The Legion has been around a long time.  I originated with Superboy.  I guess he would get bored with with Smallville and would travel into the future.  There he met a bunch of other young powered people and they formed a club house.

That silly premise has since grown into a complex mythology all its own.  In the past the group has incorporated a lot of teen soap opera trappings.  Who likes who?  Who wants to be in charge?  Who brother wants to kill him?  It could become like 90210 but with super powers.

In recent years they have kept a lot of the social interactions and added a lot more independence and action.  I was glad to see they provided character introductions.  The legion is large and their names, homeworlds and powers are hard to keep track off.  Some of the characters have multiple powers, and some have powers that only work in some circumstances. So get used to attempting to get to know them. It will take a while, but it will be worth it, as their history and deep back story unfolds.

The writer Paul Levitz came to fame by writing this book many years ago.  In the meantime he has been in charge of DC until just recently.  His story is solid and he did his best to keep most of the back story out it, but with all that history it is bound to pop up. I’m not sure new readers will get the relationship between Star Boy and Dreamgirl, or the disgraced Collosal Boy, or the references to the Legion Lost?  But there is a LOT to introduce and only 20 pages to get there.

The art is solid but not spectacular.  The characters are easy to identify (which is important in this book) by the art.

There is a lot to take in.   C    —  Don

This issue works as the next issue of Legion, continuing from about where the last series left off, but since there don’t seem to be any important changes for their continuity, it doesn’t really work as a first issue. Part of the appeal of the Legion has been the sheer size of the team, so it can make introducing everyone difficult. It’s taken care of in the Legion books with little tags that identify a character and their powers on the page, something they’ve been doing for quite a while in the last series.

Still, there are many events mentioned in this issue that happened near the end of the last series, and they aren’t bending over backwards to get us all caught up – if you want to know who “Earth Man” is and why he’s got a memorial statue getting set up, you have to go back and read the last Legion issue before the reboot.

I’ve liked Paul Levitz’s run on Legion, and not much has changed here, so for me, this is still a fun read, but I wonder how new readers might react to being thrown in the deep end.

“B” for me (and anyone else who’s been reading Legion would likely rate it about the same as they’ve been rating the last series), “C” for new readers not looking to be a little lost for a while.  — Ed