The Legionnaires take up the ‘super-hero’ duties in Superboy’s hometown. They make Superboy look bad and the townspeople turn on him. Something is rotten in the town of Smallville.
What the reader is supposed to believe is that the Legionnaires came back in time to celebrate Superboy’s great achievements. The Legionnaires then decide to double-check Superboy’s future and they see that he will commit crimes in the near future. They decide that Superboy should be jailed for those crimes. The Legionnaires must have decided there wasn’t enough time for a trial or for the crimes to actually be perpetuated. Cosmic Boy watched Minority Report the night before. Turns out that 1) the events had already occurred and 2) Superboy was under secret orders to commit the ‘crimes’ that the Legionnaires saw. Yup, the machine the Legionnaires were using to justify imprisoning Superboy didn’t work correctly.
One again I think ‘mind control’ (this time by Saturn Girl) is an excuse for the characters in this story to act like jerks. You see, the residents of Smallville weren’t really under Saturn Girl’s control, they just decided to put Superboy in his place. There is some real cruelty in the people’s reactions, especially from the Kents.
The behavior in this issue can be explained by my newly minted Grand Unifying Theory of LoSH Asshole Behavior™. The theory breaks down into three parts:
- Characters will act like assholes (or more so in the case of Wildfire) for no particular reason .
- At some point it is revealed that the characters are under some kind of mind control.
- In reality, the characters are not really under mind control, they are just using the opportunity to act the way they really want to act.
A variation on part number two is that the characters are not under mind control but are pretending to be jerks in order to help out someone. This usually involves the ‘victim’ flying off and not being present for some upcoming dangerous situation.
On my Legion Jerk © scale this issue gets a:
This issue is pre-flight rings.
Cute Saturn Girl (’nuff said)
