Edge of the c.l.i.f.f. Notes

It has been suggested that much of the GMS Legion’s rich and complex backstory can seem a little distracting to new readers. With this in mind, the website is pleased to give you some backstory about what has actually happened in the previous 1040 or so printed pages. Unlike the rest of the material on the website, this document is full of spoilers, so new readers who are keen to experience the rollercoaster-like surprises of this series are advised to read with discretion.

The GMS Legion was founded in early 1983 after four middle-school age friends (Matter Lad, Sunstorm, Colossal Kid and Chewable Kid {later the Enforcer}) discovered a meteor in the woods which gave them strange super powers. Their school, Sniffin Middle, was under the thumb of a criminal named Bill Food. Over the course of three months, several other students learned that they had powers (the reason for which would emerge about four years later) and joined the Legion in defeating Food and another criminal, a profit-mad space alien called Miss Cockroach. Sunstorm was murdered in final battle with Miss Cockroach. Another hero, who had made his debut prior to the Legion but had remained incarcerated in OCI for weeks, Power Lad, had also died, giving his life to stop the criminal Furious Four. After the criminals were defeated, the Legion, then consisting of Matter Lad, Colossal Kid, Panthera, Chewable Kid, Speedy and Infectious Girl, disbanded.

Records from summer 1983 until the fall of 1984 are mostly scarce, but some facts are known. Inspired by the near-success of Food and Cockroach, many other school administrators turned to corruption, graft and profits from illegal glue sales to fuel their pockets, and a variety of oddly-garbed criminals relocated to Corncob County. Matter Lad and Panthera began dating. Speedy embarked on a lengthy battle trying to bring a dealer called Mayonnaise Man to justice, occasionally allied with his former teammates and with a student called The Stranger with magical powers. While the Stranger would later relocate when his parents moved to the McMoney district, he was present for an apparently horrible fight against a student calling herself Anchor Girl. None of the heroes are willing to discuss this incident (hints of it are recounted in Bk 13’s “These Sounds”). Matter Lad and Colossal Kid once teamed up to fight the Gentleman Juggler. Matter Lad also teamed up with an adult hero called Icarus to fight a criminal named Magnarr (see Bk 6’s “The Return of the Chrome Crusader”). Speedy, Chewable Kid and Infectious Girl teamed up to fight a telepath from the future (see Bk 4’s “The Man from the 200th Century”).

At the same time, heroes began to emerge in other schools. In North Corncob, Sunburn and Ocean Boy began fighting crime at Daniel & the Lion Middle. At Scandal High, ten heroes emerged to fight the corrupt regime of Three Fingers Lattanzi. But in a shocking incident in the summer of 1984, Lattanzi ambushed the heroes, killing five of them and arranging it to appear as an ROTC accident. The survivors went into hiding. Throughout this time, the teen superheroes were mostly unknown to the general public, or dismissed as urban legends or hoaxes. The society of this fiction was used to adult crimefighters and adventurers with costumes and masks, but these characters rarely had actual powers, and those that did only limited ones.

In September 1984, Matter Lad, Panthera and Colossal Kid went to Scandal High School for the first time and found the campus under Three Fingers’ control. They joined forces with the five survivors of Lattanzi’s ambush and called in their younger colleagues from Sniffin. During the course of this month-long “War at Scandal High” (see Bk 2 for the edited highlights; quite a lot happened between episodes 3 and 4), the Mayonnaise Man was finally apprehended, and Chewable Kid lost his powers. Days later, he merged with the body of an alien policeman and re-established himself as the Enforcer. The eleven-strong Legion were mostly beaten in a final fight against Lattanzi’s forces, costing the Scandal hero Coyote’s life. The war ended when Panthera shot Lattanzi dead.

There followed a possibly hallucinatory episode when Miss Cockroach returned and sent the ten heroes to a parallel universe (see Bk 3’s “Trial of the GMS Legion”). Upon returning, the heroes were drafted by Corncob school superintendent Bill Prater to organize officially and help rid the school system of corruption (see “Book 3 Epilogue” in Treasury Edition 1.)

The period between October 1984 and April 1986 is again mostly undocumented, but some facts are known. The Legion agreed to act as official guardians and “go public” only if the school system built them a secure headquarters on a new, second floor of Scandal High. They were joined at some point by a hero called Gingham Lass, but it is not known whether she was an official member of the team. The school system began organizing superteams in all the county’s high schools, although the more powerful groups in the better-funded communities (chiefly McMoney and Sprayed Berries) got better facilities than others.

One major incident in 1985, while never officially recounted in the series, bears mentioning. As construction of the Legion’s headquarters drew to a close, an alien conqueror called Gargalax the Destroyer attacked Earth, kidnapped Vice-President George Bush, and involved the Legion to some degree in his plans (see Treasury Edition 2 for an excerpt from this untold story). The rescue of Bush and the defeat of Gargalax left the heroes in an unusual place: they had gone from urban legends to public curiosities to being known worldwide. The specifics of what happened next are not known, but in some way, the heroes made it abundantly known to the US government that they would be autonomous and not to be interfered with by any US agency, and the US government agreed to keep foreign powers from looking closely into the superhero situation.

One dark side of the Legion’s activities up to this point had been their willingness to kill. By early 1986, as the heroes matured and especially as Colossal Kid found faith in Christ, this was threatening to damage the team’s stability. This is only briefly mentioned in the series (and not as explicitly as the writer would prefer, but then again he also regrets the bodycount of the first two books), but the team decided to take an official code against killing.

The actual “continuity” of the series which readers have enjoyed begins in Book 4’s “Whatever Happened to the Class of ’86?” which takes place in April of that year. In this story, we see that the Legion’s ally from Sniffin Middle, Marsha Smelliot, is now principal of Scandal. She is tricked by agents from a county in North Carolina to have the school relocated there. The Legion also battles a criminal called the 2-D Man who has been active since the 1970s. The following month, Enforcer and Mental Girl crossed paths with a criminal called Princess Pumpernickel while on a middle school recruitment drive. Finally in Book 4, Phantom Lass left the team when she graduated, pausing to defeat the villainous Dream King. Phantom Lass, whose real name is Rachel, has only returned to Georgia once since leaving for Princeton, for the funeral of Brian King’s father (in Bk 7’s “Slaves of the Machine God”), but has made appearances in a pair of stories scripted by Matt Ceccato: “Moving the Green Monster” (from the GMS Legion Millennium Special and “What’s in a Name?” (from Bk 13). Several colleges in the southeast have started programs to attract graduated superheroes, but three of the county heroes - Phantom Lass, Proud Julie and Snowstorm - decided to attend Princeton, shunning a collegiate spotlight to just get on with their lives and use their powers when necessary. They are joined by a student named Jason, who fights crime as Wind Tunnel, and who is presumed to have gotten his powers while briefly in Georgia.

Book 5 contains one of the most popular GMS Legion stories: “Walls of Jericho.” This story deals with the aftermath of the closing of Bill’s High School, which was merged with Scandal, bringing with it their principal, Boss Paul (who became co-principal with the Legion’s ally Miss Smelliot), and the school’s own team of superheroes, who called themselves The Legion of Scandal High School. Thunder Lad (Scott Angelus), who was now the GMS Legion’s leader, was shocked to learn that his brother Mark was in charge of this team. He and Mark each went to live with a different parent after their parents’ divorce and lost touch. (Spare a thought for Thunder Lad’s poor mom: Scott and Mark’s sister, Alia, also gained powers as the Feather, but was killed in the Lattanzi ambush in 1984.) The team was further stunned to learn that Nemesis Boy, an evildoer who had bested them during the Carolina incident, was a member of this team. Before defeating the Legion of SHS’s plan to replace the GMS Legion as official school heroes, the Enforcer has another life change when Mamuwaldi, the alien policeman to whom he was bonded, elected to fight solo in other countries, leaving Enforcer the gift of invunerability. “Walls of Jericho” also formally introduces us to the Legion’s freshman members, Nova Girl and Shamrock. Also introduced in Book 5 is Sheila McDonald, the head cheerleader who comes to the Legion for help with a bizarre school rule, and a pair of football players named B.J. and Pete who would provide occasional antagonism towards Thunder Lad and Colossal Kid until their graduation in Book 9. Book 5 ended with the grisly discovery of Mamuwaldi’s head, mailed to the Enforcer in a box.

In Book 6, Infectious Girl, whose long-time crush on the Enforcer was becoming more apparent, decided to stop wearing a costume in favor of street clothes and a denim jacket and go by the name Virus. In these stories, set between November 1986 and February 1987, Gas Boy gained the power of fire-breathing, we met the mysterious geography teacher Mr. Kipling, record-store employee and fellow student Doug, the eccentric trio of the Vinyl Liberation Front, and the pirate radio junkie Utah. Assistant principal Judy the Whale was killed in a freak accident, and Boss Paul’s longtime associate Hilary De Sade took her place. Things really heated up in the book’s last two episodes: in “The Return of the Chrome Crusader,” Icarus, who had been living in the future, hints to Matter Lad and Thunder Lad that Boss Paul is behind a plan which would cause the death of millions. In “Blinded by Science,” Colossal Kid gets a serious crush on a substitute teacher who turns out to be an itinerant immortal. All the while he is oblivious to the “secret admirer” notes that Nova Girl has been leaving him. Mental Girl accidentally spills Nova’s secret and they’ve been dating ever since.

In Book 7 (stories set in Febuary 1987), the heroes confront one of their biggest challenges in MACHIN-O, an artificial intelligence built years before by the late Brian King, another of the five heroes killed during the Lattanzi ambush. This also featured the Legion’s latest fight with their long-running enemy Draino, who was among the Furious Four first seen about four years earlier. Sheila McDonald finally made official her feelings for Thunder Lad and they began to date. In “Melody of Chaos,” Boss Paul manipulated state legislator Newt Richgene into cutting music program funding. An enraged and unstable chorus teacher Mr. Vivaldi responded by trying to destroy the state capital with his “pretty hate machine.” Boss Paul assassinated Richgene for trying to double-cross him, while the Legion found that the pretty hate machine was fueled by human brains. Vivaldi was arrested. This book also features small cameos by heroes from other schools: Sprayed Berries’ Magnetrax assists the Legion in sealing MACHIN-O, and two heroes from Blizzard of Osbourne, Robin Hood and the Wall Crawler, are seen on television discussing a case of missing students.

Book 8’s lead story, “Who Rules McDonaldland,” can exist in or out of continuity. Either the Legion’s world is even stranger than we’ve been led to believe or the whole story is a fantasy of the Enforcer’s. You decide. In March 1987, a carnival on the football field attracts the attention of various community leaders, among them the Parent-Teacher Movement’s violent Auntie Angry. The following month’s prom saw Thunder Lad a gibbering, nervous wreck, and Colossal Kid and Nova Girl broke a school code against underclassmen attending the event. (Panthera and Matter Lad had an angst-free time and a spectacular evening which solidified their bond.) In May 1987’s “Sport of Kings,” B.J., Pete and school QB Bill Bishop attempted social vengeance against Thunder Lad and Colossal Kid. (This story, which originally appeared in the Millennium Special, will be readded to the Bk 8 lineup when it is republished in the summer of 2003.) Finally, “The Criminal Fraternity” saw the Furious Four back in action when Nemesis Boy and Chromium Queen broke Draino out of jail and used Thunder Lad’s power to reactivate the monster Palidus. Virus finally confessed her feelings for Enforcer, Shamrock was seriously wounded in the fight, and a student named Troy Bering was murdered by Nemesis Boy. During the hostage standoff at Scandal, Ms. Smelliot had sent in the invisible Panthera and Shamrock in violation of Chief D’Addario’s order that the heroes stay back. This action - which resulted in Shamrock’s injury - would result in Smelliot’s firing.

Book 8 concluded with the surprise appearance of a costumed hero calling himself Superduperman, who resembles both a hero from another universe seen in Book 3, and a famous one published in comic books by a big company. In Book 9’s “Powers and Abilities,” we see his plan to unify the varied heroes throughout the county into one army for good. He also abducts Libyan dictator Mummar Qadaffi to stand trial at the United Nations. While McMoney’s Captain Fantastic sees value in Superduperman’s plan, the Legion finds his interference with human affairs intolerable. Superduperman turns on the Legion and defeats most of them, but the Legion had predicted this event and arranged for him to fly to an “emergency” in Florida, where a recovered Shamrock provides an alibi and a hidden Matter Lad kills him with green styrofoam rocks which he claims is “kryptonite.”

The blatant “origin” of this character, teamed with some of their own obvious histories, had made some of the Legionnaires suspicious of that meteorite which had powered so many teens in Corncob County. Following up on Superduperman’s proposal, the heads of the five principal county teams arranged a hero convention in Mayretta a few weeks later. The Legion’s own membership had changed slightly in the interim. Nova Girl’s failing grades forced Thunder Lad to suspend her. Furious, she and Colossal Kid quit in protest. The team recruited Becky Ashburn, Hollywood Queen, as a replacement, but fears that she had spent too much time a “civilian” with powers - Smelliot had forbade any student but the Legion from using powers on-campus - would be borne out over the next few books.

At the convention, the five dozen or so heroes (who have met to discuss their origins and solidify various ties and share information on such shared cases as the missing students and mutilated bodies, lumped together by the media as the work of “The Brain Stealer”) are met by Mundane the Mighty, a criminal pest who had been annoying several of the various teams for years. Mundane explains that he is from the future, and that his people sent him back in time to build an army to combat Satan, who appeared in Mayretta on this day. It was Mundane who sent the meteor, charged with magic, radiation and arcane energies, into Corncob County to mutate the teens, Mundane who manipulated many of their early careers, and finally created Superduperman, a magical construct, to galvanize the heroes into all meeting at the same point. When Satan arrives, a massive battle erupts which claims the lives of two heroes: Bell Girl of Trojan High and Devil Boy of Mayretta City High. Satan’s body is destroyed by Mayretta’s Supercollider Girl and some of the heroes follow Mundane’s trail to five cosmic entities (among them the immortal substitute teacher met in Bk 6) calling themselves The Council of Five, who again urge the heroes to form a vigilant army to battle Satan throughout time. The heroes refuse the suggestion, although they agree to closer ties. “Royal Flush” concludes with Colossal Kid and Nova Girl returning to action, and Thunder Lad, Gas Boy and Mental Girl’s retirement from graduation. (They attend GA Tech, GSU and UGA respectively.) The Legion’s charter requires them to replace each graduating member and add one. These are: Hollywood Queen, Inferno Kid, Tornado Boy and Mary Thunder. This last member is shown to the readers as having been sent into their ranks by the will of Zoroaster, one of the Council of Five. The senior members of the Legion see right through this deception - her origin is every bit as “mundane” and cliched as Superduperman’s - but agree to admit her to keep an eye on her.

Book 10, subtitled “Long Hot Summer,” is set in June and July 1987. In these stories, Mr. Vivaldi was released from jail in a plea agreement after it was made evident he could not have been responsible for the bodies found in the chorus room four months previously. However, fifteen more mutilated bodies were found in an Ettalanna sewage treatment facility when Panthera, now the team leader, sent the new members on a training mission. Enforcer took a leave of absence a few days later, accepting an invitation to study criminology with Auguste Dupin IV in Paris. On the airplane, after saying goodbye to his girlfriend Virus, he unfolds a love letter signed by Glass Girl, a hero from McMoney High who was introduced to readers at the hero convention. Colossal Kid, whose father had recently been laid off, took a part-time job at a mall ice cream store, but a bomb attack on him by longtime Legion irritant Ball Boy forced the manager to fire him. Before he was sacked, Colossal Kid swore he saw Speedy mall-walking with a girl, but Nova Girl dismissed the idea as mad. Matter Lad helped Colossal Kid’s family by transmuting a sack of pebbles into gold and diamonds. As the temperature in Corncob County became blistering, Panthera suspended Virus from the team for a week. Virus had used her infection powers on Matter Lad and Inferno Kid after they teased her about Enforcer’s alleged liaisons with French can-can girls.

As soon as Panthera had dealt with that, the Legion was visited by Defenestration Girl, an incoming freshman at Blizzard High, who solicited the team’s help in locating the two other heroes of her school, who were missing. Robin Hood and Wall Crawler were seen waking, imprisoned in supply closets. Two days later, the Legion found them imprisoned by Big Red, a good ole boy bent on wiping out the superheroes. His scheme had succeeded in capturing the heroes of Blizzard and South Corncob along with three Legionnaires, but the rest of the Legion, assisted by the McMoney Eagles and Speedy’s old friend from Pebblesnot High Drama Queen, defeated Big Red’s redneck uprising. Boss Paul was infuriated by the Legion’s actions in this incident (involving five schools to “stop a bunch of dirt bikers”), insisting that if they were to continue their funding and independence, then the Legion should use those non-Legion heroes at Scandal before relying on other schools, particularly the McMoney Eagles, towards whom he seems very antagonistic. Panthera doesn’t think twice about his verbal attack on this team, possibly because most of southern Corncob has issues with the snobs of affluent McMoney.

Book 11 features stories taking place between July and September 1987. The mini-mystery of Speedy and the other girl at the mall is solved: she is Lithography Lass, a junior at Wheels High whom Speedy had met at the hero convention. He was leery about letting the Legion know about his romance for fear of how the team would react, but the duo “went public” when a fellow moviegoer became violent on one of their dates and the team proved to be very happy and accepting of Speedy’s romance, and of Lita. By August, the Brain Stealer’s known death toll had reached 48, with no solid clues. The team was wishing Enforcer would finish his criminology courses and return home to help, but not the way he did. In a Parisian hole frequented by the roughest of criminals, the Enforcer let slip that a French exchange student named Ducaud had given a crystal skull, a copy of which was owned by the bar, to Scandal geography teacher Mr. Kipling. Word immediately passed down the criminal grapevine that the long-sought skull was in Smyrna, forcing the team to protect Kipling from a menagerie of dangerous eccentrics, one of whom, Baron Von Orlak, hired both Nemesis Boy and Enforcer’s old foe Kheer to obtain it. When Boss Paul learns that the skull is a psychic weapon, he reacted as any administrator would with a weapon on school property: he confiscated it and soundly beat Nemesis Boy in combat. How this was possible the Legion could not guess, as Nemesis Boy’s power is to better any one opponent in a fight. More suspiciously, nobody guessed at all. Boss Paul and Dr. De Saad began experimenting with the crystal skull’s psychic power, their dialogue proving suspicions laid since Book 8, that they are behind the Brain Stealer killings, and that they are weeks away from the “death of millions” prophecies of Book 6.

Shortly after school reopened, Boss Paul forced the Legion to hold tryouts again. While they did not find any new members to qualify, they did find that a student named Billy Rubin has the power to induce jaundice in people, and he used it in a bid to force Hollywood Queen, the object of his crush, to be near him. Boss Paul’s plans were delayed briefly when members of the Legion and the McMoney Eagles were sent by Superintendent Prater to act as an honor guard for the groundbreaking of Wally World High, a new school in the county. That school’s forthcoming principal, Zippy Morocco, was targetted for assassination, but the plan was foiled and the shooter, Spider McFly, accidentally killed by California Girl, a non-Legion powered teen who had been hanging around the fringes of the series since Book 4. Unbeknownst to the Legion, McFly had been sent by the Gambolino crime family of Detroit on a vendetta for a decade-old incident: Morocco had seen Franco Spumoni kill someone, testified against him and relocated to Smyrna with a new identity in the late 1970s. Don Gambolino swears to complete the vendetta, and also avenge Spider McFly by killing California Girl.

On September 18, Satan returned to Corncob County. Her “home,” the “House of Clocks,” appeared in downtown Smyrna in the middle of Ettalanna Road. Acting like a bizarre housewife and offering snacks to her guests, Satan showed horrible images of future incidents to five of the Legionnaires: Colossal Kid sees his father hanging from the ceiling, Inferno Kid sees his brother dead, Panthera sees both Shamrock and Tornado Boy dead, Virus sees Enforcer betraying her with another woman, while Mary Thunder’s image is not shown. As all the county heroes gather outside the House of Clocks, Satan explains that she is not behind any of the incidents, but possesses the power to stop them from happening, or even going back in time and changing history if any of the five choose to act after the incident, but only if the Legionnaires agree not to oppose her in any way when she next moves against humanity. Before the assembled Legion, she further foretells “two dooms other than mine”: Boss Paul’s actions, in less than two weeks, will kill tens of millions before he is stopped. Further, she claims that China will launch a nuclear strike on the United States within a month. She says she will stop either of these incidents under the same terms: the Legion must agree to not oppose her. The argument reaches boiling point when Gas Boy, who had taken the day off school and was helping with the case, reminds the team of the Chana Puri incident (in Bk 6’s “The Man With Three Shadows”), wherein that extradimensional killer warned the heroes that the instant Enforcer dies, the last trace of Mamuwaldi’s soul will go with it, freeing the evil goddess Kali to invade their reality. Enforcer threatens to kill himself should any Legionnaire die by Satan’s hand. Reaching stalemate, Satan introduced the Lawyer from Hell to prove the county built Ettalanna Road on her land illegally and throws everyone out. The county heroes arrange a “Satan watch,” where two heroes on rotating duty keep the House of Clocks on 24-hour surveillance.

A few days later, in Book 12’s epic “Death Factor,” the team broke through and solved the Brain Stealer case. Mental Girl unlocked Speedy’s subconscious memory of the morning of the Pretty Hate Machine incident (in Book 7). He had seen Dr. De Sade unloading bodies while running the track at 1000 mph, but was travelling so fast he was not able to focus on it, registering only the track. Boss Paul learns that the Legion plan to arrest him and De Sade the next morning, and counters their move. He and De Sade had dug up the meteor which gave the heroes their powers years before, and had been refining the meteor’s properties to introduce specific powers into host bodies by way of a catalyst. They had been experimenting also with mind control - to ensure absolute loyalty in their soldiers, but the crystal skull (from Bk 11’s “Cataclysm of the Uberkillers”) gave them the ability to enslave any individual in the borders of Corncob who did not gain their powers directly from the meteor. These individuals, who number 300,000, were all primed for both the powers and the mind control weeks previously: the catalyst was added to the Corncob water supply. Boss Paul leaves the heroes to their fate at the hands of an army of “three hundred thousand super-powered killers.”

Captain Atlanta and Software Lad are the first heroic casualties, and all of the members of Mayretta’s Warbird One, but the remaining heroes escape from their schools and make their way to area malls, which are all connected by underground tunnels. The heroes’ best chance for overpowering Boss Paul’s army is McMoney’s Captain Fantastic, who has the power of crowd control, but Boss Paul got him out of town with a faked invitation to address a non-existant Amway convention in Spokane. In Ettalanna, while the population panics and starts to evacuate, doctors learn a horrible side-effect called the Taint: all Corncob residents were infected with the catalyst which switched “on” when the crystal skull was activated. But the skull is only attuned to mind-control within the Corncob borders. Those with an active catalyst outside of Corncob, like the thousands who commute to Ettalanna, are dying. Shamrock is also affected, as her powers came from “the Blarney Stone” and not the meteor. That magic artifact’s effects have kept off the mind control, but she is dying. When Tornado Boy is killed by one of Boss Paul’s soldiers, Panthera realizes that Satan’s prophecy (from Book 11’s “House of Clocks”) is coming true.

The heroes send two strike forces outside: a small team trying to sneak to Ettalanna to find the three heroes who attend college there (Gas Boy, Thunder Lad and Magnetrax), and a squad of ten to return to Scandal to try and find Boss Paul’s control. Panthera sneaks out with the first force to invisibly move to the House of Clocks and consider Satan’s offer. She ends up declining, but is stunned to learn that China has launched an ICBM to nuke Robbins AFB and end Boss Paul’s threat of world domination. Satan returns Panthera to their command center. Only two heroes have a chance of deflecting the missile: Mary Thunder, who has left with the smaller team and is incommunicado, and Shamrock, who is dying of the Taint in the base. Shamrock volunteers to fly and give her life to save them all. The ten heroes who went to Scandal are teleported to Boss Paul’s headquarters on a satellite orbiting Earth. There, Speedy notices tell-tale tears in Enforcer’s clothes which show he’s been holding hands with Glass Girl - her acne-like bumps are actually glass growing through her skin and have damaged his clothes. Boss Paul finds the heroes and explains his plan to create worldwide order. Matter Lad attempts to kill him, but his attack completely fails. Boss Paul explains that he used the catalyst to give himself powers - in fact, he demonstrated it before when he beat Nemesis Boy and then clouded the Legionnaires’ minds so that none of them thought it unusual. He claims to have every power that the Legionnaires do, using Speedy’s speed to propel him into a bulkhead at the speed of sound, and Gun Guy’s teleporting revolver to shoot Matter Lad in the shoulder.

On Earth, Panthera tells Colossal Kid that she will step down should they survive this and appoint Speedy her replacement. A chance comment from Colossal Kid reminds her that Mental Girl is still out there - she has in fact been on the road from Athens and was trying to telepathically call them earlier, but they were too far underground to “hear” her. Mental Girl links Panthera and Mary Thunder, who saves Shamrock’s life and kicks the Chinese missile into the stratosphere, where US military monitoring stations tracking it see the control beam from Boss Paul’s satellite and make plans to blast it from orbit. On the satellite, the heroes have been soundly defeated. Microwave Master is killed and Boss Paul viciously tears one of Matter Lad’s eyes out of his head. Finally, Defenestration Girl gives her life to end the evil. Matter Lad seals Boss Paul and her behind a titanium bulkhead and she shatters the giant window in the control room, killing them both. The heroes evacuate and the depressurized satellite explodes, ending the control and reverting the catalyst to a harmless agent. In the aftermath, Thunder Lad proposes to Sheila, who has survived her exposure to the Taint, and Matter Lad rids the county of the single-minded Mayretta City principal Snyder, whose self-glorying actions caused the deaths of the Warbird One heroes. But Satan learns that Mary Thunder’s presence on the team saved Shamrock and stopped a probable war with China, marking her as an agent of her enemies in the Council of Five, and Virus learns through the gossip that immediately spreads after they return to Earth that Enforcer has been seeing Glass Girl.

This “betrayal” is debated in Book 13’s “Soliloquy of the Shadowboxers,” where Enforcer confesses that he was actually seeing Glass Girl before Virus confessed her crush (in Book 8’s “Criminal Fraternity”). Glass Girl, who cannot touch anyone without her skin cutting them, sought out the Enforcer because he is indestructible and the only person who can safely kiss or have sex with her. A furious Virus formally charges the Enforcer with violating Legion law: by acting against the common interests of the group, he has caused a rift in it. This sets the stage for a tribunal which proves, sadly, that the only rift has come from Virus’s fury, and that Enforcer has romantic feelings for neither Virus nor Gigi, but has an awful crush on Hollywood Queen. Glass Girl testifies that Enforcer risked his longtime friendship with Virus just to provide human comfort to her, and for that, she would attack him this way? Virus, embarassed, drops the charges and resigns from the team. Hollywood Queen, wary of Enforcer after his lies, is not prepared to enter into a relationship with him, and Glass Girl breaks things off completely, not willing to love someone who has feelings for someone else, and not willing to stay a friend to someone who only came to know her out of pity. (In one fell swoop, Enforcer is rejected by his best friend, his girlfriend and the person he loves, so spare another thought for him, would ya?)

That same week, the Gambolino family of Detroit made a bid to take out California Girl, by hiring a demolitions expert named El Mole to frame her for a massive accident at the Wally World site and later have her killed in prison. Allied with the Defense Force, the Legion finds the plan to be a scam, and Don Gambolino vows to try again another day. That same afternoon, Mary Thunder fails to apprehend a very old foe named the Gentleman Juggler, but the ensuing trash they create causes Custodian Joe Curran to snap and kill the Juggler, and make an attempt to kill Mary. Auntie Angry (not seen since Book 8) reappears in this story, more bitter than ever at the child-endangerment in the superhero world, and, allied with the non-Legion Scandal hero Gunfighter, the Legion visit Victoria Station for the first time in the series. This boarded-up steakhouse, run by Jack Hammer, is a meeting place for suspected criminals and ne’er-do-wells. Also that week, Hollywood Queen got to show a poseur named Ian Knight around the school; he and his mother are actually cosmic-level deities from another plane. Auntie Angry was also active when the school’s bandleaders attempted to spark a fight with the football team. Expecting for the hapless bandmembers to lose the fight and show the world what unrepentant thugs the jocks were, the plan unravelled when the band ended up kicking nine kinds of hell out of the football team. Meanwhile, Nova Girl, fearing her own mortality, asked Colossal Kid to have sex with her. He refused, also refusing to help Speedy restart something called “L2.”

Book 13 also contains three unusual stories set just to the side of the Legion’s soap opera, in which we look into Phantom Lass and her hero friends at Princeton, the Defense Force begin to investigate some shared dreams which are coming true, and a brief excerpt from a much longer tale from a possible future or a parallel world in which the Enforcer fails to save a terrified man named Mardow from a pyrokinetic Marilyn Monroe in the flooded city of Miami. Back in our continuity, Shamrock, still recovering from the Taint, talks with a school counselor about a bizarre battle with the Legion’s old enemy Anchor Girl, who insists that everything we have known about the Legion, Mundane and the meteor is a lie and that the superhumans of Corncob are the next stage of human evolution. Shamrock confesses to her counselor that she has been in love with Colossal Kid, and deeply resents Nova Girl, for months. Very troubled by everyone’s reluctance to talk about Anchor Girl, and a file report which says nothing unusual about her, Shamrock consults the file on Superduperman, in whose killing she was involved (in Bk 9’s “Powers and Abilities”), but finds the file to be incomplete, with a bogus report which denies what actually happened.

Shamrock’s suspicions grow in “Four Days,” when Auntie Angry leads a PTM rally barring superheroes from entering Scandal. Matter Lad radios Speedy, mentioning a code L2, and Panthera leads Shamrock away. Matter Lad, Speedy and the Enforcer tell Auntie Angry to disperse the crowd, otherwise they will let the PTM and the media know that she had been regularly romanced by Boss Paul. Auntie Angry, broken, cannot believe the superheroes have been monitoring her, and agrees. Hollywood Queen again considers the situation and the unresolved feelings between her and Enforcer, and he agrees to wait until such time as she can trust him. Needing replacements for Tornado Boy and Virus, the Legion accepts Gas Boy back into the team, and, with a probably close vote, California Girl is elected. Told by some of his friends that he is unwelcome to go eat with them because of his flaming scalp, Inferno Kid is invited by Hollywood Queen to go out with her and some of her friends the next Saturday night. Finally, Mary Thunder confesses to the team that which some of them have suspected: the story of her origin is a lie, and her powers are a gift from Zoroaster. She swears that should it come down to the team’s interests or the Council of Five’s, she will support the GMS Legion.

And that’s what’s happened so far. To find out what happens next, be sure to read GMS LEGION BOOK 14 in May, and catch the online comics available here!

THE EDGE OF THE C.L.I.F.F. NOTES: