SARLSH, Part 6, By Johnathan

SENSOR GIRL

I know I'm pretty casual about the ol' spoilers when the stories that I'm writing about were printed 20+ years ago, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. The mystery of who Sensor Girl actually is is kind of a neat one and I wish that I hadn't known going in. So fair warning: if you don't already know and you think that you might be reading through the relevant Legion comics some day, skip this review.

ONE LAST SPOILER ALERT

Okay, on with the review. Sensor Girl joined the Legion at the same time as Polar Boy and so forth, without any testing or auditions. Saturn Girl merely read her mind and vouched for her suitability. This occasioned no small amount of comment, but Sensor Girl made it in. Her powers and abilities weren't spelled out right away but rather revealed piece-by-piece over the course of a fair number of issues. As I recall (I'm not at my own computer as I write this) she showed a wide range of enhanced senses, plus the ability to remove the senses of another, plus the occasional anomalous occurrence of super strength and suchlike.

Eventually, everyone was going nuts trying to figure out who she was - half the team thought that she had mind-controlled Saturn Girl or was Saturn Girl herself and the other half thought that she was somehow the recently-Anti-Monitored-to-death Supergirl, especially poor Brainiac 5. Ultra Boy tried to peek at her with his Penetra-vision (and my inner English major pegs this as possibly the ultimate expression of the Male Gaze) only to discover that she was apparently an empty costume, just flying around! The Legion was wracked with consternation!

Who was she, you ask? Turns out, she was Princess Projectra, filled with sadness over Karate Kid's death and unable to just hang out on Orando but not quite square with the Legion after, you know, murdering Nemesis Kid. The super-senses were new - she got them from ancestor spirits or something - but everything else was skillfully-applied illusion power. And the Legion must have enjoyed the mystery enough to overlook one little murder. Actually, the same thing happened with Star Boy, didn't it? He killed someone, waited a little while, put in an appearance in a new costume and ka-pow! all is forgiven and forgotten, murder-wise. Maybe it's just the novelty of seeing a new costume around the place?

Speaking of costumes, I like this one. As a Canadian, a red-and-white colour scheme evokes feelings of a patriotic nature within me (this is why I always vote for Santa Claus). As well, I am inordinately fond of double-breasted uniforms like Captain Marvel's and though this isn't quite that, it mimics the style enough for mine eyes. The only thing that I don't like about this costume is the super-wide shoulders, but it wouldn't really be a mid-Eighties costume design without some hint of that decade's awful, awful fashion sense.

Shoulders and all, she's:

JOHN APPROVED

Oops! A Retrospective Review, By Johnathan

Gah, I just realized that I completely missed an opportunity to review something as it was happening, rather than ten to forty years after the fact.. Action Comics No. 862 featured one of the best portrayals of the Legion of Substitute Heroes ever. I wish that I had my copy of that issue on hand to scan a few exemplary panels, but most of my nerdish literature is packed up in anticipation of an early May move. In essence, this version of the Subs struck a fantastic balance: they were funny without being ridiculous and effective while still being obviously unready for the Legion proper. Best of all, they weren't whiners - they didn't just sit around crying about how they weren't good enough and should just give up and go home before the real Legion told them off. This super-enthusiastic bunch of devil-may-care screwups is basically fantastic.

Plus: Rainbow Girl! Back in continuity after twenty or thirty years, with more interesting powers that justify her rejection from the Legion (better than that 'her green form is kryptonite' crap, anyway) and tenuously tied into the highly compelling stuff going on in Green Lantern right now! Rainbow Girl, yeah!

Friggin' right it's JOHN APPROVED

SARLSH, Part 5, By Johnathan

QUISLET

Yay, Quislet! Quislet was fun! I miss him.

Quislet was an energy being from a dimension of such. He basically flew around in a special little spaceship all of the time, and had the power to leap out of it and inhabit inanimate matter, thus animating it as illustrated here, in what is possibly the best example of someone's power in this whole collection of images. That robot looks sassy! Quislet tended, in fact, to create pretty fun shapes while inhabiting things. The other aspect of his power (not mentioned above, for shame) was that once he had occupied some matter for long enough it disintegrated, which I always thought was a neat little caveat. I don't know that it really featured very much in the stories, though... I think that maybe he destroyed a vital part of some super-villain's evil machinery once by inhabiting it, but not much else springs to mind.

The closest I've ever come to figuring out Quislet's name is that it's derived from quisling, and means something like "little traitor" - which is kind of apt since he was a free-thinking outsider in his home dimension and stole his little ship from his people, but I don't know if I, in a similar situation, would advertise this pseudo-treachery whilst trying to join a super-heroic group.

Mr. Untranslatable was a "wacky alien" type of character, the kind that doesn't quite think like everyone else and watches/quotes a lot of television (presumably. It's never shown but it's implied). I found him a nice departure from the so-very-serious Legion that had developed by the time he was inducted, but I guess that others didn't think so. He eventually lost his spaceship and had to go back to his home dimension, and despite the fact that he was likely assimilated or killed by his people once he got there, basically no one has mentioned him since. Hell, he didn't even get a statue, even though it'd be more like a model kit. This, I think, shows some level of disdain on the part of Legion writers. Sad sad sad.

Quislet is JOHN APPROVED, while his treatment is NOT 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!)

SARLSH, Part 3, By Johnathan

MAGNETIC KID

There was a point not long before this guide was released that the three charter members of the Legion of Super-Heroes had all semi-retired. Lightning Lad and Saturn girl had gotten married and had a baby (and a Validus!) and Cosmic Boy was... doing stuff. I don't know, maybe he was working on his music or something. In any case, this paved the way for the newly re-electrified Lightning Lass, the somewhat-telepathic Tellus and Magnetic Kid, who was Cosmic boy's little brother, Pol.

Now, Pol had been kicking around Legion continuity for a while. He got blown up pretty good in the late Seventies (by terrorists, I think) and kicked around the Legion Academy for much of the early Eighties, which might provide a clue as to why Cosmic Boy retired all of a sudden: his parents called him up and told him that it was Pol's turn to be a super-hero.

Pol was okay, I guess. He was a bit wide-eyed and inexperienced, which was refreshing, but the group was pretty big while he was on it, and therein lay the problem: when he wasn't saying anything, Magnetic Kid was indistinguishable from Cosmic Boy. It's kind of puzzling, actually. I mean, if I had the same superpowers as my brother (note: I think my brother's powers are headbutt-based) and I joined a group in which my brother had been a charter member and served on for years, I think that I might dress a little differently than him, rather than wearing, oh, the same costume. Seriously Pol - you went so far as to use a different hero name, so why not mix up the outfit a bit, too? A little blue instead of pink, maybe a hat? A vintage pinstripe suit with a horseshoe magnet on the lapel? Hell, if you're ripping off Rokk's costume designs why not kit up in the one with the fishbowl helmet? Kids (nine hundred and seventy-odd years from) today...

Not a bad picture, though. A lot more action than the last few have had, for one thing, and for another, I like the swirly blue magnetism. I also like that Magnetic Kid is using his magnetism to levitate what is patently a stone block. I'm sure that if we were to examine it we'd find a cannon ball lodged in the far side or something, but still.

**SPOILERS FOR THE MAGIC WARS AHEAD (if you care)**

Magnetic Kid also had what was possibly the most pointless Legion death ever. During the Magic Wars (which I found somewhat dreary to begin with) the team tracked the awful evil totally forgettable bad guy to one particular planet (was it the Sorcerer's World? I can't remember. Probably - writers love blowing that place all to hell) only to find that it was encased in a magical shell that could only be opened by the sacrifice of a human life. Magnetic Kid bravely gives his life to open the shield... and it turns out that that was exactly what the evil guy wanted. Further, from what I gathered from reading the rest of the story, he was eventually going to bust out of there himself. So Pol Krinn died so that the Legion could get to the bad guy maybe half an hour earlier. Whee!

For pointless deathery and bad costume decisions, Magnetic Kid is:

NOT APPROVED

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes (SARLSH), Part Two, By Johnathan

INVISIBLE KID II

There is a rule that I just came up with: Invisible Kids have lousy costumes. The original, Lyle Norg, had that brown-and-green workout outfit with the headband and all and poor Jaques up there has that yellow-and-black monstrosity. Heck, even the current, totally rebooted and up-to-date and not dead Invisible Kid looks like he just grabbed four or five random things from his closet and called it a costume. It's kind of like they want to be sure that their power will be appreciated every single time that they use it. "Oh, thank Space-God, Jaques. That thing was starting to sear my retinas."

Jaques Foccart got to be the second Invisible Kid basically through random chance. He had come to Legion HQ to get Brainiac 5 to make his sick sister well and then Computo had shown up again and possessed said sister, possibly using nanotechnology. Since Jaques had no powers or anything, Computo just totally ignored him to focus on beating up Legionnaires and in the confusion our pal drank some of the original Invisible Kid's formula (that was just, you know, lying around) and saved the day somehow (it's been a while since I've read the story, okay?). Computer-tyrants take note: underestimate Frenchmen at your peril. Afterward, Jaques joins the team and does okay. Oh, and at one point he starts teleporting as well as turning invisible and ends up in some weird hellscape and finds out that poor Lyle Norg didn't end up boinking some ghost-babe for the rest of time but rather was suffering eternal torment, which was a bit of a bummer.

I like that Invisible Kid II was named Jaques Foccart, because I was an English major and so occasionally read it as Jaques Focault, who would have the combined powers of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and have a giggle while I imagine him deconstructing the semiotic of the super-hero team (or something like that. I was an English major a while ago). Also, he's from Côte d'Ivoire and as far as I know is the only superhero ever to come from there. Dammit, except for his sister, eventually.

This picture, however... eesh. I kind of hope that it was accidentally released unfinished, because invisibility is really the easiest power to illustrate ever. Just make the outline of his legs dotted instead of solid about halfway down and then ask the colourist to fade out the yellow at about that point. Ta-da! You did it! Alternate method: leave the whole panel blank. As it stands, this is just terrible as a showcase for the character. I mean, when Superman has a shot where he's just standing there with his arms folded, he's at least hovering a foot or so off the ground, right? Take some notes, Jaques.

Invisible Kid II had two modes: brooding and surprised. In the first, he thought a lot about how his sister was sick (she was in a tube for a couple of years before Brainiac fixed her) and how invisibility was a lame power, which showed that he didn't think about the implications of having superpowers so much as read old Maxim articles about lame super-heroes. Don't listen to them, man! Sure you can't fly through the sun, but the sun's boring. You can fly through, say, the changing rooms of the stars. Plus, you can punch villains on the back of the head, which I for one have always wanted to do to Universo. In the other mode, Jaques shocased the fact that he wasn't a super-scientist or an adventurer or something, just some guy who had drank some goop. Every time that Validus or Darkseid or whoever would show up he would jump about a foot and shout "WTF!" Okay, he would shout "Sacre coeur!" but the spirit of the thing was the same. For me, it never got boring.

And that's pretty much that, Invisible Kid II-wise. Except to note that of all of the bad hairdos, post Five Year Gap, his was the worst. Still, on the balance:

JOHN APPROVED