This is a pretty rare comic. I don't mean in the chromium cover, signed and numbered, going to be worth a million dollars next Tuesday kind of way, but judged by a much different standard of rarity. This is a Secret Files comic which is actually worth your money. Rather than a few short stories and several useless pinup pages, which has been the format, Abnett, Lanning and company provide a primer to The Legion, set smack dab in the middle of the "Foundations" story that is currently going on, as a reporter comes to Legion World to do a story on the Legion for her viewers, and the comic book reader follows along. The closest comparison would be to "And Now For A Word," an episode of Babylon 5 that served as a similar gateway to the series and introduction to how the futuristic media of that world worked.
The truth is, if you've been reading The Legion, there really aren't a lot of revelations in this story. Abnett and Lanning mostly reinforce the character beats that they've been setting up in the ongoing series, and they bookend the story with the same foreboding look at Darkseid that they used in the latest issue of "Foundations." However, there's still plenty here for Legion fans to like, including a little insight into the staffing of Legion World, a nifty little futuristic Superboy outfit by Tony Harris and Tom Feister and a quick check-in with forgotten Legionnaires M'Onel, Chameleon, Kinetix, Gates and R.J. Brande, whose role in the series I had forgotten up until this point.
However, this is really a book aimed at new or potentially interested readers of The Legion, which is OK, since that's really where the Secret Files should be targeted anyway. The structure of the book has our perky reporter (who, surprisingly, comes free of any evil agenda) going through a tour of Legion World, meeting all of the Legionnaires and recapping their history and their current situation. Throughout the story, "links" offer access to further information or short profiles on various Legionnaires. It's a clever structure, and it does the same thing that the other Secret Files attempt to without feeling quite so clunky about it.
Part of the reason it works is the same reason that I had some problems with The Legion #25... split art teams. For the most part, the art is handled by Leonard Kirk and Robin Riggs, whose work fits in nicely with the style that Chris Batista has established for the book of late, but the profile pages are handled with the sort of digitally painted look of Tony Harris and Tom Feister, which makes them pop off the page a little bit more. Truthfully, there were some pages that Harris and Feister did that should have gone to Kirk and Riggs, notably the opening splash of Legion World and the tour of the habitats, since both of those scenes required strong backgrounds and instead got a sort of generic color wash. But in general, I thought that the unusual look of the Harris/Feister art worked in this context, as it made the profiles look like the kind of hyperlinked information it was meant to.
All the various subplots currently cooking in The Legion are checked off here, and this really is the best primer you can imagine for those who want to jump in on The Legion and can't find any trade paperbacks (since DC hasn't printed any). It's a good introduction to the various characters, a nice breather in the midst of the "Foundations" arc and, as I noted above, that rare instance of the deeply flawed Secret Files format being put to good use.
