Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33

Legion of Super-Heroes (v4) #33
"Untitled"
Cover Date: September 1992
Writer: Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: David A. Williams, Chris Sprouse

Previously...

The Legion is still fighting the Dominators for control of Earth, as is the other, younger Legion. It was just that sort of time for the Legion.

Plot

Get your tinfoil hats on people, because it's time for some double-barrelled Bierbaum retcon action! Fortunately, I'll be here to keep it all manageable.

Chameleon Boy (the adult one, since his SW6 counterpart died in the previous issue) is on the planet Val to meet with his father R.J. Brande. (Finding out that R.J. Brande was actually a Durlan and Chameleon Boy's father was one of the first and most respected of all of the Legion's retcons).

Meanwhile, on Winath, Adult!Lightning Lad meets with Proty II, the Legion's old team pet/mascot thing. Lightning Lad wishes that he had gone to help Kid Quantum. (Because, you see, he is actually the soul of the first Proty who basically possessed Lightning Lad after the later had died, although very few characters know this fact. This was another fan theory that the Bierbaums wrote into their Legion run.) So, two pages, two retcons mentioned already? We are making good time!

On Earth, a head Dominator hears about the 'Soul of Antares' and so hires a guy named Adam Orion, the Hunter to go capture it.

Totally, definitely, not a rip-off of Kraven.

Anyway, back on Val, a man named Rouvin heads to the local saloon, flirts with the bar-tender, and bribes a robo-sheriff, before heading back to his cabin which contains a Legion Flag, a Legion costume, could he be the mysterious Kid Quantum? And, more importantly, can he convince the readers that he isn't a terrible character that has no reason for existing? Spoiler Alert: Yes, and emphatically no, respectively.

But now it is time for some exposition. Both the Dominators and R.J. Brande and Chameleon Boy have conversations that, between the two of them, give the audience the backstory here. So, it turns out that there was a planet called Antares where a species of telepathic shapeshifters lived, but Glorith, who at this point is essentially the arch-enemy of the Legion, wanted to enslave them, so they...and bear with me here....put their species' sentience into one of their number, who was stripped of his telepathy and shapeshifting skills for some reason. Anyway, he is the Soul of Antares.

And there's some more. So, the Soul of Antares decided to create a new identity for himself, that of James Cullen, Kid Quantum, who had some sort of belt that let him manipulate quantum...stuff. But his identity got compromised, so he faked his own death and has been hiding out on the planet Val ever since.

Okay, almost done. Apparently, seven other Antareans also had their sentience preserved, and so have been bugging R.J. Brande and Adult!Lightning Lad to find the Soul of Antares/Kid Quantum for a while now. Yeah, well, let's just go with it.

So, Adam Orion shows up on Val, and starts wrecking shit and taking hostages, looking for Kid Quantum, Chameleon Boy and Brande try and stop him and fail horribly. So, finally, Kid Quantum shows up to save his friends, but, before he can do that, we really need a page where the characters try and talk themselves into the idea that this whole set-up makes even the slightest bit of sense.

"Yep...no need to question it any further."

 

 

 

But, just as Adam Orion is about to do us all a favor and plug Kid Quantum in the skull, those sentient Antareans from earlier show up and stop him. And so Brande, Cham, and the Kid Quantum head off to Antares to restore the spirit of the Antareans people, except the Emerald Eye shows up to redirect them to a planet called Gallan. I'm beyond caring at this point.

Back on Earth, SW6!Lightning Lad is pissed that a bunch of his SW6 friends got killed last issue. SW6!Saturn Girl shows up and wonders why Garth is being such a dick. The short answer: because of retcon bullshit. The long answer...

The Long Answer (Take Two Aspirin Before Reading)

At this moment in Legion continuity, it had been established that when Lightning Lad was brought back to life, it was really just his body being possessed by the soul of Proty. Now, the SW6 Legion were originally from a time after Lightning Lad had died and come back to life, but, for some convoluted reason, the Bierbaums decided that SW6!Lightning Lad would have the soul of the real Lightning Lad, even though, from a continuity perspective, he should have the soul of Proty. The change in souls also affected Lightning Lad's personality, so SW6!Saturn Girl is confused to why Lightning Lad had reverted to the way he acted before he died, rather than his new personality after he came back from life. And that is exactly the sort of story knowledge and intuition you need in order to make sense of the closing scenes of this issue, which basically explains everything that was wrong with the Legion at the time.

Commentary

Why? Why did they make this story. I mean, if you want to make a new character, fine (although at this moment, readers already had to keep track of something like forty characters). But why retcon another new character into Legion history? It just makes the entire continuity that much more unstable.

As for the Kid Quantum character, well, he's a complete dud. I mean, he's such a dud that when Mark Waid had an edict from editorial to kill off a Legionnaire in the first issues of the reboot Legion, Kid Quantum was his sacrificial lamb.

But, yeah, he's the sort of character where, just due to his backstory, the other characters continually go, "Oh, man, remember the awesome times we had with Kid Quantum", even though no such stories were ever printed, which means if feels like we're something like 80% of the way to fanfiction.

So, yeah,  in summary, 1992 was a shitty year to be a Legion fan.

Damage Stars: *****