Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #19 (1991)
written by Keith Giffen, Tom & Mary Bierbaum
pencils & cover by Keith Giffen
Last time we blew up the Moon. Now things get worse.
The story begins with the destruction of the Moon. If you were reading only the Legion book and not the Superman crossover, this would have been completely out of nowhere: there isn’t even a caption in the story telling you where this happened.
It was also out of nowhere in the Superman story, sure, but a caption would have been nice!!!
As if destroying the Moon wasn’t enough, this also results in the destruction of Medicus One, the space station where we recently saw Dr. Gym’ll. So he’s probably also dead.
We get pages and pages of destruction porn.
It’s well-penciled, and it even manages to break The Grid for a while, but I feel like this isn’t really selling the fact that THE MOON WAS BLOWN UP… I have a reeeally hard time believing Earth survives AT ALL.
There’s some good news in the middle of this tragedy: a Dominator warship was also destroyed, and also… no, that’s about it.
Well okay, I suppose the fact that this makes Circe angry at the Dominators would count as a positive development. If I had any idea of what kind of character she is.
“A Dominator dies with honor”? Since when have we seen a Dominator LIVE with honor?
And speaking of death, this is the last stand of Circadia Senus.
Although he makes an appearance way later in this era, so SOMEHOW he survives.
I should point out that none of this was planned by the Dominators, since Dev-Em initiated the “Triple Strike Program” without their consent.
Had the event actually happened in the Legion book and it was the culmination of a proper subplot, it COULD have worked to show the sad irony that even supposed master planners like the Dominators could not foresee everything.
As it stands, it’s utter chaos to me.
The last part of the Triple Strike involves the detonation of the Power Spheres, the source of power of Earth’s cities.
Which means even more destruction porn.
Including a list of at least 120 cities, some of which are not fully legible.
If you are wondering HOW THE HELL IS ANYONE STILL ALIVE ON THE PLANET AT THIS POINT… keep wondering!
Because the rest of the issue is the ending of the Ultra Boy storyline, which is COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED FROM ANYTHING ELSE.
I did not care about the Ultra Boy plot in the previous issues. This COULD have been potentially interesting, but having Nabu show up… that’s the guy behind the Doctor Fate helmet… just can’t compete with the fact we were just shown the greatest cataclysm in history and now THE STORY BASICALLY CHANGED THE CHANNEL!!!
But don’t think for a second that we can avoid depression.
And then… I have no idea of what is happening anymore.
This random woman finds Ultra Boy…
…and works through Ultra Boy’s trauma.
I never do this. But I’m going to just post the two full pages that follow the relationship between Ultra Boy and this woman, so that you can fully appreciate how both overwritten and underwritten this feels.
Across these TWO PAGES we speed through Ultra Boy falling in love with her and even having a baby. Without even seeing them.
Until Nabu puts up his helmet and confronts the woman, who turns out isn’t a woman at all but one of the Chaos Lords who wants to use Ultra Boy to reach the future.
Then Nabu kills her, after she briefly shapeshifts into Phantom Girl.
Ultra Boy is both utterly oblivious to her nature and completely useless against Nabu.
EXACTLY MY THOUGHTS ON THIS SUBPLOT, NABU.
In fact this whole thing ends with Nabu just sending Ultra Boy where he started.
And so we end the issue, which I remind you STARTED WITH THE MOON BLOWING UP and continued with OVER A HUNDRED CITIES EXPLODING, with Ultra Boy finally moving past his grief for the death of Phantom Girl.
Good for him.
BILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE DEAD BY THE WAY, CAN WE ADDRESS THAT?????
And I don’t mean in a text page where the Science Police opens an investigation!!!
The Grid: 16 pages out of 24
5 pages with an Imperfect Grid
no pages without a grid
2 splash pages
1 text page
Legion significance: 10/10
Yeah you might have guessed that BLOWING UP THE MOON is important. But it’s also the start of a long chain of events that, believe it or not, will cause an even greater catastrophe.
Oh who am I kidding, this is the 5YL era, you already know everything always gets worse.
Silver Age-ness: 1/10
The sheer destruction should logically bring it to a zero, but the fact that the population has even the SLIGHTEST chance of surviving has a bit of Silver Age-ness to it.
Depression scale: ∞/10
The Moon blew up. Billions of people are dead. The heroes are literally nowhere to be seen.
Except one guy stuck in the past who doesn’t do anything and contributes nothing.
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
The scenes of destruction are well-drawn and quite spectacular, but I’m just numbed by relentless destruction and darkness and depression.
What more can I say at this point. This is when I lost all faith in this era.
From this point onward, I have not read the majority of issues before this retrospective.
And the ones I have already read, I have done so ONCE and never felt any desire to go back.
The only exception is the very last storyline that intersects Zero Hour.
And we are just about a third of the way for the main book.
Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #20 (1991)
written by Keith Giffen, Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Al Gordon
pencils & cover by Keith Giffen
Remember how the first issue made a big deal of the war between Cosmic Boy’s and Shrinking Violet’s planets going to war during the Five Year Gap
This is finally going to show it. Just in case you needed some war to distract you from all the cataclysms.
We begin with a text page, something unusual for the series, that emphasizes how the Dominators are going to deny they were behind the Moon’s destruction.
Despite this, a Dominator fleet is moving back to Earth just in case. Notice that not every Dominator is sold on the fixation on this planet.
We ALSO begin the humiliation conga that will absolutely wreck Sun Boy.
He was so close to one of exploding Power Spheres that only his powers prevented him from dying… but he WISHES he died.
Remember that Earth is NOT part of the United Planets anymore… so the United Planets are not going to be of any help.
The Dominator ships are basically coming to Earth to take it over. And nobody really believes Superman was even involved.
So if you’re keeping track:
A) The Moon blew up
B) Billions of people are dead
C) Earth has no allies
D) The Dominators have invaded the planet
Man it sure sucks that THERE ARE NO SUPERHEROES THAT COULD BE DOING ANYTHING TO HELP, doesn’t it?
But at least Devlin O’Ryan, a guy who up to this point HASN’T DONE ANYTHING, is still alive.
Believe it or not, but the most significant part of these two issues isn’t the destruction of the Moon, or even the invasion of Earth.
It’s the revelation that the Dominators have stacked something in the “SW6 batch” and that is now loose. That’s going to be a dominant (pun intended) factor of the rest of the era.
With the exception of Ultra Boy’s adventures in the past, we haven’t seen ANY Legionnaire since the Moon blew up.
They must be up to something important, right?
Well, the first thing we see (in a frankly confusing sequence) is that Laurel Gand is disguising herself as Celeste Rockfish because… I don’t know man, I have no idea where this is going.
But I do know:
1) that they’ve made it a point to highlight that Laurel is a towering amazon, so she really should stand out more
2) Celeste Rockfish STILL HASN’T DONE ANYTHING, why should I care about her?
3) THE FREAKING MOON EXPLODED, CAN ANYONE PLEASE DEAL WITH THAT FIRST????
I hate to obnoxiously stress on this point, and I’m typically all for breaking up the tension with some comedy… but BILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE DEAD, can we PLEASE deal with that FIRST and THEN move to laugh at Kono taking pictures of Kent Shakespeare while he’s in the shower!?
Or the fact that White Witch is contacted in her sleep by… I believe the spirit of Amethyst?
The closest thing to dealing with the destruction of the Moon is Chameleon Boy wondering if Superman was responsible, only for the series to be ashamed to even mention Supes.
Shrinking Violet WAS RIGHT THERE when Dev-Em and Linear Man detonated the Moon!
Do we learn how she feels about not having been able to stop them in time?
Do we discover how the heck she survived despite being at ground zero?
No, we learn that she had her mechanical leg replaced with a blue one from a Probe.
This gets as close as spelling out that she’s in a relationship with Lighting Lass as 1991 would allow. That’s all well and good, but…
Shrinking Violet was at ground zero at the explosion.
Billions are dead.
Earth is basically in a state of war.
And her first priority was to change her leg for a new one? This is the same Shrinking Violet who didn’t want to wait to replace it with an organic one because it would have taken her out of action for too long???
Night Lass hears the bad news about Sun Boy…
…but at least Saturn Girl gave birth to her second set of twins.
And then once again the issue basically flips the channel, moving to having the Punisher Cosmic Boy narrate what happened to him during the war.
But it wasn’t just people from his planet in this war, because the human Kent Shakespeare was also there for some reason.
I could get involved in this part of the story if I hadn’t already been desensitized to the amount of destruction and depression of this series and if anybody was recognizable.
Speaking of things I no longer care about, Cosmic Boy is revealed to have been the one to scar Shrinking Violet’s eye.
Also Ivy, the kid friend of Kent Shakespeare, has some kind of plant-based power.
If I remember correctly there were plans to reveal that she’s some kind of plant elemental, but this never goes nowhere.
You know how badly the Legion has decided to stop caring about the various disasters?
THE FORMER SUBSTITUTE HEROES are the first one to actually comment on the effects on Earth of the Moon’s destruction!!!
Obligatory complain about the missing codenames: Infectious Lass is talking to Color Kid here.
Not to Stone Boy, who is in the same panel she is, while Color Kid is not.
You COULD recognize Color Kid from the previous scene, given his unusual eyes and the rainbow on the face, even if you don’t remember his name is Ulu Vakk.
And good luck figuring out the other one is Stone Boy, since he doesn’t have any recognizable features and doesn’t demonstrate his powers!
The bad news is that Shvaughn Erin reports the Science Police has found the Dominator chambers beneath Metropolis.
Matter-Eater Lad has joined Invisible Kid II’s resistance.
And we close with Circe rebelling against the Dominators…
…which makes Bounty, yet another character who hasn’t done anything so far, question her intentions to kill Circe.
The last page is a splash page depicting… uhm… a little help here?
The text page brings us even more details and background on the battle that took the spotlight from the destruction of the Moon.
The Grid: 21 pages out of 24
no pages without a grid
1 splash page
2 text pages
Legion significance: 6/10
Despite all the talk, is the battle of Venado Bay REALLY that important?
There’s the revelation of the SW6 batch, but since we don’t know yet what it is it’s surprisingly lower than expected.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Nope!
Depression scale: 10/10
Billions are dead. The United Planets won’t help, the Legion won’t help, Superman won’t help and his involvement is swept under the rug, and Sun Boy suffers a fate worse than death.
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
Same problems of the previous issue. I can’t get invested in the individual shenanigans of the Legionnaires, or even in a tragic battle of their past, if they continuously ignore the apocalyptic events surrounding them.
We are legion
10 active Legionnaires
0 reserve members
35 resigned members
11 deceased members
56 people have been members
58 people have been rejected
This is all just misery porn with perhaps a hope of stumbling into a plot somewhere, somehow.
I hope I am missing something, but apparently Ultra Boy travelled to the past for no clear reason, went through a lot of effort and time to just happen to find a Lord (or Lady) of Chaos who seduced him, then was destroyed by Nabu who had little notion of what was happening around him. Losing a child that was not even named while at it, before Nabu returns him. There is no clear reason nor consequence to any of that. Maybe it was meant to play into the Amethyst plot, since Doctor Fate and Nabu know her as a Lady of Order from her second series and a couple of Crisis panels. I don’t think or expect that anything will come from that, at least for a few years.
I had not even noticed, but it does not make any sense that the Legionnaires seen on the moon in Adventures of Superman #478 survived, let alone fail to comment on what they knew of the situation on panel at this time. They have no access to teleportion or anything, and the Moon blew up, what, less than two minutes after they thought Saturn Girl had avoided that?
No wonder the SW6 situation dominates the plot from now on. Everything else is aimless and depressing. Just a parade of names, situations and words that vaguely feel that they should have some sort of meaning, but consistently fall short. Presumably we are meant to crave revelations to come, but it is all just too much, too meandering and too clumsily told even when there is or will eventually come a clear direction.
———————————————
On another, entirely different note, it seems that you mispelled Sun Boy as Ultra Boy in the first reference to him in the analysis of #20.
Yep, I swapped the two names. Fixed, thanks!
1) Yes, you’re missing something. Ultra Boy was sent to the past with some sort of time-travel grenade given to Roxxas as an “anti-Daxamite weapon” (because you can’t kill someone invulnerable, so to defeat them, you send them far away). His travels were in the hopes of finding a way to get home, (hence from Khundia to Rimbor, but Rimbor at that time was unpopulated) and after realizing he couldn’t do that, at least to be among other human beings (hence Rimbor to Earth). He doesn’t just “happen to find a Lord of Chaos”, the Lord of Chaos detects that he’s a time traveler and she approaches him. He didn’t lose a child. The consequence was that, despite her not being who she said she was, or genuinely in love with him, his interaction with her was therapeutic to him and enabled him to properly get closure from his loss of Tinya.
2) The Legionnaires in the Superman issue had access to a spaceship capable of interstellar travel, that’s how they escaped.
We do see them narrowly escaping in the next-to-last story page of AoS #478, so I suppose you are right. I just don’t think it was well handled in that issue. The Linear Man talks to Superman in the same panel where we still see the Legionnaires still outside their ship.
I kept expecting at least one of the five to react in some way, but apparently they were entirely oblivious to the presence of Linear Man and went on to board the ship and operate it just in time to avoid the worst of the blast.
Still odd that there isn’t at least an on-panel mention of Dev-Em by Violet, Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad or Laurel. They probably lack the means to deduce what exactly happened, but they have to be wondering how come it did. And we would expect that they would at the very least tell Chameleon Boy that they met Superman and that they also tried and apparently failed to avoid the destruction. But no.
From what we see in the pages, Chameleon has no clue that any current or former Legionnaires were at the scene, nor do “Anton” and “Jonn”, despite both parties having apparently and independently having obtained some Superman footage. I assume that “Anton” is Ambassador Anton Relnic, and Jonn is apparently the “King of the United Planets”.
The refusal to have the Legionnaires speaking on panel about their meeting with Superman can only be explained by awareness (and guessing) of the editorial reality of the time. The more I think about it, the more certain I become that it is the result of schedule uncertainties. The LSH editorial office chose deliberately to refer to the meeting with Superman in the vaguest ways conceivable, and it shows.
The two editorial offices just weren’t communicating effectively enough to truly reference each other’s story, so Dev-Em is reintroduced and the destruction of the Moon occurs in a Superman book, possibly even at the request of LSH editorial, and the LSH stories deal with the consequences while happily avoiding any kn0wledge of the specifics.
Would it be so hard to write it so that sun boy had got into that state protecting people and being a hero? It’s baffling how out of the way they go to be obtuse. He was further away but the radiation effected his powers somehow. Not, he tried to stop the blast but could only contain it within himself. Same depressing outcome but a little bit actual tragedy.
Wow, harsh. (To be expected, I guess.) Aside from the very valid criticism of the fact that there’s no reference in the Legion book to tell readers they needed a Superman book to understand what happened, much of what you take issue with in this article doesn’t quite fit what actually happened in the books:
1) I can’t believe that you feel that all of that “destruction porn” is “not selling the fact that the moon blew up.” They are spending half an issue showing Earth dealing with a rain of lunar debris! How could they have sold it more? When the moon is not around, everyone on panel should be saying “Where is the moon?”?
2) Obviously, Dominators, or at least their rank and file soldiers, have their own sense of honor (as do the Khunds, as we saw in issues 15-17). They might not regard other (to them, “lower”) species as worthy of honorable treatment, but they have their own ethics to adhere to.
3) Yes, they split issue # 19 into two distinct stories, the first one ending with the destruction of powerspheres worldwide (incidentally, I loved how globally distributed the list of cities were. American comics tend to often be way too America-centric, but for an interplanetary group like the Legion, that would be a mistake. Fortunately, Legion writers tend to realize this). And then the wrapup of the ongoing Jo lost in time story. What’s so bad about that? Subplots need to be addressed, otherwise you get Claremont X-Men problems. Also, Jo’s path to emotional closure made for an uplifting (to some of us, at least) counterpoint to the tragedies of the first half of the book.
4) “Random woman finds Ultra Boy”? As eventually revealed, she wasn’t random, and she was emotionally manipulating him. He didn’t have a child, either; their goat did. She claimed to be pregnant, but I would imagine that was a lie, though I don’t know, maybe Lords of Chaos and humans can breed?
5) Sorry to harp on a typo, but I believe you meant Sun Boy, not Ultra Boy in the “humiliation conga”.
6) There ARE super-heroes doing stuff to help – Jacques and the Subs are running a resistance movement on Earth, and the active Legion is covertly working with him. But because Earthgov is outwardly rejecting the UP and accepting the Dominators, overt actions are restrained by politics. But they’re certainly there.
7) Again, you make it sound like the billions dead haven’t been “dealt with” when they devoted half of the prior issue to it, as well as the first several pages of this one. No, there haven’t been mourning ceremonies or anything, but we’ve been seeing the reaction of the UP diplomats, the SPs on Earth and others. The Legionnaires who aren’t covertly on Earth do need to do something with their time. And since you don’t like depressing comics, why do you have such an issue with the insertion of lighter moments, like Kono’s pranks or the Vi-Ayla leg banter?
8) Vi was not “right there” when the Linear Man blew up the moon. The Legion had stopped Dev-Em. Then they left, in an interstellar spaceship. Quite frankly, the fact that she changed her leg is actually a nice bit of memory. In issue # 18, she snuck onto Medicus One to have Gym’ll look at her mechanical leg because it bothered her. That’s why she was so near Earth in the Superman issue. And immediately following, we see that she dealt with the itchy mechanical leg problem.
Very minor note of amusement: In one of the text boxes from issue 19, the speaker mentions reports from Sri Lanka. Back in Adventure Comics # 346-347, the Legion needed to protect three electro-towers, one of which was in Ceylon – the old name for Sri Lanka. Names used at the time of writing in the 20th century changed over those few decades, but are assumed by the respective writers to remain the same for 1000 years.
Kudos for trying, but the cities list has at least two significant mistakes. Assuming, of course, that city names won’t change in 1004 years, which is not the best bet…
“Addis Adaba” is probably meant to read “Addis Ababa”, capital of Ethiopia.
And while there are at least two cities named “Bahia”, given the comparative population levels this entry probably was meant to read “Salvador”, which is the capital of the Brazilian state named “Bahia”, which happens to have a surface area as big as those of California or France.
Of course, in a list as varied and as big as this, mistakes are difficult to avoid.
This is the EARTH being destroyed. Utterly. Completely. This is UNPRECEDENTED in the Legion’s history! The destruction scenes are fantastic, but you can’t stop yourself to that! You CAN’T switch to Ultra Boy while in the middle of a crisis this magnitude, period!
Man, this is about PRIORITIES: Your homeworld’s been destroyed by an event that is second on a scale after THEIA -and back then, Earth was uninhabitated! Now we are facing extinction. You know what happened with ONE big asteroid hitting our planet? Dinosaurs? Well, 2,000 times that and you should get the idea, eh?
Where was the polymeric shield to protect Earth, at least partially?
And, on top of that, are they KIDDING? You cannot carry on your effing war, you just call everybody able back home, now, pronto, presto, chop chop! Earth, your HOMEWORLD, needs HELP!
This is so major that everything changes, forever!
“I can’t get invested in the individual shenanigans of the Legionnaires, or even in a tragic battle of their past, if they continuously ignore the apocalyptic events surrounding them.”
This reminds me of something I’ve seen a few times, and never really liked, where the superheroes do both at once. I recall at least one splash page with a couple of heroes in combat with multiple enemies, and the speech balloons are full of them talking about their relationship.
I’ve been following CA for a long while and love revisiting the Legion with you. I count myself as a fan of the 5YL era, and have done a few re-reads of it throughout the years. (At this point, I primarily view it as an ocean of ambitious, mostly-unrealized potential.)
And after all this time… somehow, I never knew the moon blew up in a Superman comic before it blew up in LSH, hahahaha.