Dissemble

I don't know if you've heard, but the Avengers movie is coming out this weekend. It seems like a lot of people want to see it and it's pretty good in its soulless blockbustery way.

As stated before, I'm not going to go see it.

You don't have to either, you know. You can, obviously you can, but you don't have to. If you're not crazy about how Marvel treated Jack Kirby (among other things), you can always say, "You know what? My life will be just as good if I don't see this movie as it is if I do." It is an option. You could even let Marvel know about your decision and why you made it.

Not the only option, of course; some people have decided to just not see it in the opening weekend, reasoning that this will deny Marvel and Disney the prestigious early numbers. I don't put a lot of weight on the early box office being that much more valuable than the overall take, but they must decide, and it's certainly another option. And then a lot of people have decided to see the movie, but also to donate to the Hero Initiative, and I can certainly see the logic of that, so there's one more option for you. Or you may just decide that this is not an area where you want to expend your protest energy, and see the movie or not strictly according to your particular tastes in leisure. It's all okay with me, not that you need my approval.

I do urge you, though, to do something to try to make the world a better place, as you understand it, in some way. It's a target-rich environment out there.

I wrote about this kind of thing before, you may recall, and earlier this week I finally let DC and Marvel in on my thinking. I sent this letter to Dan DiDio and Joe Quesada:

Dear Sir:

I'm writing to tell you I won't be buying your comic books any more.

To elaborate: I'm a longtime superhero comic-book fan and blogger. In February I got to the point where I wasn't comfortable buying DC and Marvel comics, or watching any of their spinoff movies and TV shows, and stopped. I suppose I should have written this letter then, but I don't think the timing makes any difference.

It's not because you're not publishing anything I like. For instance, I'm going to miss Fables so much it hurts, and I was really looking forward to trying Mark Waid's Daredevil series. (Although I should say that I plan on continuing to buy DC's Legion-of-Super-Heroes-related comics, because I don’t want to stop blogging about them.) But enjoying comics doesn't outweigh other considerations.

You can probably already guess my reasons for taking this step: your treatment of previous creators and their heirs, like Siegel and Kirby and Moore and Friedrich (and recent events surrounding Chris Roberson have certainly not changed my mind); your portrayals of female characters; your corporate owners' attempts to make copyright more and more restrictive.

DC and Marvel are the great pioneers of the superhero genre, and the discrepancy between your companies’ actions and the ideals represented by your characters is striking and unpleasant.

I'm disappointed that it has come to this. Please give me some reasons to revisit this decision; I'm willing--no, I'm eager--to do so.

Regards,

Matthew E

I don't expect it'll have any effect. Or not much. I figure I'll get a couple of form letters back, something like that. I suppose DC might decide to be hardasses about it and try to come after my blog legally; there wouldn't be much point to it but it's theoretically on the menu. The important thing is that I feel better, and that makes it worth doing, because certainly DC and Marvel weren't doing anything to make me feel better.

Legion of Super-Heroes #8 Review

Apparently Chris Roberson has cut his ties with DC Comics. I gave Roberson a hard time for the, oh, density level of Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes, but I still liked him as a writer and will continue to seek out his stuff. Looks like that's the only Legion writing we're going to get out of him, which is everybody's loss. He cites this blogpost as his reason for not wanting to work with DC any more; it's certainly an excellent blogpost and I support Roberson in his decision. I had my thoughts on just this kind of thing earlier this year; they're available here if you missed 'em and are interested. (Oh, and, don't forget: The Avengers is hitting theatres pretty soon; make sure you don't go to see it!)

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Invisible Kid disrupts a theft but some of the thieves manage to get away with the goods, at least as far as Mon-El and Ultra Boy. Unfortunately, the thieves sent out a bunch of copies of the booty, which turns out to be the chip that makes Tharok Tharok; Brainiac 5 speculates that someone's trying to put the Fatal Five back together.

Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl show up to take Cosmic Boy out for a night on the town in Istanbul. Cosmic Boy may be reuniting with Night Girl and Lightning Lad has to do some real work for a change and stop a lightning storm from getting out of control.

Review:

A slight issue. Felt like a fill-in. Here are the things it got done:
- screen time for Invisible Kid, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad
- kicking off a Fatal Five story
- walking back Geoff Johns's breakup of Cosmic Boy and Night Girl
- giving us some Lightle and Cinar art

All of which are worth doing. (Depending on how you feel about Night Girl. Me, I like her.) But it doesn't really add up to a comic book.

The first story was best: interesting villains, good action, real stakes. Only thing I didn't like about it is that the Legion came off looking like a bunch of chumps. But I guess that's par for the course in the superhero life.

The second story, on the other hand... well, was it really a story? There wasn't any conflict in it, unless you count Lightning Lad's chore, which is about as routine an affair as I can recall.

Here's my question. Who would be trying to put the Fatal Five back together? Not a lot of candidates I can think of. Basically just the Five themselves, and not all of them. Obviously not Validus (whoever Validus actually is, now that Garth and Imra have Garridan back). I doubt the Persuader would bother. There is no Tharok at the moment (right?). Mano, don't know. There is no Emerald Empress at the moment, that we've seen, anyway, but maybe the Eye could be doing it on its own? I could see Caress or Flare wanting to do it; it was their one shot at the big time. But could they?

The problem with anybody else doing it is they have to know that the Fatal Five can't be controlled. Is anyone out there stupid enough to believe that Tharok or the Empress or Validus will take orders? And if they can't be controlled they why exactly would you want them around? Which brings us to one possible answer, as the Dominators are exactly stupid enough, and they might not need to control the Five anyway; they might just want to turn them loose on the U.P.

Levitz has gone to some trouble, with his portrayal of Brainiac Five, to make it clear that he isn't just arrogant, that he actually does care for his friends and respect them. Still, he's a lot more arrogant in this run than he was in Levitz's second run; read 'em back-to-back and see for yourself. It's not entirely to my taste; I prefer Brainy when he's nicer. Like in the cartoon. That was good.

Notes:
- what's the deal with the Interlac on page 2?
- so the Legionnaires go out on the town in their regular costumes, huh? I guess it makes it easy for new readers
- Saturn Girl sounds like she's planning on dancing with some other guys after Garth

Art:

First story, by Steve Lightle: 51 panels/10 pages = 5.1 panels/page. One double-page spread of 6 panels.

Second story, by Yildiray Cinar: 43 panels/10 pages = 4.3 panels/page.

Nice to see the boys back again. In particular check out Cinar's take on 31st-century Istanbul on page 14 and Lightle's designs on the thieves (specifically I'm not sure how he got away with Jerl. Jerl looks like a Phil Foglio character, and I mean that in a good way).

Membership Notes: Nothing much interesting here; just that Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad are still on the off-duty roster.

Legion Lost #8 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The Legionnaires fight about Timber Wolf's actions of last issue. Then, some superpowered people from an organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. come after them, one on one, and generally outfight the Legionnaires, although they can't quite put them away, and it looks like the tide is about to turn when one of the... are they the Ravagers?... decides to skip to the end of the page by psychically nuking the whole area. So the Legionnaires are now captive.

Review:

That was a lot better than I hoped it would be. I had no trouble following it, for one thing, and there wasn't much to it that suggested I was coming into a story part of which I hadn't read. We'll see if this is also true of next issue.

The plot couldn't be simpler so far; some guys are out to catch the Legion for some reason. It's not distracting and it gives us a nice action-heavy comic book. I wouldn't want nothing but this, but it's fine. And the action itself is pretty good in its own right, too.

But we do get some more hints as to DeFalco's ideas about the Legion. Hint 1: Tyroc says, "We're Legionnaires, not thieves!" Hint 2: Dawnstar says, "I know what it means to be a part of a real team--a real family!" Hint 3: Wildfire says, "The Legion never quits. Never surrenders!"

None of which is wrong, exactly, just off a bit. Is the Legion like a family? Well, kind of, I guess, if you want, but isn't it more like a club? And, sure, the Legion is tenacious, but it's not really the first word that comes to mind to describe them. Really it sounds pretty generic. DeFalco could be writing that stuff about the Outsiders or the Champions or anybody. It's not wrong, but it's not interesting enough to be right.

Similarly the characters. None of 'em sound exactly right, but none of them are wrong enough to be wrong. The question there is, is there a difference between DeFalco putting his own stamp on the characters and DeFalco not quite getting the characters? And if there was, would we be able to tell?

It seems that Yera has a secret about what's really behind this mission. So that's what, three of them so far? Yera, Tyroc, and Tellus? I am now assuming that all seven of them are hiding something, and it may actually be the same thing.

As a Legion comic it was decent. As a crossover comic it was practically Shakespeare. I'm hoping that once The Culling is over we'll start to get some idea of what this title is actually about.

Notes:
- did Oz mean "caged" or "cadged"? I know "cadged", but... is "caged" right too?
- wait just a freaking second. Since when is Gim and Yera's relationship over?
- "The real Colossal Boy never throws the first punch!" No, he gets knocked out by it

Art: 94 panels/20 pages = 4.7 pn/pg. 3 double-page spreads of 5, 8, and 4 panels.

Aaron Kuder brings us the art this issue and I quite like his style. I hadn't paid attention to the credits, but when I saw Timber Wolf leaping on page 3 I was all, that ain't no Pete Woods. It's good stuff; I'd recommend him to a friend. Interesting panel layouts, too; he's not afraid to stretch the action right across two pages, and yet his panel count doesn't suffer from it.

Legion: Secret Origin #6 Review, and Site Notes

I wonder if you would indulge me, in this review, if I mused a bit about the purpose of this blog and the current state of DC's Legion of Super-Heroes franchise.

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

The villain turns out to be the Time Trapper. He controls Mycroft into trying to kill Brande, who is really Chameleon Boy in disguise. Cham defends himself against Mycroft and then against the Trapper himself. Meanwhile, Brainiac 5 uses Phantom Girl's Bgtzln insights into the structure of reality to turn the busted time bubble into a bomb that destroys the wormhole; when the wormhole's destroyed, it also gets rid of the Trapper, because, I guess, that's how he was accessing the 30th century.

Review:

I was expecting more out of this story. The whole thing turned out pretty conventionally: Brainy pulls something out of his hat, the villain is the Time Trapper, long live the Legion. Last issue's twist didn't, oh, remain twisty.

Let me tell you what I didn't do tonight. I went to the comic shop and got one single comic. This comic. Looked around for something else to buy this week, didn't find anything, bought this issue, brought it home, read it, started typing this review. That's what I did. What I didn't do was to drive to the comic shop at noon and read the thing in the parking lot once I had bought it. Like I did for Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #5.

Why didn't I?

Combination of reasons. There wasn't the big wait before this issue; that's a factor. I can't say there was a huge gap in quality between the two. Some, yes: good as Batista is, Perez is better, and the FC:L3W story had more zazz than this.

Mostly, though, when FC:L3W was coming out, we were wondering what, if anything, DC was going to do with the Legion. Now we're not. (And even if we were, a miniseries going back to their early days wouldn't be part of that wondering.)

How many of you remember when I first started this blog? LSHv5, better known as Waid and Kitson's threeboot Legion, had just started, and it was controversial. There was a school of thought, a big one, that said that whoever those snotty punks were that Waid and Kitson were portraying in that comic, they weren't the real Legion. Also, the real Legion wasn't the one who had been appearing in the pages of the late The Legion comic, or the one who would soon appear in the cartoon. The real Legion hadn't appeared in comics in about 20 years.

I didn't think much of that attitude, still don't, but it did produce a lot of discussion about just what the Legion was all about. And I had a lot to say about it. (Which was convenient, what with the blog and everything.)

In the end, though, it seems like it didn't matter what I had to say about it; the nostalgists carried the day. Their Legion, or at least one that they're willing to claim as theirs, is now the Legion appearing in LSHv7. And there's no debate to be had about this: everyone agrees that they're the Legion, and that Paul Levitz knows his way around them. (Including me! That's obvious, right?)

So now what's to talk about?

I mean, I can review comics twice a month until the cows come home, but what's the point of it? Levitz isn't the most experimental of writers, and his concept of the Legion is a fairly conservative and comfortable one; so he's really not giving me much to sink my teeth into here, and in any case there aren't any issues for me to take positions on.

In case you were wondering, I'm not leading up to saying that I'm closing down the blog or anything like that; that's not my point at all. I'm just saying that this blog was started partially as a way of contributing to a debate that is now over, so if I don't want to get really bored, I'm going to have to find something else for it to do. I may in fact shrink the reviews, at least on a temporary basis. I don't want to just summarize plots and pick over minutiae, you know? I want to try to bring some intelligence to it and say something that you might actually want to think about for five seconds.

And I'm not going to be able to do it if all I have to work with is comics like this one. Again, it's not bad or anything but it didn't seem like the game was worth the candle. Oh well. Back down to two comics a month.

Art: 86 pn/20 pg = 4.3 panels/page. One double-page spread.

Let's tally up the differences between L:SO and ST/LSH, shall we?

L:SO: 104/20 + 96/20 + 93/20 + 86/20 + 81/20 + 86/20 = 546pn/120pg = 4.6 panels/page

ST/LSH: 78/22 + 77/22 + 74/22 + 78/22 + 63/22 + 86/22 = 456pn/132pg = 3.5 panels/page

The difference between the two is 90 panels. 90 panels is basically one entire comic book. Essentially, L:SO was one comic book longer than ST/LSH, despite being twelve pages shorter.

Or we could look at it this way:

L:SO: $2.99 x 6 = $17.94
ST/LSH: $3.99 x 6 = $23.94.

DC's the bigger and more dominant company, so let's pretend that they're the baseline. They're selling us 546 panels for $17.94. That means that one panel of Chris Batista Legion art costs about 3.3 cents. Let's take that as the standard price. Multiply it by the 456 panels in ST/LSH, and you get $14.98. Did you pay $14.98 for your six issues of ST/LSH? You did not; you paid nine bucks more than that. That's the cost of three DC comics. But at least you got the Moys instead of Batista for the extra money.

I know that DC has some advantages that IDW doesn't, and can afford to charge less for their comics. I got no problem with that. But it's no excuse for this level of fluffiness in a comic on the part of IDW.

Membership Notes:

The membership at the end of this issue consists of Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Triplicate Girl, Phantom Girl, Colossal Boy, Chameleon Boy, Invisible Kid, and Ultra Boy. There's a set of six headshots of possible new members that includes Brainy and Superman, and four others. Anybody think they know who the four others are? One looks kinda like Shrinking Violet, one could theoretically be Sun Boy, and another maybe Star Boy. I don't have a guess at the girl in the bottom left.

Legion of Super-Heroes #7 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

Mon-El calls a Legion election. The Dominators seem to have created a race of Daxam-Dominion hybrids and are preparing to unleash them on the galaxy.

Sun Boy, Chemical Kid, and Element Lad discover that the Fire Sea problem is being caused by some of Phoenix's men, and they stop it. Meanwhile, Phoenix takes out Chameleon Boy, but Comet Queen and Harmonia show up to help, and they help Dragonwing finish off her annoying sister and the rest of them, and turn them over to the SPs.

Review:

The planet Daxam is one of the biggest problems in all of Legion continuity. Because what do you do with the Daxamites? There's so much latent power there, and, even worse, benevolent power, that it potentially unbalances any large-scale story you want to put there. Every Legion writer has had to figure out how to handle them. In the reboot, the writers made them xenophobic homebodies; in the threeboot, Mark Waid killed them all off. Paul Levitz's strategy has been to make enemies out of them, either one at a time like Ol-Vir and the Renegade, or a whole bunch at once like in the Great Darkness Saga or the current storyline. I don't really find them all that interesting, but I do think Levitz is wise to use them every now and then. After all, the Daxamites are, sort of, Supermen, and you want to refer to Superman in Legion stories when you can. Note that Levitz's portrayal of Daxam is basically a positive one.

Of course, another major theme of Legion comics is that of the bright future. So when Harmonia, a Legionnaire, defeats Phoenix, a supervillain, I think it's a misstep to have Harmonia representing the past and Phoenix representing the future. For that matter, I'm not sure about having a Legionnaire as old as her to begin with. (Not that I dislike Harmonia. I like her, actually. I'm just not sure she's right for the Legion.) Mon-El's bad enough, but he entered the cast back when all these things were still in flux.

The Dragonwing/Phoenix story seemed to be wrapped up in a hurry. When the SPs said, "Can we take your prisoners, Legionnaires?" I halfway expected them to be fakes who were pulling something, but this was a two-issue story, not one of your big six-issue ones. Caught me off guard.

That last panel, where Cham was walking away from the rest of the team, that's the classic dejected-superhero-quitting-the-team posture right there. I know we're supposed to lose a Legionnaire soon, but Cham would not have been on my top ten list of candidates to go.

Decent issue. Like most of the rest of Levitz's third run, it hasn't really set my imagination alight, but it's perfectly respectable comics. Maybe this will improve.

Notes:
- dear Paul Levitz and Chris Conroy, a horde is a swarm of warriors and a hoard is a cache of treasure. It's the first entry in the genre-storytelling style guide. Learn it, live it, love it
- what do we all think of Harmonia's costume? I'm okay with it
- can't say that Dragonwing is much more interesting to me after this story, but she does seem to have mastered the trick of fighting supervillains

Art: 78 panels/20 pages = 3.9 panels/page. Two splash pages.

That's a bit of a low panel count for Portela, isn't it? Otherwise, the issue is up to his usual high standards. Can't find any panels that stand out from the rest, but that's not at all a criticism.

The caption for next issue tells us that the art will be by "classic Legion artists" Steve Lightle and Yildiray Cinar. Can you really call Cinar a "classic" Legion artist? I mean, he was great and everything, but he only left the book about half an hour ago. Anyway, it'll be good to see both of them again; I don't mind missing Portela for a month if they're the alternative.

Membership Notes:

What with this issue's events, I think we have to count Harmonia as being a full-fledged Legionnaire as of issue #1.