"Untitled"
Cover Date: February 1990
Writer: Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum
Artist: Keith Giffen (Pencils), Al Gordon (Inks)
Previously...
A ton of stuff, but the only story that really mattered was the one where the Legion fought the Time Trapper and killed him, but Mon-El got mortally wounded in the process. It's been five years since then.
Plot
On Talok VIII, Shadow Lass is still in mourning for Mon-El, her husband, and gets removed from her position as planetary protector as a result.
Mon-El, however, isn't quite dead, and rises from his grave to find Shadow Lass. The problem is that his body is hosting not only the essence of the Time Trapper, but also the essence of another guy, who we'll hear more about a bit later. The Time Trapper starts making some noise about this all being part of his plan.
Mon-El and Shadow Lass reunite, but he feels compelled to inform her of his possession problem/ They fly off to Colu to meet with Brainiac 5, who will presumably come up with some sort of science-y solution to their problem. Meanwhile, the spirit of the Time Trapper explains who the third voice is. It turns out it's from a guy named Eltro Gand, who was the descendant of Mon-El (just go with it, okay.) Anyway, in an earlier story, it was prophesied that Mon-El would die soon, so Eltro Gand showed up to save him. Of course, prophecy usually wins out, so in trying to prevent Mon-El's death, he accidentally caused it. So, as an act of contrition, he sacrificed his life-force to bring Mon-El back to life, but, as it turns out, that also ended up transplanting Eltro Gand's soul into Mon-El's body, which is the retcon for why Mon-El had been acting kind of erratically for the latter part of Paul Levitz's run.
Anyway, Brainiac 5 figures out how to get the essence of the Time Trapper out of Mon-El's body, but the Time Trapper decides it's time to step in, and manages to spirit Mon-El away to the Pocket Universe (I'll explain in a minute), while siccing Brainiac 5's erstwhile android assistant on Brainy and Shadow Lass.
In the Pocket Universe, the Time Trapper explains that what he really wants is to take full possession of Mon-El's immortal body, and the two start to fighting. Mon-El manages to eventually wear the Time Trapper down, so the villain decides to explain exactly what the fuck is going on. And here we go:
The Time Trapper, who is the personification of entropy and the ruler of the end of time, decided that he wanted to conquer some eras in history where people actually, you know, lived. But, looking back through time, he noticed that the 30th century was ruled by the wizard (and perennial Legion villain) Mordru. The Trapper knew he couldn't beat Mordru in a straight-up fight, so he decided on an insanely convoluted scheme. He wanted a team of super-heroes that would keep Mordru out of power, and then be swept aside by the Trapper himself. To that end, he created a Pocket Universe with its own Superboy that would inspire the creation of the Legion, and made sure that when the Legion traveled back in time, they always ended up in the Pocket Universe. He also put Mon-El in the Pocket Universe as a failsafe, so that the Trapper would have an invulnerable body to retreat into in case of emergency. Finally, he pulled R.J. Brande, the Legion's original financier, from the regular universe's 20th century. The upshot is that the Legion would not exist were it not for the Time Trapper's machinations.
But wait, there's one more catch. Because of the Time Trapper's relationship with time, if Mon-El kills him now, then the Trapper will retroactively cease to exist, erasing all of the things he's done, including the creation of the Legion and the prevention of Mordru's conquering the galaxy. Mon-El's reaction to this news? Well...
 | ||||
| "Better oblivion than retcon, motherfucker!" |
And that's the end of the issue.
Commentary
In case you're wondering, this wasn't actually a reboot. What happened was that Levitz had set up the Pocket Universe explanation to get around the fact that Superboy, who was crucial to most of the Legion's early stories, was no longer in the main continuity. It was a pretty good work-around, but after he left, the Superman editorial staff issued an edict that no Superman or Superman-related characters could appear in Legion stories anymore. Giffen and the Bierbaums had a choice between either never mentioning the vast majority of past Legion stories, since they contained the offending material, or rewriting continuity to remove all instances of Superboy and the Pocket Universe. They elected the latter.
So, this issue was the set-up for the next issue, where history is restored, but with several notable changes, starting a period known as the "Glorith continuity". Honestly, though, it was just a bad idea all over. Almost every single story had some sort of retcon in it, whether from which characters were in it to much more drastic changes. For example, in Legion of Super-Heroes (v3) #50, a group of Legionnaires traveled to the end of time to kill the Time Trapper for killing the Pocket Universe Superboy. In the revised continuity, a group of Legionnaires traveled to Glorith's home planet to get revenge on her for destroying Daxam. And these stories are supposed to occupy the same slot in the Legion's history.
Really, this was basically end of the first incarnation of the Legion. Once Giffen and company were forced to rewrite the continuity this heavily, things were never going to work right, because virtually every story was somehow different. Not that Giffen and the Bierbaums are blameless, since the Bierbaums, who had started the careers as two of the more prominent fans of the Legion, seemingly couldn't help themselves from retconning things for no particularly good reason. In this issue alone, they decided that Mon-El's character over the past five years or so of Legion comics hadn't been to their liking, so they decided he was acting oddly because he was possessed by Eltro Gand. And they did stuff like that every issue, culminating in the infamous issue where they decided, since the popular fan theory had been that Element Lad was gay, but had since been paired, in continuity with a female character, that they would retcon the woman into really being a man, which would somehow square things. Not coincidentally, shortly thereafter Paul Levitz ordered a hard reboot for the Legion's continuity.
