If there’s one thing that DC comics is good at, it’s cosmic-level stuff. Some would argue that Marvel, when it’s firing right, beats them at it, but really, all of DC’s characters are operating on a different level to most Marvel heroes. Marvel heroes like Spider-Man and Daredeveil and even most of the X-Men are street-level heroes. By contrast, most of the Justice League can punch through mountains. And Batman probably has a gadget that can do that.

The power levels of the DC characters are just ridiculous when you think about them. The Flash, even Post-Crisis, can run close to the Speed of Light. Superman can shift planets from orbit. Even Batman, ostensibly human, is practically super-human in his athletic ability and mental skills.

So what would happen if you took all that power and let natural selection take its course for about a thousand years? You’d get the

LEGION OF SUERHEROES

Who the Hell is That?

Well, that question is a little difficult to answer nowadays. The basic concept is this- a group of superpowered teenagers living in the late 30th century are inspired by the example set by Superman of standing up for Truth, Justice and that third thing no one mentions any more, to band together and inspire people while punching supervillains in the face.

Basically the original trio of Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad and Cosmic Boy (those aren’t even in the top ten most ridiculous Legion names, so stay with me here) originally went back in time to help Superboy (a teenage Clark Kent fighting crime in Smallville) and invited him to come to the future with them and join their group.

They quickly added to the roster and blossomed into a fully fledged Legion, funded by mysterious future-rich guy RJ Brande.

Among the other prominent characters are Brainiac Five, a decendant of the classic Superman villain who uses his immense intellect for good, and Timber Wolf, who would have been a footnote in comics history if he hadn’t been all but officially recognised as the inspiration for Wolverine.

The cast also includes fan favourites Bouncing Boy, whose superpower was to turn into a ball and, well, bounce

as well as the much-ridiculed Matter-Eater Lad, whose superpower was the ability to eat anything. Solid rock, an entire tree, nuclear waste, even unfortunately placed steel bars.

The team protects the United Planets, a confederacy of several worlds including Earth. Interestingly, they also all wear the Legion “Flight Ring” which gives every member the ability to fly even through the vacuum of space. So if “flying” is your superpower, you’re pretty much screwed. Sorry, guy.

What Makes Them So Special?

Well, let’s put it this way- the Legion were the X-Men before there were X-Men. They were explicitly teenagers, and yet they weilded immense power and were granted the respect of the entire United Planets which they protected.

In fact, the X-men analogy is an apt one, because while the Legion still did get up to Silver Age shenanigans like fighting guys whose brain was clearly visibly through a glass dome on his head, they were also fairly groundbreaking in the way their stories were told. Relationships between the ensemble cast mattered, and characters would pair off and split up like .. well, like a group of teenagers. Not to mention they were, ironically, one of the first books to treat continuity with something approaching consistency, if not respect. Characters died and did not come back. Villains master plans could stretch over years our time, with foreshadowing and payoff. And this is all in an age where Superman in his own title was shooting little versions of himself out of his hand, and Batman was gleefully opening museums.

The concept of the Legion is a great one. They’re a group of superpowered teenagers from wildly different backgrounds (many come from opposite ends of the galaxy) and vastly different power sets. And yet they work together as a team. They put forward the message that all good superhero properties anywhere should- that we can overcome our differences and stand up to evil and inspire others to follow our example.

Or, to paraphrase Mightygodking- Do you like Magneto? Professor X? Superman? Wolverine? Well, imagine all of them on the same team, together, plus Iceman and Firestar and Mr. Fantastic minus the stretching and a bunch of other equally powerful characters. That’s the Legion. They kick ass.

Why It’ll Never Work

The trouble with the Legion is it’s a victim of its own continuity. It’s a horrible, tangled mess. Where it starts to get complicated is the infamous Crisis on Infinite Earths, the story DC put out in an effort to “clean up” its continuity, but which ended up just messing things up completely. Post-Crisis, DC decided that Superman was the only survivor of Krypton, and that he had never fought crime as Superboy. This robbed the legion of it’s two heroes with the “S” shield, Superboy and Supergirl. It also effectively robbed them of their origin story.

In an effort to fix things, a stand-in for Superboy, Mon-El was brought to the fore but never really clicked. The Legionairres were then aged five years to be in their 20s, thus removing another key element of their appeal.

Detriments aside, the “Five Years Later” legion at least were ostensibly the “original” legion. In 1993 DC decided enough was enough and rebooted the series entirely, starting from scratch. Then, they rebooted the series again in 2005, which is the version limping along on the stands today.

If you’re still reading, then congratulations, you’re definitely not a studio executive, who would have taken one look at that mess and run screaming to hide under his desk and call for a latte (I assume). The continuity isssue is a hard one to sort out, because which Legion do you go with? Do you stick rigidly with one version of the legion? Start from scratch? Make some combination of characters from all the different legions?

The other problem with a Legion movie is that almost everything about the Legion is a marketers nightmare. They have zero brand recognition outside of a hardcore group of comics readers. Their names are ridiculous, and so are their costumes. As every single re-write of their origin has shown, they either plain don’t work or don’t feel right without at least Superboy in the mix if not Supergirl, and there’s little chance Warner Brothers are going to tie one of their biggest franchises into a risky and potential box office flop of a film.

What We’ll Have to Settle For Instead

We’ll have to wait and see how the more famous superhero teams, the Justice League and the Avengers, fare on the big screen. Avengers is theoretically still on the way sometime next decade, but the Justice League movie is still in development hell after the last iteration (the one with Megan Gale as Wonder Woman) fell apart.

If a team movie does well, then maybe, maybe we’ll see the Legion on the big screen. Probably around 2050 sometime. Set your alarms!

Further Reading: The Legion is little known outside of hardcore comics geek circles, but the people who do like the series love it with everything they have. Many also fly into the most hilarious geek-rages you’ve ever seen over tiny esoteric matters, but still. If you love the legion, you LOVE them. And a couple of more level headed fans have written much more detailed and awesome discussions than me.

Chris “MightyGodKing” Bird used to do a regular feature called Why I should Write the legion and it’s an amazing piece in itself, but also pinpoints exactly why the legion are awesome.

Chris Sims of The Invincible Super-Blog actually wrote a propoer essay about the Legion which got published in the book Teenagers from the Future.

And the guys at Major Spoilers have done a great series of profiles of individual Legion members, summarising their character histories and main plots. Spoilers, obviously.