Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part One, By Johnathan

Ahaha! Time to review alla the Legionnaires that I haven't yet gotten around to! Uh, pre-Five Year Gap, of course. We'll leave that can of worms for a later date.

BLOK

I like Blok. I'm kind of sad to learn that he has no name, though. Silly me, thinking that it was Blok, all this time.

Blok was from the planet Dryad, which had at some point exploded. The Legion was on hand to evacuate, and for some reason a group of Dryadan youngsters assumed that since the Legion was there that they were the ones who blew the place up and so they swore eternal vengeance, got powers from a jerk named the Dark Man and started calling themselves the League of Super Assassins (and just to be on the safe side, they also swore vengeance against grass, because the whole damn planet was covered in it, as well as the sun, for just floating there and watching the place blow up). As so frequently happens, they almost killed the entire Legion on their first try but afterward never quite managed to pull it together again.

The only Super-Assassin to go anywhere other than a seat next to Ronn Karr at the Legion of Super-Villains annual benefit dinner was Blok, who had never been that struck on killing people anyway. He ended up with a light jail term because he'd helped to capture the rest of his team and tried out for Legion membership once he got out of the clink (and he completely schooled Lamprey, Nightwind and Crystal Kid while doing it, which makes me happy). Blok made a really neat Legionnaire and a great requisite Big Strong Team Member. He started out fairly clueless about how human society worked (oh yeah: he's not a human made of rock, he's an alien. Made of rock) and unlike a lot of similar characters never quite lost that trait, which was charming. He spent a lot of time watching the Legion mission logs and palling around with the White Witch and being philosophical and introspective - not quite as unusual today for a Big Strong Tough Guy but definitely a refreshing variation on the type.

As you can see, Blok liked to wear his pants hiked up real high, which I would hate except for the fact that it's so distinctive that I like it for its uniqueness. I just wish he'd wear some sort of solid colour instead of horrible stripes alla the time. Ah, well. at least this picture showcases big shoulder pads in their optimal environment - on someone with big shoulders - rather than in a less-than-suitable one, such as everywhere else that big shoulder pads have been used as a costume element, ever.

This is also a decent shape for Blok. By which I mean that he looks a lot less hideous than he frequently did back then. See, back in the old days, Blok kept getting redesigned - first he was kind of tall with a horrible neck-frill kind of thing, then he was squat with no nose, then he had these kind of erupting craters on his shoulders... I think that they eventually said that it was some sort of mutation based on environmental conditions or something but I'm thinking it was just a series of artists who hated drawing him the old way, or felt like messing with the rock guy, or whatever. The only good redesign wasn't really one, it was just this one time that Blok got all shot up and the scars and craters stayed with him for literally years. It was very very cool, in that a character's physical state is usually pretty resistant to change. Even though Batman or whoever has a broken leg and comic book time passes at about the rate of a month a year, he'll be fully recovered by next issue.

Evidently, I like Blok enough that I don't have anything particularly funny to say about him (the picture doesn't help - he should be standing there holding a train over his head or something. All this picture says is "I'm large and I like to accessorize with yellow"). I was sad when he eventually fell victim to the great purge of post-1975 (or so) characters that eventually swept through Legion comics. Booo! bring back Blok, because he is:

JOHN APPROVED

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Five, By Johnathan

Well, it's been a little while, huh? One reason for this is that I'm having a bit of a hard time thinking up anything interesting to say about the last four old Legionnaires that I have to cover before moving on to the exciting, new, awesome Legionnaires. So I'm going to plow through them all at once. Yee haw!

SUN BOY

Good basic picture of Sun Boy. I've always been fond of that costume, though the fact that it's never really changed in any significant way makes it hard to think up any new snarky things to say about it. Same goes for his hairdo, which really hasn't changed since he first grew it out in the 2970s. Mrs. Morgna's boy knows a good thing when he sees it, I guess. Oh, what I wouldn't give for him to have had a momentary lapse and started wearing a big spiky sun mask, like something Electro would wear if he was Solaro Energo instead. I coulda gone on for days!

The pose is great, though. This is almost certainly the exact posture and facial expression that Sun Boy adopts when his girlfriend of three months catches him sleeping with her sister. "Sorry baby," it says, "Dirk Morgna just can't be tied down to one woman."

JOHN APPROVED

TIMBER WOLF

Again: very hard to say anything new about this costume, as it's basically the same as the one he started out in (barring some minor redesign. The same bits are all there, just in different places). The ol' orange-and-brown-or-black-maybe costume isn't anything to write home about, but it's not terrible either. See? Not much to say.

Evidently, this picture hails from one of those periods in which Timber Wolf was having rage issues on the side. I have to admit, I always think that that sort of thing is bullshit, at least in Mr. Londo's case. I mean, he was given super-powers by a ray that his father developed out of a rare mineral, right? And then he called himself Lone Wolf because he was under the impression that he was an android and had some asinine belief that a self-aware android wasn't fit to interact with humans and so vowed to live apart, right? And then he changed his name to Timber Wolf when he joined the Legion because Lone Wolf doesn't work as well when you hang out with twenty other guys all the time, right? So... where does the 'bestial temper' thing come from? I don't recall any in-continuity explanation other than the assumption that wolf = bad temper. Could the origin of Timber Wolf's rage and interesting teeth be that Wolverine was/is a very popular character and the Legion was filled with very polite folks with no anger-management issues? Nah.

I like the mean-looking drawing in the background, though. Check it out: it looks like a drawing of a vampire from a 1970s black-and-white horror comic - Creepy or Eerie or something. Neat!

NOT APPROVED

ULTRA BOY

Favourite Legion costume, with no changes, check. Flying around looking like a loveable lunkhead, check. Nice sideburns, check.

JOHN APPROVED

WILDFIRE

Again with the unchanged costume that I like. Bah!

The only thing that I can really think of to comment on is the fact that Wildfire seems to be venting an awful lot of his anti-energy in this picture. Perhaps, says the juvenile portion of my mind, he has just experienced the energy-being equivalent of letting a large fart? I know, I know. Far too obvious. Consider this, though: could this be what Dawnstar looks so surprised about, over in her picture?

JOHN APPROVED

Okay! Next up: new folks!

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Two, By Johnathan

PHANTOM GIRL

This is another one of those pictures that looks fine at first but has something really weird nestled at its heart, so that the longer you look at it the stranger you find it. As far as demonstrating Phantom Girl's powers, the ol' "jaunty traipse through the atoms of a table" gag is a pretty fair representation of what she's all about. And you can't beat the patented Phantom Girl skin-tight, flared-sleeve, bell-bottomed, cut-out pant-suit as far as costumes go. No, what's bugging m bout this picture of PG is her hair. Why is her hair so big? It's kind of like the artist was determined to draw her with great big glam hair like Dream Girl but then had the law laid down upon 'em re: Phantom Girl having pig-tails but then rebelled against hair-fascism by making giant poofy glam pig-tails. And twenty years later? Twenty years later those things are freaking me out, man.

NOT APPROVED

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super Heroes: Part 1, By Johnathan

A while back I did a great big review of the whole durned Legion of Super-Heroes, circa the "Origins and Powers of the Legion" pages that ran way back when. Well, not long after I published that post I found another of those crazy things, in Legion of Super-Heroes v3 No. 17, and since that one included all of the pre-Five-Year Gap Legionnaires that I hadn't already covered I figured that I should probably do some sort of follow-up post. Kind of leery of long posts, though, so I've broken this one in two. First up: Legionnaires that I've already reviewed! Because what's obsessive completeness without, uh, completion?

BRAINIAC 5

You know, it's really hard to think up new things to say about Brainiac 5 when he's just standing there. That's what comes of a guy not having a costume change for 20+ years, I guess. The boots are nice and it looks like he's been working out, so that's two things. I suppose I can mention that I like the 'no black lines, just colour' style of forcefield more than the sheet of glass-lookin' ones that tend to show up in forcefield-centric comic books. I don't like this one, though. Purple forcefields aren't as good as green ones.

NOT APPROVED

CHAMELEON BOY

Probably my least favourite Chameleon Boy pic, both because of the costume and the 'how do his powers work' bit. Okay, I guess the costume's not too bad but it's definitely super-horrible with regards to palette. It's like, um... it's like Color Kid involuntarily used his powers whilst a sneeze/belch/hiccough combo was ravaging his cranial cavities - it's super-ugly, yo. Similarly, this "Let's slap CB's head on a little monkey-thing! It shows that they're the same guy!" approach to the whole issue of how to demonstrate his powers in a single panel seems even more ham-fisted than that one panel from the Sixties featuring him as an exposition-spouting garbage can. Bah!

NOT APPROVED

COLOSSAL BOY

See, Chameleon Boy? Speed lines help! They show us that Colossal Boy's getting bigger and they could've showed us how you were getting all transformative! Though in Colossal Boy's case, a wee little Gim Allon standing between his feet would've been nice. A new reader could potentially draw the conclusion that they were about to read a tale about someone who had the fantastic ability to emit gusts of wind from their fists, armpits and groin. And the only place that you're going to find that kind of action is in John and Paul Present: The Adventures of the Mighty Turbine! I like that they didn't alter his costume just for the sake of doing so - it's definitely better than the current incarnation - but I think that I might be pining for his old singing cowboy-style gloves for the rest of my life.

JOHN APPROVED

DAWNSTAR

Decent picture of Dawny in space, no real alterations to her costume (though they may have added some more fringe, I'm not sure). Not too much to talk about here, really. I mean, her wings look like they're made of papiér maché, that's one thing., but it's not really what I'd call a conversation-starter. I'd really like to know what she's looking at, though. I mean, she flies around in the depths of space fighting super-villains, 9-5: what's really going to shock her that much? My guess? A left-over missile from the Great Darkness Saga, shaped like a giant, nude, anatomically-correct Darkseid and spewing laser fire from horrible, horrible places. That, my friends, would be a hell of a sight.

JOHN APPROVED

DREAM GIRL

You know, until I took a close look at this picture just now I had thought it a pretty standard Dream Girl image. But now? Now I see that it's terrible. That's probably the worst rendition of the Dream Girl shiny one-piece that I've ever seen. It looks like it would require a whole roll of that special supermodel-brand double-sided tape to hold in place. Plus, I think she's wearing a cup. Bleh, I say. And while I'm bitching: whatever happened to that blue thing that she used to wear in her hair? That thing was great! It looked like a wireless cell phone headset, like she was constantly networking or prepared to network. Super-proactive! This all-glam look just doesn't have the same kind of synergy. Dream Girl is unlikely to land that big new client, and that's a shame.

NOT APPROVED

ELEMENT LAD

Despite the fact that I'm no big fan of Interlac, I appreciate the thought behind changing the 'e' on Element Lad's chest to it's fakey future language equivalent. I was about to say that I wouldn't run around with the Cyrillic letter j on the front of my shirt, but that's a complete lie, unless Cyrillic is one of those alphabets that don't acknowledge the majesty of the j or, you know, admit to the existence of the sound. In any case, Element Lad manages to rock the pink costume far more thoroughly than Cosmic Boy ever did. I, uh, I don't really know what he's doing in this picture, though. I can only guess that he's turned an oxygen atom into one of Element 476, Gigantium (discovered c. 2674 CE), an atom notable mainly for being almost ridiculously huge.

NOT APPROVED

LIGHTNING LASS

So at some point Light Lass got her original powers back and became Lightning Lass again. This worked well because Lightning Lad had just retired, so the Legion was still able to say that it had lightning-slinging capabilities. And I guess that the ol' Light Lass powers weren't as useful as they could be. Trouble is, lightning is kind of a boring power to have - that's why Lightning Lad had the cape! It added flair! Lightning Lass' costume needs flair. Or zazz. Or possibly some moxie.

NOT APPROVED

MON-EL

Mon-El’s another one of those cats who hasn’t changed his uniform in… ever. Admittedly, it is a pretty snappy bit of cloth – Daxam surely must have the best-dressed astronauts around. Plus, you’re bound to get attached to a tunic after wearing it for a thousand years whilst being verbally abused by ghostly assholes. I’m sure that both of those big gold buttons had its own name and complicated backstory by now and that for a while the cape was a serious competitor for Shadow Lass’ affections. I’m also sure that the ‘underwear over tights’ look doesn’t go well with this costume – so sure that I sort of blank the fact that Mon-El indulges in this abominable practice from my mind and have had more than one nerd-argument over the question of whether Mr. Gand wears ‘em inside the pants or not. Looking over my records, the answer turns out to be: both, on occasion. I believe that I have a comic shop employee to apologise to.

This is a perfectly nice picture of Mon-El, by the way. Except... Ol' Lar here has always been a character that manages to look cool despite the fact that he has a really bad haircut. This is, however, no reason to make that haircut the focal point of the image. It's like there's a hair-helmet coming to crush us, on its way to woo the Bouffant. Aiee!

JOHN APPROVED

Grr. My life has become too busy for long posts. I'm gonna break this up a bit (not like the last time, I promise - this time I'll finish). Tune in soon for Phantom Girl!

The Sad, Sorry, End: Review of Adventure Comics no. 337

When I started this review I was very excited by the prospect of writing about a Legion story that (I thought) epitomized many of the proper elements of Thirtieth Century tale-telling. Anyone who has been following along might have noticed that I launched into this project with great gusto and generated some epic and (according to Paul) irritatingly huge reviews. At this point, however, a curious phenomenon came to light: unlike most Legion stories - heck, unlike most Silver Age stories - the more I scrutinized and picked-apart this one the sicker I got of it. I’m not sure what it is, though possibly the gross orange jumpsuits on the Eddie Munster Brigade aggravated some latent Seasonal Affective Disorder. Possibly, too, it’s just kind of a lousy story. I’ve already covered most of the good parts (the wedding, the “new recruits”, the creepy house pet), so here are the other two:

FUTURE ZOO: Review of the Animal Books from Zinnat

I kind of love these guys. They seem to be of two different species, so I’m kind of baffled about how they might manage to convey information. Not that I can’t imagine more than one way that an animal might do so - far from it (for the record, my guesses include parrot-like speech mimicry, interpretive dance, Braille-like bumps on the back of the thing, tattoos, crazy TV eyes, Morse Code-like heartbeat, semaphore ears and sentient fleas that spell out words. Oh, and information-dense dung deposits). I’m just surprised that the Zinnatese managed to find and domesticate two such beasts before discovering, say, paper. Or the chisel. I don’t know - maybe the Animal Book is just a fancy version of a regular book, like when you get a copy of Dracula with a puffy leather cover instead of in the standard beat-up paperback format. Hell, maybe the bars on those little alcoves are decorative and the ‘Animal Books’ are just regular books that have been made out of animals, sliced up thin.

All I know is this: those Animal Books never showed up again, possibly because someone found out that they were being kept in cages roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum. Oh, wait. I also know that every time that Sun Boy came into the library he asked someone to “pass me a disc book from Uranus.” And he found it just as funny every time.

NOT APPROVED

The only other interesting thing in this issue were these headers that ran along the top of the page, apparently featuring the mug shots taken after Matter-Eater Lads 19^th birthday celebration on Ventura. What a night!

Anyway, Adventure Comics No. 337 ended like this: the aliens found Plan R and went home and then it turned out that Plan R was a fake, as were the Legion weddings. It had all been a ruse to get the location of Munster Planet. The Legion shows up and shuts down the machine that the aliens used to make their super-power pills. The end.

So tired of it…

NOT APPROVED

My belated New Years’ resolution? Not to do crap like this again. Next up: old familiar territory redux!

The latest in High-Tech Communication: Continuing Review of Adventure Comics No. 337

I don't know how I feel about the ol' super-shout. On the one hand, it'd be nice to know what Superboy was up to at any one time but on the other: burst eardrums. I don't know. I kind of figured that after Brainiac 5 got finished with creating those y'know, rings, the ones that let you fly, he might have devoted a half hour or so to banging together one or two walkie-talkies. I mean, I know that Silver Age Superboy had to use all of his powers as frequently as possible while talking about what he was doing or he'd lose them, but couldn't he think of the children, and also the old people and the pets and everyone else?

I like that Superboy can't just say "Great guns!" or something. He's too large for that - he needs to swear by something really, really big. It's all "Great galaxies!" or "By the rings of Saturn!" or even "Great Krypton!", which always gives me a chuckle. I hope swearing by places you were born or used to live comes into vogue soon, so I can shout "Great Windsor!" or "Holy Halifax!" or even "By the temperate climate and great dining opportunities of Victoria!" when I get surprised by seeing some of my pals taking a nap.

Adventure Comics No. 337, REVIEW DEFERRED, still.

Action Comics No. 860 is out this (wait.. last) week. There's not much new to say about the Legion of Super-Rejects (though I was surprised to see that it wasn't just a trick of perspective - Golden Boy's pants really are that high-waisted) but I'm pleased to report that my dream of a comic in which Shadow Lass and Night Girl are working as the most obvious team ever has finally come to pass, and it only took thirty or forty years!

JOHN APPROVED

Shooter coming back to the Legion? Ask me in a few more issues.