New Comics!: The "Culling" Edition (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

Superboy #9:  The most obvious problem with this issue is that we're dealing with A LOT of characters.  Between the Legion, Titans, and Crucible kids, we're juggling 18 protagonists.  We also have 13 antagonists, Harvest plus his Ravagers.  Needless to say, keeping track of 31 characters isn't easy.  Lobdell and DeFalco actually manage to make it work, but it comes at the price of the characterizations.  All the characters here, from established ones like Superboy to new ones like Ridge, are pieces being moved across a board, given lines meant to advance the plot with little left to give a sense of who the characters are.  For example, of the Ravagers, only Warblade distinguishes himself as a villain worth fearing in this issue; we know Rose is from previous issues, but we don't really see her achieve much here beside trade insults with Red Robin and Timber Wolf before being defeated off-panel.  The result is a fairly formulaic story with a fairly formulaic script.  Lobdell tries to throw a bone to "Teen Titans" readers by making it clear that the mystery of Kid Flash's past lies in the Legion Lost's future, but he never really has the chance to develop that further.  Hopefully the next issue of the cross-over event, "Legion Lost" #9, will address the mystery of Harvest, since I think it's high time that we get this show on the road.

Legion Lost #9:  Lobdell and DeFalco implied last issue that answers may be forthcoming in this issue, but we never actually get them.  Harvest hints that the purpose of including the Legion and the Titans in this Culling was because he needs even more powerful Ravagers than normal for the "great battle" set to come and Timber Wolf realizes that Harvest's control of 31st century technology has something to do with the Echo organization with which Chameleon Girl is revealed to be affiliated.  Yeah, I have no idea either.  Harvest goes so far as to claim that he manipulated events so that the Legion would get lost in our time, but, as Wildfire himself notes, it's entirely possible that he simply used his telepathic powers to realize that this claim would be the most psychologically distracting to the Legion members.  As such, we still don't know Harvest's motivations, despite his claims that he is working for altruistic purposes, and we still have no idea what his connection to the 31st century is.  The best moment of this issue is Harvest's surprising ability to hack into Tellus' telepathic link; the panel depicting the shock of the members of the Legion and the Titans was priceless.  The worst moment?  It could be Wonder Girl expressing her gratitude over the Titans finding one another in time to take on Harvest.  It seems a weird thing to identify as a "worst," but it seems totally outside Cassie's character for her to make this statement.  Before this cross-over event began, Cassie was perhaps the most ambivalent member of the Titans.  Nothing we've seen here has really done anything to show us why she changed her mind.  I think that we're supposed to believe that she's so repulsed by Harvest that she realized the value of the team, but, given that Lobdell and DeFalco haven't really paid that much attention to Cassie across this event (again, the 31-character problem), it still falls flat to me.  All in all, this issue felt like a filler issue for me, one needed to force "Legion Lost" into the event.  Hopefully, Lobdell will do something in "Teen Titans" to save this event, because, right now, it's done nothing more than convince me that the $5.98 a month I'm spending on "Superboy" and "Teen Titans" is wasted.

Teen Titans #9:  I'd like to say that Lobdell delivers the finale that I wanted here, revealing Harvest's master plan and showing his 31st-century connection.  I'd like to say that.  Unfortunately, I can't.  Instead, we learn that Harvest's "master plan" was merely to get the Legion and Titans to free the kids from the Crucible so that they can sow "fear, chaos and confusion in their wake" and inspire the public to call for the creation of an organization like N.O.W.H.E.R.E.  Um, yeah.  Are we really supposed to believe that Harvest created N.O.W.H.E.R.E. so that the Legion and the Titans could destroy it so that people would eventually come to demand it be created?  Sure, whatever, Scott.  The Titans also call shenanigans on this allegation, an understandable position since Harvest previously claimed that the whole purpose of this exercise was to recruit the Legion and the Titans as his new Ravagers for the "great battle" coming on the horizon.  Lobdell also clearly wants us all excited about this great battle, but I find myself frustrated with yet another comic that expects me to wait for years to see some plot device that isn't as interesting as the author thinks it is to come to fruition.  We also never get an explanation of how Harvest is connected to the 31st century, a sub-plot that really held no interest for me.  Honestly, I just don't know where to go from here.  We seem to have gotten my wish, that Superboy would join the Titans sooner rather than later, but I'm just not sure if Lobdell hasn't already done enough damage to make me drop these series and wait until they get a new writer.