[Legion Fan Club] Weekly Reader Week 35 New 52 Legion Continues! Dec 18 2019

[Don-El]

Fellow Legion fans, we continue to enjoy what we can of the bittersweet final gasp of a Legion series from New 52 til now. Many of your favs reappear to delight you again, Comet Queen, Dragonwing, Chemical Kid, etc.

[Legion Fan Club] presents Legion vs Dominators, LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #10-15

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #10 Star Boy takes a ragtag team on a suicide mission into Dominator space to rescue Brainiac 5. DC Universe

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #11 Cosmic Boy threatens Mon-El’s leadership if he doesn’t act immediately to save not only Brainiac and Dream Girl, but also the outclassed squad who’ve gone to rescue them. DC Universe

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #12 The Legion’s battle against the Dominators comes to an epic conclusion and the fate of Comet Queen is revealed. DC Universe

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #0 The tale of Brainiac’s admission into the Legion of Super-Heroes. DC Universe

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #13 The Legion takes on space pirates!
https://www.dcuniverse.com/comics/book/legion-of-super-heroes-2011-13/0482d9c0-5849-4ed3-a9fd-9c3ba44c59b9

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #14 Element Lad tries to take Chemical Kid under his wing as they go after the mercenaries who injured Cosmic Boy. DC Universe

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (2011-) #15 Welcome to Barcelona! So what’s this 21st century city doing in the 31st century? Glorith, Dragonwing and Chemical Kid are on the case! DC Universe

Questions to ponder (spoilers abound, BEWARE!!!:

1. The Dominators have appeared several times in Legion stories so far. What seems to motivate them to do the bad things they do? Are they just misunderstood politically?

2. Once again the theme of the importance of good leadership comes up. Is the Legion organized well for a government-backed militia / police squad? Why or why not?

3. Does issue 0 finally get Brainiac 5 right, or do you prefer other eras’ versions of Brainiac 5? Why?

4. The last two stories again feature the new Legionnaires. Which one sticks out in your mind most after reading these issues as your favorite newbie and why is that?

The next two weeks we’ll try to go a little lighter for the holidays. There are some fun gaps in the eras we’ve already spent time in that we’ll catch up on, starting next week with the very early Levitz days of the late 70s!

Long live the Legion
Long live the Legion
Long live the Legion!

[JasonTodd428]

I feel bad for skipping last week but I’ll try to get to this one.

[Jay_Kay]

Just to make sure, are we going to #15 or #17?

[Don-El]

15, sorry about that

[Vroom]

I’ll try to make this one.

Anybody read Legion #2 (that came out this week) yet?

[Don-El]

Yup, excellent fare. And I do mean “fare”, love “heaven” for young adults.

[Vroom]

I liked Heaven too. Is that new or something established within Legion lore?

[Don-El]

Very new! I’m pretty sure Bendis is trying to open our eyes to what it really is like to be an older teenager or a young adult liking to eat when you’re being social. I actually have tapes we used to make, a buddy of mine and I,older teens… on one recording we’re raiding my parents’ refrigerator and eating cold leftover steak etc…looking back at it I’m like Wow we must have been expensive to keep around… and wow did we have appetites back then

[Jay_Kay]

I really liked the second issue, it really did some interesting new developments and ideas with the characters that feel pretty interesting. Like, I want to see Jon finally sit down for the orientation because I WANT TO KNOW ALL THE THINGS.

Related to it, I’m especially happy about it because Doomsday Clock on the same day seemingly confirmed something that I thought was going to be missing, without going into spoilers.

[Meisaj]

Ok. On a long car ride and read these this morning. Thankfully I don’t get car sick.

I really enjoyed these comics - it’s my first time reading these - but they left me with some questions, which I’ve interspersed in my answers.

1. I haven’t read much with the Dominators in them. I have always wanted to get around to reading the Invasion crossover - that’s the one with the Dominators right? What would be interesting to read is if the Dominators from present DC have the same motivations as Legion era Dominators. I think the Dominators are driven by expansionist policies. It seems like the earth gov is trying to really toe a line the Dominators to avoid outright war. Reminds me of reading world history from just before WW II.

I like the idea of them trying to ibune powers through Gene splicing and cloning. Man, just 20 years ago Gene splicing and cloning sounded like extreme science fiction and now it seems like something plausible in the not too distant future.

2. Leadership seems to be an issue in all Legion series. How often are elections anyways? Seems to come up often. I kind of laugh at the trope of team members quitting to go on an unsanctioned mission and then welcomed back on the team right away afterwards. I’m not sure that’s how it works, at the very least it makes it seem like membership is something that can be thrown away when you don’t want it and regained when you do without any impact.

3. I did like the idea of children being very rare on Colu. Again, not being extremely familiar with Brainiac 5, I can’t tell too much about differences here. Does his being different from other Coluians (is that right?) Come from being the last child born on Colu in this series or from somewhere else? If it is because he was the last child, do they follow up on the new child in future issues?

4. I like the focus on Chemical Kid more than Glorith. Chemical Kid seems to be one of those power sets that could be extremely powerful in the hands of the right writer. Like how Abnett and Lanning did with Element Lad in Legion Lost. However Levitz does a good job of making Chemical Kid a new Legionaire struggling to apply his powers to different situations. I think my issue with the focus on Glorith comes more from it being a story that is very open ended and leaves a lot of threads dangling, which is ok, but it doesn’t dig deep into character motivations the same way the issue before did on Chemical Kid.

Alright… Those are my thoughts. Time to find some more to read until it’s my turn to drive.

[Don-El]

The Invasion crossover of the late '80s did indeed feature the Dominators in present day DC. They started though in early Legion stories by Jim Shooter in 1967 (Adventure Comics #361). They showed up again fairly recently in some late '70s Legion fare we were reading as one of maybe 5 main alien races trying to broker a peace deal while I believe it was Mordru and others schemed to stop it all.

They didn’t become the evil scientist species until Invasion.

In a comic book writer’s time paradox, after this verison of the Dominators that appears in the 20th century DC Universe, the 30th century Dominators suddenly are doing genetic testing and causing all kinds of trouble that culminates in the Legionnaires series we’ve been reading.

Then a bit later one Dominator turns a bit good and joins with “curent” 20th century day R.E.B.E.L.S. led by a 20th century Brainiac guy, Vril Dox.

Their current look is considered offensive to some. They remind me a lot of Wally Wood’s Mars Attacks bubble gum cards of the '60s.

It’s all in the smile, see?

Let’s see what other culture on Earth is often portrayed as wearing a robe and folding their hands like that …and this is like a 2011-2012 comic book so it’s a little surprising that this was still going on in the portrayal of the Dominators.

[Meisaj]

Ha. I missed the robe part, but man once pointed out it is hard to miss.

I don’t mind their look. I do see the Mars Attacks resemblance. Looking at their mouths alone, I always pictures them as telepathic as opposed to actual speech because you never see their mouths open.

Vril Dox is another character I know of, but not really about. He’s part of that Brainiac/Coluan character branch that I just get confused about. Braniac was humanoid… Wait no a machine/Android, wait no a god type being in Convergence, or all of the above and it will all fit together somehow. I don’t mind really as long as the story is good.

I think I have one issue of the 1990’s R.E.B.E.L.S. in a long box somewhere. Maybe I’ll try to dig it out.

[Don-El]

There’s great stories in both the 1990’s iterations of R.E.B.E.L.S as well as the 2009 version, but I did really enjoy the more recent 2009 run by Tony Bedard that ran for around 27 issues, taking place in “present day.”

[Jay_Kay]

The Dominators have appeared several times in Legion stories so far. What seems to motivate them to do the bad things they do? Are they just misunderstood politically?

What seems to motivate them in most of the stories we’ve seen is mainly conquest, but not only that, conquest to propagate their species. I got the impression from these few issues that they need other species’ genetic material in order to breed their next generation/caste of Dominators. It’s a potentially interesting conflict, but sadly they seem to mostly be used as empty bad guys.

Once again the theme of the importance of good leadership comes up. Is the Legion organized well for a government-backed militia / police squad? Why or why not?

Considering that in a meta sense their elections are purely won based on how fans like them at any given time, they could be doing a lot worse! They seem to flip flop on just how deputized they are, depending on what kind of story the creators want to do.

Does issue 0 finally get Brainiac 5 right, or do you prefer other eras’ versions of Brainiac 5? Why?

It was a pretty solid entry for him. I think he’s at his best when he’s kind of being a jerk, but one who means well and is driven to fix not only the mistakes of his ancestry, but his own as well.

The last two stories again feature the new Legionnaires. Which one sticks out in your mind most after reading these issues as your favorite newbie and why is that?

I think Chemical Kid probably comes out the most interesting. Glorith could be interesting, but there’s really just not a lot about her in these issues. The Barcelona sequences were far more interesting to me.

[Don-El]

Thanks @Jay_Kay. Sounds like we all agree that the Dominators could be a pretty good sci-fi concept in the Legion stories but one that hasn’t really been consistently or fully used yet.

In celebration of the holidays I’ll wait till early tomorrow to post the new Legion reading.

[Meisaj]

I think you are spot on about Brainiac 5. Having a slightly anti-social attitude coming from “smartest” position with a historical twist is great. I like that all the other Legion recognize it as well, but only some of them can stand up to his attitude.