Where are the Legion of Super-Heroes? DC Co-Publisher Jim Lee promises, there are plans in the works.
Videos by ComicBook.com
During a recent video interview with ComicBook.com’s Jim Viscardi, the pair talked about Doomsday Clock, the success of the Rebirth line…and, yes, Lee addressed the 30th Century elephant in the room: What is going on with the Legion of Super-Heroes?!
“I love the Legion, too, and let’s just say that any character or group that’s not out there, there are plans for them,” said DC co-publisher Jim Lee. “It’s really a matter of timing and people’s schedules lining up. It’s actually a pretty complicated process. You were talking about Doomsday Clock and Rebirth and this two-year unveiling or wait until the main story: it’s akin to that. You have a lot of people interested in launching these characters and we want to give them the best shot at success, so sometimes that means launching them out of things that are already successful, and finding the right writer, the right artist, and sometimes their schedules aren’t quite aligned, so when all that happens, then that’s when we launch a book. As you know the Legion has been relaunched many, many times, so I think when we come back we’ve got to come back our strongest.”
The Legion of Super-Heroes is a team of teenage superheroes from a thousand years in the future, when galactic governments have come together from worlds throughout the cosmos. Headquartered on Earth, the teens are inspired by the heroic legacy of Superman.
DC launched two Legion-related titles in 2011’s The New 52 publishing initiative, but both were cancelled fairly quickly, and characters from the team have rarely been seen since. A character since confirmed to be Saturn Girl, one of the Legion’s founding members, appeared in last year’s DC Universe: Rebirth and has since been spotted in Tom King’s Batman more than once. A version of Phantom Girl, a longtime Legionnaire, will appear in the forthcoming The Terrifics from Jeff Lemire and Ivan Reis.
Since Rebirth, though, appearances in-continutiy have been even more sporadic than they had been in the three years that led up to it. Meanwhile, a Legion ring and Legion-affiliated names have appeared on The CW’s Supergirl while the team itself has teamed up with Batman ’66 and Bugs Bunny in a pair of short-run stories.
(Of course, Tom King has said that he considers the Batman/Elmer Fudd one-shot to be canonical, so who’s to say the Legion’s meeting with Bugs Bunny wasn’t Rebirth canon?)
In the closing moments of the conversation, Lee also mentions Olivier Coipel, who has been working exclusively at Marvel consistently for years but has some DC work upcoming. From the context of the interview, though, it is as likely that Lee was trying to avoid two questions being linked where no link exists, as it is that he was trying to throw fans off the scent.
Legion of Super-Heroes was once one of DC’s most popular and best-selling titles, although it has struggled more or less since Crisis on Infinite Earths, which rebooted the DC multiverse for the first time and so rocked the foundation upon which the Legion — which, again, takes place in the future — was built. Numerous big-name creators have worked on the Legion since, including Mark Waid, Jim Starlin, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Stuart Immonen and Fabian Nicieza — but none have been able to recapture the critical or commercial success of the ’70s and ’80s Legion for long.
