By Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen
While dealing with various internal problems, the Legion of Super-Heroes suddenly finds itself up against a mysterious dark force that is more powerful than anything they have faced before. Most of my experience with the Legion comes from reading Superman comics where they show up often because of how tangled up their history is with his time as Superboy. I never bothered to read their own title because the frequent relaunches and reboots made working out an easy place to start a right pain. I decided to go with this one because it's considered the title's best storyline and seemed like it would be a quick read. Turned out to be an even quicker read than I thought. Despite the name, 'The Great Darkness Saga' really isn't much of a saga, lasting only about five issues (six if you include the brief prologue). All in all, it's a solid story with some truly epic moments, but really suffers from having far too many characters with barely any personality between them (which I suspect is foundational problem with this team), and the big twist being given away by the cover of every collection.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell, and Others
Originally serialised in the pages of 2000AD, Zenith takes place in an alternative Britain where a group of superheroes became the pop culture icons of the 60s before they either died, burned out, or went into politics. Zenith, the child of two heroes, is a shallow, self-centred poser more interested in using his powers to prop up his flagging pop career than saving the world. One of Morrison's earliest works, this is an interesting take on the concept of superheroes as celebrities, which makes many delightful digs at British culture in the 1980s. But Morrison being Morrison, they just couldn't resist going all-in on confusing multiverse malarkey during the third arc, which was the point where I started to lose interest and finally quit halfway through. Another problem was Zenith himself. He's thoroughly unlikeable, which wouldn't be a problem if Morrison had at least made him somewhat interesting.
Rating: ⭐⭐
By Kurt Busiek, Alan Davis, Kieron Dwyer, and Others
The 90s was not a good decade for Earth's Mightiest Heroes thanks to ever slipping sales and horrific storylines like 'The Crossing' and whatever the hell that Rob Liefeld run was. Luckily, Marvel was able to turn things around by getting Kurt Busiek (along with George Pérez) to take over the title and produce the best Avengers comic in a decade. 'The Kang Dynasty' was the grand finale of Busiek's run, a 16-part epic that saw Kang the Conqueror finally live up to his name by defeating the Avengers and taking over present day Earth. I think if they'd kept this storyline to eight issues, focused exclusively on Kang's invasion, and ditched all the subplots and side quests, this would be one of the all-time great Avengers stories instead of a plodding, occasionally brilliant one. Pérez had left the year before and Davis was meant to be the new regular artist, but left three issues in and it's mainly different fill-in artist for the rest of the story, although they do mange to keep the style somewhat consistent. The final issue is rather awkward since it was obviously influenced by 9/11 and wanted to pay tribute to the fallen, but no one major died during the story so Busiek just retroactively kills off a minor character and has everyone get upset about it.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Cullen Bunn, Gabriel Hernández Walta, Javier Fernández, and Others
There is probably no villain in the entire history of comics more complex or as compelling as Magneto. Considering how effectively he works as an anti-hero I'm surprised that it took Marvel this long to give him his own ongoing series. This was just a fantastic run that was sadly derailed by two big crossover events. Bunn did his best to work around all that dumb Axis nonsense and keep his narrative on track, but there was no getting around everything being cancelled because of Secret Wars. This forced Bunn to quickly wrap up all his storylines in just four issues, including the one about Magneto's human sidekick, one of his previous victims who is part of a weird subculture of supervillain groupies who wear their scars with freaky pride. Does make me wonder, though, if the real reason Marvel brought the axe down was because they were afraid Bunn was going to turn this into the superpowered version of J. G. Ballard's Crash.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard
Since Watchmen, comic book writers have played around with alternative histories that all ask the same question: “What would the world be like if people really had superpowers?”. In this series such individuals started to emerge after the detonating of the first atomic bomb, but only six possess the power to destroy the world and the uneasy peace between them is starting to break down. Gillen is one of those writers where I'll always try out anything new they're cooking, but I'm not sure what to make of their latest creator owned effort. Read five issues so far and it's an interesting take on an old concept, and I'm curious to see where it will go, but can't help but feel like Gillen is just recycling and reworking elements from The Wicked + The Divine.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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