Probably should have done Legionnaires first, since Abnett and Lanning's first issue of that appeared before their first issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, but oh well.
I don't know if there was a functional difference in the two Legion books over most of their run. if one was the "big events" and the other "small character stuff". For the 4 issues before both books ended, there's not really any difference in evidence. Abnett and Lanning's first Legionnaires serves to both get a handful of Legionnaires off Earth, so they can return in the midst of the Blight's conquest and go "WTF?", and also to set up something that wouldn't be paid off for a couple of years.
The Legion defeat the Blight, and then the books deal fallout from the invasion. Earth and several other worlds are heavily damaged, and the United Planets are reluctant to risk exposure by helping. There's also a power play to oust Legion booster R.J. Brande, and ban the Legion entirely, in favor of superheroes who are legally adults (and presumably more amenable to how the adults running the U.P. want things to be.) There's some push and shove around a failing stargate, and several members of the team are killed in a massive explosion.
(I assume the cast's ages were reset by Zero Hour, since I can't imagine they would still have been teenagers after the Five Years Later thing I know Giffen and the Bierbaums did years earlier.)
So let's try and talk about artists. That first Legionnaires issue was drawn by Jeff Moy, who I think had been drawing one or the other of the Legion books for a while. The art's very clean, kind of a early Bryan Hitch (when he was imitating Alan Davis) look. Tom McCraw's colors are bright. It's futuristic adventure and teen melodrama, but things are mostly OK for the heroes.
Then the Blight story starts, and Oliver Coipel steps in as penciler. Lanning inks his work heavily, thick outlines for characters, lots of shading lines on faces and bodies. Everyone looks ragged and underfed, worn down. The cities, when we see them, are shattered and sometimes barely distinguishable shapes. If there are people in those shots, they're tiny scurrying dots, like early mammals in some artist's depiction of the extinction of the dinosaurs. It's a long way from the approach Coipel would take on, for example, his Thor run with JMS, where there were a lot of panels spent on showing the grandeur of a new Asgard, and the gods tended to look very clean and neatly defined.
Angel Unzueta (with Jamie Mendoza as inker) handle the last two issues of Legion, while Adam Dekraker and Lanning draw the last Legionnaires finale. Dekraker's closer to Moy's style, albeit with a tendency to give character a look of shock that's almost a duck-face (pursued lips extending noticeably from their face.) Unzueta's got a little manga to his art, less exaggerated Humberto Ramos. In either case, the characters look more composed than during the Blight arc, closer to the optimistic teens they were before. McCraw lightens the colors up again. A lot fewer panels overwhelmed with shadows, less dark purple. The costumes pop off the page again. Things were bad, but they're going to fix the damage, if the United Planets will let them.
2 comments:
It was Coipel's art that sold me on the series when I saw it reviewed; I'd never read a single issue of any Legion comic before then, and maybe less than ten DC comics in total, not counting Vertigo.
I loved the scratchy, worn look to everything. It all looked grimy and rough and splendid.
As I said in a previous post, it took DC a long time to collect the issues, so the next/first time I saw Coipel's art was in Avengers, after Busiek left. I was quite excited to finally catch up... and his Avengers art was completely different. Much cleaner and bolder, but it had also lost all the rough scritchy-scratchiness I loved in those Legion excerpts.
The stories were garbage too, but that wasn't Coipel's fault.
I think Avengers was probably where I first encountered Coipel, certainly the first time I remember it, so the Legion stuff was kind of a "whoa, what happened" reaction. I was thinking it was just Chuck Austen's run, but then I remembered Coipel drew at least a few issues of Johns' Avengers, the "Red Zone" arc for sure.
Which at least gave us a lovely panel of Black Panther breaking the Red Skull's jaw, but also tried to make Gyrich not a completely miserable piece of crap. I sure didn't need that.
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