The Legion of Super-Heroes can be a bit of an acquired taste, and the dozens upon dozens of trades collecting their stories offer an abundance of choices that might not necessarily make it easier to break into the series. As with the characters of the Legion, the trades are many, and a lot of them don’t have a ton of depth. There is plenty of content, but it takes a while for the essential stuff to start happening, and that has been retconned and re-retconned to the end of time.
Legion of Super-Heroes: Before the Darkness (collecting Legion of Super-Heroes #260-271 and Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes #1-3) is not essential, but it builds a bridge between the departure of Superboy and the pending Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen run that would go on to define the team for many readers. The fact is that in spite of and often because of its density, The Legion of Super-Heroes is almost always at least a little bit fun to read. Case in point: Before The Darkness begins with a fight at a space circus and ends with more than one assassination attempt under its belt. So buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride. [Read more…] about Legion of Super-Heroes: Before The Darkness
.” Whether or not this is a valid claim, we will see. I will be taking us down this rabbit hole of days gone-by and do my job as a critic to give my readers as much information as they can, so they can decide if this comic is good for them. 
). In Junior High, the first date I ever went on was spent gulping a clearly empty giant-sized coke to stem back the tears of Gandalf’s apparent demise. She would go back to school and tell the cool 7th graders that the time was spent in all sorts of hot make out sessions, but I will remember that mostly I was trying to make out those rascally little Hobbits through the tears. Nonetheless, my reputation grows. My first conspiracy theory.
#3 is decidedly void of bearded magic makers. The comic by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, and Steve Foxe continues one of the most captivating Image Comics premises in years with a dig inside the conspiracy universes of false flags and school shootings. In The Department of Truth, sufficient belief in a conspiracy can drive that fiction to manifest in reality, and the third issue focuses on a mother’s attempts to cope with the loss of her son in a school shooting. On the bottomless well of evil and inhuman agendas that insist her loss is a fiction. On the psychological and emotional trauma these conspiracies unleash. On the spiral of grief-stricken escape that could lead a woman to welcome this unreality over her own truth.