Saturday, December 27, 2008

Twelve Days of Christmas Special Review Series, Part One, By Johnathan

Hallo hallo! It's me, Johnathan, back from the far-away land of Offline and fat with turkey and buttered vegetables. As promised, I'm going to rock the twelve days of Christmas with twelve reviews highlighting various modes of holiday celebration in the comical booklets that I so love. And since we're already on Day 3 (French hens!) I'm going to be playing catchup.

What are we going to look at for Partridge/Pear Tree Day? Who else but the Legion! From Adventure Comics No. 289, as recently looked at over at Super Future Friends, we have this:


Supergirl has a plot to get a little action for her cousin, so she hauls him into the 30th Century to hang with the adult Legion for Christmas. More on the action-getting plot later - today we're looking at the Legion's decorations.

Not too sure why there isn't ever any snow around the Legion Clubhouse, as it's located just outside of either Smallville or Metropolis and I'm pretty sure that at this point those estimable towns are both located in Kansas. Isn't Kansas snowy? Maybe the poles flipped in 2567 or something like that. No matter. I'm sure it's Brainiac 5's doing.

I sure do like the Santa dummy in the space ship. Some of my favourite things about the Legion's future are its intersections with our past - rather than playing some crazy game where you simulate nuclear fusion with electronic beans they play holographic Dungeons and Dragons or Spaceopoly (which I hope is all about capturing the Boardwalk Nebula early in the game). Likewise, rather than having a robot out front with a special time portal that loops images of history's greatest Nativity scenes, including the original, they have a crappy Santa dummy that someone thought would look cute in their rocket car. My Dad's neighbours would do that!

JOHN APPROVED


As for their tree: fantastic! This is the solution for my irrational aversion to even the most convincing fake Christmas tree - make 'em weird abstract treeoid forms. I haven't had a tree in my own place for upwards of ten years but I sure would set up that cone-stack. Especially if I could arrange to have planets revolving around it. Or possibly something else, I don't know. Towns I've lived in? Snack foods I have known and loved (oh, Punkys. I miss ye). The important thing is the revolution.

JOHN APPROVED

"Twelve beasts of lightning,"

2 comments:

Jim Drew said...

In the 60s comics, I recall a map showing that Metropolis was on the ocean (or another large body of water -- could be Lake Erie if you accept Cleveland as the real version). Way upstream on the Metropolis River, you could find Smallville, which helps to explain why Clark would have headed to Metropolis U after leaving his hometown. (Note that this also fits fairly well with the "Smallville" TV series.)

Notable as well was the larger town midway between Smallville and Metropolis -- Midvale!

I don't think that Smallville was strongly placed in Kansas until the Superman movie in the 1970s. That does break Smallville being a tiny chunk of 30th century Metropolis, which covered DC to Boston, unless it it grew *waaay* westward, too.

As for the lack of snow around the clubhouse? Come one, there are two way obvious answers. Most likely: weather control satellites have done away with snowfall (and rainfall) in the cities. Less likely: Sun Boy melted it all.

Skeleton Munroe said...

Yeah, things were kind of ambiguous for a while. I just assume that pre-1975 or so is Kansas.

In any case, eliminating Christmas snow is tres gauche.