High-Tech Tomorrow: Review of the Time-Mirror, By Johnathan

Just as Infectious Lass' soul-crushing rejection inspired the Super-Human Detritus series of reviews, today's entry is the inspiration for this catalogue of the majestic wonder that is 30th Century technology - and it didn't even take me half as long to get around to as Infectious Lass did!

Every once in a while, the Legion would get a big pile of gifts from some planet or other, in gratitude for the time that they defeated Galtor the Demon Spacegoat or stopped Validus from double-parking or gave their people sound financial advice. These interstellar gift-fests are third cousins to the sublime Legion Try-outs, only instead of being all "Lookit the weirdos and the weird stuff they do!" they instead are all "Lookit all the weird stuff and the weird stuff it do!". It's a fine distinction, but it's there nonetheless. Gift-gettings were never quite as entertaining as the Try-outs, due to the reduced chances of some poor slob having her/his dreams pulverized, but they're still some good fun.

Enough meandering preamble! On to the Time-Mirror!

For all that it has only one panel-worth of Pre-Crisis continuity, the Time-Mirror raises quite a few intriguing questions. Firstly, what is Saturn Girl so durned happy about? Sure it's a neat rick, but has she taken a good look at that image? Now, I don't subscribe to any fashion-model standard of beauty, but this isn't about me. I have met precious few women (nor girls, lasses or princesses) who would react with delight upon seeing that a future version of themselves has developed hips wide enough that she cannot comfortably stand at rest with her hands in front of them. Maybe she hasn't looked that far down? I mean, the gray hair looks good, the glasses are nice and she seems to have kept her skin free of unfortunate melanoma - maybe these discoveries have drawn Saturn Girl's attention and she has not yet noticed that under that high-belted skirt she has apparently doubled in width? Or maybe that mysterious bald patch in her hair hints at experiments in trepannation?

And how exactly does this Time-Mirror work, anyway? Does it actually look through time to find a picture of you when you're older? Is Karate Kid in for a big surprise the next time he visits the Hall of Gifts? Seems like a bad/depressing use of time travel technology, really. Maybe the mirror contains a complex computer that analyses your physical structure and researches your family medical history and then generates a picture based on all of this evidence? Or did the people of Xalla go cheap and just send a mirror that takes your picture, grays the hair, adds glasses and about 20 pounds and hikes up the old waistline a bit? What will Cosmic Boy see if he looks? Will he also be very hippy?

And just why does Saturn Gran have her legs crossed like she has to pee?

Time-Mirror, you make my head hurt.

NOT APPROVED

In case you were wondering, here's what was in that box that Cosmic Boy was opening"

A plant that grows a tiny belligerent dinosaur?

JOHN APPROVED

SARLSH, Part 3, By Johnathan

MAGNETIC KID

There was a point not long before this guide was released that the three charter members of the Legion of Super-Heroes had all semi-retired. Lightning Lad and Saturn girl had gotten married and had a baby (and a Validus!) and Cosmic Boy was... doing stuff. I don't know, maybe he was working on his music or something. In any case, this paved the way for the newly re-electrified Lightning Lass, the somewhat-telepathic Tellus and Magnetic Kid, who was Cosmic boy's little brother, Pol.

Now, Pol had been kicking around Legion continuity for a while. He got blown up pretty good in the late Seventies (by terrorists, I think) and kicked around the Legion Academy for much of the early Eighties, which might provide a clue as to why Cosmic Boy retired all of a sudden: his parents called him up and told him that it was Pol's turn to be a super-hero.

Pol was okay, I guess. He was a bit wide-eyed and inexperienced, which was refreshing, but the group was pretty big while he was on it, and therein lay the problem: when he wasn't saying anything, Magnetic Kid was indistinguishable from Cosmic Boy. It's kind of puzzling, actually. I mean, if I had the same superpowers as my brother (note: I think my brother's powers are headbutt-based) and I joined a group in which my brother had been a charter member and served on for years, I think that I might dress a little differently than him, rather than wearing, oh, the same costume. Seriously Pol - you went so far as to use a different hero name, so why not mix up the outfit a bit, too? A little blue instead of pink, maybe a hat? A vintage pinstripe suit with a horseshoe magnet on the lapel? Hell, if you're ripping off Rokk's costume designs why not kit up in the one with the fishbowl helmet? Kids (nine hundred and seventy-odd years from) today...

Not a bad picture, though. A lot more action than the last few have had, for one thing, and for another, I like the swirly blue magnetism. I also like that Magnetic Kid is using his magnetism to levitate what is patently a stone block. I'm sure that if we were to examine it we'd find a cannon ball lodged in the far side or something, but still.

**SPOILERS FOR THE MAGIC WARS AHEAD (if you care)**

Magnetic Kid also had what was possibly the most pointless Legion death ever. During the Magic Wars (which I found somewhat dreary to begin with) the team tracked the awful evil totally forgettable bad guy to one particular planet (was it the Sorcerer's World? I can't remember. Probably - writers love blowing that place all to hell) only to find that it was encased in a magical shell that could only be opened by the sacrifice of a human life. Magnetic Kid bravely gives his life to open the shield... and it turns out that that was exactly what the evil guy wanted. Further, from what I gathered from reading the rest of the story, he was eventually going to bust out of there himself. So Pol Krinn died so that the Legion could get to the bad guy maybe half an hour earlier. Whee!

For pointless deathery and bad costume decisions, Magnetic Kid is:

NOT APPROVED

Supplement to the Addendum to the Review of the Legion of Super-Heroes (SARLSH), Part Two, By Johnathan

INVISIBLE KID II

There is a rule that I just came up with: Invisible Kids have lousy costumes. The original, Lyle Norg, had that brown-and-green workout outfit with the headband and all and poor Jaques up there has that yellow-and-black monstrosity. Heck, even the current, totally rebooted and up-to-date and not dead Invisible Kid looks like he just grabbed four or five random things from his closet and called it a costume. It's kind of like they want to be sure that their power will be appreciated every single time that they use it. "Oh, thank Space-God, Jaques. That thing was starting to sear my retinas."

Jaques Foccart got to be the second Invisible Kid basically through random chance. He had come to Legion HQ to get Brainiac 5 to make his sick sister well and then Computo had shown up again and possessed said sister, possibly using nanotechnology. Since Jaques had no powers or anything, Computo just totally ignored him to focus on beating up Legionnaires and in the confusion our pal drank some of the original Invisible Kid's formula (that was just, you know, lying around) and saved the day somehow (it's been a while since I've read the story, okay?). Computer-tyrants take note: underestimate Frenchmen at your peril. Afterward, Jaques joins the team and does okay. Oh, and at one point he starts teleporting as well as turning invisible and ends up in some weird hellscape and finds out that poor Lyle Norg didn't end up boinking some ghost-babe for the rest of time but rather was suffering eternal torment, which was a bit of a bummer.

I like that Invisible Kid II was named Jaques Foccart, because I was an English major and so occasionally read it as Jaques Focault, who would have the combined powers of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and have a giggle while I imagine him deconstructing the semiotic of the super-hero team (or something like that. I was an English major a while ago). Also, he's from Côte d'Ivoire and as far as I know is the only superhero ever to come from there. Dammit, except for his sister, eventually.

This picture, however... eesh. I kind of hope that it was accidentally released unfinished, because invisibility is really the easiest power to illustrate ever. Just make the outline of his legs dotted instead of solid about halfway down and then ask the colourist to fade out the yellow at about that point. Ta-da! You did it! Alternate method: leave the whole panel blank. As it stands, this is just terrible as a showcase for the character. I mean, when Superman has a shot where he's just standing there with his arms folded, he's at least hovering a foot or so off the ground, right? Take some notes, Jaques.

Invisible Kid II had two modes: brooding and surprised. In the first, he thought a lot about how his sister was sick (she was in a tube for a couple of years before Brainiac fixed her) and how invisibility was a lame power, which showed that he didn't think about the implications of having superpowers so much as read old Maxim articles about lame super-heroes. Don't listen to them, man! Sure you can't fly through the sun, but the sun's boring. You can fly through, say, the changing rooms of the stars. Plus, you can punch villains on the back of the head, which I for one have always wanted to do to Universo. In the other mode, Jaques shocased the fact that he wasn't a super-scientist or an adventurer or something, just some guy who had drank some goop. Every time that Validus or Darkseid or whoever would show up he would jump about a foot and shout "WTF!" Okay, he would shout "Sacre coeur!" but the spirit of the thing was the same. For me, it never got boring.

And that's pretty much that, Invisible Kid II-wise. Except to note that of all of the bad hairdos, post Five Year Gap, his was the worst. Still, on the balance:

JOHN APPROVED