The Legion of Superheroes in Retrospect
I wrote this article a few years ago after hearing about the new direction for The Legion of Superheroes. It’s interesting to look at in retrospect.
The Legion of Super-Heroes was the first comic I read. I got in on the Earthwar Sage, where the Legion fought off wave-after-wave of villainy. It turned out the Resource Raiders were sent by the Dark Circle who arranged an invasion by the Khunds, all of whom were the eventual pawns of Mordru. Earth was conquered and devastated. A handful of the Legionnaires remained to stop Mordru. Of course, the good guys won in the end.
Those were the good ole days. Ever since, I have been a big fan of the Legion. Sometimes the stories were good; sometimes, they frankly weren’t. But I was a loyal fan. I liked the comic because it was a thousand years in the DC future. Up until the nineties, that meant the Legion was able to escape the endless crossovers that plagued other comics. You had the rarest of the rare: a relatively self-contained world in one of the big two comic companies.
The Legion also had a quirky sense of humor. It tended to poke fun of the rest of the DC universe and sometimes the comics industry in general, doing so a full ten years before subtle references or clever parodies had become a cliche in the pop culture. The comic had a certain hokeyness that was entertaining, even though the Legion in the 80’s was not the best in the series’s run.
The Keith Giffen run of The Legion was outstanding, because it stood the 30th century on its ear, but in a way that was true to what came before. The Legionnaires had become adults with adult problems, but were the same characters they had always been. Unfortunately, most of the readership did not see it that way. Zero Hour doomed that continuity to meaninglessness, and another Legion took its. The late-nineties version basically mimicked the original storyline from forty years before, but was for a new generation. It took too many of the old favorites and turned them into alien snakes and other silliness. Also, it was apparently easier to travel to the 20th century than it was before Zero Hour, because the new Legion got bogged down in crossover hell. Attempts to boost sales only served to undermine any kind of storytelling potential the new group had. When you have a roster of twenty-five heroes, you need to devote all of your limited space to those characters. That version of the group died, too.
So we have the 2005 version of the Legion. In this universe, the Legion has been around for some time.
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