What Should Be Done about the Legion of Super-Heroes?: Reboot, Deboot, or Bendisboot

Okay, first some brief history. Well, brief as I can make it.

The original Legion in action.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #321
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

DC's Legion of Super-Heroes has several distinct continuities. With characters like Superman and Batman, DC will tweak their origins and histories a little or even a lot, but keep it as one ongoing story. You have to squint to make the continuity work, but they (almost never*) totally start over. DC has taken a different approach to the Legion, perhaps because it's set in the far future of their universe and thus you can totally start it over without having knock-on effects for other characters. Periodically, DC just goes, "nope" and jettisons everything and goes back to the beginning. This has resulted in a few distinct periods of Legion history:

• The Original Legion (1958-94). For its first thirty-five years, the Legion was one ongoing story. Sure, the continuity was massaged here and there, especially with the Crisis on Infinite Earths, but the Lightning Lad of 1994 was the same guy as the Lightning Lad of 1958.
• The Reboot Legion (1994-2004). In 1994, DC started the Legion over again, retelling the story of the team's formation all over again. It was felt the original Legion's continuity had gotten too snarled, and the last couple years of the book were kind of a creative cul-de-sac. This incarnation of the Legion last just a decade.



The debut of the threeboot Legion.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #1
(script by Mark Waid, art by Barry Kitson & Mick Gray)

• The Threeboot Legion (2005-09). In 2005, DC started the Legion over again again. I am actually not really sure why. Sure, sales had fallen off, but was there not a way to bring it back without another reboot? This version didn't last long at all; even leaving aside that it died after just four years, the last year of the title saw it rejigged to remove most of the aspects that made this incarnation interesting.
• The Deboot Legion (2007-13). Barely two years into the threeboot, DC undercut it by beginning to bring back the original Legion, and soon that was the only version they were publishing. Confusingly, DC didn't just roll back to the status quo of the original Legion where it had left off in 1994, but actually to 1986, so now you have two divergent versions of the original Legion. Somewhat surprisingly, DC largely let this version keep going forward through The New 52 with only minor tweaks.
  
• The "Bendisboot" Legion (2019-22?). The Legion lie fallow for several years before DC finally brought it back with Brian Michael Bendis at the helm, starting over completely for the third time. The Bendis version seems to already be dead after just twelve regular issues and ten issues of various miniseries.

This raises the question: what comes next? Fans post this a lot on the Legion subreddit, of which I am a member. Should a new version of the Legion keep going forward from where Bendis left off? Should it go back to an earlier incarnation of the Legion? Should it totally start over again?

Princess Projectra tries to explain reboots to Superboy.
from All-New Collectors' Edition #C-55
(script by Paul Levitz, art by Mike Grell & Vince Colletta)

Many people seem to think it should totally start over. To me, though, this seems like the kiss of death. You can see from my dates above that the "reboot cycle" keeps contracting. The first version of the Legion lasted forty years, the second ten, the third five, the deboot six, and the fourth just three. I think it makes it hard to invest in any new version of the team if you think that as soon sales go a little south, DC will just toss out that version and start over again. I dutifully picked up every issue of the Bendis run as it came out, but if some totally new version came along next year, it would be a hard sell for me: I would need a really good creative team and premise to convince me to jump on board again.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, there's no other superhero premise DC does this kind of thing to on a regular basis. When Green Arrow starts getting a bit crap, DC doesn't totally start over, they just had it over to a new creative team who handles Green Arrow in a new way, but the previous run implicitly still happened even if it doesn't get referenced much. One of the things that draws me to superhero comics to begin with is how they are these weird, never-ending, eternally twisting stories across time. Green Arrow goes from being a rich playboy to a social crusader to an urban hunter to dead to a man trying to rebuild his life to a married globetrotter, but it all happened to the same guy! The Legion had this for forty years and built up an incredible history, but then it lost it all and it will never get it back if it keeps following this route.

Supergirl says goodbye to the threeboot continuity.
from Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #36
(script by Tony Bedard, art by Dennis Calero)

You could also bring back some earlier version of the Legion. Mark Waid did a recent interview where he opined you couldn't roll back the Legion now, because Bendis added a lot of racial diversity, and so any creator who brought back an earlier team would be accused of sweeping the diversity away. With all due respect to Waid, who is one of my favorite comics creators, and who has somehow managed to have multiple different strong Legion runs across different continuities, I don't buy this at all. DC displaces new nonwhite versions of characters in order to bring back the original white ones all the time! I'm not sure why having done this to Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Batgirl, &c., &c., they'd suddenly draw the line at getting rid of the black Lightning Lad.

I agree with Waid, though, that this shouldn't be done, even if I don't agree with his reasoning. The obvious continuity to bring back is the original one... but as of when? The original circa 1994, ignoring the deboot? The original circa 2013, continuing to ignore 1986-94 of the original? The original circa some kind of perceived golden age, ignoring everything since? (Almost certainly that would be the hallowed Levitz/Giffen run.)

Superboy finds out the future has been debooted.
from Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #1
(script by Geoff Johns, art by George Pérez)

Again, this feels like a bad option. It's fundamentally nostalgic. You know what will really convince new readers to give this superhero team a try? Telling them it's just like it was ten/thirty/forty years ago! And thanks to the deboot, it's a really confusing bit of nostalgia. It's one thing for DC to go, "we've chucked the New 52 Superman and are bringing back the post-Crisis one from five years ago," but to bring back the original Legion requires you to chuck the chucking of the thing you chucked!

Reddit is dominated by millennials, so the Legion sub there has a lot of 1990s nostalgia, which I haven't seen elsewhere. (I think most Legion fans on the Internet come across as though they are retirement age and like it's never been quite as good as it was in 1963.) So there I've seen a lot of calls for the reboot to come back. I think this has the same problem as above. It's one thing to roll back a recent continuity change to bring back an "original" character, it feels like another thing to bring back a continuity that was jettisoned thirty years ago. Again, needing to convince a reader to jump on to the revival of a thirty-year-old premise seems like an uphill battle at best!

(Although, if some wanted to bring back Waid's threeboot, which is my favorite clean restart of the Legion, and I think poorly served, I wouldn't object.)

"Trust me, it's all the other continuities that are lies."
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #516
(script by Paul Levitz, art by Kevin Sharpe & Marlo Alquiza)

So, okay, what's left. Well, I know this is a controversial option, but I think the Bendisboot should keep going. Yes, I think he made some bad creative choices... but so what? Comics creators make bad creative choices all the time, the next creative team just comes along and ignores them or tweaks them. Someone continuing from Bendis can use the elements of his approach that worked and jettison the ones that didn't, jumping things ahead a bit. Personally, I would streamline the team a bit and bring more a genuine character focus; one of the issues I have with Bendis's version is there are a million characters and I feel like I know none of them. But you don't need to start over to solve that problem.

One of the thing that makes the Legion work—indeed, that makes any superhero character work—is the way they accumulate a history. The Legion used to have a history of almost forty years. I think it could again. Fans might call it the "Benisboot" right now for the lack of a better name, but he doesn't have to define it exclusively, any more than Otto Binder and Al Plastino defined the original team. Let's see if we can have a version of the Legion that runs from 2019 to 2054! But barring that, I'd settle for a good decade or two.

* For example, the post-Crisis Wonder Woman continuity totally erased the pre-Crisis one, though this was later rolled back. The New 52 eliminated a lot of heroes' histories, but my understanding is these later came back in some form, though I mostly gave up on DC by that point.