Super-Human Detritus of the Thirtieth Century: Review of the Molecular Master, By Johnathan

Ha ha! I have returned, overcoming a month's worth of illness, romance and computer failure to bring you the tale of a plucky little guy by the name of Molecular Master! Here, look at him sitting around in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes No. 201:

Such a good-looking era in Legion art - check out the lovely Infectious Lass and the homely-as-sin Porcupine Pete, as well as those way-cool chairs! I want those chairs, but maybe not in orange.

Molecular master gets to try out third, after Infectious Lass has made Star Boy barf and Porcupine Pete has studded the whole damn place with quills - note their abundant presence above. Which, actually, is kind of gross. I know a few people who would have to leave that room pretty quick-like after they realized that it would be like being in a big pile of toenail clippings or used hair or whatnot.

I don't know how I feel about the Molecular master's power:

That's a pretty old conception of what an atom looks like, MM. I do like the Kirby dots, though.

Also, i think that that might be a carbon atom, which is kind of boring. I just don't know...why does making an atom really big make it all crackly and energy-tastic? are all of my atoms doing that right now? And what does he do with the really big atom, anyway? Split it?

And just why the hell isn't he called the Atom Master, anyway? Gosh darn it, I want scientific accuracy fro my minor Seventies Legion characters! Isn't this the magazine that brought us the Chlorophyll Kid, causing literally dozens of youngsters to know that chlorophyll has something to do with plants? Oh, the shame.

So anyway, Molecular Master makes it through the first portion of the Legion application without anyone bellowing "REJECTED!" at him. Meanwhile, ERG-1 (you know, Wildfire) is roaming the Legion clubhouse in my favourite form, that of a blobby little pink cloud of antimatter. This is his second appearance after seemingly killing himself while saving Colossal Boy a year earlier and he's trying to get back to his uniform so that he can have some limbs again. Sadly, all of the Legion's technology seems designed to make life difficult for blobby pink guys and so:

He tries to possess the one person on the premises who isn't covered in Legion tech. But what horrible secret does the Molecular Master conceal?

By the way, I love the Molecular Master's costume. It's A-1.

No mind! But why?

Dang. That is one creepy android. I appreciate all the work that went into making all of those robotic facial features (check out the massive power supply going into that eyebrow! I'll bet he could make Mr. Spock run and cry with one hydraulically-augmented raising of that little number) but hawk-nosed tube-men with wildly staring eyes might just be a new phobia of mine.

Robot nose! Robot cheeks! Robot Adam's apple! Oh my god, terrifying robot ears!

ERG-1/Wildfire is upset about the other aspect of the Molecular Master's power: the highly poisonous breath. I like that at this point there no longer seems to be the need for someone to shout "There must be kryptonite in the gas!", though I would think that any gas potent enough to have an effect on Superboy might not require such a roundabout method of delivery. Just heave it through the front door in grenade form and he'd kill himself by sucking it up for easy disposal. Super-villains, huh? Always over-thinking.

So: evil android filled with poison gas and after the Legion's very own deus ex machina. Can he be stopped in time?

Oops - guess not.

Ah, the Miracle Machine, as recently featured in Final Crisis (and eventually featured in Matter-Eater Lad's bowel). The Legion really shouldn't be surprised that folks try to kill them for this thing. Perhaps they should at least hide it behind something opaque - you know, give the homicidal maniacs a bit of a challenge.

Don't worry, though. ERGfire has used the Machine to restore himself to his suit (and certainly not to fashion himself as new human body, no sir), thus sparing the Molecular Master the embarrassment of standing there dramatically while that big atom completely failed to do anything to the inertron. Psh. Big atoms...

Undaunted, the Molecular Master tries again! He makes the biggest damn atom ever!

ERG-1 eats the super-atom! The Molecular Master's super-power officially sucks. ERG, on the other hand...

... has the Antimatter Kick! I don't even care that Wildfire never really did any kicking in later years - blasting this one android in the face with his foot makes him just incredibly great.

That's not quite the end of the future's best-dressed android, though. A few years later, in Legion of Super-Heroes No. 281, a bunch of Legionnaires are trapped in the past and run into the little scamp. It's a weird issue: Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz team up to produce a weird script, while Steve Ditko and Bruce Patterson compliment it with some weird art.

That costume still looks good, though. Note that in this second appearance everyone thinks that his name is Molecule Master, which is lame. I won't be a party to such a renaming, damn it.

In this issue, the Molecular Master no longer has the awesome power of the Big Atom. Instead, he can sort of generically control molecules, causing things to fly around and warp out of shape and so forth. I think at one point that he turns some air into rocks. Surprisingly, this is not an improvement. The absence of the big atoms has made me miss them.

Superboy, by the way, thinks that he's Ultra Boy, who is at this point possibly dead.

Molecular Master still has a robot nose but its not as terrifying. Thanks for showing me that, Superboy. I'll sleep easier tonight!

So it turns out that MM was working for *yawn* the Time Trapper, who really wanted that Miracle Machine, darn it. I can't remember if the thing was still uneaten at this point - if it wasn't what the Time Trapper was after here then I don't have a sweet clue what's going on. Oh, the perils of writing that hooded buffoon into your stories: I will never remember what the hell is up.

Hey, I just noticed - Saturn Girl is giving him the guns!

See? Lousy power.

Flying machine gun-attack is better than jeep-attack, but still.

Eventually, Molecular Master resorts to throwing rocks at the Legionnaires. Snazzy costume or not, that's pretty lame. Also, this version of the Master exploded when too many people attacked him at once. Were I more fond of the original version of the character, I might have concealed the existence of this one but the big atoms and the horrible robot nose and the Time Trapper connection all come together to spell NOT APPROVED.

There we go. Two hundredth post.

High-Tech Tomorrow: Review of The Concentrator, the Exciting Conclusion, by Johnathan

Oof. I meant to write this senses-shattering finale to the sizzling, stunning, uh, saturnine review of the Concentrator earlier this week, but ran up against a couple of stumbling blocks: firstly, I’ve been pretty danged busy at work, so those occasional slow half-hours that were good for a paragraph or two about Saturn Girl’s costume have gone the way of the dodo. Secondly, my evenings have been taken up with Hallowe’en preparation – super-hero boots require a fair amount of sewing, it turns out. If I ever develop fantastic powers you can bet that my costume is going to be off-the-rack. (I wrote this before the previous post, but am too lazy to edit out the redundant information. Instead, I use up more of your neurons with useless info! Ho ho ho! A similar principle applies to the slight overlap between this and Part 3 of the Concentrator saga)

 Home stretch!

 We find the Legion relaxing after a hard day’s being tortured. Tensions, it turns out, are high:

Actually, they probably aren’t. The Sixties Legion, as I’ve mentioned before, weren’t exactly paragons of camaraderie and trust. I’ll bet that if Chameleon Boy lost his wallet and Phantom Girl was walking up to him to give it back he’d have punched her out and had her up in front of the Legion Supreme Court before she could get two words out, though admittedly it might have been a ruse to expose Universo’s crooked law practice or something like that.

“Hey, how does Superboy know that it’s a trick? I’ll bet that he planned all this with the Chief! Get him, everyone – use the kryptonite stilettos!”

Oh, poo, he referenced one of basically three or four panels in this story that I haven’t posted here. In brief, Chameleon Boy was frozen or something, but his hand was still free and he shapeshifted it into something and got away. So, you know, there’s no way that Lightning Lad could ever escape as Chameleon Boy did, if the Chief means “in a similar way” when he says “as”. Fear my pedantry, Science Police Chief! It transcends time, space and relative states of fictitiousness to blast you with the full might of my withering scorn! Your wife shall sleep alone tonight, whilst you cower behind a wall composed of your crystallized tears!

I really wish that this comic had some sort of audio component. I want to hear the voice that does this to people who routinely fight electrically-charged giants with exposed brains and jaundiced Eddie Munsters and so forth. Is it super-menacing, or is it the repetition that breaks the spirit? Is the Legion’s greatest weakness its collective low boredom threshold? 

The Concentrator sounds kind of… lame. Not that I wouldn’t want to have one in my apartment, mind you – I assume that it can concentrate matter into a decent batch of chicken wings – but I can’t really see it as life-imprisonment-worthy. I mean, wouldn’t you have to know how to make a weapon in the first place to make it in the Concentrator? So... doesn’t that really just make it a faster way to get things? Not so good in the hands of a villain, I know, but I can think of half a dozen DC baddies who can do stuff like that without even trying hard. Pre-computer nerd Calculator, for instance, or the entire Sinestro Corps, even that one guy who's a hermit crab.

 The smart thing to do would be to wait until the Chief opened the door and then *WHAMMO!* Lightning to the breadbasket! I mean, the idea is that the Chief is treating them as if he were a super-villain trying to pry info out of their wee brains, so why not respond accordingly?

When she said that, it hurt Chameleon Boy’s feelings.

I can’t say it enough: disproportionate punishment. Also: isn’t there a huge abandoned fortress just going to waste on that planet? Why have the Legion locked poor Lightning Lad in a cage smaller than most bathroom stalls?* I’m pretty sure that I’d go nuts with a great quickness if I were placed in a similar situation, no matter how good the books were.

 *Speaking of bathrooms, where are the facilities in that thing? Is he sitting on the toilet whilst they scold him?

So, the Police Chief (or is he a Commissioner? It's been so long since I read the beginning of this story...), having tortured a teenager into revealing information that he and his friends said was important, orders that same teenager locked in a tiny cage on a deserted planet for the rest of his life. Satisfied after a good honest day's work, he leaves for home.

Damn, it is the Commissioner. How long have I been calling him Chief? No matter, I'll retcon it later on. 

Man, this is a good issue for facial expressions - check out the look of desperation on Lightning Lad. Good job, John Forte.

So, could it be true? Could the man who I have known and referred to as the Commissioner for lo, these many years be some sort of traitorous impostor?

Yes, it turns out. There's the real Commissioner, looking surprisingly comfortable for someone who has spent the last few days tied up in or next to a time bubble. In fact, being kidnapped and impersonated seems to have... mildly irritated him, at the most. I am now concocting a theory about the Commissioner being a worlds-weary, tough-as-nails Slam Bradley of the future, and that if the Legion hadn't caught on to the fake Commissioner's scheme then the real one would have shortly cut his space-ropes on a space-nail and administered a flurry of fistic fury on the felonious face-filcher. And also, his descriptive text is full of alliteration.

But the Legion is watching, and it turns out that the impostor is the *yawn* Time Trapper. 

Actually, this is one of the *y*TT appearances that I'm okay with - it's not really until the Seventies that the Trapper jumps the shark, or interferes with history to cause the shark to become extinct and more swiftly bring about the victory of entropy over Creation, or whatever. Plus, this panel has given me a whole new theory of who the Trapper is. Check out how he has that rubber mask crammed down over his cowl: the Time Trapper is really Batman!

Just what are you going to make, Time Trapper? Does that pistol do anything better than letting you travel through time and preventing others from doing the same? Or does it make a rubber mask realistic enough that it can be worn over a hood and still fool, like, twenty people for a couple of days? Or...

... does it possess the capability to fling what I think are possibly neutron stars around? Man, what more do you need? Dr Doom would quite literally kill for something like that! Does the pistol shoot little stars, so you can use this power on individuals instead of whole planets? Because regular guns work okay for stuff like that. Greedy, greedy boring villain.

So, finally, we get to see the awesome might of the Concentrator. I mean, the narrative practically demands it - I think that if a Silver Age reader had reached the end of this story without seeing it they'd have spontaneously combusted (whereas a modern reader in a similar situation would use all of that energy to write a really scathing blog post).

I like that the Concentrator is visually unimpressive. Oh, it's big, I'll grant that, but stramlined and futuristic it ain't. The Legion's ultimate weapon is far too secret to have the boys down in R&D gin up a really impressive outer casing for it, after all - this is the bare-bones mechanism. But what does it do?

Jeepers? All the power in the Universe? Really? But it's safe, right, due to the fact that you're going to turn it off in a second. But, uh, but what about the electrical impulses in your brain (or whatever - the closest I've come to being a doctor is dating one, and she's long gone)? Don't they count as power, for the purposes of your super weapon? This could interfere with your plan, really.

"And all of the heat energy in the air, and the chemical energy  that powers our bodies, and," *horrible moment as every lifeform in the Universe dies*

But if it was just things like suns and cars and such, extended use of the Concentrator would be pretty amusing: whole planets and galaxies flickering on and off like a city in a movie blackout and entire planets of ticked-off citizenry and the like.

I'm betting that Brainiac 5 invented this thing, as he just can't bear to stop mentioning the "all power from everywhere" thing, possibly as practice so that he can brag about it the next time he tries to pick up Supergirl. 

Now, as much as I'm not fond of the Time Trapper, I've always been partial to the Iron Curtain of Time, especially as the Legion never actually got past it - it just wasn't there, eventually, as far as I remember. Of course I may be wrong, but even if I am I like to think of that Iron Curtain hanging out somewhere with the Source Wall (as depicted in Ambush Bug, Year None), having a drink and talking over old, good times.

Man, the Concentrator... it's possibly the most powerful sci-fi weapon ever conceived-of, really. No contest on a Concentrator/Death Star fight, and the Enterprise would be cinders. But that's the problem - realistically, the Legion should from this point forward be unstoppable. There appear to be no consequences to the use of this thing other than the chance that it'll fall into the wrong hands, so why not bust it out every time the fate of the known everything falls into question? 

Great Darkness Saga: "Oh, shit, it's Darkseid!" *building sounds* ZAPPO!

The Magic Wars: "The disturbances seem to be stemming from that planet." ZAPPO!

The Infinite Man, Mordru, Glorith, Dr Mayavale, etc: "I will rule/destroy creation in mere seconds!" ZAPPO!

The Legion is too big and competent an organization to fall prey to minor threats, and when the Concentrator is there to solve the really big ones that give them the dramatic trouble that we love so much then the whole concept is broken. Legion + Concentrator = no fun, unless the plot involves Brainiac 5 going insane and using the thing to hold the Universe hostage.

NOT APPROVED

This story is JOHN APPROVED, though - it's pretty damn delicious.

Post script!

When the Legion gets back to Earth, they find:

Oh, lord. I love Superboy's lack of impulse control. Big green Iresa simply horrifies him, unless it's his inexplicable resistance to the idea of getting some that's flaring up here. Either way, the Man of a Million Super-Powers has not one iota of tact in his blue-clad body. Man, that Iresa does have a square head, doesn't she?

The only better end to this comic would be Bouncing Boy revealing that he picked Iresa up by impressing her with tales about Legion stuff and asking if he could show her the Concentrator, because he's told her so much about it.

High-Tech Tomorrow: Review of the Concentrator, Part One, By Johnathan

Hey there, friends - it's time for another review-as-voted-on! Looking way back to Adventure Comics No. 321, we're going to have a look at the fearsome Concentrator, mua-ha. I think, though, that this is one of those times that it's better to look at the whole issue, rather than extracting bits of it for humourous out-of-context ridicule. I estimate... three entries, maybe? And this is a three-day weekend! Keep tuning in to see if I can manage to meet my own very easy deadline! (Ha ha ha! It's Monday already: I fail!)

We join the Legion on page two:

Man, I sure do wish that Phantom Girl had remained all ghostly and pigment-free - just imagine how much weirder her string of peek-a-boo uniforms would have been if the cloth and her exposed bits were all the same colour. Also, think of the savings on ink! Im sure that by now we'd have seen a Phantom Girl and the Phantom Squad, Featuring Phantom Ape miniseries or something, if only because of the rising cost of little pink dots.

"Who is this stranger with Bouncing Boy's haircut, clothes and voice? Dammit, I told you not to let just anyone wander in here! Now, where's my chair? No, that's not it. No, my chair was facing the other way, so that can't be it! Also, this isn't the cactus that was here before - that cactus was shorter!"

See, what I'm trying to hint at here is that Star Boy has poor recognition skills.

Also, he's an A-1 jerk. "No, you can't be Bouncing Boy - he was a fat asshole. "

And I'll tell you exactly what Mon-El - and possibly Sun Boy - is thinking in this panel: I wonder if anyone's noticed the new way I combed my hair?

Bouncing Boy goes on to tell the story of his slimmening, which involves a shrink ray and is patently something that the writer threw together just to get rid of the guy. Not that anyone was listening to him anyway:

They were far too busy voting on whether to toss him out on his ear or not, with maybe a quick roughing up by Ultra Boy to make sure he keeps his mouth shut if any reporters think to ask about the Big Computer Sex Parties or anything like that.

So presumably they send the Reservist out for Astro-coffee or something, and then it's back to the meeting!

Now, this is back from when the Time Trapper was a super-scientist hiding behind the Iron Curtain of Time, thirty days into the future or so. Long, long before he became the Irritating Emo Plot Device From the End of Time that we all know and I loathe, he was actually mildly interesting. He sat behind that curtain and made fun of the Legion and every once in a while he tried some ridiculous scheme involving Glorith or the Molecular Master or someone like that.

Ah, there's the first mention of the Concentrator. Time to find out what it is: speak on, Star Boy!

Aw. I guess we'll never learn what that darned thing is. grumble grumble this is why I have to write such long reviews, damn Legion and their secrecy...

Superboy: Hey, Mon-El's hair looks great. I wonder if I should change my 'do?

Chameleon Boy and Triplicate Girl then show up and completely coincidentally tell everyone about some really lame attempts to wrangle info about the Concentrator out of them. This elicits some fairly elaborate eyebrow-raising and not a little nose-wrinkling, and then, in a completely coincidental occurrence:

Science Police Commissioner Wilson shows up! He's heard some talk of a Concentrator of some kind and he wants the poop! He's... kind of paunchy!

Now, this comes up later, so I'd like to point it out specifically: the chain of events here is that a) This guy hears a vague rumour about the Legion having a super-weapon of some sort. b) He asks them about it and they say that it could potentially threaten the entire Universe. c) He believes them, just like all good people should when a group of teenagers make grandiose claims.

d) Based solely on space-radio scuttlebutt and their collective word, he decides to put them through gruelling psychological torment, with possible life imprisonment waiting for anyone who blabs.

Planet Althar, uninhabited except for strange life-forms! (Space Directive X21v states that planets may be considered inhabited only if the life-forms in question are regular, small or boring. Technically, Althar is considered to be in-friggin'-habited, but the term was coined in the 2530s, and scientists of the Legion era don't talk like that any more.)

A better site for testing astronauts' suitability for space travel, you say? Could it be, just as an example, somewhere that you don't need a rocket ship to get to? I only ask out of curiosity, you understand.

Heh, Matter-Eating Lad. Nice one, Querl.

See, it came up again (sooner than I'd thought, but still): based solely on their word, this man is prepared to imprison these people for life if they reveal a secret that they themselves decided to keep. That's like... ag! I can't even think up a good example! Legion logic hurts my head!

Good issue, though.

NEXT TIME: the Legionnaires get psychologically tortured!

Review of Tedium, By Johnathan

Hey, all. Remember how I said that the posts would come fast and furious once I finished that SARLSH malarkey? We,, I probably should have added an "unless I get tied up in the longest and thired-most-hellish move of my life" caveat. Because that's what happened. On the up side, it's done, I have a new cat roommate, and the Internets are back in town. I guess I could have written some stuff while I was offline for later posting, but that smacked of effort, man. One thing, however, did stick in my tired, bitter craw: last week's Action Comics No. 864. Well, one aspect of it, at least (Lightning Lad vs. Batman was great). Let's watch:

So the big-reveal surprise villain in Action Comics this month was a) not a huge surprise and b) the friggin' Time Trapper. I hate the friggin' Time Trapper. He was an interesting villain for all of three Silver Age stories, I swear, back when he was basically just a reason that the Legion could go into the past but not the future, even with all of their Mighty Technology. In fact, he was entertaining for exactly one story, the one that also introduced the equally-hateful Glorith, when he managed to turn a third of the Legion into irritating babies and kicked Invisible Tot around. Ever since then, the Time Trapper has functioned almost exclusively as a gigantic, nigh-unbeatable threat, trotted out to shake up the status quo with a few shocking deaths or resolve some continuity point with a time quake or something. He's featured in more angsty, dreary storylines than the entire cast of Dawson's Creek. And no matter how many times he's tediously defeated, he just keeps coming back - which isn't much different than, say, Darkseid, but at least Darkseid is fun.

BAH! NOT APPROVED.

Well! I was certainly filled with vitriol, hey? Needed a little more sleep? Well, I'm well-rested now, but I basically agree. Every time the Time Trapper shows up in a story I heave a little sigh and prepare to slog through some boring comic book. It's like... like reading a late-eighties crossover event. Or 8 out of 10 early Image comics. Don't get me wrong, I'm not writing this story off just yet. I'll be the first one to applaud if anything interesting is added to ol' TT's story - I just ain't holding my breath.

This is what I meant when I was talking about him kicking Invisible Moppet. Kicking Silver Age DC toddlers = comic gold! This one instant of the Time Trapper's life is:

JOHN APPROVED