The Legion of Super-Heroes #11 – Review

By: Paul Levitz (writer), Daniel HDR & Wayne Faucher (artists), Hi-Fi (colorist)

The Story: It’s like playing Where’s Waldo?, only with several dozen super-powered criminals across interplanetary space.  That’s fun, right?

The Review: It’s a common issue in comics that once you take a step back from the flashy action sequences and charged emotional scenes, you realize there’s really nothing happening beneath it all.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with the decompressed story arc, but unless the writer can pack each issue with enough compelling material to make it worthwhile, the whole thing can seem like a needlessly dragged out plot.

If you read Legion of Super-Villains, you quickly realize Saturn Queen is not only in complete control, but she also has all the answers to their long-term plans and goals.  Essentially, she’s the only villain we’re interested in, since all her subordinates act only to serve her.  That leaves little depth or motivation to the goons the Legion tackles in this issue; their only purpose seems to be vying with each other to gain Saturn Queen’s favor, and there’s little fun in that.

With such narrow-minded minions, it’s no wonder they come across so goofy—take Sun Emperor’s confrontation with Timber Wolf: “One dead Legionnaire will surely put me back in the queen’s good graces…two or three would be a surfeit of offerings!”

The Legionnaires don’t fare much better, since their action dialogue still induces uncontrollable cringing from you.  It’s as if Levitz feels they have to banter, so he injects these silly, forced riffs while they’re in action: “Now let the boys collect them.”  “Let’s not be sexist—that’s centuries out of style.”  “They didn’t mean anything, Ayla.”  “It’s called teamwork.  Get over it.”  When they act this nonchalant, it’s hard to take their battles seriously.

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.