Legion of Super-Heroes vol4 #66 (1995)
written by Tom McCraw & Mark Waid
pencils and cover by Lee Moder
Time for some new Legionnaires!
We are immediately introduced to the Reboot version of Laurel Gand.
Daxam will play a MUCH bigger role in the Reboot than in any other continuity.
It’s going to play up their isolationism, which is perfectly reasonable considering they are lethally allergic to lead: even a minor contact with a lead-rich planet is a serious risk to them.
President Chu is pushing Andromeda to join the Legion as a negotiation tactic towards Daxam joining the United Planets. This showcases that while the President was initially against the very idea of the Legion, she has found a use for them.
This would all be well and good for the rest of the Legion, if it wasn’t for a huge problem with Andromeda… she’s a raging xenophobe.
Her character development is going to be one of the best parts of this era.
She’s the only new draftee pushed into the Legion: the others are being vetted personally.
Starting with Chameleon and Leviathan checking out Lume, a weird light-based lifeform.
However Lume doesn’t want to leave his home planet, so he’s not drafted: this is in fact his only appearance. This introduces a detail that I had not considered: while it had been established that the draftees cannot refuse to join, apparently the Legion itself can reject potential drafts.
On the basis of this scene alone I would not consider Lume a rejected member, but the situation will be clarified in a later scene.
The prospect of asking Karate Kid to join is raised, but that won’t happen for a while.
Despite Andromeda being on the cover, the main story is going to revolve around Shrinking Violet.
This is an unusual arrangement: the planet has selected THREE draftees, and the winner of a competition will become the actual new Legionnaire.
The other two competitors are Micro (who you might remember from the original continuity as the Legion of Super-Villains member responsible for Violet’s kidnapping) and newcomer Ion.
The idea of a planet holding competitions for who gets to be a Legionnaire is perhaps the option that makes the most sense for planets where everyone has the same power; weirdly enough we have seen in both continuities that multiple planets do this for their “planetary champion”, and yet it’s basically unheard of for picking Legionnaires.
I’m sorry to say that Lee Moder doesn’t give this scene justice. It’s supposed to have some crazy perspectives… the stadium is filled by tiny people who are barely visible from the stands where the Legionnaires are sitting, and the robot that the draftees are fighting is supposed to be huge for them but tiny for the visitors… but it’s all lost.
Ion shows promise, even more so than Shrinking Violet, but she immediately dies in mysterious circumstances.
Meanwhile Chameleon and Leviathan move to the next recruit: an insectoid that is firmly against joining the team.
This is Gates, who is FIRMLY against the very concept of a governmentally sponsored team.
He will eventually be forced to join the Legion and in fact become one of the most beloved members of the Reboot (even surviving into another continuity, sort of), but he’s explicitly rejected here.
Well no wonder you thought people would be eager to join the Legion: both Triad and Saturn Girl are volunteers, and XS is the Flash’s granddaughter!
I mean… she’s not wrong.
We have in fact confirmation that Ion was murdered. Notice the size of the buildings and of the local Science Police officers… remember that on this planet everyone has shrinking powers.
Poor Ion died in one of the worst ways imaginable.
This is also an excellent bit of worldbuilding: even if the shrinking powers conveniently work on clothes, a society WOULD need something to resist the size alteration.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Micro is a jackass.
This was an incredibly dumb move on Micro’s part, since his plan required him to plant a tiny a weapon during the most watched event of a planet where everyone is naturally inclined to pay attention to small details.
In fact, Violet spots the moment he doomed Ion by watching a replay of the event:
Being more pathetic than the original Micro is QUITE an accomplishment!
He tries to sneak away, but he runs into a subatomic punch.
This version of Shrinking Violet takes most of its inspiration from the 60s version…
…but there are influences from the badass from the 80s.
Violet is going to be a MAJOR part of the Reboot; this is in fact my favorite version of the character (although the Volume 3 one is VERY close).
In the middle of all this, we are introduced to another new Legionnaire exclusive to the Reboot continuity: she will take the codename Kinetix.
She’s introduced as being focused on magic and becoming more powerful, something that will get in and out of focus multiple times.
She’s introduced next to her brother Thanot, who will play such a small role that I completely forgot that he exists.
Despite the touch of darkness in her backstory, she’s a very fun character that will bring a lot of energy to the team. For some reason she won’t carry through other continuities… it’s probably a combination of several factors, as I’ll discuss later.
It could have been worse: she could have been stuck with the codename “Morpho”.
As the name implies, Kinetix has telekinetic powers. But she uses them in a rather unique way.
I think that Kinetix’s failure to outlast the Reboot is due to several factors:
A) she’s not a classic character
B) her storyline will get very convoluted
C) her powerset and personality are not as unique as other Reboot characters who provided more staying power
D) the last Reboot eras will have no idea whatsoever what to do with her. I will eagerly defend the DnA run against MOST of the criticisms against it when the time comes, but their treatment of Kinetix is inexcusable even for me.
I don’t think she’s the favorite Legionnaire to a lot of fans, but she seems to be well-liked.
Kinetix superfans are VERY devoted to her, though.
And so we close with the Legion gaining three more girls.
Thankfully Kinetix will soon get a much better costume.
Although Brainiac 5 is focusing on a different new Legion girl.
Legion significance: 8/10
All three new girls will play an important role in the Reboot. Prevented from a higher score only because most of their development is not in this issue.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
Clearly a breather issue, but it does its job introducing new members. While they’re still rough around the edges, we already see some core traits: Andromeda is assertive but aloof, Shrinking Violet is very capable but very shy, and Kinetix is bubbly and energetic but with a problematic need to be powerful.
Gates is a strange case: he gets two pages here where he’s quickly dismissed and doesn’t come back for a while. Which makes me wonder if he wasn’t originally supposed to become a member.
The weak spot is still the artwork. Once again I have to stress that Lee Moder is not a bad artist, but when you have Jeff Moy injecting truckloads of personality into the other series, you really miss that kind of energy.
Who did it better?
Andromeda is introduced as a full character (and fully dressed this time) instead of being shoehorned as a Supergirl equivalent.
Shrinking Violet also gets a proper introduction, something she lacked in the first appearance in Action Comics #276 where she had no lines and didn’t use her powers.
This is a distinct advantage of the Reboot starting out already knowing where its characters are supposed to end up, so I can’t fault the originals.
We are legion
Adding Andromeda, Violet and Kinetix to the regular members.
I’m also counting Lume and Gates as the first rejects; Ion and Micro are not counted because they were in the competition and not rejected by the Legion itself.
- 13 active Legionnaires (4 volunteers, 9 drafted)
- 1 resigned member
- 1 deceased member
- 15 people have been members
- 2 Legion leaders (Leviathan, Cosmic Boy)
- 2 members have been rejected
Comrade Gates is the best. I forgot how much I love all these guys. Poor Kinetix. Personality wise, she’s very distinct but her powers, they never seem to translate well to the page. The later ‘changes’ really don’t help.
Violet’s take down of Micro Lad is classic. In terms of who did it better, I’d say it’s an even draw. In the preboot, Violet had personal reasons for going after Micro Lad, and her victory was the culmination of many months of storyline. In this version, Violet takes him out on her first outing, establishing that she has what it takes to be a Legionnaire. She also does so for less personal but more altruistic reasons. The motivation and setup differ, but the outcome is the same.
Zoe was totally mishandled by later writers. Her quest for power led some to believe that the writers were going turn her into a certain major Legion villain. It could be that fans figured it out in advance, and that’s why the writers shifted to Violet becoming that villain (another misplaced example of trying to keep readers guessing). Deprived of her main reason for existing, Zoe was cast adrift as writers scrambled to figure out what to do with her. It’s a pity they didn’t lean into her considerable strengths as a character: her friendship with Violet, Leviathan’s crush on her, and the playful energy she brought to the team.
So is Kinetix derived from Life Lass of the Heroes of Lallor? They seem to have similar powers.
So does Quislet, although everything Quislet brings to life disintegrates.
Actually, Lume does make another appearance, in Legionnaires # 56, when M’onel saved his planet from a Khund attack (a prelude to the Dark Circle story).
I got the impression that Lume’s rejection wasn’t a choice, but that either he or his powers wouldn’t survive a trip through dark outer space. As Gates’s later joining indicates, neither the draftees nor the Legion had the discretion to reject.
The off-hand reference to a Xanthu replacement who got into a spaceship accident is recognizable to pre-boot fans as Star Boy, something that will be made explicit later, but is for now a nice wink of the eye for the long-timers.
I liked Kinetix, but it seemed like she spent way too much time on detached duty. As for what happened to her during the Hypertaxis event… Some things are just unforgivable. It was as wrong as putting tits on a snake. Kinetix does appear in Superman #29, as she was pre-Hypertaxis, alongside retroboot Dawnstar and Bendis-boot Gold Lantern, so there’s some hope that Zoe will make it into the volume 9 Legion.
I wonder if Lume was supposed to be a riff on Sun Boy’s original power set, super-radiance (as opposed to solar blasts).
This continuity does do a great job balancing Salu’s shy side and her kick-ass side. Original continuity took a long time to show that she can kick ass, and the threeboot leaned a little too heavily into the ass kicking.
Speaking of ass, it was nice to see Andromeda presented as more than just Super-Tush, and the depths of her journey really highlight how wasted she was in 5YL.
GATES!!!!!
Also, Lume would’ve made for an interesting Legionaire.
When I was reading these at release, I initially couldn’t STAND Zoe, but the way they developed her around the last minute changeup with Vi in the upcoming story really made her stand out, and her plus the relationship that she had with Vi was something really special – one of the unforced relationships that really worked in the reboot. In the end, I ended up being a big fan, and to this day, I don’t understand the choices that were made around her character. If you don’t want to use a character, especially if they’ve been kind of in the foreground for a decent amount of time, just move them into the back for a few months until you figure out a good story to tell.
What we ended up getting between the McAvennie era of the post-100 era, the DnA Hypertaxis abomination and the “Lame Lass” frying by Johns, was literally character assassination. There were a few people at the time who were very vocal about their dislike of Kinetix, and I think the creative staff had more of that opinion.
Thankfully, Williamson (and to a lesser extent, Lemire) brought her back with actual dialogue. Hoping she gets to stay around when we get the new stories.