The Legion #18 - Abnett & Lanning try to resolve dangling plot threads! And fail miserably!

Released March 26, 2003
DC Comics, Color
23 Pages

Revival of the Fittest Part Two

Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning - Writers
Alejandro Barrionuevo - Pencils
Andy Lanning & Simon Coleby - Inks
Jason Wright - Colors
Comicraft - Letters
Stephen Wacker - Editor

Synopsis

Part 2 of the story begins with Star Boy and Invisible Kid confer on Legion World.  Thom thinks its about whatever happened to him on Xanthu the prior issue, while Lyle and Brainy really want his opinion about the death of Ra's al Ghul, with a nice summary of what happened - namely his collision with a wall. But Brainy has a problem in that the mass of the remains don't add up properly.

Shifting over to the command deck, we learn that M'Onel had retrieved Ra's without consulting Kid Quantum, who's not happy about the situation.  Gym'll lets us know that Sensor is mutating into deformity.   Back in the lab, Brainy theorizes that Ra's is now essentially sentient blood, which is why his arm regenerated, and that he escaped the explosion.  M'Onel, Jazmin, Thom and Lyle rush to the clones.  M'On realizes that Ra's entire plan was to get to Legion World in order to fet to the bodies and all the clone bodies activate.  The real Ra's takes down Star Boy and steals his flight ring, then uses a command word - Talia - to activate the clones to attack M'Onel. Ra's flies off.

Back with Kid Quantum's group, they start to track Ra's clones all over the station as the clones begin to wreak havoc.  Gates is scared of Ra's coming after him for revenge. The rest of the Legion starts canvassing the place for the clones. M'Onel revives Star Boy and tells the team to track Thom's ring, which makes Ra's ditch it.  Shikari tells Gates and Kinetix to hang back as she realizes that Ra's is moving without the ring.  Gates teleports the three of them to the Threshold room to find Ra's.  Kinetix and Shikari go on the attack.  Ra's dodges an eye beam blast from Kinetix.  Ra's shoots Shikari with a blaster, knocking her out, then throws the overloading blaster at Kinetix.  The blaster explodes, knocking her out as well.

Ra's moves in for the kill on Gates but is interrupted by M'Onel. The two begin a brawl with Ra's mopping the floor with M'Onel as Ra's monologues.  After defeating M'Onel, he coerces Shikari to open a portal. When asked for his destination, Ra's suddenly backs down, saying they'd keep repeating this encounter over and over with M'Onel tracking Ra's down and Ra's kicking his ass to escape again.  Ra's submits. 

They take Ra's, now finally clothed, to the Medbay to look over Sensor. After a bunch of technobabble from everyone, Ra's indicates that Sensor can be saved, but is irretrievably changed. 

On Xanthu, the project to turn the seeds back to human has completed, with the Terrorforms returning back to human again after having expended their energies.  XS tells us that it will be a long time before Xanthy is viable again. And we are shown Sensor's new form.  

We then go to a coda of sorts with Ra's and M'Onel.  Ra's has been officially transferred to Legion World for detention. Ra's makes a joke.

Commentary

Well.  This issue highlights a lot of the bad side of bringing a character like Ra's into the Legion.  It begins with a nice hook - the mass differential with the debris - and quickly gets to the action, but then things go really sideways for me at so many levels.  The attack of the clones (ha!) was actually well done with Ra's taking Thom's ring. But the main bit - getting to the real Ra's then the fight - was not great.  They are able to pinpoint Thom's ring, but then Shikari tells only two others - Kinetix and Gates - NOT to go to where the rest of the Legion is headed because it's false. Why does she not tell the ENTIRE Legion??  Then, when the three arrive, Shikari is quickly shot, then Kinetix is taken out quickly for the second time in two issues.  I never thought this version of Kinetix was supposed to be this fragile.  But at the end of the day, Kinetix being out of action is what makes her absent from Xanthu and unable to transform back to Zoe.  All kinds of bad.

Then the M'Onel showdown with naked Ra's.  Please tell me why a human - granted a human with the blood of the Lazarus Pit or whatever, but a human nonetheless - is able to kick M'Onel's ass without a red sunlight beam as had been shown previously.  And then he just gives up and goes to look at Sensor.  And I'll also say this - any story that has this much pseudo-evogenetic technobabble has big problems, as it highlights why the hypertaxis concept is so bad from the get-go. 

And the whole Sensor thing - well, I've opined on this kind of thing already, but to me seemed a useless idea, but we'll see where it takes the character. Clearly Stephen Wacker is not reining in Abnett & Lanning at all, but as this is the end of the initial story arc that launched the Legion, I'm curious to see how things differ from here on out.

The art was pretty solid, althought I don't really like Barrionuevo's faces. Not sure if any of that was due to the dual inking going on here.

Other comments: 

Wow, Gym'll sure looks like Yoda.

"I'm Batman" - I am guessing it is Cham saying this, not Ra's, but its unclear. I enjoy this reference to the 89 Batman movie, but why is Cham a squid?  

And AGAIN with large Vi. Does she EVER do anything at normal size anymore???  This is fully ridiculous at this point.

Hasn't Gates teleported this many people before without feeling this badly?

If I recall correctly, this is the last time we really see Kinetix in action again. It's probably just as well, as Abnett and Lanning never could get her power set down properly from the minute they started writing the Legion.

So are Atmos and Insect Queen an item??  I guess that's fine, as there is a distance shot in Widening Rifts that seems to establish that.  

Overall Grade - D-. The showdown was undermined by the bad plot concept and bad choices made by the characters that did not make sense and were inconsistent with prior events.