Monday, March 31, 2008

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part One, By Johnathan

Ahaha! Time to review alla the Legionnaires that I haven't yet gotten around to! Uh, pre-Five Year Gap, of course. We'll leave that can of worms for a later date.

BLOK


I like Blok. I'm kind of sad to learn that he has no name, though. Silly me, thinking that it was Blok, all this time.

Blok was from the planet Dryad, which had at some point exploded. The Legion was on hand to evacuate, and for some reason a group of Dryadan youngsters assumed that since the Legion was there that they were the ones who blew the place up and so they swore eternal vengeance, got powers from a jerk named the Dark Man and started calling themselves the League of Super Assassins (and just to be on the safe side, they also swore vengeance against grass, because the whole damn planet was covered in it, as well as the sun, for just floating there and watching the place blow up). As so frequently happens, they almost killed the entire Legion on their first try but afterward never quite managed to pull it together again.

The only Super-Assassin to go anywhere other than a seat next to Ronn Karr at the Legion of Super-Villains annual benefit dinner was Blok, who had never been that struck on killing people anyway. He ended up with a light jail term because he'd helped to capture the rest of his team and tried out for Legion membership once he got out of the clink (and he completely schooled Lamprey, Nightwind and Crystal Kid while doing it, which makes me happy). Blok made a really neat Legionnaire and a great requisite Big Strong Team Member. He started out fairly clueless about how human society worked (oh yeah: he's not a human made of rock, he's an alien. Made of rock) and unlike a lot of similar characters never quite lost that trait, which was charming. He spent a lot of time watching the Legion mission logs and palling around with the White Witch and being philosophical and introspective - not quite as unusual today for a Big Strong Tough Guy but definitely a refreshing variation on the type.

As you can see, Blok liked to wear his pants hiked up real high, which I would hate except for the fact that it's so distinctive that I like it for its uniqueness. I just wish he'd wear some sort of solid colour instead of horrible stripes alla the time. Ah, well. at least this picture showcases big shoulder pads in their optimal environment - on someone with big shoulders - rather than in a less-than-suitable one, such as everywhere else that big shoulder pads have been used as a costume element, ever.

This is also a decent shape for Blok. By which I mean that he looks a lot less hideous than he frequently did back then. See, back in the old days, Blok kept getting redesigned - first he was kind of tall with a horrible neck-frill kind of thing, then he was squat with no nose, then he had these kind of erupting craters on his shoulders... I think that they eventually said that it was some sort of mutation based on environmental conditions or something but I'm thinking it was just a series of artists who hated drawing him the old way, or felt like messing with the rock guy, or whatever. The only good redesign wasn't really one, it was just this one time that Blok got all shot up and the scars and craters stayed with him for literally years. It was very very cool, in that a character's physical state is usually pretty resistant to change. Even though Batman or whoever has a broken leg and comic book time passes at about the rate of a month a year, he'll be fully recovered by next issue.

Evidently, I like Blok enough that I don't have anything particularly funny to say about him (the picture doesn't help - he should be standing there holding a train over his head or something. All this picture says is "I'm large and I like to accessorize with yellow"). I was sad when he eventually fell victim to the great purge of post-1975 (or so) characters that eventually swept through Legion comics. Booo! bring back Blok, because he is:

JOHN APPROVED

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Part Five, By Johnathan

Well, it's been a little while, huh? One reason for this is that I'm having a bit of a hard time thinking up anything interesting to say about the last four old Legionnaires that I have to cover before moving on to the exciting, new, awesome Legionnaires. So I'm going to plow through them all at once. Yee haw!

SUN BOY

Good basic picture of Sun Boy. I've always been fond of that costume, though the fact that it's never really changed in any significant way makes it hard to think up any new snarky things to say about it. Same goes for his hairdo, which really hasn't changed since he first grew it out in the 2970s. Mrs. Morgna's boy knows a good thing when he sees it, I guess. Oh, what I wouldn't give for him to have had a momentary lapse and started wearing a big spiky sun mask, like something Electro would wear if he was Solaro Energo instead. I coulda gone on for days!

The pose is great, though. This is almost certainly the exact posture and facial expression that Sun Boy adopts when his girlfriend of three months catches him sleeping with her sister. "Sorry baby," it says, "Dirk Morgna just can't be tied down to one woman."

JOHN APPROVED

TIMBER WOLF

Again: very hard to say anything new about this costume, as it's basically the same as the one he started out in (barring some minor redesign. The same bits are all there, just in different places). The ol' orange-and-brown-or-black-maybe costume isn't anything to write home about, but it's not terrible either. See? Not much to say.

Evidently, this picture hails from one of those periods in which Timber Wolf was having rage issues on the side. I have to admit, I always think that that sort of thing is bullshit, at least in Mr. Londo's case. I mean, he was given super-powers by a ray that his father developed out of a rare mineral, right? And then he called himself Lone Wolf because he was under the impression that he was an android and had some asinine belief that a self-aware android wasn't fit to interact with humans and so vowed to live apart, right? And then he changed his name to Timber Wolf when he joined the Legion because Lone Wolf doesn't work as well when you hang out with twenty other guys all the time, right? So... where does the 'bestial temper' thing come from? I don't recall any in-continuity explanation other than the assumption that wolf = bad temper. Could the origin of Timber Wolf's rage and interesting teeth be that Wolverine was/is a very popular character and the Legion was filled with very polite folks with no anger-management issues? Nah.

I like the mean-looking drawing in the background, though. Check it out: it looks like a drawing of a vampire from a 1970s black-and-white horror comic - Creepy or Eerie or something. Neat!

NOT APPROVED

ULTRA BOY

Favourite Legion costume, with no changes, check. Flying around looking like a loveable lunkhead, check. Nice sideburns, check.

JOHN APPROVED

WILDFIRE

Again with the unchanged costume that I like. Bah!

The only thing that I can really think of to comment on is the fact that Wildfire seems to be venting an awful lot of his anti-energy in this picture. Perhaps, says the juvenile portion of my mind, he has just experienced the energy-being equivalent of letting a large fart? I know, I know. Far too obvious. Consider this, though: could this be what Dawnstar looks so surprised about, over in her picture?

JOHN APPROVED

Okay! Next up: new folks!

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Review of the New Frontier Movie, by Johnathan

Good adaptation, overall, taking into account the compression of story necessary to squeeze two volumes into 90 minutes.. The art is, I guess, a compromise between that of the comic and the DC Animated Universe style, which works better than the triangle-shape Bruce Timm style would have. Excellent voice casting. King Faraday isn't as big a jerk, which is good or bad, depending on how much you like King Faraday.

Watching this thing on a big screen is definitely a good idea. Also, I feel that for maximum enjoyment you should watch it with Darwyn Cooke. Okay, fine, I was a couple of rows away from him. Going out for drinks with Darwyn Cooke afterward also enhances the movie's impact. Okay, drinking a couple of tables away from him. His wife was at our table, though. We all talked about lolcats.

The most important thing that happened tonight, at least for people who like Hourman, is that Rachelle asked Darwyn to clear up an argument that we'd been having. Turns out that she's been right for the last year: Hourman doesn't die in New Frontier. Whee!

JOHN APPROVED

(so I don't get to name-drop very often, so sue me. Darwyn Cooke is a stand-up guy and a talented comicsman.)