Ladies Of The Legion: The Villains

When you go around fighting crime all over the galaxy the way the Legion does, you're bound to make some enemies. And given that you're, well a legion, the odds are that some of those enemies are going to form teams of their own.
Sarya of Venegar is a member of the Fatal Five, a group of some of the Legion's deadliest enemies, as the Emerald Empress:



The Empress controls the Emerald Eye of Ekron, a mysterious artifact of immense power that responds to her mental commands.
One of my favroite things about the Empress is the fact that, at one point - because he saved her life - she had the hots for Superboy. She even did the whole, "Let's run off together and with our combined power we can rule the universe!" thing.
Silly Sarya; don't you know that green is his least favorite color?
(Also, there's the whole thing about her being a vicious, power-mad sociopath. Then again, that never stopped him from being interested in Lana Lang...)

Ladies Of The Legion - Addendum: Lois Got Hosed

So if you're Lana Lang of Earth, seen here as the Insect Queen...



...and one day as you're walking through your hometown of Smallville you stumble upon a strange, insect-like alien trapped under a tree, and after you rescue him, he gives you a ring that gives you the power to take on the characteristics and abilities of any insect or arachnid, do you:

A. Use your powers in the service of mankind as a super-hero?
B. Go a more selfish route, but still provide a valuable service, by hiring yourself out to do things like create massive quanities of super-spider silk for use in manufacturing?
C. Use your powers in the service of mankind as a super-hero, but also use them to try to prove that Superboy is Clark Kent?

If you answered anything other than C, you're clearly not a hateful bitch Lana Lang.
Lana gave the hero thing a whirl, for a while, while also trying (and failing) to prove that Clark and Superboy were one and the same, but when she found that she could only take on the aspect of any particular insect once a day, and realized that she lacked the ability to keep a catlog of useful insects in mind, she put away her costume and ring.
However, eventually, while the Legion was on a visit to 20th Century Smallville, she decided to try out for membership. Unfortunately for her, she didn't qualify for full membership because she's a hateful bitch her powers came fron an external source, and Legion bylaws stated that every Legionnaire must have a power that is, in some fashion, inherent (even if it was initially gained through artificial means).
However, she was awarded the status of "Reserve Member."
Similarly, Jimmy Olsen, who had access to a serum that gave him elastic powers and allowed him to become Elasti-Lad, didn't qualify for full membership, but managed to become an "Honorary Member."
Finally, Superboy's best friend Pete Ross, who had no powers, artificial or otherwise, also gained "Honorary Member" status in the Legion in recognition of the fact that while he knew Superboy's secret identity, he kept the secret to himself. Even Clark was unaware that Pete knew the truth. This was despite the fact that Pete, having learned to recognize the "This is a job for Superboy...but I can't get away without revealing my identity!" look on Clark's face, would always engage in some sort of distraction that would allow Clark to slip away without arousing suspicion.
Clark, being not terribly bright, despite his "super-intellect," always assumed that it was just a lucky break whenever Pete would conveniently twist his ankle, or have an epileptic seizure, or shoot some random person in the face, or whatever the hell he had to do to cover for his pal.
So three of Superboy/man's closest friends got to have some sort of status as members of the Legion.
Lois Lane, meanwhile, got the shaft.

The Show With The Highest Per Capita Hotness

First of all, happy birthday to Kevin (and, if he’s reading this, which he probably isn’t, to his cousin Joel).
Today has been, of course, largely uneventful. I went grocery shopping and picked up some things for tomorrow night’s housewarming party.
Then I came home and did a little bit of cleaning/de-cluttering.
It’s a non-stop thrill ride, I tell you.
No movement on the job-hunting front, apart from getting an e-mail from the friend of the ex-AOLer whom I’d been referred to asking if I ever heard anything from the people that he’d given my résumé to. I told him that yes, I had heard from someone, but that what I heard was that they weren’t interested in me. He wrote back saying that not hiring me doesn’t make any sense, so he’s going do some digging on my behalf, which is cool.
Lately I’ve been watching the show Shark on Sunday nights. It’s an okay show – I like James Woods – but the main thing it has going for it is the amount of hotness it has per capita compared to other shows.
Sure, most TV shows have a lot of hot chicks on them, but Shark wins out because of the quality and intensity of the hotness.
First up is Jeri Ryan, who is still smoking hot, and while she’s not wearing the so-tight-she-often-passed-out-on-the-set bodysuit she wore as Seven of Nine on Voyager, she usually wears outfits that follow her curves pretty closely.
If you watch House – which I’ve also been watching lately, if only because doing so gives me the opportunity to look forward to reading the episode reviews at Polite Dissent – you can compare her outfits to the outfits that Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) wears: lots of cleavage and curve-hugging skirts.
At the center of the hotness, though, is Danielle Panabaker, who plays Woods’ daughter (and whose IMDb photos do not do her justice). She is just unbearably cute. That’s pretty much the only way to describe her.
Plus her character goes to a private school, so most episodes feature scenes of her in a school uniform, short plaid skirt and all.
Sophia Brown is not quite on par with the others, but is still a very attractive woman and adds to the overall hotness.
Rounding out the hotness is Sarah Carter, who all-too briefly played a non-Lana Lang love interest for Clark on Smallville.
Of course, because Smallville has to be all about Lana all the time – the primary reason I gave up watching it – the powers that be pretty much immediately killed her and had Clark basically forget that she ever existed. In a season and a half following the episode in which she died, he never once made even a passing a reference to his brutally-murdered girlfriend. It was basically, “Oh, she’s dead. Welp, back to pining over Lana.”
Prior to Smallville, I didn’t actually hate the Lana Lang character, I just thought that she was pointless.
(Smallville made me hate her by making her even more bland and uninteresting than the version in the comics and then insisting on centering pretty much every episode around her.)
After all, she was retroactively shoe-horned into Superman’s history to serve as a cheap rip-off of Lois Lane in his retroactively added youth, and later to serve as Lois’ rival for his affections in his adult life.
And that’s really all she ever was and all she ever could be. Lois was there from the start, and she was always the only woman for him, not Lana.
When John Byrne revamped Superman’s history, he clearly understood the role of Lana Lang. It was pretty well summed up in the thoughts that went through the heads of Lois and Lana upon meeting for the first time in the newly-established history:

Lois: She’s very pretty. Is he in love with her?
Lana: She’s beautiful. No wonder he’s in love with her.

Of course, since that time Byrne’s vision of Superman has fallen out of favor (and so have thought balloons, for that matter) as current creative teams scramble to put things back to the way they way they used to be (With a modern twist!), which is a subject for another rant entirely.
Speaking of JB, of late I’ve been re-reading his early 90s creator-owned series John Byrne’s Next Men. You may recall, but probably don’t, that JBNM was one of the books that I dropped a bunch of money on back issues to replace the issues I was missing.
For his many strengths as a writer and artist, Byrne also has many weaknesses, and both are clearly on display in JBNM, but overall I’m enjoying it as much now as I did then.
Of course, my enjoyment of it now is hampered by knowing that when I get to the end of the series it won’t actually be the end, and now, unlike then, I know that it’s unlikely that it will ever be finished properly, despite the promise of that very last image which showed what was supposed to lie ahead for the series.
My modern sensibilities also lead me to be inclined to believe that the series would have been better if written by Warren Ellis, as it’s exactly the kind of thing that he writes well.
And for the record, it was re-reading JBNM that actually sparked lat week’s memories about Jen – along with many other memories – as it was one of the main titles I was reading during that period in my life.
In any case, I started writing this hours ago, so I suppose I should just post it now and be done with it.