Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 5 #1 pg 4

A recent Heritage win! It might seem like nothing special, but I'm really happy with it. This is from the framing narration sequence that Mark Waid and Barry Kitson used to set the stage for their new iteration of the Legion. You can see on the published page that they leaned heavily into the "teenage rebellion" aspect, with the 31st century being a sanitized, technology-reliant, human-contact-shunning near-dystopia. It was a new take on the Legion that worked fairly well, and I do remember being fourteen years old and reading "we're so sick of it, we could scream" and feeling rather validated in all my teenage discontent (there wasn't much).

Lore relevance aside, not only is Barry Kitson my favourite artist, but I am specifically a huge fan of how he draws cities, buildings, and architecture in general. I love that this page offers both a look at his take on present-day architecture and the cityscapes of the future. The level of detail in both is just incredible; classic Barry. Each building is unique and different, and I love the contrast between the boxy buildings of the present and the round, asymmetrical buildings of the future. In the top panel, we have maybe the most windows you're ever going to see in a single piece of art, an elevated train track, tiny neon-lettered signs, a highway with offramp signs, and even the machinery and communications arrays on top of some of the taller buildings. In the bottom panel, we have amorphous buildings that somehow feel more "copy-pasted" and monotonous than the squarer buildings of the 21st century (which I'm sure is a deliberate choice to make the future feel unimaginative and sanitized), and the fun detail of a walkway high in the sky that passes through one of the buildings.

The Heritage lot came with the prelim for this page, too, and I just love how clearly laid out and detailed all the buildings were even at such an early stage. You can see that 31st century Earth was initially going to have little spaceships in the sky to parallel the shot of 21st century Earth, but I like that Barry chose to leave them out, in the end. It emphasizes how insular and shut-in the world of the future has become before the Legion comes along to shake things up.