Legion of Super-heroes #17

Sometimes I think Giffen's art is stuck in this space where he's emulating aspects of Jack Kirby while parodying aspects of Rob Liefeld.

Legion of Super-heroes still has too many characters I'm not interested in and too many relationships I can't remember. I don't think anybody interested in Legion of Super-heroes reads my commentaries on them. I also don't think anybody not interested in Legion reads my commentaries on them! Legion of Super-heroes gets the least likes and the least responses of any other comic book of The New 52.

Why do I bother continuing to read it?! *sigh* Let's make this quick!

Phantom Girl has crashed on an alien planet and her translator is down, so some aliens show up speaking in a new Alien Font that I need to translate! This may be a tough one since the letters just look like smeared inkblots but I suppose I'm going to now waste more time translating it simply to find the aliens are saying things like, "This is an alien language!" and "Keith Giffen's mother chews used condoms!"

Judging by the last alien quote bubble that I thought I would begin with, I'm not sure this is anything but the entire alphabet of the font spaced out to look like words. It's hard to tell for sure since the letters are so crazy, but it looks like the last speech bubble has 27 letters and only one is repeated one time. So it seems to be a representation of the alphabet with one letter repeated. A few other bubbles have 32 letters, again with a single one repeating once. So numbers as well? Or punctuation. Anyway, that was a good five minutes wasted! Back to the story!

I believe Phantom Girl crashed on the Planet That Never Discovered Dental Hygiene! The putrid smell is probably because the planet's topsoil is composed of rotted teeth.

Phantom Girl survived the crash because she went intangible. Now she begins digging through the ship's rubble to see if any of the other Legion members survived.

What happens when Phantom Girl goes intangible while moving at high velocity? As her mass grows closer and closer to zero (assuming the transition takes some amount of time, even if a microscopic amount), wouldn't her velocity increase? Wouldn't she end up just shooting straight through the planet and into space? How can she stop when she encounters no friction?! When her mass does equal zero, does she just come to a dead stop since her momentum would now be zero? But doesn't that go against some law of thermodynamics? Fucking Tinya Wazoo. You make no Goddamned sense. I guess, once again, I simply just have to suspend my disbelief! Fucking comic books!

I like how such a simple power can be such a super headache when one tries to figure out how it would work according to universal laws. I'm sure I got a lot of shit wrong in my speculation, but you get the point. All she does is become intangible. But ultimately, she's DEFYING GOD'S WILL! And by God I simply mean Universal Law which is totally arbitrary as a rule set to this dimension.

Polar Boy survives by encasing himself in ice. Just as believable a survival method as losing all mass!

And what about Polar Boy's powers?! Isn't one of those laws of thermodynamics something about conservation of heat?! Where does the heat go when he freezes things? I believe he channels the heat through tiny wormholes where it mostly returns somewhere in deep space and dissipates. And occasionally the worm hole opens up in a character from Bleak House.

Where else can you go for Charles Dickens references and fart jokes? Yeah, yeah. The whole fucking rest of the internet, right?

Next Phantom Girl finds Invisible Kid. Good thing he survived or they'd never find his corpse. I wonder how he survived? With the power of invisibility? I think he was cocooned in ice as well. But the last Legion member they find didn't fare so well.

Yay! Maybe I can keep track of all the Legion Members now that they have one less! Let's see...infinity minus one is...DAMMIT!

Elsewhere on a planet that the narrator recognizes (Rimbor!), Ultra Boy, Chameleon Boy, and Glorith Girl are experiencing the same failure of technology that caused Phantom Girl's ship to crash. Perhaps when Phantom Girl's mass neared zero, her velocity neared infinity and she fucking broke the universe. Again. But they did notice one area on Rimbor still with power. Someone must have a gas powered generator made from Alternate Dimensional Technology and thus runs by a different set of Universal Laws!

I think I'm getting the hang of writing futuristic comic book stories!

Back on Somewhere, the little toothless aliens continue to yell the same few alien phrases at Polar Boy. They're probably screaming, "You just fucking crashed on an orphanage, you dicks!" Polar Boy ignores them and continues to walk around moping because Sun Boy is dead. Hey! Maybe that's where the heat went! Polar Boy and Sun Boy fuel each other! That would explain why Polar Boy is so depressed! How is he going to use his powers now? While he's out walking, he discovers a clue as to where they are!

Great! So now I have to believe in "organic rock"?

Back on Rimbor, Chameleon Boy finds evidence that Tharok of the Fatal Five is behind the Universal Power Outage. That's pretty fatal, all right! Ultra Boy, Chameleon Boy, and Glorith Girl are set upon by maintenance robots. But since they're just robots (never mind the advances in artificial intelligence that have made robots of this time self-aware. Probably!), Glorith can turn them into leaves with a spell.

Somebody had better warn Mon-El and his pervy fingers!

And then back on the Promethean Giant, this bit of awesome happens:

So that's what they've been saying this whole time: "Is it okay if we roast and eat your dead friend?"

Since this has been, by far, the best issue of Legion of Super-heroes so far, I hope it doesn't end up being one of Dream Girl's dreams. If all of this is really happening, I wonder if the readers killed Sun Boy? I bet Levitz and his editors (and maybe Giffen too) decided that whichever Legion member received the least votes in the election would be killed and eaten by aliens! Nice job, voters! I didn't vote so this is hardly my fault.

Polar Boy, offended, attacks the aliens and calls them "cannibals." Polar Boy. They're hardly cannibals! Eating Sun Boy is no different from you eating a member of the Legion of Super-cows. Before Polar Boy can throw a punch, the Promethean Giant begins to awaken! The horror!

The issue ends with the new and improved Tharok discussing a Fatal Five reunion with Persuader. But for the moment, they'll just sit back and see if the Legionnaires can make it out of the current predicaments Tharok has forced them into with his technological shenanigans. Also, Validus has just crashed on some planet's surface and he's ready to begin killing things.

Legion of Super-heroes #17 Rating: +2 Ranking. Best issue yet. I'll never dislike an issue of Legion of Super-heroes where their member count drops!