"The Elements of Heartbreak"
Cover Date: July 1992
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Coleen Doran and Curt Swan(!)
Previously...
Okay, get some Tylenol because we're now in the part of Legion history where the stories make no God-damned sense unless you've read thirty years worth of Legion stories AND know exactly how the retcons have affected them.
The adult Legion (I'll get to that in a minute) is on Earth. In five-year gap between Levitz' and Giffen's runs, Earth has been secretly taken over by the Dominators, who, as you might guess, aren't great dudes. Anyway, the revolution against Dominator rule has starter, and the Legion has spent the better part of last year fighting them.
But wait, there's more! As part of the story, some stasis chambers under the surface of the Earth have been opened, releasing the SW6 Legion, who are essentially younger versions of the Legionnaires, meaning that, in addition to the two dozen or so characters already in the Giffen run, now you've got another entire Legion to keep track of. Oh, and no one knows if they're clones or not or where they've come from, but they're fighting the Dominators too.
Oh, and for the past dozen years or so, Jan Arrah, known as Element Lad, has had an on-again, off-again relationship with a Science Cop named Shvaughn Erin. Okay, ready? No, you aren't, but let's get on with it anyway.
Plot
On the wartorn Earth, adult!Element Lad breaks into a drug store to get some pills for Shvaughn.
At the same time, and not too far away, SW6!Chameleon Boy and SW6!Element Lad are attacking a Dominator patrol squad. SW6!Element Lad fucks up and accidentally kills a bunch of them, so runs off alone out of shame.
Adult!Element Lad get the drugs back to Shvaugn, who is taking them to help her get through her ProFem withdrawal. You know the second you hear the word 'ProFem' that things are about to go off of the rails. Anyway, Shvaughn wants something to take her mind off the pain, so asks Adult!Element Lad to tell her a story.
Not missing the chance to use a tired dramatic device, Adult!Element Lad's narration of the story is juxtaposed with SW6!Element Lad's running around being sad. The story is about a Trommite kid (on Trom everyone had the power to transmute the elements at will, but they all got killed, and now Jan is the only one left). So, the kid asks his father why he can't kill things with his powers. His dad answers "A Trommite can kill no one if not himself." The kid does not respond well to this zen bullshit, and so kills his dad by turning him into "flakes of carbon."
Around this time, Shvaugn cuts her hair and insists on being called 'Sean', but wants Adult!Element Lad to finish the story. So, it turns out that all of the people and animals of the planet Trom shun the kid for killing his father, and, depressed by the isolation, the kid kills himself by turning himself into "flakes of carbon." The End.
The lesson that Sean takes from the story is that he has to go through the rest of this transition on his own, which does not seem like a particularly good interpretation of the story that Adult!Element Lad told. He leaves, and Adult!Element Lad lets him go. Sean stumbles around for awhile, and then collapses into a snow bank, and who should happen by but SW6!Element Lad, they talk for a bit, and SW6!Element Lad gets retrieved by SW6!Saturn Girl while Sean just kind of wanders off.
Meanwhile, in space, SW6!Valor meets Adult!Valor, and they're mighty confused by this turn of events. Also, the Emerald Eye teases a return, but it's hard to get excited about that.
Finally, as was the custom of this era's Legion, there are a couple of text pieces that give important exposition. It's really a testament to how continuity-heavy this Legion was that, even with Keith Giffen using a Watchmen-esque nine-panel grid for every page of his run, they still didn't have enough room to get all of the necessary information in the actual comic.
The important text piece her is a letter written by Shvaugn Erin right before she became Sean. She explains she grew up as a dude on a planet with some seriously regressive gender-identity norms, so he had trouble fitting in, and he had a crush on the young Element Lad, so this led him to run away to some sort of future-hippie commune on Earth, and then decided to become a woman for some vague reasons about not being comfortable with who he was, also, so as to make the wooing of Element Lad slightly easier. And she had been doing it ever since, except the Dominators outlawed ProFem, and now she's about to turn back into a man.
Commentary
I suppose my first question is...why? I mean, on the one hand, I guess making a long-term recurring character a transgender person is a novel form of retcon, but this probably isn't the way to do it, not the least of which is because it kind of conflates being gay and being transgender in a way that's confusing at best.
I've heard two theories about why they made Shvaugn Erin into a man. Keith Giffen in an interview he did for the Legion Companion said that he wanted to kill Erin off, but some other member of the creative staff was against is. Giffen said the only way he wouldn't kill her off is if she had some sort of interesting hook he could use. The other guy blurted out 'She's really a man' and there you go.
The other theory has to do with the Bierbaums, who were longtime fans of the Legion before they became writers. There was a popular fan theory that Element Lad was gay, primarily centered around the fact that he originally wore a pink costume and didn't have an established girlfriend. Eventually, when Paul Levitz took over, he gave Element Lad a new costume and a girlfriend in the guise of Shvaughn Erin, thus foiling the fan's speculation. Ten years later, the Bierbaums find a way to make continuity conform to their wishes by making Shvaugn into a man, which would then lead to Element Lad becoming gay or something.
Anyway, either way, those theories do kind of point to the problems the Legion were having at the time. On the one hand, you had a guy like Giffen, who could be a tad bit capricious, and on the other you had the Bierbaums, whose stories often teetered close to fan-fiction. Incidentally, their partnership ended about as badly as you might think, with Keith Giffen blowing up the Earth in his last issue, and then the Bierbaums moving on to a spinoff featuring the SW6 Legionnaires.
Just not a good moment for the Legion.
Damage Stars: *****
No comments:
Post a Comment