After Civil War, the Young Avengers next appeared in a miniseries called Young Avengers Presents. This is collected in the Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung omnibus, but I picked it up on its own in a used bookstore way back when, so I read that copy instead. Much easier to hold a trade paperback than a giant hardcover!
Writers: Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction
Artists: Paco Medina & Juan Vlasco, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks & Jaime Mendoza, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis & Mark Farmer
Colorists: Nathan Fairbairn, Jay David Ramos, Christina Strain, Brian Reber, Paul Mounts
Letterer: Cory Petit
The miniseries consists of six issues, each focused on a single member of the Young Avengers (except for #3, which teams up Wiccan and Speed) in the wake of Civil War. I'm not as plugged into big Marvel events the way I am into DC ones, so I had to work out some stuff here from context that must have happened in titles not focused on the Young Avengers: mostly they are working on the side of the Avengers who have gone underground because they are illegal, except for Cassie "Stature" Lang, who is working for the Initiative, which I think is the legit, government-registered superhero team? Since (or in?) Civil War, Captain America is dead, the Young Avengers met Bucky, and Hawkeye and Captain Marvel came back to life. Mostly this fine, though; I was able to follow along, except it would have been nice to know what made Cassie part from her comrades and pick the Initiative instead.
Each story has a different creative team, but there are no duds here. The writing in each story is great, and in most cases the art is too. I'll take it story by story; the first is Ed Brubaker, Paco Medina, and Juan Vlasco's tale of Patriot. This is one of the highlights of a strong volume; Eli "Patriot" Bradley is questioning his own name. How can he be a "patriot" for a country that did what it did to his grandfather and so many others, that refuses to see patriotism unless it's jingoism? With Hawkeye's help, he seeks out—in the absence of Captain America—his erstwhile sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky can't give him any answers, which I think makes the story all the stronger: two people trying to find the America they aspire to. Brubaker is generally a strong writer but not one I'd associate with teen heroes, to be honest, so it's pleasing to see him do such a good job here, and the art by Medina and Vlasco matches him well, detailed and realistic, with good command of faces, which is needed in a dialogue-heavy story. A strong opening to the volume.
The second story, about Hulking, is equally strong. In the original Young Avengers story, Hulkling discovered that his mother wasn't really his mother, but that he was the son of the Kree warrior Captain Marvel and a Skrull princess; his supposed mother was killed. At the time, his parentage was academic because Captain Marvel was dead—but this is comics, and Brian Reed and Harvey Tolibao's story begins with him seeking out his recently resurrected father. I found this really sharp and astute, a boy and a man trying to reach out and forge a connection where none exists. Sure, they are father and son, but they share only DNA, not any kind of emotional bond. It's quite sad, and really well done. I think of the five OG Young Avengers, Hulkling and Wiccan were the two who felt the least fully formed to me, and this does a good job of remedying that when it comes to Hulkling.
We then move onto a story of Wiccan and his twin-from-another-mother, Speed; they theorize that they are the lost souls of the children of the Scarlet Witch, and in this story they set out together to find her. Once again, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Alina Urusov really nail it. It's good to see some actual interaction between the twins, there are great jokes, and I appreciated getting some depth on the often glib Speed. Urusov's art is strong, and I really liked the way the two interacted with a former Avengers villain.
Next comes Paul Cornell, Mark Brooks, and Jaime Mendoza's story of Vision, who has the consciousness of the former Iron Lad (and future Kang the Conqueror) loaded into him, though it's almost equally a story of Stature, with whom Iron Lad shared a kiss before he returned to his doomed place in the timestream. Cornell of course does a great job by both characters; I have been a little skeptical of including the kind-of adult Vision as one of the Young Avengers, but Cornell sold me on him for the first time here. Particularly strong is the depiction of Cassie, though; it seems more like her story than his to be honest! It is let down a bit by the art, which struggles to depict Cassie's size-changing in general, and a moment where she size changes at the same time the Vision phases in particular.
The actual Stature-focused story is also a good one. Kevin Grevioux centers the story around her family: Cassie is struggling with her mother and stepfather much as they are struggling with her, and her emotional state causes her to progressively shrink further and further. I liked the focus on the Young Avengers as friends here; the story isn't just about her, but also Kate, Billy, and especially Eli trying to help her, and it's well done. Cassie is probably my favorite Young Avenger. I did find Mitch Breitweiser's art a bit stiff, not always up to the emotional moments.
Finally, we end on a story about Hawkeye finally meeting Hawkeye, that is to say, Kate Bishop finally meeting Clint Barton. It's written by Matt Fraction; I think this is the first time he wrote either character, and he would go on to write an acclaimed run featuring Clint with Kate as a co-star. It's a bit predictable but fun enough; Kate is my second-favorite Young Avenger, and he captures her well. And, of course, you can't go wrong with Alan Davis and Mark Farmer on art.
Overall, it's a strong volume; I had expected to like maybe half of the stories, not all of them! Handing characters largely the work of one creative team off to others can be a fraught undertaking, but every writer here demonstrated a great grasp of their Young Avengers, and in all but a couple cases they were well-matched by the art. In the absence of ongoing adventures for the Young Avengers, I'm glad Marvel saw fit to release this.
This is the second in a series of posts about the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye. The next installment covers part 3 of Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung. Previous installments are listed below:
I think The Emerald Wand of Oz and Trouble Under Oz were intended to be the first two of four books authorized by the Baum Family Trust, published by book packager Byron Preiss and publisher HarperCollins. But Byron Preiss died in a car accident, and I think the books didn't sell very well anyway.
But there was clearly also unfinished business. The first two books both had Dorothy missing, and mysterious clouds that would pop up and bedevil Dori and Em. I think it's pretty impressive, then, that years later Sherwood Smith decided to do a third book that would wrap it all up, published through Pumpernickel Pickle, one of those small presses that exists to essentially self-publish Oz novels. Illustrator William Stout did not return; instead, the book was illustrated by Kim McFarland, herself an author and illustrator of the self-published A Refugee in Oz (2010).
Sky Pyrates over Oz by Sherwood Smith illustrated by Kim McFarland
Published: 2014 Acquired: September 2024 Read aloud: May–June 2025
The first book took place on the ground, the second under it. The third, naturally then, takes us up into the sky. Like Trouble, Sky Pyrates uses a specific Baum novel as a clear jumping-off point, but in this case, not an Oz one: rather, it's Sky Island that inspires this book. Though Dori and Em never go to the Sky Island in this book, they do meet one character from it, and interact with a whole archipelago of islands that float above and around Oz.* It's an evocative setting, and it's Smith's most Ozzy one so far (I didn't find Unicorn Valley in Emerald Wand very interesting and Trouble Under stuck to preexisting locations from the canon). Raggedy-Baggedy, the island of living stuffed people is fun, but my favorite was the land of the winged cats who live in a cloud castle—like Baum always did with animals, Smith does a good job of making them cats in personality and tone. I also enjoyed the titular sky pyrates. Not pirates, but pyrates—swashbuckling adventurers who help those in need in the sky.
The book also delves into an aspect of the Baum canon I don't think anyone else ever has. On Baum's map of Nonestica that first appeared in Tik-Tok of Ozthere was the "Kingdom of Dreams," a location he never mentioned in the text of any of his books. Smith makes it into a creepy mysterious place, home of the Nightmare Sorcerer who's behind the strange clouds. But she doesn't spoil all the mystery, establishing that the Nightmare Sorcerer is an interloper in the land himself, thus leaving open what it might be like without him. I think it was well-handled over all.
I also think the sisters are bit more active in this one than in the previous books, solving problems on the various islands they visit. As someone who very much enjoyed the group problem-solving aspect of Oz novels, I was appreciative of this. The sisters are whisked to Oz with their dad, but Smith has his transformed into a (non-talking) dog in short order, meaning that though he contributes, the sisters' choices still drive the narrative. Unfortunately, I did find that as the story came to an end, things kind of got too big for the girls to handle, and Glinda and to lesser extent the sky pyrate captains very much took over while the girls watched. It's a tricky thing to do in an Oz book, I think—make a threat big enough to be exciting, but not involve people like Glinda and Ozma in the resolution. (I also didn't feel like Glinda's defeat of the Nightmare Sorcerer was very climactic; why not do that back at the beginning of the book?)
I found the wrap-up to the whole trilogy decently satisfying, though there were still some threads left open. We know what happened to Dorothy, but I didn't really get why the sisters thought they were related to her. It seems to me there's a clear space for a fourth book, still: the girls themselves flag this up when they point out at the end they didn't have an underwater adventure yet, which would tie into the subplot of Dori meeting a mermaid in both Emerald Wand and Trouble Under. Furthermore, the book ends with the girls' dad knowing they've travelled to Oz, but their mom still in disbelief. Surely that was the direction of the possible fourth book: their mom being dragged along this time and learning that magic is real. Though how would Rik have fit in? The end of the book also promises he and the other Nome boys will join the sky pyrates and possible learn some discipline. On top of all that, this book briefly introduces another American kid book drawn into Oz, a deaf boy named Liu, and Dori and Em speculate it would be fun to go on an adventure with him as well. So there are lots of possible directions for more! I would read them; I feel like these books were on an upward trajectory.
My kid said they liked it. I think they were particularly into the sky cats.
Kim McFarland's illustrations are... okay. Like with William Stout's in the first two, there's not many of them, and like with those, they're often portraity instead of dynamic. But I wonder if that was a deliberate choice in trying to match the first two books. We do learn from the cover that Dori and Em are Black (this was not clearly indicated in the previous books' pictures, nor stated in the prose), which I think makes them the first Black children in any Oz book I've ever read. I don't think McFarland is as good an illustrator as Stout though, even if I wasn't very into his portraity style. Hers is more... DeviantArt, I guess?
Oh, one other thing. There's a bit (clearly inspired by Ozma of Oz) where the characters have to find a transformed Dorothy in a storeroom. When they are looking for her, they first find a phoenix who bursts into flames and then flies away. Glinda says it's nothing to do with their adventure, but someone else's—either an end or a beginning. I am guessing this is a tie into another Sherwood Smith book, but don't know which one! She did write a book called The Phoenix in Flight, but I think that's sf. She later wrote a quartet of novels called The Phoenix Feather; was she anticipating that?
Back in July 2021, I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to my kid. They were almost 3 at the time... now they're almost 7, and we've read sixty-two of them! We've read every one of the Famous Forty, plus all the "Borderlands" books and any Oz novel by a Royal Historian and/or with some kind of imprimatur from either the Oz Club or the Baum Trust. I was optimistic when we started, but would never have guessed we'd be going four years later at a rate of fifteen per year! Of course, they don't even remember those early books directly anymore, though the first seven or so they've re-experienced a couple times via various adaptions (movies, audiobooks, the Shanower/Young comics), so they know what happened in those ones. But I think there's a big wasteland of memory from Tik-Tok onward; I'm not sure when you reach a point where they clearly do remember the books again. Are they the only kid in the world whose conception of Oz is primarily drawn from Oz Club publications? Imagine remembering Ozmapolitan of Oz better than Tin Woodman!
I'm not sure if they so much like it as think that reading Oz books is just a way of life. Maybe someday they will read them on their own, and get to experience those early books for themselves.
Next up in sequence: ???
* I know the purpose of Smith's books was to tie into Baum's Oz books specifically, but I am a bit disappointed we didn't get at least references to some of the many floating islands that Ruth Plumly Thompson introduced in her Oz novels: the Skyle of Un, Umbrella Island, and Kapurta. I guess the grand unified Oz sky island novel remains to be written. (Actually, I think all of the relevant novels were under copyright in 2014, and two of them still are. It's the kind of thing Oziana could do... except that while they have the right to reference all the Famous Forty novels, they don't have the rights to reference Sherwood Smith's!)
Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)
Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")
But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)
Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko
I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.
Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?
His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.
I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently. In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.
I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.
He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!
I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.
There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series.
Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)
Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.
Cover blurbs are interesting, in that they give you a sense of what kind of reader the publisher thinks a book will appeal to. For example, following the publication of Ancillary Justice, it seemed to me that basically every book with any vague space opera trappings was blurbed by Ann Leckie. I was surprised, then, to note that Adrian Tchaikovksky's Service Model was blurbed by John Scalzi, because it's hard for me to imagine that there is significant overlap there. Tchaikovsky writes hard sf with a biological bent, which isn't really the Scalzi tone at all. But as I began reading Service Model, I got it.
This is supposed to be funny.
Unfortunately, I didn't find it funny at all, aside from one joke about remote work. The book is about a valet robot who accidentally(?) kills its owner and then goes on a quest for purpose; the book takes place after the majority of human have died, and only robots remain. The book goes from the robot's original estate, to the central planning office for robots, to a collective farm, to a library, to God. What might have been a perfectly fine novella is a bloated tedious novel; there are by no means enough ideas, depth, or character work to fill almost 400 pages.
For Christmas, my wife got me the two Loki Modern Era Epic Collections from Marvel, which collect Kieron Gillen's acclaimed run on Journey into Mystery. I already owned Gillen's Thor run, so I was going to read those three collections, and then go from them into Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers run, where Loki appears as well; I've had the omnibus of it since it came out in 2015, but never gotten around to it.
But I didn't want to read the second Young Avengers without doing the first; I borrowed part of that from the library way back when and enjoyed it a lot, and have always intended to pick up a complete collection of it. And if I was going to read both Young Avenger runs, which feature the Kate Bishop Hawkeye, surely this was the time to read both the Matt Fraction/David Aja and Kelly Thompson/Leonardo Romero runs on Hawkeye, both of which I've long been interested in!
So what soon emerged was one of my characteristically long and complicated comics reading projects, which will take in stories featuring the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye from Young Avengers vol. 1 (2005-06) to Hawkeye: Kate Bishop (2022), with fourteen stops along the way. The first of those is the first half of the omnibus of the original Allan Heinberg/Jim Cheung Young Avengers run:
Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung
stories from Young Avengers vol. 1 #1-12, Young Avengers Special #1, and Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #1-4
Pencilers: Jim Cheung, Andrea Di Vito, Michael Gaydos, Gene Ha, Jae Lee, Bill Sienkiewicz, Pasqual Ferry, Stefano Caselli
Inkers: John Dell with Drew Geraci and Dave Meikis, Drew Hennessy, Andrea Di Vito, Michael Gaydos, Gene Ha, Jae Lee, Bill Sienkiewicz, Pasqual Ferry, Jim Cheung, Rob Stull & Dexter Vines, Jay Leisten, Matt Ryan, Jaime Mendoza, Livesay, Mark Morales, Stefano Caselli
The first thirteen issues here are the original twelve-issue run of Young Avengers plus the Young Avengers Special, which are entirely written by Allan Heinberg and mostly illustrated by Jim Cheung (he pencils everything but #7-8 and the special). I think it's a masterclass in how to set up a bunch of a new characters in a preexisting universe and instantly get the reader to actually care about them. The opening six-issue story is about the Avengers (who have been disbanded at this point in time) discovering the teenagers the press has dubbed the "Young Avengers" are running around and deciding to stop them; specifically, the story focuses on Captain America, Iron Man, and Jessica Jones. We discover the mystery of the Young Avengers along with them, as they uncover who these characters are—Patriot, Iron Lad, Hulkling, and Asgardian (later "Wiccan")—and then as two more end up joining the team—Hawkeye and Stature.
As "Young Avengers," I think Heinberg and Cheung were particularly clever about their backstories because mostly, they are not obviously linked to whom they seem to be linked. Hulkling isn't a mini-Hulk but a shapeshifter (we find out in a later story arc that he's half-Skrull); Wiccan isn't actually an Asgardian but a sorcerer; Iron Lad looks like Iron Man but is actually using the futuristic technology of Kang the Conquerer. At first it seems like only Patriot is who he seems to be, the grandson of Isiah Bradley, the original, black Captain America, but we even eventually discover that his powers don't have anything to do with his grandfather. (When I first read this story, by the way, I had never read Truth: Red, White & Black, so rereading having done so gave me a lot of helpful context. There's even a brief mention of Josiah X from The Crew, who is Patriot's uncle.)
Not pictured: the Crew callback. You can't say Allan Heinberg doesn't love his Marvel universe, but I really appreciate that he loves all of it, not just the stuff he would have read as a kid. from Young Avengers vol. 1 #3 (script by Allan Heinberg, art by Jim Cheung & John Dell)
But the characters aren't just successful in continuity terms—otherwise I don't think Young Avengers would have become the long-lasting series it is. Rather, every one of them leaps off the page as people with personalities. Patriot's earnestness but also lack of self-confidence, Iron Lad's determination not to fulfill his destiny, Hawkeye's playfulness and authority, Stature's lack of confidence, and so on. I basically loved all the characters right away, though I particularly liked Hawkeye, Stature, and Patriot. Patriot (Eli Bradley) I've discussed already, but I do like his determination to overcome his own powerlessness (even if I am a bit skeptical to the decision to make the one black character the one who is using drugs!) and do the right thing.
Kate Bishop as Hawkeye is fun right from the off: powerless like Patriot, but unlike him, confident in her abilities, taking down bad guys in the middle of her sister's wedding while wearing a bridesmaid's outfit and deciding to become a superhero right there on the spur of the moment. You can see why she became a breakout success.
I like that it's the two team members who joined late to keep the team going after Iron Lad "quits"; it's a nice touch. from Young Avengers vol. 1 #6 (script by Allan Heinberg, art by Jim Cheung & John Dell, with Dave Meikis & Jay Leisten)
I also really like Cassie Lang as Stature. She's the daughter of Ant-Man, and she aspires to heroism, but has spent her childhood largely isolated from her (dead) father, with a mother who wants her away from that life, and a cop stepfather who still sees her dad as the criminal he used to be. Like her father, she can control her size, shrinking and growing; it's the kind of on-the-nose metaphor that works so perfectly in superhero comics, that makes them what they are: this girl who feels like she's nothing can literally become nothing, but can also finally make herself seen.
I like Iron Lad a lot, which makes it a shame that the very nature of the character basically makes it impossible to use him in any stories other than his first one. from Young Avengers vol. 1 #5 (script by Allan Heinberg, art by Jim Cheung & John Dell)
This first six issues are a single story, "Sidekicks," about the Young Avengers coming together and trying to avert Iron Lad's future as Kang the Conqueror. It's a great story, about what we have to do to avoid becoming who we're afraid we might be, and how sometimes we have to take steps we thought we never could. Cheung is a great artist, able to do action and character. I'm surprised he hasn't done more big stories than this, he seems like he ought to be one of the greats. (Maybe I'm wrong and he has.) Justin Ponsor also does great stuff on colors, manipulating tone and atmosphere effectively—the story is bright when it needs to be, gloomy when it needs to be, and he brings out the facial details really well.
The weak part in the first twelve issues is thus, not surprisingly, the second story illustrated by Andrea Di Vito, "Secret Identities": he just doesn't have Cheung's command of character in a story that really needs it. Other than that, the story is fine; this is where we learn that Patriot didn't really inherit anything from his grandfather, but rather is using "mutant growth hormone" to give himself powers. But he also learns that he can be strong without it.
I miss Jessica Jones. Maybe I should have added my unread Alias Omnibus to this project? ...no, cut it out! from Young Avengers Special #1 (script by Allan Heinberg, art by Michael Gaydos)
After this is the Young Avengers Special, where Jessica Jones interviews all the Young Avengers; we get a frame story illustrated by Jessica's co-creator, Michael Gaydos, and then short flashback tales for each of the Young Avengers by a variety of artists, including greats like Gene Ha and Bill Sienkiewicz. They're small but strong moments, deepening our understanding of these great characters.
Then comes the final story of volume 1, "Family Matters," where the Super-Skrull comes looking for Hulkling... because it turns out that Hulkling (Teddy Altman) is half-Skrull, half-Kree, and the rightful emperor of the Skrulls! It's a good set-up for a story, but I found the death of Teddy's mother an overly gratuitous moment that seems ultimately self-defeating: surely there was good drama to be mined from the revelations here, and surely this is a kind of trauma the series ultimately won't be able to cope with; it'll just be downplayed unrealistically. Dude saw his mother burnt to death right in front of him!
Surprisingly
optimistic takeaway for a kid whose mother was just brutally murdered
hours earlier. He's weirdly chummy with the Super-Skrull! from Young Avengers vol. 1 #11 (script by Allan Heinberg, art by Jim Cheung & John Dell, with Jay Leisten, Jamie Mendoza, & Livesay)
This is also the story that introduces "Speed," Tommy Shepherd, who is apparently the twin brother of Wiccan (Billy Kaplan) despite different parents—both the lost souls of the children of Scarlet Witch and Vision from some storyline I've never read. As I've indicated, the series is deeply embedded in the mythos of the Marvel universe all long, but this is probably the point where it got a bit too complicated for me; there's a lot to keep up with. I wasn't too sure about Speed as a person, either; a bit too nasty for what I like in a superhero comic. He feels like a Geoff Johns creation, and that's not a compliment.
If there is a flaw in the opening twelve issues, it's that—as you can tell from my summaries—that they're all bound up in the mythologies of the characters themselves. The stories are about Iron Lad's history, Patriot's history, Hulking's history, and clearly building toward something about Wiccan and Speed's history. This is all fine in isolation, but it stops Young Avengers from feeling like it has an ongoing premise. What are these characters trying to do when they're not dealing with their own backstories? What good are they accomplishing in the world? That's what I like to see in my superhero comics, and it's not here. This feels more like a movie, not a premise for an ongoing comic book. As John Seavey says, good superhero concepts should be "storytelling engines," but the Young Avengers don't have one yet... even if I think they could.
Oddly, then, it's up to a totally different creative team to try to come up with one. The last story I read was the Young Avengers tie-in to the Civil War event, which was a crossover with Runaways. This is written by Zeb Wells and illustrated by Stefano Caselli. Civil War was about an attempt by the government to create a superhero registry; some superheroes were opposed (led by Captain America), some on board (led by Iron Man). The Young Avengers are opposed, but Cap won't let them get into action because they're still young and untrained. The government is rounding up unregistered superheroes, and when the Young Avengers hear that the "Runaways" have been targeted, they spring into action.
I haven't read Runaways, but the basic premise is explained here: they're kids that discovered their parents were members of a supervillain group called "the Pride" and, well, ran away. They don't want to be heroes or villains, they just want to be left alone. Unfortunately, the events of Civil War means they can't be. Of course, when they first meet the Young Avengers, there's friction, but the two groups soon learn to work together to escape the threat of a government that's gone too far. There are some interesting connections between the groups; for example, the Runaways have their own Super-Skrull who is at first excited and then disappointed to learn that Hulkling is his prince, but refuses to embrace his destiny.
Whoops. from Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #3 (script by Zeb Wells, art by Stefano Caselli)
As an introduction to an ongoing storytelling engine for the Young Avengers, Wells does a good job. Here they are not dealing with their own backstories, but they are earnest, inexperienced do-gooders, eager to help, especially help people they think are like themselves. As they learn, they are different from the Runaways; the Runaways don't want to help others, they just want to stay out of trouble. As the first person to write the Young Avengers other than Heinberg, he has a good handle on their characters. They're not really taken further here, but they all get good moments and feel true to themselves. I was surprised to particularly like how he writes Speed, who has a charming big-brother relationship with Molly, the youngest of the Runaways.
Just two juvenile delinquents having fun together. from Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #3 (script by Zeb Wells, art by Stefano Caselli)
Unfortunately, I didn't care for the art of Stefano Caselli; I don't know if I could quite explain why, but it has a vibe I associate with mid-2000s DeviantArt that is just not my style, and it leans into the grotesque a lot. Probably the dark, murky coloring from Danille Rudoni doesn't help; it's often hard to see what's actually happening.
Still, I had kind of expected the first non-Heinberg/Cheung Young Avengers tale to be bad, and this isn't bad at all. Indeed, it made me think I should have included Runaways to this series of posts... but no, it's long enough, and I don't want to move backwards anyway. It looks like Marvel did a four-volume "Complete Collection" series of trade paperbacks; this story is collected in volume three. Someday I'll go back and read the previous fortysomething issues so I can get the full context... but not today, I have enough going on right now!
This is the first in a series of posts about the Young Avengers, Loki, and Hawkeye. The next installment covers Young Avengers Presents.
Okay, second in my series of 2025 Hugo posts we have my reviews of all the books: Best Novel, Best Related Work (though once again we have a year with very few books), and Best Young Adult Book. Like I said in my previous post, I didn't save my nominating ballot, but I know I nominated one thing in one of these categories... Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, and it made the ballot. Fun fact: this is the only Hugo finalist where I am mentioned in the acknowledgements!
As enumerated in my above review, I very much didn't get into this, certainly my least favorite thing I've ever read from the pen of T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon. I think honestly it's about on a par with Someone you can Build a Nest in, in that I don't really want either one to win. I broke the tie between them by deciding that if one of them had to win, I'd rather see someone new win the award (Wiswell), rather than someone who has won Best Novel before (plus other Hugo Awards besides).
Look, clearly this is someone's cup of tea, but it isn't mine. Arguably this is cozy fantasy, and it might be overdramatic to say it, but I hate cozy fantasy. I think Abigail Nussbaum puts it really well in her review of Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden:
Too often, what these novels call kindness is actually the flattening of all difference, and what they call coziness is a refusal to acknowledge cruelty. This novel recognizes that kindness is hard,
that well-intended people can have wildly diverging points of view that
can lead them to abuse and dehumanize others, and that conflicts are
not won by "destroying" your opponent with a killer argument, but by
getting them to see you as someone worth compromising with—even if that
means sitting across a table from someone who thinks you shouldn't be
allowed to make your own decisions.
I don't know that this book is "cozy" per se but I do think it fails to recognize the difficulty of kindness, and everything falls apart because of that. If this wins, I'll be as mad as I would have been if Legends & Lattes had won.
A tedious bloated novel that's supposed to be funny but very much isn't. I guess I'm excited Adrian Tchaikovsky is finally getting attention from the Hugo electorate but the novels of his that have been chosen for this are surely not his best.
4. No Award
I don't think I often use "No Award" in Best Novel, where there's usually at least one book I really like, and the rest tend to follow a spectrum. Sure, you don't like the book you rank sixth very much, but that shouldn't be unexpected, because what are the odds of you loving all six books in a category? But this year, I found myself struggling to decide which of three books I disliked the least so that I could figure out the whole bottom half of my ballot, and I feel like that if you end up in that situation, it demonstrates that none of those finalists ought to have been on the ballot to begin with.
As you'll see in my linked-to review, I thought this book started strong and had a lot of potential it didn't totally deliver on. It's alien biology sf, a subgenre that Tchaikovsky is the current kind of for sure, even if I think he doesn't quite succeed in bringing the science elements together with the political elements thematically. But it's definitely up to something more interesting than Someone You Can or even Tchaikovsky's own Service Model by a significant margin, and I wouldn't be mad if it won, though to my mind the remaining books on my ballot are clearly better.
This is a fantasy murder mystery, and I ended up really enjoying it, moreso than I expected. Just a really good example of its genre, very immersive and interesting; exploring the world is as compelling as the mystery, perhaps more so, but so is exploring the characters. Not as ambitious as The Ministry of Time, but other than that, a very good book, and I'd happily see it win... well, except for my disappointment at the clearly deserving Ministry not winning!
There are some books that are optimized to be of interest me, and this is one of them, even if I did not expect it. Very literary, good jokes, sharp character work, interesting themes. "What if Graham Greene but time travel and the Cambodian genocide and interrogating Victorian-ness?" is the kind of question more sf should ask, clearly. Much better than "What if D&D but nothing bad ever happens?" I do like space adventures a lot but this is why I read the genre.
As any longtime follower of the Hugo Awards knows, there's one thing members of Worldcon are a little too into when it comes to the "Best Related Work" category, and that's finalists that are about Worldcon itself. This is an example of that genre; it investigates the issues that came with the Hugos administered at the Chengdu Worldcon, where members of the Hugo subcomittee preemptively removed works from the ballots without justification, violating the procedures laid out in the WSFS Constitution. Sure, this was definitely a significant piece of journalism when it comes to the Hugo Awards... but does that make it a significant piece of nonfiction writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy? I don't think so.
This is another piece of investigative journalism about the Chengdu Hugos. I gave it the edge over the other one because 1) I tend to find Barkley's prose style pretty pompous, and 2) Nicholas Whyte said it was better done, and if anyone would know, it would be him.
5. No Award
Like I said, I don't really care for when Hugo finalists are about the Hugos. If a piece of writing about Chengdu had to be a finalist, I would much rather it have been Ada Palmer's "Tools for Thinking about Censorship,"
which was inspired by Chengdu but has applicability beyond it...
unfortunately much moreso with each passing day here in the U.S. I find
myself recommending it to people who have nothing to do with the
sf&f community all the time. But I didn't think to nominate it, alas; I wonder if it will turn up on the longlist.
Is this a "related work"? I guess so. These redditors seem like nice folk but a bunch of redditors doing stuff isn't really what I want out of "Best Related Work"; again, does this really advance our understanding of the genre? Could be worse, though: it's not a Seanan McGuire tweet.
This is a four-hour YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel at Disney, chronicling its initial development and marketing, the host's (not very good) experiences there, and its long-term lack of success. I am not the target audience for four-hour YouTube videos to be honest, but if they have to exist, this is probably a good one. I watched it at 1.25 speed and was reasonably entertained throughout, and am now informed on a topic of mild interest to me.
2. Track Changes: Selected Reviews by Abigail Nussbaum
This collects a bunch of reviews by the sf critic Abigail Nussbaum from the last twenty years, mostly from her own blogs and Strange Horizons. Nicholas Whyte often says something like that a good critic: 1) gives you more insight into texts you already read, and 2) makes you want to read ones you haven't. Of course, these things are helped along by the critic having tastes that are, if not identical to yours, sympathetic and comprehensible.
I think Nussbaum succeeds on all of those marks. Her broadly positive reviews of works like N. K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, The Good Place season one, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun, and so on gave me a stronger sense of what those works were up to, even when I wouldn't have given them a positive review myself. I didn't particularly care for The Stone Sky, for example, even though I enjoyed the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy, but I did like her discussion of how the "dangerous minority" trope turns up in sf&f, where the persecuted minority has some kind of special power (like mutants in X-Men): "Instead of abandoning it, Jemisin compounds it, and then dares us to keep reacting to it from the same place of comfort that originally made it so popular. What does it mean, after all, to build a world in which there is no choice but to oppress and abuse certain people? It tells us nothing about real racism, but it might say a great deal about the kind of people for whom that kind of story holds an appeal."
She's also an incisive negative critic, figuring out what a text was trying to do and articulating how it fell short, as we see with Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Severance season one, Helen Wecker's The Golem and Jinni, Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, Jac Schaeffer's WandaVision, and so more. In her discussion of The Last Jedi, for example, she puts really well something that often bothers me about falling-to-the-Dark-Side stories in Star Wars: "Like nearly every Star Wars movie before it, The Last Jedi
is a film in which no one seems to have a firm understanding of what
good and evil actually are. In which the metaphor of the light and dark
sides of the force has been allowed to so thoroughly dominate that the
actual meaning of it--the idea that people are 'on the dark side' when
they do bad things to others--is treated almost as an
afterthought. The result is a film about a struggle for a man's soul in
which the matter of morality never even comes up. In which our heroes
try to convince a villain to become good without ever articulating
either what good is, or why being bad is undesirable." Some of these stories, I actually see more positively than she does, but a good negative review can still let you understand a work more deeply.
In particular, Nussbaum often puts works into their generic context,
pointing out how they resemble each other. Not to do the "gotcha" move
you sometimes see in genre criticism ("oho you thought this book was
original but isn't it just doing Iain Banks again?") but to better
reveal each text's own rhetorical project. Because she's done such a good job laying out her perspective on texts I do know, I find myself intrigued to read ones she gives positive reviews to that I haven't. It's clear that, like me, she's interested in both space opera and epic fantasy, but also wants works that interrogate how those genres work in interesting ways. Anyway, great stuff here, and I'd happily see this win.
1. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt Right by Jordan S. Carroll
I've written a full review of this, but it will appear in the next issue of Studies in the Fantastic, so here I'll just be brief... but I really liked this! Jordan's take on exactly what the appeal of sf is to racists and fascists helped me understand the genre as a whole and our present political moment. What else could you want? Exactly the kind of thing the Best Related Work Hugo ought to be rewarding in my opinion. Am I biased in favor of my friend? Almost certainly, but if voting to help your friend win a Hugo Award is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
[UNRANKED] The Maid and the Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko / Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee
I left these two books off my ballot for different reasons. Jordan Ifueko was a finalist for the Lodestar Award two previous times, in 2021 and 2022, but neither book did much for me. I felt like I didn't need to read a third book by her that I would end up ranking in fourth or fifth. (Nicholas Whyte, though, said the kinks had been ironed out from the earlier books and ranked it first! Oh well, I made my decision.)
Moonstorm I would have read, even though I find Yoon Ha Lee a little variable. But after Worldcon created controversy by using ChatGPT to vet panelists, Lee withdrew Moonstorm. This was after the final ballot was published, so you technically still can vote for it, but he also took it out of the voter packet, and I hadn't downloaded the YA packet yet. So there you go.
4. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
This book follows parallel narratives of two sisters. There's certainly a good premise in here, but it very much struggles to get out. Rather than depict a war to liberate an oppressed country, it takes place years later, and shows the struggle to rebuild—both a nation and yourself. If you were the Chosen One who saved your people, what would you do next? Unfortunately, the backstory is a bit too complicated and a bit too relevant; it feels like you're reading a sequel to a book you never read, and the relationships between characters depend too much on things you're only told in brief bits of exposition. In the present-day narrative, one sister goes to dragon school in the nation that conquered her, but this is woefully underdeveloped. (To Shape a Dragon's Breath did the same basic idea much better.) The other sister experiments with dark powers to save her sister, but not much seems to happen there either. Both plotlines are more interested in romance; both sisters end up in very obvious enemies-to-lovers plots. "oh this person seems to hate me and i hate them but everytime i see them i get butterflies idk what this means..."
And this might seem small, but I found the linguistic worldbuilding very unconvincing. Like, the names didn't cohere or fit.
3. The Feast Makers by H. A. Clarke
While So Let Them Burn may have felt like a sequel to a book I didn't read, this actually was—and yet I enjoyed it much more. Mostly, I must admit, on vibes. This book gives no quarter to someone who hasn't read the previous ones; it seemed to have no clear central plotline, but instead be paying off character threads from earlier books, mostly about who the main character would get together with. But the vibes are good; it's about a teenage lesbian witch coven in (I am pretty sure) rural Ohio. It's not really my thing, to be honest, but it's so completely itself I found it charming regardless.
Unusually, I had actually read two Lodestar Award finalists before the ballot was even announced. This was a prequel to Elatsoe, which I read and ranked second in 2021. I enjoyed it a lot; as I said in my review, "Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole."
This is also a follow-up to a previous finalist. Often I might complain about that, but I guess a good follow-up to a previous finalist is better than a weak original novel (even if a weak original novel is better than a weak follow-up). I found this novel very interesting and unexpected; while the first novel was about the main character battling sexism so she can become an awesome mecha pilot and fight kaiju, the second is about her coming into an awareness of (essentially) Marxism and attempting to impose revolution on her society. Not really where I thought it was all going. Not a perfect book but a fascinating one, which is what I am happy to award.
Final Thoughts
I might have deployed "No Award" higher than normal in Best Novel but I actually think it was a decent shortlist. Of the six finalists, five were by authors who hadn't been Best Novel finalists before, and one by an author who hadn't been a Hugo finalist in any category at all. (That one ended up being my favorite, so there you go.) Yes, I thought three of them sucked but the good ones were quite good.
After last year's book-heavy shortlist, I had hopes that Best Related Work was back on track but unfortunately this year, we have just two actual books, two pieces of self-referential Worldcon journalism, a YouTube video, and bunch of people making posts on Reddit. Hopefully next year is better, because I really like discovering interesting sf criticism via this category, and that only happened once (kinda twice) this year!
What do I think will win? Best Novel is a tough one to judge, I think. Kingfisher has won in the past but I don't think Sorceress is strong enough to be a repeat winner. The Wiswell doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that will win over a majority (thankfully). If it's a Tchaikovsky, I think the voters will prefer Alien Clay to Service Model. I would of course dearly love it to be Ministry of Time, but I also see that it's the kind of book that is probably divisive (a lot of people on r/Fantasy have it on the bottom of their ballots; of course those people have bad taste). So my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it to win on transfers.
I'm guessing one of the about-the-Hugos works wins Related Work, it's that kind of year.
The tastes of the Hugo electorate in YA fiction are largely inscrutable. The two debuts in this category (So Let Them Burn and Feast Makers) don't strike me as having quite the wide appeal you need to clinch it. We have three follow-ups to previous finalists, sequels to books that came in second (Heavenly Tyrant), third (Sheine Lende), and sixth (Maid and the Crocodile). Based on that, I'm going to guess Heavenly Tyrant wins, but I am not very confident in this.
Collection published: 1992 Contents originally published: 1961-64 Acquired: November 2023 Read: July 2025
Writers: Edmond Hamilton, Jerry Siegel Pencillers: John Forte, Curt Swan Inkers: John Forte, George Klein Letterers: Joe Letterese, Milton Snapinn
This volume continues on from volume 1, establishing the Legion of Super-Heroes as a regular ongoing feature; it contains the Legion stories from issues #306 to 317 of Adventure Comics, plus one story from Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen guest-starring the Legion. All of the regular Legion stories are written by Edmond Hamilton (husband of Leigh Brackett, fact fans), usually with art by John Forte. We can see that the Legion has bedded in as the regular concept we now recognize. Though the early stories here claim they come from the twenty-first century, it soon switches to the thirtieth and stats there. Beyond that, we get key concepts like the idea of Legion tryouts, the Legion of Substitute Heroes, the debut of Proty (and then Proty II), the resurrection of Lightning Lad, the first mention of the Time Trapper, Phantom Girl's thing for Ultra Boy, Star Boy's thing for Dream Girl, and so on. Overall I found this a solid set of Legion stories that really show how it can work as an ongoing concept; I reread my review of volume 3 (into which this ones leads) before writing this one, and I was I quite grumpy about it, writing, "Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft." Well, maybe Hamilton's early days were better than his later ones, or maybe I was just in a bad mood back in 2016, because I didn't think this was great literature, but I did enjoy it for what it was. Maybe it was interesting because you can see the Legion concept developing, as was the case in volume 1, whereas that wasn't really a factor later on.
I like how in the DC universe, a random guy who sees a kid fall into vat of chemicals can state with confidence that he'll grow up to have superpowers... and that he'll be right. from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #306 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
In any case, here are some notes and highlights. Like I said above, this volume contains the debut of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and in fact two other stories focused on them. Obviously I know about them from later stories, but this was my first time reading their debut. I can see why people glommed onto them, they are actually quite charming. Polar Boy, Night Girl, Stone Boy, Fire Lad, and Chlorophyll Kid are all rejected at Legion tryouts, but remain so dedicated to the Legion that they decide to form a back-up group for the Legion. (Legion rejects get flying belts, which seems kind of over-the-top, but maybe flying belts are a dime a dozen in the thirtieth century.) What really makes the story shine is Polar Boy's determination to make the Subs work as a group; they keep trying to help the Legion but are unneeded, but Polar Boy knows if they don't prove useful sometime, his new friends will fall apart.
Good guy Stone Boy. from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #315 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
The other highlight for the Subs is the one where the Legion creates a contest to admit one Sub. It's neat to see them use their crappy powers cleverly, and it's charming both that Stone Boy wins because of his motivation, not his powers, and that he turns down the offer so he can stay with his friends. You can see why these characters would make an impression on the readers, and why later writers would keep going back to them.
You might think that someone handed a cast of characters with (I believe) eighteen members might think to themselves that that's enough, but not Edmond Hamilton, who introduces three more Legionnaires here: Element Lad, Lightning Lass, and Dream Girl. Element Lad's is okay, more an excuse for a scientific mystery than a new character (and I don't think he really does much in the rest of the volume).
Lightning Lass's is interesting; I had never read her debut story before, though I was familiar with the broad strokes from later stories: joins while her brother is dead, gets her powers changed. What I hadn't known was exactly how this all happens, and I was actually surprised. I've read the story where Lightning Lad is resurrected before, but it was an awful long time ago, so when Lightning Lad was seemingly resurrected I thought it really was him. It turns out to be his sister disguising herself as her dead brother. Sun Boy figures it out but plays along; the Bierbaums would later make him into kind of an entitled player, but here he's a good guy, helping her out covertly (or at least he thinks he is, because he doesn't know she has lightning powers too). I'm a bit surprised they didn't pick up on the cross-dressing angle later on, as Lightning Lass makes a very successful boy.
I
said this story makes Sun Boy into a good guy but maybe not, since he's
apparently the kind of person who scrutinizes people's Adam's apples to
determine if they "really" are the gender they present as. from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #308 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
Later, after Lightning Lad comes back to life, she continues in the Legion. I knew she got her powers switched later on, to control of gravity (thus making her "Light Lass") but I had figured it was by accident or something. It's actually done deliberately by Dream Girl in her debut story (who knew it was so easy to change someone's superpowers? who knew someone who take their powers being changed so easily?), because the Legion doesn't permit member to have identical powers. Lightning Lad came back to life in Adventure #312, and the power swap happens in #317. I'm assuming they got letters from earnest fans who noted the contradiction because no one in the intervening stories notes the issue.
The face of a woman who is mean... and likes being mean... and of a man who likes it when she is mean. from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #317 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
Speaking of Dream Girl, she doesn't join up permanently in her debut, but she immediately makes an impression, both in terms of her physical attributes (the subplot about all the boys swooning for her is hilarious) but also in terms of her cleverness, using her powers to try to save the Legion's life without threatening the timeline. Dream Girl is one of my faves, so I was delighted to see this story. If I'm not mistaken, it would be a long time before she returned, not until a story collected in volume 5.
And speaking of long gaps between appearances, Star Boy was one of the very first Legionnaires we learned about, in Adventure #282, but then promptly disappeared, appearing in no other Legion stories for over two years, until #310 (collected here). He finally does something of note in the Dream Girl story, though it's mostly falling for her. During his run, Paul Levitz would explain this long absence, as well as Thom's changing powers, in one of my favorite Legion stories. Another story that later writers would do a lot with is Adventure #316, where Ultra Boy goes on the run... though of course he turns out to have good reasons for it that he can't tell anyone about.
From this, the Bierbaums would later birth a very controversial retcon... which I'm not gonna lie, I kinda liked? from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #312 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
Chamelon Boy's "pet," the seemingly sentient, telepathic, shapeshifting blob named Proty, makes his debut in #308, the story where Lightning Lass debuts... and dies in #312, just four issues later, sacrificing his life so that Lightning Lad can come back to life. But Proty II debuts immediately thereafter, without fanfare, in Jimmy Olsen #72. Jimmy identifies someone disguised as him as Proty (how he does this, I don't know, because there's no story where Jimmy meets Proty), but he's corrected by Chameleon Boy: "Actually, it's 'Proty II', a friend of my first protean pet, who died when he sacrificed his life for Saturn Girl!" And that's it! I wonder if Jimmy Olsen #72 was mostly done when someone informed its writer/editor that Proty had been killed off, so they had to add this comment at the last minute... and thus a whole new character was born! When Proty II pops up in Adventure for the first time, it's with no more explanation.
"Superboy's brain has been replaced by that of the man responsible for one of history's worst genocides!" "Ah, well, must be Tuesday again." from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #314 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)
Obviously a lot of these stories are ridiculous (e.g, the one where Supergirl fights her own duplicate, who turns all the female Legionnaires pink), but the place of honor has to be set aside for the one where a criminal sneaks into their clubhouse and steals a time bubble... so that he can team up with Emperor Nero, John Dillinger, and Adolf Hitler ("the three wickedest men in history"), transferring their brains into the bodies of Superboy, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy to create super-criminals. I am not so sure you would see Hitler treated so casually these days; funny that he gets taken more seriously the further away we get from him.
I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up
in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 5
Okay, second in my series of 2025 Hugo posts we have my reviews of all the books: Best Novel, Best Related Work (though once again we have a year with very few books), and Best Young Adult Book. Like I said 
