Important A Goal?

I was recently reading "Doomsday Clock" #9 (DC, copyright May 2019) and on page 4, the top three panels read:

Geoff Johns wrote: It's December 27th, 3019. A boy sacrifices his life to save Earth's Sun. Although his body is destroyed, his ring survives.

The explosion sends the ring careening through time like a tachyon particle.

It's December 20th, 3019. The dead boy is alive. He sweats under his iron mask, auditioning to join a legion of others dedicated to uniting the universe.

In case you can't find or order it in a store.

The story of a hero in three panels, seven sentences. I would love to write that well.

I'm working on that! Writing with no frills, yet great impact that is. So far all my attempts are escaping me. I think that in some ways the drabble I posted at BCTS is close to the best I've done so far, and I still find it lacks impact and fails to be a real story.
Indeed that piece is like a hanging fragment of a story with no connectors anywhere. Yet it is hard to get the connectors in in the number of words in a drabble.

You know that the boy referred to is Ferro Lad, and his sacrifice to save the Earth from a Sun-Eater was a classic Legion of Super-Heroes storyline back in, oh, the sixties or seventies, don't you? (LSH geek here)

What I mean from it is that, well, Geoff Johns IS a great writer, but in this particular case he was just summarizing a well-known story.

Sir Lee wrote: You know that the boy referred to is Ferro Lad, and his sacrifice to save the Earth from a Sun-Eater was a classic Legion of Super-Heroes storyline back in, oh, the sixties or seventies, don't you? (LSH geek here)

I own a couple of copies of LSH #300, which includes the story about his brother Douglas finally finding peace. Also, somewhere I've got the SW6 stories with Andrew Nolan.

Sir Lee wrote: What I mean from it is that, well, Geoff Johns IS a great writer, but in this particular case he was just summarizing a well-known story.

Yes, but getting to a good abstract or executive summary can be more difficult than the original manuscript. Props as props are due.

To be honest, Dr. Manhattan erasing the entire possibility and premise of all the Legions just by moving an antique lamp six inches - practically on a whim - says a hell of a lot about how the various incarnations have been treated by the company's writers and editors over the years. I doubt I'm the only one biased on that subject!

I'm still fascinated by tale attributed to Ernest Hemingway for the shortest short story.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Flash fiction in general is a great way to practice writing in general. When you can evoke emotion or contemplative thought by setting such harsh constraints for yourself, that's incredible. I feel like it can put me in a more creative mood.

Everyone writes differently, but I've found much more success in starting out with a single paragraph summary, then fleshing it out by continually asking questions about the statement until it becomes a full outline. It's an editor's trick, iirc.

As a side note, in looking up the proper term for "flash fiction," I also just learned that Cosmo magazine used to be a literary magazine.