And here’s the second piece I snagged from Jeff’s recent CAF Live artdrop! This one is fascinating, to say the least, so buckle up while I try to speedrun the context, here.
Throughout this Legion’s continuity, an unknown entity (eventually revealed to be the Time Trapper) has been pulling Legionnaires into various time periods, giving them new memories, and seemingly observing how they react to their changed circumstances. This time, several Legionnaires have been inserted into World War II-era America (or, if you will, into the Golden Age of comics, very clearly patterned after the JSA). The Legion is a team of youths with unique attributes or technology, banded together to fight the Nazis, and everything from their codenames to their dialogue was doctored to feel like a comic straight out of the 1940s.
The most notable thing about this version of the Legion is that everyone’s powers have been reduced so that they’re more on the level of other Golden Age superheroes. On this page, we see that Cosmic Boy’s magnetism is now a series of actual magnets that each affect a different material, Element Lad’s transmutation powers are now contained in an “element gun” he designed, Chameleon Boy’s shapeshifting is now the ability to construct and inhabit any kind of disguise, LeViathan (or Colossal Girl, here) is now just an ordinary girl who happens to be seven feet tall (plus she wears a blonde wig, much like Black Canary!), and Triad, now Triplicate Lady, is a seemingly-solitary heroine whose secret is that she’s actually triplets! The only Legionnaire with their powers unaltered is Brainiac 5 (Or Brainiac-Minus-One, here), who maintains his super-intelligence, and is the only character to actually be from another planet.
Here, we see that the super-villains of the Axis Powers (each based on a Legion foe, with a particular tip of the hat to whoever decided to make Roxxas, the xenophobic, genocidal Daxamite, into the Nazis’ Aryan superman) have stolen an Atomic Bomb, and rigged it to detonate atop the Empire State Building. The Legion battles their foes (with Chameleon Boy disguising himself as Cosmic Boy and sacrificing himself so the Legion’s leader can survive), while Brainy attempts to disarm the bomb, only to realize that there’s no way to stop it, anymore. The next few pages will see the Legion banding together to boost Brainy’s forcefield in order to contain the explosion, sacrificing themselves in the process, at which point all the involved Legionnaires reappear in the timestream, safe and sound with their memories restored.
Whew! With that all out of the way, I think the first thing I want to bring attention to is how delightfully Golden-Agey the character designs all feel, with the bold, blocky colour patterns, the domino masks, and the skirts for Triplicate Lady, there. Considering all of these designs only appeared in this one issue, this is a very special pickup for me. Jeff’s told me that this was a heck of an issue to work on, having to make sure to get the city and technology right for the time period when he was much more used to drawing things set in the far future, but as always, he did a magnificent job. I don’t own many action-heavy pages from him, so it’s great to have a firsthand example of how he tackles a busier page like this. And doesn’t that nine-panel layout just lend a page an even stronger classic feel? Also note the jetpacks that the Legionnaires use to fly, with their “flight rings” being the rings attached to the cords they pull to activate them.
And, I mean, I’m not just going to come out and say that the best part of this page is Brainiac 5 wearing a suit, but would you believe me if I told you that my fiancé owns and wears a suit very similar to the one Brainy’s wearing, here? Food for thought.
