Stuart Immonen

This volume collects the second half of the so-called "Five Year Later" Legion—which is also the last two years of the original thirty-six-year Legion continuity. It not only collects the main Legion title and the Legionnaires spin-off, but also some issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. and Valor that tied into it. It's a pretty nicely put together collection, and it means that DC has collected all the Legion material from 1958 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1994 in hardcover. All they have to do is the five years of Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 (and some ancillary material from that time) and they'll be done. C'mon DC, you can do it! But as for this volume itself, I'll take it in chunks because it's so big:

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #40-48
These issues set up the new status quo for the Legion; you may remember that in the previous volume, a group of younger (cloned?) Legionnaire surfaced, the so-called "Batch SW6." The opening story sees the two Legions divvy up responsibilities; the older (original?) will take responsibility for the wider United Planets, while SW6 Legion will stay on "New Earth," the collection of linked domed cities that's all that's left following the destruction of the Earth.

Most of these nine issues are given over to a tedious storyline about the return of Mordru, using an army of the dead to try to take over the galaxy. I found the beats of this storyline very repetitive, and it dragged on and on. Writers Tom & Mary Bierbaum, on their own after co-plotting with Keith Giffen in the previous volume, are good at character moments and comedy, but I think not great at telling big stories; there are lots of nice moments and good ideas, but the overall story just isn't big enough to justify the space given to it. The art is excellent, though; well done Stuart Immonen especially.

Legionnaires #1-8
Legionnaires also starts with a multi-part story, this one about a new Fatal Five assembling to take down the new Legion. Again, it's okay but too drawn out, and again it has great art, here from Chris Sprouse.

What did really work for me in this set of eight issues were the last two, a pair of standalone stories. The first features some exquisite Adam Hughes art in an adventure where the Legion visits the Atlantis dome; the character driven stuff really suits the Bierbaums' strengths in a way that wasn't true of the earlier stories, and Hughes is all-time great when it comes to "acting"; his Legionnaires are expressive and lively. I would have loved to have seen a longer run from him on the Legion. There's also a Brainiac 5–focused story that I found so-so, but really shines thanks to some Colleen Doran art. Again, she's an all-time great, and Legionnaires was lucky to get her early in her career.

The fun thing about seeing the young Legion in a 1990s comic is that they come across as genuine teenagers in a way that wasn't really true of the 1960s squares of the era from which they were supposedly plucked.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #49-52 & Annual #4
This section opens with a "Bloodlines: Earthplague" annual; it is of course terrible, but all of 1993's Bloodlines annuals were, so I don't know how much we can blame the Bierbaums for this. (It is, however, kind of misplaced; it takes place during the Mordru storyline from earlier in the book.) A skateboarder dude with attitude gets powers and travels to the thirtieth century and lives it up... and it's just awful all around, not helped by some really bad art. (There are five credited pencillers and four credited inkers.)

The last four issues here are transitional standalones: a comedy Tenzil "Matter-Eater Lad" Kem story, a big celebration for the fiftieth, a story about Kent Shakespeare and some Legion-adjacent children, and a Timber Wolf story. Most are not great. The Tenzil one was nowhere near as funny as previous Tenzil adventures; I am not sure what happened there. The one about the kids was confusing; maybe I would have liked it more if I could remember who these characters were, but I mostly did not. (It's been over two years since I last saw most of them in the previous Five Years Later omnibus.) The Timber Wolf one mixes great Stuart Immonen art with terrible Christopher Taylor art, and seems like a bit of a regression for a character I don't particularly like to begin with.

That said, I did really like #50, which was also the swansong of the Bierbaums on the main book. One thing I've really liked about their run is the sense of the Legionnaires as real people that have grown and aged and come to terms with themselves, and that's really present in this issue; there's a great conversation between Light Lass and Timber Wolf, for example. There's a strong Element Lad focus here, which really works; I think they nicely picked up the baton of treating these characters as people in a way that Paul Levitz had begun and no one before him had. It's a shame all this work got wiped out by later writers, even when DC did return to the "original" Legion.

Legionnaires #9-15
I wouldn't call this great, but it's a reasonably strong run from the Bierbaums; instead of doing one big story, it's more in the classic 1980s style of the Legion, where there's a bunch of different stories on the boil all at once, rotating in prominence, with the character work being the main throughline. I think this plays to their strengths more than other work in the volume, and I think had they been allowed to stay on the title, they could have eventually made it great. Unfortunately, what should have been the best subplot (Kono and a disguised-as-a-woman Tenzil infiltrating space pirates) turns out to be the worst. I don't know how they screwed that one up but it just doesn't make sense at all.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #53-59
Tom McCraw's brief run on the Legion is freaking awful. They're once again on the run and against the government, which feels like a regression; they adopt stupid new codenames; they suddenly start acting and posing in a very 1990s "attitudinal" way. I don't really know what anyone was going for here but it was pretty badly done.

L.E.G.I.O.N. '94 #69-70 / Legionnaires #16-18 & Annual #1 / Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #60-61 & Annual #5 / Valor #20-23
First we get some pages from two issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. that wrap up Jo Nah's search for the missing Tinya Wazzo, though he finds out that L.E.G.I.O.N.'s Phase is no Tinya, but her cousin. This is a retcon I don't buy and tend to ignore, but good on DC for including the pages here. (I think these are the only issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. to ever be collected?) After that we get two Elseworlds annuals, one where the Legion are Arthurian knights in space, and one where it's an Oz riff. Neither is a great Elseworlds tale, though the Arthurian one has its moments.

Finally, we get a set of timebending Zero Hour tie-ins that draw this era of the Legion to an end. A couple issues of Valor are here, though Colleen Doran art aside, I don't rate them highly; even Mark Waid can't make this dud of a premise work. (The SW6 Valor has to replace the original Valor and do everything he did, but earlier and quicker, for some reason.) Then time anomalies begin threatening the Legion and Legionnaires in the thirtieth century, their continuity slipping around them; Cosmic Boy turns out to be the Time Trapper; a series of increasingly complicated but meaningless reveals about nothing are made. It's the worst kind of superhero comics, where what happens is more important than how.

And then it all comes to an end. I guess I can see why DC decided to start over with the Legion, but it seems to me that this was the beginning of the slow thirty-year death of the Legion. No longer was the Legion a single ongoing story to which different authors and artists added their bits, but rather it was now continuously jettisoned and started over arbitrarily. Even when later runs were strong (I do really like the "threeboot"), the overall health of the Legion as a concept never recovered. I wonder if there was a way to continue on from this era and make it work (probably such a way requires there to never have been an SW6 Legion) but we'll never know.

But regardless, this is a great collection in that it provides ready access to a key slice of DC history. Even the bad choices here are interesting, and the good choices are great. I'm pretty close to owning an unbroken 1958-94 run on the Legion, and I look forward to savoring this volume as the culmination of the original dream.… (more)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

In the first volume, Elsa seems like she could be the same character we knew from Bloodstone, just older, but in the series's second volume we are told she was raised by her father (not her mother, as established in her debut), who dropped her into monster pits as a baby in order to develop her skills. It passes my law of retcons: though different, I find it just as interesting as her old origin.

The book as a whole is good fun... one sort of feels like it's simultaneously (almost) Stuart Immonen's best work and like he was wasted a bit. Like, there's not a bad panel, scene, character, or composition here... but oughtn't he be illustrating things like Secret Identity or Moving Pictures? Though if they had got some hack to do this, it wouldn't have worked. At first I thought the whole thing was a bit of an Authority parody... then I remembered who wrote The Authority! But when I got to the end, I realized I was right. What kind of writer satirizes themself just six years later? Don't answer that, but it's funny anyway.

So is it great? I don't know. Is it worth your time? I don't know. But if Marvel reprinted the complete run at an affordable price again (I read it via Hoopla this time), I probably would pick it up. Healing America by beating people up!

Elsa Bloodstone: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (more)