I think Legion of Superheroes animated series has the right concept: take elements of different Legions (Threeboot, Geoff Johns, Silver Age, Zero Hour, Bendis, etc) and combine that and use it to reflect current mediaolitics, etc and what is modern in the DC Universe be it DCAU, Zack Snyder DC films, Smallville, etc
Legion can get away with race-bending because they exist in a future where humans no longer have any societal splits involving races, so changing someone's race won't really affect their character or how they're treated in the same way that, say, Batman being black would alter the character in a modern worldview.
I at least hope they won't go for a black Lightning Lad like Bendis went with. If you're going to race-bend Garth, don't go for the obvious.
What is it with black guys having electrical powers anyways?
No one is saying that only black guys get electrical powers. But it does happen often enough for people to notice. Tv tropes even has an entry on it.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...ectricBlackGuy
Once you get past a certain level of notoriety for a character, you can honestly make any number of changes to them since the amount of people who are actually gonna know them well enough to be angry is comparatively small. There was a funny post I saw early this year around Comic-Con that was someone saying they couldn't wait for people to suddenly pretend to give a shit about Marvel's Sersi so they can feign outrage about her being played by an Asian woman in the MCU, even though the overwhelming majority of those people probably didn't actually care about the character prior to that.
I don't mind Garth having a different skin colour. I can just assume that was always the colour but the transmission from the 30th century didn't come in clear--or there's some visualization fad in the future that allows you to keep changing your look.
But if he has brown skin-tone, then likely so would Ayla and Mekt. Changing one character has a domino effect on all the other characters related to him.
Forget lightning-themed characters - what's with redhead's getting turned black?
(You'd think some of them get turned Asian, at least.)