Did DC Just Reinvent One of Their Most Obscure Superhero Teams?

In this week’s Generations Shattered #1, DC seems to have introduced a reinvented version of one of their most obscure superhero teams: The Forgotten Heroes. Originally introduced in 1984, The Forgotten Heroes originally consisted of Animal Man, Cave Carson, Rip Hunter, Congo Bill, Rick Flag, and others C-list heroes who at that time had been largely forgotten by readers. They teamed up after having their reputations smeared by the U.S. government when they found mysterious templed suddenly appearing all over the world, and were dismissed as cranks. It was soon discovered that the pyramids were part of an elaborate plot by Vandal Savage to kill Superman.

Led by Immortal Man, the Forgotten Heroes teamed up with Superman himself to destroy the pyramids and foil Savage’s plans. The team later reunited to battle a team of Forgotten Villains, but have been absent from DC’s publishing line since 2001, when they were referenced in flashback in an issue of Superman: The Man of Steel, in an early example of pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths creeping back into the Superman continuity following the relatively strict continuity of the era from 1986 until 2000.

While the new team of heroes assembled by Booster Gold, Skeets, and Kamandi aren’t an exact match for the Forgotten Heroes, it certainly seems like they could be a version of it. First of all, these heroes are literally forgotten — Kamandi comes from just after the Great Disaster, when history records are sketchy at best, and the other heroes come from a previously-unseen Earth in DC’s multiverse.

The team also includes Rip Hunter — as well as his father, Booster Gold, who didn’t exist during those first Forgotten Heroes stories, but whose career with Rip as Time Masters included its fair share of going underground and letting people think he was dead or at least gone for periods of time. In the final pages of the first issue, we learn that Cave Carson — whose name appeared on Rip Hunter’s chalkboard earlier in the issue — is part of whatever will happen in the second half of the story, next month’s Generations Forged.

Like the Forgotten Heroes, this new, as-yet-unnamed team of time-traveling heroes find themselves thrown together by circumstance, rather than coming together for common cause, and like the Forgotten Heroes they already have a team of villains facing them that is kind of a bizarro version fo themselves (a number of time-travelers brainwashed by the villain Dominus to act on his behalf).

Generations Shattered is available in comic shops and on digital platforms now. Generations Forged will be in stores the first week of February.