Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes LEGION #4 (Preview)

^^^I think at the end of the day that's probably gonna be the best response. Even if we do get a storyline to explain Shady was an imposter/under mind control/emotion control/being blackmailed/etc etc, it would have to be pretty awesome to avoid the standard cliches that come with this stuff. I am happy to just ignore that it ever happened as long as it never gets brought up again...up until the Earth-Man thing, Shady was one of my favourites so I would like for her to remain that way.

The only way I want Jeckie back is as Jeckie. I never want to see her in that hideous Sensor girl costume again.

I'd prefer to see Sensor, rather than a delusional Jeckie on the brink of insanity because she can't accept that her husband is dead. And frankly her old costume seems damn revolutionary in a world of stupid, insulting boob/butt/navel-baring all over the place.

If KK comes back, I'd rather it be as a new character, male or female-- possibly not even humanoid. No more ridiculous resurrections, please!

How about if Shady VOLUNTARILY gave herself over to the possession? There are all sorts of story possibilities there. What could be compelling enough to make you surrender your free will to one who in all likelihood will do things that totally and permanently screw up your life?

It could be some Talokian ritual to bring people back from near death, and she tried it to get Lar out of the Phantom Zone.

There ya go, FC!

I could see a story where Shady becomes trapped in her own memory, similar to the one where Jeckie was trapped in one of her own illusions a while back. Maybe she was yearning for a happier time in her life, before Mon got stuck back in the zone, and Lady Memory supplied it for her and took her place. She could use her memory powers to alter the Legion's memory of Shady so they wouldn't notice the differences, then tried to seduce Earthman to be her champion and conquer her planet for her.

Now that Earthman is gone (praise the Lord), maybe she'll "sink her hooks into Mon-El, just like that!"

Why does Shady have to have been mind-controlled? Why couldn't she have just made a bad decision?

Most of my thoughts on this issue have already been covered by other posters. I'm still enjoying Portela's work. It was very nice to see Jan coaching Hadru, and Hadru responding with more humility than we've seen so far.

Invisible Kid was put to good use.

The back and forth between Nura and Brainy was fun. I agree that it is odd that none of the Legionnaires has mentioned the villain Glorith in the context of their current teammate of the same name. Perhaps they don't remember her, and Brainiac 5 is stumbling upon a time manipulation explanation? Some clarity would be nice.

The Dominators were dealt with a bit too quickly.

I do hope that Shadow Lass and Mon-El get back together as a couple. I don't like the suggestion that other posters have made that Shadow Lass has somehow been manipulated. She's human. She made some choices that many don't agree with, and I'm totally okay with that. It makes her a more complex and complicated character.

Mon-El's comment 'just don't ever try that trick on me' and Chemical Kid's response were cute.

"Mistakes" and "bad decisions" don't cover what Shadow Lass did imho. "Betrayal," "sleeping with the enemy," "complete role reversal," and "utter hypocrisy" would come closer to the mark.

Any Legionnaire jumping into bed with an unrepentant bigot who imprisoned and tortured a long-time comrade, let alone lover, is a scenario that just doesn't hold water. If the basic logic and motives of any character or plot device don't hold up, the whole story falls apart under its own flawed structure.

I like complex, imperfect characters who make mistakes, but this goes way beyond that. imho.

yeah, I am with jim....if we are supposed to take seriously that this relationship did happen between Shady and Earth-Man, I want more of a reason than 'she made a bad judgement call'. That's why I would rather we just ignore that it ever happened.

Or to put it another way.......Shady's justification for dumping Mon for Earth-Man was that Earth-Man was a great warrior and his extreme manliness got her Talokkian war instinct all a'hummin', right?

So why is she even WITH an organisation like the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group whose purpose partially revolves around helping those who are too weak to help themselves? Are we meant to believe that she has only been with the Legion this long because they never suffered a substantial loss? That the second the Persuader actually managed to kill one of the Legion, she would have thrown herself at him?

Shady dumping Mon-El for Duplicate Boy would be bad judgement, but could conceivably be in character depending on the storyline.

Shady dumping Mon-El for the guy who came closer than anyone else to destroying the Legion is either terribly off characterisation, or at the very least should ring MAJOR alarm bells with the rest of the team as to how much they can trust her from here on out...

Ditto.

Earth-Man's qualifications for 'great warrior' was that he (with the help of his team) kicked the Legion's butts and had them on the run, which means that, if Shady is 'into that sort of thing,' we should have seen her express similar interests in Computo, Universo, Darkseid, the Time Trapper and / or Mordru...

Given that her pre-Mon-El crush was on Brainy, the *least* 'great warrior' one can find on the team, I don't think it's at all in-character for her to go for the 'great warriors.'

What *could* be in-character is her having an interest in the most notable men of a species. Brainy is pretty much Coluan number one, and Mon-El is similarly the universes most famous Daxamite. Earth-Man, by becoming the most prominent Terran champion, for a while, could have occupied a similar niche.

The problem is how much Geoff wrote that into a corner by having Earth-Man toss Mon-El into the Zone, toss Drura into the timestream, blind Color Kid, tear Double-Header in half, torture Sun Boy, etc. Paul may have been counting on the fact that most of this happened off-panel before attempting to use Earth-Man, in the hopes that it wouldn't 'poison the well,' (or, as with some of the other stuff from recent years, like Wildfire-is-Red-Tornado, flat out intended for it to be 'chronicler's error' and 'never happened'), but he didn't do enough to 'un-poison that well' or address (or correct / negate) those circumstances and make the relationship believable.

A sentence dropped here or there indicating that the majority of Earth-Man's reputed off-panel activities were exagerrations, that Double-Header had only been hurt in the fight (or had finally completed his much-delayed mitosis and split into two people, leading to some onlookers thinking that Earth-Man had 'torn him in half'), or that Color Kid had recovered from the temporary damage he'd taken in a fight with the JLE, etc. could have gone a long way to making Earth-Man a bit less un-salvageable a character.

Instead we have scene after scene where Earth Man uses Colossal Boy's powers or Sun Boy's powers or Element Lad's powers, and upstages (or even *lectures*) those heroes in various ways, making him less and less popular to anyone who actually likes those Legionnaires.

I'll admit that Paul had an uphill struggle to make Earth-Man's story compelling, but it's like he didn't even try.

And so, despite feeling that this story had great potential, when the character died, all I felt was relief that this tiresome episode was over, and cheated that it never amounted to anything.

At this point, the only sane reaction to me, instead of trying to retroactively make sense of it all (and make sense of Shady's actions during this time), is to spit on the ground and say, 'We shall never speak of this again.'

Given that the Lightning Saga took place with the pre-Flashpoint Justice League, I think it is fair to say that for THIS Legion, it never happened.


The original Glorith was a minor character that only a few Legionnaires met when she was an adult and they were kids. Why would anyone make any connection between the two Gloriths. Glorith could be as common in the 31st century as a name like Mary today.

[snip]

Damn it. Where's that "LIKE" button?

I don't know what makes me cringe more: the story itself or the way it's given some fans license to say some really nasty, anti-woman crap in various forums. (And when people do that, I wish they'd try and bear in mind that Shady's a fictional character. She did this stuff because the writer and the editors wrote it that way, and couldn't be arsed to make it even remotely plausible. )

LMAO! Thanks, Set!

That's my thought, too.

I can't be mad at Shady for this decision, because she isn't real. Her choices are 100% on the shoulders of the writer.

In the words of Jessica Rabbit, 'I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.'

I must say that I enjoyed this issue more than than any since the TMK era. Although Paul did get Shady & Mon-el's dialog mixed up on the last page.

I was going to post a lengthy reply here, but then Jim G. said everything I wanted to say. Thanks, Jim, for saving me from being late to work this morning

You're quite welcome!

I agree with much of what has been said about that the Earth Man and Shadow Lass affair. I'm just saying that suddenly revealing that Tasmia was being mind controlled would make a bad situation , or bad story, worse.

In the real world, prisons and death row are full of criminals - even murderers, who have women that love them. What makes women love bad men? Is Tasmia any worse than her teammates who allowed Niedrigh to become part of the team for the political reasons? Should they have disbanded the team or left Earth?

Given the context of a xenophobic Earth were Niedrigh's actions universally viewed as criminal? His team was called the Justice League, not the Injustice Gang. Do even the worst among us, have some redeeming qualities? Did Shadow Lass see them where others didn't?

A woman who had a teenage crush on Brainiac 5, can't harbor an attraction to rugged warriors? Really, are women such shallow and one dimensional beings?

Sleeping with the enemy? Yes, that's exactly the story that Levitz wanted to tell. What if the Joker or Lex Luthor were somehow forced to become members of the Justice League in current times? How would members react? Sure, there are lots of problems with the concept and the way the story was told. It is the story Levitz wanted to tell - an idea that he wanted to explore. He spent 16 issues doing it. It ended up being a story of redemption - which went over like a lead balloon. God, how we hate redemption.

In all honesty, it's a story that I didn't enjoy all that much. There were lots of problems with the execution and there are other stories I would rather have read. Given all that, to suddenly make it all a "mind control" thing would feel like a cop out to me. As readers, we now have to deal with Tasmia as a character who is very different than the one we knew before. Pretending it didn't happen would be the easy out.

You make some good points, Jerry.

[snip]


Thank you so much! I wanted SO badly to say this, but I was so ticked off that I honestly couldn't find the words. I am so damn tired of judgmental attitudes against female characters, especially since Shady couldn't have "betrayed" Mon-El because they weren't together anymore!

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Given all that, to suddenly make it all a "mind control" thing would feel like a cop out to me. As readers, we now have to deal with Tasmia as a character who is very different than the one we knew before. Pretending it didn't happen would be the easy out.

Agreed. Shady as OOC "traitor" or Shady as brainwashed victim? Both choices are what's called in Yiddish fairytales a "goat's dessert." They're both effing awful. Let's just pleeeeeeeeeease move on already!

Gah.

Well, I don't know about FC's orjim's motivies for what they suggested, but my comment was tongue-in-cheek.

And if anyone believes in redemption, it's me, but I didn't really see that in Kirt.
To me, everything was about his own glory and agrandizement.

That includes the torture he put Lar through, his relationship with Shady and his final death.
He didn't die for anyone else but himself and the seeming proof that he was superior.
He was a true narcissist, as well as a sociopath, imo.
I think that he died unrepentant.

Tasmia's self-importanace wasn't very pretty either.

I would have felt the same if a male character was used/abused the same way, though.
I protested the Progeny/Jan in a similar way.

But, like I said earlier, with the deaging, I can accept Tasmia's change to selfishness much easier, so I'm moving on.