Justice League United #8 - The Infinitus Saga Part 4 of 6. Its the WHOLE LEGION!!!

Released January 14, 2015
DC Comics, Color
37 Pages

The Infinitus Saga Part 4 of 6

Jeff Lemire - Writer
Neil Edwards - Penciler
Jay Leisten & Keith Champagne - Inkers
Jeromy Cox - Colorist
Travis Lanham - Letterer
Amedo Turturro - Assistant Editor
Brian Cunningham - Group Editor

First off, an apology - I completely botched the issue and part numbering the last couple of entries, but they are fixed now.  This is what happens when you try and use templates, but rush through things.  Haste makes waste!  I deeply regret the error. Now on with the issue!

Synopsis

We open with Dream Girl hovering over a devastated 31st century Metropolis, and also get a very succinct background on how and why the Legion of Super Heroes was formed.  We see a couple page vignette of what appears to be the retroboot Legion taking down Universe, the Fatal Five, and a generic action shot, with each panel showing more Legionnaires in their prime. But then we see the devastated landscape of current Metropolis.  

And another roll call!  The Legion here is: Cosmic Boy, Dream Girl, Lightning Lad, Lightning Lass, Bouncing Boy, Duplicate Girl, Invisible Kid (II), Colossal Lad, White Witch, Ultra Boy, Blok, Shadow Lass, Sensor Girl, Element Lad, Shrinking Violet, Matter-Eater Lad, Polar Boy, Quislet and Star Boy.

Star Boy snaps Dream Girl out of her reverie - the Infinity Wraiths have arrived on Earth, and the Legion is working as best they can to evacuate as many as possible before they go meet Brainiac 5's team in the past. Cosmic Boy urges that they keep to the plan of defending Earth, but as Infinitus looms large in the sky above, Dream Girl, as leader, has final say and they regroup at the Time Institute to go back to the past. 

Once in the Time Institute we see an interesting sight - several 90s-looking Legionnaires coming in with Element Lad! We see Andromeda, Magno, Dragonmage, Compute, Kid Quantum 2, Monsters and Kinetix! Dream Girl orders the Legionnaires onto the Time Platform, but is warned by the scientists that they can't guarantee safety with the past in flux. Long Live the Legion and engage the Time Bubble. Oh, hey, there's XS! 

We come back to the very end of the prior issue with Supergirl, Manhunter and Mon-El trying to stop Byth in a getaway ship, when it explodes and they are confronted by an armored Hawkman - who is suddenly blasted by energy. The Legion exits the timestream and Lightning Lad has just stunned Hawkman. Manhunter and Supergirl catch up to Byth and Ultra in order to prevent the metamorphosis into Infinitus. Manhunter mentally tries to help Ultra but is pushed out by Byth.  Byth flies his spaceship into the anomaly followed closely by Supergirl. The anomaly initially begins to shrink, but then spirals out as an immense Infinitus forms out of the anomaly.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Commentary

Well, NOW we're cooking with gas here.  We FINALLY see the rest of the Legion and we even visit the 31st century! This is easily the best issue of the series so far. It's almost all Legion and it's very action packed.  Granted, there are a decent amount of one or two page action panels to help make it a page turner, but the action moved at a decent clip so that I definitely wanted to jump to the next issue right away.  

Art is pretty solid here, and I really liked the art team's take on the Legionnaires, although there was one moment with Dream Girl where her facial expressions did not seem to match with the words on the page. I think the larger panel spreads made sense in this issue as the creative team had to tell about the Legion AND show how big that Legion actually is.  A large team requires a lot of space to show on a page in a book like this. I mean, there's a huge roll call on this issue, but most of those characters don't say a word.

It was interesting how the Legion's origin was nicely summed up in about a page, with only a few small dialog boxes. Saved and bankrolled by RJ Brande? Check. Inspiration of past heroes? Check. (And it was interesting that it was specifically the Justice League that was mentioned rather than Superboy). It's not hard to tell origins or plot summaries quickly.  You just have to know how to do it properly, and I think Lemire does well here. Now, with that many characters, you also have the challenge of showing what everyone can do, and that's almost impossible in this kind of story; most of the characters will just be background eye candy. But you know what? In this particular case, I'm OK with that.

This particular series was released during the time when I was on a lull from comic books. During the post-threeboot period, I popped in to read some Batman titles, but those times always seemed to coincide with AFTER the second Levitz run had concluded, so I did not know that this series had even been released until many years later. And when I picked back up, it was when the Bendis version was in full swing.

So now that I mentioned THAT version of the Legion, I'm just going to go ahead and say it - DC made a HUGE mistake in not going with this Legion being featured in JLU. THIS is the Legion I've been saying for years now should exist today - all the classic Legionnaires along with those from the reboot. XS and Kinetix?! Are you kidding me??? Before reading this, I had seen one still from this issue where Kinetix and Monstress were behind Dream Girl on the Time Platform, and I had assumed this was a reunion shot at the end of the story.  To my surprise and delight, it was in the middle of the story and Kinetix, XS, Monstress and others are zipping around in the fight. It was wonderful.

After Levitz shooed XS off the page in his version, and Johns ignobly killed off Kinetix in Legion of Three Worlds, this is a breath of fresh air. We don't even see those horrible Legion Academy recruits Levitz forced on us in his last book - all of the 90s Legionnaires we see here have had panel time of at least a decade in their own runs, so having them as part of a massive team is HOW IT SHOULD BE.  Like it or not, the 90s reboot of the Legion is the longest lasting Legion reboot, so erasing them in the Threeboot or wiping them out of time like Geoff Johns & Paul Levitz did was a bad move.  This (and similarly, the Supergirl and the Legion animated movie) is how you handle a Legion with this many characters and this much history.

I'd venture to say that there are probably a decent amount of adult comic book readers who were big readers in and around their late teens/early 20s, but then became irregular readers once more responsibilities started pushing their way to the front.  I certainly did that with Batman around this time as well, and there were big changes going on in the Bat titles based on what I had read all through the 90s, but I was able to keep up with things and generally not be lost. 

Over the last 30 years, it’s been difficult to do that as a Legion fan. If you were a time traveler that jumped 6-7 years ahead each jump and picked up an issue of the Legion, the worlds are SO far off, you would have a much worse time re-orienting yourself to what you are seeing.  This is vastly different from almost every other DC property.  So that's why this team really hits close to home for me as I see all the OG characters, and all the new characters I really came to love in the reboot. If you pick up a book casually after a few years, it's good to see the same characters there. Maybe there was a continuity reset of some kind, but fine - you still have characters that you can lock in on as a guidepost because they are familiar.  THIS is the Legion that should have been featured in Levitz's books in the 00s, and THIS is the Legion that should be out there now.

Of course, the editing was STILL a problem in this issue. We get a line on panel about Shadow Lass being in a hospital on Mars, but who do we see right over Dream Girl's shoulder as she exits the time stream?  You guessed it, Shadow Lass.  Also, Colossal LAD in the roll call?  That's a new one.  At least its not Micro Lad.

Overall I'm going to give this issue an A.  Lots of Legion.  Lots of sorely missed Legionnaires as well, even if they didn't have speaking parts.