in Various Comics |
 Faced with a world-threatening menace, the new Challengers of the Unknown break out the big guns. They team with two Supermen - Red and Blue - the Teen Titans, Steel, Lori Lemaris, Aquaman, Supergirl, and most of the heroes of the DCU. As the Millenium Giants epic unfolds... |
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(The Millenium Giants first show up in other books such as Superman: Man of Steel, Supergirl, Steel, Aquaman, and Teen Titans, but the Challengers aren't on board yet.) The Challengers are flying the Atlantic when they first learn of the giant menaces. (Superman 134. A continuity glitch here, since they already banged into the English giant in their own title.) The Challs zip to Mexico. Superman is split into Superman Red and Superman Blue. Both are not as good as a single Superman. They crash into things and upset Lois as to who she married. Cerne (AKA The King Under the Hill) stomps the US Navy in the Mediterranean. Reaching to the sea bed, he calls up volcanos and wipes out the Pacific Fleet - 25,000 lives... (The story moves to Adventures of Superman 557, but the Challengers don't appear in that issue, so we skip to Action 744.) |
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The Challengers arrive in Mexico City (Action 744). It's devastated. They hunt down Lois Lane to find Superman. Which one: red or blue? The Mexican giant emerges from Metropolis Harbor, threatening the city, so the Challs take off. The Challengers explain to Lois that the giants may in fact be trying to heal the Earth, not destroy it. Maybe they can siphon energy from the giants themselves... and so on. Everyone agrees that the Supermen Red and Blue need to unify their actions - - but Red and Blue work at cross purposes. Blue argues they need a plan. Red knocks him away, taps a power cable, and grows gigantic to beat on the Mexican giant. No good: Red dissipates while the giant reforms. Marlon now believes, "They can't be stopped." (And the story moves to Superman: Man of Steel 79.) As to art, compare Kenn with the rendition above. In one pic, he looks East Indian, in another black. In fact, he's Asian-American. Oh, well. |
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Supermen Red is dying, dissipating. Yet he manages to argue with Blue about their responsibilities. (Superman: Man of Steel 79) The giants are carving big rifts in the planet. The Mexican giant has reassembled in Sydney, Australia. The Challengers fly there with Lois Lane. Marlon plans to buzz the giant. Lois yells, "You Challengers are the closest thing anyone's got to a superhero here at the moment... We've got to do more than distract the thing!" Superman Blue has partly fused with Superman Red. Zooming low, they smack the Mexican giant - and actually rock it. Kenn talks to Lois. She heard a native legend about ancient twins who defeated a giant - maybe the twin Supermen are the modern version. How did the ancient legend defeat the giant? By poisoning his food. Lois gets an idea, and broadcasts over the radio... The Supermen hear her plan: since the giants follow ley lines, maybe they can "foul up the giant's energy intake". Steel offers a converted weapon that "absorbs bio-etheric energy and converts it to tectonic graviton pulses". The Supermen bore into the giant with the weapon, and ram it into a spiraling energy field. The giant falters. The machine overloads - and the Supermen get blown into the "planetary bio-etheric grid". The Supermen wake at "The Heart of the World" and meet The Keeper of the Flame who shows them the Altar of the Giants, their power source. "As long as the fire burns - giants walk the Earth." The Supermen are up to the sacrifice, and dive into the flames. DOWN fall the English, Mexican, and Egyptian giants. The Supermen return, super-charged. The Mexican giant has fallen apart. Only his head remains, another monument in the Australian Outback. The Challengers bark, "The Supermen have done it!" Lois rejoices. "They've stopped the Millenium Giants from destroying everything on Earth!" But an old shaman warns, "And doomed the Earth itself... To you, the giants were monsters, but to us, they were part of the web of life of this planet.. Life would not have ended, only returned to an earlier state to begin a new cycle... By extinguishing the Eternal Flame," they snuffed the ley lines that bound the planet together. Now it will suffer the same fate as another world - Krypton!" (And the story concludes in Superman 135.) |
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The Australian Outback is an inferno. According to the shaman (he was Aborigine, but is now Mexican), the giants have siphoned off the bio-etheric energy of the planet AND the Medallion of the Damned has sunk to the Earth's core, destablizing it. Supermen Red and Blue shoo the Challengers and Lois Lane. The shaman directs the Supermen down into caves inside the "body" of the Mexican giant. "Life takes many forms." Lava manifests as a dragon wearing the Medallion of the Damned. They fight the dragon and seize the medallion. Poof. The shaman and Supermen figure out that one Superman must journey downward and expend ALL his energy to heal the core. The other must journey to the surface and do the same to seal the ley lines. Sick of mysticism and riddles (like the rest of us), they rush to the sacrifice. The shaman sloughs his disguise: he's really the Keeper of the Flame. The Supermen triumph and "Earth is saved!" Except, according to the Manhunter from Mars, the Supermen don't exist any more. Fear not. We learn later that Superman returns in his original form, crashing at the Kent farm. (Superman Forever.) So all's well. |
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Comments The new Challengers get some serious face time in saving the world. But just like the Ghostbusters, it's all in a day's work. It's fun to see our heroes drawn in different styles. Nice to see them come out in the daytime, too. Art note: The early Millenium Giant issues are a mosaic. You can fit nine issues together to show the three giants side by side from head to toe. Their toes are underwater, but even there we see heroes like Superman and Lori Lemaris. |