Legion Lost #2 – Review

By: Fabian Nicieza (writer), Pete Woods (artist), Brad Anderson (colorist)

The Story: Can’t we just talk, energy-being to energy-being?

The Review: I’ve noticed in reviews of the two new titles featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes that folks mostly take issue with the inaccessibility of the team itself.  Like many DC properties, the Legion has a very dense, complicated history, but unlike many DC properties, it’s had to reinvent itself from the ground up at least a couple times, arguably more.  The team has tons of characters, each with a long, complex background, and a rather specific setting.

Any one of these points by itself would make Legion pretty obtuse to readers, but put them all together and you have yourself a surefire niche title, one existing mostly for the pleasure of its small band of devotees and hardly anyone else.  If Legion’s to have any chance of expanding its audience, it needs winning stories by top-notch writers and artists, and it needs it now.

Nicieza is a top-notch writer.  His work on both Robin and Red Robin demonstrated a high bar for quality titles featuring young characters.  He has a great ear for first-person, semi-stream-of-consciousness narration, and he shows it through Wildfire’s description of events this issue.  He mixes exposition with character bits (“No, really, Wolf, try stopping an energy-based form with a chunk of wood.  More sprockin’ stubborn than I am…”), reading naturally and engagingly.

Unfortunately, a lot of the narration gets wasted on the same set of expository points: Alastor, an alien of the future, enraged at the death of his sister from Earth’s xenophobia, goes back in time to “our” present day to infect humanity with a virus that will transform them all into mutant hybrids.  Not only did the debut cover this ground already, but this issue actually goes through this whole spiel twice, meaning you’re already feeling worn out from half the plot in two issues.