Showcase ‘96 #8 (1996)
by Tom McCraw & Roberto Flores
cover by Tom Grummett
Showcase ’96 was an anthology book, like most incarnations of Showcase, that will feature the Legion a couple of times.
This time they don’t make it to the cover, which is about a completely unrelated Superboy story…
…with pencils by Roberto Flores, who is doing his very best Humberto Ramos imitation.
You can especially tell with the way he draws XS.
The Legion is investigating several deaths found on the latest world to join the United Planets.
XS is explicitly looking for the victims, but given how she’s drawn it REALLY looks like she’s fixating on this anatomically correct statue.
I honestly had to double check this wasn’t Ramos using a pseudonym.
Which is USUALLY a bad thing for me, as I don’t like much of his work… but I can never praise his Impulse enough, and from the looks of it Flores would be a worthy successor.
Bizarrely, for one page the colorist ends up giving Leviathan the same skin color of XS.
This is truly unexpected since the colorist is Tom McCraw, the same colorist of the main Legion books!
The same coloring error is in the digital version of DC Infinite (which isn’t the one I’m using for technical reasons, but I checked).
Things are so bad that the High Chancellor fears for his life at the next meeting, so he sends someone else that the Legion will have to protect.
As much as I love Gates and don’t care all that much for Leviathan, I must admit Gates has been more irritating than charming lately.
Turns out that the murderers are Quicksand and Holdur; raise your hand if you remember these two!
They used to work for Pulsar Stargrave, and I think this is their only Reboot appearance.
See, if Gates had made only THIS observation, I would be on his side!
The problem with Flores doing a Ramos impression is that he draws HUGE feet, so XS is at a disadvantage against Quicksand.
We’re going a bit overboard with the fanservice here. Unless Quicksand is not human, that cannot be comfortable.
You see Quicksand, if you had converted more of your mass into sand instead of posing for the camera, MAYBE you might have slowed her down.
Great work, Gates, no notes.
Because the other VIP has already murdered the targets, Quicksand and Holdur try to run for it…
…but thanks to XS’s quick thinking, they end up trapped in Leviathan’s Transuit™.
Hey, that’s less embarrassing than Spider-Man trapping Sandman in a vacuum cleaner in their first fight!
While it’s just been mentioned in captions, the situation is a bit complex here: this system has TWO inhabited planet, but only one of them has been offered membership by the United Planets.
However the three Legionnaires manage to save the leaders before the final assassination takes place.
And at the end, the terrorist attack kind of gets results because the request to join the United Planets is withdrawn.
And we close with the reassurance that no actual character development took place.
Legion significance: 0/10
I should have reviewed this one before the current storyline, but I’m doing it now because I’ve reached the absolute latest point at the series where I could place it… because I completely forgot this story existed.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? 6/10
There is SOME potential here, but 10 pages just isn’t enough to deal with a political plot like this while ALSO doing character work AND have a fight scene… and the story ends up doing nothing interesting.
Good artwork despite some laughably forced fanservice… but that’s about it.
And it’s not just Quicksand: there are a couple of pages where XS is posing for the camera so much that Dream Girl would be proud of her, but it doesn’t fit the character.
It’s a shame that Quicksand is not used more, as her power is VERY versatile and she does have a fairly memorable design. No, not just for the fanservice.
I still have no clue why Holdor exists in any continuity.