Adventure Comics #363

December 1967

Cover art by: Curt Swan & George Klein

Story: Black Day for the Legion!

Writer: Jim Shooter

Pencils: Jim Shooter (Layouts) & Pete Costanza

Inks: Pete Costanza

The Legion are on Earth and they confront Dr. Mantis Morlo (who looks like Sivana) who is conducting experiments that are poisoning the planet. Here they commit the one error that is the basis of the rest of the story. The fools don't arrest him! They just leave his lab after destroying his equipment, and he threatens revenge as they depart.

Well Morlo does try to get his revenge. First by attacking 3 of the member's homeworlds: Princess Projectra's Orando, Daxam which Mon-El hales from, and Dream Girl's planet of Naltor. The heroes have adventures of course. Like fighting Chemoid robots, who can alter their elemental composition. I liked that one quite a bit. A pretty boring sea undertaking, in which Saturn Girl's ESP senses a booby trap on a door. Uh-uh. Not buying it. Then the failing of the entire planet of Naltor due to bad dreams. In each case Dr. Morlo escapes the Legion.

Eventually, Chameleon Boy figures out what is going on. Each “Morlo” is actually a Chemoid robot designed to look like him. His antennae figured it out, because if it was the real Morlo they wouldn't have rescanned him. Morlo is actually in orbit around Earth, and he has a missile that will destroy it. For some reason he paints a target on Earth, before launching his missile. He does, and the Earth has been annihilated! Sweet revenge! HAHAHAHAH! Well except it hasn't been destroyed. Superboy, Mon-El, and Element Lad used asteroids to create a fake Earth for Morlo to blow up. Now they finally arrest the dude.

Not a bad little comic. My real problem was the art, which wasn't very good. Very stiff looking with the characters in some really weird poses. Ah, well.

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  • https://captaincomics.ning.com/forum/topics/silver-sightings-the-che...

    I wrote about these issues before and I thought that the art wasn't that bad. It was different from what Curt Swan and George Klein would have done, obviously. But I guess there were too many Superman stories to tell those months or they wanted to give Swan a break!

    I liked Mon-El's aggressiveness and the underwater battle.

    Morlo was an oddity among Legion villains as he wasn't even a physical threat to any of them but his Chemoids were formidable opponents and apparently he had resources to spare! As well as a LOT of paint!

  • Thanks for the link back to your discussion on this, Philip. Glad to see the good Commander agreed with me on the Pete Costanza art. Also, that we both saw the Dr. Sivana similarities.

  • I don't remember if I've heard of Shooter doing layouts before.

  • His first Legion scripts were done by layouts especially his first one, Adventure Comics #346 which he actually penciled.

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