A Farm in the Country Where He Can Run and Play

I've pointed out before how, for a while, the Legion of Super-Heroes was the franchise that DC Comics used for a lot of their experiments with long-form storytelling. The story of Lightning Lad's death and resurrection, for example, took place over nine months, which was rare in the 1960s. Earthwar, Secrets of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Great Darkness Saga... they were all unusually long stories for their time. Even the Five Years Later series was very experimental, very un-episodic, and very long.

That's not really what it's for anymore.

The Legion has been rebooted enough times that DC must have had to think, many times, about just what you can do, narratively, with this group of superheroes. One thing they've settled on, many times, is that the Legion is not, basically, a concept of a team of futuristic teenagers who were inspired by the legend of Superman. The Legion is the set of characters created in the 1950s through 1980s who live in the future and belong to a team that was inspired by the legend of Superman.

This is where DC and I don't exactly see eye-to-eye, because I think they might have been better served to be true to the concept, at times, even at the expense of familiar characters. If each reboot had introduced a whole new roster of Legionnaires, designed for the times in which they were published and brought into the comic book gradually. They didn't do that. Every time the Legion has been founded, it's been founded by Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy. They've had to go back to the late '50s, early '60s, for their starting point.

This often works against efforts to make the Legion a team that's diverse enough to be 31st-century-realistic. That's not my point, but I did want to mention it.

My point is, it's hard for this not to lead to nostalgia. It's hard for writers to have to go back to the comics of their youth for characters and not get the message that the point of it all is the going back.

Let's look at the last few times a new writer started on the Legion, long-term.

2003: Mark Waid, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, rebooted the team to a lineup of characters that matched the Silver Age team

2005: Geoff Johns, a veteran comic-book writer, brought back a lightly edited 1980s Legion for use in his comic books, and used them as supporting characters for Superman

2006: Jim Shooter, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, took over Waid's team and did some stories where he worked out some old grudges and gratitudes from earlier in his career

2009: Geoff Johns, whose retroboot Legion is the only one left standing, puts the Legion in some extremely nostalgic stories in Adventure Comics. But he quickly loses interest

2010: Paul Levitz, a veteran comic-book writer who had written the Legion in the past, takes over Johns's Legion for a few years. Toward the end, he brings in Keith Giffen as artist and co-writer, a veteran comic-book creator who had written and drawn the Legion in the past

2019: Brian Michael Bendis, a veteran comic-book writer, starts a new series with a Legion lineup that draws heavily from '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s characters, but not '90s, '00s, or '10s

Here's what I think DC's idea of the Legion is now. I think their idea is that it's where veteran writers can take their nostalgia out for a walk.

That's certainly what Geoff Johns was doing. I wouldn't dare to imagine what Shooter thought he was doing. Waid and Levitz and Bendis, on the other hand... I think all of them were actually trying to do good stuff, to bring some vision to the title. (Some with more success than others.) But I don't think that's why DC gave them the job. I think DC gave them the job because they were proven veterans who loved the Legion from long ago. And I don't think that bodes well for who gets to write the Legion next.