Time Beacons 9: The Origin of the Universe File

Today’s story comes from Legion of Super-Heroes (v2) #295. I wasn’t planning on covering this story originally, but it turns out it’s very important! So I’m glad I caught that in time.

LSH #295 is called “The Origin of the Universe File”. It follows directly on last month’s story, the Great Darkness Saga. In the wake of Darkseid’s attack on everything, longtime Legionnaire Light Lass decides to quit the team, and has invited her boyfriend Timber Wolf to join her. He is conflicted, and goes to his friend Blok for advice. Blok, a newer Legionnaire, spends a lot of time catching up on Legion history by watching old holo-videos from the Legion’s archive, and suggests that Timber Wolf watch one of them with him. It’s the contents of this video that are of interest to us from a time-travel point of view.

The story Blok shows Timber Wolf is one from the Legion’s earliest days. (It’s a newly written story, you understand; this isn’t a reprint issue with a framing device.) A team of five Legionnaires (Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Colossal Boy, and Triplicate Girl) are flying to the Time Institute to help out with a fire.

This is the first point of interest. The Time Institute is a 30^th-century institution where the scientists study, you guessed it, time. And time travel, and related topics. This is its first appearance. We’re going to be seeing much, much more of it; it’s one of writer Paul Levitz’s most useful contributions to the Legion mythos.

Also introduced in this issue is the proprietor of the Time Institute is this gentleman, the Chronarch, Circadia Senius, and, yes, he looks like a big cockroach man. Don’t be fooled; he’s a totally solid dude and one of the Legion’s top supporting characters; he’s also going to be back frequently. As for his physiology… on the one hand, it’s nice anytime the Legion writers give us characters who aren’t just regular humanoids; Levitz and artist Keith Giffen are particularly reliable in this area. (Although the flashback sequence is guest-drawn by veteran artist Howard Bender.) On the other hand, I’ve sometimes thought that the Chronarch’s resemblance to a cockroach is actually significant given his position as head of the time institute… but that’s something we won’t get to for a long time.

The Legionnaires handle the fire with little trouble, but more worrying is what Circadia Senius says about what caused it. Seems he and his people were trying to look at the beginning of time, and got as far back as the giant hand cradling the galaxy, when a lightning bolt from nowhere struck their time viewer, destroying it and starting the fire. Nobody knows what that’s all about, so the Legionnaires are called to be on hand again when Circadia Senius repeats the experiment.

It proceeds in the same way. The time viewer shows the giant hand and the galaxy, and they try to look further back, and the lightning bolt strikes… but this time Lightning Lad absorbs the energy. They can’t capitalize on it, though, because, immediately, an image of one of the Guardians of the Universe appears, bawls them out, and transports the entire Institute into space, with the Chronarch and the Legionnaires inside.

The Legion tries to regain some kind of control of the situation, but they’re forestalled by the arrival of three Green Lanterns. The Green Lanterns (a Durlan woman, a Xudarian man named Galte-Re, and a human named Vidar) intend to destroy the Time Institute completely, to protect the secret of the origin of the universe, on behalf of their bosses the Guardians. The Legionnaires fight back, though, and are holding their own when Saturn Girl appeals telepathically to the Guardians on Oa for some kind of hearing to resolve the situation. The Guardians agree and teleports them all to Oa.

On Oa, the Guardians tell the Legionnaires and Circadia Senius about their own experiences with the origin of the universe: long ago, one of their number named Krona tried to view it himself, and was likewise struck down, and after this, evil was for the first time unleashed into the universe. So the lightning bolt wasn’t from the Guardians; it’s some kind of cosmic failsafe that nobody should try to circumvent. The Guardians themselves don’t know.

Now, this material is something we’ve touched on before. But it’s good to bring in an examination of the Krona story and its implications at this point, because it’s something DC was going to emphasize in the next couple of years, resulting in some consequences for the Legion that were of the most drastic nature, and continue to affect Legion comics today; we’re going to be spending a lot of time teasing that out.

The upshot of all this is that the Guardians are happy to have the Green Lanterns return the Time Institute to Earth, and Circadia Senius can resume his research into time, but it has to be with the constraint that he not try to dig into the origin of the universe anymore. Anything else but that.

The Green Lanterns put the Time Institute back and fix it up, and two of them depart, leaving Vidar, who seems to be the Green Lantern for Earth’s sector, and who seems intrigued by the new possibilities of the Institute. Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy depart in the Time Bubble to try to recruit Superboy and Supergirl for the Legion (which helps us fit this story into the Legion’s own chronology), but Vidar sabotages their trip and summons a bunch of weird distracting monsters.

(A note on the chronology I just mentioned. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Legion fans spent a lot of time poring over the early history of the Legion, trying to figure out how to put the stories in the order that made the most sense. What they came up with didn’t match publication order. So, the first story we looked at, in which the Legion travels back in time to invite Superboy to visit the future and join their club, occurs some time after the Legion’s creation, and after Phantom Girl, Triplicate Girl, Chameleon Boy, Invisible Kid, and Colossal Boy joined, even though we don’t see them in that story. Paul Levitz, who had a background in organized comics fandom, accepted this chronology as valid and his writing reflected that.)

The Legionnaires polish off the monsters and catch Vidar trying to view the beginning of time, counting on his Green Lantern ring to be able to deal with the cosmic bolt. They fight him and win pretty easily, and the Guardians show up to take him into custody. We learn that the government of Earth has reacted to all this and by decreeing that Green Lanterns are no longer allowed on Earth. (Which was something that Legion fans had been wondering about for a while. Green Lanterns still exist in the 30^th century, right? So why don’t we ever see them?)

The resolution of this story starts the wheels turning in Timber Wolf’s head, and he realizes that he must stay with the Legion, just as Light Lass must leave it. They say goodbye, sadly. Meanwhile, Blok realizes that the name “Vidar” is familiar to him: it’s the last name of the Legion’s friend Rond Vidar, who’s a time-travel expert in his own right, but is also the son of the supervillain Universo. Universo’s gimmick was hypnotism and mental domination, but he has long had an interest in time travel himself, and, sure enough, he bears a striking resemblance to the Vidar in the holo-file.

So that was unusually fruitful for a story that was largely a cool-off lap after a major epic: we get the origin of the universe recapped, we get some information on Universo’s background, we learn about where all the Green Lanterns are these days, and we are introduced to the Time Institute and its Chronarch.  Speaking of Circadia Senius, I hope you liked him, because he’s a key character in the next story we’re doing…