1. Since Progenitor takes a Villain role, he is listed that way, despite Jan Arrah’s past positioning as a Hero.2. Heroic images for Element Lad are grouped under Progenitor’s listing, but will be tracked separately.
3. “Between” in terms of his personal chronology; some appearances are outside of the universe or billions of years in the past, disjointed from the chronologies of the other characters.
4. Although actually an alien race, they act uniformly as Villains and are listed as such.
5. The Omniphagos may more properly be an Alien Creature rather than a Villain.
| Cover | This is Element Lad/Progenitor’s face. The eyes are crystalline because he transformed himself into tromium and never changed himself all the way back, which made him immortal in the process. |
| The face above Wildfire’s is Chameleon. | |
| 1:2, etc. | The Legionnaires are wearing Progeny Restraint Locks, designed to prevent them from using their powers, and if tampered with, to create a miniature black hole and kill the wearer. Brainiac 5 has found a means of disabling them, however. |
| 1:7 | “Squaj”: originally spelled “squadj”. |
| 2 | Some fans posited that this wasn’t really Element Lad based on the rather specious argument that his clothing had been shredded in the memory-crystal holograms. Like he wouldn’t have found a change of clothes in several billion years? (And like Element Lad, of all people, couldn’t simply use his powers to recreate his costume?) |
| However, the matter of his costume is a good item to consider: after several billion years, he couldn’t have changed to something different? Answer: of course he could. When he was seen in Legion Lost #6, he wasn’t wearing this outfit. Instead, since he has been searching for the Legionnaires and since his Progeny had found them and he knew this, he changed his outfit to be one that they would recognize, possibly to put them at ease, possibly to get them to lower their guard. | |
| There is a throng of Progeny on the tiers of the palace hangar hall. | |
| Curiously, there seems to be a lot of broken machinery and other detritus on the floor of the hall. Is this a sign of a civilization in decline? Maybe these are projects that Jan has been working on, or which he worked on and lost interest in long ago, due to his unfocused mental state. | |
| Chameleon, Saturn Girl, and Shikari are at the bottom of the page. | |
| 3:1 | Observe the body language of the Legionnaires. Several of them are simply amazed, Brainy is pondering the possibilities, Chameleon and Monstress are eager to embrace him, Shikari is reverent, Umbra is neutral, and Wildfire seems outright suspicious. |
| Note the small crystal in the Progeny’s grip. In 3:2, the crystals are larger and appear to be making the Progeny float away. Progenitor has presumably created them to move the Progeny out of his way. | |
| Left to right, the dialogue balloons are from Ultra Boy, Kid Quantum (noting the crystals she kept), Monstress, Live Wire, Wildfire (who also went through the Rift), Brainiac 5, Chameleon, and Umbra. | |
| 3:2 | Live Wire and Kid Quantum are in the lower left. |
| 3:3 | The silhouette behind Live Wire cannot be identified. |
| 4:1 | “Rokk” is Rokk Krinn, of course; Cosmic Boy, the third Legion founder along with Live Wire and Saturn Girl. |
| 4:5-6 | Possibly this is similar to a Palean memory-crystal, although it is colored differently. Jan has had a few billion years since he created the ones Jazmin has in order to modify and perfect them, after all. |
| 4:6 | The silhouettes in the foreground are Wildfire, Shikari, and Monstress. |
| 5:1 | The silhouettes are Chameleon, Saturn Girl, Shikari, Live Wire, and Monstress. |
| 5:2 | This is the second Legion Outpost, presumably, although between Progenitor’s brief memories of his time with the Legion and the very brief (days or hours) he was exposed to the second Outpost, this could well be the first one. |
| Jan spent only a couple years on Earth. It probably never meant as much to him as Trom had, so forgetting the name isn’t surprising. | |
| 5:3 | Element Lad and Kid Quantum were both in the rift when it collapsed; Meta and ERG-1 had already been pulled through. Jan presumably sheathed Jazmin in tromium and adhered her to the Outpost shell at the same time that he transformed himself. |
| 5:4 | Chameleon and Saturn Girl are seen here. |
| 6:2 | Kid Quantum and Live Wire (based on body position) are seen here. |
| 6:4 | This counts as an appearance for Element Lad despite not being able to see him actually in the suit. |
| This suit is the same one Brainiac 5.1 wore in Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #125. | |
| The background here should be the same black on white as in 6:5. | |
| The silhouette below Kid Quantum’s chin cannot be identified. | |
| 7:1 | These colors indicate that this is probably inside (or on the edge of) warp space, what is briefly seen during stargate travel. There may also be relations to the timestream. |
| Jan can be seen on the outer hull of the Outpost. | |
| ERG-1’s energy is presumably being sucked back into the universe with them, invisibly. | |
| The silhouetted characters are (left to right): Progenitor (floating), Umbra, Brainiac 5. Wildfire, Monstress, Ultra Boy, Saturn Girl (probably), and Kid Quantum. | |
| 7:2 | We will consider this to be the last appearance of Element Lad; he is tracked as Progenitor after this point. |
| 7:4 | If Jan had been catapulted back to a very early time in the universe, perhaps the life cycles of the earliest stars were much shorter. Still, one billion, four billion, twenty billion years: what does it matter? |
| Perspective would seem to be off here, or else Jan has used his powers to increase his size a little. He does that in Legion Lost #12, 14:3. | |
| That’s a mighty long spike of hair, Brainy. | |
| 8:1 | This contains one of the observations about how life began: how many times did versions of life start and completely fail on Earth before it managed to survive even just a few days? Can it possibly have been done right the first time? By extension, then, on how many worlds has the beginnings of life been achieved and then been wiped out? On how many has it never made it past single-celled creatures, or even never past recombining amino acids? But by the same token, are we the pinnacle, or are there worlds which look on us as an stage no more developed than we look at bacteria? |
| 8:2 | With Jan’s powers (or with Chemical King’s), the ability to spark life is quite clearly possible. Could he do it right the first time? Probably not. But given a billion years and thousands of planets to try and try again… |
| 8:3 | Two of these species are the Kwai and the Progeny; the topmost one has not been seen, and may be extinct. |
| Off-panel dialogue is from Kid Quantum. | |
| 8:4 | Part of the Legionnaires’ problem is that they remember Jan as quiet and shy, somewhere between monastic and calmly unpredictable. The Jan they knew would never have resorted to “lending a hand.” Arguably, being conscious and unprotected while traversing the boundaries between universes could shift one’s entire way of thinking. |
| 9:1-2 | This is probably still a projected image rather than Progenitor actually opening the walls of the palace hangar hall to space and then taking the Legionnaires the equivalent of hundreds of miles from the throneworld of the Rosette. |
| 9:2 | Other than Progenitor, none of the characters on the platform is uniquely identifiable. Since ten are on the platform but only eight shapes are seen here, this does not count as an appearance for any of them. |
| 9:3 | The boots are Live Wire’s. |
| 10:1 | The silhouette behind Umbra is unidentifiable. |
| 10:2 | Brainiac 5, Ultra Boy, and Kid Quantum are seen on the platform. |
| 10:3-4 | As before, we cannot make out individuals on the platform, nor can we see all ten forms. |
| 10:4 | This would seem to indicate that Jan didn’t get catapulted back to the very origin of the universe (barring the Ark being a remnant of a prior universe, a là Marvel’s Galactus). |
| “My grife” is not a phrasing which has been used before; it is usually just the single word. (This bit of dialogue is from Ultra Boy.) | |
| 11:1 | “Opened the Ark”: note in 10:2 that the four sides of the pyramid have been folded back, as though it were a paper toy. |
| And again, here we can only clearly identify Progenitor. | |
| The source of the second dialogue balloon cannot be identified. | |
| 11:2, 12:1 | The chamber which Progenitor refers to appears a heck of a lot like the cell they were in during Legion Lost #10, but the Progeny probably aren’t big on individualism in architecture (or anything else), much less creature comforts. |
| 11:4 | What else might this micro-lesion have done? Caused madness, perhaps (as occurred in the preboot)? Then again, what might have caused it? Neron’s curse? Exposure to the Fires of Creation? |
| 11:5 | The “?” above Brainiac 5’s head counts as dialogue for him, much like Impulse’s “icon balloons” do. |
| 11:5-6 | And once again, the postboot continuity echoes the preboot: the Silver Age Lightning Lad got his lost arm restored by <Dr. Lars Hanscom>. |
| 11 | Progenitor vs. Marvel’s Molecule Man: who’d win? |
| 12:1 | Dialogue is from Kid Quantum. |
| 12:2 | Progenitor could possibly do telepathy by creating Jewel Kryptonite, but all his powers still relate purely to elemental alchemy. |
| The pink of Monstress’ costume can be seen at the top of the panel. | |
| 12:3-4 | Inking or coloring error on the bottom corner of Umbra’s cloak. |
| 13:1-3 | This is the archetypal Brainiac 5, cutting through the emotions with sharp reasoning. |
| 13:4 | Yes, he worked hard and saved you all, but for him, that was several billion years ago. People change. |
| 13:5 | Is this what Singularity’s appearance gets distilled down to? A tiny bit of philosophy in whether the Legion should oppose Progenitor? Lo, how the mighty have fallen. |
| 14:3 | Note that Garth’s restored hand has no glove on it, but that his uniform sleeve is present. Looking back on earlier views, his robot arm did not have a sleeve covering it. When Progenitor restored his arm in 11:5, he presumably restored both the sleeve and the glove — making the costume incomplete would be unusual — and Garth took the glove off to marvel at his hand in 11:6. He hasn’t replaced the glove because he still doesn’t quite believe what has happened. |
| 14:5-6 | Monstress’ comments doesn’t seem to make sense; Umbra isn’t taking any “moral high ground.” However, Chameleon’s retort cuts things sharply: Candi is being perhaps too eager to excuse Jan. |
| 14:6 | Gotta love Umbra’s facial expressions. |
| 15:2 | It isn’t clear whether it is Shikari herself who is “Variant”, or the entire Kwai race. The Progeny seemed eager to kill all Kwai, and Progenitor didn’t identify her outright as “Variant”, so maybe he can’t tell unless he examines an individual. (Assuming that “Variant” is even something definable and not “I’ll know it when I see it.”) |
| 15:5 | The silhouettes are Shikari, Wildfire, Kid Quantum, and Monstress. |
| 16:1 | The facial silhouette is Live Wire. |
| 17:2 | If the Ark is just a tunnel through to the Legion’s home section of the universe — like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s wormhole — then the Progeny scout ships may be coming out the other end and trying to send information back which isn’t coming through. Alternately — and since Shikari seems to be needed to traverse the Ark — maybe the passage is a veritable maze and the scout ships simply get lost… or destroyed. |
| 18:1 | The silhouettes are Ultra Boy, Live Wire, Wildfire, and Umbra. |
| 18:3 | Off-panel dialogue is from Wildfire. |
| 18:4 | The Legionnaires — or specifically Live Wire — aren’t quite ready to trust Saturn Girl and her telepathy at this point, so they are using the flight ring to contact her. |
| 19:1 | And in opposition to the above, here Imra needs to be quiet when she is this close to Progenitor, so the telepathy is a necessity. |
| 19:7-20:1 | The real world subtext here is that a lot of terms which offend people are offensive not because of the terms themselves or even because of the speaker’s intent, but because the offended one chose to be offended, giving the term power, meaning, and thrust which may not have been there to start with. |
| 20:2 | Progenitor’s inability to recall his own name while being able to call to mind (after a few seconds) those of some of the Legionnaires is a telling point of his loss of self-identity and related insanity. |
| 20:2-3 | This would seem to settle the pronunciation of Jan’s name: like the girl’s name rather than like the Scandinavian boy’s name (“yawn”). (Arguably, it should be pronounced the other way, since most all the Silver Age Legionaire’s real names were tweaked versions of traditional boy’s and girl’s names, with “Jan” being a varient of “John”. Few people in fandom seem to have preferred the Scandinavian pronunciation, however, and this coincides with the typical pronunciation.) |
| 20:4 | Element Lad was a bit spacey after he recovered from Mordru turning him into crystal. His extensive time spent as tromium may have further affected his ability to remember things. |
| 21:4-5 | It isn’t quite clear if Progenitor was going to pronounce Monstress as Variant and erase her anyway, or if her admission that he didn’t make her resulted in that decision. Or perhaps claiming that Progenitor didn’t make you is the equivalent of heresy, with the sentence being death. |
| 21:5 | This particular panel reminds me of the art of Colleen Doran, with the added plus that the Avatar in her A Distant Soil comics is responsible for culling “variant” children from their society. |
| 21:5, 22:3 | Alas, we will continue to count Monstress’ corpse as an appearance for her. |
| 22:3 | This is one time where no one will be complaining that “We didn’t see a body.” |
Character Name |
Cover |
Panels / Speaking |
| Heroes | ||
| Ultra Boy (Jo Nah) | 11 / 5 | |
| Kid Quantum II (Jazmin Cullen) | X | 22 / 10 |
| Umbra (Tasmia Mallor) | X | 14 / 6 |
| Live Wire (Garth Ranzz) | 30 / 21 | |
| Chameleon (Reep Daggle) | X | 28 / 15 |
| Saturn Girl (Imra Ardeen) | 27 / 13 | |
| Brainiac 5 (Querl Dox) | X | 17 / 14 |
| Monstress (Candi Pyponte-Le Parc III) | X | 33 / 15 |
| Wildfire (“Drake Burroughs”) | X | 14 / 8 |
| Shikari | 15 / 3 | |
| Villains | ||
| Progenitor (Jan Arrah) (also appears as tromium and as Element Lad) |
X |
52 / 57 1 / 0 6 / 0 |
| Progeny | 4 / 1 | |
| Omniphagos | 1 / 0 | |
