Andy Lanning

While this does act as a bit of a prelude to the movie, overall, it falls flat. The art is serviceable, the storylines shockingly boring, considering what Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning have done in the past.

In fact, though it also showed how far comics have come in 45 years, the more interesting reads were the backup issues that introduced the individual members of the Guardians.

Put it this way: if you're looking for some great secret that deepens your understanding of the movie, these aren't show more the droids you're looking for. However, if you want some weird first appearances of each of the members (with the exception of Star Lord, a character who has had his origin rewritten way too many times), then this is a fun book. show less

Despite how much I enjoyed the two Legion of Super-Heroes deluxe editions DC released over the past few years (The Great Darkness Saga and The Curse), Legion Lost largely flitted by without my notice-- until I found the hardcover in a used bookstore for half-price.

Legion Lost technically stars a different version of the Legion than the one in The Great Darkness Saga and The Curse, but this is largely the same cast of characters, just thrust into a different situation, and it's pretty easy to show more go from the one to the other without being confused; everyone just has new, "hip" codenames, and there's no babies. Legion Lost opens with nine Legionnaires waking to find themselves trapped in a completely different part of the universe, with no apparent way home. And this isn't the bright, shiny world of the United Planets; it's a rough, dark corner of space, where might makes right. Basically, it's Star Trek: Voyager with superheroes.

Each chapter of Legion Lost is told from the perspective of a different character. The story starts with Shikari, a native of this region of space, stumbling across the Legion while fleeing her pursuers; her unfamiliarity with the Legion and familiarity with the locals adds to our disorientation, as she doesn't explain her reference point, and our own reference points have become alien. The best part of this chapter is definitely when Shikari finds a recording of Element Lad from who knows how long ago: he put the others into hibernation and lived alone until he died! It's a haunting message from the past, and lets you know how bad things are before the story even starts.

From there, we move from Legionnaire to Legionnaire. My favorites were definitely Monstress-- the one-time sheltered elite turned hulking brute by a gene bomb-- who operates as the heart of the team, and Saturn Girl-- the team's telepathic leader, who finds herself pushed to the limit keeping the team together under these circumstances. She does some terrible things, perhaps, but I loved her all the better for it. She might be my favorite Legionnaire overall.

The pushing to darker places works really well: Legion Lost shows what the Legion of Super-Heroes is by showing us what it isn't and what it could be. It's Star Trek: Voyager with superheroes, yes, but it's also Voyager done right. You never got the sense that Janeway and her crew were tested by their ideals like you do the Legion here, in the darkest of places.

The art, by the team of Olivier Coipel, Pascal Alixe, and Andy Lanning, is scratchy in a way that just reeks of the 1990s to me, but is also perfect for the story, really representing the dark places the team finds itself. Also the colors by Tom MacCraw really make the darkness come alive, even if the Legion itself is wearing fluorescent spandex.

I finished my review of The Curse stating I'd become a fan of that particular incarnation of the Legion of Super-Heroes; I think we can safely state that now I'm a fan of the Legion full-stop. Some more of the Abnett/Lanning Legion comics are being collected next year, and if they're half as good as this, they'll be fantastic. show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This is sort of a Doctor Who spin-off: the Sleeze Brothers, shady P.I.s, were introduced in Follow That TARDIS!, a DWM strip collected in A Cold Day in Hell! At the time I read the original strip, I wrote, "The Sleeze Brothers went on to have their own comic series from Marvel. The Tardis wiki doesn't count it as part of the Doctor Who
universe, but who knows why. [...] You can get it pretty cheap on the secondary
market, show more but I am not sure I am motivated to do so..." And yet, I was! I am not sure if I could explain why, except that I found something charming and uniquely Marvel UK-ish about the whole thing. The pastiche-heavy future world of these strips struck me as being very much of a piece with Russell T Davies's "New Earth" setting, and thus something that fit into the Doctor Who universe in spirit, if not in continuity. (Though, having read them all now, they totally could be part of the Doctor Who universe.)

This contains six single-issue stories, plus an eight-page prologue establishing how the Sleeze Brothers—formerly minor criminals—became private investigators. If you read interviews about this series, it's often stated that despite the fact that though it seems like a Blues Brothers rip-off, it's really not; this is totally belied by this story, which opens just like the film, with El Ape Sleeze (or "El'ape" in some of the stories) meeting his brother Deadbeat after he's released from the penitentiary, following by a gratuitously destructive car chase. So who knows.

The six stories here are fine. None are works of genius, though by the end of the volume, I found there was a certain weird charm. Blues Brothers may have been a starting point, but it was never this weird. They get involved in gang wars, in attempts to use holotelevision to brainwash the city, in attempted presidential assassinations, in Clueesque murder mystery dinners, in behind-the-scenes shenanigans at award shows, in intergalactic peace conferences. Most of the time, they are almost gleefully unaware of the stories unfolding around them, not understanding why anything has actually happened

I wouldn't say I loved any of these stories, but there was only one I didn't like, the presidential assassination one, which seemed to have little panel time for the ostensible main characters, and was too much on the convoluted side. (I think the cases should be beyond their understanding, but not mine!) Most of the time, I was enjoying the inane details and strange pastiche that makes up their universe. I mean, it's not high art, but it's so completely itself that I couldn't help but be charmed by it.

As you watch the Sleeze Brothers going up against a two-headed pig police sergeant, crawling through sewers, ending up in an Alien pastiche, satirizing the sexual intrigues of the Kennedy administration, revealing the killer is a parasitic life-form living on his brother's back, encountering an army of ninja cats, it's clear that no one made this comic book to appeal to a preexisting trend or perceived gap in the market. No one here was out to make a quick buck, because this is not the comic that could make anyone one. This exists because John Carnell and Andy Lanning wanted it to exist, and because they loved it. And I think that comes through at its best moments.

Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

In the lead up to the Annihilation: Conquest crossover event we get a mix of the kinds of silly, overly serious nonsense reserved for younger readers willing to buy into comic machismo but you also get issues of Starlord. I'll admit, I'm only reading these in anticipation of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie but to that effect the Starlord issues are highly entertaining. Much of their pull comes from having a set of eclectic characters trying to work together in not so obvious ways. show more The fact that one of them doesn't work out so well just goes to show how dedicated the writers are to character driven action despite the greater plot being more or less contrived. So I guess I recommend this collection but only for the Starlord limited series. show less