Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Mon-El confusion!

Can someone help me?!

This Mon-El business is really confusing me. I bought his run in Superman but I think I must have missed some issues. It doesn't make sense to me!

Can someone tell me;

1) Why did the Phantom Zone implode in the first place?

2) How has Mon-El ended up back in the Phantom Zone at the end of War of the Supermen??

3) Has there been any explanation as to why he's had to spend 1000 years in the Phantom Zone before joining the Legion? This bit of his origin never really made sense to me - it just seemed like Superman wasn't trying very hard. Has it been straightened out of tweaked this time?

I would like for this 1000 years in the Zone thing to eventually be soft-retconned into his having been extracted at various times, and spent entire lifetimes out of the Zone, but had his memory erased before being sent back in.

His memories of the time in the Zone have always been messed-up, and this would be a fun way of having that cake and eating it too.

"Okay, time to get you back into the Zone in time for the Legion to 'rescue' you! You'll forget your adventures with us, but we'll never forget you!"

Who are these mysterious strangers who pluck Mon-El out of the Zone and put him back in time to be 'rescued?' Who knows. We haven't met them yet. Or have we? Perhaps they are teenagers from the 41st century, come back to find a powerful ally who their own historical records indicate was 'available' at the time...

I just picked up that issue of Adventure yesterday. I opted for not bothering to try and make sense of it and just liking that Chang draws pretty guys. Except that Cham's eyebrows are ridiculous, but...



At least Mon gets his old costume back, which must make all the hardcore traditionalists happy.

1 it was destroyed by Zod off-panel with no explanation of how he did it.

2 Mon-El wasn't really in War of the Supermen. During the Last Stand of New Krypton, he and the Legionnaires rescued all the bottles cities and flew off to enlarge them on the appropriate planets. Having finished his task and on the verge of death, Chameleon Boy put him back in the (recreated off-panel) Phantom Zone.(Adventure 514)

3 He had to spend 1000 years in the Zone because that's what happened. At the end of Adv 514 he is shown coming out of the Zone in the Legion's time. I agre it is a tough sentence but otherwise it would be a time paradox. Legion meet Mon-El so bring back permanent serum so Mon-El doesn't spend 1000 years in the Zone... so the Legion don't meet him so don't bring back the serum... so he does spend 100 years in the Zone... and on to infinity.

When Superman freed Mon-El a year or so ago, there was recognition by Superman that the Legion had a cure for the lead poisoning so it implies that once Superboy met Mon-El in the 30th/31st century, he knew he wasn't going to free him.

If the Legion wanted to, they could travel back to the 21st century, free Mon-El, then go 990 or so years in the future to just before they were supposed to free him, and put him back. Then tell him to pretend he was in the zone for 1000 years. This wouldn't change history much at all.

They could even mess with his memory, so that he didn't have to pretend.

And it doesn't have to be the Legion. Pretty much any other group with access to Zone technology could do this. Mon-El could end up working with the R.E.B.E.L.S. for a couple of decades, so long as his adventures with them didn't make it into the history books, and it wouldn't affect things at all.

His 'thousand years in the Zone' is carte blanche for him to have a thousand years of adventures that we've never heard of...

And it would make Superboy / the Legion look a lot less jerkish if they ended up with some knowledge of this, to explain why Kal-El waited a thousand years before doing anything about the situation.

A fun soft retcon might also be that the cure for lead poisoning required a long time to work, that Brainiac 5 introduced it to Mon-El back in the recent 21st century adventures, and that it has spent ten centuries 'brewing' in his body, and finally, by the 30th century, was strong enough that he could get a final booster and stay out of the Zone for good.

It's been previously established that a 'side-effect' of the cure was being able to function under a red sun. (Which is just hella crazy. The side-effects of real cures are like 'nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, thoughts of suicide...' not like 'oh, also removes your *other* greatest weakness!') Perhaps Brainy went that extra mile and made a 'cure' that reconfigured Mon-El's entire body on a genetic/cellular level so that he's no longer susceptible to lead *and* can metabolize red solar energy, which required a bit more work, since it was rebuilding his entire body cell-by-cell.