Superman 2026 Annual: Year One Thousand #1 Review

What Happened That You Have to Know About:

I'm writing this paragraph on Monday, July 27th. I haven't seen any of the previews for this comic. But I'm going to make a prediction here, which is that, as far as the fiveboot Legion is concerned, you don't have to know anything about what happens in this issue. We'll see!

Now that I've read it...

No, some of this is going to come into play. After the events of DC KO, Superman has a lot of extra cosmic power. He uses it to set the timestream straight and make it so that all versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes are still possible and still exist, including at least some of Darkseid's Omega Legion, who are now very very sorry for what they've done, but are also captives of Brainiac One Million, who has also captured all of the other Legionful futures. Brainiac 1.0x10^6 also wants to hijack a different future, newly created by Superman somehow. Right now it has no superheroes, and he assigns Cyborg Superman, of all people, to prevent a Legion from forming. One must assume that the new Legion in the upcoming series will have to deal with this.

Review:

Well, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be a comic in which blocks were rearranged. I kind of wish it had been a bit more than that, though.

How is it as a Superman comic? That is the name on the cover, after all. I guess it's good enough. The throughline of the story is that Superman keeps wanting to do one more thing before he finally goes home to Lois and the 21st century, and in the end, as he says, his past saves him from his preoccupation with the future and he does go home. That's a story, contained in this one issue, even if there are lots of competing distractions (the Infinite Man! Pandora! The Hourman with the emphasized jowl lines!) keeping us from seeing it. But it's pretty weak. If I was a Superman fan who didn't care about the Legion, I'd advise myself to skip this one and pick up the storyline in Action #1100.

But, as you all know and as fate would have it, I do care about the Legion, so let's look at that. I think we can conclude that DC will simply never kill off all Legions except for the one they want to move forward with. They didn't during Infinite Crisis, they didn't during Final Crisis, and now they didn't during DC KO. Nor should they! If they did, it would just be a countdown until someone brought 'em back anyway. But I think we would like to see a resolution for some of the issues surrounding all these Legions. I do want Legion comics: I want them to be about futuristic superheroes inspired by Superman, having optimistic science fiction adventures. I don't want them to be about kicking DC continuity around the block one more time. If there must be a reboot, then get it over with and just give us some good comics. Don't linger on the meta stuff. Nobody likes it!

No, for those of us who are fond of all the past versions of the Legion, we got it underlined for us three times that they're still around and not going anywhere. "Long live all the Legions...", "...every version deserved to live...", "all Legions are now possible." It's very nice. I don't know if it's any way to run comic book continuity, but that's their problem.

I was hoping the new Legion would get off to a clean start. And maybe they will. But this comic seems to be suggesting that they won't.

One interesting thing. There's no explanation in this comic of why the Legion of Super-Heroes is such a big deal. The closest anybody gets is Brainiac 1.0x10^6, who says they were inspired by Superman. Are we just supposed to know? Or is Joshua Williamson saving that material for the actual Legion comic? I do think there should have been something about it, though. I have it on good authority that every comic book is someone's first.

As Brian Hyland once said, see you in September! (At the latest. I may post other stuff before that.)

Notes:

We can see some tubes in Brainiac 1.0x10^6's lab with past versions of the Legion in them: Silver Age, Five Years Later, retroboot, reboot, threeboot, and fourboot. And I guess we have to include the Omega Legion too. Will they see any use? Who knows?

How many of us recognized the Infinite Man from his silhouette on page 10? Although I did wonder if it might be Superman himself, with his new hat. But I guess if that had been it they would have tried to match it more exactly.

The Time Trapper has now been a rogue Controller, the personification of entropy, Cosmic Boy, Superboy-Prime, Doomsday, and Superman. I've checked the schedule, and your turn is Tuesday the 18th. Bring snacks.

There's a preview of LSH v9 #1, just the first three pages, and according to the Interlac on the second page, the city we see is "Superlopolis". I wonder if that's correct.

I would like us all to get away from this habit of distinguishing parallel worlds by what superheroes are in them. Are superheroes that important? What about the world with no shrimp, or the world with nothing but shrimp? There must be some other stuff going on.

Art: 175 panels/38 pages = 4.6 panels/page. Two splash pages, five combined pages.

The art is done by Eddy Barrows and Yasmine Putri, but I'm not a hundred percent how it was split up. According to the credits, there are two stories in this comic, but where does one end and the other start? I guess the Barrows one ends when Superman is rescued by the time bubble, and the Putri one starts on the next page with Lightning Lad. They're both pretty good. Putri makes Hourman look kindly, which has got to be a tough assignment. It's a very water-coloury style, which I always like. Barrows also gets paintery with some of his panels, to good effect, although his characters sometimes get a bit Gary Frank around the eyes.

Look, Nah, No Hands

 Recently had an exchange on Bluesky with a chap who said, in relation to the current political situation in the United States, "We need the Legion!" To which my response was, if I remember right, "No, we need the Authority!" Maybe I don't have the Authority analyzed quite right here, but my point was that Donald Trump doesn't make a great Legion of Super-Heroes villain specifically.

It's true that the LSH has brought down corrupt politicians in the past. There was the story in the Baxter run, about Universo's pet president. There was the reboot sequence where Cosmic Boy outsmarts President Chu and ends her regime. Still, I would say that the first is really a story about the Legion versus Universo, and I would say that the second is a long-running subplot.

But! There was a Legion story in which the world faced immense political corruption, violent revolution and even more violent reprisals, isolation from traditional allies, and ecological disaster. This was the Terra Mosaic story in the Five Years Later era (written by Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum). Basically, the Dominion had infiltrated Earth's government and installed its own puppets, to Earth's great detriment, and various Legion-related characters got involved with the resistance to this government in different ways.

When the conflict between the government and resistance boiled over into a full-on war, the United Planets calls in the Legion to go in and help. And the Legion, uncharacteristically, refuses. They say, no, Earth has to win this fight itself. Earth is fighting for its own soul. Of course the Legion could intervene and turn a victory over to the people of Earth, but it was the people of Earth who let the Dominion take over in the first place, who accepted their influence, and now it's the people of Earth who have to throw it off.

This brings to my mind Lex Luthor's complaint about Superman, that Superman's presence makes the Earth dependent on him and unable to achieve the greatness that they otherwise could. I don't think Luthor is correct, because I don't think Superman does make the Earth dependent on him... but if 30th-century Earth slid into brutal tyranny of their own weakness, they would be dependent on the Legion if they needed the Legion to pull them out of it. And, note, most of the Legionnaires at the time were no more Earthlings than Superman is.

Similarly in 2026 reality. It wasn't Universo who inflicted Donald Trump on the world. We, collectively, did that ourselves. I'm as prone as anyone to imagining how the Legion of Super-Heroes, or Superman, or Light Yagami, might use their abilities to bail us out of this widening gyre, but we'd still be the same people at the end of it, and if we got ourselves in trouble once, we'd do it again. We've got to fix it ourselves, and we've got to learn, and we've got to change, and we've got to teach our children wisdom.

News: Patreon

Happy New Year, all.

I've started a Patreon; it's at this link. There's already a short story there for subscribers, just to entice everybody to jump aboard.

If you've ever wondered how you can support this blog, you now have an answer. All the crucial Legion-related content that I write will still be posted here, but I wouldn't put it past myself to have the occasional non-crucial Legion article up on the Patreon, pour encourager les autres. Similarly, I'll still have most of my other stuff at matthewe.com, but I didn't create the Patreon page not to use it, if you see what I mean.

Obviously you're all wiping relieved sweat from your brows at the realization that my opinions will now be easier to encounter and broadcast. I understand. 

Anyway, it's an experiment. Let me know what's working for you and what isn't, or, really, anything that's on your mind about the relevant topics. More to come!

It's a Bad Codename, Though. Did He Call Himself That?

A while ago one of my intrepid correspondents asked if I'd do an article on the Composite Superman. I said sure why not. (Blithely.) I soon ran into trouble with that: I don't have any Composite Superman stories in my possession, and for all I know I've never read any. But I'm not going to let that stop me.

Some of Superman's villains have this background of being just a normal sort of guy who randomly gets superpowers and becomes an enemy of Superman because reasons. The Composite Superman is one such. And I don't really need to address most of his deal (although he's got a pretty good look! Half Superman, half Batman, but with green skin! Why does he look like that? Shut up, that's why), but the thing that makes him on-topic for this blog is that he gets the powers of pretty much the entire Legion of Super-Heroes, and uses them to fight Superman, Batman, and Robin.

A Superman villain with the powers of the Legion is, on one level, a neat idea. (In the sense of, the Legion is very powerful as a group, and someone with all their powers would be a worthy adversary for Superman.) It's also a lazy idea. (In the sense of, instead of coming up with a new idea for a villain's abilities, we could just borrow from these characters over here!) And, my main point, it's also dismissive of the Legion.

The Legion of Super-Heroes are more than a long list of code names, real names, home planets, and superpowers. They're characters, with individual histories and personalities, who have existed in a context for a long time, and are not just ore to be mined for someone else's story. For the World's Finest writers to ignore all of that and copy the powers down into their new throwaway supervillain speaks to the role and status of the Legion in DC continuity.

For that matter, it also undercuts the Legion's theme of teamwork, since the Composite Superman has all the powers in one person. He doesn't need to act as a teammate.

And that's what I have to say about the Composite Superman.

I don't want to make too big a deal of it. It's a small deal.

Except that it's been over a decade since DC stopped publishing stories about the retroboot Legion (although there was a brief period during which Brian Michael Bendis did whatever that was he thought he was doing), and during that time DC showed that the Legion really wasn't a priority for them, so, whatever size deal it is, it's disheartening. Legion World turns its lonely eyes to Joshua Williamson.

A Note

 I am aware of the current "Legion of Darkseid" goings-on in *Superman* and other titles. I'm not going to be reviewing it here; this is a case where I'm going to wait until the ball stops rolling before I go to pick it up. I may or may not have something to say about it. After all, this is a blog about the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the characters appearing in *Superman* may be the Legion, but they aren't, currently, superheroes.

Everybody doing okay?