Invasion and the Legion

In preparation for Volume 4, we first need to take a little step back to look at a couple of things that were going on during the latter part of Volume 3 and that will have a HUGE impact not just on Volume 4, but also on the Reboot. And a little bit in the present as well.
This is a MASSIVE crossover that spans the entire DC Universe of the 20th century, but I will mostly discuss the parts that will affect the Legion. But I highly recommend checking out at the very least the main 3-part miniseries.
Also I have a soft spot for this crossover: I think it’s one of the best organized and best written company-wide crossovers in general, and this was my first exposure to A LOT of the post-Crisis DC Universe.

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Invasion! #1 (1988)
plot and breakdowns by Keith Giffen
script by Bill Mantlo
pencils by Todd McFarlane
cover by Bart Sears

The first part of the crossover shares the same cover date of LSH #55 and Wanderers #8.

As you can see from the cover, the Dominators are going to be the main villains of the crossover.
This is the event that made them major players: before this, they were associated with the Legion and therefore acted almost exclusively in the 30th century.
While I don’t remember them being particularly active in the 20th century on Earth after the event, they will become a key player in any space adventure.
And I firmly believe that their actions in this event, plus their influence on L.E.G.I.O.N. (which I will cover separately), are the real reason why they will become essential to the Legion from this point forward.
Yes they originated in the Legion books, but I would argue that before the crossover they were nowhere near as important as the Khund.

We begin with the Dominators discussing about humans.

This presentation introduces a concept that has been used before in science fiction whenever the plot requires a specific reason for why humans are special: that they are not as uniform as aliens.
This idea pops up in many settings because it’s narratively useful in another way: it’s a convenient excuse for why most alien civilizations are written as monolithic.
While I’m not a fan of the trope of “all aliens of this species think and act the same”, it CAN be used effectively. And I think the Dominators fit this idea, making them TRULY alien.

But there’s also the fact that MOST beings with superpowers originate from Earth.

Also we have a scene that tells us why the Dominators are all the same: they DO have independent thinkers, but they are so rigid in their caste system that don’t listen to this guy even if he’s going to be VERY important later on.
It’s going to be a little frustrating talking about him specifically, because the Dominators are so alien that they don’t even use NAMES.

One of the reasons why the Dominators will be able to create so much chaos is that the Green Lantern Corps are currently in shambles, with just very few members still having powers.

This series is a great demonstration of how cunning and ruthless the Dominators are.
For example, since they anticipate that the Green Lanters who are still alive despite having lost their power could make the idea of invading Earth unpopular with the public… they send assassins to take them out.

A quick word about the artwork. Todd McFarlane was already in high demand: going by the cover dates, this was after he started working on Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man.
I’m not generally a big fan of his style, and he’s even rougher than usual in some parts of this series… but he does have a few great moments here and there.
I’m bringing this up especially for his alien designs, which are just stunning.

The Khund have already formed an alliance with the Dominators before the story even starts, but the Alliance grows rapidly.
First among them are the Daxamites, whose involvement in how this will affect the Legion cannot be overstated.

Darkseid won’t show up. I really like this little interaction because just how ballsy the Dominators are if they expect Darkseid to join the Alliance instead of just taking charge, and by how both parties anticipated how the other would act.

One of the reasons why I like this event is that it shows just how desperate the state of the Galaxy really is: there are no “good guys” here, at least not with any realistic chance to matter.
That’s one of the things that always interested me in the Marvel space adventures, as all of their major players are also different shades of grey.

But let’s meet the other members of the Alliance.

First for what concerns us, there’s the Durlans: this event really pushes their alien nature, as they’re mostly depicted as a mass of tentacles wearing a cloak. The fact that Chameleon Boy’s typical form is not their real one had already been established, but from this point forward this will be the closest thing they get to an “real” form.

The Thanagarians will arguably play a bigger role in the crossover, even if they won’t show up much in this overview. Following the interpretation started with the Hawkworld series, the post-Crisis are full-on fascists.

On the Legion-adjacent side of the Alliance, we have the Gil’Dishpan and the Daxamites.
The Okaarans originate on New Teen Titans, as enemies of the Tamaranians (Starfire’s race).

And in addition to the Khund, we have the oddly named Citadel who are mostly associated with the Omega Men, and the Psions who are creations of the Guardians Of The Universe (the first of their many, MANY creations to turn evil) who will also mostly deal with the Omega Men.

The Alliance has kidnapped people from many planets for their experiments, thanks to the help of another alien race: the creepy Spider-Guild, also mostly dealing with the Omega Men.
Considering how I love this event, it’s crazy that I still know next to nothing about the Omega Men!

Among the prisoners are a couple of important cases.
The blond one is Adam Strange, classic DC space hero. But the other is a new face that we will meet again in L.E.G.I.O.N., a guy named Garryn Bek from planet Cairn.

Interesting moments of the first issue include the Omega Men running into a Durlan ship that is PHYSICALLY MADE OF DURLANS…

…Doom Patrol recurrent foe Garguax being considered useless by the Alliance…

…and Brek gets to meet a Coluan that will eventually save and ruin his life.

But the Invasion does literally begin with Australia.

It’s where the Daxamite realize they now have superpowers.

Luckily for Earth’s heroes, they decide to strictly adhere to their original agreement.

Sorry to any Australian reading this, but in DC Comics you most likely died in 1988.
I don’t make the rules.

Only after ALL THAT, the Alliance makes a formal request to Earth.

In what is easily the least believable part of the story, the United Nations swiftly take a decision on what to answer.

And you know what? For once, I can’t criticize the Daily Planet for their COLOSSAL FONT SIZE.

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Invasion! #2 (1988)
plot and breakdowns by Keith Giffen
script by Bill Mantlo
pencils by Todd McFarlane & Keith Giffen
cover by Bart Sears

I will talk briefly about the tie-ins after the end of the main series.

One thing that this series does really well is selling you the sheer scale of the conflict.
It does the job a little TOO well, in fact, because it’s hard to accept Earth is going to bounce back to the previous status quo in like two weeks.

The first issue focused almost exclusively on the invaders. This one moves to the heroes, meaning I have less to talk about.

There’s at least an attempt to explain why certain tactics are not being considered.
In the previous issue we learned that magic users won’t interfere because the “Lords of Chaos and Order” have prevented it, and now that we won’t use nukes because… well…

This is the last issue with McFarlane artwork (part of it, the rest is by Giffen), so it’s a chance to see him draw Batman.
Who is either practicing looking like Spawn or is just making sure he doesn’t sneeze on other heroes.

I have to assume DC Comics didn’t have regular readers in Australia.

By the time the heroes fight back, the presence of Superman is enough to warrant the Daxamites to take an active role.

And they are very, VERY powerful: in this period, DC was going by the idea that the Daxamites were MUCH stronger than Kryptonians. Presumably they still had their pre-Crisis strength, while Superman was significantly weaker in this era.

But it doesn’t last for very long.

That’s obviously because of the presence of lead in the atmosphere, although they don’t know it yet.
This is what really turns the tide, because it happens when the Khund abandon the Daxamites to their fate while Superman helps.

We now move to the part with Giffen artwork, and to what is easily the most historically significant part of the whole event.
Because the Dominator we saw rebel at the beginning drops a MAJOR bombshell: the common origin of most superpowers!

This is introducing the concept of a “mega-gene” that turns regular humans into superpowered “metahumans” after they experience some kind of trauma.
This is a very blatant parallel to the “X-gene” of Marvel, meaning that DC Comics just introduced their own version of mutants.

But he also created a Gene-Bomb^{(patent pending)} that is supposed to negate ALL superpowers.

We then have a very important Legion-related moment, even though you might not realize it at first.
It’s when one of the Daxamites infiltrates a Dominion base to send a call for help to his home planet: since there’s lead there, it’s a suicide mission that leads to his death.
Why is this important to the Legion? Because this is MON-EL’S FATHER.

Even more importantly, the Coluan we saw earlier allied himself with a Durlan to create a mass evasion by the Alliance prisoners.
The Coluan is Vril Dox II, also known as Brainiac 2… the son of the original and Brainiac 5’s ancestor.
And the Durlan, who still doesn’t get his own name, is actually REDACTED but we’re not supposed to know yet.
We will follow both during L.E.G.I.O.N.

In fact the main L.E.G.I.O.N. cast meets here. We’ve already seen Garryn Bek and Vril Dox, but we also have Strata (the rock guy in the background, although it could be one of the Omega Men) and Lyrissa Mallor (ancestor to Shadow Lass).

The Alliance is already in a bad shape thanks to the efforts of the heroes, but they lose any chance of winning the war once a fleet from Daxam shows up.

As if things weren’t bad enough for the Dominators already, the rest of the Alliance also learns that they were being lied to the whole time.

Good news: the war is over!

Bad news: this comic still hates Australia.
I expected Russia… this is still the Cold War… but why Australia?

Breaking news: humanity can still suck.

Soooo… why ISN’T the series over yet?

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Invasion! #3 (1988)
plot and breakdowns by Keith Giffen
script by Bill Mantlo
pencils and cover by Bart Sears

For reference, this shares the same cover month of LSH #57 and Wanders #10.

The story continues because the renegade Dominator activated the Gene-Bomb.

This causes humans with superpowers to go haywire, and several characters will either develop power or get a power boost.
This is how Maxwell Lord gets his powers and how Fire develop hers (she was initially only able to emit fire from her mouth, now she’s a Human Torch)… but as this is well outside the scope of the retrospective, I’m not going to get into the specifics.
This also affects the second version of the Doom Patrol, so I’ll briefly talk about that in their retrospective.

It is a little weird to have a third of the Invasion series basically treating the aftermath of the invasion itself. But we do have confirmation about what happened to the Dominator leaders.

Long story short: the heroes figure out a way to reverse the effects of the Gene-Bomb, by having Martian Manhunter extract the knowledge out of the mind of its Dominator creator.

The Gene-Bomb is quite significant for the 20th century heroes, but not so much for the Legion.

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The various Alliance species appear in a lot of tie-ins, but there isn’t much Legion-related stuff there. With the exception of course of L.E.G.I.O.N., but I’ll cover them next time.

But I have to mention Flash #21 and #22, which focuses on the Durlan invasion of Cuba.
Written by William Messner-Loebs with artwork by Legion artist Greg LaRocque, this storyline either famous or infamous for featuring a team-up between Flash, his father and FIDEL CASTRO.

Also, Flash might have slept with a Durlan posing as one of Castro’s soldiers.

I wasn’t kidding about this being a team-up with Fidel Castro.

Together, they expose the Durlans posing as Cubans.

Castro appreciates the help so much that he throws Flash a birthday party.
(this is post-Crisis Wally West, so his identity is public)

It’s absolutely WILD this happened!!!

This is not out of nowhere: it’s integral to the plot, because Flash has learned the Manhunter cult is planning to assassinate Fidel Castro and is not sure if he should stop them.

This is even a significant event in Wally West’s life, because HIS FATHER sacrifices his life to repeal the invasion from the Durlans. Although we learn it AFTER he exploded.

You would think this would come up more often!!! Why is the death of Wally West’s father basically never mentioned?
Oh, right, probably because it’s in the same issue of:

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Finally, I have to mention that the event was spoofed by Chris Claremont (with Rob Liefeld artwork) on Uncanny X-Men #245, most likely because at the time the X-Men were based in Australia.

It has its own version of the Dominators: the Conquest.

Honestly, targeting Earth makes more sense at Marvel that on DC.

Instead of the Gene-Bomb, the invaders are going to drop the Jean-Bomb…

…which is just Jean Grey with a lot more hair and without nipples.

As a spoof of Invasion, it’s pretty funny. But if you didn’t know what this was parodying, I’m guessing this comic wouldn’t have made any sense whatsoever.

What do these comics have against Australia???

The parody also has its own version of the Khund…

…the Thanagarians…

…the Daily Planet…

…the Daxamite, whose leader randomly plays poker with Wolverine…

…and it ends with Havok blasting away the Jean-Bomb with an obligatory Crocodile Dundee reference.

I’m not too familiar with this period of the X-Men, but let me tell you: even knowing what this story is parodying… I have no freaking idea of what is happening.