In "Our Lives Together," I spotlight some of the more interesting examples of shared comic book universes. You know, crossovers that aren't exactly crossovers.

Longtime reader Andy N. wrote in with this one. I can always trust that Andy will come up with a nice, hard-to-find one! He's good like that.

Anyhow, our story begins in Legion of Super-Heroes #23, from 1986, by Paul Levitz, Steve Lightle, Greg LaRocque and Mike DeCarlo), the last issue of the series that Steve Lightle drew. It's a shame, as he was awesome on that series. He still did a bunch of covers, though.

Anyhow, the issue opens with some sad stuff, as Mon-El is in excruciating pain...

As it turned out, the cure that Brainiac Five came up with to cure Mon-El of his crippling lead poisoning was wearing off and it seemed like Mon-El was going to die. Mon-El wanted the others to just let him die in peace. He is so weak, however, that the others are able to overpower him and once again send him into the Phantom Zone, where he can be held in stasis while Brainy tries to figure out a cure. He is none too pleased with this turn of events...

Mon-El is so pissed off that he actually has a page where he screams about wanting to die and there are, like, multiple big panels of him just screaming "DIE!" Melodrama much, Mon-El? You might have been named after a Monday, but you don't have to always have such a big case of the Mondays, am I right?

Anyhow, he decides to mess with them by flying away from Earth. You see, if he flies off in the Phantom Zone, they can't very well figure out where he is. So the Legion then send Phantom Girl and Tellus to find him and get him to come back to Earth so that they can communicate with him.

Meanwhile, despite time being ALL messed up due to Crisis on Infinity Earths, a group of Legionnaires decide to go back in time to get Superboy anyways...

They find him and bring him back to the future...

Note that at this point in time, we're still before the Man of Steel reboot and soon Superboy is still part of continuity. One of, if not THE biggest problem of Post-Crisis DC Comics continuity is that there was no cut-off point after Crisis where continuity changed. Nope, instead, you had multiple titles doing multiple different types of continuity. So Superman doesn't reboot until well after Crisis, despite Superboy still being shown to being part of the timeline post Crisis. It was a whole big ol' mess.

As an aside, in the previous issue, Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass had their first heart-to-heart since Lightning Lass re-joined the team as Lightning Lass (after regaining her powers). They continue to work together in this issue, setting up one of the all-time great lesbian romances of the late 1980s/early 1990s (granted, that's a low bar to hurdle, but still)...

Anyhow, like I said, time is all messed up, so when they come back to the future from 1986, they get sent on a detour to the 21st Century, where they see a dude driving by...

How the heck is that Jonah Hex? Well, let's see it from his perspective...

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You see, in 1985, in an attempt to keep the long-running Jonah Hex series around (sales had gone way down), DC agreed to a radical idea to send Jonah Hex into a post-Apocalyptic future in the 21st Century and have him rock some Mad Max style adventures there. Longtime writer (the late, great) Michael Fleisher still wrote his adventures. In Hex #10, Ron Wagner and Carlos Garzon drew the issue.

The issue opens with Hex being hired to find some guy's daughter who has ended up in a cult. When he goes off to find her, well, he sees something weird...

And that was that. Just a cute little "crossover."

Hex then rescues the girl from a strange cult...

As an aside, the issue has a really weird last page. The girl escapes from her room as soon as Hex gets her home, but then the issue abruptly sets up a cliffhanger for next issue. Like, REALLY abruptly...

Thanks for the suggestion, Andy! If anyone has a suggestion for another piece of interesting shared continuity, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!