Let's talk Legion: Adventure Comics No. 315

I have returned, ladies and gentlemen and all who are neither, and how surprised are you that I have a Legion of Super-Heroes tale from the 60s to discuss with you? Not very? Full points!

Now, originally I had planned to take a look at some far out Sixties future-tech or maybe an unusual alien creature or two but once I started reading this particular issue again I got all delighted and felt compelled to talk about the whole damn story. It's like trying to eat only one item at a buffet, I swear.

We find the Legionnaires checking yet another collection of monitor screens...

I maybe have a problem with the universality of this Universal Monitor, hinging on whether those labels are permanent or not. I mean, i can see some borders on this thing, so it's not fantastically huge... is the implication that the 30th Century DCU contains six or seven inhabited planets? I think that I might have seen more than that in the last issue of Green Lantern, so maybe there's a chance that the Legion hasn't been doing as good a job as they've been leading us to believe. Also, Tree World?

"Legionnaires, our planet is named Arboriax. My people are proud and call for war at the slightest insult... please stop calling us Tree World."

At first I thought that maybe Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl were bored or late for a date or something, but it turns out that those watches connect them to the kinda-Universal Monitor so that they can all sneak off to a conference, probably on Planet Ventura (Dice World). I figure that most of 'em will be knee-deep in human depravity by lunch time. What happens on Ventura, after all.

Of course, as soon as the Legionnaires turn their backs, some asshole aliens show up - these ones seem to have evolved from replilian beavers. Maybe they're from Tree World!

An aside about the reason for this invasion: the "aliens coming to Earth to steal something - often gold or twinkies - that does not exist on their planet" plot is basically as old as superheroes themselves, or at least would be if the Forties weren't all about the Nazis. Once the Fifties rolled around, though, this kind of thing was happening about once a week. Batman and the Flash probably have weekly get-togethers where the one who dealt with the fewest armoured-car-robbing extraterrestrials has to buy the beer. HOWEVER: glass? These guys come from a planet that doesn't have glass? Maybe... maybe they think that something else is called glass, like einsteinium or something. After all, glass must be hard to make poison out of, and I reckon that any race bright enough to figure out space travel must have the capacity to put together the old "sand + heat" equation. Right?

Well, at least they had the forethought necessary to keep the Legion from swooping in as soon as they cleared the ionosphere and... HEY! That is clearly a piece of glass on the side of that thing! And (scroll, scroll) they have glass cockpits on their space ships! I am so damn confused by these guys.

Well, maybe that's a good sign. Maybe they do have their words mixed up and they're going to start stealing poodles or Hostess Fruit Pies in a minute.

No, no. No, they're stealing glass. They're  putting a lot of effort into stealing glass.

They built special ships with special weapons to steal glass with. Those special ships have glass in them. Argh!

It's just as well that we're done with them, because another few minutes of thinking about this might have a detrimental effect on my well-being. In a few panels that I'm not putting up for space reasons the Legion of Substitute Heroes trounces these orange-clad bozos and that's the last that's ever been seen of them, as far as I know and barring a surprise appearance of three of them in a cloak as the real identity of the Time Trapper at the end of Legion of Three Worlds.

Superboy shows up just after the Subs finish mopping up, and the two Legions finally meet! The Substitute Heroes, despite having just stopped a fleet of technologically-advanced-if dumb aliens with the super-powers equivalent of a bag of firecrackers, are riddled with low self-esteem and all worried that the Legion will make them stop hanging around in a cave and picking up after them. Instead, the Legionnaires are so impressed that they offer to make one member of the Substitute Legion a super-duper official Legion member.

A contest is organized! Each Sub gets a Legion sponsor and has to complete aan assignment all by themselves! Scores will be awarded!

But of course, the sponsors have to be selected. How do you figure they do that, folks? Pick a number? Names from a hat, Planetary Chance Machine? Nah.

It's time for a brand-new selector machine! There have been variants on this sort of device throughout the Legion's history that making new ones has to be someone's hobby. My theory about this particular device is that is was designed as a backup in case the big computer ever broke down and nobody could think up another way to randomly assign kissing partners. I was going to put in the next panel, featuring the results, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this. Just note that poor Night Girl didn't get teamed up with Cosmic Boy, who she loves, in a way that probably would be treated as dismayingly stalkerish today but was reasonably endearing in the 60s.

Polar Boy gets the first assignment and it's a bit of a doozy. The Legion sure isn't slacking on the "challenging" aspect of these tests.

Meanwhile, "the Human Guinea Pigs" is a great name both for a scientific group and for a band. It doesn''t really come up later on in the comic but I bet that they're young mavericks, flouting the established conventions of Thirtieth Century scientific research and testing strange formulas on each other because they can't get the funding to purchase convicts and wearing their hair in unconventional

ways. Accidently freezing themselves is probably just a normal Saturday afternoon thing for the Human Guinea Pigs - they probably freeze themselves instead of sleeping.

Polar Boy's game to try, though, which is one reason that I like him so much. If you put me in a room with cold powers and orders to thaw some frozen guys the best I'd come up with would probably be something along the lines of "Well, they're frozen all right. I wonder what will happen if I cool them down even more? Maybe they'll loop around to being warm

again!" Granted, I've probably played more video games than Polar Boy and so have no concept of real-world logic, but still: hauling them off to the Earth's core is quite a bit more productive no matter how you look at it. I'm not so sure about those harnesses though - I have to believe that dropping one of these guys into a pool of molten cesium (or whatever - I was an English major. As far as I know the Earth's interior was accurately described by Milton) would result in some pretty serious negative scoring. Maybe one or two knots, or even a four-point harness?

Safety considerations aside, he does it and does it in style, using his power to protect himself from the blazing heat while baking the scientists to a crisp golden brown, if my youthful experiments with the noble frozen meat pie are applicable here.

A good first showing for  the Substitute Heroes, even if it set back cryogenic research by decades ("the freezing works okay, but we just can't get the thawing oven hot enough" "Try the self-cleaning setting!") and made that one scientist quite a bit tubbier somehow.

The question now is whether the Legion are panicking or not. Did they actually expect Polar Boy to finish this challenge? If they let him in, what are they going to talk about? Will he want to let more of his loser friends into the club? Or am I being cynical? Let's see what they whip up for the next challenger, Night Girl:

Consider this panel the intermission to this very long post. Isn't it pretty?

Hmm. Still no real indication of how the Legion feels about this process. Sure it's going to be rough on Night Girl to operate on a planet swathed in perpetual sunshine but she's proven herself to be a pretty canny customer on a number of occasions. Also, the selection committee looks to be composed entirely of male Legionnaires, not that I want to imply anything about their commitment to fairness being compromised by the presence of a hot babe in a bouffant hairdo. Okay, I kind of do.

 Sun Woman is basically the perfect enemy for Night Girl - she has the same super strength, only hers is solar powered, so that one of them will always be able to grind the other into powder depending on ambient lighting conditions. She also shares Night Girl's excellent costume sense - look at that thing! Shoulder antennae, sunburst on the stomach, good colour scheme and a sun-ray halo. Good heavens, that's a great costume element - why the heck it hasn't that been lifted for some other fire-themed villain in the decades since I'll never know. Some negative points for the stiletto heels, but big bonus for knowing how to dress a henchman properly (see intermission picture). I'm going to throw out a JOHN APPROVED for her.

HOWEVER, for someone who has such super-costume design savvy, Sun Woman fails to apply her skills properly here. When confronting an unknown champion of justice you have to look for telltale thematic signs, SW, and the black costume, star-shaped cape-pin and owl insignia simply scream "night-themed super-hero, try to keep in a brightly-lit area." Night Girl gets thrown into the decidedly non-brightly-lit dungeons and proceeds to use her restored super-strength to tunnel around the city and set up a resistance.

Night Girl's plan is to have the Vannar citizenry burn huge piles of coal around the city in order to block out the sun and thus deprive Sun Woman of the source of her powers.

Now, I'm going to ignore any question of environmental impact. I'm not going to question the fact that these people have seemingly never thought of burning coal, even though it apparantly lies around in giant heaps, free for the gathering (although I guess it's reasonable to assume that this is a largely solar-powered planet). No, I'd just like to point out that Vannar is one of the few 30th Century planets that I've ever seen get future-clothing right.

Not that those jumpsuits are exactly high fashion, mind, but look! They're all different colours! Take note, Lizard-Beavers! Look, Coluans! Not everyone looks good in mauve - remember that.

Anyway, that's that for Sun Woman, except for one more panel where she's looking super pissed-off as Night Girl flies  her off to jail. Note that Night Girl, in addition to being well-dressed, knows how to make an entrance. The only thing that would have made this whole thing better is if she had done it a few feet to the left and turned it into a double uppercut. Violence solves everything, kids!

Okay, so Night Girl is in the running! Who's up next? Why, it's the Chlorophyll Kid! Let's see what crazy task they think up for this little scamp!

What?

This is where I start to get suspicious, kids. Splitting a mountain is Superboy-level stuff - poor Chlorophyll Kid, I think, has just gotten a very unsubtle message to the effect that his leafy presence is not required in the Clubhouse. Still, the little guy is game and flies up the mountain to check things out.

HA HA HA! He does it! The Legionnaires are all doing that thing where they tug at their collars and go "Ai yi yi!" Plant power!

The Legion is getting desperate! They don't know what to do! Chlorophyll Kid split a damn mountain! They start to reach, and send Fire Lad to a world where it rains all the time, tasking him to give the tribes that live there a permenant source of fire. A fairly unremarkable event - he does it, of course, making use of a convenient oil well. There are only really two things to take note of: Fire Lad's sponsor is Bouncing Boy, who I normally don't mind but who is completely insufferable throughout this issue. Also, the tribesmen are really quite remarkable. I encourage you to enlarge yonder picture and take a good look at them.

Huge blond afros!

I think that this is the point tthat the Legion Task Selection Squad gives up. Despite all of their efforts, those damn Subbies just keep finishing their tasks. Besides, the next challenger is Stone Boy - no carefully tailored task for him, no sir, just some big generic monster with a huge ass.

Stone Boy, of course, doesn't give up. That's the defining feature of the Legion of Substitute heroes, after all, through all of their various incarnations. They may be a bit weak on the power front, and they might be somewhat incompetent but they persevere and ultimately triumph. Stone Boy's plan is actually fairly elegant: dig a pit and then lure the monster into it with his own damn body, turning to stone as necessary to avoid chomping.

A while back (I'd link to it but I can't find the damn post), Rachelle pointed out that various Green Lanterns occasionally use their rings to facilitate extreme laziness, to do something like picking up a piece of paper off of the floor. Saturn Girl seems to have fallen into that same habit here. Did she really need to read Stone Boy's mind to figure out what he was doing, or is there something else going on here? Did she lose sight of him and want to avoid using her neck and/or eye muscles to look around (overly-developed eyes are a real turn-off, ladies)? Or is it that she has only ever seen a hole being dug by a swarm of tiny DTCH-DGGR class robots and that the concept of manual labour was so alien to her that she had to violate someone's consciousness before she could reconcile what her eyes were telling her with reality? maybe there's a reason that the time-mirror showed her as so hippy.

As I said, Stone Boy has a pretty good plan. Sadly, some curious villagers spoil it all - I think that maybe there's a reason that the Rantak is so fat, if this is the average intelligence level on this planet. So according to the rules, Stone Boy is the only Substitute Legionnaire to fail the test. Now: back to the Clubhouse to tabulate the scores!

Stone Boy is the winner! He was all selfless and so forth! Yay! Somehow this is more impressive than flying to the core of the planet!

By the way, check out how surprised he is. Now look at the same scene, five seconds earlier:

That's right, the scores were plainly visible. Evidently, nobody was paying attention to the giant display in the centre of the room.

So Stone Boy wins, and everyone else is too polite to point out that they kind of completely refuted the Legion's original reasons for rejecting them (Polar Boy, for example, was rejected for his lack of control). I don't know if they let him in because he legitimately did the best job or because they figured that he would be the most unobtrusive. In any case, he chose to go off with the Substitute Legion, claiming that they were his Legion and making me go "Awwww..." but likely earning him a few smacks upside the head once everyone got back to the cave.

It's probably for the best, really. I will bet a hundred dollars that if you can dig up a comic from an alternate universe in which Stone Boy joined the Legion Ferro Lad will be alive and well and there will be a monument out front of Legion HQ depicting what appears to be a statue in an orange jumpsuit being fired into a Sun-Eater with a bomb strapped to it and a terrified expression.

Very long post.... done!

Review of Lazy Costuming Syndrome, By Johnathan

Every once in a while, you may see/ have seen me complain about something called "Lazy Costuming Syndrome" - heck, I think that there's a tag for it, I've bitched about it so much (yep, there it is down there). Since I have some good examples of this dreaded affliction on hand, I thought it might be fun to pin down exactly what I'm talking about in these drunken ramblings of mine. NOTE: I'm not actually drunk... this time.

Lazy Costuming Syndrome (LCS) can affect characters, writers and artists. It is characterized by a super-hero or -villain wearing as a permanent or long-term costume the clothes that they were wearing when they either acquired their powers or first put them to use in thwarting or perpetuating crime. There are two major sub-strains of this disease: Strain LB (for Lucky Bastard) and Strain LD (for Laundry Day). This syndrome is not exclusive to residents and writers of DC's 30th Century Earth, but is especially prevalent among them, possibly because virtually everybody in that particular fictional century is wearing some freaky tights-and-tunic-or-whatever getup that could qualify as a super-suit of some kind.

Strain LB affects characters by having them already in possession of a suitable costume when their moment of truth arrives, and occurs in a variety of levels of severity - the mildest cases appear in characters such as the Barbara Gordon Batgirl, who fights crime in a Hallowe'en costume that she was wearing when she happened upon a Killer Mothing-in-progress. Indeed, some experts argue that Gordon doesn't possess the disease at all, as she is perhaps the most severe case of the Coincidentis Virus on record, being a judo-, computer- and gymnastics-expert, who's adopted father the Police Commissioner happened to be Batman's best friend and who stumbled upon a crime-in-progress whilst wearing a superhero outfit and having something to prove re: her ability to smack down baddies.

Slightly more severe is the case in which a character comes from a race or group who share the same power and choose to glorify this in their everyday outerwear. Stone Boy, above, is an example of such. His people run around in bright orange getups that work perfectly well as third-rate super-hero costumes, with a logo and everything. Although I suppose it's possible that those are ceremonial hibernation clothes that everyone is wearing, which would mean that Stone Boy spent a number of years fighting crime in his pajamas. Either way, it's evident that Distant World does not possess an abundance of graphic designers - that rock is hideous.

Polar Boy is another example of this level of LCS, Strain LB, in that he is a member of the cold-projecting subset of the population of Planet Tharr and, judging from the above evidence, this entitles him to wear the little purple-and-fur number that we all know and love so well. Why, it is even likely that he already thought of himself as a Champion of Justice, in a lifelong struggle against the machinations of the evil Sun! Which is why I want to see Polar Boy in a costume modeled after the Kool-Aid Man.

Perhaps the most extreme case of Strain LB known, Fire Lad defied the laws of logic and causality and greatly advanced the field of LCS research by acquiring fire-based powers while taking a pleasant stroll wearing an almost excessively fire-based costume. Neither Fire Lad nor Science has been able to provide an explanation of why he might do so, and the level of LCS in his system at the time has been theorized as being near-lethal.

The LD Strain of LCS has similar symptoms to the LB, in that it causes the hero or villain to adopt whatever they were wearing at the time of their first foray into adventure as their costume. The effect is markedly different, however, in that the victims of LD Strain LCS essentially end up wearing their everyday clothes. The effects of this strain can be seen in heroes such as the Jack Knight Starman or Matter-Eater Lad (just because it's skin-tight doesn't mean it's a costume, Tenzil). It may never be known what percentage of the 30th Century super-human populace are afflicted, due to the above-noted fact that virtually every citizen of that time wears on an average day an outfit that wouldn't look out of place on, say, a one-shot Justice League Europe villain. Documented cases include Bouncing Boy and Mon-El, but by far the most dramatic is that of the ill-used Legionnaire Tyroc:

Note that Tyroc first used his powers at the age of about seven or eight and from that point wore exactly the same high-collared, gold-chained playsuit that he had had on that fateful day, down to the little Robin-style pixie boots. i would commend him for taking the little sleeves off around the time that he hit 14, but I suspect that he did it because they were starting to cut off the circulation in his arms. Perhaps the most telling sign that LCS was involved in the clothing choices of Tyroc is the fact that someone chose to send a small, seemingly non-super boy out to play in a gleamingly white outfit. Extra-dimensional island only sporadically connected to earth or not, no parent in their right mind would even consider such an act unless under the insidious thumb of this frighteningly pervasive disease.

LCS is NOT APPROVED, despite some giggles on my part.

SARLSH, Part 7 (The End), By Johnathan

Hooray!It's the end of the Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes! Let's do it!

TELLUS

As might be becoming apparent, I quite liked these late additions to the Legion. They represented a conscious effort on various writer's parts to inject some new life into a group that had become fairly static, member-wise, at about the time Jim Shooter stopped writing stories. I mean, this is a team that had 24 members within its first ten years and then admitted 13 more in the next two decades or so - and four of those new members (White Witch, Timber Wolf, Chemical King, Polar Boy) had appeared in that first decade, while a fifth - Invisible Kid - was basically a sequel to one of the original 24. Tellus and Quislet were pretty much the only non-humanoids in the first iteration of the Legion. I mean, Tellus is still pretty humanoid, but at least he has a fish face and a tail and little stunted legs instead of being a Klingon-style "guy with some sort of extra crap on his head" alien. I always figured that he was based on this one ocean-dwelling telepathic mutant that teamed up with the Legion to fight excessively Mod aliens this one time, which is nice because I liked that story.

Sadly for people like me who like the new members, they've suffered significant attrition as a result of 'New Writer's Syndrome' which is a condition that I made up to describe the tendency of someone taking over the writing chores on a comic book to gleefully slaughter any members of the supporting cast that were introduced by the old writer (this is why I am so concerned for the Head now that Gail Simone has left The All-New Atom), whether for cheap dramatic effect or because the new writer just doesn't like 'em. The Legion is especially vulnerable on this front, for a couple of reasons: firstly, because that 'original 24' I mentioned has been established as the canon Legion and are basically there to stay (barring the occasional dramatic event), and secondly because in a team book - especially one in which the team members don't have solo super-careers - everyone is supporting cast. In essence, this means that everyone who joined the Legion after Princess Projectra and Karate Kid (non-inclusive, I guess) is fair game for ignoble death, mutilation and non-inclusion in reboots. I haven't read the Legion comic in which Tellus was killed off - heck, I don't know for sure that he does die - but I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, aside from making the Legion seem less like a Humans and Humanoids Only Club, Tellus filled much the same role as Blok: philosophical outsider who didn't quite "get" what was up with those crazy humans. Nothing new, really, though Tellus has the added element of attracting a fairly incessant stream of racist commentary from Wildfire on the subject of Tellus being a useless fish-asshole. The Legion does not, it seems, have much concern for cultural or species-related sensitivity, or perhaps were reluctant to embark on the logistically nightmarish task of trying to throw a guy made of antimatter out of a building. Tellus' powers (not shown, boo) of sub-Saturn Girl-level telepathy and telekinesis were useful, plus it was always fun to see him zoom through the air with is little legs trailing behind him. I also liked the fact that his given name (Ganglios) would be a great moniker for a brain-based super-villain (as opposed to fish-based super-hero) to sport, though this name-related joy is dampened by the fact that his super-hero name is one letter away from being shared by a most irritating telephone company.

Bah. Over all, I like Tellus, but for me he's kind of become symbolic of misused Legion characters, and so I get grumpy when I think about him too much.

NOT APPROVED

WHITE WITCH

The White Witch is a venerable character - she first appeared way back in (issue), during that whole escapade with Evillo and his mythic crew. She was there as the Hag, a cackly old witch of the Hansel and Grethel sort, and eventually her dear sister Dream Girl arranged to change her back. Subsequently, she turned up now and then when the Legion had some sort of magical trouble and Brainiac 5 was going into a Batman-as-willful-idiot fugue state ("Nope, I categorically deny the existence of magic. It's completely impossible that it exists. Laughable, really, why... hold on, Zauriel, I have the Spectre on the other line."). Eventually, she got mixed in with the whole Mordru/Sorcerer's World shebaz and I think that it was as a result of one of the LSH's interminable battles with The Poorly-Dressed Sorcerer that Mysa finally joined up, some twenty-odd years after her introduction. She was originally a sultry redhead, but I'm pretty fond of the pale n' wispy redesign, shown here, and especially of the eyelash-antennae, which are tied in to this neat theme of magic in Legion continuity - the better you are at it, the weirder-looking you get. There are all these wizards and witches on Sorcerer's world made of water and plants and such, Mysa's all pale and antennaed and Mordru's outfit is magically awful (seriously, I think that there are flashbacks to when he was less evil/powerful in which his helmet isn't as gaudy and the wings are smaller).

The White Witch was a fun addition to a team of bickering egoists, which was kind of what the Legion was at the time. She was thoughtful and spiritual rather than argumentative and moody, plus she palled around with Blok a lot. She also added a lot of power and versatility to the team: though her magic operated under D&D rules (lots of studying, only so many spells in her head at one time, once a spell is cast it's gone) she was pretty good at improvising with what she had on hand spell-wise to keep her more hapless teammates alive.

As for the picture: it's a very good rendering of the White Witch costume, though I don't know what the hell she's doing. This is further evidence, though, that Polar Boy should be making a snowflake in his picture - together with Element Lad and the White Witch, they'd have a theme going!

JOHN APPROVED

(and just because she's not a comic nerd and thus it's noteworthy, she's also JOHN'S GIRLFRIEND ANN APPROVED)

SARLSH, Part 4, By Johnathan

POLAR BOY

I've discussed Polar Boy as a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes in a prior review, so this time I'm just going to talk about his time in the Legion proper, so as to avoid repeating myself. After years and years of trying, Brek Bannin finally became a Legionnaire at the same time as Magnetic Kid et al, whether due to the fact that he'd been doing a really good job in the Legion farm team for years and years or because they needed a few more folk around the clubhouse for tax purposes, I'm not sure. I was pretty fond of Legion Polar Boy, both because I had always liked him and because he had attained this huge goal that had coloured his whole life and it completely showed in whatever he did. When he was hanging out with the other new recruits he was full of good advice from his days in the Subs, while around the old-school Legionnaires he just tried so damn hard, to the point that he campaigned for and won leadership of the Legion. He made a good leader, too, as far as his being readable is concerned - instead of instantly becoming a giant dick (see Wildfire, Lightning Lad) or constantly doubting himself (see Lightning Lad). I mean, he did doubt himself, but for good reasons, as he was constantly struggling with the fact that he was now the leader of a big, complicated organization like the Legion instead of something small and simple like the Substitute Legion.

What I didn't like about this iteration of PB was the costume. I mean, he always had a lousy costume, what with the lavender and the fur trim and all. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more fashion-conscious Legionnaires (Uh... I'm sure that there have been some. Saturn Girl? No no, the pink thing. Well, maybe Brainiac 5 was testing a fashionist-o-matic or Blockade Boy was visiting or something) voted against him because of that thing. This new costume is... close. If only it were, say, light blue instead of lavender. Also, I hate the weird shoulder hoops. I understand that Polar Boy is a small guy and he needs to compensate to some extent, but sheesh. take those things off, though, maybe slap the old costume's logo on the back and this could be an okay costume. The skullcap alone, as a replacement for the toque-cowl, was a giant step in the right direction.

As for the 'demonstration of powers' portion of this picture... well, it's somewhat lacking. Blasting out a snowman is a very 1960s Iceman stunt, really. Polar Boy was usually more about volume of ice produced rather than being concerned with what form it took, but as I recall, his sculptures were always a bit nicer than this. I don't know - seeing as how he's adopting essentially the same pose as Element Lad did, wouldn't it make more sense for him to have produced a snowflake-ized version of that stupid big atom?

Ayup, Polar Boy is:

JOHN APPROVED

(EDIT: Note the shift in spacing toward the end. You may have noticed this in earlier posts - this is a symptom of me having written a review on another computer and taken it home one way or another to cut and paste. Blogger does not like this - perhaps it views the writing of posts in another program as some sort of cyber-infidelity. In any case, until I find a quick and efficient way to fix this sort of thing and/or I stop writing reviews in inappropriate settings, we all get to suffer through inconsistent formatting)

(PS: These Legion reviews are kind of serious compared to my regular stuff, huh? I don't know if anybody cares, but if you do, rest assured that there'll be all kinds of Superhuman Detritus, Future Zoo-ing, High-Tech Tomorrows and Detective Comics Firsts, soon soon soon. Heck, I might even finally get the Henchman Fashion File off the ground. In the meantime, scroll down - Paul posted!)