The Legion of Superheroes: Yeah, We’ve Been There…

History is a powerful thing; if we do not learn from it, we are doomed to repeat our past mistakes. With the upcoming reboot many fans are worried about how the changes will affect the characters they love, the stories they grew up reading and the relationships they rooted for. Well now you know how fans of The Legion of Superheroes have felt for years, reboots and retcons are in their blood. It is for this reason they are a perfect book for DC to examine and learn from when executing their relaunch this September.

Imagine being in The Legion of Superheroes, as a creator you have one of the greatest trump cards in comics and you use it to tell some great stories. You have the benefit of being in the future, a thousand years separates you from the “current” timeline in the DCU and you can literally create a future for some characters if they so choose. You say Batman dies in 2031 and we know that is when the Dark Knight falls. It’s history to you, and thus it is fact. You get to literally ignore everything the main DC books are doing and play in your own corner of the sandbox with your own toys. Sometimes you’ll find and play with others toys and we readers get a story like The Great Darkness Saga, but most of the time you blaze your own trail and move forward, growing and changing as you age, something rare in modern comics. You have this power to tell any type of story they want, your own trump card of time, but there are better cards out there, cards that beat whatever you may be holding at the moment.

The editorial Powers That Be have trump cards bigger than the Legion could ever hope to play. The DCU has the reboot and retcon cards.  And the LoSH has lost many a hand. The LoSH have history that even the most loyal of readers probably couldn’t explain entirely well. And now Superman is the first hero in the DCU who knows how their history has changed, yet again. Maybe that’s why DC is putting out a third legion book called Legion of Superheroes: Secret Origin to tell the current version of how the Legion was founded.  The sad thing is this was explained pretty well in the recent Action Comics run Geoff Johns did with Gary Frank, as well as Superman Secret Origin, Geoff’s Legion of Three Worlds mini- and even Paul Levitz’ current Adventure Comics and Legion of Superheroes run. DC has acknowledged that the Legion’s past was a mess and needed some clarification and they have been working on it for almost 3 years. Now when the reboot card is played again they have to start over because their history has changed.

See, that very trump card that helps the LoSH be different and tell unique stories is a double-edged sword. It’s the two of hearts and in the game DC is playing deuces are wild. When history changes so must the future. When your foundations are built on a ‘Superboy’ and one doesn’t exist you have lost your past, your very reason for being. This has been a consistent problem for the LoSH. Reboots and retcons are cards every company plays once in a while; it can be a soft reboot or a retcon of a character like Marvel did with Heroes Reborn in the 90’s or a hard reboot like DC did with the Legion of Superheroes post Zero Hour. Nothing had happened before, there was no history for the team– it was a fresh start for the teenagers of tomorrow. Aside from the 5 Years Later storyline that launched volume 4 of the LoSH, which was a soft reboot, this was the first major reboot of the legion, and only one of may more to come.

The LoSH has almost been rebooted and retconned more times than a fan can count. We have had the Legion Lost era, 5 years later, Mark Waid’s run, Supergirl and the LoSH, Geoff John’s stint with the characters, including The Lightning Saga, Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds and a bit in Superman: Secret Origin. Then Levitz, a man who made LoSH popular back in the 80’s, returned to the book for a fast passed run that is building to something great, then boom, DC plays the reboot card and things get shuffled around again. Paul has to start over again, though he has said in interviews nothing much has changed but some characters going off into the legion lost book. Fans are a skeptical lot, and the LoSH had been on solid ground for the first time in a while, Levitz had done something even Legion legend Jim Shooter hadn’t been able to do, he made LoSH a viable book again. That is the amazing thing about the LoSH, no matter how small or big a retcon, no mater how may reboots there have been, the fans stay around.  A few may come and go, but the same base group of fans will stay with the characters they love.

I feel that if we look at what DC is trying to accomplish with this line-wide reboot and take into account what he have learned from the various LoSH reboots over the years, we get a solid idea what DC is trying to do and how things will change. Each LoSH reboot or retcon has been an attempt to stabilize the bloated continuity that all series get after a few decades of being written by dozens, if not hundreds, of writers. They were also done in an attempt to draw in new readers to a book that was generally a harder sell for the reading populous. This was a book that had no ties to Batman, wasn’t a rehash of a golden age character, and didn’t get involved in what assed for crossovers back in the day. It had a small tie to Superman that would fluctuate in and out of continuity with a semi-annual regularity.  It was a fringe book, it had a group of fans but its sales were not going up.

Look at Jonah Hex and Sgt. Rock. Both characters that have their die-hard fans, they have that base that will buy the book out of loyalty and those who buy it for subject matter, but few new readers are attracted to these books. Secret Six, Rebels and Animal Man are some other examples of books that have their fans, but are not really in the main DCU.  What DC is trying with these new 52 books is to retcon some stories out of cannon that hurt the books and characters, remove some stories fans are not to happy about and in some cases reboot the franchise entirely. They want these characters to matter again, maybe they are going about it the wrong way, maybe they are tossing aside some great stories with the bad, but they are trying to appeal to a wider market the only way that has shown to be successful in the past.

Sure many people who bought Secret Six will not buy the new Suicide Squad book, but more than enough people who like Harley Quinn will give the book a look through. Some will stick with it and others will drop it, but I guarantee more people will look at it now than they would have had it been launched last year. Same with any of the titles DC is launching in its Dark or Edge line. As with the Zero Hour LoSH book they are tossing aside everything for some characters and letting people come in with some new ideas to see what they can do to draw in new readers.

With every new retcon or relaunch DC tried with the LoSH they would always see a very vocal group of fans rise up in outrage at DC robbing them of their childhood, changing things just for the sake of change, destroying great stories from the past etc. Sound familiar? See with every change they made DC drew attention to those books, they got new people trying them out, and they still had the fans who bought the books. They would let the fans complain and focus on telling what they thought was the best stories they could at the time. If that meant a change to the history of a team, a marriage dissolved or a character never existing so they could introduce a new take on them, then they did it.  LoSH was the perfect testing ground for how to do reboots and retcons because they always had the first trump card I talked about, they had no ties to the main DC that couldn’t be in flux.

Each LoSH reboot or retcon has been an attempt to stabilize the bloated continuity that all series get after a few decades of being written by dozens, if not hundreds, of writers.

Time is a powerful thing in comics, any sci-fi story that has time travel or takes place in the future stresses the importance of the past. We see this in the Legion book. They always mention the sins of the past and how what happened is a learning experience so the same mistakes are not made again. This is another example I feel like DC can learn from the LoSH. They know what went right and wrong with the 5 year later legion, what fans could accept and what went to far post Zero Hour. They let the book rest for a while before letting Mark Waid come in and have free rein to create the Threeboot continuity. Then they experimented with that before letting Geoff Johns restore the original LoSH and streamlining every reboot and retcon into a solid package. DC made a plan that built on all they had learned from the past and applied it to a set of characters on the fringe of the DCU, and they made it work.  There are going to be three LoSH books in October, ask any fan if that was even possible a year or two ago and they would laugh at you. But here we are, at the start of a new era, a new DCU where anything is possible,  every book has the same possibilities as the LoSH to tell fun stories that can explore their own little corner of the universe, their own slice of history.

We may complain about reboots and retcons, we may mourn the discard of some of our favorite stories or characters, but those books will always be there for us to read. DC may have some trump cards that can beat any hand we can play as fans, but there is one thing they cannot take away from us, our history with these characters. Like the Legion we need to learn from the past, embrace it and accept that while things we thought we knew come and go, there is always a chance of things returning in a few years. Just ask any Legion fan and they will tell you, reboots and rectons? Yeah, we’ve been there, and we are still here.