Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1 – Review

By: Paul Levitz & Keith Giffen (writer/artist), John Dell & Scott Koblish (inkers), Hi-Fi (colorist)

The Story: If you’re down on your luck, there are worse pals than a giant eyeball that grants wishes.  Plus—flying monkeys!

The Review: The annual poses an interesting challenge to comic book writers.  The added page count gives a lot more narrative freedom, but at the same time, readers can’t be depended upon to buy the thing with its bigger price point, so the stories can’t really be game-changers.  Most of the time you get a bunch of short features with varying degrees of quality; rarely does anyone attempt to stretch a feature across the whole thing.

Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen, however, are not men to shy away from a challenge, considering how long they’ve been in the biz.  Unfortunately, for all the ambition and buzz going into this issue, their tale of the Emerald Empress’s return only somewhat succeeds in validating the five bucks you’ll have to fork over for it.

The length of the issue demands a plot of fairly grand scale.  You can’t expect an epic, but there should be more than four Legionnaires getting tossed around by a temporarily revamped villain.  The actual events of the issue don’t have much meat to them, so the space is mostly filled with exposition, told with ever so much melodrama: “I felt a wave of energy from Orando minutes ago, and a strange shift—as though everything I had seen on the planet for weeks had been false, and a curtain was being pulled away.”

And when you don’t get big doses of exposition, you get treated to the uninspired, repetitive dialogue.  Most irritating is how frequently they spend whole slews of panels commenting on how this version of the Empress is different from the last one.  And for all the talk going on, you don’t really get a good sense of the characters’ personalities.  They all have the same aggressive, sarcastic voice, offering as little interest to their conversation as the action.

The Empress can’t be taken seriously as a threat because so much of her supposedly dastardly deeds are taken for granted.  The Legionnaires say a great deal about her corrupting the planet, but other than some weird plants and a medieval theme, you’re not sure what’s being corrupted.  Maybe if you get to see what Orando is like before the Empress mucks around with it, you’d have a better idea of her craziness, but for all appearances, Orando has always had a feudal society (check out the crossbows and girl-lusting lord).  It would also help to know more about the current girl held in the Eye of Ekron’s thrall other than she’s crazy.

The Legion of Super-Heroes #3 – Review

by Paul Levitz (writer), Yildiray Cinar (pencils), Francis Portela (pencils & inks), Wayne Faucher (inks), Hi-Fi (colors), and Sal Cipriano (letters)

The Story: Earth-Man is forced to go on his first mission as a Green Lantern and the Legion finds itself pitted against Saturn Queen.

What’s Good: I absolutely love Earth-Man under Levitz’s hand.  He adds a really fun dynamic to the team, his dialogue is consistently dickish, and Levitz continues to tease new developments for the character.  I’ve really enjoyed Levitz’s placing Niedrigh in increasingly uncomfortable positions, and when, this month, he’s forced to save the lives of some tiny lifeforms on a far away planet, it’s really amusing in a “fish out of water” sort of way. Earth-Man’s constant tone of dismissive disgust is fun, but I’m starting to become increasingly interested in a possible redemption further down the road for the character, which may very well be the route Levitz is taking him.  It’s promising stuff and honestly, the more Earth-Man I get from Levitz the better.

Beyond this, much of what has made this Legion relaunch so successful this month recurs.  The large cast is handled aptly with all the characters feeling natural and in possession of their own unique voices.  Furthermore, by modern comic standards, this is another issue that is packed with content; a lot of narrative movement occurs.  While it’s not quite as ridiculously crammed as the last two issues, it’s still heftier than most comics and feels a bit more settled.