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Pat McGreal and Mike Vosburg’s “Homeward Bound” reveals that the JLI’s Russian member, Dmitri Pushkin AKA Rocket Red #4, is not actually Russian. He’s…Ukrainian. And as the Soviet Union is collapsing, Dmitri returns home for a visit. Bear in mind this story came out in 1992…

Dmitri’s mostly not around today: he died in the O.M.A.C. storyline and seems to still be gone after the last reboot. Although a version of him had a star turn in The Human Target.

If he were here in 2026, he’d have some hard choices to confront. But I can’t envision any scenario where he’d fail to defend his loved ones. And that’s what he does here, though in this 1991 tale, the greatest threat is to those of Russian ancestry.

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Yeah, I miss Dmitri.

Paul Kupperberg and Don Heck contribute a General Glory story, “If This Be My Destiny…?” Set in the 1960s, it’s a comic within a comic. As you may remember, General Glory himself was suffering partial amnesia in the 1960s, unable to recall the words that transformed him, but his adventures continued in the General Glory comics that cast a ray of sun into Guy Gardner’s bullied childhood.

The twice-fictional General Glory’s musings on his own mortality are interesting. Unfortunately, this adventure revolves around the Yellow Fang, the apparent result of Kupperberg looking at the old Marvel villain the Yellow Claw and asking, “Is there a way we can make this even racister? Just to underscore the point, you understand?”

Triumph...and tragedy! (Plus a shameless Nick Fury Sr. pastiche to complete the picture. “We have Nick Fury at home.”)

The main tale of this issue, “Klaarsh Reunion,” is a weird but charming little adventure by Michael Jan Friedman and Eduardo Barreto. It starts with Ted Kord (the Blue Beetle) facing his fifteen-year high school reunion and his closest friends in the League going along for moral support. Like last issue’s main story, there’s a sub-theme of the Leaguers being real friends to each other, but this premise is in a more believable register than the League organizing a prank show.

It’d be positively down-to-earth (har) if the aliens hadn’t revealed themselves. A huge spaceship comes down and tractor-beams the whole reunion into the sky, heading for deep space. But when I say “the aliens,” I don’t just mean the ones flying the ship:

Late-stage Giffen-era stories course-corrected a bit from “Blue Beetle, what a clown, what a shortsighted idiot jerk.” They started to lean more on Beetle’s status as a tech whiz--as well as a capable fighter, once he’d addressed his weight issues. (We’ll get back to those.) He signals the other Leaguers not with the usual signal device, but with a new model he’s been prototyping. And he’s also the one who has to sabotage the aliens’ tractor beam/force field so his teammates can enter:

The aliens soon realize they’re meeting far more resistance than they anticipated over a bunch of now-ordinary immigrants, and they capitulate like the cowardly bullies they are. (Write your own ICE analogy here.) With the threat defeated, Friedman renders the tension between Beetle and Guy, and Guy and Ice’s almost-relationship, in a way that makes them all seem like semi-normal people.

And Beetle makes peace with his past.

This 1992 story has some parallels with a 1988 tale from Gerard Jones and Ty Templeton in Secret Origins #30. In it, Ralph Dibny (not yet a member of the JLE) goes back to his old hometown for a cookout. He can’t fathom why everyone treats him coolly compared to his hometown-hero brother Ken, no matter how many stretchy stunts he pulls, dumb jokes he tells, or superhero anecdotes he relates!

Ken spells some things out for him. Like Ted, Ralph comes to grips with the fact that he’s been a bit self-involved, looking down on others for their quotidian lives. For all that it’s good to let your freak flag fly…sometimes it’s worth trying to assimilate, at least for an afternoon. Even if you’ll never be great at it.

Monday: Having turned Blue Beetle and Captain Atom into household names, the JLI flirts with bringing in the fourth-most-popular, second-most-racist Charlton hero!