An ironic end

Adventure Comics #341, dated February 1966, has an exciting adventure for the Legion of Super-Heroes. One of the Legion, Triplicate Girl, has been killed, and the rest of the team pay tribute to her before launching her urn-craft to its final resting place.

Then after the funeral, Triplicate Girl turns up and asks what all the fuss was about - her colleagues had forgotten that she has the ability to split herself into three identical girls, and only one of them was killed. Entirely unbothered by this, she announces that since there are only two of her now, she will henceforth be known as Duo Damsel, and the story continues on. The Legion stories got a lot less childish a few months after this point, when Jim Shooter (still basically a child himself, but writing much more mature teenage fiction) took over as writer. But here we're definitely still in the Silver Age writing style, as we can see from the inscriptions on those urns.

The Legion seem not to have known it was the done thing to write a bit about the deceased hero on the urn, and include a proper picture, so they just did a sketch of Triplicate Girl's face and signed their names below it. The others we see are much more interesting to anyone who comes to Shanghalla and looks around. Beast Boy had been seen in a previous story, the other four are just made up for the purposes of this scene.

Many people have speculated that Mog Vagor is the big green thing and the horrible space beast is the human, and I definitely agree with them. But everyone who comments on this picture seems to take Leeta 87's urn entirely at face value. Did the friends and relatives of this great superhero really choose to decorate her memorial with a caricature of her ignominious demise? I think not.

The true story of Leeta 87 is obviously that she was her world's greatest superhero, with a very strange sense of humour. Working in her day job at a 30th-century newspaper, she insisted on writing all the articles about her exploits to say that she was a blundering incompetent who always succeeded in defeating the super-villains by sheer luck. When people asked why, she just explained that it was funny! And nobody could argue with the great Leeta 87, even if they really didn't get it.

And so when she finally heroically perished, in the course of saving the entire universe, the people had no choice but to inscribe her urn with the picture and text she'd composed herself. A fitting tribute to a superhero? Well, no, but it's what she wanted. I guess she thought it was funny, even if nobody else did...