Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1
This Annual is the most complete early map of the so-called 'Glorithverse' — the post-Crisis reality in which the sorceress Glorith replaced the Time Trapper as the architect of the Legion's founding, with Valor standing in for Superboy as the team's inspirational hero. Told almost entirely in flashback through Ultra Boy's life story, it is the issue that formally establishes Glorith as a major ongoing villain with cosmic-scale time-manipulation powers, retroactively rewriting decades of Legion continuity in a single 64-page story. It also delivers the in-continuity death of Phantom Girl and explains her displacement into the 20th century as the L.E.G.I.O.N. character Phase — directly bridging two concurrent DC series. For collectors and historians of the Five Years Later era, it is the foundational lore document that the entire Glorithverse depends on.
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The Annual was scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Tom and Mary Bierbaum, who had co-plotted the Volume 4 relaunch alongside Keith Giffen; Giffen did not contribute art or plot to this issue, leaving the Bierbaums to write it solo. According to a note the Bierbaums themselves included at the back of the issue, the story was a vehicle for theories about the Time Trapper's role in Legion history that they had developed as fans before becoming professionals, now retrofitted onto Glorith as the Trapper's successor. Interior art was handled by Doug Braithwaite, then an early-career British penciller, while Adam Hughes — already gaining a reputation for dynamic cover work — supplied the painted cover with inker Al Gordon. The issue was released in July 1990, roughly a year into the Five Years Later era, at a point when the regular series had not yet fully explained the mechanics of the Glorithverse that readers were already experiencing.
Trivia · 7 facts
- Title of the lead story is 'Charade'; the issue is Legion of Super-Heroes Annual (Volume 4) #1, cover-dated September 1990, released July 1990.
- Written by Tom and Mary Bierbaum; pencils by Doug Braithwaite; inks by Doug Hazlewood and Larry Mahlstedt; cover by Adam Hughes and Al Gordon.
- Functions as one of the earliest and most thorough explorations of the 'Glorithverse,' the continuity in which Glorith replaced the Time Trapper after Mon-El destroyed him in the regular series.
- Phantom Girl dies in this issue — Glorith displaces her to the 20th century as revenge on Ultra Boy, where she becomes the character Phase in the concurrent L.E.G.I.O.N. ongoing series; Glorith simultaneously moves a 20th-century Durlan forward in time, and that Durlan eventually becomes R.J. Brande, the Legion's financial founder.
- A small Legion squad — Brainiac 5, Duo Damsel, Valor (Lar Gand), Laurel Gand, Saturn Girl, and Rond Vidar — confronts Glorith on her homeworld of Baaldur; all are defeated, and Valor is aged 200 years in an instant by her powers.
- The narrative structure uses Saturn Girl's telepathic link to Glorith as a framing device, allowing Glorith to review Ultra Boy's entire life history across roughly 40 pages of flashback — one of the densest retcon documents in Five Years Later continuity.
- The issue was later collected in the Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus Vol. 1, which compiles Legion of Super-Heroes (vol. 4) #1–39 and Annuals #1–4.
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Reprinted in Hawkworld #4 (1990)
Key issues in Legion of Super-Heroes Annual
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