DC Annihilated One of Its Best Teams (and That’s a Good Thing)

The Legion of Super-Heroes is one of the best superhero teams from DC Comics, yet it is also one of the most neglected. The team has undergone numerous reinventions, making it difficult to keep track. It’s unfortunate because the group represents an optimistic viewpoint of the future, featuring a colorful cast of characters and many iconic stories. Some of the team’s variations were more successful than others, but the group’s most recent reboot was probably one of DC’s worst attempts with the team. Brian Michael Bendis’s attempt to reinvent the Legion fell flat on its face and is likely one of DC’s biggest blunders.

Writer Joshua Williamson and artist Dan Mora have introduced an evil version of the Legion, working for Darkseid. The new evil Legion of Super-Heroes have been recurring characters throughout DC’s All-In Initiative, specifically in the Superman comics. Mora has shared preview pages for the upcoming issues of Superman, revealing that the good Legion of the future have been wiped out. While it’s upsetting to see characters we love decimated, the silver lining is that the most recent incarnation of the Legion of Super-Heroes has been wiped out. This leaves room for a better, and hopefully a more classic, version of the Legion to appear.

The Legion of Super-Heroes Are Wiped Out

The preview pages shared by Mora show Superman in the future, where he sees buildings toppled and the bodies of the Legion of Super-Heroes scattered across the ground. The interesting thing about the image is that the Legion presented in Mora’s artwork appears to be a mix of various designs from the many reboots. Lightning Lad from Geoff Johns’ Legion Threeboot is shown impaled, whereas Bendis’ Chameleon Boy and Saturn Girl lie stiff in the foreground. There are also the skeletal remains of three giants, suggesting it’s the corpses of all three versions of Colossal Boy. Mora’s preview image doesn’t offer any dialogue, leaving only up to the readers’ interpretation of the gruesome image.

Darkseid seemingly perished in a conflict with the Justice League, but his essence was corrupted and formed a new universe that became known as the Absolute Universe. Darkseid has bigger ambitions with the Prime DC Universe, creating his own evil version of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Darkseid and his Legion likely caused the carnage depicted in Mora’s preview pages. It’s theorized that Darkseid is slowly corrupting the Prime Universe and is working his way backward from the future to the present. The corpses of the multiple different Legion teams imply that all versions of the group teamed up to try to stop Darkseid, but failed. Different Legion variants have teamed up before with Geoff Johns’ Legion of Three Worlds comic, with a Legion of Four Worlds storyline being foreshadowed in Johns’ Justice Society comic.

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Why The Legion’s Death Is a Good Thing

The Legion of Super-Heroes has suffered from many bad storylines and reboots. When Superman’s past as Superboy was erased after Crisis on Infinite Earths, that essentially rendered a good chunk of Legion lore moot. The team needed to reboot, yet it never seemed as if DC was ever satisfied with where they left the team. They would continuously make changes to the team, several reboots and relaunches that eventually led to DC giving Bendis the keys to the Legion kingdom in the latter half of the 2010s. Bendis gave the Legion of Super-Heroes radical new redesigns to make the team more diverse and better represent the modern-day youths.

While there was some hesitation towards the redesigns, genuine hype surrounded Bendis’ Legion. Bendis was an all-star creator who made Ultimate Spider-Man and Alias bona fide hits. Ryan Sook’s artwork was also phenomenal, with his redesigns, if anything, delivering interesting new aesthetics to the team. There were even announcements that Bendis was going to work on the next major Legion animated series. Bendis’ Legion had all the hallmarks to be a modern classic, but ended up falling short. The new Legion book was mostly a retread of the team’s greatest stories, with nothing necessarily new. The comic also featured too many characters at one time, with no one character’s voice standing out from the sea of dialogue. The addition of Jon Kent over Superman in the Legion also rubbed fans the wrong way, with many not welcoming the aged-up Superboy as quickly as Bendis and DC wanted.

It wasn’t all bad; there were some standout issues, and the artwork was generally terrific. Unfortunately, the Justice League vs. Legion of Super-Heroes comic felt very disjointed, and Bendis ultimately left DC before he could follow through with any of his Legion subplots. The Legion has since been stuck in a weird limbo, with many fans preferring to ignore Bendis’ version of the Legion altogether. It felt like Bendis left DC with a bag of something that they had no clue what to do with. Even though DC could’ve continued where Bendis left off with a new writer, it was probably for the best that the company wiped the slate clean and started over again. It’s clear that fans and other creators want a Legion of Super-Heroes that are closer to the classic version we recognize.