How Loki Could Introduce the Squadron Supreme

We're coming up on the debut of Marvel Studios' Loki, and the highly-anticipated series has had a lot for fans to look forward to. The series' expanded take on Tom Hiddleston's God of Mischief — combined with the weirdness of his new mission with the Time Variance Authority — was expected to manifest itself in some unexpected ways. While we've really only gotten fleeting glimpses of exactly what that will entail, we do know the series is set to explore alternate realities and bring some weird pockets of Marvel Comics lore and real-life history to life. Granted, there are an almost infinite number of possibilities for what that could bring, but one theory has risen from the pack — that Loki could end up being the perfect place to introduce the Squadron Supreme.

Created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema and first debuting in 1971's The Avengers #85, the Squadron Supreme are an eclectic group of superheroes from an alternate universe eventually dubbed Earth-712. The group is a not-so-subtle send up to DC Comics' Justice League — usually, the "Satellite Era" of the team that stretched through the 1970s and 1980s — and their individual costumed members often homage an existing DC hero. Some of these pastiches are a little more obvious — including a Superman-like strongman named Hyperion, a wealthy brooding Batman-esque businessman named Nighthawk, and a Black Canary-esque singer with a sonic cry named Lady Lark. Other aspects of the Squadron Supreme have gone on to differ from their counterparts, including Power Princess, a female gladiator with a Wonder Woman-esque origin story who was later revealed to be a construct from Mephisto, and Doctor Spectrum, an even-more-bizarre take on the mythos of Green Lantern. After initially going toe-to-toe with groups like the Avengers and the Defenders, the Squadron would go on to be seen as heroes in their own right, with their own stories being told in multiple maxiseries and graphic novels over the years. The most iconic among them is the eponymous Squadron Supreme maxiseries of the late 1980s, which is regarded as the magnum opus of Mark Gruenwald, the Marvel writer who would go on to serve as the real-life inspiration for Mobius M. Mobius, Owen Wilson's character in Loki.

While the Squadron Supreme could be regarded as an element that's "too big" to introduce in Loki, that would arguably be part of the fun — and to an extent, the circumstances of the Disney+ series lend themselves perfectly to the group's debut. Namely, we do know that Loki will pick up on the hero after what happened in Avengers: Endgame, after the Tesseract accidentally fell into Loki's hands during a revisiting of the events of The Avengers. Given the motivations that Loki had in 2012 — namely, being hell-bent on destroying the newly-formed version of Earth's Mightiest Heroes — the Squadron Supreme would be able to serve as an interesting foil of that. Loki and the TVA could easily travel to an alternate reality where the Squadron was the premiere superhero team — potentially one where they have turned their world into a utopia, as they did in the first Squadron Supreme maxiseries. This would show Loki firsthand that the number of public-facing heroes in the Marvel multiverse stretches far beyond the Avengers, something that would have seemed bizarre to both Loki and casual MCU viewers in 2012. If the Squadron were to potentially take an antagonistic stance against Loki, that would be fascinating in its own right too, and would open up a whole can of worms in terms of characterization and plot on the series.

Even just on a purely tonal level, there's something about the idea of introducing the Squadron Supreme on Loki that just works. The self-aware, surreal nature of the Loki series lends itself perfectly to subversion of expectations, and nothing would fit that bill quite like introducing a self-aware, surreal take on the Justice League. Given the ways that the Justice League has hit the public consciousness over the years, from comics to animated television to two versions of a big-screen movie, there are definitely a lot of preconceived notions for the Squadron's Supreme to play around with. The team's introduction would also carry through a fun precedent of the MCU's Disney+ shows introducing surprising characters, whether it be "Pietro Maximoff" in WandaVision or Val in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Is Loki going to definitively introduce the Squadron Supreme across its six-episode Season 1 run? At this point, there's no way of knowing — but there's definitely a lot of reason for them to do so. Bringing the group into the MCU would be yet another unexpected, multi-layered way for the franchise to tackle the very idea of being a superhero, while also bringing in characters that have developed a fan following in their own right. It's one of those possibilities that's just weird enough to work — not unlike the very concept of the Loki series itself.

Loki debuts on Disney+ beginning Wednesday, June 9th.

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