The Legion #3 Review!

 

Released 12/26/01
DC Comics, Color
22 Pages

Legion World

Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning - Writers
Oliver Coipel - Pencils
Andy Lanning - Inks
Tom McCraw - Colors
Comicraft - Letters
Mike McAvennie - Editor

Synopsis

Picking up where we left off, the Lost Legionnaires have been picked up by the crew of the Bouncing Boy, Cosmic Boy, Triad, Invisible Kid, an enlarged Violet with Chuck Taine piloting. Lots of reunions, notably Brainy/Lyle, Cos/Imra/Jo and Cham getting friendly with Triad Orange and Neutral with Chuck looking on from the pilot's chair getting misty eyed. They head to the Footstep Ship stolen in LW3.    

Shift to McCauley, apparenly in admiral garb dedicating a plant that will terraform the moon.  He and someone (maybe Venge?) confab about ignoring the Orandan ambassador, Robotica seems to be a looming threat, and stalling M'Onel from seeing the Legionnaires. 

Speaking of the Legion, they are emerging back into space and Shikari detects a cloaked planet, leading to the reveal of Legion World, hidden and under construction for a year. Brainy makes the obvious deduction that Brande is behind it, when the man pops out to welcome everyone.  New flight rings are distributed and we get the tour of the house.  The place has multiple habitats and was designed when Brande thought a new Legion may be needed.  We see that our old friend Gear was brought in to oversee the construction. We meet Sensor, who was integral to hiding the place.  Brainy reveals that he still has all the specs for their Threshold drives in his head. Brande reveals his vision: Because the UP is in such bad shape, he wants to rebuild the Legion as an example of cross-planetary cooperation.

Four days later, M'Onel is at a deactivated stargate.  Apparently, bad beasties still leak through the network occasionally.  He begins to get suspicious that what he's doing is busy work and gets a signal from the Legion.  He flies off in a rage.

We switch focus to Ayla on Winath.  A portal opens and Shikari pops out looking for Ayla, who gets defensive.  Cham follows and wraps her in a big hug.  Apparently Brainy and Lyle have been busy in the last four days.  We get a nice back and forth between the two.  Cham drops the news about Garth with Mekt listening from afar.  She doesn't take it well.

Back to Legion World, Rokk and RJ are discussing going BACK to the Lost galaxy to broker an agreement with the Kwai to assist in navigation using Brainy's new portal device.  Imra is regretful and wants to be on that mission to understand Garth's fate for herself. Then Rokk wants to find out what's going on with Vyrgra (spelled correctly) as there had been an assumption that Gates was in the lost crowd.  Given all that's happened there with a pandemic, its the place to go.  Just wear a mask and get vaccinated.  Ahem.

Jazmin sports a sleek new hairstyle, and Ayla arrives to throw her hat in to the mission back to the Lost Galaxy.  She heads out in a new ship to the Kwai galaxy with Imra, Wildfire and Lyle. Ayla strips down and puts her Spark uniform on as we get a one page rundown of how Legion Lost ended.  They discover an energy anomaly pulsing electrical energy.  

We switch scenes again to Metropolis where M'Onel aggressively confronts 'McCauley' who promptly shifts the lights to the red sunlight spectrum and kicks M'Onel's ass. We are then given the reveal that Leland McCauley is actually Ra's al Ghul.

Commentary

Issue 3 was interesting.  I had extremely high hopes for this issue given that the Legion was fully reunited at this point. However, it didn't really deliver as I felt like it should.  There was a lot of stuff going on here; parallel threads going on that required a lot of scene jumping, so the pacing felt off.  But a lot of really cool stuff happened in the meantime.  I think it was the little things that detracted it for me which I'll get into below, but they were minor relatively speaking.  Coipel's art here, with the exception of the M'Onel scenes here are much better for me than in the previous two issues, for whatever reason.  I also knew going in who the imposter was, so that had no shock value for me, which likely affected my perception of the pacing.  

So, on to the nitpicking!! :)

The Legion's Back!  That in itself is super awesome!  But answer me this.  Why the SPROCK is Violet enlarged in a small spacecraft???  I get that they don't do any kind of Roll Call or Name Badges or anything, so DnA and/or Coipel are scripting out them showing off their powers in really stupid ways.  Same with Triad. Small space - we don't need three of you taking up more space if we don't need it. And Cham certainly seems to be getting very friendly with Lu while Chuck looks on.  I was surprised that it wasn't Lu Purple under Cham's arm instead of Orange.  Wonder if DnA or the colorist got that messed up (I doubt it - McCraw tends to know what he's doing with the Legion).  

Neat little background tidbit with Chuck and Vi at the helm in the back of the frame before they get to Legion World.

I'm not sure if this was ever addressed in fandom elsewhere, but I take it that Legion World is essentially the reboot version of Weber's World.  Based on Brande's description, it sure seems to be meant to serve the same purpose. But Brande's speech about the Legion and its purpose don't really seem to MEAN anything this time more than what he's said in the past. Like in the beginning of the reboot.  SMH

The Garth situation was brought up WAAAAY too late. We are 65 pages into the story, and we just now get to seriously discuss Garth's death? This seems to be a problem of the 22 page issue layout more than anything else, but even still, I feel like this is too late. I'm glad that we get to visit Winath to pick Ayla up using the new technology.  Its interesting though, as Winath appears different here than in LW2.  More farm robots and less Oklahoma - this seems to be more pre-DnA than the LW Winath, which is an odd choice given the work they did on that issue building Winath.  It's good to see the Cham/Ayla relationship again and hopefully go somewhere.  Or not. 

I love RJ's scooter and I want one.  :)

I will say this.  Coipel draws a very pretty Ayla.  I don't mind pics like the whole Ayla changing scene.  I'm not a prude.  But wouldn't she have changed before they got into the cruiser?  Were they in THAT much of a rush?  

And Ra's al Ghul as the big bad is a horrible idea for the Legion. I'm glad they were able to get to the imposter reveal sooner than later, so that's good, but the reveal of who it is, I've never liked.  Still, the way he kicked M'Onel's butt was pretty solidly done.

Overall Grade B-