Legion of Super-Heroes #9 – Review

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

The Story: Brainiac 5 and Chameleon Boy hit up Durla for some new leads to the assassinations on the United Planets Council, while Tyroc and Timber Wolf try to prevent more deaths.

The Review: The Legion’s massive cast tends to pose a lot of difficulties for writers.  For one thing, it takes a lot of effort to give each Legionnaire a fair chance in the spotlight.  For another, keeping track of all their different personalities and backgrounds in the context of whatever storyline they’re caught up in can be a taxing juggling act.  Then there’s the obstacle of dreaming up a mission/opponent big enough to challenge for the two dozen or so members.

Paul Levitz has the expertise to handle all three of these problems, but he doesn’t do so with much inspiration.  This Durlan plot to assassinate the UP council just doesn’t have much teeth to it.  Some of the missing bite comes from how unthreatening the assassins have been portrayed so far.  They’re quite lousy at assassinating people; across three issues, they’ve only managed to kill off two individuals, one of which had almost no importance attached whatsoever.  If there’s a bigger mastermind behind all this, let’s hope he or she (or it—we’re dealing with Durlans here, after all) shows up soon, because the henchmen aren’t really selling.

There’s little reason to hope more formidable opponents will pop up anytime soon, considering the sluggish pace Legion has now.  By the end of the issue, all you’re left looking forward to is a visit to Chameleon Boy’s aunt, who may or may not be directly or indirectly connected to the Durlan conspiracy.  That’s the kind of stakes the Legion deals with now.  Like Timber Wolf says, “We’re Legionnaires—not nursemaids!”  Quite right—shouldn’t they be out preventing galactic war, or trying to stop an invasive species of hyper-flies from eating the time-space continuum, instead of mostly waiting around for an opportunity to thwart some raging shapeshifters for the umpteenth time?