I’m not kidding.

This is not a Photoshop.

..yeah, he’s gonna die alone.

From a very old issue of Batman:

Well? Can you? Go ahead, use Google if you like. I mean, Batman has a Bat-computer.

(Incidentally, the story of this comic is that Signalman, pictured, keeps sending Batman clues – because he is a retard – and then narrowly manages to escape Batman every time without managing to steal what he intended to steal. Every time this happens, he celebrates, because he figures his repeated failures mean he is a big shot. Seriously. That is the plot. How did these guys manage to shave themselves without dying?)

I was reading the recently-deleted “Marvel B0y” Livejournal last week, by the guy purporting to be a “Marvel insider” and generally bitching a lot about Brian Michael Bendis and the like. And one thing he wrote stuck with me: that Bendis and Ed Brubaker and others were all submitting proposals on how to “fix” Doctor Strange, and how he, Marvel B0y, could fix Doctor Strange with ease.

And it’s weird. Because Dr. Strange doesn’t really need to be fixed.

The constant criticism of Dr. Strange is that he’s “too powerful” and can “do anything.” This is silly, of course – if nothing else, Dr. Strange obviously has at least the limitations placed on the Genie in Aladdin – no resurrections, no making people fall in love with you, and ixnay on the wishing for more wishes, pal… but I digress.

Let me put it to you this way. Dr. Strange is, well. A doctor. Are you a doctor? If not, kindly explain to me (without Googling) how chemotherapy works, beyond “they put radioactive crap in you and it kills the cancer.” And that’s complex. Explain how antibiotics work; how infection spreads into the bloodstream; how you get a sunburn. I trust you see my point here: simply, that doctors know more about something very complex and very important than most of us. (Stan Lee and Steve Ditko didn’t just pick the name out of a hat.)

And doctors don’t even know everything! As one medical friend of mine put it to me a while back, “look, twenty years ago, we didn’t have the slightest idea how aspirin worked. And now? We still don’t know, but we know enough to know a lot of ways that it probably doesn’t work. This is progress.” Apply that metaphor to Dr. Strange, now, and it works perfectly. Doc knows a lot more about the Dark Dimension and the neighboring areas than anybody else on the planet; it’s his job. But if next week the Fasdysops of Xxxxx7’l attack, he’s going to have to improvise.

That’s cool. That works fine. John Seavey already addressed Dr. Strange’s general storytelling module and why it’s good all on its own: the mystic superhero as guardian of our reality. And I don’t want to retread what he’s written, except to point out that the reason Strange’s model works so well is exactly the reason everybody seems to think he needs to be “fixed” – because he doesn’t really work all that well in a traditional superhero context. Yes, the Defenders, I know – but A) the Defenders never really worked that well as a concept, and B) the Defenders were, when you get right down to it, mostly a team book vehicle for fighting villains on a Dr. Strange level in the first place.

(I will, however, add the time-honored “superhero runs into problem his awesome powers cannot solve” shtick as being one that works quite nicely for Strange in particular – consider the recent entertaining Dr. Strange miniseries The Oath for a good example of this, as all of Strange’s power fails him when he needs to confront basic ethical conundrums.)

This is a classic case of trying to hit a hammer with a screwdriver. If you want to write straight-up superhero stories, there are no end of options for you to pursue. If you want to write Dr. Strange, then don’t write those stories. He flat-out doesn’t work in a lot of superhero stories because he really is extremely powerful, at the top end of the food chain. And that’s fine, and honestly, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to a lot of other characters; nobody insists on shoving, say, the Silver Surfer into a Daredevil story, but Dr. Strange constantly gets pulled into other characters’ stories whenever they go up against absolutely anything mystic, and writers routinely punk him out to make the Big Bad of their story look even meaner. That’s fantastic: Dr. Strange is the Lt. Worf of the Marvel universe.

In all seriousness, though, for his own series, Strange is simple: he fights Cthulhu and Dracula and Nyarlathotep and Hades and Mephisto and anybody else who is A) really mystical and B) really goddamned powerful and scary. And he doesn’t always know how to beat the bad guy. Why should he? He’s human, and for all his studying there are an infinite number of dimensions and therefore an infinite number of threats to Earth he won’t know about in advance, no matter how much he studies. This means that a lot of Dr. Strange adventures will end up being quest-model stories.

And finally, the powers issue. In the old days, this wasn’t a big issue, because in the old days, we had thought bubbles to say things like…

“…my Faltine blasts… useless against this new foe! Watoomb preserve me, but I must find a way to…” blah blah blah magic-cakes.

Hokey, yes, but they served the valuable purpose for the reader of establishing when Strange needed help. Nowadays, this type of writing is largely shunned. I’m not calling for a return to it. I mean, come on – stylistic shifts in the art form happen, and attempting to force things back to The Way They Used To Be, artistically speaking, isn’t gonna work any more than trying to make it to the top of the charts with a Buddy Holly cover band. But it does underscore the need for a way to exposit to the reader what Strange knows and what he doesn’t, what he can do (in this situation) and what he can’t.

Now, in a more modern style of writing, the easiest way to do this is with a DKS character. DKS stands for “doesn’t know shit,” you see. Someone who is not stupid, but completely unversed in the expertise at hand, so the expert character explains to him what the rules are right now. This is especially essential in any narrative about or involving magic, because whereas in other story settings you only need to explain the unfamiliar, in a magical story you need to explain pretty much everything. (In the Harry Potter books, for example, Harry himself was the DKS character, forcing everybody else to explain things to him all the damn time, or working his lessons into the “what the reader needs to know” portions of the book. This was actually a very elegant use of the storytelling device by J.K. Rowling.)

In short, Dr. Strange needs a non-magic sidekick. But now we run into a new problem: all his existing sidekicks know a lot about magic. Wong, for example, is himself more or less a walking magic encyclopedia second only to Strange. Clea arguably knows even more. And so forth. However, we’re lucky, because in The Oath Brian K. Vaughan put together the start of a relationship with Night Nurse that shows some promise in this regard, though, so even that problem is handled.

So tell me again: why is Strange broken? Because I honestly don’t see it. He does what he’s supposed to do very well, and it’s not his fault people keep wanting him to be an Avenger.

I’ve decided that this is now a regular feature here at mgk.com (well, until I get bored with it, but who knows how long that will take). Every week, we will return to the pages of Who’s Who, the classic 1980s DC comic book encyclopedia of their characters. Every week, they shall be judged on the only scale scientific enough that matters: the Rex The Wonder Dog scale.

Now, it is obvious that no character can approach Rex The Wonder Dog for sheer quality, so we need not worry about dispensing a 100% Rex rating, which is for Rex and Rex alone. But I believe we can create a sort of a field, if you will:

100 Percent Rex: Rex The Wonder Dog
99 Percent Rex: Batman, Superman
90 Percent Rex: Brainiac Five, The Shade
75 Percent Rex: Blue Devil (pre-“I’m cursed to be a demon” Blue Devil, obviously), Guy Gardner
60 Percent Rex: The All-New Atom, Hawkman (all of them)
45 Percent Rex: Booster Gold when he was in that mecha-armor suit
30 Percent Rex: Kid Quantum I, Hal Jordan (shut up, I have determined this through science)
10 Percent Rex: that sorta-vampire dude from Team Titans
.21 Percent Rex: Superboy-Prime post-insanity

So, now that you have an idea of the playing field, let us judge our first entrant.

Fun facts you may not have known about Roy Raymond, Television Detective:

1.) He legally changed his name to “Roy Raymond, Television Detective.” He had to sue Metropolis City Hall for the legal right to insert the comma in his name, and Raymond v. Metropolis was a groundbreaking case in the DC universe common-law tradition.

2.) Who’s Who claims that he “could be a great detective but prefers investigating different types of enigmas.” These include such mysteries as the Missing Fritos Of 10:30 and The Secret To Getting Into Julie From Accounting’s Pants.

3.) He gets more pussy than you do, and you’re just going to have to deal with that.

4.) Will Ferrell based his Ron Burgundy character off of Roy Raymond, Television Detective, only removing the “detective” part in final script rewrites to avoid legal trouble.

5.) Roy Raymond, Television Detective is so laid back, he breaks the fourth wall so he can lean against the side of his own panel.

And the final verdict is…

 Roy Raymond, Television Detective starts off with a high 65 rating for pure balls and also because he rocks that pipe like a motherfucker. However, his insistence on shouting things aloud like “by the Throne of Zeus!” over and over again got old after the first couple of movies times he did it, and this loses him eighteen points.

Why DC doesn’t reprint this comic, I will honestly never know. It is a dog who is bullfighting. And as issues of Rex The Wonder Dog go, this is comparatively tame.

YOU HEAR THAT, DC? GIVE US REX THE FREAKING WONDER DOG!

(More Rex The Wonder Dog here.)

Delivered to my inbox by virtuous elves, acting in secret: Gemstone have signed “new, hot talent,” to take over on Donald Duck and Friends with issue #375, and I am pleased to have the chance to present to you two pages from the issue. My source refused to name the new writer, but I have a definite hunch as regards his identity. It’s certainly a radical, daring shift for a Disney property, but I honestly think this new approach will bring in an as-yet untapped crossover market.

Just… pretend to look surprised, I guess.

Because everybody loved it so much…

Dialogue courtesy Optimooseprime.

This is Firestorm.

For those of you who do not know such things, Firestorm is a superhero with the power to transmute nonliving matter from one type of matter to another. So, for example, he can turn oxygen into iron, or lead into gold, or helium into plutonium, and so forth. Note that his power is not limited only to base elements, but indeed to more complex molecules. He’s not really limited in terms of scale when it comes to this power. (As an afterthought, he can also fly and shoot “nuclear blasts” at his enemies.)

Now, the more cunning among you may have noticed that this makes Firestorm, at the very least, a ridiculously powerful demigod, one of the most powerful superheroes imaginable. So you would think that his rogues’ gallery would compose some of the most fearsome villains ever created. Right? Right?

First up, let us consider the Enforcer – a character which is actually two characters, each wearing the exact same suit of armor. (This despite the fact that the first one is a big, brawny guy, and the other is a slender woman.) Apparently it’s a very form-fitting suit of armor. So, let’s see – it’s got boot-jets, and a laser gun, and super-strength. It’s maybe a bit generic, but as super-suits of armor go, it’s not bad.

But Firestorm can turn it into talcum powder with a thought whenever he feels like it.

Now the Hyena is just kind of depressing. First off, the Hyena is a woman who turns into a male hyena monster, which is, well, definitely a new spin on the were-monster stereotype, to say the least. And note that even though this naked were-monster is male, we’re still not allowed to see so much as a nipple. And yes, the Hyena is of course completely outmatched by Firestorm in every possible way.

But what’s really depressing now is that the Hyena has become DC’s token Villain You Can Kill Off. The Hyena has died, by my count, three times in the last decade. I have no idea if any of them were this particular Hyena. Maybe the whole Hyena curse or disease or whatever it is nowadays is transmissible, and when you get bitten by a Hyena, you become a Hyena (and thus a third-rate supervillain, good enough to be killed by Jason Todd or Deadshot, probably not so good to appear as a threat in The All-New Atom).

Also: he/she/it is presenting. And that is just wrong.

So, let me get this straight: Her name is Silver Deer. She is a Native American supervillainess. Her powers are turning into spirit animals and super-gambling?

If her weakness turns out to be liquor, how wrong would that be?

And again: turning into spirit animals and magically affecting games of chance versus “I can convert the air above you into giant rocks” is not a good matchup.

Now, Slipknot is interesting, because I mostly like the costume (that noose motif on the mask is cool, admit it) and the gimmick. He’d probably make a good Batman villain, the sort who shows up for one issue of Detective Comics when Alan Grant was writing and get his ass handed to him after a decent fight drawn by Jim Aparo.

But he is going up against Firestorm. Firestorm’s handle is “the Nuclear Man.” Slipknot’s handle is “the guy who’s really good with rope.” I don’t care if it’s fancy super-rope that Slipknot treated with fancy super-chemicals; Firestorm can still turn it into a puff of nitrogen at will.

Later, Slipknot got his arm blown off in an issue of Suicide Squad, but managed to survive. We know this because he showed up (with one arm) in Identity Crisis, as a prisoner who had taken up the worship of Kobra, DC’s very own third-rate cult leader supervillain with world-conquering ambitions. Understand that becoming the sworn follower of a lame-ass dictator wannabe with delusions of adequacy was just about the best Slipknot could manage.

His superpower is: he is a fucking furry. Why on earth is he appearing in a Firestorm comic? Ever? Dear god, somebody tell me that Weasel died in an issue of Suicide Squad or something. Weasel is the sort of pathetic supervillain that you actively wish Geoff Johns would kill off. That’s how bad he is.

I’ve been getting a few emails recently asking me to do a few more character-based I Should Write The Legion bits, which seems fair because I’ve been concentrating a lot on plot ideas lately. But the thing is – most character issues end up being plot ideas anyway, or at least subplot ideas. Character issues in an ongoing serial adventure narrative should either shape action or initiate it, especially when said narrative is about twenty-plus different characters.

But it’s worthwhile to discuss, so let’s start with my favorite.

The entire idea of the name “Brainiac Five” never made sense to me as a kid, because even then I knew that Brainiac was a bad guy. Cultures do not take the names of bad guys to describe good guys. Ever. We don’t say “wow, that Barack Obama, he’s a Hitler-level public speaker.” (Well, actually, there’s probably some idiots writing for certain right-wing websites saying exactly that, but they prove my point about it being both stupid and non-complimentary.)

Tie onto this the secondary point that being smart, in and of itself, is not a good reason for Brainiac Five to be a dick. Smart people can be wonkishly engaging just as often – if not moreso – than average folks, eager to tell you and explain to you about stuff they know, because they like knowing stuff. There has to be a reason Brainy’s defensive and arrogant and personally combative.

And here’s one more thing that doesn’t make sense: “twelfth-level intelligence.” How many fingers do Coluans have? Ten. They would be most comfortable working with a base ten numerical system, and we know as humans that we’re naturally inclined to create ordering systems in tens: top ten lists and top one hundred lists exist for a reason. Why on Earth would Coluans create a system of ordering and describing intelligence with twelve steps, rather than ten? Believe me, they’d find a scientific excuse to make it a ten-level system. Coluans might be smart, but they’re still prey to basic psychological foibles. It seems to me that the natural inclination of a Coluan would be to invent an intelligence classification system with ten levels, not twelve (and naturally put themselves at the top).

The answer, for me – not that this will surprise some of you – lies in the hidden history.

When Vril Dox overthrew the Computer Tyrants of Colu, way back in the day, the emerging scientific council wanted to thank him. They did so by making him the beneficiary of a new, as-yet untested (but of course it would work) process to elevate his intelligence. The Coluan intelligence ranking method uses processing capacity as its intellectual denominator, and this new process would expand Dox’s intellectual processing capacity by two levels, making him a hundred times smarter than any Coluan – already the species with the highest processing capacity in the known universe. More impressively, the process was genetic, so it would be passed on to Dox’s heirs.

Unfortunately, Vril Dox was kind of an evil bastard. Worse, the process worked, but also led to mental instability. The combination of the two led to the first Brainiac.

Still, Colu wasn’t too worried yet. Sure, Vril Dox turned out to be a bad apple, but the process itself was fundamentally sound, and when applied to a normal Coluan it would no doubt advance their intelligence safely. Vril Dox II was everybody’s proof of this: although only ten times smarter than the average Coluan (“eleventh-level intelligence”) and kind of a cold fish to say the least, he wasn’t insane, and his creation and leadership of L.E.G.I.O.N. proved the case. Colu prepared to start applying the genetic remodeling to its entire populace…

…until Lyrl Dox, Vril II’s son, turned out to be insane from the crib, with twelfth-level intelligence making it even worse. Lyrl temporarily turned L.E.G.I.O.N. into a fascist police force before his father stopped – and lobotomized – him.

Colu was stunned, and the genetic process abandoned forever – but it was now inherently tied to the genetic legacy of the Dox family line. As other Coluan family lines grew in size, the Doxes steadily shrank until they were just a single family. Most of the time, of course, Doxes proved to be brilliant scientists and politicians – maybe a bit unstable or quirky, but nothing dangerous. (Interestingly, a side effect of all of this was that for a Dox, romantic love relationships were the norm – completely the opposite of cool, logical Coluan society, but such irrationality was necessary for the line to survive.) Most Doxes worked quietly at home or subtly in public, their eleventh-level intelligences advancing Coluan – and even galactic – society in prodigious and uplifting ways.

Lyrl was posthumously referred to as “Brainiac Two” and forgotten…. until Brainiac Three, Pril Dox, blew up half of Colu with his anti-bombs in 2421. That set Colu on guard. The Dox line barely survived – and again, in 2706, when Brainiac Four, Orl Dox, created a massive interstellar pirate fleet and led her minions to destroy galactic communication networks in a bid to completely control interstellar civilization as she knew it. The rare glimpses of twelfth-level intelligence in the Dox line became dreaded events, and Coluan society prepared more intensely each time.

Being Coluans, they decided that the gains perpetuated by the Dox line were worth the occasional sacrifice of a Brainiac popping up, so they let it continue. But when Querl Dox was born, and his twelfth-level intelligence was obvious within hours of his birth, this time they took steps. Young Querl was designated Brainiac Five less than a month after being born. He was taught separately from all other Coluan youth, banned from the thoughtcreches, feared and shunned by just about everybody. The title of “Brainiac” became not just a condemnation but an insult, a declaration of advance perfidy.

Maybe his parents could have helped him get past this, but his father, Kell Dox – a kindly, gentle dreamer who took to writing haiku in between his brilliant chronal experiments – died of Nux Syndrome six months after Querl was born. (Nux Syndrome is dreaded in Coluan society – a brutal, random, nonhereditary genetic disease that strips away intelligence before it kills. Praetor Lemnos later created a modified, contagious version of it and unleashed it on Colu.) His mother, devastated by the loss of her husband (Coluans aren’t used to romantic love, remember) and unable to deal with society’s condemnation, fled her son, working in isolated labs and refusing to contact him.

Eventually, Colu decided to just cut its losses in advance and exiled young Querl offplanet. (It wasn’t an official exile – it was an “intellectual exchange program” but everybody knew what it was.) Querl studied everything – everything – he could get his hands on. And eventually he found out about the Legion.

He’d probably tell you that he joined it to make sure that the Legion did what it vitally needed to do – namely, implode the stagnation of the United Planets – properly. And to be fair, that’s what he believes. But he believes it because he can’t admit the real reasons he joined. He’ll never admit to anybody that he joined the Legion because he’s terrified – absolutely fucking petrified – of what he might do when he goes insane and really earns the name Brainiac, and that he wants to make sure that he’s surrounded by the most capable and powerful heroes in the universe when he finally snaps so they can deal with him. (The fact that he might be the first Coluan to ever have stable twelfth-level intelligence is one he’s never allowed himself the luxury of considering.)

And he could never admit, not even to himself, that what he wants more than anything is a family.

…there isn’t any problem you can’t solve with arrows!

ARROWS!

The DC: The New Frontier movie is honestly pretty bad. Weak voice acting (Neil Patrick Harris is good; everyone else is mostly not), generic-looking animation that looks more like warmed-over third degree Dini/Timm models than the gorgeous Darwyn Cooke pencils from the comic, and a superhero-heavy storyline (which removes a lot of the charm of the book) all contribute to make what is easily one of the best comics of the last decade into Just Another Crappy Superhero Cartoon.

Bleh.

EDIT TO ADD: I remembered that a few days ago one of the comic news stories making the rounds was that DC was considering scrapping their animated DVD movie of the famous Teen Titans story, “The Judas Contract.” And how Teen Titans fans were trying to mobilize to get it made, and…

…why?

Seriously. If you’ve already read “The Judas Contract,” it’s not going to get any better as a cartoon; comics stories in particular are noteworthy for losing a lot of their storytelling power in cartoon form. Think for a second about how many episodes of the various DC cartoons are explicitly based on existing comic book stories. (For BTAS, as an example, I can think of one or two Joker episodes, and that’s about it.) Using themes and broad story arcs from the comics (“the Legion and the Fatal Five team up to destroy the Sun-Eater” or “Terra joins up with, then betrays the Teen Titans”) is fine, but pure adaptation?

It’s impossible to duplicate the effect “The Judas Contract” had on its readers at the time, because the cartoon can’t duplicate the months of reading New Teen Titans, watching Terra work within the team, and then one month when you weren’t even slightly expecting it OH SNAP SHE IS FUCKING DEATHSTROKE THE TERMINATOR, Y’ALL. The box copy on the back of the DVD will say something like “can the Teen Titans ever be prepared for betrayal… from within?” and the shock value of the story – which is in large part the reason it worked so well – just won’t exist, unless you seriously think new viewers are going to think “hey, maybe Robin or Kid Flash is the traitor.” (Hint: they will not.)

Here’s an idea: make direct-to-DVD movies with actual new stories. Wacky, I know, but I’ve watched Batman: Mask of the Phantasm multiple times, because it is actually a good movie, rather than cheap regurgitation of existing product transformed into fanboy porn designed to milk ever yet more money out of an existing fanbase.

I wanted to wrap up my exciting summary of Tintin In America with a flourish, but the problem with the book is that Herge’s plotting – such a strength of the series in the later books, when he neatly worked multiple subplots together into 64-page maxi-comics with ridiculous skill – here is total ass. Immediately after the rockfall which Tintin of course survives, he captures Bobby Smiles.

You of course see the problem: Tintin has already beaten up Al Capone and spent most of the book chasing down Bobby Smiles, the other evil-est gangster in Chicago. And then, two-thirds of the way through the book, Tintin catches him. Leaving another third of the book where Tintin essentially has nothing to do, so Herge goes into his stockpile of stupid as gangster after gangster concocts a horrible death trap for Tintin, which he always blithely escapes in the most retardedly lucky way possible.

In case I’m not making myself clear, consider these two examples. Firstly, Tintin is tricked by a gangster into visiting a sausage factory. “Hey,” says the gangster, “let’s go up over the giant meat grinder and take a look!”

Seriously.

Now, you might be wondering what incredibly insane stroke of luck Tintin might have to get out of this one. The answer is terribly depressing.

Tintin owes his life to a union, the members of whom stop working (and shut down the grinder) at the exact instant that Tintin and Snowy fall into the giant whirling metal blades of death. It was probably a corrupt union, too.

Leaving aside the question of why Tintin would be rescued, even unintentionally, by agents of the same social forces he’s fighting –

– he then meets up with the gangster, who takes credit for shutting off the blades and saving Tintin’s life. Tintin accepts this unconditionally. Whirling metal blades of death? Everyday occurrence for Tintin! It just sort of happens, you see. Nothing suspicious about whirling metal blades of death. Or for that matter the tricked-out guardrails which conveniently gave way.

But it gets even stupider!

You’d think this would be a powerfully simple deathtrap Tintin is in this time, right? Take him out onto the lake, tie a weight to his feet, then toss him overboard. (Or through a trapdoor, which is not quite how non-pressurized environments work on boats, but whatever. We have already established that Herge loves himself some trapdoors.)

Guess what?

But how can this be?

It is worth noting at this point that Herge took no pains whatsoever to set up this switch. In fact, this scene is the first (and only) time you see the circus strongman and/or his trainer in the entire book.

So, in order for this to work:

1.) The gangsters have to have the opportunity to accidentally switch their gigantic real “dumbbell” (well, actually it’s probably a barbell, but whatever) for the fake wooden one. How often does this happen in real life? How often do the paths of two people with massive novelty dumbbells coincide, anyhow?
2.) They also have to fail to notice that the fake wooden dumbbell weighs a lot less than the massive metal dumbbell.
3.) They have to perform task #2 repeatedly.

And remember, these gangsters are the terrors of all Chicago.

To sum up:

Tintin, you lucky fucking bastard.

You also don’t want to piss off someone with Bahlacti-speed.

Way back when I was a young me, one of the first comics-related things I ever read was a hardcover compendium of Superman stories at the library. This was a genuinely great collection, filled with Golden, Silver and Bronze Age Superman stories, and readers were spoilt for choice of some of the best classic Big Blue stories around: the first one with Titano, the introduction of Mon-El, “The Two Lives Of Jonathan Kent” (easily one of the best Super-stories ever printed, and not just because the villain was an evil hippie with magical wish powers), a classic imaginary death story…

…and my personal favorite, the one where Superman teamed up with Orson Welles (seriously) to fight evil Martian space Nazis.

Now, I probably can’t get away with Orson Welles. But…

Okay, let’s work this thing out.

Right. Alien space Nazis. Shouldn’t be too hard, do the “they receive signals” trick. Whoops, turns out, though, that that means that you’ve only got an effective radius of one thousand light years from Earth – that’s practically next door in spatial terms. Hm. We need this to be a fairly backwater world, so that when the Legion encounters the evil alien space Nazis they’re totally unheard of and new.

Okay, no problem. What happens is that in the far distant future, the Nazi radio waves hit a gravitic anomaly sort of a thing, yes? And the gravitic anomaly slingshots the Nazi radio waves in a totally different direction and speeds them up to much much faster than the speed of light, and the theory of relativity does the rest of the work, shoving the radio waves backwards through time so they hit the planet that will create the alien space Nazi civilization and accompanying war machine in, oh, let’s say about 2950, giving the Xgrylth Reich about 150 years and change to build up a truly fearsome armada.

From there, it’s cake: you have your explanation for the evil alien space Nazi armada, it sounds even semi-plausible, and all you need to do is tell the artist to draw the shit out of some planet-stomping giant Nazi war robots and some awesome-looking space Messerchmitts and some wicked-cool space SS troopers (to laugh in the Legion’s faces when some of them get captured and thrown in the Space Gulag of Ropticon 7, you see) and oh oh oh don’t forget the Turbo-Star-Panzer Brigade, armed to the teeth with death rays and alien fascist self-importance.

Bluntly: if the Legion of Super-Heroes fighting evil alien space Nazis is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.