You really set my hormones a-raging when I first encountered you….

I have always been a big fan of Dawnstar and the Legion.

Just wishing that they can restore her to continuity and do her justice

I really wish you would have listed the actual issues that you referenced, because I’d like to go back and read those books.

Especially the ones after she lost her wings, because I never had those books -

Specifically, the JPGs that are numbered 15, 18, and 22.

I would greatly appreciate this info.

thanks,

Peter

Well, apparently, that was done by someone named KingCobra53… That vaguely rings a bell. :)

I’d have also included a panel or two from “A Shared Destiny,” the end of her galactic self-tour and the centerpiece of her relationship with Wildfire, in “LSH” v2 n311. Yet you hit nearly every other high point in their intricate pas-de-deux of the heart.

That’s the one I missed! Crud. I used part of the same issue for the Wildfire piece the week before, but forgot it here. :/

You pull up enough value to redeem the whole “Bounty” story arc with this. … Almost.

I appreciate a lot of volume 4, but the abuse heaped upon all the Legionnaires post-Adventure Comics confused me. Wildfire, Dawnstar, Blok, The White Witch, Tellus… All were sidelined for little or no reason other than the writers apparently loved the Legion THEY grew up with.

(Why they didn’t recognize that face earlier is a storytelling mystery. But we’ll skip that.)

There were a couple of panels from the Bounty run that I had to leave out in order to keep the whole shebang under thirty pages. :) One of them was Rokk asking, regarding Bounty, “Is she–?” and having Brainiac respond with a yes. The other was Brainy reading her medical scan and wondering to himself what sort of game “Bounty” was playing. They were some very subtle clues, but they were there, especially with the panel where she essentially looks at the reader and flat out says “Legionnaires have been known to crack up.”

I’m glad that I did well enough to please a huge Dawnstar fan. Hopefully, I can do the others justice (I may have to stretch a bit for Tellus, Chemical King and Tyroc, but at this juncture, the plan is to do all the Legionnaires. If and when it comes to it, I have plans to also cover characters like Gates, Thunder, Kinetix, XS, Shikari, and even Gear, thought that’ll be a short one. “Gear was yellow and said Superboy smelled funny. The end.” :)

Tune in next time for Timber Wolf, and thanks for the compliments!

Thank you for a lively, inclusive, superbly illustrated page, beautifully supportive of Dawnstar’s legend. I’m copper-skin-toned with envy (the positive kind) over your having made this so vivid and comprehensive. I’ll recommend this with enthusiasm to others. You, or someone, did very well to link to it at Dawny’s article on Wikipedia.

Your host of pages show every essential element of her characterization over 13 story years, from origins to disappearance. The scans from the TMK-to-Zero-Hour period are especially helpful, as I find it hard to even haul out the few issues I bought — and those solely for seeing her. It was a hard period to endure, after her mutilation, which I perceived immediately when “Bounty” first appeared.

I’d have also included a panel or two from “A Shared Destiny,” the end of her galactic self-tour and the centerpiece of her relationship with Wildfire, in “LSH” v2 n311. Yet you hit nearly every other high point in their intricate pas-de-deux of the heart.

I cheered outright at these lines:

~ Her “powers are essentially unique in comics.” That they are! The tracking aspect also was meant as a tribute to Native Americans, however much echoing a stereotype. Mike Grell (creating her look) wouldn’t have had it any other way, nor would Paul Levitz.

~ “[...] a spiritually superior winged woman in the 30th century.” Yessss!

~ She “navigated stellar distances by eye and outflew the swiftest starcruiser by sheer force of will. Dawnstar is back, and she’s pissed …” You pull up enough value to redeem the whole “Bounty” story arc with this. … Almost.

~ “Wildfire must be made of stern stuff, indeed, to resist that face.” They all must be. (Why they didn’t recognize that face earlier is a storytelling mystery. But we’ll skip that.)

~ She “came back up from the very nadir of existence to save the man she loved and try to make right her mistakes.” You cite this as being the conclusion of a far broader character arc over her whole Legion career. I must admit, even after being a fan of this character for over 25 years, I never quite saw it that way. It takes a lot of perspective-building to take TMK’s lemons and make some Absolut Citrus, but I have to give you props for that.

In any event, Dawnstar is now back in a continuity story, not a memory or a hallucination or a temporal crossover, but vibrant and, most of all, whole, with all six limbs. An event to celebrate, indeed.

I have been trying for most of this decade to get my hundreds of MBs of art and writing about Dawny into an effective Webspace. I know now what will have a prominent place on my links page, though, and that’s this splendid essay of yours. Thank you again!

That’s another reason why the Legion was cool. They had Dawnstar, they had Tyroc, (who, as awkward a character as he may have been, was an active black superhero in 1976, well before most teams were integrated) they even had Bouncing Boy for those of us who were gravitationally enhanced… Diversity was invented by the Legion! :)

Ultra Boy is one of those Legionnaires who I think will take much more effort. I have a complete run of Legion now, counting the Archives, and he’s in every third panel of every incarnation of the book. :)