The Stop Button

The first story, from Jim Shooter and Mike Grell, opens with Princess Projectra’s shuttle crashing as she attempts to land at Legion headquarters. Timber Wolf is there to save the day, complaining about “women drivers” the whole time. Karate Kid shows up in time for the Princess to stumble out of the shuttle and fall unconscious. They’re sweethearts, so he’s very concerned.

Turns out Projectra has a rare “pain plague,” which causes terrible pain for a number of hours then passes. It’s technically not fatal, except the pain kills you, so who cares if the disease doesn’t. The Legion comes up with a solution—each Legionnaire will take an hour of the pain so it doesn’t kill anyone, and Projectra will be spared.

They immediately find out the pain intensifies as the illness develops (so hour two’s pain is worse than hour one’s). They also discover the Legionnaire who takes the pain will lose control of their powers (and mind), attacking everyone around them. So it’s all very dangerous. Good thing Superboy is flying across the galaxy at warp speed to get there for the final hour.

Even if it weren’t poorly written and poorly illustrated, the story’s also poorly plotted. A deus ex machina resolves everything, with every page bringing some immediately resolved problem to keep the story going. Shooter’s sexism might be the move of a dick writer, but the rest of the story is just the moves of a bad one.

Cary Bates handles writing chores for the backup (with Grell returning and arguably much worse). Some tween has won a contest to spend the day with the Legion, complete with his own flight ring. Pay attention to the flight ring thing; it’ll be “important.”

First up on the tour is getting the mail, except this time someone has sent the Legion a “witch wolf,” the most dangerous animal in the solar system (our solar system?) because it emits poison radiation and mind controls people’s powers to backfire on them.

One by one, the Legion goes into the room with the witch wolf, and, one by one, it reverses their powers and knocks them out. Will the guest star tween somehow figure out what’s going on, something the professional superheroes just can’t intuit on their own? Most definitely.

And will he be rewarded at the end with the promise of sexual contact from the female Legionaries, their male colleagues cheering the lad on? Also, most definitely.

The comic starts and ends icky from the sexism. In between is bad writing from two different writers and tepid (and worse) art.