These are the last four issues written by the Bierbaums.
Will they go out in a blaze of glory or fizzle out?
Legionnaires #12 (1994)
written by Tom & Mary Bierbaum
pencils by Adam Hughes, Chris Sprouse & Chris Gardner
cover by Chris Sprouse
The Legionnaires don’t seem to be very popular in-universe right now.
Last time the Legionnaires were dealing with an uprising, caused by a mix of xenophobia and a food crisis in New Earth.
We begin with Inferno (the SW6 Sun Boy) being saved by a random Science Police officer.
Who immediately has a huge crush on him.
Uhm, isn’t Inferno supposed to be a teenager now? As a Science Police officer I assume she’s an adult.
So I don’t feel bad when she’s knocked out by Inferno’s groupie / stalker.
We then move to Kid Quantum being sworn in as a new Legion member.
Sure is great to see the rest of the Legion caring about the important stuff while there’s an uprising.
There’s also a hilarious gag about the Legion flag being raised by Element 152, the same element the Flight Ring is made of, as a Matter-Eater Lad joke.
Sorry, did I say hilarious? I meant unfunny and stupid.
Even the rest of the team has had enough of his constant goofing around, something I have to agree with.
Credit when it’s due, but when Giffen introduced M.E.L’s new jokey persona, he managed to strike a balance between making him joke around without reducing him to an idiot.
The Bierbaums seem to consider him ONLY as comic relief.
Which leads to one of the dumbest decisions of this run, WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING.
In order to teach M.E.L a lesson, he’s going to replace Chameleon Boy in an infiltration mission.
We will soon see that this is even dumber than it sounds.
To make matters worse, the New Earth government is so weak that autocrats are showing up all over the place.
The access point to one of the city-domes is currently locked by a massive chain (so take a guess who’s about to show up), but thankfully Triad can help.
The Bierbaums are VERY fond of the idea of making Triad’s three bodies have distinct personalities. Nothing against that, and in fact it’s going to be a big part of her Reboot characterization… except THAT one makes sense because it’s created this way from the beginning.
This is supposed to be the same Triplicate Girl of the early Legion stories, despite the fact that her duplicate bodies ACTED NOTHING LIKE THIS.
Then again, what can you expect from the Bierbaum’s characterization skills?
People were paid to write, pencil, ink, color, edit, letter, print and ship this comic.
With money.
The Legion enters the city-dome, assuring the Science Police that they’ve got this.
They don’t.
Kid Quantum is the one who has to save them with his stasis field, WHATEVER THAT’S SUPPOSED TO BE. Seriously, it has NOT been explained in the story yet.
I thought it might disable weapons or slow up time (as the Reboot version will), but instead it does… whatever the plot needs, I guess?
Things inside the dome aren’t much brighter.
The Legionnaires save the alien woman from being burned alive.
Wait, superheroes saving lives instead of wasting everybody’s time?
What is that doing in THIS book?
Kid Quantum’s stasis field can also heal her. Considering his power seems to do basically anything, is he the new Tyroc?
Live Wire has taken the spot of the worst Legionnaire in this book for a while (more on that soon), so I guess it’s appropriate that Inferno feels jealous enough to suddenly drop some casual xenophobia.
The crowd also attacks a Dominator child…
…but when the Legionnaires try to save her, they are zapped into nothingness.
In other plots, the Legionnaires are planning to infiltrate the space pirates.
Kono is recruited for this (they’re her people), which of course makes it the perfect moment to bring back the most hilarious running gag from her Legion membership: the fact that she used to run around taking pictures of guys in the shower.
Sorry, did I say hilarious? I meant unfunny and repetitive.
Matter-Eater Lad gets back at her with a picture of HER in the shower.
Understandably, the girls are pretty upset at the idea of him invading their privacy.
And they’re perfectly okay with Kono doing the same with guys because… uhm… I guess the Bierbaums find this hilarious?
And finally, Cosmic Boy is still on the verge of death because Live Wire zapped him.
Thanks to Saturn Girl, however, he has a fighting chance.
Something that makes Live Wire jealous because he’s just. The. Worst.
And Saturn Girl finally, FINALLY has had enough of him!
Legionnaires #13 (1994)
written by Tom & Mary Bierbaum
pencils by Frank Fosco
cover by Adam Hughes
The cover certainly promises a fun teenage comedy romp. Given the precedents, I’m not optimistic.
The Legionnaires weren’t killed by the Dominator kid, they were just teleported into prison.
The Legionnaires can handle themselves in a prison riot…
…but not to prevent the cops from slaughtering all the other prisoners.
HOW ARE YOU SO BAD AT BEING HEROES!?!?
This particular group includes Element Lad (I refuse to call him Alchemist), so they really have no excuse for not preventing the slaughter.
He does point out that he was injured in the previous issue, but he IS shown to still have his powers!
Wait, is… is Inferno being a good person instead of an absolute piece of garbage?
You mean that was an option THE WHOLE TIME and they just decided to write him in the worst possible way?
Yeah that tracks.
Who would have thought that Sun Boy could be written as a competent hero and nuanced character?
Why, doing that would have required to actually read his stories instead of reducing him to a one-note jackass.
Chameleon Boy tries the old “shapeshift into the enemy’s leader and hope nobody notices”, and to his credit that ALMOST works.
They then find themselves attacked by a squadron of… dominatrixes? Dominatrices?
They’re impressive enough to bypass Inertron, and I remind you that the stuff is too much even for Superman to break!!!
That’s naturally the work on Grimbor. On one hand I’m glad he’s finally being treated like a threat to an entire team of Legionnaires… but on the other, this is easily his worst look ever.
I mentioned that swapping Chameleon Boy for Matter-Eater Lad was a stupid decision, and we’re about to find out why.
Kono gets all her Sklarian friends to fix M.E.L. so he can infiltrate her people…
…to turn him into a Sklarian girl.
They did this thanks to the gender-reversal virus from the Subs special.
That’s a neat reference, but why would you EVER want to risk using a gender-bent M.E.L. in yellowface when YOU HAVE CHAMELEON BOY IN YOUR TEAM!?
Is teaching him a lesson (IN WHAT!?) worth the risk of blowing the mission!?
They do infiltrate the space pirates pretty quickly…
…only for Matter-Eater Lass to IMMEDIATELY blow her cover!!!
If you HAD to replace Chameleon Boy, I feel like virtually every other Legionnaire would have been a better choice.
Gender and race apparently aren’t a problem, right? Couldn’t they have put Saturn Girl in yellowface? Or maybe Shrinking Violet or Phantom Girl, who were in the Espionage Squad?
Or do the whole skin color + gender change to Invisible Kid, who was ALSO in the Espionage Squad?
This whole plot did absolutely nothing for the mission and the plot, other than add a couple pages and satisfy some fetishes.
In other plots, the Legionnaires who were zapped into another dimension last time are still there…
…and only Invisible Kid is able to escape thanks to sheer concentration.
Look, it’s nice that he FINALLY gets something to do, but you have Brainiac 5 RIGHT THERE and having a brain that can process information better than anyone else IS HIS ENTIRE THING.
Cosmic Boy awakes from his coma, proving to be the one member of this team who is not a complete moron.
Forget the origin of the SW6 batch, forget Glorith’s and Universo’s masterplans… THIS is the greatest mystery of this run.
Legionnaires #14 (1994)
written by Tom & Mary Bierbaum
pencils by Chris Gardner
cover by Adam Hughes
Seeing the Legionnaires rallying together on the cover makes me realize we haven’t seen the entire team assembled since the book started.
We won’t see it here either.
Despite my dislike of the Bierbaum writing, I had my hopes up when I saw that Grimbor was going to appear on this book: after all this is close to being the horniest Legion, so there was the potential they could do something creative with S&M Reed Richards.
Instead he’s just a generic villain.
Also he apparently cares about the law now, because he’s acting as the guardian of the elected leader of the Paris city-dome.
Because the guy who once took the entire Earth hostage would definitely care about this.
I don’t have a problem with Grimbor being a xenophobe, since he’s the villain.
But you couldn’t find anything more creative for him to do than whip a child with a chain? I know Grimbor’s entire theme is chains, but come on!
I also have a really, really hard time believing Grimbor would be fooled by Triad creating her duplicates.
Creating traps for super-heroes is his gimmick! They COULD have made use of the backstory of this book if he expected her to just have two bodies, like Duo Damsel, and be surprised when she has a third one.
But that would require the writers to recall the premise of their own series.
With Grimbor taken out, it’s time to deal with the tyrant of the Paris dome.
Honestly, it’s a bit hard for me to entirely side with the Legionnaires here.
It looks like Paris never voted on following the New Earth law that prevent the city from shutting down borders and communications.
But also, even if this “New Earth Charter” was signed… why would that make this election illegal?
Unless the guy is lying, as Chameleon Boy seems to imply?
The worldbuilding of New Earth is all over the place, you can’t introduce a political plot without setting up ANY of the rules of how this society works!
Also, I would love to see this guy’s election campaign.
We’ll get back to this plot soon. Because in parallel, the space pirates discover that Matter-Eater Lass is actually Matter-Eater Lad.
Thankfully the pirates are too inept to prevent the spies to send a message to their teammates.
The ship is taken by the Legionnaires, mostly because Computo finally uses her powers… I believe for maybe the second time in the series?
To be fair, there is ONE detail in all of this that I really liked: the pirates hid the loot by shrinking it to microscopic size. Neat idea!
This is where the space pirate plot reconnects to the Paris one, because they were working for the tyrant…
…or so they thought: they were secretly working for Grimbor.
I have no clue whether this guy is lying about being in the dark or if he’s covering his track.
In fact I DON’T KNOW THIS GUY AT ALL, he showed up in this issue!!!
Also: how the heck are we supposed to reconcile this issue, where Grimbor is the respected second-in-command of the mayor of Paris, with LSH #51 where he attacked a research facility AND was arrested at the end!?!?
Again: this might have been an interesting contrast between ideologies if we were given ANY context for how the cities of New Earth are really doing.
Heck we don’t even have enough evidence to be sure whether this guy was actively making things worse by inciting the xenophobia of his citizens!
Grimbor seemed to be the one in charge, so maybe this guy is actually sincere and his only problem is that he’s too bad at his job?
Imagine this idea in the hands of better writers: a Dominator Legionnaire who rebelled against her people because they ran experiments on her! Bonus for having a Sun Boy equivalent NOT being absolute scum towards a girl!
The mission was a success.
The treatment of Matter-Eater Lass as a nuisance to everybody and the butt of every joke, not so much.
In other plots, Cosmic Boy gets better.
The mystery of what Saturn Girl ever saw in this version of Live Wire will not be solved in this issue. I’m afraid it might never be solved.
As a reminder, Live Wire shot his teammate (with lightning) because he got in the way during a mission. But unless he turns himself in, the team apparently has no system in place to punish him.
Also recall that these two WERE THE ONES WHO CREATED THE LEGION IN THE FIRST PLACE.
And we close the issue to introduce the focus of what will be the last Bierbaum issue.
The plot about this telepathic kid, not Saturn Girl’s butt.
Live Wire volunteers to participate in the mission, something that Saturn Girl vetoes…
…but for some reason Invisible Kid disagrees.
Saturn Girl links everybody’s mind, in order to face the kid.
Aaaaand they fail.
Legionnaires #15 (1994)
written by Tom & Mary Bierbaum
pencils and cover by Jeff Moy
As a sign of things to come: the last Bierbaum issue is also the first penciled by Jeff Moy, who will later become a VERY prominent artist during the Reboot.
The arrival of Moy is a good occasion to highlight something that has been going on for a while, and that will be repeated over the years.
The first page of the book includes a roll call of the most prominent Legionnaires appearing in the issue, including both the civilian name and the superpower.
It’s not an invention of this series by any means, it has been used in the past for Legion stories, but it will quickly became a staple of the Legion.
It’s a great idea, especially since this team is quite large and some of the civilian names are a bit hard to remember unless you’re a superfan.
Turns out the telepathic link wasn’t a great idea, since now they can experience each other’s nightmares AND their worst traits are exaggerated.
The rest of the series didn’t have that excuse, though.
With some encouragement from Saturn Girl, Ultra Boy breaks free of his nightmare.
See, now THIS is how you put your favorite character in a good spotlight, instead of forcing him in a position that doesn’t fit his character at all.
Too bad it took THIS long for the Bierbaums to figure it out.
Andromeda’s nightmare is not being able to save everyone despite her powers, fitting her being a Supergirl equivalent.
Apparition’s nightmare is snakes.
Gossamer’s nightmare is being Live Wire’s sister.
Live Wire’s nightmare is killing his pet bunny.
Wait, what?
Uhm, I don’t know anything about the bunny stuff, and Live Wire DEFINITELY needs to learn to take responsibility… but I call bulls##t on this “nobody can stop you from making mistakes”.
The guy recklessly fired lightning blasts in a crowded area and lied about what he did, I feel you guy could at least TRY to teach him SOMETHING!
This is supposed to be a tender moment when Saturn Girl realizes why she loves him.
I still don’t get it.
Ferro’s nightmare is being in this series.
This would have been a good scene if he had done ANYTHING in this series.
Did you even remember he was a member?
You couldn’t stop being annoying for ONE issue, couldn’t you Live Wire?
Well… your adult counterpart HAS been completely useless during this entire era, Brainy, so in a way HE might be slightly responsible for A LOT of deaths.
So what’s going on? It’s all Live Wire’s fault, because his idiocy triggered a kid with weird telepathic powers.
In the middle of this, we have the return of Inferno’s mermaid fling.
Who is being stalked by Inferno’s stalker.
The placement of this sub-plot is strange, considering it’s the only part of the book that is unrelated to the plot about the kid. I’m also pretty sure it doesn’t go anywhere, thanks to Zero Hour.
In fact, we now move to the kid’s nightmare: he’s re-living both the Dominator invasion…
…being hit by his mother…
…AND watch her die in front of his eyes!
Yeah, now try complaining about your dead bunny.
Okay, Live Wire, you get ONE chance to set this right with the kid.
Or not. HOW ARE YOU SO BAD AT THIS!?!?
Okay, I guess you have TWO chances, thanks to Saturn Girl’s telepathic link.
This SOMEHOW works, pushing the kid to release the others.
And this is how the Bierbaum run ends. With a happy ending that most of these characters don’t exactly deserve.
Legion significance: 0/10
Whether it’s because of Zero Hour or because of the disconnect from the other series, this amounts to nothing.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not enough imaginative weirdness. And everybody is too stupid to be charming.
Depression scale
#12-14: 7/10
New Earth continues to barely hold together politically; it doesn’t take much to have rebellions and attempts to secede, and the heroes are too ineffectual or too disinterested to have an impact.
#15: 3/10
But at least they save a kid. Baby steps I guess.
Does it stand the test of time?
#12: 0/10
Very inconsistent pencils, everyone is unlikeable, and it’s boooooring.
#13: 4/10
Same problems of the previous issue but with one ray of sunshine: where was THIS Sun Boy in the previous issues AND the other series!?!?
#14: 2/10
The political thriller or the Grimbor fight could have been interesting in the hands of better writers.
Could have used less Live Wire being the worst, too.
#15: 6/10
Perhaps the cruelest joke is that the Bierbaums seem to have learned from some of their mistakes and are getting better… in their last issue.
There’s still a lot that needs work, since it’s still too disjointed and the focus is all over the place, but at points this DID feel like the Legion for perhaps the first time in this series.
As for the Bierbaum run as a whole…
The Legionnaires were SUPPOSED to incarnate the aspirational, fun and light-hearted Legion of the early years.
Instead they come off as stupid, impulsive, self-centered, intellectually braindead, hormonal teenage horndogs that don’t have an ounce of heroism in their bones.
I have rarely disliked the cast of a book more than these morons.
This run completely squandered all the potential of the basic concept and, from a writing standpoint, fails at nearly all levels.
I admit the Bierbaums had SOME good ideas here and there, but I won’t miss them.
AT.
ALL.
We are legion
33 active Legionnaires. Of these, 20 are in the “Legionnaires” team
1 presumed dead (SW6 Mon-El)
2 in sick leave (Kent Shakespeare and Devlin O’Ryan)
5 reserve members
28 resigned members
18 deceased members
83 people have been members
68 people have been rejected
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to infiltrate a gang of Sklarian pirates. You are Sklarian. Your partner is not.
Do you:
A) brief your partner on Sklarian culture so they have a chance of passing as Sklarian?
B) risk your mission and your partner’s life by giving them no information whatsoever on Sklarian culture?
Of course Kono would go with B. What about everyone else involved in plotting the mission? Didn’t it occur to anyone that Tenzette needed a crash course in Sklarian culture? If everyone figured the mission would be funnier this way, they were wrong.
Why would Catspaw be upset over someone potentially taking shower pics of her? She’s easily the horniest of the legionnaires. Doesn’t she want the attention? Or is she upset because she can’t get any even if all the boys see her nudes, because she claws anyone she tries to get frisky with? Given how catlike she is, does she even shower with water? Have I just put more thought into her character than the Bierbaums did?
I do have to give the Bierbaums props for remembering Tinya’s fear of snakes, a plot point from that one time Mantis Morlo was raising monsters in the sewers.
How long is Imra’s hair? In some panels, the ponytail reaches her shoulders, but in other panels it’s long enough for her to whip people with it. Between Imra and St. Maixent, it’s apparent that the artist likes drawing hair. I much prefer Moy’s cute habit of having characters sticking their tongues out.
Maybe doing a tongue count will be appropriate for Moy’s issues in the reboot.
This era was just so much wasted potential…
OK, so I’ve been waiting for a good time to post this, and I guess this is really the last opportunity. I asked Tom Bierbaum on his blog about the original plans for an “early Legion” series and how it morphed into Legionnaires, and here is what he had to say:
I think the original plan for the “Legionnaires” spinoff (to tell the new history of the Legion in the revised “Glorithverse” timeline) was changed to the adventures of the current SW6 kids mostly because there was an initiative at the company to spend less time rehashing the past and more on moving forward and it felt like retelling revised Legion history would have been out of step with that initiative. I personally was happy to change approaches since I’ve never particularly liked retelling and changing established continuity, and in fact we’d labored mightily with the Glorith timeline change (in LSH #5) to alter existing continuity as little as possible and keep it as simple as possible to just switch everything back to the original timeline if that ever became the desired course.
Probably somewhere in our boxes of old things there might be copies of what we were proposing for the “Retelling” spinoff but we haven’t run across it in years. Something to keep our eyes out for. I don’t remember a great deal of details, other than we wanted to bring in a mystery “Legionnaire X” whose identity would be masked and there’s be an ongoing mystery through the early issues who it was.
And I think we were going to give Glorith a big role as an ongoing villain and give her some background about her formative years and the abuses she faced that helped mold her ruthlessness.
I wanted to preserve the early Legion costumes as much as possible but I suspect they were going to let Chris Sprouse or someone else redesign them to make the “Retelling” series feel contemporary.
We’d have also told the story of Kid Quantum’s short tenure in the early Legion (as someone who apparently lost his life because the Legion let him in with an artificial power that relied on some sort of technology, motivating the Legion to amend its rules to prohibit powers that relied on devices or other artificial assistance).
Otherwise, I’m not remembering a lot and I don’t believe much of what we were coming up with for the “Retelling” was kept around for the “SW6” version of the spinoff (other than our general characterizations of the Legionnaires), though it’s possible Chris might have begun to design those great “Legionnaires” uniforms before the changeover.
Thank you for the additional information; I was going to talk about the original plans for the Legionnaires series at the end of the era, where I’ll talk about the Legion entry in Who’s Who, but this includes additional stuff.
For once, I mostly side with the DC editors. In this period DC was trying REALLY hard to distance itself from the pre-Crisis era, and having a whole series set in that era that was also trying to modernize things would have contrasted with the editorial line.
As a reader I would most likely have loved this “have your Legion cake and eat it” approach, but let’s be realistic: Levitz also tried to have the regular series be both a continuation of the pre-Crisis characters AND at the same time be firmly a post-Crisis book… and considering they closed the book, I wouldn’t have put too much faith in this version of Legionnaires working.
It is interesting that the Kid Quantum story they wanted to tell is basically the exact same that will actually happen in the Reboot. I don’t think they were credited for the idea.
Now, a more direct point on the issues reviewed. I’ll start by addressing something that has come up a lot in your reviews of this series: the Legionnaires suddenly having personalities not shown in their early history. This connects to what Tom Bierbaum said in my quote from him: to re-tell the stories of the Legion for a modern audience, he and Mary gave them personality traits, which were kept into the Legionnaires series. Let’s face it, the early Legionnaires HAD NO PERSONALITIES beyond being generically heroic. They were distinguished only by their powers, and by to whom they were romantically linked. I’m not saying that the Bierbaums did a great job of it, but they were at least trying to give shallow characters (i.e., the Legionnaires pre-Shooter) some actual character depth. The fact that there was no sign of these in the Hamilton stories shouldn’t be thought of as a strike against the Bierbaums for doing so.
Kid Quantum’s powers were explained in the text piece of the issue in which he was introduced: he makes a stasis field that slows or stops time within it. In issue # 12, he’s not healing that injured woman, he’s freezing her in time so she doesn’t experience any pain until medical folks can treat her. The earlier depiction of the Science Police acting cooperatively groggy by his stasis field is ham-handed, the idea (in the action) was that his field would time-freeze them, not that they’d be sleepily lulled into submission.
I fully agree that the early Legionnaires were basically blank slates, but in my opinion they botched the attempt to give them a personality.
Some of the added stuff works: M.E.L being the jokester or Phantom Girl being stuck-up don’t contradict anything from the original stories.
But Saturn Girl? I have a REALLY hard time reconciling this vapid version with the original assertive one; even in the early Hamilton run, she was probably the only one with a distinct personality.
They also drop the ball in making Lightning Lad and Sun Boy absolutely unsufferable. And they have no excuse with the new members.
I give the Bierbaums credit for trying to make the characters less shallow, but the problem is that most of the Legionnaires ended up being MORE shallow than the original blank slates!
There’s also the problem of where the Legionnaires are picked up from history. If this was a very early Legion, fine, we haven’t seen much of them. But including the Shooter members means that these characters already went through the ENTIRE Hamilton run, where A) some of them did have a personality B) they were established heroes with experience, not the incompetent idiots of this series.
Agree to disagree on this one. If these were explicitly new versions I wouldn’t have a problem with the lack of consistency. But if you introduce them as the younger versions of the team in the main series, you’re asking for them to be compared.
In a different series in a book published 17 months earlier. They couldn’t fit a single sentence about his powers? Not one “my stasis field will freeze them in time” balloon? It’s not a completely straightforward power like “is strong” or “shoots lightning”, a proper explanation would have helped. Maybe I’m the only one confused by the panels where he uses his powers, but I don’t think I’m asking for much.
“Yeah, now try complaining about your dead bunny.”
Good one. You really got me with that.
Did you see that the Sklarian Raiders somehow made it into the Supergirl movie? I have no clue how they made that choice, but it was cool to see Legion stuff on the big screen (even if I didn’t realize it until afterwards).
Yep! Weird how they became the first non-Kryptonian Legion race on the big screen… my money was on Coluans.