Time and Time Again Conclusion

Time and Time Again concludes with a moon-shattering bang.  This has been the longest multi-chapter Superman saga so far in the post-Crisis era, although longer tales are on the near horizon.

Superman #55

Time and Time Again phase 6

Camelot is under siege by the forces of Morgaine Le Fey, who is using an unstoppable new black knight to break into the castle.  The wizard Merlin uses his magic to discover this new secret weapon is really the time-lost Superman who, vulnerable to magic, is being controlled by the sorceress.  The wizard frees Superman from Morgan's spell and uses the Man of Steel as his own white knight against the witch instead.  In the end, Camelot falls and Superman disappears in the explosion.

This issue is the second time post-Crisis Superman travels back in time to help the Demon fight Morgaine Le Fey, although their first meeting in Action Comics #587 didn't happen by the end of the story.  So technically this is the first?  Superman still has a beard on the cover, but we see it's already been magically removed when Merlin unmasks him.  However, half of his face has a beard again when Merlin transforms him into the white knight. 

In the present, Lois waits in her apartment where her seldom-seen cat Elroy has torn apart the shirt which Clark left behind when he changed into Superman. 

In the backup story, the Newsboy Legion continues to find trouble at Cadmus.  We don't get much of a story, it's mostly just an excuse to call back to Jack Kirby's legendary run on Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, which first connected the Newsboy Legion to the Superman mythos.  We do, however, get the first appearance of mad scientist Dabney Donovan, who was first mentioned in Kirby's run but never actually appeared.  Dabney will re-emerge as a greater part of the ongoing story in a few years.

Adventures of Superman #478

Time and Time Again phase 7

Superman finds himself back in the future again, this time he meets the "5 years later" Legion of Superheroes as depicted in the current comics at this point in time.  This version of the Legion is barely recognizable to me, but it's far enough in the future that they remember the death of Superboy now.  Dev-Em, previously a surviving Kryptonian in pre-Crisis continuity, is re-introduced as a Daxamite driven mad by lead poisoning.  We find him on the moon battling another Daxamite, Laurel Gand, who serves as a post-Crisis stand-in for Supergirl.  Basically, an characters who used to be Kryptonian have been retconned as Daxamites now.  Dev-Em uncovers a secret Dominator hide-out under the moon's surface that's also been rigged to obliterate the moon.  Superman helps the Legion stop Dev-Em from blowing up the moon at the last second.  After the Legion departs, however, the Linear Man appears.  Insisting he can't let Superman change time, the Linear Man re-starts the detonator and the moon explodes, killing the millions of people who had been living there.  Superman finds himself back on the moon in his own time contemplating if he'd rather have remained stranded in the future to prevent that tragedy.

Legion of Superheroes continuity was an unintended casualty of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it can be very confusing for those who haven't been following them without interruption during this period.  This story typifies the Man of Steel's interactions with the post-Crisis Legion of Superheroes: in the course of three months Superman meets three different incarnations of the Legion, each with varying degrees of recollection about him.  The fallout of the destruction of the moon will continue in Legion of Superheroes #19, but what would seem like long-lasting ramifications will be erased in another reboot in a few years.  The next time Superman meets the Legion it will be another completely different version.  The pre-Crisis Legion started out as a Superman book (hence the "super" in the title), its longest-running solo series was actually a continuation of Superboy.  In my opinion, the Legion should have always stayed a Superman-family series, but once it stopped being that it also stopped being one of DC's most popular books and has never recovered from it.  

Action Comics #665

Picking up immediately after Time and Time Again ends, Superman flies from the moon to the Earth and finds Lois asleep on her couch with her cat.  Although nearly five months have passed for him, he learns he's only been missing here for a few hours.  Clark falls asleep telling Lois about his adventures, and wakes up to find she left him a love note on his shredded dress shirt before going to work.  Clark catches up with her at the Daily Planet, where managing editor Foswell tells them the Whites are going to be gone even longer now on a Caribbean cruise.  He begs Clark to come back on staff full time and he accepts.  Lois is assigned to cover the story of Lex Luthor's will, and Clark is assigned to cover the mysterious deaths of six inmates at Styker's Island prison.  The six bodies are reanimated as zombies under the control of Baron Sunday, although it turns out he merely put them in trances that mimicked death.  Superman frees the convicts from Baron Sunday's mind control, and the villain ends up in a catatonic trance.  The doctors wonder if this could be permanent, and to date Baron Sunday has never returned.