Saturday, April 27, 2013

LSH 2010 Reread, part four

(Covering Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 6 # 11-13, Legion of Super-Villains # 1 and Adventure Comics # 525-527, 2011)

Major developments:

*Saturn Queen arranges for her removal from prison and surrounds herself with new allies. Her previously nebulous goal is clarified: the villain now worships anarchy and chaos and plans to destroy civilization. She has a particular hatred for the "false dharma" preached by planets of immortals, such as Oa and the Rock of Eternity, which the villains destroy. One of the original LSVers, Micro Lad of the planet Imsk, is murdered by a newcomer called Akka for questioning Saturn Queen.
*Star Boy has been in the 21st Century, driven somewhat insane by way of his... well, Brainy "explains" that his uniform is connected to the multiverse, or something.
*Cosmic Boy concludes that the Legion Academy's "seniors," Lamprey and Power Boy, are not Legion material. Coulda told him that thirty years ago and spent pages and time on characters we cared about, really.


I'm going to tell myself that, no matter what happened to end this title prior to the "New 52" launch - about which, more next time - Paul Levitz at least began plotting this run of stories before the word came down that DC management was about to do something dumb again. I believe this is true because the new LSV story just starts out awesome. It starts like Levitz had a big and wonderful, fantastic plan for an epic adventure.

Now, speaking of adventure, the set-concurrently stories in Adventure Comics remain just as inessential as ever, but they do reveal that Rokk and Lydda split up at some point during the "Wilderness Years." Also, the character of XS, from the 1994-2004 iteration of the Legion, finally shows up. Levitz seems as baffled as I am as to why in the world anybody would leave her entire universe and go move into some parallel world and has had no idea what to do with her. The team doesn't seem to need her - they have super-speedsters already. So, rather than finding a way to incorporate her into a group that's got too many characters anyway, he's just had her hang out, in costume, on some nice island somewhere, making mosaic artwork and thinking about her future. At least the artwork by Jeffrey Moy, who had drawn the character many times in the 1994-04 period, is really good.

As for Star Boy, I don't know how to explain this. I understand from Wikipedia that... actually, no, I read the Wikipedia entry about Thom and did not understand more than about six words of it. Basically, I guess, since we last saw him, he's been in the 21st Century doing secret weird stuff on behalf of the Brainiac Fives of three universes, who made him a suit that's a map of the multiverse, and he's the reincarnation of Scalphunter who was in the Kingdom Come story and got stuck in the Source Wall and was in the Justice Society and some other nonsense. Jesus wept.

But setting aside that hiccup for a minute, the LSV story begins really well. The special, and issues # 11 and 12 are just terrific, and get the adventure off to a great start. Then something strange happens. Issue # 13 does not advance the plot at all. It's just a long fight scene with no character or plot development. It feels exactly like management and editorial told Levitz that he had to keep this story going an extra month, beyond what he planned, because issue # 16 would be the final issue of the title before another relaunch, and that the final episode of this storyline needed to be there.

I have a bad feeling that this will prove to be somewhat troublesome when we wrap up this reread, next time.

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