Whatever Happened to the Legion of Superheroes (And Can They Be Saved?)

The Legion of Superheroes is one of the most important teams in the history of superhero comics, and there’s no two ways about it. While there were groups like the Newsboy Legion and the Young Allies in the Golden Age, the Legion of Superheroes was the first major team of teen heroes and helped define the weird sci-fi that Silver Age DC would become known for. The Legion is also one of DC’s least popular current properties. Despite having some high profile fans like Jonathan Hickman and Mark Waid, the Legion has been a failure multiple times in the 21st century. With DC All-In making the publisher more popular than ever, and teams like the Justice League and Justice Society returning, the question needs to be asked — what happened to the Legion and can they be saved?

The main problems with the Legion have their origins in the shifting tides of DC continuity. While this can be a general problem for getting into DC for a lot of superhero fans, the Legion is a very special case. The Legion was a confusing soap opera involving a massive number of superheroes, and that’s before stories like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint get added to the mix. The Legion’s publication history is pretty interesting, and are where our answers life.

The Legion of Superheroes Is the Most DC Team of Them All

The Legion of Superheroes was introduced in 1958’s Adventure Comics #247, where Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad came back in time to meet the hero who inspired them to become superheroes, Superboy. They’d bring Superboy to their future — the 30th century, although the sliding timescale of comics has made it the 31st century in later Legion comics — and Superboy, and later Supergirl, would become a member of the Legion. At this point, I could list all of the members of the Legion, but we don’t have all day. The thing that most people don’t get about the old Legion is that the Legion are actually the template for the Claremont X-Men. Part of the fun of old Legion comics, especially once Jim Shooter comes on the book at 13 (look it up), was the soap opera aspect. It was a bunch of teenagers in spandex; of course it was going to be a massive soap opera.

The Superboy, Supergirl, and the Legion had decades of adventures, and then Crisis on Infinite Earths happened. This is the beginning of the Legion’s problems. Crisis changed DC’s history, doing away with the multiverse, Superboy, and Supergirl. Those last two screwed up the Legion the most; Superboy was literally why the team existed. Legion creators had to scramble, and readers got the “Five Years Later” era of the Legion. However, the complications that had been to added to the Legion in order to make it work post-Crisis made the Legion untenable. The Legion ended, but post-Zero Hour would see an all-new version of the Legion introduced for the ’90s. And it actually worked. The Reboot Legion is basically just the old Legion modernized and the Legion had two books throughout the ’90s — Legion of Superheroes and Legionnaires. This is a great era of the Legion — Annihilation writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning wrote most issues of both books and they’re sensational — but it too would fade away. The ’90s were a different time, and the bright shiny Legion just didn’t fit. Legion Lost was DC’s first attempt to save the Legion in the early ’00s, but it wouldn’t work.

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Since then, there have been five different versions of the Legion. There’s the Waid/Kitson Threeboot, the post-Infinite Crisis return of the Silver Age Legion, the New 52 Legion, Bendis/Sook’s Legion, and Darkseid’s Legion that was introduced in DC All-In #1. This where we get to the main problem with the Legion — it’s gotten much too confusing. Superhero comics can get quite convoluted, but the Legion takes it to another level. The return of the multiverse and Superboy helped a bit — mostly because it allowed an explanation for all the different Legions and gave the team back their idol — but modern fans know that reading the Legion means that the Legion you like could be ended at any time and replaced by another one.

The Legion of Superheroes is in many ways superheroes distilled down to their purest form. The colorful costumes, the simple names, the soap opera drama between members, and some of the best villains in the history of comics are all part of the Legion’s history. However, the fact that there is no concrete Legion and that there have been six distinct versions of the team is the biggest problem. It’s not a problem without a solution, though, and the solution comes from looking back.

Pick a Legion and Stick With It

The return of the Silver Age Legion in 2007’s “The Lightning Saga” is the key to the whole thing. The Silver Age Legion is the blueprint for the rest. It’s the one with the most connections to the present day. The best way to fix the Legion would be to bring back this version of the team, and throw a true A-list team on the book. Honestly, just get Mark Waid to come back to the Legion and give him Dan Mora as main artist, with Clayton Henry as the back-up artist for Mora. It would be perfect. Legion fans want the best Legion stories, and we’d prefer it to be as streamlined as possible.

As with many of the good ideas of the post-Infinite Crisis DC Multiverse, the New 52 ruined everything. Rebooting everything and creating a fourth version of the team right when we were getting things back to normal torpedoed any hope the Legion had to come back. strong. If DC wants the Legion to thrive again, they need to set who the Legion is in stone and give them to passionate creators who understand how to do Legion stories. It won’t be easy, but it’s the only solution that would bring one of comics’ greatest teams to prominence.