Paneling: Adventure Comics #353

Yesterday, the comics community was rocked by the news of the passing of writer-editor and former Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter.

Saying that Shooter’s legacy is complicated is a bit of a cop out, but ultimately, there’s no other way to describe it succintly.

I never met the man and only knew him through his work and through the often-contradictory stories told about him by the creators who worked with him, some who remembered him fondly, others who…didn’t.

However, there’s no denying that he had an impact on me through that work. I was, and remain, more of a DC fan, but I read plenty of Marvel comics during his tenure as EiC, including many comics that he wrote himself.

Of course, he also did a lot to shape the comics from DC that I loved during his earlier career as a writer there, writing the adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes while not much older than I was when I started regularly reading the stories of those future teens, and indeed while younger than those teenaged heroes.

When I heard the news of his passing yesterday, I shared the panel at the top of this post from Adventure Comics #353, the second part of a two-part adventure that ended with the death of a Legionnaire, a story written with more gravitas and emotional maturity than the average comic adventure of the time written by people much, much older than the teenage Shooter.

Maybe it’s my bias towards DC, but any mention of Shooter tends to make me think of the Legion before anything else. I’ve loved the Legion for a long time, and while most of the stories I’d read while I was young were written by others, much of what I loved was based on his work.

As I went back and read older stories collected in digest reprints, the stories by Shooter still had a currency that other stories I read in digests lacked. Some ideas were dated, but the stories didn’t feel as old-fashioned as, say, a Superman story from that same period did. I didn’t have to make as many allowances to enjoy young Shooter’s stories as I did for so many others.

With all that said, the panel I actually want to focus on isn’t the one above, but rather one that precedes it by a bit and leads up to this moment in which we see the young hero Ferro Lad preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

It’s a very simple panel that conveys so much and has managed to stick with me through the years.

To set things up: In the 30th Century, a menace known as the Sun-Eater, a giant space cloud that, as the name implies, eats suns, is headed towards our solar system.

The Legion of Super-Heroes, a group of super-powered teams from many different worlds which includes Superboy, who regularly visits from the 20th Century and had served as the team’s inspiration, is forced to work with a group of super-powered villains to attempt to destroy the Sun-Eater before it destroys Sol.

Despite their combined efforts, and even with an artificial boost to their abilities, the hero-villain team is unable to stop the Sun-Eater. However, the villainous genius Tharok has created a bomb that can destroy it…if someone can deliver the bomb to its core, as Tharok has not had time to create any sort of propulsion system.

Earlier, Ferro Lad, a mutant with the ability to turn his body to living iron, had discovered the Sun-Eater’s core, but had been unable to reach it and the Sun-Eater spat him out.

It’s clear that delivering the bomb is a one-way ticket, and, deciding that he’s the likeliest to make it there and possibly survive, Superboy volunteers.

And that leads us to the panel in question, the fourth panel on page 19.

This one has always stuck in my head because there’s just so much going on.

First, Ferro Lad is right. If Superboy were in any condition to deliver the bomb, there’s no way he would have been caught flat-footed like that.

Beyond that, like every member of the Legion, Ferro Lad holds Superboy in such high esteem that he couldn’t stand by and let the universe lose the Boy of Steel when there was a boy of iron who could do the job. Further, as an inhabitant of the future, Ferro Lad knows that Superboy can’t die here, as history tells him that Superboy goes on to become Superman, and it’s clear that in his current condition he very much will die if he attempts it.

And finally, there’s Ferro Lad’s need for redemption. His attempt at fighting the Sun-Eater earlier was the least effective, even though he was also the one who came closest to destroying it by finding its core.

The panel is emblematic of themes that would recur throughout so many creators’ runs on the Legion. The Legionnaires’ reverence for the hero who inspired the team’s formation. The willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice. The promise of second chances.

Maybe even more than the actual moment of sacrifice, this panel is a pivotal moment in Legion history, and for me it will always be an essential part of Jim Shooter’s legacy.