Reboot the Legion of Super-Heroes

[LordUltimus]

Like it says. Make your own version of the Legion. What are the characters like now? What's the state of the galaxy? What, if any, connection do they have with Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes?

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

I'd probably just center it on Mon-el or a descendant from the House of El. I don't need a modern day character to be a POV.

[joebleau]

You dont. they were perfect before Bendis.

[justinslot]

(Black Adam killing Psycho Pirate voice) No more silly reboots.

Aren't we in a period of DC continuity where everything happened and there's no need to explain anything? Roy Harper is alive again! Why is the Legion still being subjected to shitty reboots and being cut off from decades of history?

Anyway, it all happened, pre-Crisis, DnA, threeboot, Five Years Later, pocket universe, Legion of Three Worlds, etc. The Adult Legion from 1961? That happened too. Everything happened! The Bendis Legions are clones or from an alternate dimension or clones from an alternate dimension. The Legion begins again with members from all its eras, with some new Legionnaires being the descendants of now adult and probably retired original members. It's not the stupidest thing imaginable that Lightning Lad is descended from Black Lightning in this scenario, just a cute wrinkle, because it's not pretending to replace years and years of comics.

A Legion that is constantly rebooting cannot be a viable property. I propose that all the events that happened since Crisis happened in some way but not exactly as they were portrayed in the comics--sometimes they happened to a clone or a doppelganger or a hypertime variant. Sometimes they happened to the same person! The same Imra lived through all this stuff and had all these adventures, just maybe not the same way as it looked at the time. Imra's a great example of a character who could have lived it all since she's one of the few who's basically been the same throughout her comics existence.

Subject the Legion to the same rules as the rest of contemporary DC, basically. No more insulting reboots and insisting previous comics didn't happen, a practice DC has moved away from. Embrace history.

[astro@work]

Not a fan of reboots, but....

1. DON'T tie it to any current characters. DC can't leave it's continuity alone anymore, so tying Legion continuity to anybody except adult Superman will force another unwanted Legion reboot within 5 years.

2. Include ALL previous members from all the continuities, even if only as footnotes; this ensures more longetivity because it won't compete against other iterations that had unique characters.
Create a Legion where all characters belonged and it will compete less with "My Favorite Legion That Was the Only One to Include..." (looking at you Kinetix/Dragonmage/Ivy/Kent Shakespeare/Magnetic Kid et al).

3. Don't reinvent beloved characters into something they never were (oh hi Princess Snakejectra)...don't give us a reason to hate a new reboot and yearn for it's demise.

[Mutant God]

I'll put Space Ghost in it, don't know why just will.

[Stick Figure]

I’ve said before that prior to Bendis, my exposure to the Legion was limited to a late 70’s book a friend had. Not great reading. Bendis hit it out of the park to me. I don’t know how the book can be rebooted when all people want is a version from decades ago. How can they redo the book to appeal to new fans if older fans won’t like it because it’s not what they know? Bendis just scratched the surface with the book.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

I'd probably just center it on Mon-el or a descendant from the House of El. I don't need a modern day character to be a POV.

I'd probably pull from the Mark Waid stuff. I don't mind connecting the Legion to modern day lore but they are few and far between. It's more like Wildfire is apart of the Firestorm Matrix than Black Lightning and Lightning Lad are related.

But Karate Kid will become the Batman of the 31st century. .

[AJpyro]

You dont reboot. Just bring back Zero Hour Legion and keep going from there.

[OBrianTallent]

It's been proven time and again you can take an existing property and work it into something exceptional without rebooting it and starting over from scratch. DC's biggest failure was in not letting Hickman have the series when he wanted it. Can you imagine the energy he poured into the X-line poured into the Legion? One of the biggest issues for me with the Bendis-boot was taking existing characters and completely changing them...Dawnstar without wings? Likewise, what was the point of racebending characters? We didn't need African versions of Lightning Lad. If you want a diverse Legion of Super-Heroes, there's plenty of characters to pull in from Invisible Kid II, Quantum Kid, Dragonmage, Computo II, Dragonwing, Xs and then we have the non-humanoid Gates, Gear, Shikari, Monstress...there's so many options from throughout the years that there is no real need to reboot characters into non-recognizable versions of themselves.
That being said, where was it in Infinite Crisis or Final Crisis where they established the different booted versions of the LSH were from different universes, such as the teenboot version was Earth 2? In my rebooted version I would play on that. One option would be to give the Legion dimensional travel. Along with lightspeed and time travel, it would seem they would have established some form of consistent inter-dimensional travel. I would start with the adult Legion (silver age version?) and use them as the basis for the story.
Another option would be to just go whole hog into DC's go to and have a great cataclysm that ends up merging future earths together there by merging Legions. So we have the Silver Age Legion alongside such characters as Monstress, Shikari, Gear, Lyle Norg Invisible Kid (who died in the original Silver Age version) fighting alongside Jaques Foquart and how his "old" teammates would react to a younger and ALIVE version of himself. This way we pull in favorites from the various versions and we have a true Legion.

[Lee Stone]

I would start with a sequel to Legion of Three Worlds.
Have a 'crossover' between all the Legions again.

Then when it's all over, the Levitz Legion takes center stage and expands with a few members from the others, and grows forward from there.

[superduperman]

Go back to the pre-Crisis continuity.

[OBrianTallent]

I would start with a sequel to Legion of Three Worlds.
Have a 'crossover' between all the Legions again.

Then when it's all over, the Levitz Legion takes center stage and expands with a few members from the others, and grows forward from there.

You said what I was trying to way better and with far less words than I! lol

[Rod G]

Pre-Zero Hour Legionnaires (series).

There you go.

[Jim Kelly]

I have a few different approaches to Legion continuity, as head canon, but one that I've had for the last several years is that it's like a videogame, but what a videogame could become in the far distant future. Everything that happens in the Legion is explainable if it's this game reality where the skins change, rules change, the interactive features allow whoever is playing to affect the outcomes. There's a lot more to it than just that, but that's the basic idea.

Like in WESTWORLD, the characters are self-aware (they have thought balloons/first person narration), but whenever they stumble on certain limitations to their reality they are prevented from discovering the truth. The Time Trapper might be one way that the system manages these glitches.

I apply this to every Legion story I read and it helps me accept all the inconsistencies and reboots. The fact that they are so easily able to move through time and space makes a lot more sense, if they are not actually moving at all, they are just clicking from one setting to another.

My only major problem is how to incorporate the current 21st century based comic books into this concept. Previous iterations of the 20th/21st century work fine, if they are also part of a videogame of the future. But present day mainstream continuity always wants to be the true reality. So these two different concepts are in conflict--they can't both be true at the same time.