TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: It's a Legion of Super

Saturday, December 21, 2024

It's a Legion of Super - Heroes Christmas !

As Christmas comes closer and closer one tends to think about which topics one might tackle in the last few days leading up to the holidays - since you never know if you will get a chance to do a proper Christmas post - so I have decided to do the long promised Adam Hughes Legion of Super - Heroes post ( yes, this is also not the Adam Hughes post that I initially was going to make but we are slowly getting there ) although with a little twist here - as longtime followers of the blog have come to expect from me - by including the story Star Light, Star Bright, Farthest Star I See Tonight ! " by writer Paul Levitz, artist Jose Luis Garcia Lopez and inker Dick Giordano from issue 11 of the DC Super Special Series.

This is one of the few stories by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez that is still part of my comicbook collection as it is included in the second volume of the LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES : BEFORE THE DARKNESS hardcover whose main part is about THE REFLECTO SAGA and about which I reflected ( pun very much intended ) in this post . Now being that the story as well as this issue has been reprinted a few times I thought that there would be better scans available but it appears that we will have to do with these.

Okay, now we come to the part with The Legion of Super - Heroes by Adam Hughes. Or better said LEGIONNAIRES by Adam Hughes since he didn't work on the main Legion book and rather on the sister series.

Keeping in mind that LEGIONNAIRES chronicled the adventures of the younger Legion while the other Legion book was all about the grown up Legion ( there was a very complicated storyline in which the grown up Legion found a secret cave full with younger versions of themselves in suspended animation and the smart thing they did was leave it open if those were the original Legion members and all the old versions were clones that were allowed to grow old or if the young versions were the clones because that way the fans could believe the version that they were more in line with ) it was only logical to put somebody like Adam Hughes on LEGIONNAIRES since he is especially adept at drawing girls.

And I'm not saying that he would not have kicked it out of the ballpark if they had put him LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES proper because this guy can literally draw anything but he was just more suited for this book.

Now as well a fit as that may have been except for the seventh issue Adam Hughes only drew a few pages on the following issues. One of the things that prevent Adam Hughes from doing interior pages full time is that his kind of quality takes time so you either put him on a project where he can take his time to finish it or you put him on a monthly title and are content with however many pages he can produce each month.

It just takes him a lot of time to draw this which is why it is even more frustrating when he does a title with two of comicdom's hottest female characters like BETTY & VERONICA and instead of the ultimate wall to wall babefest with scorching pin up after pin up of these comicbook babes you get drawings that you could easily put in a children's book.

I mean, I didn't expect something like his work on PENTHOUSE COMIX ( which granted was not nearly as explicit as I remembered but we will come to that if I ever manage to write my post on that ) but that was just embarrassing. But I guess this is the kind of work Adam Hughes has to put out now if he doesn't want to get cancelled for drawing beautiful women in an appropriate appealing way like Milo Manara or Frank Cho.

Anyway, coming back to Adam Hughes on LEGIONNAIRES thankfully that was way before feminists and SJWs ruled the world or instead of an issue filled with nubile Legion Busenwunder in bikinis we would have gotten the politically correct bodyshaming fat women in way too tight spandex the comicbook companies are trying to ram down our throats nowadays.

Yes, that particular issue of LEGIONNNAIRES came out in 1993 so we score another point for the 90s, the " worst " decade in comicbooks.

And to demonstrate how much we as comicbook afficionados have lost since then I have included a few pages. Not all of them because that would be too easy and also because with all the pages from the following issues combined we have just around the right page count for a full post.