Pocket Universe Primer

In January 2973,¹ three teenagers from different worlds — Rokk Krinn of Braal, Garth Ranzz of Winath, and Imra Ardeen of Saturn’s moon Titan — met on an interstellar flight to Earth. On disembarking from the passenger liner at Metropolis Spaceport, Imra (who, like most natives of Titan, was a formidable telepath) detected an imminent assassination attempt on another passenger, billionaire industrialist R.J. Brande, one of the galaxy’s richest men. Reacting to Imra’s cry of alarm, Rokk and Garth responded, Rokk with his innate, Braalian power of magnetic control and Garth with his recently acquired ability to throw bolts of lightning. Together, they saved Brande’s life and subdued the would-be assassins, who were promptly arrested.

Before the three young people could go their separate ways, Brande made them an offer. He was impressed by their resourcefulness and power and felt that with the proper guidance and support they could be a formidable force for good. Brande was an aficionado of the great heroic age of the 20th century, and he saw in the three super-powered teenagers an opportunity to launch a new era of heroes. He told them of the life of Superman, history’s greatest hero, who had become a legend while still only a teenager — Superboy.

Inspired by the chance to emulate the legendary hero, Rokk, Garth, and Imra agreed to Brande’s proposal. Outfitted with equipment, a headquarters, and costumes, they took the names Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl and became the first members of the Legion of Super-Heroes (Superboy #147, Secret Origins vol. 2 #25). They later were officially deputized by the Science Police (DC Super-Stars #17 and Secret Origins vol. 2 #25) and authorized to act as law enforcement agents throughout the United Planets.

They were the first, but they would by no means be the last. In short order they were joined by other super-powered teenagers: Triplicate Girl (Luornu Durgo of Carggg), Phantom Girl (Tinya Wazzo of the other-dimensional world of Bgztl), Chameleon Boy (Reep Daggle, a shape-changer from the planet Durla), Invisible Kid (Lyle Norg of Earth), Colossal Boy (Gim Allon of Earth), Brainiac Five (Querl Dox of the planet Colu), Ultra Boy (Jo Nah of Rimbor), Star Boy (Thom Kallor of Xanthu), Shrinking Violet (Salu Digby of the planet Imsk), Sun Boy (Dirk Morgna of Earth), Bouncing Boy (Chuck Taine of Earth), and many others. In later years, the Legion would swell to more than two dozen members, although for legal reasons, they were limited to no more than 25 active members. Per the Legion’s constitution, each member was no more than eighteen years old when they joined and possessed at least one unique super-power.

In December 2973, the Legionnaires traveled back in time to meet their heroic inspiration: Superboy himself. Using a Time Bubble, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl journeyed back to the town of Smallville in the middle years of the 20th century, where they sought out the Boy of Steel in his guise as Clark Kent. They revealed their origins and took Superboy with them back to the 30th century where, after a brief hazing, they inducted him into their ranks (Adventure Comics #247).

In January 2975, the Legion inducted Superboy’s friend Mon-El. Mon-El was space explorer Lar Gand of the planet Daxam, a world whose natives gained powers like Superman’s away from their world’s red sun and heavy gravity. He was given the name Mon-El by Superboy, who encountered Lar while he was stricken with amnesia and came to the erroneous conclusion that he was from Krypton. During his stay in Smallville, Mon-El became deathly ill from exposure to lead, an element lethal to Daxamites. In order to save his friend’s life, Superboy was forced to send Mon-El into the Phantom Zone (Superboy #89), where he remained for more than a thousand years, able to see the world but not to touch it. Finally, in the 30th century, Brainiac Five used his scientific genius to devise a serum that would protect Mon-El from lead poisoning and allow him to maintain his powers even under a red sun. He emerged from the Zone permanently and became a Legionnaire (Adventure Comics #305).

Over the next decade, Superboy & the Legion shared adventures on many occasions. Thanks to his vast powers, Superboy could travel through time to join the Legion in battling foes like Universo, Dr. Regulus, the Dark Circle, and eventually a resurrected Darkseid. He became close friends with many of the Legionnaires, who were the first true peers the Boy of Steel ever had.

For their part, while they loved and respected Superboy, the Legionnaires often held him at arm’s length. As much as they liked him personally, from their perspective, his destiny was written. The day that he would eventually leave active membership, the tragic fate of his adoptive parents, his career as Superman, and his eventual death all were matters of historical record. Superboy was their friend, but he was history.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

The true history of the Legion of Super-Heroes begins not in the 30th century, but countless millions of years in the future, at the end of time. There, on the barren husk of what was once the planet Earth, amid the ruins of unknown numbers of civilizations, stands a foreboding citadel manned by a contingent of beings snatched from throughout history to serve their master: the lord of entropy — the Time Trapper. A being of almost unimaginable power, his features (if any) completely hidden by his hooded robe, the Trapper is the incarnation of decay, the embodiment of death; not simply human death, but the death of history itself. From his citadel at the End of Time, the Trapper plays an inscrutable and deadly chess game with time, maneuvering for control over the populated eras of history while waiting patiently for all of creation to fall into his hands.

The Time Trapper was one of the Legion’s deadliest foes, vastly powerful and virtually unassailable. After an encounter with the young Legionnaires in 2975, he retreated to the distant future and erected the “Iron Curtain of Time,” a barrier that prevented the Legion from seeing or traveling into the future (Adventure Comics #318). However, the Trapper periodically returned to the 30th century to carry out new schemes aimed at stymieing or destroying his persistent mortal enemies.

In 2982, the Legion unmasked the Trapper and discovered him to be a Controller (All-New Collectors’ Edition C-55), one of a group of powerful extradimensional beings who split off millions of years ago from the Guardians of the Universe to pursue their own ruthless battle against evil. (The Legion had encountered the Controllers before; in 2978, the Legion battled the Sun-Eater, an enormous space-going monster created by the Controllers, which nearly laid waste to the galaxy before it was destroyed through the heroic sacrifice of Legionnaire Ferro Lad (Adventure Comics #353).) About a year later, with considerable effort, the Legion managed to overpower the Trapper and delivered him to the prison planet Takron-Galtos (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 #282). Months later the Trapper, a pathetic shell of his former self, was drained of most of his power by the resurrected Darkseid (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 #291). In 2986, when Takron-Galtos was destroyed by a wave of anti-matter during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Trapper disappeared, presumed to have perished (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 #18).

In fact, he did not die, but was instead returned to the End of Time, where he was disciplined for his failure by his master — the real Time Trapper, who had enslaved the virtually omnipotent Controller and used him as a proxy (Legionnaires 3 #1). Ultimately no one, not even the Legion, was immune to the Trapper’s manipulations, as the three founding Legionnaires — Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl — shortly learned when they were captured by the Trapper’s minions and put through a gauntlet intended to drive them mad (Legionnaires 3 #2–4). However, even then they did not realize the true extent to which the Trapper had manipulated them.

The true architect of the Legion was not R.J. Brande, nor Superboy, nor the three founding members, but the Time Trapper himself.

From his citadel at the End of Time, the Trapper aspired to conquer all of history. With his vast power, most of his mortal opponents could only present a momentary inconvenience; his only true obstacles were beings of his own level. The single greatest threat to his domination was Mordru, an ambitious sorcerer from Zerox, the Sorcerer’s World. Mordru was born in the 20th century, when the Sorcerer’s World resided in another dimension and was known as the Gemworld (Amethyst vol. 3 #1–4)). By the late 30th century, he was probably the most powerful human mage who would ever live and he had his own plans for universal conquest. His power was such that even the Time Trapper could not hope to achieve anything better than a stalemate in a direct confrontation. Nor was Mordru vulnerable to mortal frailties (except for a purely irrational terror of being buried alive, a long-term after-effect of his imprisonment between the 20th and 30th centuries), so he would not succumb to old age as would other human foes. To oppose Mordru would require changing the odds.

So the Trapper devised a new scheme: He would create a third force to oppose Mordru, one that could not easily be connected to him (sparing him a direct confrontation with the sorcerer), but that could tip the balance of power in his favor. His solution was a society of powerful young heroes — the Legion of Super-Heroes.

He laid out the pieces with great care. There were various significant pieces, of course, like the nameless Durlan shapeshifter who would become R.J. Brande, the Legion’s organizer and financier.² The most crucial, however, the center point on which the structure would be built, was the Legion’s heroic inspiration: Superboy.

Looking through time, the Trapper saw that there was no real Superboy; Superman did not attain his full power until he was an adult, and while there were other teen superheroes, none ever achieved truly lasting fame. Undeterred, the Trapper created his own. First, by means known only to himself, he stole an instant of time, a fourth-dimensional “slice” of the universe from early in its existence. He then carefully nurtured this microcosm of the universe, ensuring that the course of its history would suit his needs. He wiped out all other inhabited worlds except Earth and Krypton and manipulated the histories of both those worlds to bring about the creation of his Superboy, a Kryptonian survivor who went on to become Earth’s greatest champion while still only a teenager.³

By unknown means, the Trapper linked the past of his private “pocket universe” to the history of the 30th century. In the years to come, when the residents of that age looked back through their Time Viewer or traveled back in time — with two sole exceptions⁴ — they saw not the “real” past, but the Trapper’s manufactured history. This had the additional benefit of limiting the meddling of mortals in the timestream, where they might interfere or interrupt the Trapper’s manipulations. Only Superboy had the power to travel unassisted between his world and the real universe.⁵

A finishing touch to the Trapper’s creation was the diversion of a Daxamite space explorer from the real universe into the Pocket Universe, where he encountered Superboy and later joined the Legion after a thousand years in the formless void of the Phantom Zone. The Trapper had special plans for this “Mon-El.”

With all the groundwork laid, the Trapper’s plan came to fruition. The nameless Durlan-turned-billionaire, inspired by a false history, organized a group of heroes in homage to a boy who had never truly existed. When those heroes traveled back in time, they met their “Boy of Steel” and became his friend, with none of them, least of all Superboy himself, suspecting the truth.

In subsequent years, Legion succeeded beyond the Trapper’s wildest dreams, vanquishing or crippling not just the sorcerer Mordru but other major powers like the Dark Circle, the Khundian Empire, and Darkseid himself. All along, none of them had the slightest idea how they had been manipulated.

Part Two: The Greatest Hero of Them All…

Footnotes

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