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Heroes
(also appears as a space manta and an Omniphagos)
1. Although actually an alien race, the Progeny act uniformly as villains and are listed as such.2. The Omniphagos may more properly be an Alien Creature rather than a Villain.
| General | Kid Quantum and Monstress get absolutely no attention this issue, and Apparition and Ultra Boy only get cameo appearances. |
| 1 | This is presumably a modified Omnicom that Brainy is using, something simpler than the complex ones which probably don’t work any more. We’ll still consider it an Omnicom for tracking purposes, though. |
| 1:1 | The text should be in Interlac. |
| 1:2 | Brainy must have been using this in speech mode prior to this scene. He surely would not put up with a device whose user interface consistently made him deselect the option. |
| 1:3 | “Examine Live Wire’s Hydroponic Garden” would not seem to a “Problem to Solve.” |
| 1:4 | These notes should have been dialogue, perhaps. Brainy is adding a note, not reading one. (This counts as dialogue for Brainy, therefore.) |
| 1:5 | Ultra Boy is too the left. He has probably turned around and leaned out of his seat, per 3:2. |
| 2 | No idea? My first guess would be what it appears to be: a Terran pyramid, although that is also patently ridiculous. |
| 3:1 | Assuming that this is a perfect pyramid (that is, half of a perfect octahedron) and three kilometers from base to tip, then the volume (one-half of one-third of the square-root of two times the cube of the square-root of two times the radius of the circumscribed circle of the octahedron [which would be the height of the pyramid]) would be 18 cubic kilometers. The density of silicon is 2330 kilograms per cubic meter, which would put this pyramid at some 42 trillion kilograms, or about 46 billion tons. (Brainy’s figure was off by a factor of ten.) For comparison purposes, the Earth is about 6.5 billion trillion tons (6.5 x 10^21), about 141 billion times the mass of the pyramid. |
| I’m not going to try to calculate the gravitational pull for such an object. We’ll take it on faith that it could create a field sufficient to support such debris orbiting around it. | |
| 3:1-2, etc. | These Omnicom notes count as dialogue for Brainiac 5.1. Ones like those on page 1 do not. |
| 3:5 | “I have way too much to do, but don’t you dare take anything off my plate!” Brainy has got to be a Virgo (although aspects of Aquarius, Leo, and Sagittarius are in there, too). The Chinese signs of the Horse and the Dog also apply. |
| 3:6 | “Latent” (that is, “hidden”) is the wrong word. Try “innate” or “instinctive”. |
| 4:3 | Since when does Garth wear his flight ring on the left hand? Perhaps it doesn’t work (or just doesn’t fit) on his artificial right hand. |
| 4:4 | Brainy is presumably taunting Garth: “Well, I guess we’ll have to board it then, won’t we? Duh!” Pity the art is too warped to demonstrate that here. |
| 5:5 | Interesting revelation about the basis of Umbra’s powers, especially in conjunction with the later mentions of “hard-light” constructs. Umbra’s darkfield would seem to be a sort of anti-light, and both it and light can be “densified”; we have seen Umbra create everything from areas of darkness to clouds to near solid items. (This may also explain further why she could affect Tinya in the previous issue: Tinya was visible, so she was open to attacks dealing with visibility.) |
| 6:3 | “Interdims” would be “interstellar dimensions,” directly in parallel to “Interlac”. |
| Brainy has dealt directly with magic before — in Supergirl Annual v3 #2 — and he didn’t like it. | |
| 6:5 | Shikari is the head seen next to Chameleon. |
| 6:5-7 | These glow-balls have not been seen before, although they are similar to the rectangular “flash-panels” used by some Legionnaires in previous stories. They are probably based on Kwai technology, adapted by Brainy into a form very familiar to the Legionnaires, replacing technology that no longer works. |
| 6:7 | Whether those mass discrepancies are higher or lower than expected isn’t known. One might expect “hard-light” to be far lighter than the silicon the sensors detected, but perhaps its density is such that it is vastly heavier. (If I had an idea whether 46 billion tons could produce a gravity well like that seen with the pyramid, I might be able to guess at which it is.) |
| 7:5 | The mere fact that it is a tunnel into the unknown may be enough to remind her of The Stem. |
| Shikari’s spikes are out, to the left. She must feel threatened. | |
| 7:6 | Brainiac 5.1 is in the foreground. |
| 8:2 | “Shtup” (or “schtup”) is usually a sound effect reserved for an action more, erm, “organic.” |
| Brainy and Umbra are in the foreground, in silhouette. | |
| 8:4 | This counts as an appearance for Wildfire, since his energy trail is part of him. |
| 9:1 | “Proverso” is the local area’s general language, parallel to Interlac. |
| 9:3 | “All-Eater”? They found Matter-Eater Lad! |
| 9:4 | The “angry colleague” is Wildfire, who has the Progeny by the throat. |
| 10:1 | The pyramid must be riddled with passageways if this Progeny managed to avoid the Omniphagos while it managed to get to the surface and destroyed the Progeny ship. |
| 11:1 | Brainy is lying to himself. He does believe Shikari, but he doesn’t want to, or else he would dismiss her out of hand. She is going to have to reprove herself and her powers over and over again. |
| 11:2-3 | “Smell” is perhaps the closest standard sense Umbra can use to describe it: the presence of the light permeates the ether. |
| 11:5 | That is Brainy’s foot. |
| 11:7 | It is possible that the blinding brilliance of the hard-light is itself a form of prison, such that even if the Omniphagos escapes the interdimensional cell, it can’t find its way through the pyramid’s maze of passageways. The builders of the prison didn’t take into account millennia of debris accumulation damping the light. |
| 12:2 | Guess they should have brought Kid Quantum along, huh? |
| 13:5 | Interesting skewering of the monster movie cliché. |
| 14:5 | It is possible that the Omniphagos emits some sort of telepathic static which affects its prey, causing the disorientation that Brainy describes. |
| 15:1-3 | Why would an “all-eater” project energy beams from its hands? Assuming that the Progeny term for the creature is accurate — which is questionable — perhaps this energy has some sort of a digestive function. (Compare to the blue-skinned creatures with mouths in their hands from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars, for example.) |
| 15:7 | “File Error”? This sort of terminology grates, like seeing movies about computers which show program code in BASIC did in the late 1980s. |
| Dialogue balloons are from Chameleon and Umbra. | |
| 15:8 | Chameleon was about to tell Wildfire to not kill it (like he did with the quantum parasites in the previous issue). No worries, this time. |
| 16:3-4 | How do you stun an energy being? (Perhaps you jar its sensors or damage its containment suit.) |
| 16:5 | Standard comic code stuff: the bad guys get punished. (Almost a pity, as it could have been interesting to see the team pick up a Progeny cast member for a couple issues, serving to de-Villainize the race. Then again, the inevitable story arc for such a situation is to send the no-longer-evil creature back among its kind with the hope it will change the system from within; compare to Hugh the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Bartleby the Rat Creature from Bone.) |
| 17:1 | Presumably the energy beam from the Omniphagos’ hand would have sucked Brainy in similarly. |
| 17:5 | Note that Chameleon’s eyes and mouth are not glowing: he can match the Omniphagos’ shape, but not its powers. |
| 17:6 | How Brainy knows this isn’t clear; suffice to say that he knows it. |
| 19:4 | I hesitate to agree that freeing the Omniphagos was a crime; an “error” would be more accurate. |
| 20:1 | The Omniphagos has one hand in the darkfield. It is probably using the energy from its hand to help split up the darkfield, pulling it in two directions. |
| Wildfire is to the far left, then Shikari and Chameleon, then Umbra, and Brainiac 5.1 is to the far right. | |
| 20:6-7 | This methodology makes little sense. Brainy’s field provides protection, and maybe a small amount of thrust. Wildfire shouldn’t particularly need the protection. “Teamwork” is a great idea, but forcing it like this doesn’t make for the best storytelling. |
| 21:3-5 | Compare the potential to Marvel Comics’ Galactus, but without the conscience that guided him. |
| 21:5 | This doesn’t count as dialogue for Brainy. |
Character Name |
Cover |
Panels / Speaking |
| Heroes | ||
| Brainiac 5.1 (Querl Dox) | X | 82 / 72 |
| Ultra Boy (Jo Nah) | 2 / 0 | |
| Live Wire (Garth Ranzz) | 7 / 2 | |
| Saturn Girl (Imra Ardeen) | 5 / 8 | |
| Umbra (Tasmia Mallor) | 30 / 18 | |
| Apparition (Tinya Wazzo) (footnote A) | 1 / 0 | |
| Chameleon (Reep Daggle) (also appears as a space manta and an Omniphagos) |
23 / 15 1 / 0 3 / 3 |
|
| Shikari | 37 / 15 | |
| Wildfire (“Drake Burroughs”) | 29 / 16 | |
| Villains | ||
| Progeny (1) | 18 / 8 | |
| Omniphagos | 18 / 0 | |