SARLSH, Part 6, By Johnathan

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SENSOR GIRL

I know I'm pretty casual about the ol' spoilers when the stories that I'm writing about were printed 20+ years ago, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. The mystery of who Sensor Girl actually is is kind of a neat one and I wish that I hadn't known going in. So fair warning: if you don't already know and you think that you might be reading through the relevant Legion comics some day, skip this review.

ONE LAST SPOILER ALERT

Okay, on with the review. Sensor Girl joined the Legion at the same time as Polar Boy and so forth, without any testing or auditions. Saturn Girl merely read her mind and vouched for her suitability. This occasioned no small amount of comment, but Sensor Girl made it in. Her powers and abilities weren't spelled out right away but rather revealed piece-by-piece over the course of a fair number of issues. As I recall (I'm not at my own computer as I write this) she showed a wide range of enhanced senses, plus the ability to remove the senses of another, plus the occasional anomalous occurrence of super strength and suchlike.

Eventually, everyone was going nuts trying to figure out who she was - half the team thought that she had mind-controlled Saturn Girl or was Saturn Girl herself and the other half thought that she was somehow the recently-Anti-Monitored-to-death Supergirl, especially poor Brainiac 5. Ultra Boy tried to peek at her with his Penetra-vision (and my inner English major pegs this as possibly the ultimate expression of the Male Gaze) only to discover that she was apparently an empty costume, just flying around! The Legion was wracked with consternation!

Who was she, you ask? Turns out, she was Princess Projectra, filled with sadness over Karate Kid's death and unable to just hang out on Orando but not quite square with the Legion after, you know, murdering Nemesis Kid. The super-senses were new - she got them from ancestor spirits or something - but everything else was skillfully-applied illusion power. And the Legion must have enjoyed the mystery enough to overlook one little murder. Actually, the same thing happened with Star Boy, didn't it? He killed someone, waited a little while, put in an appearance in a new costume and ka-pow! all is forgiven and forgotten, murder-wise. Maybe it's just the novelty of seeing a new costume around the place?

Speaking of costumes, I like this one. As a Canadian, a red-and-white colour scheme evokes feelings of a patriotic nature within me (this is why I always vote for Santa Claus). As well, I am inordinately fond of double-breasted uniforms like Captain Marvel's and though this isn't quite that, it mimics the style enough for mine eyes. The only thing that I don't like about this costume is the super-wide shoulders, but it wouldn't really be a mid-Eighties costume design without some hint of that decade's awful, awful fashion sense.

Shoulders and all, she's:

JOHN APPROVED

Oops! A Retrospective Review, By Johnathan

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Gah, I just realized that I completely missed an opportunity to review something as it was happening, rather than ten to forty years after the fact.. Action Comics No. 862 featured one of the best portrayals of the Legion of Substitute Heroes ever. I wish that I had my copy of that issue on hand to scan a few exemplary panels, but most of my nerdish literature is packed up in anticipation of an early May move. In essence, this version of the Subs struck a fantastic balance: they were funny without being ridiculous and effective while still being obviously unready for the Legion proper. Best of all, they weren't whiners - they didn't just sit around crying about how they weren't good enough and should just give up and go home before the real Legion told them off. This super-enthusiastic bunch of devil-may-care screwups is basically fantastic.

Plus: Rainbow Girl! Back in continuity after twenty or thirty years, with more interesting powers that justify her rejection from the Legion (better than that 'her green form is kryptonite' crap, anyway) and tenuously tied into the highly compelling stuff going on in Green Lantern right now! Rainbow Girl, yeah!

Friggin' right it's JOHN APPROVED

SARLSH, Part 5, By Johnathan

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QUISLET

Yay, Quislet! Quislet was fun! I miss him.

Quislet was an energy being from a dimension of such. He basically flew around in a special little spaceship all of the time, and had the power to leap out of it and inhabit inanimate matter, thus animating it as illustrated here, in what is possibly the best example of someone's power in this whole collection of images. That robot looks sassy! Quislet tended, in fact, to create pretty fun shapes while inhabiting things. The other aspect of his power (not mentioned above, for shame) was that once he had occupied some matter for long enough it disintegrated, which I always thought was a neat little caveat. I don't know that it really featured very much in the stories, though... I think that maybe he destroyed a vital part of some super-villain's evil machinery once by inhabiting it, but not much else springs to mind.

The closest I've ever come to figuring out Quislet's name is that it's derived from quisling, and means something like "little traitor" - which is kind of apt since he was a free-thinking outsider in his home dimension and stole his little ship from his people, but I don't know if I, in a similar situation, would advertise this pseudo-treachery whilst trying to join a super-heroic group.

Mr. Untranslatable was a "wacky alien" type of character, the kind that doesn't quite think like everyone else and watches/quotes a lot of television (presumably. It's never shown but it's implied). I found him a nice departure from the so-very-serious Legion that had developed by the time he was inducted, but I guess that others didn't think so. He eventually lost his spaceship and had to go back to his home dimension, and despite the fact that he was likely assimilated or killed by his people once he got there, basically no one has mentioned him since. Hell, he didn't even get a statue, even though it'd be more like a model kit. This, I think, shows some level of disdain on the part of Legion writers. Sad sad sad.

Quislet is JOHN APPROVED, while his treatment is NOT APPROVED.

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!