Legendary DC Creator Keith Giffen Explains Why Legion of Super-Heroes Reboots Always Fail

Keith Giffen might be best known for his acclaimed partnerships with frequent collaborator J.M. DeMatteis, but he has plenty of iconic projects he has written on his own or with others, including a fan-favorite run on DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes. During his run, Giffen drew “The Great Darkness Saga,” a story he later revisited with DeMatteis in Booster Gold #32. On an episode of his new podcast I’m Not Dead Yet, Giffen answered fan questions, many of which centered on his time with the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

After the fact, Giffen took to Facebook, where he shared a photo of himself standing in front of a door featuring one of his Legion issues’ covers. One of his fans asked why he thought DC has found it so impossible to have long-term success with the Legion since the ’80s, as the series has been reinvented and rebooted a number of times since the original Crisis on Infinite Earths.

“All the people who have approached it since my days have gone in thinking there was something wrong with the book and tried to ‘fix it,’” Giffen said. “As a result you lose the charm of the book. The Legion was always (as far as I am concerned) a really entry level DC book. Even I did when I took it on, but at the end of the day its a book about a club of kids with super powers and a clubhouse. For a while it was like, the book had the youngest audience of any book that I had done (other than the hard core Legion fans).”

Since Legion of Super-Heroes titles take place in the future, DC’s big cosmic reboots tend to shift things quite a bit for them — most notably the first Crisis, which established that Clark Kent didn’t get his powers until he was 18 years old, suggesting that Superboy never existed and fundamentally altering the history of the Legion, which was founded based on stories about Superboy’s early career and legacy.

Here’s how Giffen describes his podcast, which you can subscribe to here: 

After what seems like a million years drawing and telling stories, its time to finally sit down and talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Join me as I go over my career, speak with colleagues and generally moan about anything and everything in the comic book world from today and yesterday.