L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 Annual #2 pg 21

Behold, my first ever Heritage Auctions win! This is from a few years back, and I remember the distinct feeling at the time that I was finally taking my first step into a larger world, as a certain respectable old space hermit might say. Prior to that, I'd bid on eBay and bought from dealers, but winning this page was the first time I had to learn the ins and outs of bidding at a large auction house (and a big thank you to Rubén DaCollector for answering all my questions about bidding at HA as a Canadian!).

This is a fascinating page, too. It's not exactly a first appearance page, but it features the first appearance of a non-canon idea which would be made canon some 20 years later. It comes from L.E.G.I.O.N.'s 1991 annual, which means it's a tie-in to DC's "Armageddon: 2001" event, where an entity known as Waverider went around giving various characters a look ten years into their prospective futures. Here, Vril Dox is shown the results of a nightmare scenario where one small oversight on his part ends up with him being mind-controlled by one of his enemies, and shaping L.E.G.I.O.N. into a totalitarian, despotic regime.

This page features the story's first look at ten-year-old Lyrl Dox, Vril's son, who of course in the comics at the time was only a baby. In this possible future, Lyrl's mother Stealth has escaped L.E.G.I.O.N and taken Lyrl with her, and the two spend their days living simply on a jungle planet. Here we see Lyrl putting the instincts he inherited from Stealth to good use, and hunting down their dinner.

So, what makes this page a sort of "first appearance?" Well, when this comic came out in 1991, this was nothing but a potential future for baby Lyrl, featured in a single issue, which was inferred to never come to pass as long as Vril never got himself into trouble. But, when the second R.E.B.E.L.S. series came out in 2009, set several years after the end of L.E.G.I.O.N. and R.E.B.E.L.S. volume one, the writers decided to take this one-off idea and make it a core part of the story. While Vril had never gotten mind-controlled, Lyrl, estranged from Vril and now a teenager, had indeed been living a savage existence on a jungle planet with Stealth. I was a big fan of the concept, and so I'm glad to own the page that inspired the writers to take R.E.B.E.L.S. volume two in that direction.

Now, onto the page itself! The amount of detail in the foliage and undergrowth is just breathtaking. I'm a particular fan of the fine details on every tree trunk and branch, and the mushrooms in the second panel. The dappled shadows on Lyrl's back from the foliage are also a fantastic touch. This is also a rare and excellent example of a page from a time when lettering was still done directly on the page, but which actually features no lettering at all! The scene is allowed to play out purely visually, which lends to the sense that this predator/prey encounter is nearly as silent as it is swift.

(Although, the page does technically feature one instance of lettering: it's not really visible on the scan, but in person, you can see that McKone wrote "BOING!" below the deer-antelope creature in the first panel, but it was later erased.)