COMIC TALKING POST: “The Order” and a Completely Unbiased Review of “Legion of Super-Heroes” #37

If you like superhero comics, you should be reading The Order.

Seriously: The Order is good comics. Yes, I understand that it doesn’t have any old familiar faces in it. This is one of the reasons it’s good: it’s a bunch of new characters in an established setting! Actually, here, let’s go over the a list of common complaints comics fans make about current comics:

1.) It’s always the same old guys. The Order presents you with a team of entirely new characters. Iron Man is listed as a member of the cast but barely ever shows up, and when he does it’s usually as a plot device to annoy the characters. (Incidentally, it’s great writing for Tony Stark, I might add – Tony as well-meaning genius who doesn’t quite think through all his actions because he has fifty billion things on the go at any one time.)

2.) Everybody is an asshole. In The Order, thanks to a great “interview” storytelling device, you learn that the members of the team are all – wait for it – good guys. In fact, the reason they’re in The Order is because they want to help people. How about that, eh? In other comics, when Calamity tracked down the guy who crippled him in a car accident, Calamity would have beat the shit out of the drunk driver guy. In The Order, Calamity figures out that this guy is a depressive who needs some help, so he plays Nintendo Wii with the guy. (And he does it offpanel without a big showy “I forgive you” scene, because you don’t need to read that scene to know Calamity is a good guy.) Supernaut is a liberal veteran; Veda is a movie star who uses her money to help orphans learn karate (for real, and it works a lot better than it sounds); Anthem is a recovering alcoholic who helps rehab groups get funds they need. They’re good people who decide to get superpowers, and you might think that’s boring, but it just isn’t.

3.) All death, all the time. I admit that The Order might have turned people off in the first issue by firing several members, making people think that this was like the new X-Statix or something and that it was going to have a revolving-door cast – a belief probably compounded by the fact that the concept involves people getting superpowers for just one year. This is not the case – the first-issue firings were intended to display the purpose of the team as a force for justice through example. Six issues later, the cast is consistent from issue one. As for the powers thing, I’m sorry, but no way does Matt Fraction put all this effort into developing characters and then replace them after a year with somebody else – he’s just not a bad writer, and it’s obvious he’s got plans for these characters long beyond the one-year mark.

4.) Not enough cool shit. In six issues, the Order have already fought unfrozen Soviet super-villains from the 1950s and zombie robot hobos, plus next issue they get to deal with Namor being pissy. I believe I can rest my case.

So read The Order. It is good comics. If you are like me and you wait for the trade, buy the trade, so The Order can be one of those trade-market sensations (like Immortal Iron Fist, which you should also read but that is neither here nor there).

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Legion of Super-Heroes #37 is the first issue by the new creative team of Jim Shooter (writing his first regular comic in years and the first he’s written for the Big Two in at least a couple of decades) and Francis Manapul.

And it’s pretty good.

Certainly it’s better than the fairly dull placeholder issues Tony Bedard and Dennis Calero churned out. In one six-issue story, they managed to boot Supergirl back to the twenty-first century (as per presumable editorial mandate), and reintroduce Matter-Eater Lad, Wildfire, Evolvo Lad and possibly Validus in a frenzy of minor reinterpretation fit for an Ultimate book. Their work was nothing more than perfectly serviceable fanboy porn, and indeed short of reintroducing the Levitz-era Legion, I doubt there would be a better book for the old-school Legion fan’s vigorous masturbation. Bored the shit out of me, though, with yet another “Brainiac Five doesn’t tell anybody what he’s doing to solve everything” plot (which is so old seriously please stop it because it is dumb), and that weird-ass line about “the legendary matter eaters of Bismoll” that just made me wince.

Fuck it, you know what? They were bad comics. I am tired of making excuses for mediocre crap, and that is what the Bedard/Calero issues were. They were mediocre crappy superhero comics, and just because they were better than the absolute nadir that DC and Marvel can produce (in great amounts during 2007, especially) doesn’t make them worthy of celebration or even tolerance. I am tired of that. Give me good comics or give me… well, when I figure out a clever ending to that phrase I’ll be sure to tack it on, believe you me.

Anyway, what this means is that Shooter and Manapul have the opportunity to shove the Legion upwards in quality if they can, and after the first issue I’m relatively optimistic. Thoughts in order:

1.) Francis Manapul’s art is fantastic. Not quite the sort of artist I want to see on the Legion these days (honestly, I’d love to see a Western/manga hybrid artist like Takeshi Miyazawa take a crack at the Legion), but you can’t argue with quality, and Manapul is quality. Legion fans should enjoy him for now before he gets shoved upwards to more high-profile books; he’s just that good. (I give him a year on Legion tops.) His work is dynamic and fluid, maybe a bit overly cheesecakey in places but at least not insultingly so. He’s got a great feel for both the sci-fi and superheroic aspects of the Legion.

2.) Manapul also works well with Shooter’s pacing, which is way more old-school than most writers these days. This is good. The story averages about six panels a page, which gives a nice dense story flow (which the Legion, with its huge cast, absolutely demands) and allows Shooter to convey a lot more information per page to boot. He’s using about half the cast or so this issue, too, which barring an enormous big bad for the Legion to fight is about the right balance for an average issue of Legion. On a nuts-and-bolts level, this is exactly how the Legion should be written.

3.) Shooter’s plotting thus far is also decent (as I honestly expected it to be), with one questionable aside (devoting a lot of pagespace to a new character who gets killed off halfway through the issue for reasons which, at present, seem… nonexistent, although I hold out hope that there’s a good reason for it that we haven’t seen yet). The new villains are new, and not just the Fatal Five or the Time Trapper or Grimbor the Chainsman yet frigging again, and they are appropriately bad-ass. The “Lightning Lad as inexperienced leader” plot and the Projectra subplot are both handled adroitly and well. Most importantly, this is an excellent jumping-on point, which the start of any new run should be – Shooter quickly and easily addresses the core concepts of the Legion, both in general and specific to this version.

4.) Now we come to the bad part. Shooter’s dialogue is, well… Shootery, and very reminiscent of the Valiant books he scripted back in the day. Which is to say it is wordy as all hell (which isn’t always bad, mind you, and preferable to minimal dialogue in my mind, but Shooter’s dialogue is uniformly wordy), many of the jokes don’t fire off (“okay, KK” is just… not that good, and certainly not so good that it needs to be repeated twice), the expository dialogue gets in the way of the story a lot, and a lot of the characters just sound stiff. True to Shooter’s writing history, that last point isn’t uniform – he writes Lightning Lad and Projectra very well, for example, and it’s clear he’s really got a feel for them. But then he writes a scene with Lightning Lad sounding natural and the most forced dialogue I’ve read in some time coming out of Light Lass’s mouth, and… eh. To say nothing of Invisible Kid expounding mid-fight in words better suited for Brainiac Five.

I’d give it about a B+ or so, with some of the lowness chalked up to first-issue roughness. There’s room for improvement, certainly, but this is probably the best single comic thus far to come out of the “threeboot” Legion, and it’s clear that Shooter wants to explore new ground with the characters, which is very important.