"But That Trick Never Works!" "This Time for Sure!"

I'll get to reviews of the new issues of Legion Lost and LSH in due time, but right now I'd like to talk about a comic book I'm actually enjoying, to wit: The Hypernaturals, by DnA, published by Boom! Studios. If you haven't been reading it--and why not?--it's the same kind of cosmic stuff DnA did with the Legion and with Guardians of the Galaxy at Marvel, only this time they're playing with toys of their own creation.

The Hypernaturals is not just a Legion ripoff; it's its own thing. However, there are enough points of comparison between The Hypernaturals and the Legion (and Guardians of the Galaxy, for that matter) that it's not a waste of time to discuss it in a Legion context. So far, we've had almost three issues of The Hypernaturals; two regular issues, and the Free Comic Book Day preview issue #0. In those three comics, we've found that the Hypernaturals is a team of superheroes that defends a futuristic world known as the Quantinuum, named after some kind of futuristic technological singularity that has revolutionized human society. The Hypernaturals have limited terms of service, and get turned over every few years. The newest group has just gone out on their first mission; it didn't go well, and now some of the older ex-Hypernaturals and some new recruits have to try to figure out what happened and to keep things together.

Here are the twelve pillars of Legion storytelling, as established over more than fifty years of comics about these characters.

1. The Legion is a group of superheroes.
2. There are many Legionnaires.
3. Being a Legionnaire is a special thing.
4. Legionnaires don’t all have overwhelming superpowers, but combine their more modest talents through teamwork to be effective.
5. The Legionnaires started their heroic careers as teenagers.

6. The Legion lives in the distant future.
7. The future setting of the Legion is an optimistic one, and so is the Legion's outlook.
8. The future setting of the Legion is one in which space travel is common and there is abundant life on other planets.

9. The Legionnaires were the best friends of Clark Kent when he was a teenager, and helped him learn how to be a superhero.
10. Either directly or indirectly, the Legion represents the legacy of Superman ten centuries in the future.
11. The Legionnaires are the champions of diversity, and against xenophobia, in their society.

12. In Legion comics, characters can experience permanent change.

Now, in some ways, The Hypernaturals shares some of these points. In other ways, it resembles DnA's run on Guardians of the Galaxy. Let's explore that.

1. The Legion is a group of superheroes.

The Hypernaturals are superheroes too, although I believe that DnA don't actually use the word "superhero", but DnA's Guardians mostly aren't; they're space adventurers and reformed villains and cosmic entities and stuff.

2. There are many Legionnaires.

The Hypernaturals split the difference between the Legion and the Guardians here; at any given time the number of active Hypernaturals will be about the same as the number of Guardians, but over the years the cumulative total number of Hypernaturals, many of whom are presumably still alive, probably approaches Legion levels.

3. Being a Legionnaire is a special thing.

This seems also to be true of the Hypernaturals, but not the Guardians. The Guardians have a lot of esprit de corps, but for them it's more of an it's-a-dirty-job-but-somebody-has-to-do-it kind of situation, and the Guardians don't really have the respect of their contemporaries; they're viewed as a nuisance more than anything.

4. Legionnaires don’t all have overwhelming superpowers, but combine their more modest talents through teamwork to be effective.

This one's interesting. The Guardians have struggled with their power level throughout their existence; at first they were constantly overmatched by the overwhelming cosmic menaces they've faced, and then they were replaced by the Annihilators, who were actually too powerful. This was an ongoing theme of the comic book. Anyway, the Hypernaturals team seems to be composed of individuals all of whom have respectable amounts of generally useful power.

5. The Legionnaires started their heroic careers as teenagers.

Not true of either the Guardians or the Hypernaturals, for the most part.

6. The Legion lives in the distant future.
7. The future setting of the Legion is an optimistic one, and so is the Legion's outlook.
8. The future setting of the Legion is one in which space travel is common and there is abundant life on other planets.

The Guardians live in the present-day Marvel Universe, which isn't a particularly optimistic place, but the Hypernaturals' future is sufficiently distant and optimistic to compare to the Legion's. One thing is this: the Quantinuum is the kind of science-fiction concept that could be used as a source of pessimism, in a future-dystopia way, but in a recent interview on Comic Book Resources, they implied that they were sticking with the optimistic take on it. Also, you can see lots of traces of the present day in the Legion's future, even with the thousand intervening years, but the Quantinuum seems to have led to a future in which the past is no longer easily visible. All three comics have space travel and life on other planets.

9. The Legionnaires were the best friends of Clark Kent when he was a teenager, and helped him learn how to be a superhero.
10. Either directly or indirectly, the Legion represents the legacy of Superman ten centuries in the future.

Neither the Guardians nor the Hypernaturals have anything going on like the Legion's relationship with Superman. Nor do I think there's any way that they could. That's not a criticism; it's just a historical circumstance.

11. The Legionnaires are the champions of diversity, and against xenophobia, in their society.

The Guardians also have a specific mission, which is to protect the galaxy from all the random cosmic rifts and interstellar avatars and stuff who are always threatening reality. The Hypernaturals mission seems more general.

12. In Legion comics, characters can experience permanent change.

This is mostly because the Legion is relatively insulated from the maelstrom of DC continuity by their future setting, a state of affairs that has been allowed to persist for most of the Legion's existence. The Guardians don't have the same thing; during DnA's run with the Guardians there was quite a bit of crossover with other Marvel events, and the characters who died (for instance) are probably not going to stay dead. None of this applies to the Hypernaturals, who have their whole universe to themselves, and are wholly owned by Abnett and Lanning, who can permanently kill them all off at any moment if they're of a mind to.

So the Legion and the Hypernaturals do have some common ground, and it's going to be interesting to contrast the two future settings, if nothing else, as LSHv7 and The Hypernaturals continue. In particular I'm interested in the Quantinuum, in just what it is, and in how its existence changes storytelling in that setting. It's the kind of thing I wish Levitz would try in LSH, tell you the truth.

I don't want to get into too many details of The Hypernaturals, but one of the characters I'll be keeping an eye on is the kinda-like-Brainiac-5 guy Thinkwell. Similar superintelligence, similar high-handed way of dealing with people, points of distinction not immediately obvious. I look forward to doing another of these three-way comparisons of Thinkwell, Brainy, and Qubit from Irredeemable.

I don't want to get too enthusiastic about The Hypernaturals. I mean, it's good, and DnA are pretty reliable as writers, but it's easy to do the first story; the real test is the second story, which we won't see for (sigh) a year. Anyway, if you're disenchanted with the Legion, it might scratch your itch.