A Brief, Selective Timeline of 3 1/2 Or So Legions of Super-Heroes

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April 1988: Who’s Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes #1. The level of complexity of the main Legion series by this point may be suggested by the fact that there is a seven-issue miniseries devoted to explaining who all of its characters are. This is sometimes perceived as a bug and sometimes as a feature. By this point, John Byrne has rebooted the Superman franchise, declaring that there had retroactively never been an in-continuity Superboy, so Byrne and Levitz devise a complicated bit of business involving a “pocket universe”–an alternate timeline in which there had in fact been a Superboy who worked with the Legion.

November 1989: Legion of Super-Heroes volume 4, #1. Keith Giffen, Tom and Mary Bierbaum and Al Gordon launch a very different take on the Legion, set five years after the end of volume 3. It’s wildly stylized, incredibly smart and clever and elegant, and apparently too “difficult” for some readers. It’s also initially hampered by the DC editorial decision that the “pocket universe” wouldn’t fly either, so the series gets two mini-reboots within its first five issues to clear that up. (At this point, I could attempt to explain what Batch SW6 was, but there are limits even to my willingness to confuse Techland’s readers. Don’t even ask how Supergirl fits into the picture.)

(More on Techland: Exclusive Preview: Peter Bagge’s “Other Lives”)

Giffen leaves after a couple of years, and Legion’s storytelling becomes somewhat more straightforward; it also spawns a spinoff title, Legionnaires, in April 1993. During the Zero Hour crossover event of 1994, the Legion’s timeline comes to an end, and September 1994’s Legion of Super-Heroes #61 ends with a great tearjerker scene in which the team members disappear into the void, one by one, followed by several blank pages.

October 1994: Legion of Super-Heroes volume 4, #0. The existing Legion series is relaunched with a zero issue, by Tom McCraw, Mark Waid, Stuart Immonen and Ron Boyd. (So is Legionnaires, by Waid, McCraw, Boyd and Jeffrey Moy.) This time, they start fresh, throwing out all the old continuity and introducing the characters as if for the first time. (Longtime readers refer to this team as the “reboot” or “Mark 2” Legion.) The next month, the new incarnations of Legion and Legionnaires continue with their titles’ then-current numbering–#62 and #19, respectively. Both titles run until March 2000, by which point the team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning is writing them. They’re followed by the mostly Abnett/Lanning-written Legion Lost (12 issues, 2000-2001), Legion Worlds (6 issues, 2001) and The Legion (38 issues, 2001-2004). By the end, there’s a new Superboy, who’s naturally joined the team.

February 2005: Legion of Super-Heroes volume 5, #1. Waid (this time with artists Barry Kitson and Mick Gray) starts from scratch with the Legion again, ditching both the first and the second incarnations’ continuity and recasting the team as something of a youth movement; this becomes known as the “Mark 3” or “threeboot” Legion. With #16, it becomes Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes (Supergirl was kind of a hot property for a while around then); with #37, Jim Shooter and Francis Manapul take over, and the title goes back to Legion of Super-Heroes. This incarnation gives up the ghost with March 2009’s #50, whose script is credited to the pseudonymous “Justin Thyme.”

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