Is the Legion of Super-Heroes Coming to Supergirl?
12/05/2016 04:00 pm EST
With Cadmus seemingly sidelined at the end of last week's midseason finale, there are a lot of questions about just what the second half of Supergirl season 2 will look like -- and the DC All Access webseries may have provided fans with a tantalizing clue.
On Friday, DC released a video (seen above) detailing their top ten Legion of Super-Heroes stories, couched in the context that with Mon-El appearing on Supergirl, "the Legion of Super-Heroes can't be far behind."
While it's questionable at best for fans to immediately leap to the conclusion that DC All Access has enough of an "in" with the TV side of things to read that line as a solid confirmation, it's also probably naive to assume that DC spending money to produce a video featuring a team that's currently without a regularly-published comic doesn't mean something.
The Legion of Super-Heroes is a team of teen-aged superheroes from a thousand years in the future. Headquartered on Earth, they come from a variety of different worlds and have a variety of different powers (although each of them wields a Legion flight ring, which provides its wearer with a universal translator, the ability to fly, and some other perks).
Inspired by the legend of Superboy, the Legion traveled back in time to recruit Superman as a teenager, and would periodically steal him away to the future to have adventures with them, returning him to Smallville when they were done. At different points, the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superboy (Conner Kent) and Supergirl have also been part of the Legion.
Once one of DC's most successful and popular franchises, the Legion of Super-Heroes have suffered quite a bit since the first line-wide continuity reboot following 1986's Crisis on Infinite Earths. At that time, Superman's backstory was modified so that he was never Superboy and the Legion had to modify its own backstory to accommodate, "invalidating" many of the stories that pre-Crisis Legion fans had loved. The character who took Superboy's place in those retroactively-altered tales, though? Mon-El, the Daxamite hero often known as Valor.
While he did have his own ongoing series set in the present day for a while, and participated in the World of New Krypton storyline which also took place in the then-current DC Universe, most of Mon-El's memorable stories have taken place as part of the Legion of Super-Heroes, so when he came on board, many fans wondered whether it was just a matter of time before we would see the rest of the Legion.
That impression was rooted, in part, in the fact that fans have already seen evidence that the Legion not only exists in the world of Supergirl, but has a relationship with Superman. In the season 1 episode "Fortress," Supergirl headed to Superman's Fortress of Solitude for the first time and one of the first things the audience saw was a Legion of Super-Heroes flight ring (pictured above) mounted on a crystal dais inside.
Has anything much changed? Well, not that we know of. That said, Mon-El still has not quite found a niche for himself in the present day, and he has been exposed to lead (a story point which was fairly quickly abandoned when Jeremiah Danvers pulled the bullet out). That could be significant, since in the comics there was a long period of time where the character got lead poisoning and had to be put into stasis, only to be retrieved and cured by the Legion centuries later.
Supergirl airs on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. New episodes will return in January.
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