Comic Shop Comi--Eh, it's just Scooby-Doo Team-Up #33

Scooby-Doo Team-Up #33 (DC Comics) So when I first started this blog, every Wednesday night the post would be a feature I called "Weekly Haul," wherein I reviewed all the comics I brought back from the shop that afternoon. At the time, the stack of comics was sizable enough that the word "haul" wasn't too much of an exaggeration. Then, in 2010, I moved to a city without it's own comic shop, so I changed the name of the feature to "Comic Shop Comics," because I was no longer getting comics on a weekly basis. Even though I moved back to a city with a comic shop some years ago, I kept the "Comic Shop Comics" title, because the number of comics has been dwindling to the point where "haul" doesn't seem to describe it. Some weeks, like this week, I wonder if I'll even continue the feature at all, under any name, because it's honestly not hard to imagine a Wednesday night in the near future where I go to the shop and then return empty-handed.

This week, for example, I came home with just a singe comic book. Comic books--at least the kind one can find in a comic shop on a Wednesday evening--seem to be drifting apart, and I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's Comics.

Anyway, I'm glad I found at least one comic today. Better still, it was a good one.

As you can see from the cover, this month's issue of Scooby-Doo Team-Up, DC's best gateway comic to the DC Universe's superheroes, features The Legion of Super-Heroes. It occurred to me that I've read exactly three comic books featuring the Legion this year, and all of them were out-of-continuity team-ups with characters seen on television (the others being Legion of Super-Heroes/Bugs Bunny Special #1 and Batman '66/Legion of Super-Heroes).

The three founders travel back in time to pick up Mystery, Inc and take them to their own time, as the legendary ghost hunting detectives are needed to help the LOSH solve the mystery of The Ghost of Ferro Lad. Before it's over, The Fatal Five will attack, and we get to see battles I think it's safe to say no one had ever imagined before writer Sholly Fisch typed them up, like Fred Jones vs. Mano, or Daphne Blake vs. The Persuader.

Fisch is joined by his usual partner on the series, Dario Brizuela, who does a pretty fine job of drawing all those Legionnaires into the superhero style he's established for the series.

While Fisch gets a lot of jokes out of the team-up, I can't help but feel there were a lot left on the table...perhaps the result of there being so many goddam Legionnaires--about nine of them get panel-time, many others simply have cameos. A Scooby-Doo/LOSH miniseries would be needed to take full advantage of all the opportunities presented by the teenagers from the late 1960s traveling a millennium into the future to hang out with the teenage superhero army.