BHOC: SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #248

So last month I had backed into buying SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES, purchasing the most recent two issues, albeit in reverse order. In my head, I never made a specific decision that I was going to continue to follow the series, but when this next issue turned up at the 7-11, I bought it without qualm. This would only go on for a couple of months before I once again dropped off–somehow, the Legion just couldn’t consistently hold my interest. Some of it was this period, which is a bit of a mixed bag No-Man’s-Land between Paul Levitz’s two runs as writer. There were some good stories to be had here, but the title was inconsistent.

I suspect that one of the draws for me during this time was the artwork of Joe Staton. I found Staton’s cartoony style very appealing, and it helped to make the Legionnaires more into characters that I wanted to spend time with. On the other hand, Gerry Conway’s work in the late 1970s often didn’t set my world on fire. I had liked his AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and a portion of his JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA run. But he felt a bit like a fast-working journeyman who would take (or be given) a wide assortment of assignments and he’d do them all, regardless of how interested or invested in them he was. I never got a sense that Gerry’s LEGION was anything more than a job, a few more pages to help make the rent every month. None of what he did was ever less than competent, but there was some spark of inspiration missing for me.

The story for this issue opens with the Legion exploring the network of old sewer tunnels that exists deep beneath Metropolis–it seems that indoor plumbing hasn’t improved much in 1000 years. They’ve come in response to a call for assistance from the Science Police, who’ve had a number of their officers being attacked down here by something they couldn’t identify. So it is that Cosmic Boy, Phantom Girl, Sun Boy and Shadow Lass venture deep into the darkness, attempting to make contact with whatever malevolent force is operating down here and bring it to heel.

And sure enough, there’s some manner of gigantic sludge monster inhabiting these waters. Before the Legionnaires can detect it, it swats Shadow Lass out of the sky with its tentacles, then attacks the other Legion members. The Legionnaires conjecture that it may be some manner of biological weapon left over from the recent war with the Khund. The heroes, particularly Sun Boy, are able to drive the beast away, but they then see that Shadow Lass has been badly injured when the creature smashed her into the sewer wall. They race to get her to proper medical attention. Elsewhere, we get a fun (if perhaps bloated) two-page scene between newlyweds Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl as Garth attempts to make dinner for the pair for the first time. It’s a fun, humanizing scene, for all that, at two pages, it may be overlong. Just as events are getting hotter, Saturn Girl picks up telepathic news about what’s happened to Shadow Lass, and she and Lightning Lad head for Legion HQ. But as they go, a remnant of their uneaten dessert begins to move and grow.

Having also heard the news, Shadow Lass’s boyfriend Mon-El practically yanks Brainiac 5 out of his lab to help find a way to help her. Coldly, Brainiac performs a series of tests, then announces that if Shadow Lass wakes up, she’ll be fine, but if she doesn’t, she won’t. As opposed to the cover, where Mon-El gets in Sun Boy’s face, here in the story it’s Brainiac 5 that he goes off on, ready to take his head off his shoulders for how little he seems to care about the fate of his fellow Legionnaire. Elsewhere, the Legion’s benefactor, Billionaire R.J. Brande learns that he’s bankrupt, which means that he’s not going to be of much use to the Legion in the year future, to say nothing about himself. As he ruminates on the situation, he’s attacked by plantlike chutes that enter his residence through his sink–another aspect of modern plumbing that hasn’t been improved upon in a millennium.

But Brande is able to hit a personal panic button and summon assistance from his young charges. At Legion HQ, Superboy and Cosmic Boy are exercising when the alert comes in, and they race off with Phantom Girl and Lightning Lad to rescue their benefactor. After they go, Sun Boy is thinking about how his flighty nature helped put Shadow Lass in the hospital as well as his disquietude concerning how Brainiac 5 has been acting of late. But before these thoughts can lead anywhere, the pair are accosted by the sewer creature, which has pursued them to their Headquarters and gained access to the place through its plumbing, the same as elsewhere.

And as the issue wraps up, Sun Boy and Brainiac 5 fid themselves in the crushing grip of the beast. Now, this is maybe less of a cliffhanger than it first seems, given that Sun Boy was able to drive it away with his radiance abilities several pages earlier. But, hey, we’re at the end of the comic, we need something here. To Be Continued! I suspect one of the things that bugged me about the Legion is the fact that its take on future civilization lacked depth and consistency. The 30th Century still wasn’t a fully-realized world, it often just seemed like a reflection of modern times but with “space” added to common terms–space breakfast, space kitchen, space baseball, etc. It never really felt legitimate to me, so when stories were sent there, there was a feeling of performativeness about the entire adventure.