Wednesday, May 19, 2010

On a glorious return to the 30th century

OK, fine, 31st century, you nitpicking yahoos...

After months of anticipation, years of setup, and decades of patient waiting from hardcore fans, Paul Levitz has relaunched the Legion of Super-Heroes with a brand new number one.  It carries on from the new iteration of the team that Geoff Johns et al has been writing for the last few years, as far back as the Lightning Saga.  The original Legion is back, their adventures with Superboy are back in place, and Levita has the job of taking a team that has floundered for a couple dozen years now and whiping them back into shape.

Paul Levitz was the publisher of DC Comics.  He has a large collection of whips.

In a single 48-page issue, Paul does the following:

Creates almost a dozen new characters (tho to be fair, several of them may be dead already)

Restarts the Green Lantern Corps by recreating the event that gave it its start in the first place.

Hands a Power Ring to literally the last character anyone would have expected, all the while playing fair about who it would be.

Destroys the homeworld of one of the Legionnaires, and in a way that doesn't make it feel like a cheap death at all.

Slips in the first major reference to the upcoming Flash event "Flashpoint" in a perfectly logical way.

Sets up no less than five plot threads for future use.

He could have started off by picking up on any of the threads Geoff Johns laid out.  He picked up exactly one (the new GL member)  and took it in a way I'm dead positive Geoff never thought of, made passing reference to another couple, and just went off on his own.

Yildray Cinar (a name that sounds more like a character FROM Legion, not that of  its artist) knocks it out of the park with a plethora of new character designs, solid story telling and only three splash-pages in the entire book.  And one of those is so choked with action that it's really more a multi-panel page without borders.  Awesome work.  His covers were a mere taste of what he can do.

I swear to you, if this book doesn't become a juggernaut, I will lose all faith in comics fans.

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