Welcome, to The Year 3000! I don't have much Legion of Super-Heroes stuff, and it's all from the Abnett/Lanning team, but we're giving it the next 5 weeks here on Sunday Splash Page.
After a main feature story in Legion of Super-Heroes Secret Files #2, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning took over writing both Legion of Super-Heroes and Legionnaires. I know, I'm struggling to conceive a world where the market supported two Legion books. Although it only did that for another 4 months, so maybe I shouldn't bother.
Most of the brief runs on both books were taken up with the "Blight" storyline. A fore swoops in and takes control of the Earth, isolating by disabling the stargates. The Blight takes control of members of the Legion, using them to bring captives to "The Stem" a mysterious tower where no one is sure what's going on. A few Legionnaires are left hiding in the shadows, doing their best to bring civilians to safety, but running low on hope, until reinforcements arrive.
Abnett and Lanning used a similar outline for Annihilation: Conquest when they were writing for Marvel about 7 years later. It's not a perfect mirror. The Blight are a species so advanced the only thing left to conquer was death. So one of them seems to have contacted Entropy itself, turning them into essentially vampires. The Phalanx didn't have much of a goal until they encountered Ultron's consciousness and were subsumed. And he was trying to work towards the perfect melding of organic and technological. But the heroes being scattered, outnumbered, cut off from any retreat. Faced with former friends forcibly converted to enemies.
The Legion, being the Legion, find a way to free a sort of sentient energy species the Blight had enslaved, enabling it to reach the next stage in its life cycle in a brilliant display of light and color (although it doesn't really come off in the art. A few panels of a cream-colored ribbon traversing a stellar sky.) Whereas the Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova basically wrecked Ultron and did their best to wipe out the Phalanc, so different strokes for different folks.
There are a lot of characters, but Abnett and Lanning tend to break the team up into smaller groups and focus on one or two. Maybe write an issue from one specific character's perspective. I don't know most of the casts' backstories, but I get enough about their powers and personalities for it to work. There's a fair amount of romantic drama and general angst flying around in the background. Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad thinking about marriage. Ultra Boy being a little too clingy with Phantom Girl. I didn't feel wildly invested in all that, but it adds depth, and helps to illustrate the personalities.
4 comments:
I remember seeing some panels printed in a review in (I think) SFX and being entranced, but I wasn't able to get the actual comics. I think because the review was printed months after the original issues.
DC eventually collected Legion Lost, the follow-up story, and I got that, but they waited a few years before they finally collected Legion of the Damned, and I was at last able to read the story that first grabbed my attention.
Anyway, I liked it.
I was able to pick up the 2-volume Legion by Abnett and Lanning tpbs DC released in 2017. The first volume had these comics, the second volume is Legion Lost.
Yeah, the Legion of the Damned collection I have is the 2017 release. The Legion Lost collection is from 2011. Good old DC, releasing the first half of a two-part story six years after the second half!
Throwing a bone to the back issue market? "We'll wet their whistle with the second half, then they'll go to you schulbs to find the first half! Win-win!"
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