Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #60 (1989)
by Paul Levitz & Keith Giffen
cover by Steve Lighle
The beginning of the four-part storyline that will end Volume 3 and, in a way, the original incarnation of the Legion of Super-Heroes: the Magic Wars.
The first page is a standard splash page, with Polar Boy discussing with Sensor Girl her election in the previous issue…
…but that’s just the last breath of fresh air before The Grid settles in.
But even if we leave The Grid aside, I still find things that annoy me… like the insistence that Sensor Girl won the vote because the Legionnaires sympathized with her killing Emerald Empress.
I’m calling bulls##t on that since it was INCREDIBLY CLEAR that she didn’t kill her on purpose!
Last time I analyzed the vote, but I didn’t comment on why the Legionnaires might have voted they way they have.
My guess is they voted for Sensor Girl because she’s one of the few Legionnaires in this period who actually seem to CARE about the Legion.
And the Timber Wolf got second place because he swept the “screw it, let’s try anything at this point” vote.
Hey remember how many times I complained about the fact that, with all the spotlight Sensor Girl received, it was ridiculous that they NEVER ADDRESSED the fact that Timber Wolf received her husband’s inheritance?
Well they finally do address it… in one throwaway panel.
Well that was definitely worth the wait.
Meanwhile in Greece, the mythical Hydra awakens!!!
Well at least that’s SUPPOSED to be the mythological Hydra, except it doesn’t breathe fire in the myths.
It does have poisonous breath, but this doesn’t look like it.
The Legion shows up, with a great vote of confidence from Phantom Girl.
Timber Wolf’s fight with the Hydra is… uhm… slightly less successful.
But he’s saved by Tellus doing the Heimlich Maneuver on the Hydra.
You might have noticed that Saturn Girl sports a new look. Unlike most other Giffen redesigns it doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out… it’s a decent futuristic uniform… but it doesn’t look like a superhero costume and it’s a MASSIVE downgrade for her.
Meanwhile, THIS FREAKING GUY keeps trying to break free of his prison… somewhere?
He’s shown a couple of times throughout the story and I THINK this is supposed to be the bad guy that will be the final challenge of Volume 3.
And I say “I think” because if this is the same guy, HE WILL LOOK NOTHING LIKE THIS.
Shrinking Violet is called into action, revealing us that the new costumes are not just ugly to look at: they’re also impractical.
We also discover that Wildfire can no longer keep his physical form, now that Quislet is gone.
On one hand, that’s good news because that look was ugly as sin.
On the other hand, Wildfire was already dumped by Dawnstar AGAIN before this… now he’s lost his body once more, and at this point the amount of trauma they’re dumping on him is approaching parody levels.
Worst part? Volume 4 will actually be EVEN WORSE for him.
Earth is getting hit worse and worse. This time it’s the weather controls…
…which are attacked by THIS THING. And I am once more confused whether this is connected to the final bad guy or not.
For once things are not making sense ON PURPOSE, just in case you were wondering how far away from the Silver Age we are.
Shrinking Violet fights what I assume is a water elemental, and for once the new costume is helpful… on accident.
The weather has gone completely haywire across the entire planet.
Which might be related to THIS FREAKING GUY.
The weather is not the only thing going crazy: magic is also WAY more easily accessible.
Including a kid getting a magic wand and wrecking the place…
…until Fake Stephen Strange fixes everything.
We get confirmation that all this mess because of magic…
…and because of THIS FREAKING GUY.
Where has Sensor Girl been throughout this crisis?
Talking to a bird.
And the bird comes with a warning: the laws of science don’t work anymore and are being replaced with the laws of magic.
Well that clears things out.
And so we close the first part with the best artwork Giffen provides in this 4-parter.
Legion significance: 8/10
This is mostly just the prelude, but the Magic Wars will have immense importance. This one is slightly lower because we haven’t really explored what’s actually happening.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
As mentioned, things don’t make sense ON PURPOSE.
Does it stand the test of time? 4/10
Full disclosure: I don’t like this storyline.
At all.
But the first part isn’t that bad.
The mystery behind what’s going on works relatively well, but there are a few drawbacks… the artwork, The Grid, how everyone looks, the artwork, making Sensor Girl leader and doing nothing with it, the artwork, the impenetrable interludes with THAT FREAKING GUY, the artwork, and the unsatisfactory action being restrained by The Grid.
I also didn’t like the artwork.
The Grid: 23 pages out of 27
We are legion
18 active Legionnaires
7 reserve members
7 resigned members
1 on sick leave (Mon-El)
12 deceased members
45 people have been members
52 people have been rejected
I truly disliked this storyline as well.
Even now, I can’t help but have a strong feeling that it was written and penciled on autopilot. Even the theme and plot feel lazy and opportunistic. “Mysterious underexplained bad guy is revealed to be breaking free from his bindings. Perhaps coincidentally, magic now works to levels previously unseen. General havok ensues, imposing on our heroes all kinds of very forgettable fight situations and allowing the creators to present pretty much any sort of chaotic situation and dwell on it as much or as little as they like with little to no need for setup, explanation or resolution. Incidentally, that means that all of a sudden their world is significantly more chaotic and dystopic.”
It is a recipe for effortless justification of spending panels that ultimately make very little difference either way and pretty much demand that the reader fill in the blanks and declare that there is some sort of emotional weight and meaning in the situations presented. It is the banalization of worldwide tragedy, leading to an incredibly businesslike statement of tragic need for sacrifice down the line in #62.
In retrospect, it truly feels to me that these last four issues were just an exercise on spending time so that the gap without a regular monthly LSH book did not grow too large. It is a very bleak and depressing storyline, yet it has very little lasting impact or consequence.
It is probably no coincidence that such a lazy storyline is happening while Keith Giffen is also writing the early issues of L.E.G.I.O.N.
This would have been the perfect opportunity to compare and contrast magic and science. Science can be cold and sterile. Magic is beauty and wonder. In a science-dominated world, how much magic could be allowed into the world to bring balance without tipping everything into chaos, disorder, and death? How can the Science Police operate when they need to partner up with a Magic Police? Can anything as inherently unruly as magic even be policed?
Instead of considering these questions, we get a lot of big, dumb explosions, and even bigger dumb MOUTHS. By this point, many of Giffen’s artistic choices have gone from being irritants to being infuriating, but his obsession with disembodied mouths is simply baffling. Giffen apologists claim The Grid gave the book a cinematic feel. Fine. Art is very subjective. But I have yet to hear anyone try to defend the rampant mouths.
What a way to end an era.
It’s odd that I never opened these issues again after they originally came out because they were so disappointing to me at the time. I had no idea what was coming with the 5YL reboot, but it was very clear to me the series was stalling as badly as it was during Omen/Prophet (the other multi-part nadir for the Levitz/Giffen run).
Those “new” uniforms look even worse to me today than they did back in 1989.
I collected the Legion. I collected these issues. I pride myself on having a great memory for comics and trivia.
I don’t remember a single thing about this storyline other than the name.
Make of that what you will.
The whole concept of “science stops working” is ridiculous. Gravity is clearly still operational, people aren’t floating away willy nilly. Bottom line is that short of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, maybe maybe Grant Morrison, no writer of comic books has the broadness of mind to conceptualize a world with completely different laws of nature (or super-nature).
This storyline was built on a germ of an idea which really needed more sunlight to make it into a proper story.