Return to the Threeboot: A Review of Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising

Comic hardcover, 192 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2008) 
Acquired and read August 2016

Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising

​

Writer: Jim Shooter

Pencillers: Francis Manapul with Aaron Lopresti, Sanford Greene
Inkers: Livesay with Matt Ryan, Nathan Massengill
Colorists: JD Smith with Nathan Eyring
Letterer: Steve Wands

With Supergirl gone, the "threeboot" Legion returns to its original title, though it gains a new (less attractive) logo in the process. It's always odd when a new creative team takes over a title with a very distinctive voice, especially if that new creative team doesn't have any interest in aping what came before. Jim Shooter's writing is not really like Mark Waid's at all, nor is Francis Manapul and Livesay's art anything like Barry Kitson's. Though you might argue that the Waid/Kitson Legion never lived up to its potential-- the revolutionary idea was downplayed more and more as the series went on, and they seeded so much character stuff in the first twelve issues that they never came back to as Supergirl and the Dominator plot took over the focus-- I'm not convinced the solution was to basically throw all that out. The idea of the Legion as an inspiration to the youth of the galaxy, and the face of a wider moment, is completely gone here: we never see the crowds outside Legion H.Q. anymore. Even the DC Comics spinner racks are gone from H.Q.; when we do briefly see Phantom Girl with some comics, they're drawn as generic books, not as recognizable issues of DC Comics as they would have been during the Waid/Kitson run.

Ah, yes, I too really enjoyed the classic book Comics.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #43 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

Plus Shooter introduces future space cursing to the title, which is... terrible, to put it mildly. I don't remember anyone using any of that stuff during the Waid/Kitson run, other than "grife," which works because it's basically "grief." But under Shooter, suddenly everyone is saying "florg." People are "florged" and bad guys are "florgging." It's a desperately terrible word that needs to go; it throws me out of the story every time I read it. Florg florg florg florg florg. It's not real! It doesn't even sound like it could be real!

Like, how can I take dialogue like this seriously?
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #38 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

Putting aside all my change-of-creative-team kvetching, how was Enemy Rising, which collects the first half of Jim Shooter's run, before the "threeboot" was inceremoniously dumped for the "deboot"? Basically, it's okay. Shooter has the Legion being overstressed with crises popping up across the solar system and the galaxy, while Lightning Lad-- the new leader-- struggles with United Planets bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was fun at first, but the longer it goes on, the more irritating it gets, because it's the same thing again and again, as Lightning Lad gets more calls than he can handle, pisses someone off, and the Legion gets a new restriction slapped on it, repeat ad nauseam. I kinda felt like he deserved a better portrayal of his leadership than he got, and based on the way this subplot is seemingly resolved at the end of the book, I don't think it was worth the eight issues spent on it. (Plus, does it make sense that the United Planets would be anti-Legion again in the wake of the Dominator War?)

Other than that, the Legion is fighting mindless aliens that are popping up across the galaxy. Brainiac sets up a minor mystery about them, but other than that, they're not very compelling foes. The minor enemies the Legion encounters, like Science Police officers, aren't very interesting either. And was it really necessary to have a group of space pirates turn up to threaten our teenage heroes with sexual coercion? Ick. His Legionnaires seem more bickering than Waid's, too. Not that Waid's didn't argue, but it usually seemed to come from principled beliefs; these guys are just mean to each other a little bit too much.

The whole premise of this series is that she's underage, you know.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #37 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

I liked Francis Manapul's later work on The Flash, but here he doesn't do a ton for me. It's not bad, but the sort of anime-influenced style he uses is a little generic. I really liked Aaron Lopresti's fill-in, on the other hand-- his characters were very expressive, and I loved the playful stuff he did with Chameleon throughout the issue.

If I was a shapeshifter, I'd be making my fingers into miniature people when I was bored, too.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #41 (art by Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan)

I guess I'll see where this all goes, but for now it comes across as a sort of action-adventure epilogue tacked onto the Waid/Kitson run. Nothing wrong with it on its own, but I felt that Waid and Kitson were reinventing these characters and concepts, whereas Shooter is just using them somewhat generically in a widescreen story.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXII: The New 52

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2011 (contents: 2011)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2016

DC Comics: The New 52
by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Dan Jurgens, Aaron Lopresti, Matt Ryan, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, Francis Manapul, Brian Buccellatto, J. T. Krul, Freddie Williams II, Gail Simone, Ethan Van Sciver, Yildiray Cinar, George Pérez, Tony S. Daniel, Philip Tan, Eric Wallace, Gianluca Gugliotta, Wayne Faucher, Paul Jenkins, Bernard Chang, Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, Rick Bryant, Jesús Merino, Scott Lobdell, R. B. Silva, Rob Lean, Michael Green, Mike Johnson, Mahmud Asrar, Dan Green, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, Ryan Winn, J. H. Williams III, W. Haden Blackman, David Finch, Richard Friend, Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Mick Gray, Ardian Syaf, Vicente Cifuentes, Judd Winick, Ben Oliver, Guillem March, Kyle Higgins, Eddy Barrows, J. P. Mayer, Duane Swierczynski, Jesus Saiz, Kenneth Rocafort, Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Fernando Pasarin, Scott Hanna, Tony Bedard, Tyler Kirkham, Batt, Peter Milligan, Ed Benes, Rob Hunter, Mikel Janin, Yanick Paquette, Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman, Alberto Ponticelli, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Andrea Sorrentino, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Ferndando Dagnino, Paul Cornell, Diogenes Neves, Oclair Albert, Miguel Sepulveda, Nathan Edmondson, Cafu, Jason Gorder, Ron Marz, Sami Basri, Joe Bennett, Art Thibert, Adam Glass, Federico Dallocchio, Ransom Getty, Dan DiDio, Keith Giffen, Scott Koblish, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Moritat, Mike Costa, Graham Nolan, Ken Lashley, Ivan Brandon, Tom Derenick, Jonathan Vankin, Phil Winslade, Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Scott McDaniel, John Rozum, LeBeau Underwood, Sterling Gates, Rob Liefeld, Ig Guara, Ruy José, Fabian Nicieza, Pete Woods, Paul Levitz & Francis Portela

This book is unpaginated, but as it collects 52 issues, and most single issues these days are 20-22 pages long, it must contain around 1,000 pages of comics, making it nearly unreviewable, especially given that this book isn't one big story (like some other DC omnibi I've read, such as 52) but rather the beginnings of 52 different stories. Still, I'm going to try, and I'm going to do it by speaking to 1) the book as a whole, 2) the continuity issues involved, and 3) each subsection of the book. So please bear with me. Each of the issues is a #1 issue, published in the wake of Flashpoint, which reset the DC universe.

The Book as a Whole
To be honest, it's not a very satisfying reading experience. I think it could have been, but that would require a totally different way of approaching the single-issue comic than is normal in the 2010s. None of these are done-in-one stories, a format that still exists, but is probably avoided in the first issue of a series more than anywhere else, given that you want your readers to pick up issue #2. That said, I don't think they needed to be as formulaic as they are: I'd estimate the 75% of the stories here have the same structure of fight scene→bit of personal life or backstory→dramatic last page appearance of someone. Sometimes the order of "fight scene" and "bit of personal life or backstory" is swapped. As I kept on reading, I just got tired of seeing this cliche over and over again. I'd say that it was unsatisfying to not know the end to the fifty-two different stories begun here, but in actuality, I don't want to know the end of the fifty-two different stories begun here, as most didn't do enough to grab my interest in their twenty pages. Some dude turning up on page twenty does not a hook make if you haven't laid an interesting groundwork first.

The Continuity Issues
Sometimes I think people overestimate how much continuity contributes to the reading experience of a book. I've seen a lot of complaints about the New 52 that it's hard to get invested in characters when you don't know what old stories count and what ones don't. But Crisis on Infinite Earths did the exact same thing-- it was ages before the "past" of the new, integrated DC universe was completely built up, and I think people forget how piecemeal it was at first. The pre-Crisis Wonder Woman and Superman continued to appear for a year or two because George Pérez and John Byrne's reboots weren't done yet! The pre-Crisis Superman, for example, turned up in an Omega Men storyline that was explicitly post-Crisis, yet there's no way it could happen with the post-Crisis Superman. So things are going to be a bit muddy when you introduce a new shared universe all at once, and I think that's okay.

That said, I'm not sure why DC didn't got full clean slate with more of these characters. For example, we're told Animal Man has been a hero, retired from heroing, and is now returning to heroing-- but this doesn't add anything to the story when he could just be a recently established hero. Too many of the characters here have semi-complicated backstories because bits of their pre-Flashpoint backstories have been retained, but nothing is done with these backstories. Arsenal and Starfire apparently worked together on a team of teens before, but not in the Teen Titans because the Teen Titans #1 here is about the first Teen Titans team coming together. So they were just on... some team? But it doesn't really matter because they don't act like they know each other at all. Why not make it their first meeting then? Though the idea of there being a bunch of former teen sidekicks is weird anyway given DC's compressed the timeline down to five years. Like, you can have everything be fresh and new, or you can have a bunch of legacy characters, but it seems to me you can't have both. (And yet there are four different Robins!)

Like, this is neat because it gives you enough to go on if you don't know Deadman, but also upends the formula with a genuinely expected yet interesting final-page reveal.
from DC Universe Presents #1 (script by Paul Jenkins, art by Bernard Chang)

Justice League (Justice League, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Captain Atom, Firestorm, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Mister Terrific, Deadman)

Only three of these stuck out to me in a good way: Wonder Woman is slickly drawn, a surprisingly dei noir take on an old character. I read the first few issues of this run on Comixology back in 2011, and though I forgot to keep reading, this reminded me of what I enjoyed then. Everything I've ever seen of Francis Manapul's take on the Flash has been solid, so I ought to pick it up someday, though this one I liked more for the art and layouts than the story (it definitely fits into the cliche #1 format I mention above). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the take on Deadman here. Like, this had great ideas and amazing artwork. On the other hand, the new Justice League #1 is almost embarrassing, and Justice League International is the perfect example of the kind of comic book you just can't do in a brand-new universe-- none of these also-ran character have backstories now!

DC's 2011-12 My Greatest Adventure Revival: A Brief Return into Space

The original My Greatest Adventure was an anthology comic from DC that ran for 85 issues, from 1955 to 1964. In issue #80, the Doom Patrol (a group of superpowered misfits) became the focus of the book, and with issue #86 the book was retitled Doom Patrol. The Doom Patrol book lasted until #124, and the book's been revived many times since. My Greatest Adventure, however, remained moribund from 1964 until 2011, when it was brought back as a six-issue follow-up to Weird Worlds. Like Weird Worlds, each issue of My Greatest Adventure contains ten pages apiece of three features. Garbage Man and Tanga return from Weird Worlds, while My Greatest Adventure replaces Lobo with Robotman, who was in fact one of the original members of the Doom Patrol back in 1963.

Like with Weird Worlds, I'm reading it as part of my mission to read all of DC's non-Green Lantern space comics, as Tanga takes place in space.

Robotman (written by Matt Kindt, art by Scott Kolins, colors by Mike Atiyeh, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

I've never read a Doom Patrol comic, so I don't know what here is preexisting and what is new by Matt Kindt. Kindt depicts a Robotman who's left the Doom Patrol and set himself as a sort of high-tech troubleshooter. Robotman was created when a daredevil's body was destroyed in an attempt to set a new landspeed record, and nanites created a robot body for his brain; his assistant is same woman assigned to him for the landspeed record attempt by the mysterious U.N.R.E.A.S.O.N. organization, who feels responsible for his accident.

Kindt flirts with interesting ideas here: mind/body dualism seems to drive his take on the character of Robotman, whose body must obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but whose mind is under no such obligation. But I don't think the story ever did much with that concept. In this story, he investigates creatures created by the same nanites that created him, and returns to the island of his accident. Part six doles out some interesting revelations-- but by then the story's over! So it's oddly paced, especially given that part six's big revelations are mostly given by Robotman in narration, not in actual dialogue. Less time on the giant monster fights in earlier installments could have balanced this one out a bit better.

That said, I'm falling in love with Scott Kolins as an artist, having recently encountered his work on The Flash with Geoff Johns a couple times. He draws a great Robotman (Robotman's form can change as the nanites rebuild him to suit his current situation), amazing Kirbyesque monsters, realistic-looking but attractive human beings (I really liked the appearance of Robotman's human assistant), and ornate-but-eminently-readable layouts. This feature had the best art in a book of good artists doing excellent work.

from My Greatest Adventure vol. 2 #4

Garbage Man (story and pencils by Aaron Lopresti, inks by Matt Ryan, colors by John Kalisz, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

This continues the story begun in Weird Worlds, with Garbage Man returning to Gotham to investigate the crooked law firm that had him bumped off, seek revenge, reunite with his old flame, fight with Batman, and battle mysterious monsters in the sewers. I guess you can't say that Aaron Lopresti doesn't pack it into his ten-page installments! The premise clicked a bit better for me here than it did in the first six parts; I like the idea of the scumbag high-powered lawyer becoming the protector of Gotham's homeless. The pacing was better in this half of the story, too, and I was so sure there was going to be a certain twist I ended up surprised by the lack of one.

Lopresti's unity of art and story continue to impress, though the whole thing still seems to be a bit too much Swamp Thing; the "twist" that does happen is one that Alan Moore did with Swamp Thing back in the 1980s! The end sets us up to expect more adventures for Garbage Man, but to my knowledge, this was the character's final appearance.

Tanga (story and art by Kevin Maguire, colors by Rosemary Cheetham, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

Similarly, this story was the last appearance of Kevin Maguire's free-spiriting space adventurer Tanga, even though the story ends with her flying off into space for more hijinks and also indicates there's some mysteries behind the character.

Like with Garbage Man, this half of the story hangs together better than the half in Weird Worlds, as the secret of Za is revealed. I'm not so keen on making female characters overcome sexual threats to prove themselves-- it seems very limiting-- but other than that I enjoyed this. Maguire always does great stuff with facial expressions, and an outraged Tanga gives him a lot to play with. The events of the last part were very good, too, being a lot more downbeat than I expected, and giving some tragedy to the otherwise exuberant Tanga. It seems like it would be easy to work Tanga in as a guest star in another space-based book even if she's not going to get her own feature again, but then again, I suppose there haven't been very many DC space heroes books post-Flashpoint that she could appear in.

DC's 2011 Weird Worlds Revival: A Brief Foray into Space

Weird Worlds was a science fiction anthology title published by DC Comics from 1972 to 1974; it lasted ten issues. Its big claim to fame was IronWolf, a sword-and-planet epic that I will read someday. The title was revived in 2011 as a six-issue miniseries. The format was a little different here, with three stories running across all six issues, advancing ten pages at a time per issue. I picked it up as part of my ongoing reading of all DC's space-based titles, as one of the features, Kevin Maguire's "Tanga," is set in space. (So is the Lobo feature, I suppose, but my space-based interests largely exclude both Green Lantern and Lobo.) A collected edition was solicited, but never released; there was however a follow-up series, My Greatest Adventure, which I should read next month.

I like the idea of the series; the inclusion of Lobo presumably allowed DC to float a couple riskier premises in Garbage Man and Tanga, who were completely new characters. There are some pacing oddities, however, which make me think that these were originally meant to come out 20 pages at a time, or just that contemporary comics writers just don't know how to do 10-page stories.

Lobo (written by Kevin VanHook, art by Jerry Ordway, colors by Pete Pantazis, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

A little bit of Lobo goes a long way for me. I've enjoyed him as a guest character in other stories, or when he's used sparingly. Like, I enjoyed his original stories in The Omega Men, and he was surprisingly fun in L.E.G.I.O.N. But by the time R.E.B.E.L.S. rolled around, I was tired of him. Yet in the 2000/10s, Mark Waid and Tony Bedard made good use of him in The Brave and the Bold and R.E.B.E.L.S. revivals, respectively-- because in both series he was an amusing addition, not a focus.

This is the first story I've read where Lobo is actually the main character, and it confirmed my suspicions. He just doesn't work as a main character. He's invincible and dumb; the effective humor in L.E.G.I.O.N./R.E.B.E.L.S. and The Brave and the Bold came from pairing him with characters like Vril Dox and Supergirl, who need to work with and manage him. But an invincible brawler is not much fun to watch on his own. Lobo has something he wants to do, which is kill a guy and collect some money, and despite some obstacles placed in his path and a very slight twist, pretty much just accomplishes it as is. Depressingly straightforward and tension-free.

Garbage Man (story and pencils by Aaron Lopresti, inks by Matt Ryan, colors by Dave McCaig, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

This is one of two stories I've read this month both written and illustrated by Aaron Lopresti (the other was a Parasite story in The New 52 Villains Omnibus, review forthcoming in February), and in both I've been decently impressed. A lot of comics artists struggle as writers, but Lopresti does a great job of achieving a unified tone and vision for Garbage Man-- a creature created via an unholy unison of human consciousness with, well, garbage. There's some good stuff here.

Unfortunately, a couple things about it don't quite click. There's a plot set up with Batman that goes nowhere as Batman actually never meets Garbage Man (maybe he will finally turn up in My Greatest Adventure). The book is a bit choppy (though maybe I should be viewing it as six ten-page stories and not one sixty-page story). But the worst part is that it all feels a bit old hat: I've never actually read Swamp Thing, but all the am-I-a-man-or-a-monster stuff is so familiar anyway. He even trudges around in the swamp a lot! I'd've liked to have seen Lopresti's obvious talents be funneled into something more original. Or just have him write Swamp Thing, I guess.

Tanga (story and art by Kevin Maguire, colors by Rosemary Cheetham, letters by Jared K. Fletcher)

Tanga is a purple alien in space, flying around, looking for a good time, and getting into a lot of trouble but don't worry, she has the superpowers to handle it. Maguire is always so good with facial expressions; I get a lot of enjoyment just seeing him draw people talking because of how well he does it. I wish this felt a little less aimless-- Tanga is attacked by a random spaceship, she destroys it easily (it's automated), and it never comes up again in favor of a story about her protecting the dimwitted inhabitants of an alien world from an onslaught of monsters.

I wish this one had more of a hook, because I enjoyed it a lot, but not as much as I wanted to. Tanga just wants to have fun. This isn't quite enough to hang a serious story, and the story isn't funny enough for it to be a humorous one. Plus some jokes went on a little too long, like her attempts to drink the local alcohol on the planet she visits. But overall this is fun. I've read a number of comics drawn by Maguire, but I don't think I've ever seen him write before, and he's pretty good at it, so I look forward to seeing him wrap this up in My Greatest Adventure.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part VIII: Batman: The Ring, the Arrow and the Bat

Comic trade paperback, 182 pages
Published 2003 (contents: 1998-2000)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2014

Batman: The Ring, the Arrow and the Bat

Writer: Dennis O'Neil
Pencillers: Greg Land, Sergio Cariello
Inkers: Dick Giordano, Matt Ryan
Colorists: Greg Wright, Rick Taylor
Letterers: Clem Robins, Willie Schubert

Year One, August - Year Two, February
I wish I'd known about this book when I did my big readthrough of Green Arrow tales, because it's much more Green Arrow and Green Lantern's tale than it is Batman's. This collects two stories: the first, "Peacemakers," is about the first meeting between Green Arrow and Green Lantern, while the second, "The Arrow and the Bat," unites the two with Batman.

That said, it's not very good. I feel like the later you are in Denny O'Neil's career, the worse his writing is, and this book is no exception. It's jumpy, characters don't (re)act realistically, the conspiracies are too complicated to make sense, it's bloodier than a mainstream DC superhero story ought to be, and it doesn't even get basic points of continuity right. Oliver seems to have lost his fortune already, but he hasn't even joined the Justice League yet because there is no Justice League yet. And it was O'Neil who wrote the story where Oliver lost his fortune, set well into his tenure on the League! What's the point of writing a tale to tick off a continuity box if you get the continuity wrong? None, as far as I can tell, because this is a disappointing and uninteresting book.

Next Week: Batman enrolls in D.A.R.E. in Venom!