Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.
The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!
L.E.G.I.O.N. #58 - September 1993
Nearly twenty years ago, DC held a cross over event between three of their titles that featured, in one form or another, space cops. Green Lantern, Darkstars and Legion all joined together in Trinity, a story of ancient gods returning to Maltus, birthplace of the Guardians of the Universe and the Controllers, and proceeding to wreak ruin upon the planet.
Being a Green Lantern reader then, as now, I picked up the issues of the other series to make sense of the storyline which, as memory serves, wasn't that bad at all. Here in Legion #58 we're at part six of Trinity and, as we join them, the three teams have been set against each other while the three gods stomp around destroying stuff.
In amongst the chaos, though, there's some nice moments. There's a touch of nostalgia, for example:
Look at that: G'nort, Hal and Kilowog all fighting together.
There's some humour as well. Back before Boodikka became an Alpha Lantern, she was the bad ass fighter of the Corps and had earlier been sent to deal with Legion's equally tough recruit, Lobo. One thing led to another and they vanished from the battlefield. In Legion #58, an officer's sent to track down Lobo to find out if he knows where Boodikka's gone:
I don't know what's weirder: that Boodikka presumably owns panties with the Green Lantern logo on them or that Lobo's happy to slip them on...
But there's also a bit of sadness, too: Bertron Diib, one of the Legion recruits, selflessly tries to save the inhabitants of Maltus while the three gods destroy the place and pays the price for his heroism:
This was the last big storyline to feature Hal before Emerald Twilight came along and changed everything by introducing us to Kyle Rayner and it's a good sci-fi romp with some lovely art.
And man, it was nice to see G'nort again...
I used to have a the Green Lantern portions of the crossover. Those issues leading up to Emerald Twilight were almost like a funeral march. There was even one last team-up with Green Arrow.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, but to be fair, Gerard Jones had his own plans for a big change in #50 (see here for details) so if it was a funeral march, he was playing the tune.
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