An atmosphere of darkness, an overwhelmingly powerful villain, superheroes fleeing in panic — Jim Shooter’s Legion of Super-Heroes story for Adventure Comics 369 and 370 (June and July 1968) was about 20 years ahead of its time.
I remember being struck by it when I happened across it then, and I wasn’t alone.
“That remains, to me, one of the best LSH tales, a raw, riveting story by Jim Shooter that had the Legion’s two most powerful members, Superboy and Mon-El, running for their lives,” observed TwoMorrows editor Michael Eury.
No longer following the title closely then, my 14-year-old self recalled the Legion as a brightly futuristic teenage club. What th–? Shooter had turned all that on its head, with fascinating results that might have been termed “superhero noir.”
Mordru was introduced retroactively in a flashback to an exploit we’d never seen, one in which Mordru, a sort of interstellar Hitler, cowed the free worlds into accepting his planetary conquests.
“Setting himself up as a dictator of Zerox, this immortal sorcerer embarked on a mission to conquer the universe one world at a time,” noted Mike Conroy in 500 Comic Book Villains.
When Mordru attacked Earth as a hundred-foot giant, only the combined power of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes was able to contain him, literally.
As Mordru telepathically dominated the other members, Superboy and Mon-El swooped in at super-speed to seal him into an airless steel block, rendering him comatose.
We readers learned all this background at the same time new member Shadow Lass did.
In one of those tragic twists that pepper time-travel series, the darkness-projecting superheroine had previously been introduced as a memorial statue in Adventure Comics 354 (March 1967). We learned that she died saving the Science Asteroid as an adult before we ever met her as a teen.
And no sooner do we learn how formidable a foe Mordru is than an air leak permits the deathless despot to burst free from his prison, forcing Superboy, Mon-El, Duo Damsel and Shadow Lass to flee to 20th century Smallville in an effort to escape.
There, believing themselves to be the only surviving members of the Legion, they all adopt secret identities like Clark Kent’s even as Mordru begins using his power of telepathic mental domination to seek them out.
After a quick makeup job to disguise her blue skin, Shadow Lass poses as an exchange student so she can stay with the Langs.
“You must have come quite a distance, Betsy!” Mrs. Lang says.
“Er … yes, indeed!” is the reply, as Shadow Lass thinks, “Planet Talok … 57 billion parsecs away, to be exact!”
As Mordru’s gigantic sinister shadow oozes across the town, Shadow Lass is able to shield her team from its probing with her own shadow power.
The superheroines are particularly effective in this story. When two trucks are about to collide, Superboy and Mon-El are unable to intervene for fear of revealing their presence to Mordru. But the disguised Duo Damsel, cleverly using her “double strength,” is able to avert the accident without anyone catching on. Even Legion reservist Lana Lang acquits herself well at a key moment.
When gangsters armed with tommy guns invade and take over Smallville, the disguised heroes urge the townspeople to fight back — and then realize their own hypocrisy.
Mon-El says “We told the people of Smallville not to hide from their troubles … to face up to the gangsters!”
“…While all the time, we’ve been hiding from Mordru!” replies Shadow Lass.
But the moment the newly emboldened champions don their superhero costumes, the gigantic Mordru spots them and attacks. Forced to their knees, the four teens escape when Superboy and Mon-El drill into the Earth at super-speed.
Superboy swiftly constructs a hypnosis device to temporarily wipe the memory of their heroic identities from the four teens and his foster parents so that Mordru’s telepathic probing cannot find them. But the super-sorcerer’s invasion of their minds has the accidental effect of making their self-induced amnesia permanent.
Meanwhile, Mordru’s monstrous interstellar army invades Smallville even as the super-sorcerer seals the community in a bubble and propels it into orbit (the residents of that little Kansas town had a rough week).
It’s left to the one person who remembers that Clark Kent is Superboy — his best pal Pete Ross — to take action.
When Pete enlists Lana’s help by revealing Clark’s secret identity to her, she uses her Bio-Ring to become Insect Queen, scales the wall of the Kent home and spirits Clark away.
“I don’t know how you learned my identity, but thanks for reminding me of it! … Wait right there, you two! I’m going for my costume, and reinforcements!” Clark says, soaring off into the night sky in his PJs.
Despite their best efforts, the Legionnaires are unable to defeat Mordru, and are moments from death when the terrible effects of Mordru’s Fireball of Force cause a cavern to collapse around him, sealing him up again.
Superboy uses his hypnosis ray to rob Lana of her awareness of his secret identity, and then at super-speed Mon-El turns the ray on Superboy, causing him to forget what Pete knows.
And back in the future, the other Legionnaires explain how Princess Projectra and the White Witch fooled Mordru into thinking he’d destroyed them.
This two-part tale, with art by Superman stalwart Curt Swan, reflected what would become a running theme in Shooter’s work: an omnipotently powerful villain who forces overwhelmed heroes into flight or moral compromise.
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