Analysis Notes
| General |
Throughout this series, the present day scenes feature
a group of kids being given a tour of Legion Headquarters. Never named
as such, they all wear the costumes of preboot Legion applicants. We will
refer to them by those codenames, with “Li’l” prepended:
Li’l Calamity King, Li’l Antenna Lad, Li’l Color Queen
(since that’s the name Color Kid was referred to by when under the
influence of Grandian Gender-Reversal Germs), Li’l Porcupine Pete,
Li’l Infectious Lass, and Li’l Night Girl, jointly referred
to here as the Li’l Subs. We might assume that these are supposed
to be the pre-applicant postboot versions of those characters except that
Night Girl has already been seen in two separate stories; unless this
is the same character in a different costume, this is not Night Girl. |
| The flashback origin of Ultra Boy occurs several years
before this story, probably a couple years before he joined the Legion. |
| Since it involves Ultra Boy, this mini-series must occur
after Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #100 (story #1), and since it
involves Umbra, it occurs before Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #100
(story #5). We will place it just before Legion of Super-Heroes
v4 #100 (story #5), to make things simplest when it comes to tracking
character appearances. |
| 1:1 |
Dialogue is from Chuck Taine. |
| Doro and Chuck can be identified from the dots here, but
there are only four dots for the other five Li’l Subs, so they are
not tracked in this panel. |
| 1:2 |
The preboot Calamity King’s real name (per the DC
Heroes role playing game sourcebook, but never named in the comics) was
E. Davis Ester. This is another indication that “Doro” is
not the real Calamity King. |
| It’s not clear what “greatest challenge”
Chuck is referring to. Since he mentions repairs, something to do with
Brainy’s labs is a good bet. |
| 1:3 |
This parklike area is on the back side of Legion Headquarters,
a view not typically seen. While we usually see buildings crowding behind
it, there could be a park space of sort between the HQ and the rest of
the city. Hamilton Park is seen in the city in The Legion #1; although
it would have been completely redone following the Blight invasion, we’ll
still dub this as the same park. |
| 1:4 |
Then again, maybe he is Calamity King. |
| 2 |
Notice the trading card featuring Chameleon. Also dropped
are a piece of candy, a Gameboy and a cartridge for it, and a ball of
some sort (a Pokéball, maybe?). |
| 4:3 |
In the preboot, Star Boy got his powers by flying through
the tail of a comet. We will see his postboot origin in Legends of
the Legion #4. |
| 4:4 |
This panel counts as dialogue for all the Li’l Subs. |
| 4:5 |
The back of the heads are Li’l Calamity King and
Li’l Night Girl. |
| 5:1 |
Blue captions throughout the origin flashback count as
dialogue for Ultra Boy. |
| None of the non-human characters in this scene are from
known races, despite superficial skin color similarities with some of
them. |
| They are presumably drinking Silverale here. |
| It’s interesting to note that Jo is not wearing the
Emerald Dragon gang symbol, here or in the rest of his origin. Of course,
no one else, including the Bone Spike gang members, are wearing symbols
either. Possibly this bar is a neutral territory where everyone is expected
to remove their symbols before entering. |
| 6:7 |
Why are you cross-eyed in this panel, Jo? |
| 7:3 |
The blonde girls are presumably Winathian. |
| 8 |
In the preboot, Jo’s origin had him taking a space
joyride rather than running from a gang. |
| 9 |
In the preboot, Jo was swallowed by an Ultra-Energy Beast
(or if you go by one of the trading cards very late in the preboot,
by
an Imskian Space Dragon). This Space Whale looks a lot like the preboot
Super Moby Dick of Space. |
| This scene has strong echoes of when the X-Men met the
spacefaring whale creatures, the Acanti. |
| 10:3 |
Most kids wouldn’t have supplies on board. Either
Jo is more responsible than average or a certain amount of supplies are
just standard issue on spacefaring gravcars like these. |
| 12:4 |
Notice that Jo’s boots apparently completely dissolved,
but his feet, while perhaps in pain, are not noticeably burnt. This implies
that, as with the preboot Ultra-Energy Beast, merely being inside the
Space Whale is having an effect on Jo (possibly because he is breathing
the atmosphere); the later eating of the meat just boosts that. |
| 12:5 |
Giving the Space Whale an ulcer there, Jo? |
| 14:3-4 |
Jo probably discovered his powers via wish fulfillment:
“Grife, I wish I didn’t have to walk through this muck.”
This may imply a mental block on his part which prevents him from using
his powers more than one at a time, and perhaps which limits him to the
half-dozen or so powers which he displays. Jo may be potentially much
more powerful than he thinks. |
| 14:5 |
The Space Whale is (only) the size of a couple Legion
HQs, per Jo’s comment upon being swallowed, so how much distance
can he be covering, even if he is travelling through the intestines and
such? The primary answer here is that, with the dim light (phosphorescence,
probably) and the unfamiliar setting, everything looks the same, so Jo
covers miles and miles, going in circles, never realizing he is covering
the same ground (er, meat) over and over again. A possible second explanation
would be some form of dimension warp or natural tesseract in the Space
Whale’s gullet, making it much larger on the inside than on the
outside. |
| 15:1 |
Did the shock of using the penetra-vision for the first
time knock Jo on his butt, or did turning that power on turn off his
flight, and he fell down as a result? |
| 15:4 |
Wonderful. “Seven stranded castaways, here on Space
Whale Isle!” And all of them color coded for easy recognition:
green, yellow, red, indigo, blue, orange, and purple. |
| 16:3 |
They missed a great chance for a thought balloon here: “And
did it make you all pale and three-fingered, too?” Who knows what
an extensive diet of Space Whale meat would do? |
| 16:4 |
The castaways/settlers all have whale-meat shoes. |
| 17:1-2 |
Don’t these castaways know they are supposed to
be hoping to be rescued, maybe building a raft or something? Or do they
just wait for guest stars to show up? |
| 18:3 |
The Space Whale probably eats every ten days, like a snake
or some such. Possibly it, like the Acanti, creates a natural space
warp for travelling between star systems, and a jump always takes about
ten
days, regardless of the stellar distances. (This would also explain
why they are so seldom seen, since they never stay in any system for
long.) |
| 20:3 |
This planet isn’t one which has been seen before. |
| 20:4 |
The satellite looks a little like Nomad from the Star
Trek episode “The Changeling”. |
| 21:1 |
Missing here is how Jo hooked up with Leland McCauley
and details about his costume (which differs here from any seen in early
WorkForce appearances) and codename. Even more than his Space Whale-oriented
origin, that would be the interesting story. |
| Seen here with Ultra Boy are Inferno, Spider Girl, Karate
Kid, and Live Wire. Evolvo was also a member of the WorkForce, but he
isn’t shown here. This
scene must occur between Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #64 and Legionnaires#21. |
| 21:2 |
The text in 21:3 implies that this scene occurs prior
to Jo and Tinya’s wedding, but this scene is most likely to have
occurred during Legion Day in Legion
of Super-Heroes v4 #100 (story #2). |
| 21:3 |
Since this panel mentions Jo and Tinya’s wedding,
we will assume it
comes from Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #96. |
| 22:1 |
The Li’l Subs here are Li’l Antenna Lad, Li’l
Infectious
Lass, Li’l Color Queen, and Li’l Porcupine Pete. |
| 22:7 |
This is a non-continuity appearance of Ultra Boy, but
it still is tracked. |
