Legion: Secret Origin #4 pg 6

This is a page with a few fun stories behind it. For starters, it's one of the very first pieces of comic art I ever purchased, and it's also singlehandedly responsible for the creation of my CAF account!

The year was 2021 and I was forging ever deeper into the wonderful world of comic art. I'd bought some pages off eBay, but I was still a little bit hesitant to start buying from dealers or independent sellers (I look back and laugh at it all now, of course). I had started frequenting CAF, but hadn't made an account, and was considering buying some pages from Anthony Snyder. One night, I made my usual "Legion" keyword search on his site, and lo and behold, there were a whole bunch of pencil pages from the Legion: Secret Origins series! But, I was young, and foolish. I told myself "I'll look again in the morning", but I hadn't yet learned that good Legion art tends to fly off the proverbial shelves. When I came back the next morning, all but two pages had sold. Fast forward a few weeks, and I'm searching around on CAF. Cue the usual "Legion" keyword search, and what do I see? This very page, freshly listed in the Classifieds!

If such a thing existed, I think I would have set a world record for "fastest CAF account creation". I sent the seller a message, staked my claim on the page, and the rest, as they say, is history! I love being a member of CAF, and I'm proud to be a part of the community that's grown around it. There's definitely something to be said for the motivational power of a good piece of comic art!

Now, onto the page. Legion: Secret Origins was an excellent way to refine and standardize the Legion's origin story for audiences during the Retroboot era of the early 2010's, who might have been unfamiliar with the team and its extensive history. One of my personal favourite parts of the miniseries was the surprising friendship Paul Levitz wrote between Brainiac 5 and Phantom Girl (which might have had the potential to grow into something more, had Supergirl and Ultra Boy not come into the picture), which is demonstrated to marvelous effect on this page here. The scan does an excellent job of showing off Chris Batista's precise, clean pencils, but it doesn't show off all the preliminary looser pencils and reference lines that are also present on the page (which you can see in the additional images gallery). I really enjoy getting to see the whole of Batista's penciling process, from preliminary sketches to final lines, present on a singular page.