Can any one person actually explain it all???
I get it up to Zero Hour and End of an Era. That’s childsplay. I tried to make sense of the Wiki article and WOW. What a mess.
I get the Supergirl issues and the theme of that Legion. (Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes)
But…threeboot, and legion lost, retroboot…My God.
Paging cmkeller!
Basically, there are three main ‘versions’ of the Legion - they’ve been rebooted like many comic characters and teams, the problem arises from the fact that they tend to get rebooted out of synch with the rest of the DC universe.
You’ve got :
Classic flavor Legion.
The “Archie” or Reboot Legion.
And the “Threeboot” Legion.
Threeboot is easiest. In the lead-up to the Infinite Crisis event, DC wanted to launch a new Legion title, and they did - recasting the Legion of Super-Heroes as the super-powered forefront of the galaxy’s somewhat rebellious youth movement. They primarily appear in their own title, which was briefly re-titled ‘Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes’, and ran for fifty-odd issues. Outside of their own book, they had few appearances and didn’t tie in to DC continuity all that much, because the book was hamstrung by another editorial group at DC reviving the original ‘Classic’ Legion.
They were last seen in the “Final Crisis : Legion of Three Worlds” mini-series that teamed up all three versions of the Legion.
I can do more, just figured I’d give you bite-sized chunks…
The Archie/Reboot Legion is also pretty easy. Around the time of the ‘Zero Hour’ event, DC wanted to start fresh with the Legion because of continuity tangles caused by Crisis on Infinite Earths, amongst other things.
So the two Legion titles of the day (Legionnaires, and Legion of Super-Heroes) got a reboot (though not new #1 issues, probably hampering their sales) and essentially, started the Legion over from the beginning. That version ran for about ten years - 1994-2004, and while they did appear in a lot of crossover materials, it’s still pretty distinct. In addition to the two titles I mentioned, their latter years included ‘Legion Lost’ and ‘The Legion’ before their cancellation to make way for the Threeboot Legion.
The Classic Legion is where it gets slightly hairy. The ‘original’ run of the Legion went up through the End of an Era crossover that led into Zero Hour and the subsequent Archie Legion. But prior to that, there were some story arcs that were not universally well received.
The most important dividing lines to be aware of are the transition from the “Legion of Super-Heroes” title that had continued from “Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes” to the premium-paper stock ‘Baxter’ relaunch of Legion of Super-Heroes in 1984; and the ‘Five Years Later’ relaunch of Legion of Super-Heroes in 1989.
Those stories are all in the same continuity. But some of the later uses of the Legion chose to excise later bits from the relaunches. Notably, none of the appearances of the Classic Legion after 1994 reference the ‘Five Years Later’ stuff. That part of the run got put into a memory hole.
The Classic Legion got pulled from the dustbin of comics history in ‘The Lightning Saga’, a crossover story in 2007. This revival is sometimes called the ‘retroboot’ version, and seems to omit some of the events from the second LSH title, the ‘Baxter’ relaunch one. Notably, Karate Kid is alive again. Other events seem to be intact.
The Classic Legion and the Threeboot Legion both existed for a few years, with the Classic appearing only in other books, then the Threeboot Legion book was cancelled, and the Classic Legion got its own title back, and continued through DC’s “New 52” reboot in 2011.
Thanks, that makes more sense now!
Happy to help! The Legion is one of my comic book passions. I am closing in on owning every appearance they’ve ever made - though some are in reprint form, due to the incredible expense of the originals.
I was a big Legion fan as a youngster, but stopped buying comic books when I started college and most of my disposable income went for beer. Here’s a site devoted to them. I’m linking directly to an article on my scratchbuilt model of the Legion clubhouse, but you can easily backtrack to the main site.
Like i said, up til End of an Era, it’s actually easy. I can even explain the Pocket U and how Superboy died, then wasn’t allowed to be reffed to, then was replaced by Mon…errr…Valor…and then reappeared as an homage.
But it’s Classic/Threeboot/reboot Legion appearing in various other DC mags that really messed me up. At one point i joked that continuity being effed up is actually PART of Legion lore now.
Whatever their next appearance it should go as follows:
LSH: We are the Legion of Super-Heroes!!
Batman: Yes, yes…but which one??
I proposed once to Kurt Busiek that when DC gets around to bringing them back, they should do an anthology series structured as different realities being viewed by an outside force trying to bring a definitive Legion history together. Think Monitor for the LSH.
Because Kurt is an ACTUAL WRITER and not a fan who throws stuff at a wall to see what sticks, he rightly said that was way too complicated.
What do you not own? Just pre Adventure #300 appearances?
Holy crap that model is nice.
OK, I’m responding to the page!
First of all, I will happily pimp my Legion help file which I’m amazed to see is still hosted on the linked site. The potential problem is that it is in the format of the old “Windows Help” which might not have a viewer application anymore, but given the breadth of the internet, I have no doubt a usable one can be found.
It is quite old, I have not updated it since about 2004. A large part of that was because shortly after that point, DC started messing with Superman’s history (Mark Waid’s “Superman: Birthright”) with zero regard for how it affects the continuity of the post-Zero Hour world. I had a lot of bytes invested in getting post-ZH Superman, Superboy, Brainiac and Lex Luthor clear within the context of Legion history, and now, it was pretty much all gone.
But to get to your questions: The Legion can effectively be divided into four sub-histories:
Pre-Zero Hour, which encompasses two reboots - but those were in-continuty reboots
Post-Zero Hour
Waid and Kitson’s “Threeboot”
Geoff Johns’ “retro-boot” of the first.
Before the Legion had a regular feature, consistency was a pipe dream at best. The writers said in the story whatever felt good at the time. But from Adventure Comics # 300 all the way until the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the writers paid attention to the history, and even attempted to reconcile some of the mistakes of the ultra-early writers who didn’t care.
Then, the Crisis happened, and the reboot of a Superman as a hero who was never Superboy was mandated from higher-up, as was the non-existence of Supergirl. The Legion writers addressed the Superboy problem by having the Time Trapper create an alternate dimension with a Superboy who matched the Legion’s history. Supergirl’s absence was ignored, which was not really problematic, she was instrumental to very few Legion stories. Things were fine for about three more years.
Then, in 1990, the idiot in charge of the Superman books - who wielded the most power in the DC comics offices - decided, for no reason that I could ever fathom, that the Time Trapper’s Superboy had to have never existed. Beholden to this mandate, the writers of the Legion book put together an in-continuity timeline change, the result of which was the Legionnaire formerly known as Mon-El was now to be called Valor and was the Superboy-equivalent in Legion history. (A Supergirl-equivalent was also introduced, but that doesn’t really contribute to the confusion.) Then, a few months later, that idiot woke up and realized that removing that story from Superman’s history would have reprecussions for his books (e.g., the introduction of a new Supergirl in the Superman books, and her attraction for Lex Luthor, were important plot points that could not be explained without that Superboy story, so he told them, “never mind, put it back in”. The Legion writers sighed, cursed under their breath, and wrote a little backup story which put the Time Trapper and his Superboy back into a never-well-explained (though in my help file, I come up with a pretty good retcon for this) limited slice of Legion history.
Finally, four years later, DC felt a need to present readers with a simple introduction to every character they were publishing, to be available in a single month’s issues, so that new readers could on-board easily rather than need to hunt down back issues. Mark Waid was the man chosen to do this for the Legion, and he decided that it simply couldn’t be done. So he made Zero Hour a nice capstone to the Legion history that came before and re-started it.
This began the second era of Legion history, the “Archie Legion”, which for the first time ever presented a Legion in the process of formation, where new readers could grow with the team, and nods to the prior versions would be appreciated by old readers. This was fine for a number of years, but eventually, readers grew less interested in the stories (which were, in fact, less interesting) and the numbers dropped. They brought in Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning to try and revitalize the property using the existing team, but that boost proved to be temporary, and the Legion was headed for cancellation. It was also during this time that DC pretty much gave up on caring about historical consistency. Changing Superman’s origin and re-introducing the dead original Doom Patrol are among the cases where they just went ahead with what they felt were good stories without any thoughts to the implications on stories that were previously published.
So DC turned once again to Mark Waid to revitalize the property, and he created the “threeboot” in which the Legion is sort of a youth rebellion in a restrictive, controlling environment, another case where DC went with a story that ignores what went before. While the team were new versions of familiar characters, the villains were completely new, and the team was introduced in situ, their origins never, to this date, explained. Readers failed to connect with the team, and after three years, the book was cancelled.
Finally, after a few years of no Legion presence (except for the Starman of the JSA being a time-displaced Star Boy), the original Legion - based on a modified version of the team as published in 1989 (but somehow with Karate Kid alive - did I mention that DC stopped caring about continuity?) was re-introduced in the pages of Justice League of America and later, Superman. These appearances led into the “Final Crisis” event, which included a mini-series called “Legion of Three Worlds” in which the three versions of the Legion - the modified-1989 version (anything published between 1989 and 1994 was completely ignored, except for a brief cameo appearance in a double-page spread) are said to be from alternate Earths (a concept re-introduced after being eliminated in the first Crisis) and they fight pretty much every Legion villain there ever was. The conclusion was to establish a Legion roster going forward, which was the modified-1989 version plus two characters from the post-Zero-Hour Legion. The other two Legions were shuffled off, one to explore the multiverse and one back to their home dimension. Mon-El’s/Valor’s new 20th-21st century history was established in a Superman storyline.
That’s the official history to this point, not counting whatever DC has introduced in its “Rebirth” event, which I have very little knowledge of. The roster that exited the Final Crisis event was pretty much untouched by the “New 52” reboot (though a second book had seven Legionnaires time-displaced in the 21st century) and when the book was cancelled for low sales, they dropped a hint that the Legion was from the future of new-52 Earth-2 rather than from the future of the main Earth on which most of the stories DC were publishing took place. But that was left a little ambiguous, and they appeared in a Justice League storyline which seems to have the Legion and the Justice League on the same Earth.
Whew! So, did that answer everything?
Dale Sams:
That’s pretty much exactly what happened in Action Comics # 864.
Why is is called the *“Archie Legion”?
*
Because they were teenagers, and artist Jeff Moy’s style in faces was somewhat reminiscent of Dan DeCarlo’s Archie house style.
The thing about Superboy is that he brought a lot of younger readers to comics, being a character they could more relate to. But at some point, since you knew that he would grow up to become Superman, you’d realize that nothing could really happen to him. Kind of the same problem that you have with a lot of prequels. But it was ongoing. Superman would advance with the calendar and “drag” Superboy behind him about fifteen years or so earlier. Eventually you got to a point where Superboy was having adventures on the same temporal turf that Superman had already been active in. Oh, they tried to work around it by keeping young Clark in the eternally fifties-ish Smallville or by attributing some of Superman’s early adventures to his “Earth Two” counterpart, but past a certain point it just wouldn’t hold together. The irony is, that after all those years of you thinking that Superboy was the one comic character that couldn’t be killed, they did just that.
“Archie Legion”-?
By the way, great explanation there, CMKELLER
Why “Archie”? Something to do with Archie comics?
Answered two posts above.
A couple of comments, a question and a brief Rebirth addendum to an excellent synopsis of the Legion’s history.
There were about 4 mini-reboots during this period: Superboy removed, Mordru takes over, Glorith slots Mon-El into Superboy’s slot and Glorth takes over. There may have been other micro-reboots during this period. For something like 6 to 8 issues, the book kept getting rebooted every issue or two.
bwah? Do you have the issue/number handy?
And it was crazy-good for the first ~2-3 years, up until the story with President Chu was ended, imo.
According to um…Waid, Rucka, Giffen, or one of the other writers involved in the “52” mini-series, those historical consistency problems were intentional, to set up Infinite Crisis and the Superboy-Prime Reality Punches thing. I don’t remember which writer it was, but he swore they were planned in advance and I believed him.
IIRC, they also established that the pre-Boot Legion was Earth-One’s Legion, the “Archie Legion” was from Earth-247 (which showed up in a couple of panels of Infinite Crisis) and the Threeboot Legion was from Earth-Prime (something Waid had introduced in his run of the Threebooters: they were constantly reading and referencing old Adventure Comics issues that could only have come from Earth Prime.
Rebirth has been sadly lacking the Legion. Saturn Girl showed up in Rebirth being arrested (because she took food without paying to give to a homeless person) and saying “Everything will be fine. Trust me” with a goofy smile.
She then shows up in Arkham (for petty theft and at worst, the harmless delusion that she’s from the future? This makes sense in the DC Universe which apparently only has one mental-health institution…and that’s the one where they keep the Joker…but not anywhere else) only now she’s agitated that something’s wrong.
Then the Earth One version of the Emerald Emperess shows up in a Suicide Squad/JLA crossover and the Emporess is really, really looking forward to getting to Saturn Girl to do something nebulous but mean.
Finally, Saturn Girl (still in Arkham…and now that I think about it, how exactly are they keeping her locked up? She could easily kick Professor X’s psychic ass and DC lacks telepaths, so she should be able to just stroll out of Arkham). Anyway, she’s getting really freaked out that history seems to be broken all of a sudden (probably from Wally’s return). Someone dies in a hockey game who shouldn’t have died.
My theory is Dr. Manhattan is trying to prevent the Legion’s optimistic future from happening and it’s messing with Saturn Girl’s head.
Well, I do want to say, I’m really enjoying this “Supergirl and the LSH” I’m reading. Very futuristic, and frankly Supergirl has always bored me elsewhere.
Fenris:
It was two timeline changes, but they were both part of the single “DC Comics” reboot of the Legion timeline.
Issue # 13 of the Bierbaum/Giffen run.
Thank you! I was never A fan of that period of the Legion, and was largely just skimming the issues by then. I think I saw the text piece and then just stopped reading the issue, so I’ve never read that short story before! It was very cool to read a “new” story of the classic Legion.
I appreciate the info 