Legion of Super-Heroes vol4 #69 (1995)
plot by Tom Peyer & Tom McCraw
dialogue by Mark Waid
pencils by Lee Moder
cover by Alan Davis
That is a very pink cover.
We last left the Legionnaires dealing with Composite Man, who has ALL their powers AND is supposedly super-smart.
Good news: Andromeda is staying out of range, so Composite Man won’t have the powers of a Daxamite.
Bad news: the strongest member of the team is out of the fight.
At least she’s more useful than the Science Police.
The Legion is playing defense right now, as Cosmic Boy is seriously struggling to come up with an actual strategy.
The team’s best weapon might be Saturn Girl…
…if Invisible Kid and Cosmic Boy weren’t this obnoxious.
On one level I get it… they’re risking their lives when Saturn Girl sounds like she’s trying to stay away from danger, they’re overwhelmed by the terrible odds, and there had been tension in how to handle the team…
But on the other hand, Invisible Kid’s snark is out of nowhere (he’s supposed to be the genius with SOME people skills, unlike Brainy) and Cosmic Boy comes off as a TERRIBLE leader.
I like to think that in the long run the lessons that he learns in this storyline will make him possibly the best leader the Legion has ever had, but WOW is it uncomfortable right now.
We get some additional lore about Chameleon: he comes from a royal line of spiritual leaders.
So he’s basically in line to be the Durlan Pope.
Notice the mention of Composite Man killing Chameleon’s father. You might think this is to introduce the possibility that R.J.Brande is his father in this continuity as well, but the Reboot will go in a different direction.
And while I vastly prefer what the Reboot does to the Durlan Brande… it does rob us of the possibility of Pope Brande.
It’s always uncomfortable when Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl are mad at each other, isn’t it?
It’s like having the Legion mom and dad fighting!
Well, Brande is more like the Legion’s father, but who ever gets mad at Brande?
Cosmic Boy’s plan is to have XS use Chameleon as bait, taking Composite Man away from the rest of the team…
…while they work on replicating the formula that the Durlans used to sedate him the first time.
Without giving too much away… there is a point later in the series where Cosmic Boy is acting like a jackass on purpose for a secret reason. He’s doing it SO much here that for a moment I thought we were already there… but no, he’s just insufferable for no reason right now.
This is a reeeeally desperate plan.
One of the elements needed for the plan is Forteum-147, which is a weird easter egg.
“Forteum” us an obvious homage to John Forte, but it’s weird to see 147 as the in-joke number.
Typically when the Legion does something like this, it uses 247… that’s THE Legion number, as a reference to their first appearance on Adventure Comics #247.
147 is instead likely a reference to Superboy #147, the Legion origin story… and it’s weird to use it with a John Forte reference because he didn’t draw that story!
The Science Police, useless in any timeline since 2962.
As a testament to how much she has grown since her first mission, XS is moments away to sacrifice herself in an attempt to stop Composite Man.
I find it really hard to believe that Composite Man has super-intelligence…
…when he runs right into Cosmic Boy throwing the serum at him.
And that’s how Composite Man is ultimately defeated.
OR IS IT???
Yeah it turns out that Invisible Kid botched the translation for the formula.
Don’t blame Invisible Kid too much… if Chameleon said 147, in base 9 that’s the equivalent to 124 in base 10. And I can’t think of a single Legion lore connected to the number 124… but just barely!
Because thanks to an amazing coincidence, Volume 4 will actually end in the year 2000 with issue #125. We missed one heck of a spoiler for ONE NUMBER!!!
But enough about math-based trivia (to everyone’s sigh of relief)… it’s time for Saturn Girl to showcase why she’s the best.
Chameleon’s mind was incredibly painful to explore, and he wasn’t even a homicidal maniac!
Yeah if there’s one thing all superhero teams eventually learn, it’s that you DON’T MESS WITH A TELEPATH.
The now catatonic Composite Man is taken back to Durla, where Chameleon will bury his father…
…and keep in mind that he’s starting to speak Interlac. That’s going to be important.
As for Saturn Girl… she’s had better days.
That was basically me during the entire 5YL era.
Legion significance: 6/10
The effects of the ending will be felt for a while.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
A solid issue, and for once I think that Lee Moder’s artwork fits rather well for the most part. I’m not a huge fan of how he draws the Legionnaires… his faces are a bit off-putting… but that final trip inside Composite Man’s mind is magnificently creepy.
The story does show the Legion being utterly overwhelmed, but a bit too much… the team is still young, sure, but to me they came off as a bit too inept.
As mentioned, Cosmic Boy’s attitude is quite uncomfortable to read. I think that was the intent, and as discussed there’s an argument to be made that he will develop into an amazing leader BECAUSE he saw first hand what happens when he doesn’t trust his teammates… but while it makes Saturn Girl’s victory better, it also makes some pages harder to get through than they should be.
Who did it better?
It’s REALLY a stretch, I know, but… the first time a Legionnaire was committed to a mental hospital after saving the day was Matter-Eater Lad eating the Miracle Machine.
While that WAS an awesome moment for him… I’m going with Saturn Girl doing it better, because it was foreshadowed and it’s slightly less ridiculous.
We are legion
Moving Saturn Girl into sick leave.
- 12 active Legionnaires (3 volunteers, 9 drafted)
- 1 sick leave (Saturn Girl)
- 1 resigned member
- 1 deceased member
- 15 people have been members
- 2 Legion leaders (Leviathan, Cosmic Boy)
- 2 members have been rejected
Interesting letters: the fact that the Reboot didn’t start with an issue #1 remains baffling.
It’s not without precedent: Action Comics, Detective Comics and many others didn’t renumber after Crisis… but at least they didn’t start IMMEDIATELY from zero, the characters had many years of untold stories behind them, so it made SOME sense.
It’s particularly strange because the Reboot started in 1994; while restarting a series from a #1 wasn’t as frequent as it is today, it DID happen.
It’s obvious from the answer that the main focus was to avoid pissing off the old readers TOO much, but the idea that there had been too many #1 is a bit weird because technically speaking at that point the main Legion book had only started from #1 just twice:
-Volume 1 was a miniseries of reprints, so it doesn’t count
-Volume 2 never had a #1 because if continued the numbering of the Superboy series
-Volume 3 (1984) and Volume 4 (1989) were the only two #1 the Legion had.
By comparison later this year the Legion will start a new incarnation… supposedly with a Volume 9.
These days (at least since Marvel’s Heroes Reborn, maybe?) re-numbering ongoing series seems to happen at the drop of a hat, but there were definitely some sort of legal reasons not to start a new “volume” of a book back in the day, to the point where Barry Allen’s Flash series continued the numbering from Jay Garrick’s despite a decade’s hiatus. This may have had something to do with postal regulations, and mail comic book subscriptions were still a big part of distribution even in the mid-90’s.
Specifically, it was that publishers would have to buy a license from the USPS for each new title. So, they would reuse title/licenses unless it was really worth it. And generic titles like Action, Adventure, Sensation, etc. were good because they could easily host different strips.
Too much pink energy is dangerous!
Surely Brande is the grandpop of the Legion.
I think that even today most readers would rather not see new volumes and #1s. They serve little purpose beyond implying good jumping-on points (and they are not even all that good for that purpose) and making the decisions about trade paperbacks and other compilations ever so slightly easier.
Publishers and some editors apparently like the opportunity for promotion of new creative teams and the modest influx of curious readers that come from that unfortunate habit of relaunching at any pretext, but I think that it ends up encouraging reader disengagement. All the more so when most new #1s are something of an accessibility challenge for the uninitiated.
Even verifying how many books a given team or character has in any given month has become a bit of a challenge with so many forgettable “events” and specials and alternate universes. There was a nine-issues Thanos-centered event – involving the Infinity Stones, no less – in 2024 and I expect that most regular readers did not fully notice. It created a new spin-off book and I think that even less readers noticed. Not entirely surprisingly, it only lasted for five issues.
Pink is Imra’s color, but she’s certainly not in the pink at the end of this issue.
Cos must need a Snickers Bar. You’re not yourself when you’re hungry. I get that he’s feeling a bit overwhelmed, because Composite Man is one hell of a challenge, but he should know better than to take it out on his team. I question that green medic’s attitude too. “If there’s a change”? Bedside manner much?
It’s difficult to read tone in a comic, so I’m not sure if Lyle was being snarky or if he really was scientifically curious about how scary the inside of a Durlan’s head is. He is a something of a daredevil. We have to assume he experimented on himself to gain his powers. Given the opportunity, I expect he would dive into an alien mind. He might regret doing so afterwards…
I don’t recall Durlan base 9 coming up again. It’s an odd choice for a numeric system. Granted, one third isn’t irrational in base 9 and it is in base 10, but base 12 is superior to either. We use base 10 because we have ten fingers. Perhaps Durlans have eight tentacles and one mating arm.
Brande is not the Legion’s father. He’s their grandfather. He doesn’t have a direct hand in raising the kids, but he does periodically hand out presents. The original reboot plans for him that were editorially nixed. He wouldn’t have been revealed to be Cham’s father, but instead he would have turned out to be [redacted].