Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 4 #72 pg 10

This was another pickup from Lee Moder's estate. I find that this page works best with a bit of context from the page immediately before it. In the aftermath of the Legion's battle with the Daxamites of the White Triangle, both Apparition and Andromeda are believed to be dead. At the funeral, Shrinking Violet looks over the crowd and remarks that of course, everyone is going to miss Apparition, who was warm and friendly and caring... but she wonders, sadly, if anyone is going to miss Andromeda, who was always an outcast by choice.

On the following page, without a single word of exposition or narration, we get our answer. Brainiac 5 might have forgone attending the funeral, but Andromeda is certainly not far from his thoughts.

I love this page. It's tragic and appropriately dark (see the note to the colourist at the bottom of the page), and it plays into what's possibly my favourite relationship across any incarnation of the Legion: the one between Brainy and Andromeda. In a sense, the emotions on this page are the embodiment of how their relationship wound up playing out throughout the rest of the series: a ton of potential that was never acted upon or properly resolved. I've always been sad that the writers never allowed their relationship to develop, but I'm happy to own this page from back when there was still potential for it to go somewhere.

More than anything, I love how so much is said here without relying on any kind of explanatory dialogue ("HAARHH" doesn't count). It's an immediate answer to Violet's question from the previous page, and it's the first look the readers get at exactly how much Brainy cared for Andromeda, after he'd cured her of the lead poisoning that was killing her and she'd chosen to open up to him about her upbringing and her doubts about the White Triangle's xenophobic beliefs. His outburst here is the most emotion Brainy had ever shown at this point in the series, so it catches the reader completely off-guard, and I remember it having more of an impact on me than any other page in the issue when I read it for the first time. Art-wise, the black border and the use of shadows is just perfect, and I think Moder really picked the best angles to give the scene a real sense of isolation and loneliness.