Perhaps I underestimated you, cartoon

After eleven episodes, I'm starting to warm up to Legion of Super-Heroes, a "Kids WB" cartoon on "the" CW.

Mostly quick and painless background: the Legion is a group of teenage super-heroes, 1000 years in the future. In occasional comic book appearances in the late 1950s, they generally would travel to early/mid 20th century Smallville and whisk Superboy to the mid/late 30th century for either an adventure or a practical joke. (It was about a 50/50 chance each time. Kept things interesting for Superboy, I guess.) Their three-member group quickly attracted more and more future-teens, each with their own super power; and eventually they became popular enough that they were allowed to have adventures even if Superboy wasn't around. Almost 50 years after their comic book debut, the Legion has its own cartoon, although they've once again been saddled with a young Clark Kent. (They're calling him Superman, but they actually plucked him from his Smallville youth, before he had adopted that identity.)

For the first ten episodes, I was mildly disappointed and mostly unentertained. The Legion has a rich, completely tangled background, complete with dozens of worlds populated by super-powered alien species and soap opera romance, but the cartoon predictably avoided scratching the surface. We got the occasional appearance -- in the background, silent -- of lesser-known Legion characters like Blok and Tyroc, but the stories always seemed to be about the same core team: young Superman, Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Brainiac 5, Bouncing Boy (an odd choice), and either Triplicate Girl or Phantom Girl. And we had two appearances each from the Fatal Five and Lightning Lad's moderately-malevolent brother Mekt, but each episode really felt a little too self-contained.

What really bugged me, though, was the lack of tension. Brainiac 5 -- in this incarnation a green robot with body-modifying Inspector Gadgetesque powers to go with his supposedly superior intellect -- is all friendly and super-nice to everyone, and never seems particularly smarter than any other character designed to provide exposition. Lightning Lad is about as rebellious as Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who was a total dick to everyone (but still loved pizza). Saturn Girl was your typical totally weak female mental-powers superhero sans personality. These people are supposed to be angry at each other, or trying to have sex with each other, or both.

The latest episode aired in the states, "Chain of Command," has raised my expectations. Legion leader Cosmic Boy made his first appearance, which pissed off acting leader Lightning Lad, and I suspect that their mutual animosity wasn't fully resolved by the end of the episode. Triplicate Girl -- whose cartoon redesign is, well, pretty sexy, actually -- is starting to show affection for Bouncing Boy. (They married in the old comic books, but she wasn't nearly this hot back then, and he wasn't quite so rotund.) The action took place on Lightning Lad's homeworld of Winath, where we saw that almost everyone is a fraternal twin (evil brother Mekt being a notable exception -- not having a twin on Winath makes you an angry loner, you see).

Best of all, in this episode Cosmic Boy introduced the team to Ferro Lad, the disfigured (thus masked) boy who can turn his body to iron. Introducing Ferro Lad into a story is like bringing in Spider-Man's old girlfriend Gwen Stacy: you can be pretty sure someone's going to be taking a nose-dive off of a bridge pretty soon. Ferro will probably only make it another couple of episodes before he heroically sacrifices himself to stop the Sun Eater in the season-closing two-parter (which, true to the original story, will also involve the Legion turning to the Fatal Five for help). This is perhaps fitting, as Ferro only lasted seven issues in his original incarnation. Personally, I'm just happy he wasn't killed off in his introductory episode, like how the also-not-adult-enough Teen Titans cartoon botched the Terra story. Having a character around even a little longer makes their inevitable death or betrayal a lot more interesting.