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Legion of Super-Heroes (2011-2013) Vol. 3: Fatal Five Kindle & comiXology

by PAUL LEVITZ (Author), KEITH GIFFEN (Illustrator), SCOTT KOLINS (Illustrator), Format: Kindle Edition
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 30 ratings
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In the New 52, the Legion of Super-Heroes has remained safe from the machinations of the Fatal Five...until now. Mano, the Persuader, the Emerald Eye, Tharok and the destructive Validus have joined forces to put an end to the Legion and spread death on a galactic scale. Can a scattered Legion of Super-Heroes stop them?

Legendary 31st Century super-team creators Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen reunite to tell their latest epic in LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES VOL. 3: THE FATAL FIVE. Collects LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #15-23.
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  1. Part of Series
    Legion of Super-Heroes (2011-2013)
  2. Print length
    198 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
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  5. Publisher
    DC
  6. Publication date
    February 4, 2013
  7. File size
    733345 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Levitz has worked for DC Comics in various capacities for over 35 years, with tenures as an editor (ADVENTURE COMICS, BATMAN), a writer (ALL STAR COMICS, LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES), and ultimately President and Publisher. As a writer, he is best known for his long association with the Legion, which began in 1974 and has continued off and on ever since — with a particularly fan-favored run published between 1982 and 1989. In 2009 Levitz stepped down from his executive role at DC to pursue writing again full-time, and he is now the author of the relaunched LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00I3OIEIA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ DC (February 4, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 4, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 733345 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 198 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 30 ratings

About the author

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Paul Levitz

Paul Levitz

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Paul Levitz was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1956, and entered the comics industry in 1971 as editor/publisher of The Comic Reader, the first mass-circulation fanzine devoted to comics news. He continued to publish TCR for three years, winning two consecutive annual Comic Art Fan Awards for Best Fanzine. His other fan activities included editing the program books for several of Phil Seuling’s legendary New York Comic Art Conventions,. He received Comic-con International’s Inkpot Award in 2002, the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award in 2008, and the Comics industry Appreciation Award from ComicsPro (the trade association of comic shop retailers) in 2010. Levitz also serves on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Levitz is primarily known for his work for DC Comics, where he has written most of their classic characters including the Justice Society, Superman in both comics and the newspaper strip, and an acclaimed run on The Legion of Super-Heroes, a series he’s recently returned to write. Readers of The Buyers’ Guide voted his Legion: The Great Darkness Saga one of the 20 best comic stories of the last century, and visitors to the site comicbookresources.com selected the same story as #11 of the Top 100 Comic Book Stories of All Time. DC Comics has just issued a new hardcover edition of Legion: The Great Darkness Saga, which made the New York Times' Graphic Books Bestseller List.

Cumulatively, Levitz has written over 300 stories with sales of over 25 million copies, and translations into over 20 languages. As a DC staffer from 1973, Levitz was an assistant editor, the company’s youngest editor ever, and in a series of business capacities, became Executive Vice President & Publisher in 1989 and then served as President & Publisher from 2002-2009. He continues as a Contributing Editor, but is now concentrating on his writing.

His current writing projects include Taschen’s 75 YEARS OF DC COMICS: THE ART OF MODERN MYTHMAKING, which the LA Times praised for "its colossal ambitions, insights and collected rarities" and the NY Times called "richly conceived history."

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
30 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mauricio P A Macedo
3.0 out of 5 stars Lot's of Potential, but...
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2014
Verified Purchase
I've heard a lot of bad things about this recent run of Levitz in the Legion, and I have to say I disagree with most of it. Sure, unlike his previous, there is nothing in the least groundbreaking about this run. It's just plain competent, but, IMHO, still enjoyable. This is supposed to be the last volume of his most recent run, and, while it starts pretty strong, with the return of Levitz's greatest collaborator, Keith Giffen, proving itself to be quite unpredictable, it sorts of drags on until the end, which was, quite frankly, anticlimatic. It seemed rushed, with a lot of things still left hanging in the air (result of cancelation, I guess). However, it's still a fine read, and the art is mostly top notch.
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Cilantron
1.0 out of 5 stars I feel your pain, Brainy. New 52 Legion, part 3 of 3
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2017
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Collects Legion of Super-Heroes (2011) #15-23

Was Levitz's idea here "okay, if they're going to cancel my book, I'll make it so no one will ever want to read Legion again?" I bought this even after reading the negative reviews, to see for myself just how bad it is. Save your money and don't bother.
The art - with the exceptions of Portela (2 issues) and Maguire (1 issue) - is hideous. Giffen could draw back in the day (  The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga  ) but not anymore. It looks like he is no longer capable of drawing something I want to look at.
Wasn't Validus one of Saturn Girl's kids? Is this a Validus II? A new Emerald Empress - we have no idea who she is or why her outfit is so ridiculous - no matter who draws her.
Deaths ***spoiler*** the only confirmed Legionnaire death as I see it is Sun Boy. You can't kill Phantom Girl with a landslide.

The first volume of the New 52 Legion (which didn't really get rebooted - it picks up right after "When Evil Calls" ends) was okay, but this third one, yikes!
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Kevin M. Derby
2.0 out of 5 stars Latest Legion Incarnation Crashes and Burns
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2014
For the first time in four decades, DC is not publishing comics featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes, DC's premier heroic team of the future. The comics collected in "The Fatal Five" reveal why.

Despite being rebooted several times in the last 25 years, the Legion has not flourished as part of the "new 52." That's clearly on display in this book despite Paul Levitz, a longtime Legion writer who brought the group to new heights 30 years ago in the "Great Darkness Saga," manning the helm. The art is fine though there are too many artists which different styles and some of the art simply feels out of place, including a spot from Levitz's old partner Keith Giffen who helped craft some of the plot.

While there are some nice moments, including a look at a leadership election, the book is a mess.Having dragged the plot along, Levitz wrapped things up a bit too quickly due to the cancellation--making the ending anti-climatic to say the least Way too much of the action takes place off screen including the death of one character and the unexplained resurrection of another. Levitz goes over the top in ushering the Legion off the stage and often does it in a gruesome fashion. A longtime time Legion hand and a fan for 50 years, Levitz's love of the team is unquestioned but some of the plot twists (cannibalism?) simply don't work. To his credit, Levitz attempts to wrap things up for his team and give some of the Legion as close to a happy ending as he can manage but even with that being the case there are too many plotlines left unresolved.

There are certainly moments in "The Fatal Five" which will appeal to readers and, especially, longtime Legion fans. But they are not enough to redeem the book. Only die-hard Legion fans should read this book and, frankly, many of them will not enjoy it.

Since Levitz left the Legion in the late 1980s, the team was thrust into a much darker story for Giffen's "Five Years Later" (FYL) series. This proved too dark for many fans and a more traditional version of the team was launched to run concurrently with the FYL team but both were wiped out of existence. DC rebooted the team with the "Archie Legion" which went for ten years before they were pushed aside for the "Threeboot Legion" which was more rebellious. After four years, the "Threeboot Legion" was knocked off for what appeared to the Legion that Levitz had left behind in the late 80s but that team got drastically reshaped as part of the "new 52" as several members left as part of the truly awful "Legion Lost" comic and others left on their own accord.

Confused? This is simply getting absurd with new Legions every few years. Levitz was doing fine with the newest incarnation until the "new 52" took hold and the comic plummeted, not even surviving two years. While the Legion will probably never come back to the glory days of the 80s, there can be a place for it in comics. But, if it does come back, DC needs to find a plan and stick with it instead of rebooting it every few years as new writers come up with ideas. Till then, long live the Legion!
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Axel
1.0 out of 5 stars This book deserved to fail.
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2014
The rating is misleading. The one star suggests there is perhaps something redeeming about the stories collected here. There isn't. This volume a terrible, horrible excuse for a series of stories using beloved Legion characters, but which twists everything the Legion is about and which, ultimately, deservedly, damned the series to cancellation, and that was merciful. I just couldn't give it zero stars.

Let me explain. The Legion of Superheroes has always been about three key things; (i) optimism, much in the same vein as Stark Trek was hopeful in its view of humanity; (ii) diversity of cast; and (iii) science fiction. As regards the first element, Legion of Superheroes was different to most series or stories published about the future in comics, because it was wise enough to posit a future in which humanity had essentially figured itself out, defeating poverty, disease, and best of all, had reached out to the stars. It avoided the post-apocalyptic tropes of other elements of popular culture which suggested the future should be feared and would always be worse than the past. Instead, it suggested that the future of humanity was actually going to be positive and that some of the reason for this was the legacy of Superman. An inherently cool idea if ever there was one in comics. The book also benefited from an incredibly large cast. Every month could focus on a different character or group of characters. It was hard to get bored. And to top it all off, the series has always had a very strong science fiction backbone.

Together, these three elements made for one of the most enduring and original series in comics and explained why the concept was particularly popular in the 80s when those three elements were explored to their fullest potential by the same writer of this volume. Cut to the era of the "new 52" and the complete abandonment of those main elements, and what you have is massive, epic, unquestionable failure.

In a move that smacked of corporate stupidity, editorial decree split up the Legion causing the loss of several members of its cast to a sister book set in the past, thereby robbing the main book of some of the key characters responsible for the series appeal and undercutting the main purpose of the concept in the first place (hint, it's about the future, stupid.) By the time this book was relaunched, the size of the Legion was no longer an asset to be exploited. It was a liability requiring a complete betrayal of what made the series valuable. As if Marvel would ever be stupid enough to apologize for the 2 million, seven hundred and 34 X-Men that make up the cast of their books. Then, not content to ruin the Legion that way, there were calls for a darker, more serious "tone." Again, a stupid decree from people (Jim Lee and Dan Didio) who completely misunderstand what the strength of the property is.

And then, if that wasn't enough, there was Keith Giffen. Keith Giffen is responsible for some of my favorite comics. He's a writer and artist who achieved legendary status for his work on the Justice League in the 80s. But every time Keith Giffen gets his hands on the Legion, he breaks it irretrievably.

Which brings us at last to this volume. Reeling from the idiotic editorial decrees to split the cast in half, and alter the tone of the book beyond recognition, Levitz's stories began to break under the weight of having to write something that was a mere echo of the real thing. Realizing that something had to be done, DC thought it was a good idea to let Giffen back onto the book, and between Levitz having lost sight of what made his work resonate and Giffen subconsciously wanting to destroy the Legion for having given him a real career in comics to begin with, these stories take a drastic, dark turn. Characters are slaughtered wholesale and deaths occur in a meaningless, offhand manner, all designed to give readers a false sense that "anything can happen." In the space of two or three issues, the Legion turns from a bright, hopeful series about how humanity claims it's place in the cosmos, inspired by the legacy of Superman and the energy of youth, to a B horror movie trading on cheap shock value as "storytelling." In a particularly ill-judged and misguided sequence, a beloved character is killed for no purpose and subsequently eaten by aliens. But that isn't why people read the Legion in the first place.

Keith Giffen and Paul Levitz should be embarrassed by this work. In fact they should apologize to fans. A betrayal of every fan who waited 20 years or more for the return of the "true Legion" and an indictment of two men whose record actually proved that better could be done, this volume of Legion stories is insulting in many ways. It's heartbreaking, because I waited those 20 years for the Legion to return, only to see it die a horrible, ignoble death. So epic was this failure that DC Comics is actually not publishing a book about this group of characters for the first time in over 40 years.

I'm writing this review for fans of the Legion who cared, who were owed more, and who deserved better.
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Top reviews from other countries

The Green Man
5.0 out of 5 stars A fitting end
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 22, 2014
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There is a strange anomaly here. The comments on amazon uk have been good, those on com damming. Well, I'm stating this is an excellent collection, and so keeping the Atlantic Divide going. The Legion has been messed about with enormously in recent years; finally Levitz had taken back the reins and made LSH a really strong comic again. This novel collects issues 15-23 of the most recent version of the comic, and it shows all Levitz' strengths - excellent characterisation, well crafted plotting, and moments of genuine emotion. I'm giving nothing away by saying the villains are the Fatal Five (they're in the title, after all) yet they have been revamped, made genuinely world menacing, and yet are still consistent with what has gone before. In fact, looking back at the first two collections in this series (Hostile World; The Dominators), you can see how Levitz has been carefully preparing the ground for their appearances here.

Which is not to say that everything here is predictable. There are deaths, and for once I found these comic deaths genuinely shocking - not least because they were understated. When there is war, people do not always go out in a blaze of glory; sometimes they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. These deaths also hit hard because of the reactions of the survivors - unlike the "deaths" in Legion Lost, here people grieve for those who are killed.

My only hesitation here is the artwork, which varies a lot. Sadly the weakest episode is the one drawn by Giffen, who was a great Legion artist in the past. His work with Levitz on The Great Darkness Saga was a peak, but he is long past that now. Here his work is reminiscent of Kirby on a bad day, and Kirby would never have suited the Legion. Luckily Portela is also in action, providing the clean lines this story needs, but it would have been better had he drawn the entire thing.

This is an ending. It seems that the title has been cancelled, due to falling sales. Personally I'm baffled by that, but any publisher will only keep a title going if it is profitable. Maybe the Legion needs a bit of fallow time but this collection, like all Levitz' work, is consistent with all that has happened in the past (right back to the Golden Age with Shooter in the 60s) and yet deeper and more mature. At some point, I feel sure, the Legion will be brought back. I can only hope that when it is the writer will pick up and build on this run, rather than carelessly throwing it away in yet another reboot. This is a fitting ending, but I salute the once and future Legion.
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