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Alone and bored on a 30th Century Night-- a review of Legion of Super-Heroes #1

Note 1:  I hope I haven't used that Barenaked Ladies line before on a LSH review before but I think I have.
Note 2:  The Jim Lee variant cover is fun for so many reasons, not the last of which is the 70s style Legion logo and the classic space cruiser in the background.

In many ways, it feels like it's 1989 again and all may be right with the world again.  After 21 years, Paul Levitz is back writing Legion of Super-Heroes again.  Even the cover logo is the same as it was for the 1984-1989 Levitz-penned Legion run.

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 is a prime example of how to write a comic book in the year 1989.  It's plot heavy, dialogue intensive, character packed and gives you just enough explanation to bring you up to speed but assumes that you already have a strong grasp of what's going on.  Let's be honest, the Legion has never been an easy book for a new reader to penetrate, mostly based on the sheer size of the cast and long history of the team and I don't know how much Levitz goes out of his way to really make this the mythological "new reader friendly" book.

And, honestly, I don't care because I finally have my Legion back.

I used to pick up the old Adventure Comics little digests back in the early 1980s, after Adventure had become a reprint series.  There were great old Superman and Supergirl stories in there but the main showcase of those reprints were the great Silver Age Legion stories, where anything could happen.  Space whales, lightning-induced resurrections, Legion of Super-Pets and untold tales of the Adult Legion where all of the women were trying to outdo all of the men in some kind of futuristic sexual revolution.  And all of those wonderful stories were couched in a vision of the future inspired by 1950's science fiction.  From there, I eventually discovered the actual Legion of Super-Heroes title, jumping on just in time to catch the end of Levitz and Keith Giffen's "The Great Darkness Saga," one of the few truly memorable post-Kirby New Gods tales.  At the same time, Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman may have been getting the accolades for their character-driven runs on Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans but Levitz was right there, keeping pace with them and, miraculously, keeping a long, good run together even as Claremont and Wolfman petered out in their titles.

From a purely fanboyish perspective and even with as much as I enjoyed most of what came afterwards, Paul Levitz's Legion is my Legion.

20 years later, Levitz has remembered what made his run successful; his focus on the large cast.  Looking at the number of Legionaires who are in #1, it's shocking to try and think how many more weren't present.  Tyroc, anybody?  That's what I always liked about Levitz's stories; he juggled more characters and plots than anybody else and would let them play out as long as possible without ever getting into the Claremontian dangling-plot territory.  Legion of Super-Heroes #1 shows us the beginning of many different plots and character stories, all possibly building out of the same events.  Levitz has the whole of DC's future to play with and he's willing to tackle that large canvas and make his stories large as well.  It worked for him back in the 80s and hopefully it will work for him here too. 

Artist Vildiray Cinar can pull off a lot of the super-hero stuff in Legion of Super-Heroes but I don't know if he can pull off the future.  Cinar is a good super-hero artist, often looking a bit like Tom Grummett (an artist I've always wished would take a nice, long stab at drawing the Legion) but ever since Keith Giffen, the future has always looked wonderful.  Giffen introduced a sense of design into the future that's been carried on by Olivier Coipel, Chris Sprouse, Barry Kitson and Phil Moy.  There's almost always been a unified look to the design of buildings, space ships and technology that set the Legion's future apart from anyone else's future.  Hopefully Cinar will be able to find his own sense of design and really define what the 31st century looks like now.

Going into Legion of Super-Heroes #1, I knew what I wanted out of it and that's mostly what Paul Levitz and Vildiray Cinar delivered; a return to a future and to characters that I know.  Maybe that's a selfish way to review a comic but I wanted "my" Legion back and that's what Levitz has given me and no one should know "my" Legion better than the man who wrote it. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
"The Scream Heard 'Cross the Universe"
Written by: Paul Levitz
Pencilled by: Yildiray Cinar
Inked by: Wayne Faucher
Lettered by: Sal Cipriano
Colored by: Hi Fi