The Legion #25 - Foundations

Released October 29, 2003
DC Comics, Color
39 Pages

Foundations - Celebrating 45 Years of the Legion

Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning - Writers
Chris Batista - Pencils
Robin Riggs, Chip Wallace, Doug Hazelwood - Inks
Sno Cone - Colors
Jared Fletcher - Letters
Stephen Wacker - Editor

Additional Art:

Eric Wight (Art & Color Pages 1-3, 37, 38)
Tony Harris & Tom Feister (Art & Color - Pages 10-12,20-21,30-33)
Dave Cockrum & Al Milgrom (Pages 14-18)
Paul Rivoche (Art & Color - Pages 23-28)

Synopsis

Lana Lang and Pete Ross flag down a young Clark Kent in 20th century Smallville to work on a book report. He declines and continues on to his parents' shop. On the way he meets the Legion founders looking very similar to their Adventure #247 costumes and take him to the future. 

In the 31st century, Spark is on Trom, speaking to the memorial of Element Lad as she works through her guilt about feeling bad about him while also depositing some other crystals she found in the Kwai galaxy.  Triad interrupts her to say that the celebrations are starting on Legion World.  As they fly away, the crystals start to interact with each other. 

Kid Quantum kicks off the Foundation Day celebration to a packed arena, a day to celebrate the founding of the Legion, a UP wide event. More specifically, she welcomes a group of new Legion candidates. Jazmin hands them over to Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl who begin a guided tour of Legion World starting with the Winath habitat.  The recruits begin to talk to one another, and we meet Amp Girl, Retro and Babbage, who is from Robotica.  Cos begins to pull Babbage into a welcoming conversation when he is called away to a "dimension storm" emergency on Braal.  

Cosmic Boy emerges into Braal space with Shikari, Kid Quantum, Brainiac 5.1 and Apparition (and apparently Wildfire).  The storm erupted as part of the old stargate dismantling process as president Wazzo's yacht was nearby on a secret mission. Rokk and Jazmin flirt while Brainy looks for the solution - destroy the old stargate. 

Back at Legion World, we see that Spark's special guest is her brother Mekt at a wake of sorts for their dead brother Garth. Ayla asks if he'd like to say something, and we get a three page montage of Mekt-as-solo, yet another retelling of the Ranzz origin, and the clash between the siblings that led to Garth losing an arm, ending with Garth's sacrifice in Legion Lost. As Ayla gives Mekt a personal tour, he recalls the last time he saw Garth when Mekt was still in jail.  In the retelling, an inmate breaks out and attacks Garth.  The inmate is struck through the bars my Mekt and subdued.  Mekt only wanted to be like Garth, but he can't bring himself to say it, and uses his stammer to get out of it.  In the restroom, he is shown to be wearing a LiveWire costume beneath his clothes. 

On the Presidential Yacht, Tinya floats in to give a status report to her mother.

On Legion World, Retro asks about Element Lad.  Saturn Girl goes into a lengthy recap of Legion Lost's Jan storyline. 

Back to Braal, the Legion team is able to get the situation under control, and the mystery reason for the presidential yacht's presence is... Superboy!

Rokk and Imra go to Trom to visit Jan's memorial and confess to feeling guilty about forgetting about him.  They find the memorial destroyed, then a crystalline Element Lad appears claiming to be Garth.

We finally return to young Clark Kent from the prologue of the issue, apparently taken to the future by the Legion founders.  Suddenly they transform and it is revealed they are servants of Darkseid from Apokalips.

Commentary

For a double sized issue, and all the "big events" that happen in this issue, this was extremely light on content, with the only interesting things happening being the discovery of Superboy and the abduction of Clark Kent in the issue bumpers.  For a 39 page issue, the synopsis above was very short.  Most of the Legion Worlds reviews were about this length and most had much longer of a synopsis.  So thanks, DnA, for a mostly-recap story to save my carpal tunnel?  But for a 25th issue celebrating the 45th year of Legion publication, as a consumer I'd frankly would not be happy to have paid double the cost of an issue only to mainly get recaps and rehashes.  The only other thing that was worth a fig in this issue was the acknowledgement, finally, of Element Lad's sacrifice, which also raised a lot of questions for me that I'll get to later.  

The Foundation Day concept is a method to bring Legion recruits back into the universe and give us our second tour of Legion World which springs us into the Element Lad flashback.  Spark's pulling Mekt on station serves to retell Mekt's story and give him a rather odd obsession on Garth.  I don't remember, but I guess we'll find out in 14 issues if this is ever addressed in the story.  In one way the twist is kind of interesting, Mekt is an oddly disturbed and obsessed individual.  But on the other end, as foreshadowed by Legion Worlds 2, he's obviously a complete psychotic.  I'm not sure which Mekt I prefer, but at the end of the day, this is an action-oriented comic, so I'd prefer Lightning Lord, thank you very much.

Of course, at the end of the issue, both the rewind and focus on Jan as well as Garth, and their sacrifices, are set up to merge Garth into Jan's body at the end.  And as far as I'm concerned, the sacrifices that both characters made at the end of Legion Lost are tossed out the window.  I guess the precedence of Garth dying and being resurrected exists from before, but this felt a bit cheap to me.  Not to mention the weird parallel to the story of Mary Magdalene returning to Jesus' grave on Easter morning.  I absolutely hated with every fiber of my being what DnA did to Element Lad and doing this felt like they were rubbing my face in it yet again.  

We had a lot of artists here.  Batista does his usual amazing job. It was fun to see Cockram again on the Mekt flashback.    I'm just gonna say that I'm not really a fan of the Harris/Feister art combo here.  The faces are way to garish in expression in a lot of cases and the coloring seems way off somehow. 

Honestly, the thing I wanted more of was the story in the bumper - why is young Clark Kent in the 31st century along with Connor?  But even the Connor story was flat for me until the reveal.  Why was Wazzo there?  Just call the Legion from the get-go.  They've dealt with these gates before and they know Connor.  Instead we have, again, Kid Quantum and Apparition foisted upon us instead of two other Legionnaires that could use the screen time.  This is what I am talking about with DnA's overuse of certain characters. I get that the other function was to set Jazmin and Rokk up romantically, but that could have been done anytime or even offpanel.

A few other comments:

The dedication to Otto Binder and Al Plastino was nice. 

Just as a point of order on Jazmin's kickoff to Foundation Day, RJ Brande wasn't the UP president at the time the founders saved him...  I'm assuming that this event is taking place on the anniversary of the founding? (That would be May 25 for those of you following at home.  Whether the year is 2994 or 2998 depends if you prefer the KC Carlson style of planfulness or the McAvennie style of winging it...)

Is that Rond Vidar on p8?  It sure looks like Rond.  And if it is I have a host of questions about Lori Morning.

I enjoyed Cos bringing in Babbage to the fold.  Also, I like Babbage (I used to work at the software retailer of the same name around the time I got into the Legion, but I was long gone, and so was the company, by the time this issue came out).

It'd be great to see Braal again, especially since Cos is nominally still a wanted man at this point.  

The addition to Wildfire in the Braal away team isn't well done; he's just there suddenly. 

Maybe its just selective memory, but it was actually Ayla's idea to use the Lightning beasts to recharge their car on Korbal. 

The Legion Lost recap does bring up a few things - if they were thrown outside of time, then that means that Kid Quantum was also outside the universe when they were thrown out.  Wildfire DEFINITELY was as he made the trip first and SOMEHOW made it back to the Kwai galaxy.  So he should have been just as insane as Jan.  The other thing that still doesn't sit well with me from a universe perspective is that I never took Jan to be smart enough to do interdimensional physics.  Long form chemistry? Sure.  But theoretical physics would have been a Brainy function.  I know, I know, the story needed it... 

I had to laugh at Tinya's line: "The Legion never fails" - Except when trying to control a mystical eye, or defending the earth from the blight or.... Hey, omelets & eggs, am I right?

Final Grade: C-