When DC decided to try and revive the old Archie heroes, Legend of the Shield was one of the first two series. It ran 16 issues, which was middle of the pack for the Impact! line, and was centered primarily on Joe Higgins, once a promising young officer, until railroaded under false charges.
Grant Miehm, who was plotter as well as artist for most of the series, goes somewhere between The Fugitive and The Incredible Hulk (TV show) style story. We learn in the first issue Joe's paranoid, authoritarian bully of father, General Higgins, was behind his conviction, because Joe could only be considered for the Shield project as an enlisted man, not an officer. Joe learns this by the beginning of issue 3, and spends the next 10 issues on the run, using the Shield armor to help reporters, politicians, kids in trouble from gang violence, while also trying to find some allies to help clear his name.
The fugitive thing does end, as Joe confronts his father in a kangaroo court and partially clears his name. The original Shield is involved, which has Mark Waid's (who is credited with dialogue most of the time) fingerprints all over it, as Joe's armor is the best the military could do to re-create the original version.
Joe's has some bulletproof alloy, but also can create an electromagnetic field if he clasps his hands together. I guess it's like completing a circuit. I like the design (which I'm guessing was Miehm's work) better than the original's. The shoulder/chest piece being smaller looks better to me and doesn't raise as many questions in my mind about how Joe manages to bend at the waist.
The book pivots briefly to a different character wearing the Shield armor, but it never feels like it's going to stick, and it doesn't. Although once Joe's back in the suit, he's rocking one of those terrible super-long '90s ponytails like Nightwing had for a while. Just awful.
The abrupt end of the line, like with The Jaguar, left several threads unanswered. While Joe was evading his father's attempts to kill him, there was a secretive crime lord industrialist type trying to figure out how to use the Shield to his own purposes. Joe confronts him once, but is forced to help him. There's never any conclusion to that. They don't really explain why Joe kept having weird visions of the original Shield trying to speak to him, either. So it goes.
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