L.E.G.I.O.N. '92 Annual #3 pg 15

For a long time, I've been limited in what I can post to CAF by my teeny-tiny scanner that can't even fully scan a 9x12 piece. Last week I decided I'd had enough, hauled a big portfolio down to Staples, and got to scanning (and shopping around for a nice scanner to bring home with me).

All that to say, here's a piece I've been wanting to share for a while, freshly scanned in the highest quality I could get! I picked it up off of eBay last summer. The third L.E.G.I.O.N. annual is by far my favourite of the five annuals the title got, and it's also a tie-in with DC's 1992 event "Eclipso: The Darkness Within". L.E.G.I.O.N. has ostensibly come to Earth to hopefully add the planet to their list of client worlds, but Vril Dox, as usual, has ulterior motives. Here we see him and Lady Quark undercover, attempting to buy one of Eclipso's black diamonds off of some thug in a bar... with predictable results.

I don't own a lot of action pages, so I was very pleased to pick this one up. I enjoy the variety of fighting moves McKone chose to showcase here, especially Vril's in panel five. Everyone always forgets that he's an absurdly good hand-to-hand combatant until he's wiping the floor with someone.

Hands down the funniest part of this page (of the whole annual, really) is that super-genius Vril Dox needed to disguise the fact that he's a green-skinned alien, and the best disguise he could come up with was... a hat. That somehow casts a very unrealistic shadow over his face. I get a good laugh at that every time I read this one. I am, however, a big connoisseur of comic art where the characters are "dressed down" or out of uniform, and this page fits the bill perfectly! My favourite detail is how the back of Lady Quark's shirt is made of mesh, so you get some intricate cross-hatching in the panels where it's visible.

This annual had five inkers, and there's no indication which of them inked this page, so if anyone knows, please do drop me a line or a comment!