Legion Clubhouse #176: MANHUNTERS!

Hey, folks,

Nice episode. I thought I’d give you a few notes on this for some context:

You kept saying that Laurel Kent doesn’t exist because Superboy’s gone. Laurel could still have been a descendant of the post-Crisis Superman. Easy answer.

I think what’s more messed up, continuity-wise, is that it’s well-established that by the 30th century, the Guardians of the Universe have already returned (cf. Universo). We’ve seen them. So why didn’t Laurel figure out that something must have happened already with the whole New Guardians thing?

The arc took two issues because Millennium ran eight weekly issues (two months), and every book had to tie in with Millennium for those two months. I recall that Adventures of Superman had a weird offshoot standalone story for the second month of the Millennium event. So yeah, this story could’ve been a single issue, but then Levitz would’ve had to come up with something else to do in the second month. I think it was just a bad idea from the start to make the LSH book part of a crossover firmly set in the 20th century.

The Guardians of the Universe and the Guardians of the Galaxy are nothing like each other, but I can see someone trying to draw a parallel with the New Guardians. The thing is, though, even they aren’t that much alike. Probably the closest you can get to a parallel would be the 21st-century Guardians of the Galaxy via their MCU origin (which comes a couple of decades later, so who’s stealing from whom?). Even that isn’t much of a parallel because the New Guardians receive their power from the Oans and Zamarons. It’s a trope that isn’t new at this point in comics history for either company.

The use of Manhunter sleeper agents wasn’t consistent across Millennium, which, IMO, is part of the problem we’re seeing here. Characters like Lana Lang were sleeper agents who didn’t even know they were sleeper agents, while Rudolph West knew it all along. It’s very confusing.

The Manhunters appeared a few times in the Bronze Age, mainly in flashbacks to the creation of the Green Lantern Corps. The Manhunters were front and center in a JLA story that introduced Mark Shaw as a new Manhunter in the mid-1970s, roughly ten years before Millennium, and Crisis on Infinite Earths shows them in a flashback (another recapping of the Guardians’ origin). So they were still lurking in the background (ha!) in the post-Crisis DCU.

It also raises another point: If Levitz hadn’t already had plans for Eclipso, maybe he would’ve been the better choice for being a Manhunter, recruited perhaps by the last Manhunter android (who wouldn’t have been Laurel).

As for who’s more of a continuity mess, I’d say Hawkman over Mon-El. Mon-El’s involvement with the past was minimal, and Levitz’s Superboy retcon included the Time Trapper saying (somewhere) that they had shunted Mon-El to the Pocket Universe in the first place for him to end up in the Phantom Zone. Hawkman, however, became a colossal snafu when the DC editorial decided to reboot Hawkman well after the Crisis by placing Hawkworld in the “present” instead of being the flashback series that Tim Truman had meant it to be (or so I’ve heard).

Thanks again for this episode. LLL!