"Different Paths"
Cover Date: Holiday 1988
Writer: Paul Levitz
Artist/Co-Plotter: Keith Giffen
Guest Artists: Ernie Colon, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Erik Larsen
Previously...
Okay, settle in.
Polar Boy was elected leader of the Legion, which hasn't been going all that well. The most recent catastrophe is that a few Legionnaires banded together to go kill the Time Trapper after the villain put together a hopelessly complicated plan that ended with an alternate version of Superboy getting killed. The grand result of the plan is that a bunch of Legionnaires resigned for various reasons.
In another sub-plot, the guy named Atmos, from the same planet as Star Boy, has stolen Dream Girl, Star Boy's girlfriend, which led to Star Boy quitting the Legion out of frustration.
Finally, Blok, a giant rock-man, is going through puberty.
Plot
The White Witch is on the Sorceror's World, having resigned from the Legion a few issues ago. She's trying to decide whether or not she want to rejoin the team, but eventually decides to stay on the Sorceror's World and be a mentor to a young Khund boy in the ways of sorcery.
Elsewhere, on Colu, Brainiac 5, who also resigned from the Legion, is hanging out on Colu trying to figure out what they hell he's supposed to do now. He eventually decides that he wants to tinker around with time travel, since it was recently revealed that the Legion didn't really know how to travel through time so much as the Time Trapper wanted them to think they did. Some Coluan leaders come into to tell Brainiac 5 that he's not allowed to fuck around with the fabric of space and time for fun, and this makes Brainiac 5 sad.
On Xanthu, Atmos, feeling that merely stealing Star Boy's girlfriend from him doesn't really show the depths of his own assholish-ness, has decided to show Star Boy up on their home planet out of spite. Star Boy, who must be secretly hated by every Legion writer to date, decides to just get the hell off of Xanthu. This pisses Atmos off, and Dream Girl starts to suspect that Atmos is using his powers to screw with her mind.
Somewhere else, Blok is having the least-subtle subplot about being a teenager in comic book history.
 | |
| "Adults don't understand, man!" |
Back at the Legion base, Polar Boy is kind of depressed that he's been such a terrible leader. The End.
Comments
I know a lot of people like the Levitz Legion, but I'm not really one of them. Probably because I didn't really grow up with them, so I don't have that same sort of emotional attachment. I did have something of an attachment to the reboot Legion that came around after Zero Hour, but well....
At any rate, this comic falls near the end of Levitz's initial run of Legion, and it came at a weird time for the book. After the crisis, the Legion had to hurriedly figure out how to fix its continuity to make up for the fact that Superboy, who had appeared in basically every foundational Legion story was no longer in continuity. So Levitz wrote a story that involved a pocket universe and an incredibly convoluted scheme by the Time Trapper, and it basically held everything together as long as you didn't think about it too hard.
And it wasn't all bad, since the story itself was decent enough, and it did lead to one of my favorite Legion stories ever, an epic showdown with the Time Trapper in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50. But, by this point, it's fair to say that the Legion was getting kind of stale. After all, Levitz had been writing the book for something like a decade straight.
I guess the thing I was always thought was interesting was that Levitz took a book set 1000 years in the future, one which had loads and loads of characters, and decided, 'What the hell, I'll make a soap opera out of it.' In his defense, it worked out pretty well, but it did create one rather large problem.
Soap operas rely, to a large extent, on continuity, in order to have tons of character development, you need earlier stories to be recalled by the reader. Once the Crisis hit, the Legion's continuity started falling apart, and that kind of made this version of the Legion untenable.
Here's what I've never gotten, though: What is so fucking special about this version of the Legion? I mean, what's so great about it that DC went to extraordinary lengths to bring it back after about twenty years in Limbo? It's a fine book, but a book like this is never really going to attract new readers, as evidenced by the fact that the Levitz-penned Legion #1 released as part of the line-wide reboot was denounced as wholly unwelcoming to new readers.
Damage Stars: **
One for the book, one for Atmos' Mohawk
No comments:
Post a Comment