Welcome to one of the most confusing parts of the Legion history, as everything from this point forward will be a mess to follow until Zero Hour ends.
Yes. All the 5YL part so far? That was THE EASY PART.
Valor #17 (1994)
by Mark Waid & Colleen Doran
If you forgot were we were (possible) or fell asleep trying to read this series (more likely), Mon-El is dying from lead poisoning.
A big part of the confusion is directly related to Glorith messing with the timeline.
This was published a month AFTER LSH #53 where she dies, even though that story included a direct reference to the ending of the NEXT issue of Valor.
Because of course everything surrounding Glorith HAS to make zero sense.
Mon-El, I can give you a bit of slack since you’re currently dying, but she already explained in the previous issue that you were just her plaything.
Glorith is ALSO responsible for the lead poisoning.
So if I’m understanding this… BIF “IF”… this is Glorith’s plan:
1) poison Mon-El
2) disguise herself as a damsel in distress and seduce him
3) conquer the planet Baaldur for her
4) making him incredibly weak and on the verge of death
5) ???
6) rule the universe and do a softcore photoshoot together
What was the point of poisoning him??? Was it to make him to weak-willed to resist her influence?
What ass-backwards plan to conquer the universe.
The Legionnaires plan to stop the all-powerful Glorith is to distract her while the others get her.
Ah yes, the classic Stantz maneuver.
Perfect plan, no notes.
Mon-El agrees to follow Glorith if she will heal him.
Is it just me or Colleen Doran would rather pencil anything else but this story?
This is a big deal for the Legion, because this is the Mon-El from their past: if he doesn’t get his adventures, nobody is going to populate the United Planets and they won’t exist.
Well, it SHOULD be a big deal, but time is shrugging this off.
Or maybe it takes a while for the effect to reach the future.
(I don’t know why but it seems I have 80s movies in mind today)
Mon-El will accept Glorith’s cure only if she agrees to stop being evil, which of course she won’t.
Which means that Mon-El dies.
This isn’t a fake-out, by the way. The original Mon-El of this timeline, the one we’ve been following since Invasion, the one who joined L.E.G.I.O.N., will actually stay dead.
What a tragedy. Let’s take a moment to remember the greatest hits of this Mon-El.
Clearly the greatest hero in history. Also, this issue has a cover date of March; the ending was already spoiled by LSH #53, which had a cover date of January.
Killing Mon-El before he becomes Mon-El, as you might imagine, results in time being absolutely broken.
And that is BEFORE the SW6 Mon-El shows up.
Valor #18 (1994)
by Mark Waid & Colleen Doran
How’s this for a confusing basis for a series?
The first 17 issues star Mon-El, but not the Mon-El from the Legion of Super-Heroes: the younger version before he was exiled to the Phantom Zone.
But now the protagonist is the SW6 Mon-El, who is a doppelganger of the Legion Mon-El… so it’s not “young Mon-El” anymore, it’s “slightly younger version of the older Mon-El”.
Yes look at the costume, which looks EXACTLY THE SAME of the adult Mon-El.
You might remember that FOR SOME REASON the Legionnaires believed SW6 Mon-El died in the time stream. Turns out he was fine and just waiting to end up here.
It’s rare for a story to acknowledge in-universe that it’s not making any sense.
Obviously not following Glorith was the right decision, but you might think that Past Mon-El refusing to let his future play out was selfish.
Except that, if I’m not mistaken, Past Mon-El didn’t know that his future actions would be THIS important.
No if there’s someone to blame for this it’s definitely Glorith, because she KNOWS he’s supposed to create the future of the Legion… and yet if she had her way and he accepted, this would ALSO have radically screwed the timeline.
The only way to preserve the timeline is for SW6 Mon-El to live out his past life all over again.
Which I remind you would require him to live for a thousand years in the Phantom Zone FOR THE SECOND TIME. Because THIS version still remembers the first.
Can you blame him for snapping?
The Legionnaires decide to follow him with Past Mon-El’s ship, which SW6 Brainiac 5 quickly modifies in order to track a superpowered Mon-El.
I can absolutely believe Brainiac 5 can come up with this on the fly.
Screwing up the timeline brings into the game characters that will play an important role in the rest of this era: the Linear Men.
Not to be confused with the Linear Man who allowed the Moon to explode.
They’re related, but this is a different set of time travelers.
Meanwhile, SW6 Mon-El saves people from a hostile ship thanks to a double splash page.
And after fighting off some rather creative weapons, he’s captured.
He JUST arrived in the 20th century and already got captured by the Khunds.
If the future depends on this guy, no wonder the timeline won’t last until the end of the year.
Valor #19 (1994)
by Mark Waid & Colleen Doran
cover by Stuart Immonen
I’m guessing “the exciting adventures of the younger copy of the older version of the character you’ve been following” wasn’t the best advertisement.
When it comes to fixing the timeline, the Linear Men suck. This will become incredibly clear during Zero Hour.
It’s not like the Legionnaires are any better.
Turns out that SW6 Mon-El let himself get captured by the Khunds in order to wreck their ship from within.
Sounds legit.
He’s also running away from the Legionnaires trying to force him to save the universe.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
He also wastes a few pages gets busy fighting a Khund in power armor.
Glorith is predictably failing at stabilizing time. Can’t she do ANYTHING right?
It’s up to Waverider to at least try fixing this mess.
He’s the only member of the Linear Men who has time powers of his own (the others are purely tech), and the only one you probably recognize.
He’s going to get A LOT of exposure during Zero Hour; his story is complicated enough for another time (pun intended).
Good thing, because the Legionnaires aren’t getting anywhere.
So Waverider takes over.
Because the best way to fix screwing up time is just paving over it.
Sounds legit.
Then the two get into a weird argument whether Mon-El’s actions are predetermined or not.
It’s so deep that it goes all around to become shallow.
Mon-El decides to leave…
…but it’s only a fake-out: he does take out the Khund warship like history said.
This resets the timeline (I think???), and the involvement of the Legionnaires is retroactively removed from history.
And Glorith is still alive, in the 20th century. Although we’ve already see her die in the 30th century because of the blast from Devlin.
I’m not even going to try to understand where THIS version of Glorith is coming from.
As for SW6 Mon-El, he has accepted that he will HAVE to re-live his original history.
Which isn’t much, because he’s going to be trapped in the Phantom Zone in just 48 hours.
So EVERYTHING he’s supposed to do in order to set up the United Planets is going to happen in the next two days?
We already SAW his actions in LSH Annual #2, and that story DEFINITELY took longer than two days to play out!!!
Legion significance: 0/10
As incredible as it sounds, the death of Mon-El has no real impact on the Legion. It does introduce a lot of time travel nonsense that will cause Zero Hour, but you’re FAR better off reading that miniseries on its own.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
I’ve made fun of the Silver Age a lot, but I have to give it credit: when they set up time travel rules, they stuck to them. A bit too much at times. But this was just nonsense for the sake of it.
That’s right, this is the rare case where the Silver Age MADE MORE SENSE.
Depression scale: 8/10
The greatest hero in history dies before he has the chance to do anything. His future version is going to suffer through hell a second time to preserve the legend. In the meantime, the Legionnaires are as useless as the people who are supposed to keep the timeline straight.
Confusion scale: 10/10
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
This stuff is utterly incomprehensible TO ME. Which is QUITE an accomplishment considering that I’m a superfan of both the Legion and of time travel stories!
But this is a mess all the way through.
The young Mon-El was an incredibly bland character, but killing him off to replace him with a far more confusing alternate version is absurd.
Characters are either irritating (Glorith) or flat (everyone else), the action is sub-par, the pencils are bad, and the plot requires a PhD in bulls##t to follow.
I normally have a very high opinion of Mark Waid as a writer, but I think it’s abundantly clear he has absolutely no idea of what he’s doing here.
We are legion
No changes to the count, since everyone else still believes SW6 Mon-El is dead.
This results into one of the strangest quirks of the count: it currently includes TWO future versions of Mon-El, despite the fact that THEIR PAST VERSION IS DEAD.
33 active Legionnaires. Of these, 20 are in the “Legionnaires” team
1 presumed dead (SW6 Mon-El)
2 in sick leave (Kent Shakespeare and Devlin O’Ryan)
5 reserve members
28 resigned members
18 deceased members
83 people have been members
68 people have been rejected
As long as we’re talking 80’s movies, we’d be better off watching “Better Off Dead” than reading this mess. On the one hand, things are finally happening. On the other hand, it’s a jumbled ball of confusion.
You would think Waverider (formerly Matt Ryder) might mention that he works alongside Linear Man Matthew Ryder. He has some experience with being a chronal doppelgänger and can empathize with at least some aspects of Mon-El’s plight. Somehow that never comes up. Maybe it would just make it all more confusing.
Mon-El taking out the Khund cruiser brings to mind “Mon-El’s One-Man War”, and the last thing this book should have done is try to crib plot from a much better story. That story’s quality only makes this dreck look worse by comparison.
It’s no wonder this era collapsed.
WTF happened???
This could’ve been a great moment for character development: Like the Infinite Man Mon-El goes time and again and again back in time to relive his monstrous life until, for the last time, he quits for good and becomes the New Time Trapper!
Ssh. The inimical sentient timeline known as the Time Trapper hasn’t incarnated in human form yet. Don’t invite paradox by suggesting it happening before it happens. It’s happening for the first time known soon, depending on your value for ‘soon’. Is ‘soon’ relevant when time is broken and events are occurring/ being published out of sequence?
How soon is now?
But yes, there are any number of ways this could have been handled better.
The Linear Man who blew up the moon was a member of the Linear Men group, not a separate group that is merely “related”.
As for Glorith, it’s clear from her continuing appearances that whatever the effect Devlin had on her, it wasn’t fatal. Could be that that’s what actually “broke time”, if it reflected her time manipulation powers on themselves.
Bottom line, with time broken due to Zero Hour on the horizon, a lot of stuff that should be logically impossible happens. There’s no point trying to make sense of it, paradoxes happen when there’s a time crisis.
Apparently from this point on both Valor, Legionnaires and Legion Vol 4 are existing under the shadow of unreparable time shifts, paradoxes and displacements up to Zero Hour.
Which I suppose gives the plot a sense of helplessness and urgency, but not too much of an actual direction or sense of purpose.
I honestly find myself wondering whether the character themselves won’t even consider just waiting for the end, since they are destined to be destroyed and rebooted in a short time anyway.
Sorry for my random comment, but I have a suggestion for a random thoughs post: what do you think about thought bubbles and their massive decline in american comics, a decline that really took place in the 80s and 90s?
He thought he didn’t think much of it, besides finding the faux-noir style a bit overused for certain characters like Batman or Daredevil.
Most likely not enough for a post.
Then he wondered if this bit could work for a comment.
Thanks for the fun and nice reply! First-person perspective can be over-used and abused indeed, especially when it’s many characters. The classic thought bubble can give a greater sense of immediacy and clarity in those cases.
That said, I think this is a rich topic. I watched NerdSync’s video on thought bubbles and it opened my eyes to how rich and interesting of a topic this really is. One of the reasons why they fell out of fashion was probably because of how they were abused for excessive exposition.