Legion of Super Heroes - the Levitz/Giffen Era Reviews

[Zero Hunter]

I think the Legion Academy stuff Levitz did in his last run in Adventure Comics (issues 523-529)was some of the best stuff he has done since his original run. I liked how it showed that not every person at the Academy goes on to join the Legion. Some go back to their homeworlds to act as planetary heroes, some go on to join the Science Police, and some join the Legion proper. To me this is the kind of book Bendis should have been writing with all his new characters instead of rebooting the team.

[SJNeal]

^ ^ ^

This was honestly the only time the Legion Academy really worked for me! Jimenez gorgeous pencils played a big part in that I'm sure...

[Sutekh]

Yeah, these new Academy recruits rubbed me wrong at the beginning, since they seemed to be replacing Lamprey, Nightwind, etc. but I really was intrigued to learn more about Dragonwing, Glorith and Variable Lad, in particular.

[kcekada]

I wasn't as fond of Levitz's creations as I was of the fan-created characters. I always wondered if that had something to do with great-looking characters such as Nightwind, Lamprey, and Crystal Kid not being inducted into the Legion. I recall Jimenez creating Gravity Kid, I think. His costume was nod to the Cockrum/Grell era -- and he had a relationship with Power Boy, but I don't think even he made it to the Legion proper.

Dragonwing and the other new characters Levitz created didn't seem inspired to me.

That Legion Academy issue, though, did show the scope of the Legion and its potential. I think that mostly got discarded in the Giffen era which seemed to be more limited in scope -- despite being well-written. One thing I did miss when Nightwind and company showed again in Adventure Comics (almost 10 years ago!) was the lack of zip-a-tone used in her costume. The same thing happened after Frank Miller redesigned Black Widow's costume. Eventually, it would just be colored a dull grey.

Levitz's stories in Adventure Comics were more interesting than the ones he told when Legion was relaunched. I don't know if that was due to editorial interference or not, but something was lost from one to the other.

[caj]

I love the two endings too this issue. The scene between Wildfire and Dawnstar was heartbreaking. And those images of the statues of the dead Legionnaires put an exclamation point on the decision to not bring any new members in.

[kcekada]

You guys are forgetting that Saturn Girl's powers don't work that way. They aren't constantly on all the time. She's a telepath, not a perpetually function mind sensor. She has to actively turn her powers on and use it on a specific person. You guys are expecting her powers to function or be used in ways that up to this point they never had functioned before.

I will argue that there were many previous instances where her powers functioned exactly that way -- dating back to origin of the Legion. How else would she have known that R.J.Brande was about to be attacked?

Saturn Girl was much more formidable in her early Silver Age appearances. I recall when she won leadership by mentally persuading Legionnaires to vote for her (her reasons were altruistic). Someone who was masquerading as a Legionnaire and forming a relationship (including marriage!) would have been under a lot of emotion duress -- that should have been evident to Imra. I don't really recall any run ins between Imra and Yera -- so maybe the opportunity to pick up on the masquerade never presented itself. I'll give Levtiz a pass on that.

I don't really understand why her abilities became more and more limited. Conway even pushed her to have limited telekinetic abilities, but I guess Levtiz disavowed that, but for a founding member -- she just didn't seem to have much going for her in the 80s.

I found this description of her abilities on Wikipedia:

Saturn Girl's powers in her initial Silver Age appearances appeared to be great; she could summon distant people; probe human, electronic and animal minds; "push" weakened minds and even directly control others' thoughts and emotions. In later years, her abilities were portrayed more conservatively; her telepathy was used most often for communication or sensing surface thoughts, while her ability to influence and probe minds was usually limited to minds that had already been weakened in some way, such as by fatigue or a villain's mind control.

She did have one significant story line in The Universo Project, but I don't recall all the details of that arc. I found it odd that while Levitz was pushing the abilities of Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad, Imra had gone backwards in his run.

[caj]

I will argue that there were many previous instances where her powers functioned exactly that way -- dating back to origin of the Legion. How else would she have known that R.J.Brande was about to be attacked?

Great point!!!

I don't really recall any run ins between Imra and Yera -- so maybe the opportunity to pick up on the masquerade never presented itself. I'll give Levtiz a pass on that.

Imra was actually stranded on the icy asteroid with Yera and should've picked up that she was an imposter.

[kcekada]

Well, duh! Yes, right from the start -- the jig should have been up. The slack given to Levitz had now been rescinded.

[caj]

We're so close to Giffen's art going south.

However, I believe #304 was some of the best art he and Mahlstedt did during their time together. This issue was beautiful.

[Timber Wolf-By-Night]

I wasn't as fond of Levitz's creations as I was of the fan-created characters. I always wondered if that had something to do with great-looking characters such as Nightwind, Lamprey, and Crystal Kid not being inducted into the Legion. I recall Jimenez creating Gravity Kid, I think. His costume was nod to the Cockrum/Grell era -- and he had a relationship with Power Boy, but I don't think even he made it to the Legion proper.

Dragonwing and the other new characters Levitz created didn't seem inspired to me.

That Legion Academy issue, though, did show the scope of the Legion and its potential. I think that mostly got discarded in the Giffen era which seemed to be more limited in scope -- despite being well-written. One thing I did miss when Nightwind and company showed again in Adventure Comics (almost 10 years ago!) was the lack of zip-a-tone used in her costume. The same thing happened after Frank Miller redesigned Black Widow's costume. Eventually, it would just be colored a dull grey.

Levitz's stories in Adventure Comics were more interesting than the ones he told when Legion was relaunched. I don't know if that was due to editorial interference or not, but something was lost from one to the other.

I've seen it speculated by other Legion fans elsewhere that Levitz really didn't seem to care for any Academy student that he either didn't create himself or that he at least didn't place there himself. I mean, look at the students at the Academy in this issue before Jacques and Mysa show up. Who's the only one who, under Levitz's pen, ever joined the Legion? Pol Krinn, Cosmic Boy's already established younger brother, who has the same powers as Cos and is even wearing a duplicate of Cos's Adventure Comics era costume, who joins up only a couple of issues after Cos resigns from active duty, and who isn't even using an original name (I was surprised when I found out through Who's Who in the LSH that there as an earlier Magnetic Kid during the 60's). Even Grev, Shadow Lass's cousin, says out loud that he's not even intending to join the Legion, as long as his cousin's there.

Like many who started with the Legion in the early 80's, this issue was my first proper introduction to the Academy. And yet, looking back, not just on this issue but on Levitz's later work with the Academy in the 00's in the revived Adventure Comics run....the Academy is really a concept that is wasted under Levitz's pen. He refused to let any students actually join the Legion if they weren't his creations; if anything, he went out of his way, in the narrative, to paint students like Power Boy and Lamprey as "second-rate." He did more with Laurel Kent out of the Academy than was ever done with her in the Academy, and most of that was just tied into her pre-Crisis origins as a descendant of Superman (or alleged descendant, post-Crisis, after which he just got rid of her). He co-created Tellus, true, but he also created Dragonwing and Chemical Kid (and I guess co-created Comet Queen with Giffen), and those two were not well received by the audience. He did create students like Visi-Lad in the 80's and Variable Lad in the 00's that did generate at least some audience interest, but he did nothing with the first and ultimately killed off the second. Worse still, he seemed to regard the Academy at best as a place to stick Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel, without any seeming interest in doing anything with them. Sure, Bouncing Boy was part of the "new" Legion of Substitute Heroes, but that appeared in one annual only. And Luornu...after using her in the "Conspiracy" storyline, he kills off her second body, and seems to set up the possibility of her rejoining the Legion using Brainiac 5's force-shield belt, but goes nowhere with that. In fact, I think her last appearance before "Five Years Later" is her mulling over that possibility, then...nothing.

As for this issue itself....Invisible Kid II and the White Witch get sent to the Academy for this one issue, ostensibly because they both got recruited under exigent circumstances without any Legion Academy training and "need" to make up for this. However, all they do at the Academy is get mobbed by the actual students, hang out with them in their private quarters, and school the students when they argue over whether or not Wildfire is a jerk by showing them how lonely Wildfire as....what, some kind of lesson on the isolation of being a Legionnaire? It's a nice little look at a subplot being introduced about the "will-they-or-won't-they?" relationship between Wildfire and Dawnstar, but it advances the Academy students' story not one bit. There's a training mission involving escaped space zoo animals that is actually just a reworking of an earlier story's mission about the Academy trying to recapture escaped space zoo critters that Levitz penned in his first run on the Legion in the 70s! But the worst part of the issue and this look at the Academy is the bait-and-switch. The cover sets the reader up for an expectation that one of the Academy students will soon join the LSH (if not in the issue itself), only for a meeting of Legionnaires that takes place off-screen to basically say, at the end, that none of them will be joining. Juxtaposing Star Boy's for-the-record summation of said meeting with the montage of statues of dead Legionnaires only highlights Levitz's apparent belief that not one of the students is good enough to join, with the closing argument "...better no new Legionnaires than another dead one" implying that if any of these students join, they'll just end up dying. (And oh, the bitter irony that his final Legion story before Giffen and the Bierbaums take over, ends up doing just that: Magnetic Kid sacrifices his life just to move the plot along, and is allotted virtually no time to be mourned. Substitute-Cosmic-Boy ends up dying as a substitute for any "real" Legionnaire instead.)

[caj]

Timber Wolf, I definitely liked this issue a lot more than you did but there's no denying that you make some valid points.

[caj]

Legion of Super Bloggers review of Legion of Super Heroes #305 - the mystery of Shrinking Violet is finally solved, Dawnstar begins her quest for a mate, a mysterious villain begins an assault on an unknown world, and Colossal Boy makes a major decision.

http://legionofsuperbloggers.blogspo...eroes-305.html

[caj]

I had so many problems with this storyline:

1. I can't believe that in all of the bylaws of the Legion, there isn't a rule that says if someone discovers that there is a serious threat to the team or to a Legionnaire, that the Legion Leader must be told. How Element Lad, Cham, and Brainy chose to keep Dream Girl in the dark about this is ridiculous.

2. They make the decision to not involve Saturn Girl. They use a machine to probe Yera's mind when Imra could've done the same thing. And it would've been much more interesting using her in this story. Another time Levitz refused to use Saturn Girl's abilities.

3. Yera suffers no consequences for her actions. Regardless of how naïve she was (and she had to have been majorly naïve), at the end of the day, she impersonated a Legionnaire. She should've served some sentence for doing that. And even if they told her that Violet was sick, did it ever occur to her that the other Legionnaires would want to know this bit of info and be aware of where she was while she recuperated?

4. Colossal Boy looks over all that she's done and decides that he no longer loves Violet but wants to stay married to someone who deceived him and was impersonating a team member that put them in grave danger.

[Nomads1]

I had so many problems with this storyline:

1. I can't believe that in all of the bylaws of the Legion, there isn't a rule that says if someone discovers that there is a serious threat to the team or to a Legionnaire, that the Legion Leader must be told. How Element Lad, Cham, and Brainy chose to keep Dream Girl in the dark about this is ridiculous.

2. They make the decision to not involve Saturn Girl. They use a machine to probe Yera's mind when Imra could've done the same thing. And it would've been much more interesting using her in this story. Another time Levitz refused to use Saturn Girl's abilities.

3. Yera suffers no consequences for her actions. Regardless of how naïve she was (and she had to have been majorly naïve), at the end of the day, she impersonated a Legionnaire. She should've served some sentence for doing that. And even if they told her that Violet was sick, did it ever occur to her that the other Legionnaires would want to know this bit of info and be aware of where she was while she recuperated?

4. Colossal Boy looks over all that she's done and decides that he no longer loves Violet but wants to stay married to someone who deceived him and was impersonating a team member that put them in grave danger.

Yeah, it was kind of a Ms Marvel/Immortus' son/Avengers #200 love story. Really not well thought out. They had an end game they wanted in sight, and screw it how we'll get there.

Peace

[kcekada]

Pol Krinn was a disappointing choice. I don't know if Levitz planned on killing him all along. If so, I can respect his choice to kill off one of his own characters. I wish he would at least have gotten a new outfit instead of his brother's outdated Silver Age costume.

I'll always appreciate the work that both Levitz and Giffen did on the Legion, but both also made decisions that hampered the team's long term appeal.