A little more future history explored.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Wilfredo Torres
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Nate Piekos of Blambot
What They Say:
Our heroes’ origins are revealed as team leader Archive V takes us from his technological birth to the breakup of the League, and a Black Hammer favorite makes a shocking return!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Quantum Age continues to scratch a particular itch for me, one that I’ve frustratingly had for too long, as there is no proper Legion of Superheroes book out there. Jeff Lemire is leaning heavily into it as this series goes on and I keep wishing it had been pitched there as an official book in some form. This issue expands on everything a good bit more in some fun ways and that’s delivered wonderfully through Wilfred Torres’ artwork. It’s unfortunate that it took over two months to get this installment because it does slow down the narrative overall when you’re reading a lot of books and forget some of the threads. This issue works a bit better in that it’s mostly history material for one character before it ties into the present storyline.
This one goes back a few decades as we see young Archive leaving the connected nature of his world with Mother. He wants to explore individuality out there in the universe as he craves something different than what he’s always had for the first thirteen years of his existence. It’s a one-way journey, however, and heading out into the universe and going to Earth means a lot of struggles with how different he is. We get to see the kind of simple life he was living when he’s forced to go to an athletic event but it’s here that an attack over some foreign policies of Earth and the United Galaxies draws in some violent protests. That has Archive along with a couple of others leaping in to help and realizing that they work really well as a team – and that there are a lot of teens just like them out there that they can bring on. It’s a very shorthand version of Legion history with expected alterations but it’s effective in capturing that kind of classic tone.
Watching the birth of the Quantum League and the expansion of the roster is a whole lot of fun since it taps into something from my own younger days that I’ve enjoyed a lot elsewhere. Lemire captures the youthful innocence well but segues it hard into the reality that lead to the death of most of them and Archive’s own return to Mother to try and be brought back into the whole to forget – a process done many times over the centuries. When it shifts to the present and we get more of the attempt at reviving things, that shows us the truth of Mother and it’s one of those areas that delights and has me hopeful for something interesting in the connections to the modern day Black Hammer storyline. The expansiveness of what Lemire is doing is fun as it works familiar continuity but without the intrusiveness of decades of material and way too many other writers.
In Summary:
Quantum Age continues to be an interesting project as I want to see more of how it ties into the past but I’m also just enjoying the storyline that it’s presenting. It’s working in Black Hammer tradition with flashback/origin material that expands and connects with events in the present and that’s served Lemire well elsewhere. It’s working well enough here too but it’s such a strong love letter to the original Legion that it’s almost going too far in some ways, making me spend more time looking at comparisons than enjoying the story itself. Wilfredo Torres gets a great range of characters to work with this time around and has a killer end page to set up what’s to come in the next issue, which can’t get here soon enough for me.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: October 10th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99