SARLSH, Part 4, By Johnathan

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POLAR BOY

I've discussed Polar Boy as a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes in a prior review, so this time I'm just going to talk about his time in the Legion proper, so as to avoid repeating myself. After years and years of trying, Brek Bannin finally became a Legionnaire at the same time as Magnetic Kid et al, whether due to the fact that he'd been doing a really good job in the Legion farm team for years and years or because they needed a few more folk around the clubhouse for tax purposes, I'm not sure. I was pretty fond of Legion Polar Boy, both because I had always liked him and because he had attained this huge goal that had coloured his whole life and it completely showed in whatever he did. When he was hanging out with the other new recruits he was full of good advice from his days in the Subs, while around the old-school Legionnaires he just tried so damn hard, to the point that he campaigned for and won leadership of the Legion. He made a good leader, too, as far as his being readable is concerned - instead of instantly becoming a giant dick (see Wildfire, Lightning Lad) or constantly doubting himself (see Lightning Lad). I mean, he did doubt himself, but for good reasons, as he was constantly struggling with the fact that he was now the leader of a big, complicated organization like the Legion instead of something small and simple like the Substitute Legion.

What I didn't like about this iteration of PB was the costume. I mean, he always had a lousy costume, what with the lavender and the fur trim and all. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more fashion-conscious Legionnaires (Uh... I'm sure that there have been some. Saturn Girl? No no, the pink thing. Well, maybe Brainiac 5 was testing a fashionist-o-matic or Blockade Boy was visiting or something) voted against him because of that thing. This new costume is... close. If only it were, say, light blue instead of lavender. Also, I hate the weird shoulder hoops. I understand that Polar Boy is a small guy and he needs to compensate to some extent, but sheesh. take those things off, though, maybe slap the old costume's logo on the back and this could be an okay costume. The skullcap alone, as a replacement for the toque-cowl, was a giant step in the right direction.

As for the 'demonstration of powers' portion of this picture... well, it's somewhat lacking. Blasting out a snowman is a very 1960s Iceman stunt, really. Polar Boy was usually more about volume of ice produced rather than being concerned with what form it took, but as I recall, his sculptures were always a bit nicer than this. I don't know - seeing as how he's adopting essentially the same pose as Element Lad did, wouldn't it make more sense for him to have produced a snowflake-ized version of that stupid big atom?

Ayup, Polar Boy is:

JOHN APPROVED

(EDIT: Note the shift in spacing toward the end. You may have noticed this in earlier posts - this is a symptom of me having written a review on another computer and taken it home one way or another to cut and paste. Blogger does not like this - perhaps it views the writing of posts in another program as some sort of cyber-infidelity. In any case, until I find a quick and efficient way to fix this sort of thing and/or I stop writing reviews in inappropriate settings, we all get to suffer through inconsistent formatting)

(PS: These Legion reviews are kind of serious compared to my regular stuff, huh? I don't know if anybody cares, but if you do, rest assured that there'll be all kinds of Superhuman Detritus, Future Zoo-ing, High-Tech Tomorrows and Detective Comics Firsts, soon soon soon. Heck, I might even finally get the Henchman Fashion File off the ground. In the meantime, scroll down - Paul posted!)

Comic Foundry Rules

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No time to do comic reviews this past week, but I do want to take a moment to praise the awesomeness of Comic Foundry Magazine. Issue #2 came out last week (this time in full colour!) and it is seriously great.

It's like if everything awesome about the comic book community came to life...and then maybe got cursed or something and became a magazine instead of a living thing.
Finally a magazine for smart, funny, cool comic fans!
The cover feature of the new issue is an interview with Matt Fraction...and, hey, putting an actual comic creator on the cover of a magazine instead of a picture of, like, Captain America?...nice one!
Also in this issue...
  • A fashion feature on how to get Jimmy Olsen's look!
  • An interview with Dinosaur Comics' creator Ryan North!
  • All-Star Batman & Robin drinking game!
  • Interview with Kristen Bell!
  • A Venture Bros. Article!
  • Album covers by comic artists!
  • A letter from me!

It's super great. Support this effort by buying at least one copy!

SARLSH, Part 3, By Johnathan

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MAGNETIC KID

There was a point not long before this guide was released that the three charter members of the Legion of Super-Heroes had all semi-retired. Lightning Lad and Saturn girl had gotten married and had a baby (and a Validus!) and Cosmic Boy was... doing stuff. I don't know, maybe he was working on his music or something. In any case, this paved the way for the newly re-electrified Lightning Lass, the somewhat-telepathic Tellus and Magnetic Kid, who was Cosmic boy's little brother, Pol.

Now, Pol had been kicking around Legion continuity for a while. He got blown up pretty good in the late Seventies (by terrorists, I think) and kicked around the Legion Academy for much of the early Eighties, which might provide a clue as to why Cosmic Boy retired all of a sudden: his parents called him up and told him that it was Pol's turn to be a super-hero.

Pol was okay, I guess. He was a bit wide-eyed and inexperienced, which was refreshing, but the group was pretty big while he was on it, and therein lay the problem: when he wasn't saying anything, Magnetic Kid was indistinguishable from Cosmic Boy. It's kind of puzzling, actually. I mean, if I had the same superpowers as my brother (note: I think my brother's powers are headbutt-based) and I joined a group in which my brother had been a charter member and served on for years, I think that I might dress a little differently than him, rather than wearing, oh, the same costume. Seriously Pol - you went so far as to use a different hero name, so why not mix up the outfit a bit, too? A little blue instead of pink, maybe a hat? A vintage pinstripe suit with a horseshoe magnet on the lapel? Hell, if you're ripping off Rokk's costume designs why not kit up in the one with the fishbowl helmet? Kids (nine hundred and seventy-odd years from) today...

Not a bad picture, though. A lot more action than the last few have had, for one thing, and for another, I like the swirly blue magnetism. I also like that Magnetic Kid is using his magnetism to levitate what is patently a stone block. I'm sure that if we were to examine it we'd find a cannon ball lodged in the far side or something, but still.

**SPOILERS FOR THE MAGIC WARS AHEAD (if you care)**

Magnetic Kid also had what was possibly the most pointless Legion death ever. During the Magic Wars (which I found somewhat dreary to begin with) the team tracked the awful evil totally forgettable bad guy to one particular planet (was it the Sorcerer's World? I can't remember. Probably - writers love blowing that place all to hell) only to find that it was encased in a magical shell that could only be opened by the sacrifice of a human life. Magnetic Kid bravely gives his life to open the shield... and it turns out that that was exactly what the evil guy wanted. Further, from what I gathered from reading the rest of the story, he was eventually going to bust out of there himself. So Pol Krinn died so that the Legion could get to the bad guy maybe half an hour earlier. Whee!

For pointless deathery and bad costume decisions, Magnetic Kid is:

NOT APPROVED

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes (SARLSH), Part Two, By Johnathan

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INVISIBLE KID II


There is a rule that I just came up with: Invisible Kids have lousy costumes. The original, Lyle Norg, had that brown-and-green workout outfit with the headband and all and poor Jaques up there has that yellow-and-black monstrosity. Heck, even the current, totally rebooted and up-to-date and not dead Invisible Kid looks like he just grabbed four or five random things from his closet and called it a costume. It's kind of like they want to be sure that their power will be appreciated every single time that they use it. "Oh, thank Space-God, Jaques. That thing was starting to sear my retinas."

Jaques Foccart got to be the second Invisible Kid basically through random chance. He had come to Legion HQ to get Brainiac 5 to make his sick sister well and then Computo had shown up again and possessed said sister, possibly using nanotechnology. Since Jaques had no powers or anything, Computo just totally ignored him to focus on beating up Legionnaires and in the confusion our pal drank some of the original Invisible Kid's formula (that was just, you know, lying around) and saved the day somehow (it's been a while since I've read the story, okay?). Computer-tyrants take note: underestimate Frenchmen at your peril. Afterward, Jaques joins the team and does okay. Oh, and at one point he starts teleporting as well as turning invisible and ends up in some weird hellscape and finds out that poor Lyle Norg didn't end up boinking some ghost-babe for the rest of time but rather was suffering eternal torment, which was a bit of a bummer.

I like that Invisible Kid II was named Jaques Foccart, because I was an English major and so occasionally read it as Jaques Focault, who would have the combined powers of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and have a giggle while I imagine him deconstructing the semiotic of the super-hero team (or something like that. I was an English major a while ago). Also, he's from Côte d'Ivoire and as far as I know is the only superhero ever to come from there. Dammit, except for his sister, eventually.

This picture, however... eesh. I kind of hope that it was accidentally released unfinished, because invisibility is really the easiest power to illustrate ever. Just make the outline of his legs dotted instead of solid about halfway down and then ask the colourist to fade out the yellow at about that point. Ta-da! You did it! Alternate method: leave the whole panel blank. As it stands, this is just terrible as a showcase for the character. I mean, when Superman has a shot where he's just standing there with his arms folded, he's at least hovering a foot or so off the ground, right? Take some notes, Jaques.

Invisible Kid II had two modes: brooding and surprised. In the first, he thought a lot about how his sister was sick (she was in a tube for a couple of years before Brainiac fixed her) and how invisibility was a lame power, which showed that he didn't think about the implications of having superpowers so much as read old Maxim articles about lame super-heroes. Don't listen to them, man! Sure you can't fly through the sun, but the sun's boring. You can fly through, say, the changing rooms of the stars. Plus, you can punch villains on the back of the head, which I for one have always wanted to do to Universo. In the other mode, Jaques shocased the fact that he wasn't a super-scientist or an adventurer or something, just some guy who had drank some goop. Every time that Validus or Darkseid or whoever would show up he would jump about a foot and shout "WTF!" Okay, he would shout "Sacre coeur!" but the spirit of the thing was the same. For me, it never got boring.

And that's pretty much that, Invisible Kid II-wise. Except to note that of all of the bad hairdos, post Five Year Gap, his was the worst. Still, on the balance:

JOHN APPROVED

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part One, By Johnathan

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Ahaha! Time to review alla the Legionnaires that I haven't yet gotten around to! Uh, pre-Five Year Gap, of course. We'll leave that can of worms for a later date.

BLOK

I like Blok. I'm kind of sad to learn that he has no name, though. Silly me, thinking that it was Blok, all this time.

Blok was from the planet Dryad, which had at some point exploded. The Legion was on hand to evacuate, and for some reason a group of Dryadan youngsters assumed that since the Legion was there that they were the ones who blew the place up and so they swore eternal vengeance, got powers from a jerk named the Dark Man and started calling themselves the League of Super Assassins (and just to be on the safe side, they also swore vengeance against grass, because the whole damn planet was covered in it, as well as the sun, for just floating there and watching the place blow up). As so frequently happens, they almost killed the entire Legion on their first try but afterward never quite managed to pull it together again.

The only Super-Assassin to go anywhere other than a seat next to Ronn Karr at the Legion of Super-Villains annual benefit dinner was Blok, who had never been that struck on killing people anyway. He ended up with a light jail term because he'd helped to capture the rest of his team and tried out for Legion membership once he got out of the clink (and he completely schooled Lamprey, Nightwind and Crystal Kid while doing it, which makes me happy). Blok made a really neat Legionnaire and a great requisite Big Strong Team Member. He started out fairly clueless about how human society worked (oh yeah: he's not a human made of rock, he's an alien. Made of rock) and unlike a lot of similar characters never quite lost that trait, which was charming. He spent a lot of time watching the Legion mission logs and palling around with the White Witch and being philosophical and introspective - not quite as unusual today for a Big Strong Tough Guy but definitely a refreshing variation on the type.

As you can see, Blok liked to wear his pants hiked up real high, which I would hate except for the fact that it's so distinctive that I like it for its uniqueness. I just wish he'd wear some sort of solid colour instead of horrible stripes alla the time. Ah, well. at least this picture showcases big shoulder pads in their optimal environment - on someone with big shoulders - rather than in a less-than-suitable one, such as everywhere else that big shoulder pads have been used as a costume element, ever.

This is also a decent shape for Blok. By which I mean that he looks a lot less hideous than he frequently did back then. See, back in the old days, Blok kept getting redesigned - first he was kind of tall with a horrible neck-frill kind of thing, then he was squat with no nose, then he had these kind of erupting craters on his shoulders... I think that they eventually said that it was some sort of mutation based on environmental conditions or something but I'm thinking it was just a series of artists who hated drawing him the old way, or felt like messing with the rock guy, or whatever. The only good redesign wasn't really one, it was just this one time that Blok got all shot up and the scars and craters stayed with him for literally years. It was very very cool, in that a character's physical state is usually pretty resistant to change. Even though Batman or whoever has a broken leg and comic book time passes at about the rate of a month a year, he'll be fully recovered by next issue.

Evidently, I like Blok enough that I don't have anything particularly funny to say about him (the picture doesn't help - he should be standing there holding a train over his head or something. All this picture says is "I'm large and I like to accessorize with yellow"). I was sad when he eventually fell victim to the great purge of post-1975 (or so) characters that eventually swept through Legion comics. Booo! bring back Blok, because he is:

JOHN APPROVED