Trade Waiting - Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds

I've been told that one thing every comics fan needs to own in their personal collection is a complete event. Obviously, doing so would almost certainly be costly and probably saddle anyone with a decent amount of bad comics. Of course, there are exceptions. For me, those would be either World War Hulk or Final Crisis. I enjoyed both of the main series for the two events but Final Crisis not only had fewer tie-ins they also had better creative teams, at least on paper. Another reason why I was interested in getting all of Final Crisis was because it was one of the few comics that I managed to keep my enthusiasm for when I switched from buy singles to buying only trades. So, today I am going to take a look at Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds. Hit the jump for my review.

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #5 Review

With my general dissatisfaction with the series, coupled with the huge delays, I wasn't even sure if I was going to review Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #5 this week, yet here I am writing an image and spoiler filled review, similar to the new format I tried with Blackest Night #1 last week. Why am I writing a special review for a book I didn't even care for to begin with? Was it so good that it just blew me away and changed my opinion of the title? Well, uh, let's go for some diplomacy and say it's ending has to be seen to believed. Oh yes, spoilers this way be. Full review after the jump.

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #5
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Pérez and Scott Koblish

No, you're eyes do not deceive you. This is, indeed, a Final Crisis tie-in. Yes, the same Final Crisis that ended back in January and recently released its hardcover. As you can probably guess, Legion of 3 Worlds has been delayed quite a bit, so I'm going to do a quick recap. Superboy-Prime went to the future (you don't want or need to know how he got there, but it was something to do with Countdown, punching stuff and 'killing people to death'), formed his own Legion of Super Villains and started trashing the future.

The current Legion summoned Superman to fix things for them. When it wasn't enough to stop Prime, they called in two other iterations of Legions from the various reboots and retcons throughout the years, who are now available due to the Multiverse.

Everyone fought, there were shock deaths, Superboy Prime dared someone's dare and Kid Flash and Superboy were brought back to life through unexplained time travel. Oh, and Superboy-Prime was revealed to be the calculating, intelligent and longtime Legion villain, the Time Trapper. Don't worry, no one else understood how that works and it's retconned away by the end of this anyways.

With that all said, let's dive right in to this issue.

"-- like make a Wildfire/Wildfart joke."

This issue continued with the fight in the Arctic between Superboy-Prime and the recently revived Superboy, along with some random canonfodder, like Yellow Eyebeamboy and Green Mouthwash Lad above. Prime had some of his trademark "wit" and some decent lines, like the following:

"See? That was way cooler."

Of note, Fire-in-a-Bottle Lad didn't die from that, despite nuking half the North Pole when his suit ruptured. A quick bandaid and it was all better. The fight sequences throughout most of the start of this issue were much like this with one shocking death or non-death after another, random Superboy-Prime one-liners and flip-flopping between Prime and his Time Trapper future self. If you like Perez's art, this is all done with the Secret Invasion widescreen, zoomed out macro view of the fights where we're given the odd zoom in to a random fight, but no real resolution or context for how the battle goes between the dozens of different characters.

"Mordru will not be confined to stupid speech bubbles!"

Which brings me to a major problem this issue, and series, has - the Legions, who make up the entire subtitle for the series, have no reason to be here other than to die or invoke nostolgia from longtime Legion fans (assuming they agree with how Johns props up his version of the team at the expense of the other incarnations).

Sure, the Legionnaires show up in almost every panel of the comic, but, outside of the odd Brainiac scene, they are completely inconsequential to the story or its outcome. Even the "epic" battle taking place away from the two Superboy-Primes gets resolved in a handful of panels (not pages, panels) with some random Legionnaire draining Mordru's power and then taking out half of the super villains, which we were told through narration and not even shown. Why even bother with the huge cast of characters and having Superboy-Prime recruit the villains if they serve no purpose and Prime is the only actual threat worth showing on screen?

"No one knows nor cares who any of these people are."

Just look at the above splashpage for an example of what I mean. These Multiverse helpers "beat up" Time Trapper Superboy Prime in the span of a few panels, yet the three other Legions have been getting their asses handed to them for five issues straight and barely do anything, but, aside from the above splashpage, most of them are never seen again. Only a few do anything to the Time Trapper and I can only assume the inclusion of them was some nod to fans of the Legion and served no actual story purpose that could not be accomplished with Superman or the million other Legionnaires.

"You are still that stupid."

The end to Superboy-Prime's threat is, of course, due to his own stupidity. After temporarily disabling the Time Trapper version, Brainiac has the Legion teleport him to the location of the younger Superboy-Prime in the Arctic, which results in the above panel. This is funny in the Prime is a retarded manchild sort of way, but we are talking about the same Prime that just recently teamed up with and tolerated the being that destroyed his universe (Anti-Monitor) and space Hitler (Sinestro) to further his goals in the Sinestro Corps War without acting like this and it was written by Johns. Yet, here, he can't even go a panel without calling someone stupid or punching things to solve his problems. It's also the same Prime that, at the start of this series, formed his own team of super villains and was at least acting like he had two brain cells to rub together.

"This would have been a pretty cool ending..."

The meeting with his future self, as mentally stimulating as it was, ended with the younger Prime punching his older self, resulting in the above meta ending where Prime is literally erased from the page of the comic, which I thought was a great and fitting end to a character that had been, up until now, the representation of the common overzealous internet fanboy. Sadly, this isn't quite the end, which I'll get to in a moment.

"Oh, uh, Conner, um, no one's mentioned anything about cults or anything to you have they?"

Conner's back and he's Chinese! Wait, no, just rushed art. Actually, what I wanted to ask is if we'll ever see any kind of mention of Cassie's pyscho dead boyfriend cult running days from 52. I'm pretty sure the minute Conner goes online, he's going to find out about it and that is going to be one awkward conversation with Wonder Girl...

"Ma!!! Get me my grilled sammiches!!!"

Getting back to Superboy-Prime, Geoff Johns pulls his best (or worst, depending on your viewpoint) impression of Grant Morrison by imitating an Animal Man issue with a fourth wall breaking conclusion to Superboy-Prime's story. No, this isn't some fan made conclusion you see above. This was actually published in a comic. There's more, but, first, a brief intermission.

"This scene has nothing to do with this comic or review. I just find it funny seeing Starman buying McDonalds."

This is the only panel Starman appears in. He bought some fast food. Mmm, orange drink. Now, back to the Prime discussion!

"Your troll-fu is weak Superboy-Prime! You need to work on that two-finger typing if you want to contend with Sephiroth1337_xXx."

Oh, yes, Superboy-Prime, the comic book representation of internet fandom, is back on the new Earth-Prime and is living in his parents' basement, collecting comic books and posting on the DCU messageboards. And, yes, the thread he's posting in is real. You can view it in all its glory here.

I'm not sure what to think of all this. It's either the greatest thing ever in an insane, Frank Miller All Star Batman sort of way with the perfect put down to comic fans everywhere from subtle-as-a-bag-of-hammers Geoff Johns or it's the worst ending to a book I've ever read and something I can't believe saw print. I read it one time and I laugh and shake my head, unable to comprehend the enormity of what I just bought and read while another time I'm hollaring to my mother to make me a grilled cheese sandwich before I start writing a snarky review (ohhh, I'm getting meta here, must think of ways to insult my readers before continuing, will include random Legion jokes for images and not properly name characters before posting).

However, indecision over whether to like or hate this ending aside, I really, really, can't see how this was green lit from the start as the actual conclusion to any comic, Geoff Johns writing it or not. You can't just write a comic, have it delayed as much as this was and featuring an obvious, but humourous, jab at the people buying the comic and then go beyond all references to pure mockery of said fans. While I'm not going to lose sleep over this outright insult to fans and critics alike, I've lost a bit of respect for Johns, as a writer, for doing something as shallow as this. The ending, whether you enjoyed it or not, is Johns's interpretation of you, the fan, reading the comic and had no bearing on the actual Legion of 3 Worlds story or miniseries. The only conclusion I can come to, as Prime was written out of the story prior to it, is that it is there for no other purpose than a blatant last attempt at driving home his contempt for whomever was reading the issue at the time.

Verdict - Avoid It. Whether Johns actually meant the Superboy-Prime conclusion to come off this way or not, this is about the least professional thing I've ever seen and I honestly thought I was being pranked by some fake copy my LCS spliced together before finally letting it sink in that I just spent more than $20 and about a year's worth of time on a series only to be treated as the butt of a joke by the writer and DC. This isn't a "I'm never buying DC or Geoff Johns comics again!", but there's a definite lack of respect for both after reading this and I can't, in good faith, recommend something like that to anyone.

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4 Review

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #4 (OF 5)
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Pérez and Scott Koblish

A little warning before continuing with this review - I do not share the more common and positive sentiments towards this issue. In fact, I'm sure most will vehemently disagree with me in regards to many of my complaints about this issue, but I just can't bring myself to praise it like many of the forum goers or other reviewers seem to be doing.

That said, my first complaint, which seems to lead to every other problem, is that this reads like fan fiction. It's pure wish fulfillment and mary sue writing with Johns' favourite characters and is riddled with contrived and ridiculous retcons throughout the issue. I felt like I was reading every random forum post about how someone would bring back so and so character and was shocked seeing such writing make it to print.

For starters, let's deal with Bart Allen/Kid Flash's return. It is a long winded, exposition filled explaination that didn't make a lick of sense in regards to how it explains his return, why he's younger or how he retrained his memories of being an adult. It amounts to Johns simply wanting a character he enjoyed back and doing it with no real plan or thought behind it.

The next resurrection for this issue was the much speculated return of Conner Kent, better known as Superboy, who died fighting Superboy Prime back in Infinite Crisis. How did he come back? Starman dug up Conner's body, stuck it in Superman's regeneration tank (the same one he used when he "died" fighting Doomsday) and left him in there for a 1000 years. Another Legion team went back in time and grabbed some Lex Luthor hair and used that to regenerate the human part of Conner's half-human, half-Kryptonian DNA.

While there's no major problem with this manner of resurrection (Although, we could say Superman wasn't technically dead, so was able to regenerate. Conner was dead dead and it shouldn't be possible), it does raise the question as to what the hell was the point of Starman's addled brain, the months of buildup and his job digging up graves or any other question regarding his trip to the past. Why didn't they just use the same team getting Luthor's hair to grab Conner's body and bury it at the Fortress of Solitude? What was so dangerous about the mission that Starman was required to be insane in order to accomplish? While I don't care about the science behind Conner's return, the events used to execute it should make some kind of sense and it comes off poorly written when you look beyond the results.

And this isn't me not wanting these characters revived. I actually love that both Superboy and Kid Flash are back. However, being happy they are back does not vindicate One More Day level of writing (okay, it's never that bad) nor does it give Johns a free pass to just write whatever the heck he wants in order to get his favourite characters back.

The manner in which these characters were resurrected doesn't even touch on the manner in which the various Legions are treated. The two non-Silver Age Legions seem to exist in this story for the sole purpose of a) making the Silver Age Legion look good and b) to serve as cannonfodder for the Legion of Supervillains and die ignominious deaths. They don't celebrate these other Legions so much as massacre them in throw away panels or grind them up against the fanboy mentality and analogue, Superboy Prime. It's really disconcerting seeing someone writing a book about these characters when it appears he obviously hates 2/3rds of the cast and only wants to write his versions, further adding to the fan fiction-like feeling of the writing.

This all culminates with the Time Trapper identity reveal at the end of the issue, which I pray is a joke or some fake out, as it reveals the infinitely patient and calculating Time Trapper as none other than Superboy "I'll kill you dead" Prime. It's a shock ending, alright, but it also makes no sense, much like the Cosmic Boy Time Trapper reveal from Zero Hour.

Verdict - Avoid It. Clearly, this issue and series is not aimed at me anymore. I love that Johns has revived Superboy and Kid Flash, but with so many time travel options available to them, they didn't have to be so hamfisted about these resurrections. It's like handwaving of details away so he can have his cake and eat it, too.

I'm sure people will disagree with me and I know I'll be in the minority in regards to this issue and fully accept that, but I just can't, in good faith, give this issue a passing grade nor get past my hang ups. Maybe someone can explain to me what I'm missing here that everyone else is gushing over?

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #3 Review

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #3 (OF 5)
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Pérez and Scott Koblish

Where Final Crisis suffered from too many obscure characters with seemingly little to no explanation for being in the story, Legion of Three Worlds suffers from having far too many Legionairres and Johns trying his best to explain every single one of their appearances and histories, causing the story, what little there is between the massive fight sequences, to crawl at a snail's pace.

Furthermore, there are just way too many characters in this story. Let me rephrase that, Johns is trying to micro manage far too many characters. These battles literally consist of hundreds of characters, yet it felt like Johns was trying to tell me who every single one of them was, what their backstory is, what their motivation is and so on to the point I just stopped caring and my eyes started glazing over as I watched random person get killed or someone else get knocked down. I just couldn't associate with anyone outside of Superboy Prime, Superman, the Brainiacs and the one or two other characters I have a stronger grasp of and could pick out of a crowd.

Does this mean the issue was bad? I don't think so, as I did enjoy it, on a fundamental level, but I know I shouldn't be casually flipping through certain sections, glancing for dialogue that mattered as random people I don't care about died either. At the least, these should have been interesting or shocking, but the deaths just became so, I don't know, immaterial, as if they didn't even add anything to the story and had no place being in the issue. In fact, many scenes felt unnecessary or aimed at the more die hard Legion fans as opposed to being necessary to the story.

In the end, the only things you need to know are Sodam Yat came back after a nice scene with fellow Daximite, Mon-El, Superman and Superboy fought for all of two panels, where Superboy blew a hole in Superman's hand, and, at the very end of the issue, after some painfully dull explanations over the course of several pages, Kid Flash, Bart Allen, returned to the land of the living and Superboy Prime is still terrified of him after what happened in Infinite Crisis. I assume Kid Flash was plucked from the time stream and that is why he is a child again.

Verdict - Check It. The scenes that were impressive were extremely well done, but most of the book felt forced or aimed at a very niche audience of Legion fans with encylopedic knowledge of the teams, even with the numerous attempts by Johns to cue us in on who's who.

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #2 Review

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #2
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Pérez and Scott Koblish

While this is a much better outing than the Legion of Three Worlds history lesson that was issue one, this issue, in comparison, felt a lot more rushed. It was as if Johns, after having caught everyone up on the Legion characters, who they are and who all the major players are, forgot he had to setup the plot for the rest of the series and rushed everything into this issue so he could start moving next on. It felt like he crammed the first two issues of most storylines into this one after wasting the first issue.

Now, don't misunderstand me. This was still a great issue, by any standard. It has a lot of great moments and the meeting of the Brainiacs was exactly as I would have imagined it, but I think the rushed nature of this setup issue robs this issue of a lot of the impact it should have had, especiallyw ith some of the things that happened here.

To start off, we were quickly introduced to Random Legion Member #1032 (Mysa), who is being rescued by several Legion members introduced last issue, and Random Legion Bad Guy #2930 (Mordru), who has captured her. We're not told how or why she was captured, but I don't think it matters.

The Legion free Mysa and, as expected, Mordru shows up to stop them. This is all precursor to the introduction of the last Green Lantern in the universe, Rand Vidar. The small band of Legionnaires looked to be holding their own against Mordru until the entire Legion of Super Villains showed up. This should end badly for all involved, right? Not exactly...

Instead of the massacre we were all expecting, Mysa teleports the team back to Earth. Well, all except Green Lantern, who stayed behind to ensure their escape as he protected them during her spell. This leads to a nice introduction to the all the villains and Superboy Prime's past deeds as the ring recaps everything in brief sitreps for the last Green Lantern and the reader.

As expected, Prime hasn't forgotten his hatred of the GL's and, after several panels of what I consider filler / introductions for all the villains as we get shots of several of them using their powers one at a time on the GL, before Prime finally gets a hold of him and promptly kills the last Green Lantern.

After this, we get pages of the Legion attempting to contact the other two Legions using the lightning rod from the JSA/JLA/Legion team-up and the old crystal ball the JLA and JSA used to use to converse between Earth-1 and -2.

Meanwhile, Brainiac has several plans in motion as he sends one team off to retrieve the dead Rand Vidar's body and take it to Oa to meet a mysterious Daxamite (more on this later), another team to go back to the 21st century for some reason and yet another group to go intercept the Legion of Super Villains, who are on their way to Earth.

While all this is going on, Brainiac and the remaining Legion manage to contact and bring the other two Legions to this Earth, much to their confusion and my delight, as the various Brainiacs inevitably started bickering with each other.

Finally, we skip the retrieving of the dead body and pick up with the team tasked to going to Oa. After we see the ring of the deceased GL trying to find a suitable host and failing before returning to Oa (Mogo was destroyed, so no more ring guidance system), we catch up with this team as they confront the mystery Daxamite. As I'm sure everyone figured out by now, it turns out to be none other than our very own resident Daxamite, Sodam Yat, aka, Ion, who is now sporting a mohawk and a more Alan Moore GL Annual-like appearance and claiming to be the last Guardian of the Universe.

As you can see, a lot happened in this issue, almost all setup, and I even glossed over a lot of details and backstory parts to keep this brief (well, brief for me). I think the rushed feeling I get from this issue comes from the sudden shifts in focus with little buildup, like the sudden 'go get the dead body' scene to 'oh, we're at Oa now' with nothing in between, which many of the scene changes and plot developments experienced.

Further adding to this feeling is the artwork. Perez is often heralded for his ability to draw so many characters on panel without losing any of the detail, but this issue is far from his best in that regard. While they still have lots of characters on panel, the layouts seem to be designed solely for that purpose - to have lots of people on every page - with little rhyme or reason. The sudden shifts to single character fights, like when the Green Lantern takes down several of the villains one at a time, when you have dozens of people in the previous panel further compounds this problem with the art for me.

It's hard to describe in words, as many will see single pages with all this stuff happening on it and looking fine and wonder why I'm being so hard on it, but I think many of these "lots of people on panel" scenes hurt the story more than help it. The Legion vs Super Villains fight really suffers as we get this huge clash of the titans with the heroes severly outnumbered and the pages make it look like it's all one on one fights when Prime could tear everyone apart on his own. Add all these heavy hitters to the mix and it should have been a massacre, but Perez does his job of showing off everyone's powers individually and it hurts the epic scope of this threat and the fights come off as a generic super-heroes vs super villains brawl.

Verdict - Must Read. This has been a lengthy review as it is, but I just have to end this on a positive note, as this comes off as one big hate-on for this issue when that couldn't be any further from the truth. This is an excellent, yet flawed, issue. Thankfully, the good outweighs the bad by a large margin, but this review is for those that aren't buying this issue, for whatever reason, and I think they've read more than enough of the glowing reviews on other sites and are interested in knowing the flaws as well. For the rest of us that bought it, we just get to enjoy it and shake our heads at why they didn't.

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #1 Review

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Pérez and Scott Koblish

Can an issue both disappoint and have you chomping at the bit for the next installment at the same time? Because that's exactly how I feel after reading this issue.

The disappointment arises from the fact this is a trumped up Wikipedia article with pretty pictures from George Perez. In fact, the use of the Superman museum and the Jimmy Olsen hologram was even worse than reading a simple Wikipedia article and it went on and on for the entire issue as it framed everything the Legion and Superboy Prime did.

I realize Johns has to setup dozens of characters, re-introduce people to this new Legion and its alternate future - all while setting up the actual story for this arc - but this is not how a story should be told and it comes off very similar to the exposition filled nonsense from the recent Batgirl mini-series, which is far from a good thing.

To be honest, the only thing really noteworthy from this first issue was seeing Superboy Prime assault the prison world and free the Legion of Super Villains. There was also a shock killing of some longtime Legion supporting character, but I didn't even know who it was at the time and the moment was lost on me, making me wonder why this was such a big deal.

Basically, all you need to know about this issue is:

• the Time Trapper is the bad guy and brought Superboy Prime to the future
• the Legion of Super-Heroes is on the verge of being disbanded due to the events of the recent Action Comics arc
• Superboy Prime destroyed the prison planet and freed the entire Legion of Super Villains
• Superman was called to the future and Brainiac reveals they will enlist the other two Legions from the three different Legion continuities

Of those bullet points, they take up about 5 pages of story combined with the rest of the oversized pagecount dedicated to explaining who everyone is.

Regarding the artwork, I'm not a big fan of George Perez (well, I used to be a fan, but his art has kind of stagnated and seems to be just going through the motions in recent years), but I think this is some of his best work in years and I was surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did.

Now, with my disappointment over this issue handled, how is it I'm still pumped for the rest of this arc? Well, all the boring introductions and setup seems to be out of the way and seeing Prime's handiwork, that of slaughtering over 20,000 guards and searing a giant, flaming Superman S-emblem into the prison planet, and the promise of the other Legions being called in for the next issue is more than enought to make up for this lackluster and disappointing Wikipedia entry.

Verdict - Check It. To be fair, I think you could skip this issue, read this review or random spoilers and be able to jump right into the next issue without missing a beat. This was the equivilent of a Secret Files one-shot or some other character profile book with the exception it was narrated instead of just static images and text profiles. To me, that's not good storytelling and I don't like paying $3.99 for it. However, what little that does happen is great and the setup for the rest of the story is taken care of, leaving us with nothing but, hopefully, action packed, balls to the wall action for the rest of the series.

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Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds Archives

Archives - Back Issue Bins - DC - Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds

Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds

Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #1 - Verdict - Check It
Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #2 - Verdict - Must Read
Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #3 - Verdict - Check It
Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #4 - Verdict - Unknown
Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #5 - Verdict - Unknown

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