New Mutants: Lethal Legion #5 // Review
They wanted to defeat Count Nefaria. They had a plan and everything. The thing is...Nefaria has been around forever, and he’s no stranger to a huge team of superheroes trying to take him down. So, they didn’t exactly succeed. And actually...what they did only made him more powerful. So...yeah. That was kind of bad. Things are going to get worse before they get better in New Mutants: Lethal Legion #5. Writer Charlie Jane Anders concludes his mini-series with penciler Enid Balam, inker Elisabetta D’Amico, and colorist Matt Milla. Anders clutters the issue a bit to get the ending to reach a respectable level of completion, but it’s a fun closer.
Dani, Rahne, and company have run into a rather large subterranean dragon. It’s not going to attack them. It’s not angry or anything. It’s just...sad. The thing had been victimized by Nefaria. (It’s in good company. There would be way too many in that camp to fill a single support group...or a class action suit, for that matter.) Rahne suggests that it might want to get revenge on the villain, but is it really fair to make it stand up to something that has hurt it so deeply?
There has been some attempt on Anders’s part to try to give Nefaria a bit of new life with the mini-series. It’s not easy. The guy’s been around for like...60 years, and he’s never been a major villain. Much of the reason why has been the fact that he’s just a bit too...generic. There isn’t a whole lot to make him unique aside from his overall...Italian-ness. Anders may not be doing a great deal with Nefaria, but there HAS been a lot of action with the team. It really IS their book, and they all seem to be more or less addressed in the run of the final issue.
There's a deep sense of emotional warmth throughout the art. Heroes and villains alike are given a very sympathetic appearance on the page. There are so many characters coming together at the end of the mini-series. The art team does a good job of keeping them all distinct and very emotionally engaged throughout the entire run of the final issue. There isn't nearly enough time with any of them to really feel a strong connection from reader to character. However, it's a lot of fun to see it wrap up.
Honestly...there are probably at least 2-3 more characters than are actually necessary in the ensemble. There’s a core group that seems to be continuing to work well for the team, and the overall run of the series has been pretty good, but there’s a big pile-up at the end of the series for the big resolution. It just feels cluttered. The best writers on any mutant team book have always managed to direct the flow of traffic. Anders has done a pretty good job, but things just got congested on the way to the series’ climax.
