Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinNo fun, falling right over since 1969

A legion of comics.

§ October 6th, 2025 § Filed under legion of super-heroes, question time § 15 Comments

DavidG asks what he probably thought would be an easy question for me to answer

“There’s now about eleventy million versions of the Legion. My list of them in order of appearance below, yours may vary. How would you rank them and why?

“OG
Five years later/no Superboy
Archie legion
Threeboot
Retro boot
Bendis boot”

Now I gotta be honest, it too me a second to puzzle out what eras a couple of those were referencing. For example, I’d never heard the term “Archie Legion” before…shockingly, as it turns out, when I looked it up and it seems to be in common usage in referring to this particular era. More on that when I get to it.

Anyway, I’m going to address these general eras in order, staring with the “OG,” which of course stands for “Original Garth Ranzz:”

This is The Big One, the longest last incarnation of the Legion (continuing on into the next era, more on that in a moment), starting in Adventure Comics in 1958 and running straight through ’til Legion of Super-Heroes Volume…Three, I’m pretty sure, in 1989. (Again, doesn’t exactly end here, which I’ll address.)

Over this period of time we had a natural growth of the team, as members came on, dropped out, even died, with subplots and soap opera-esque elements keeping the readers involved and interested in the relationships of their favorite characters. This was a storytelling strategy that would work so well in later team books such as X-Men and New Teen Titans, and I think we can thank Teen Jim Shooter for coming aboard and showing the grown-ups how its done.

And it certainly worked on me…I really enjoyed the variety of characters and their interactions and the occasionally oddball stuff they all got up to, particularly in the Silver Age era. I’ve noted before I started reading Legion in the early ’80s, and worked my way backwards through back issue purchases and, later, the Archive editions, and still get a kick out of these comics to this day.

This was the era of the Legion that worked the best, I think, with its established history and long-standing relationships and plots and such. I wrote quite a bit about it before in response to a question from…hmmm, looks like a certain Mr. DavidG. Interesting.

Now, DavidG, you just asked me to rank these, really, and here I am just typing my little fingers off about this series and, well, probably every other Legion series on this list, too. But if I were to rank it, this Legion, the Original Stuff, is my favorite Legion.

And now here’s the “Five Years Later Legion:

…and I wrote about this at length some time ago, as did blogging brother Andrew. As such, I won’t go overboard writing about this era, running from ’89 to ’94 (ironically, about five years), but to say this is not an entirely separate incarnation of the Legion, but rather an extension of the original material. As implied by the “Five Years Later,” Legion continuity jumps ahead five years, everything is different, things are a mess, not everything is explicitly explained to you, so this ain’t a comic you can scan through in six minutes and say you’ve read it. You gotta sit down with it and absorb that story.

The storytelling and setting eventually…normalizes, so it’s easier to follow, but things get more complicated when a younger, more innocent version of the Legion shows up. A spin-off title, Legionnaires, is added to accommodate the extra characters, but eventually it all ends up getting rebooted by DC’s Zero Hour crossover event.

As far as ranking goes…I will say that I really did find this series a fascinating read at first, reading and rereading each new issue as it came out, and being rewarded for the effort. And I was caught up in the mystery of the young Legionnaires, though I wish that had resolved differently than it did. Still, this is a solid #2 in my Legion ranking.

That Zero Hour reboot brought us to this:

…the first actual complete fresh start for the Legion. Everything that had gone on before? Forget it, this is All New! And it was also…pretty good. This is the version of the Legion where Princess Projectra was a giant snake person, which seems to stick out in folks’ minds. Interestingly, this new reboot of the Legion did not cause the cancellation and relaunching, with new #1s, of the two ongoing Legion titles. There were #0 issues introducing the new status quo, then just jumped back into the series’ normal numbering and continued on. A rare show of restraint, I thought.

Oh, right, and this is the “Archie Legion” series, so called because the characters were so young, some of the art reminded folks of Archie character designs, and Jughead joined up as “Hamburger Lad.” One of those may not be true.

This was also the era that had the relatively dark, but effective, Legion Lost mini-series, where members of the team were trapped in unknown space dealing with new threats (and maybe a familiar one). I quite liked that series.

Okay, ranking, ranking…we’ll just call this #3 of my favorite Legion runs, but honestly the space between #2 and #3 is very, very small.

And now, the THREEBOOT:

…because, you know, this is technically the third full reboot of the Legion. Started in 2004, ended in 2009. Repurposes the team as working under, and against, an oppressive society that disapproves of their shenanigans. An interesting note about the series is that it temporarily changes its name to Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes when she comes to the future to join the group.

Also I should point out that Jim Shooter, writer from the original Legions, comes back to write the last dozen or so issues of this series. However, the final issue, #50, is credited to a pseudonym and I’ve never bothered to read it. I have it in a box somewhere should I ever decide to do so, but that seems increasingly unlikely.

How to rank it? It’s a brief-ish run, though not as brief as other Legion runs to come. It is good, though, and I like that it’s a shorter standalone read, even if the whole thing ends on a slightly sour note. (Or maybe it’s great…like I said, I hadn’t read that issue.) If I had to rank it, I’d put it maybe at #3.5, which is maybe cheating a little. This was a solid attempt at trying to do something a little different with the Legion while still honoring the stories that had come before. Shame it didn’t last longer.

Now, it’s about this point that I decided I was done with Legion (save for the classic reprints) for the time being. So I wasn’t reading DC’s next attempt at making the Legion work, the “retroboot:”

I realize that New 52 cover is jumping ahead a bit. This version of the Legion began in the “post-Infinite Crisis” era around 2007, first appearing in Justice League of America and Justice Society of America, then in other books before getting their own title. The “Retroboot” team is a return, more or less, to the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity of the Legion books from the original era. It’s not exactly 1:1, but close enough, I guess.

Somewhere in here the Final Crisis tie-in Legion of 3 Worlds shows up, teaming up all the reboots of the Legion into one big adventure, and trying to establish which Legion is the main continuity Legion now. (Spoiler: it’s this one, the post-Infinite Crisis one.)

This is the same Legion that makes it through the New 52 relaunch relatively unscathed, and even gets an additional title, Legion Lost. However, this era still comes to an end around 2015.

I can’t rank this, since I didn’t read any of these (except the Legion of 3 Worlds, and I barely remember that (outside of the George Pérez art). All I can say was that my interest in Legion had been diminished by the multiple reboots and didn’t feel like diving back into yet another attempt at this point. That’s not to say I *didn’t* like the reboots, but I certainly didn’t like getting invested in a series only to have it go away and be given yet another restart.

And then, here we are, the last on DavidG’s list, the Brian Michael Bendis scripted reboot from 2019:

By this point I’d been out of current Legion books for about a decade, so I was willing to give this new version a try. I did like the two-issue intro mini-series (Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium) where we follow an immortal character into the time of he Legion. But the new Legion series itself…the art by Ryan Sook was nice, but the story definitely felt like we were pushed into the deep end of the pool in regards to the setting and the number of characters. Using Superboy as the reader-viewpoint character should have been a natural “in” to everything, but in execution it all still felt cluttered and convoluted.

Most shocking was after the promotion and big build-up, this new series only got 12 issues (plus a two-issue “Future State” tie-in, among other appearances). I’d put this run at #4 on my list…I wanted to like it, I gave it a chance, but I don’t know if the sales were there or what but it felt like DC didn’t give it much of a chance. Could it have improved given more time? Sure. But what we got wasn’t enough and it wasn’t great, art aside.

I know I didn’t discuss every single appearance and iteration of the Legion here…I mean, there’s the Doomsday Clock tie-in, there’s the stuff going on right now in the Superman books, that sort of thing. Not sure what the future (cough) holds for the Legion, whether we have yet another new attempt at a series sooner rather than later. Will it be Absolute Legion of Super-Heroes? Might be one of the few ways to get it to sell for sure at this point.