Superman: Time and Time Again, part 2

Time and Time Again part 2
Legion of Substitute Podcasters episode 580

Action Comics 664: Time & Time Again, part 5 of 7 (on sale 3/5/91)

• Superman finds himself back in the age of dinosaurs. After several weeks he has grown a beard, and one day he meets Chronos, who was stranded there after a fight with Blue Beetle (Blue Beetle #22). Chronos theorizes that Superman may have absorbed exotic energies when he first went into the time vortex, and the energies are triggered by the release of an explosion. Chronos tries to use the time travel hardware in his suit with the energy stored in Superman to make a controlled time jump, but he tries to double-cross Superman. Superman destroys the equipment and is bounced forward in time to the time of the wooly mammoth. He recalls that a humanoid alien race lived at that time (as seen in Superman v2 #6), and finds their city just as they flee the planet. The resulting explosion from their spacecraft bounce him forward in time to Camelot.

Superman 55: Time & Time Again, part 6 of 7 (on sale 3/19/91)

• There’s a big battle at Camelot, with Merlin and Arthur’s forces on one side and the demonic forces of King Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fey on the other. She is preventing Merlin from summoning the Shining Knight, so Merlin calls on his own half-brother Etrigan the Demon. There’s a guy in black armor fighting for the demons, but Etrigan blasts the armor away and it’s Superman. When Morgan stopped Merlin from getting Shining Knight, Superman popped in, and she found and enchanted him. Merlin gives Superman some enchanted armor to fight on his side. Camelot is about to fall, so Merlin sends Etrigan out to take residence in the body of a human, who turns out to be Jason Blood. Superman disappears in a blast of magic as the castle falls.

Interlude: Who’s this Dev-Em guy, anyway?

• Silver Age: the Knave from Krypton – First appeared in ADV 287 in a Superboy story. Dev-Em is a Kryptonian juvenile delinquent who put himself into suspended animation to avoid Krypton’s destruction. He later arrived on 20th Century Earth and plagued Superboy, before traveling to the 30th century where he reformed and joined the Interstellar Counter-Intelligence Corps instead of taking the offer of Legion membership (ADV 320). 
• Bronze Age: ICIC operative - He was helpful during the Great Darkness Saga (LSH v2 294) and later in taking down the Dark Circle clones (LSH v2 322-325).
• Post-Crisis: According to his new entry in "Who's Who in the Legion" #1, in a history never seen before or since, he's David Emery from Titan, whose family emigrated from Titan to Earth because they didn't have normal telepathic powers. But upon adolescence, his mental powers kicked in and he turned himself into a Kryptonian and fed a phony backstory to the Legion. He refused to join the Legion for fear they'd find out.
• 5YL: insane Daxamite from the 20th century (as we’ll see in this issue)
• Post-Infinite Crisis: a renegade Kryptonian sentenced to the Phantom Zone for murder, attacks Superman but taken down by Mon-El (Action 851)
• DCEU: thousands of years in the past, he was put on trial for murder, but escaped and made his way to Earth on a Kryptonian scout ship. He killed everyone on board except for Kara Zor-El, but is killed as the ship crashes on Earth (prequel comic to “Man of Steel”). In the movie, a different Dev-Em was briefly seen as one of General Zod’s followers.
• Krypton (TV): a former commander in the Kryptonian army and ex-betrothed of Lyta-Zod

Adventures of Superman 478: Time & Time Again, part 7 of 7 (on sale 3/26/91)

• Timeline: We saw in LSH #17 that a newspaper dated 3/28/95 the story of the deaths of the Tornado Twins, then in issue #18 Valor and Shadow Lass took on the Dark Circle. The 2995 Sourcebook puts the end of this issue on 4/11/95.
• Page 1 – last time we saw a colony on the moon, it was during the wedding of Garth & Imra and the moon had been colonized by the Chinese.
• Page 3 panel 1 – Back in issue 6, we were given the following, in an Omnicom article on the Last Days of Daxam: “Little is known about the fate of the third great survivor of the 20th century, Dev-Em (the other two being Lar Gand and Glorith). He is known to have lived beyond the destruction of Daxam and has long been linked to the Interstellar Counter-Intelligence Corps, but no information on his whereabouts –“ and the article cuts off there.
• Page 3 panel 3 – Valor sent Dev-Em to the future, thus more or less replacing how Superboy sort of sent him to the future.
• Page 4 panel 1 – Rokk and Cham are in the Legion HQ on Talus
• Page 4 panel 3 – Back in LSH #3, we were told that Garth & Imra’s twins were due in April 2995.
• Page 6 panel 1 – Laurel knew the Pocket Universe Superboy, who Superman also met in the crossover with the Legion
• Page 10 – a quick recap of the Death of Superboy arc
• Page 11 panels 1-2 – here’s the rest of the origin of the 5YL Dev-Em: he got bored on Daxam, went to Earth, messed with Valor, contracted lead poisoning, and sent to the future to look for a cure (which is better than hanging around in the Phantom Zone for 1000 years), but sickness + time travel = insanity
• Page 14 – Operation Triple Strike has the Dominators ready to blow up the moon, that’s how they blackmailed Earthgov
• Page 18 – they stopped the explosion with 2 seconds to spare, just like James Bond. But all that exposition lasted way longer than 19 seconds.
• Page 19 – the Linear Man FINALLY explains what’s been going on with Superman, he’s been bouncing Superman from time to time to prevent him from changing history. 
• Page 20 – as it turns out, stopping the moon from exploding was NOT what Linear Man wanted, it was supposed to send Superman back to his own time. So since Imra stopped the timer, he’ll have to restart it…
• Page 21 – Superman is back in his own time, finally, and has an epilogue in Action 665 in one week.
• “Don’t miss the Legion of Super-Heroes #19 to find out how the event Superman just witnessed is affecting Earth in 2995!” – but you listeners will only have to wait one week to hear about it, instead of the two weeks you would have had originally to wait to read the issue.

Action Comics 665 (on sale 4/2/91)

• Superman makes it back home. He tells Lois he’s been gone for five months, while for her it’s only been hours. He relates what he’s seen and done, and tells her about how he saw the moon destroyed while he could do nothing about it. She tells him that for all his powers, he’s not God, he can’t do the impossible – “you did your best, you can’t expect to win every time.”

Note that the Time & Time Again reprint collection also includes Superman 61 and 73, featuring the Linear Men.

Next time: Where's the kaboom?