Analysis Notes
| 1 |
Dialogue captions are from Chameleon. |
| 2-3 |
As will be seen later in this issue, Spark, Element Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Chameleon are all mental illusions created by Saturn Girl’s unconscious mind. She presumably chose the set of Legionnaires who would be most desired by the Lost Legionnaires: Cosmic Boy, as a founder of the team and close friend of Live Wire and Saturn Girl; Spark, with her connections to Live Wire, Chameleon, and even Brainiac 5.1; Element Lad, as the missing Lost Legionnaire; and Leviathan, perhaps due to her own past abuse of power issues. Of note, too, are the Legionnaires who are not present; in particular, Invisible Kid, who has a rivalry with Brainiac 5.1 and with whom the ruse might be seen through. |
| 2:4 |
Recall that Chameleon was the last Legionnaire uncaptured by the Blight and had been ready to abandon the Legion’s ideals at the time. Legion Lost comes fast on the heels of the Blight invasion of Earth, so Chameleon may still be processing the same issues as then. |
| 2:6 |
Awake, suddenly, and with no one questioning why. (Answer: they were unconscious because of Saturn Girl’s influence.) |
| 3:2 |
“No one died.” Advance looks at the cover of the next series, Legion Worlds, indicate that Gates is among the dead or missing in the aftermath of the rift’s closing. |
| 3:3 |
The hands are Live Wire, Wildfire, Kid Quantum, Chameleon, and Apparition (with the black on the latter being shadow rather than a costuming detail). |
| Credit the dialogue balloons to Live Wire, Wildfire, and Kid Quantum, since that is who they are positioned next to. |
| 3:5-6 |
Much of this information was seen in Legion Lost #1, via the Palean memory crystals. If any of it is new, that can be attributed to Saturn Girl’s mental connection to the Progenitor, the real Element Lad. |
| 4:1 |
Element Lad’s de-aging should be sounding alarm bells for Brainiac 5.1. See 4:6. |
| 4:3 |
Apparition’s dialogue is really Saturn Girl talking, covering up the inadequacies of her handwaved explanation. |
| 4:4 |
“Oh, grow up,” says the girl who just grew in size. |
| The heads at the bottom of the panel are Chameleon, Kid Quantum, and Cosmic Boy. |
| 4:5 |
It’s extra hard to believe that McCauley would have let the ship go without someone he trusts as part of the crew. (But he doesn’t trust anyone other than himself, does he?) |
| 5:3 |
Kid Quantum and Element Lad are to the left side of the panel, and Cosmic Boy is talking to Wildfire.
|
| 6:4 |
This is one of the first views we have had of Wildfire’s full suit, and it is obviously based on medieval armor: tunic, plate armor, and helmet. This provides some interesting echoes to Legionnaires Annual #1, the Elseworlds Camelot story, and to Wildfire’s (retroactively added) preboot brother, Squire Burroughs, who ended up with powers similar to Wildfire’s. |
| 6:5 |
Actually, they are putting down on the planet because they expect to need to full team to pull Umbra, Monstress, and Ultra Boy out, and several members cannot fly, since their flight rings were rendered inoperative by the translation out of and back into the universe. |
| 7:1 |
Dialogue and the floating face are Live Wire’s.
|
| 8:1 |
One wonders what Monstress would feel if she were to, say, lean against one of the buildings. Do they equate to rock formations? Would the building collapse? Perhaps the illusion is strong enough to simply convince her that she does touch a solid object. |
| 8:4 |
Since Ultra Boy is invulnerable at the moment, Umbra obviously hits something. While the sound effect and rubble is mostly just “cartoon violence,” exaggerated for effect, the simple fact that Umbra was thrown as far as she was and made a major impact raises questions about her strength and level of invulnerability. She has never shown any significant resistance to damage — a blow like what Singularity must have delivered should have seriously injured her — so possibly she is able to unconsciously use her darkfield to protect her, not unlike how a Green Lantern ring works: when she gets hit or impacts, the darkfield absorbs damage above a certain level, so although she was knocked unconscious, she avoids being killed. |
| 9/10:1 |
Note the strength of Saturn Girl’s mental illusion: not only do her illusions mesh seamlessly with that created by the planet so that Singularity sees them, but they also affect Singularity in concert with the other illusions. |
| 9/10:2 |
This panel features Monstress, Cosmic Boy, Spark, Element Lad, Apparition, Kid Quantum, Wildfire, and what must be Shikari’s feet. |
| 9/10:4 |
“I will deny you all!” is an odd phrasing. While Singularity presumably means it as a reference to denying them the victory he assumes the want, the phrase also underlines the multiple levels of illusion going on here. |
| 9/10:5 |
Singularity might be absorbing some of the kinetic energy from the Legionnaires’ blows, a là Sebastian Shaw, or this may simply be a case of “Superman syndrome”: the harder the Legionnaires hit and the closer they come to beating him, the harder Singularity fights back. |
| 9/10:6 |
Chameleon is in the dust by Leviathan’s knee. |
| 11:1 |
Chameleon used this pangolin form in Legion Lost #7, too. |
| 11:2 |
Cosmic Boy’s hand is visible in this panel. There is someone’s head at the bottom, next to Leviathan, but whose cannot be identified. |
| 11:4 |
Singularity is apparently larger than the other Legionnaires, perhaps 10 feet tall. This is not especially clear in other images of him. |
| 12:2 |
In 13:1, Brainy says that there are “imagers” in the air rather than “images”, as here. Both could be right, with the imagers creating the images. (Which itself makes for an interesting concept about the creation of illusions, that they aren’t so much about the creation of sets and scenery as about creating a field wherein each point has all the pertinent illusion information for that point, not unlike a massive raytracing setup.) |
| Kid Quantum and Spark are in the background. |
| 12:3 |
Note that Brainy requests the use of two of the other Lost Legionnaires. Is this only because Ultra Boy is the one who can see through the illusion and Chameleon has most recently provide Brainy’s transport, or is Brainy intentionally (or maybe unintentionally) avoiding the four rescuers due to his unspoken doubts about them? Or perhaps Imra is ensuring the preservation of her illusions by making him subconsciously avoid them? |
| 13:1 |
If Brainy’s comments about the mode of “transmission” of the illusion are accurate, this raises the question of how the illusion affects Wildfire, since he is energy and doesn’t breathe. Beyond “Brainy is wrong,” three other possibilities arise: first, that the imagers affect Wildfire in some way other than breathing, possibly simply mucking with his senses rather than creating a city illusion; second, that Wildfire is not affected at all and sees the desert rather than the city; or third, that Saturn Girl’s unconscious mind, in order to create a full picture, has forced the Lorcus Prime illusion on Wildfire along with her own. That she would do this to Wildfire but not Ultra Boy seems inconsistent. |
| Brainy’s comments also raise the question of whether his own force-field could filter out the imagers. Since he doesn’t try, he must have considered the option and discarded it. |
| 13:5 |
Note the inscription on the fountain — “Bienvenue A Elliot 0701” — which seems to translate as “Welcome, Elliot” with a July 2001 date. Since Olivier Coipel is French, this is presumably a reference to a friend of his. (The date might be “0700”, which would correspond to about when the art for this issue was being completed. Perhaps “Elliot” is a son or nephew who was born that month?) |
| 14:2-3 |
Ah, yes. When in doubt, use brute strength and destroy a piece of billion year-old technology. Who knows what useful information or technology Brainy could have gleaned from it, perhaps even something which night have helped them get home? |
| 14:5 |
Attribute the off-panel dialogue nto Chameleon. |
| 15-16 |
You can’t help but wonder if Singularity didn’t know the truth already, to some degree. |
| Note that Singularity’s story is, at its heart, a Superman fable. |
| 15:1-3 |
The “Nooooooooo!” dialogue counts as dialogue for Singularity in all three panels it crosses. |
| 15:4 |
So, is Wildfire reacting to the city (or whatever he saw) going away, like Spark is? Or is he reacting to everyone else’s reaction? As soon as the city vanished, Singularity presumably collapsed and everyone else started staring around, so he could be wondering what everyone is reacting to. |
| How about that: Ultra Boy didn’t utterly destroy the technology! |
| 16:5 |
It seemed likely that this “smoking gun” might show up again in the conclusion of this series, but instead, he merely serves as an object lesson: too much power can harm those around you. |
| Each of the Legionnaires except Brainiac 5.1 and Saturn Girl is in this panel; Brainy is hidden by the dust raised by Singularity’s departure, per 16:4. |
| 16:7 |
Note that the Lorcans did value Singularity. They just had no solution for him. Inherent in him (and in all superheroes) is the need to engage in violent confrontation, something which was antithetical to their society. (And observe that no society becomes a utopia overnight. The Lorcans must have had to deal with Singularity as an icon of an outmoded way of life for years, even generations, before they decided that they could no longer tolerate him.) The Lorcans’ only solution was to preserve both their own society and Singularity’s worldview. |
| 17:6 |
This counts as an appearance for both Umbra and Saturn Girl. |
| 19:1-4 |
Interesting to see Chameleon and Umbra seemingly close after some of the comments she made to him in Legion Lost #4. |
| 19:5 |
She is maintaining five active mental illusions, after all. |
| 19:6 |
Psychothenol is obviously a drug which dulls the brain, probably intended to anesthetize the brains of telepaths in order to lower their defenses so as to operate on them. |
| 20:5 |
Brainy had obviously considered this possibility on some level, in one track of his mind. |
| 21:3 |
Well, this resolves the question of what happened in Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #125, 19:2. |
| Tinya was the last to disappear because Imra was putting the most effort into maintaining her. |
