him.

We get more Sun Boy feeling sorry for himself, not wanting to put the Legion flight ring back on. That feels like a waste of half a page and since we all know he's going to recover his inner strength and rejoin the team, can we just get to it already?

Mordru absorbs Kinetix, which, according to the White Witch, means she's now imprisoned inside him. Or every spell she knew is and all her power as well.

Threeboot Element Lad turns the ground around Prime into Kryptonite which, strangely enough, actually affects him. Prime freaks out, his skin turning green, and throws one of the Kryptonite rocks through Element Lad's chest... killing him too. Prime flies off in a panic, shattering the bubble around Zymyr (killing him as well) and Cosmic King changes the radiation into yellow sunlight, saving Prime.

Since Mordru has Kinetix's memories and magicks, he learns about Dream Girl's visions of the future. Superboy-Prime must burn down the Fortress of Solitude or the good guys will win. Are they even trying to make anything make sense anymore or is Johns just playing with all his super-hero dolls and throwing whatever sticks into a script?

Prime flies away, some of the Legion chases, and everyone else stays behind to fight. Can I just point out that this fight started in issue number 2 and doesn't show any sign of stopping? How is Metropolis not completely flattened?

In the Fortress of Solitude, the Brainiacs are irritated that the heroes who travelled to the past are late. Of course they arrive just as the complaints start and Polar Boy presents Brainy with a single Lex Luthor hair... why not grab more? Why not grab a brush?

Why is Light Lass here? She uses her powers to bring Superman's Super-Lab to the surface. It was buried under ice, 1000 years ago, by Starman. Inside the lab is the same Kryptonian chrysalis machine that brought Superman back to life after the battle with Doomsday.

They activate the machine, insert the hair, and now must wait 90 seconds to build whomever they're building in the machine. Since we have to write the Brainiacs as idiots, they start arguing about who's going to actually select the correct crystal to get things started.

Because Prime has reached the Fortress, and the heroes have attacked, we get a collapse of ice and all three Brainiacs are knocked out before they can finish this. Polar Boy heads up to fight Prime alone (everyone else got knocked out somehow) so Dawnstar and Wildfire can figure out what to do.

How it makes sense for Polar Boy to go, and not the more powerful Wildfire, is yet another example of Johns wanting to write the pair together more than actually do anything that makes the story better. Dawnstar tries to use her powers to discover the "path" to select the right crystal. Yeah, that's not how her powers work.

To no one's surprise, Prime blasts off Polar Boy's arm and grabs him. Instead of killing him quickly, like he did to the other Legionnaires Johns doesn't care about, Prime punches Brek in the face (which would kill him) and gloats about how he's not a real Legionnaire. Brek points out that no one will remember Prime and Superman's dream will never die.

Oh, and Dawnstar says that Wildfire is the path - he'll pick the right crystal.

Sun Boy shows up, saving Polar Boy, and blasts Prime. Told ya...

Wildfire picks the right crystal (no idea how he's able to do this, but we get a nice little moment of the two together) and the regeneration is complete. Sorry, as much as I like Wildfire and Dawnstar, this was just dumb. This was worse than that cliched moment when the hero cuts the correct wire by just guessing to stop the bomb.

Prime claps his hands, sending Sun Boy and Polar Boy flying, and all the Legionnaires start waking up. Instead of focusing on the Legion, we get yet another rebirth:

Conner Kent Superboy is back! And he's punching Prime!

Ok, so we have Superboy, Superman, Kid Flash, the last Green Lantern, and Superboy-Prime. Can we bring back the rest of the Justice League and Teen Titans too? Can all three Legions just continue to be shown as the weakest, most ineffective heroes in a book with their name in the title?

We get fights in two places - Conner attacks Prime and Superman attacks the Time Trapper. With the Legion standing around and firing blasts at the villains.

Superman grabs the Time Trapper's cloak and rips it open, revealing the (hopefully) last surprise of this series: The Time Trapper is actually an older Superboy-Prime.

I guess that's better than skinny Doomsday... maybe... 

 

Legion of 3 Worlds #5

It's the grand finale! Writer Johns, penciller Perez, and inker Koblish give us one final issue to wrap up every bit of insanity that's been going on.

We begin at the end of time, where the Time Trapper's speech patterns have completely changed so he sounds exactly like the teenage Superboy-Prime. That's impressive - I don't think I could sound like a teenager for money and I'm much younger than the Trapper is.

As Superman, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy writhe in pain, we see classic old Legion covers in the background... and yes, I'd rather be reading any of them than this issue.

Wait, it's not the Trapper speaking. At least I don't think it is because the Trapper is yelling into the void and speaking to whomever is "saying" the captions. So are the captions Superboy-Prime and he's telling us what's going on? Does anything make sense?

As Superboy-Prime and Superman-Time Trapper start saying the same dialogue, we move to the 31st Century for the battle currently happening there. Conner is nice enough to give us more background about what happened when Prime killed him and then Prime calls Wonder Girl ugly.

Continuing the trend of the Legion just standing around while others do things, Sodam Yat blasts Prime with the entire Green Lantern Corps. He's wearing a ring on each finger (and thumb) and has enough time to swear to rebuild the Corps.

Bart and Conner get to yell "Titans Together!" as they smash into Prime as well.

At the end of time, as Superman and the Trapper fight, Saturn Girl telepathically reaches out to Brainiac 5. You see, the end of time, or the Vanishing Point, is a nexus to all of time and space so you can reach anywhere. Imra tells Brainy that the Trapper is Prime and that he knows they'll lose this battle.

I'm also going to point out that the three Legions have two Mon-Els, three Ultra Boys, three Timber Wolves, one Kid Quantum, one XS, and multiple really, really powerful heroes and yet none of them can do anything against Superboy-Prime. I have no idea why they're calling in any backup.

Prime chases after Dawnstar, angry that she's the one who lead everyone to him, so he flies after her to kill her. Wildfire gets in the way, telling him to "stay away from my girl."

Prime's comeback? "Out of my way, Wildfart!" And he shatters Drake's suit, causing a massive explosion. Luckily we know that this won't kill Wildfire because he's made of anti-energy and he can just pull himself back together, so to speak.

Back to Metropolis, at the battle that never ends, and Mordru has just discovered that Kinetix had all the mystic energy of universe-247. Which means that there were no other magic users in the entire universe. So he's become supremely powerful. Or, really, considering how useless she was against Prime last issue, maybe that's not a lot of power?

Mordru starts draining all the Legionnaires of their powers and bringing the LSV back from unconsciousness. Glad we didn't forget about those guys, right?

The White Witch realizes a sacrifice must be made, "and the sacrifice must be mine."

Wildfire's explosion caused a ton of damage but Dawnstar flies in to see what happened. Drake's lying on the ground, a hole in his suit, with the other Wildfire having cauterized the wound. Cauterized? The suit? I'm starting to think Johns didn't read the old comics either. They're playing this like Wildfire took a horrible blow to his... energy?? and he may die.

We get a nice romantic moment between Dawnstar and Wildfire and he tells her he loves her, too. Good to know five issues talking about the path paid off with this tender moment. At least one thread of the series hasn't been ignored.

More Super-fighting and we get our first twist - Conner burns a line across Prime's chest, marking over the S-symbol and suddenly Time Trapper's chest has the same scar. What do we learn from this? Saturn Girl doesn't know, but Brainiac 5 is there to provide all the exposition.

He theorizes that Trapper is "a sentient alternate timeline rebelling against ours." And he sees all the different timelines and can't differentiate between what's the true timeline and what isn't.

So the plan? To weaken the Trapper as much as possible at the end of time. Which, honestly, should've been the plan all along.

The three Legionnaires link their flight rings together and Lightning Lad ups the electricity to create a distress signal throughout the different universes. Saturn Girl sends her thoughts, reaching as many people as she can. And Cosmic Boy opens up portals (no idea how he can do this) to the multiverse.

Suddenly, we get a load of different Legionnaires. We get the 5YL Legion. We get more Threeboot and Reboot Legionnaires. We get the L.E.G.I.O.N. We get the 70s Legion. We get the Giffen Subs. We get the Legion of Super Pets. We get the SW6 Legion. We get the Silver Age Legion. We get... well... everybody... 

On Earth, Mordru continues searching for the White Witch, blasting at Blok to get her to face him. Which she does, using Mordru's own dark spells against him. She takes over his powers, absorbing all of his magic, and becomes the Black Witch. And Mordru is gone.

Two pages to wipe out Mordru. And half of the LSV when she blasts them. That was quick.

At another point of the battle, Bouncing Boy and his wife, who is now Duplicate Damsel, arrive to face Earth-Man and the others. After her other body died during Countdown, Luornu discovered that she could make as many of herself as she wants. Is anyone keeping track of any of this?

The Legionnaires keep beating on the Time Trapper until they finally knock him unconscious. As Gates teleports the Trapper to the 31st Century, we get a nice moment where the young versions of the original three Legionnaires meet the current versions.

The elders' words: "Mr. Brande was right, Legionnaires. Don't quit. Don't ever quit."

And they fly away, leaving all of these Legionnaires at the end of time. With no way to get home. Seriously - there's no transporters, no way to open stargates, no idea of where they are, actually. Just a bunch of Legionnaires stuck.

The Time Trapper is awake and face-to-face with Superboy-Prime. We get a cliched moment where the younger version can't believe he's looking at the older version of himself and threatens to kill him. (Didn't we see this, kinda, the last time Darkseid showed up in a Legion comic?)

Prime punches the Trapper, causing a huge blue explosion. Both fade into nothingness, Prime reverting to a pencil sketch.

We get a bunch of reunions and then they ask the important question, did they just break the Legion code? The Brainiacs say that Prime hitting the Time Trapper was like hitting a reset button - it didn't kill them and the future is now wide open.

The big plus is that Prime no longer has any powers. He wakes up, back on Earth-Prime, where his family and friend have read this comic book and want nothing to do with him. I think this is now the hardest part of the story to believe - like his parents would have read any comics...

It's wrap up time everyone. The Legion is re-building everything after all the destruction, the planets are still arguing with each other, the Legion has buried their fallen members, Wildfire is fine and spending more time with Dawnstar, Sodam Yat sends out the Green Lantern rings to find more members (so he coulda done that any time?), Sun Boy is happy to be a Legionnaire, Phantom Girl has come back (no idea from where), and Blok is really badly damaged.

Then we get the big reveal of the Black Witch. She's back on Sorcerer's World, speaking with fonts from Sandman, and looks very evil.

We still don't know what's happened to 8 missing Legionnaires: Chameleon Boy, Dream Girl, Element Lad, Matter-Eater Lad, Quislet, Sensor Girl, Tellus, and Tyroc. I can tell you where a couple of them are, if we're following volume 3 continuity, but I don't think we are.

Starman is okay, eating fast food in the 21st Century. Because they never spelled it out, his mission was this: go back to the past, dig up Conner's grave, take some of his DNA, head to the Fortress of Solitude, put the DNA in the Superlab so they can grow a new Superboy, and bury it under the ice so Conner can spend 1000 years regrowing himself. How would Superman not notice this happening?

Next big reveal - Superboy-Prime is on the same Earth as the Threeboot Legion. That's why Element Lad's Kryptonite affected him. And they have to go back to keep an eye on him... kinda...

The Reboot Legion decides to head past the white void and into the multiverse. Shakari (still not spelling it right) senses more survivors in parallel Earths and they're going to wander around to find them. Yep, they're the Wanderers now.

XS and Gates stay on this Earth, the former to get to know her home planet and the latter because... he wants to fight xenophobia. Man, I know they need these two to stay for the following series, but they couldn't come up with something better for Gates?

The cosmic treadmills come alive and everyone shouts "Long Live the Legion" before the two teams disappear.

In non-Legion-related news, Kid Flash and Superboy go back to the 21st Century and rejoin the Titans. Was that the goal of the series?

In Earth-Prime, because we can't end the story with a happy ending, we see Clark Kent threatening his parents and typing on his computer. His eyes turn red and he's done something horrible to the girl he likes, so nothing really changed, did it?

 

We have two questions to answer here... 

One, did the series work?

Let's start with sales:

Issue #1 - August 2008 - ranked 20th at 68,270

Issue #2 - October 2008 - ranked 23rd at 64,404 

Issue #3 - February 2009 - ranked 15th at 61,347 

Issue #4 - April 2009 - ranked 28th at 56,883 

Issue #5 - July 2009 - ranked 29th at 55,933 

 

To no surprise, this is the best-selling book with "Legion" in the title in a long, long, long time. Being tied to Final Crisis, and having George Perez draw it, made it a top seller.

I also think this mini-series did accomplish a ton of goals. They solidified the Legion in the 31st Century and that wrap-up at the end of issue #5 spelled out everything that was going to happen in whatever new Legion series was going to follow this.

On a non-Legion note, they also brought back Kid Flash and Superboy and brought them back to the Titans. Which, to be honest, was probably more important to the DC universe than anything involving the Legion.

Superboy would take over a relaunched Adventure Comics as well, which sold even better than this mini-series and featured Legion back-ups for over a year. 

For many readers, this was their first exposure to the Legion and I think it garnered a ton of new fans for the team. I don't think you can try to argue that this wasn't the perfect way to relaunch the team. Of course, it took them a year to give us a new solo Legion book, which wasn't ideal, but if DC is consistent with anything, it's wasting opportunities that are Legion-related.

This mini-series did everything it was supposed to do.

 

Two, did the story work? 

I know way too much about the Legion, about all three Legions, having just finished a ton of rereads. And I was lost a few times. There were just too many characters, too many things going on, and too many moments of Johns throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something stuck.

My greatest disappointment with this series was that there were just too many things going on and the "stars" of the book ended up spending too much time in the background. Even Superman was minimized.

There was also just way, way, way too much Superboy-Prime. I get that he's the main villain (the Time Trapper takes a back seat to Prime) and he's leading the charge, but he sucked the air out of every scene he was in and pushed everyone to the background.

For example, why have the LSV in this at all? They did nothing. If Prime had only recruited Mordru, almost no part of the story would've changed. If fact, that would've streamlined the story and removed a lot of unneeded moments. The Legion goes up against Prime, the Time Trapper, and Mordru. Did you need anyone else on the villains' side?

And the conceit of needing to pull the other two Legions into the story didn't work either. Brainiac 5's plan, if you can call it that, really only needed a few of the other Legionnaires. Everyone else was fodder to be killed in dramatic ways that didn't really end up meaning anything.

Also, by having the three teams, Johns overwhelmed himself with characters and he ended up making huge mistakes, story-wise. He didn't care if any of it made sense, or followed what the characters had shown in previous stories, or even if he got their names spelled correctly.

At least all the pages looked good. I've been trying to figure out if there is another artist who could've handled all these characters. George Perez may have cemented GOAT status with this book.

But I don't think I'm going to be in any rush to read this series again.

 

What did you think of Legion of 3 Worlds? Please share your thoughts below or on Reddit.

 

Podcast time! The new Long Live the Legion episode has arrived where Jim and I talk all about the White Triangle story in the first year of the Post Zero Hour Legion, culminating in an indepth look at Legionnaires Annual #2. Listen to it here or watch it here.