Speed Force

Yes, it’s actually here! This issue is a lot more story-focused than the last few, which I remember being more about showing the war between the Superman and the three Legions of Super-Heroes on one side and Superboy Prime and the Legion of Super-Villains on the other.

First: the art. It’s George Frelling Pérez. Do I really need to say anything more? Didn’t think so. The book looks fantastic.

The big events:

1. Following through on last issue’s resurrection of Bart Allen. We get a touching reunion between Bart and his cousin Jenni Ognats (XS of the reboot Legion), and Geoff Johns once again shows that he’s found Bart’s voice at last. (Quoting Disney’s Aladdin in the 31st century: absolutely perfect.) We also get some mumbo-jumbo about why Bart returned as a teenager instead of an adult, which doesn’t really make any sense (or fit with what we saw during 52 and Flash: The Fastest Man Alive, but then it’s not as if that’s been particularly consistent to begin with.)

2. Another hero returns from the dead, revealing that the Legionnaires in The Lightning Saga had at least two objectives to their time travel mission.

3. A major character’s true identity is revealed again, and it’s not the same identity as last time. (Shades of Monarch, there.)

Overall, I found it a better read than the earlier issues of the series, because it was much less scattered. I do get a sense that Geoff Johns is treating the “other” legions as expendable, making it possible to kill off “major characters” and still keep the “originals” around.

A couple of spoilery notes behind the cut:

BEWARE SPOILERS

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The other resurrection was, as many fans suspected, Kon-El, a.k.a. Conner Kent, the Superboy who was cloned from a “dead” Superman way back in “Reign of the Supermen,” who went on to appear in his own series, Young Justice, and Teen Titans until he was killed off in Infinite Crisis. I’m not a huge fan, but I did think it was a waste to kill him off. But since he doesn’t seem to be back in the present day (unless he’s the Kryptonian Nightwing, or has his ID been revealed?), I have to wonder whether he’ll be staying in the 31st century.

As for the Time Trapper being an older Superboy Prime…I have to say, “meh.” I liked the idea from Zero Hour of him being an older Cosmic Boy, but I think that’s long since been abandoned. This means Superboy Prime has been retroactively inserted into decades of Legion stories, and will no doubt be around for much longer, and I absolutely loathe Superboy Prime. He’s annoying, he’s overly powerful, and the way writers (Geoff Johns in particular) use him as a stand-in punching bag for elements of fandom that they dislike strikes me as juvenile and faintly offensive. I’d be quite happy to never read another comic with Superboy-Prime again.

Frankly, I think it would have been more interesting if they’d made him a future Conner Kent, though that would still fall under DC’s “evil is genetic!” paradigm (see: Ravager, Jericho, Raven, and of course Superboy himself.)