So as you may have heard, there's a new Legion of Superheroes comic. Strictly speaking, it's the fifth comic to bear that name, but who's counting? This version of the Legion is yet another reboot -- this is the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth continuity, but again, who's counting? The real question is: is it any good? Sad to say, it's not.
To begin with, let me get Waid's Legion bona fides out of the way. He's said time and again that he's a fan from way back. He's mentioned that writing the Legion is his dream job, although, to be honest, if I paid Waid to write my grocery list, two days later, he'd be on Newsarama explaining how writing my grocery list is his dream job, and he's always wanted a chance to put his own spin on my need for milk and english muffins. But be that as it may, I'll accept as a given that Waid loves the Legion. Of course, Tom and Mary Bierbaum loved the Legion, too.
So what has Waid given us? It's the 31st century, and adults are so totally square, man. Like, they won't even hit a giant robot when it's attacking downtown! They're all talking to each other on video screens even though they're standing five feet away from each other! Don't you get it, man? Parents just don't understand.
Yes, it's a comic about the generation gap. Slightly timelier than a comic about the space race, I suppose, but nowhere near as relevant as a comic about Watergate. The 31st century that Waid has chosen to portray is one in which the adults are stuffy and rule-bound, while the kids do the right thing. Just in case we miss the point, the 42-year-old Waid has replaced the usual Legion slogan -- "Long Live the Legion" -- with the much more pertinent "Eat it, Grandpa!" Why not just go with "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30?"
In this version of the Legion, we've got our core group of Legionnaires -- all those cool heroes that Otto Binder and Jerry Siegel and all the rest invented way back when. According to one character, there are 15 or 20 core Legionnaires at this point. On top of the core, though, there's a new concept -- any teenager can call himself a Legionnaire, and there are about 75,000 kids who do so. One generation got old; one generation got soul! It's an army of youth, and they're on the march!
All right, so the theme -- at least the obvious theme -- stinks on ice. But is it any good apart from that? Truth to be told, not really. This is a comic taken up by two big set pieces and one Deeply Touching Moment. The first is the "Legionnaires vs. Giant Robot" battle I alluded to before. We meet six Legionnaires, and we even find out what powers five of them have (sort of -- if you don't already know what Light Lass can do, the art and dialogue don't make it very clear). We then go back to Legion HQ, where we meet the latest Legionnaire -- Invisible Kid. Sun Boy spends a few pages showing Invisible Kid around without actually telling us, the readers, very much, and then it's off to the second big set piece: We follow the Legionnaires through the Transmatter Room, where they are teleported to war-torn Lallor.
Lallor is the site of our second big set piece: it seems that the adults, unhappy with the fact that their kids have taken up the banner of the Legion, have decided to do something about it by killing all the kids who pledged to the Legion. We enter Lallor in the midst of a slaughter, as armored troopers are killing innocent teenagers left and right. The Legion responds to this by ... standing around while their leader, Cosmic Boy, debates with the U.P. government about what to do. On the one hand, gee, it's a real delicate situation and golly, we wouldn't want to upset the intersteller political balance, yaka, yaka, yaka. On the other hand, there are people being brutally slaughtered. As Cosmic Boy spends half a dozen pages alternately debating with the government and explaining to his colleagues that there is a Really Good Reason not to stop the Lallor Slaughter, the rest of the Legion stops the Slaughter. Even Cos eventually comes around, breaking of his communication with the government by giving the new and improved Legion battlecry ("Eat it, Grandpa"). Well, in this case, it's more of a battle whimper, but you get the idea.
It's here that the comic shows some glimmer of possibility. Because the Slaughter of Lallor raises the possibility that this isn't a ham-fisted allegory about the generation gap: it could be a somewhat more subtle allegory about the Neocon movement. If you assume the Legion represents freedom loving people everywhere, with the core Legion as the U.S., the Legionnaires of Lallor could represent the Kurds, and the UP government could represent the UN. If you squint enough, you can sort of see Waid saying "When the Kurds rose up against Hussein, we should have gone right in to help them instead of sitting on our thumbs." This analogy ignores a lot of political realities, including the fact that we made our own decision not to help the Kurds for our own reasons, but it sort of works if you look at it just right. Besides, ignoring political realities to get soemthing that sort of works if you look at it just right is what the Neocon movement is all about. The real problem with reading this analogy into the story is that while it kind of fits with the Lallor piece of the comic, it doesn't really fit with the other two-thirds of the book. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if that's what Waid was going for as the series develops.
Finally, on to our Deeply Touching Moment: When we come home to Legion HQ, Invisible Kid asks Star Boy about the tent city of Legionnaires camped in front of Legion HQ. Star Boy tells a stirring story about the time the grown-ups tried to bulldoze Legion HQ and the tent city Legionnaires standing in front of the bulldozers. This is, of course, an analogy about the book itself, with the tent city Legionnaires playing the role of Legion fans, who have time and again stood in front of the bulldozers of cancellation.
The real problem for me, though, isn't the ham-fisted allegory, and it isn't the clumsy storytelling that neglects to introduce most of the characters by name and power. For me, the real problem is that it doesn't feel like a real Legion story. For me, the Legion in one sentence is "Young adult superheroes in an optimistic future." This Legion fails on two levels. First, the future is anything but optimistic. It feels like it's borrowed straight out of Brazil (the movie, not the country). Second, this Legion doesn't feel superheroic to me. They fight an army. Forget that. I want to see my Legion fighting supervillains or weird aliens. The giant robot felt right, but that was literally only one panel (a splash page, but still). Give me the Legion of Supervillains or Starfinger or Universo, not the Lallorian Fourth Regiment, Infantry Division.
This isn't to say that the comic is totally without redeeming features. Waid does a pretty good Grant Morrison impression, sprinkling off-the-wall ideas into the comic and leaving the reader to pick up on them as he or she will. Naming the giant robot a "Macrobot," for example was brilliant, and naming Reep "Chameleon" -- not "Chameleon Boy" -- is handled nicely. It's only when Waid tries to make it clear how clever he is that things get clunky; in particular, the exchange in which it's explained that Gim Allon (Colossal Boy) is not a regular-sized kid who can grow, but a giant kid who can shrink only serves to make Gim look really stupid.
Overall, then. you can color me unimpressed with the first issue of this bold new era for the Legion. I'll stick around -- hell, I stuck around through worse eras of the Legion, and I'll be damned if they'll chase me off from this one -- but I'm really hoping for improvement. I know Waid's capable of it -- his early post-Zero Hour run on the book with Tom Peyer and Tom McCraw was one of the better runs in the history of the book. But so far, this ain't it.
Posted by Jason Fliegel at January 1, 2005 3:10 PM