itsokimasenator

            So in this issue, we'd find out that Mon-El wasn't really dead back in that old story, he was very close to dead but not quite there yet.  So the device projected Eltro Gand's being into Mon-El's body and Eltro's personality took over, though what was left of Mon-El's surviving personality was kicking around in there too, relatively dormant as Eltro became the dominant personality. This, to us, fit in as a neat twist on why the well-adjusted Mon-El of the 1960s became the brooding, psychologically unstable Mon-El of the 1970s and 1980s.

            Toward the end of Paul Levitz's run on the Legion (#50, I think), they did a big story where some Legionnaires set out to destroy the Time Trapper. They succeeded, but Mon-El was killed in the process and Paul's run on the book ended with Mon-El dead and buried. Keith's idea for the story in #4 was that the Trapper had left a seed of himself in Mon-El and that seed would allow the Trapper to raise up Mon-El's body as the Trapper's new invulnerable vessel. So that was the story of #4, Mon-El is resurrected as the Trapper's unstoppable vessel and at that point we discover that Eltro Gand has been the dominant personality within Mon-El for many years, but this death and resurrection has shaken loose the original Mon-El personality and allowed it to re-assert itself.  I don't really recall how the issue was going to end, but I think the idea may have been for the original and very heroic Mon-El personality to finally take charge and destroy himself to stop the Time Trapper once and for all.  By the end of the issue, as I think it may have been planned, Mon-El would really be dead, essentially having committed suicide to make sure the Time Trapper was really dead this time as well.

            But after Keith and we had pencilled and scripted several pages of this issue, the edict about not using the Superman mythos hit. We talked it over with Keith and really didn't know what to do, but gave ourselves a few days to think about it.

            The next morning, Mary had to drive me to work for some reason, and on that roughly hourlong commute, the idea occurred to us. We were already working out a story in which we established that the Time Trapper had manipulated events to create the Legion (giving some purpose to his creations of the Pocket Universe and Superboy) and our next thought was:  What if destroying the Time Trapper would destroy all his creations and return the timeline to whatever universe the Time Trapper was working to avoid. We could address the need to change the timeline by having Mon-El destroy the Time Trapper in #4 and destroy with it the Legion timeline the Time Trapper had created with the inclusion of the Superboy mythos. Then we could spend #5 showing the result of no Time Trapper and how things would have turned out with none of the Time Trapper's changes in the timeline. By the end of that issue #5, characters in that timeline would find a way to reconfigure the timeline in an approximation of what the Time Trapper had done, with new pieces in place of the elements of the Superboy mythos that existed in the Time Trapper-influenced timeline. So in issue #6, we're suddenly back to the way things were, but with a few key changes in the timeline, including no more Superboy.

            Knowing what I know now and with the perspective and experience we've picked up since then, I doubt I'd have the courage to advocate trying something this complicated and ambitious (and controversial and impolitic for the DC of that era). But it was a hell of a great story and I'm glad we were dumb enough to go for it. For you folks who didn't like the result or thought it was too confusing, I understand your point of view. But I think the overall story was a great one and #5 is one of the best Legion issues ever. And I believe I'd think that if I were just a Legion fan reading that issue and uninvolved in its creation.

            In any event, Keith liked the idea and our editor Mark Waid liked it and it seemed to address our problems. What we never really focused on was what would happen to the then-current Superman continuity if Mon-El and Superboy retroactively never existed, and that turned out to be the downfall of the whole thing. The story worked great for the Legion's needs but created a problem with the Superman continuity and the Superman people had no interest in doing anything in their books to address it. Thus we ultimately had to include an epilogue scene in #13 in which we reveal that the Trapper still isn't quite dead and the Pocket Universe lives on because of necessary events in the 20th century, without which the new timeline would unravel. It was a compromise that seemed to satisfy everyone, and certainly created enough confusion to befuddle those who were trying to attack and pick apart our storyline.

            But as complicated as the original story was, I always felt like it had an integral simplicity to it -- The Time Trapper creates the Pocket Universe, Superboy and other events to create the Legion and stop Mordru from conquering the universe...The Trapper is destroyed, his machinations go away and the original timeline, with Mordru conquering the universe, re-asserts itself...Glorith is granted the Time Trapper's powers, she recreates the Trapper's machinations with Valor in place of Superboy and a close approximation of the Time Trapper's timeline re-asserts itself. That seems like a strong, straighforward concept that isn't that hard to understand. But add in that the Pocket Universe remained necessary and so it was kept around to preserve some events in the 20th century, and there's a certain loss of symmetry and elegance. But I suppose as compromises go, this wasn't a terrible one.

            So with all of that as preamble, let's go through Legion #4.

            The cover (a battered Mon-El cracking his knuckles in preparation for a real knock-down, drag-out fight) is interesting because Keith essentially had to draw it twice. He'd done a lot of work on the first version, but that work was destroyed because he had his neighbor posing for the cover, showing Keith how it looks to have someone cracking their knuckles. When the neighbor reached up to assume that position, he knocked over a bottle of ink and ruined Keith's first version of the cover.

            In a separate snafu, to our dismay, all of the captions from the top row of panels on page five somehow got left out. I believe we were supposed to get some technical medical discussion of the Validus Plague that had forced one of the Ranzz twins to be sent off to the planet Quarantine.

            As was the case with #2 and #3, upon re-reading this issue 15 years after the fact, I was surprised at how ridiculously ambitious and complicated the issue was and yet how effectively we laid in the necessary background in the story itself, through the text pages and the "What Has Gone Before" box. Keith was really pretty savvy about how to tell a comic book story and always included a lot of room for explanation, and he always came up with interesting creative ways to tell those explanatory scenes.

            I think my favorite part of this issue is the depiction of Brainiac 5. Keith drew in some great faces and gave us the specific dialogue or at least a very good sense of how he saw Brainy reacting to everything. I liked this version of Brainiac 5 -- distracted, droll, maybe a touch arrogant and unfeeling but completely dedicated to fighting the good fight.

            I also liked the way Mon-El comes across, a real force of nature, a completely unstoppable force for good that is utterly 100% ethical. Shadow Lass probably didn't come across as well, she seemed pretty dwarfed by Mon-El. But I liked the sense of their relationship, their complete devotion to each other but even greater commitment to their duty as Legionnaires.

            Pretty amazing that we really only touched on three Legion characters in this issue when there was so much catching up to do in this universe. Certainly not the way a conventional comic book would have done it, but we were anything but a conventional comic book.

            I also love the white page at the end. I think Keith came up with that exact effect but I'm pretty sure I came up with the general strategy of having #4 and #5 end as those entire timelines unravel, leaving readers to wait until the next issue to see what emerges from the white-out. Of course, others quickly decided that once Keith and we had left the Legion, there'd be one more "white event." I remain pleased that our white events were carefully conceived to have a certain internal consistency and to preserve Legion history as closely as possible (while always keeping around the possibility of bringing back the original history completely intact -- once the restrictions on the Superman mythos were removed all we had to do was figure out a way to resurrect the Trapper and have his machinations re-assert themselves and all would be as it was).

            Instead, because readers supposedly couldn't deal with Valor replacing Superboy and Glorith replacing the Time Trapper, they got the complete elimination of the entire history. This is something that puzzles me about the modern comics readership, how many fans actively prefer to start a continuity over rather than deal with a continuity they don't like or that's difficult to fully master. They want both to know everything and not to work very hard to know it.  For my part, I always liked knowing there would always be more out there you could find and learn that would deepen your knowledge of the whole universe.  Obviously you need to have some general mastery of the concept to enjoy any given story that you're reading, but to me, all you ever really needed to know about the Legion was that it was set in the future and the Legionnaires were the good guys trying to stop the bad guys.