By Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84856-009-9
Once upon a time, in the far future, a band of super-powered kids from dozens of alien civilisations took inspiration from the greatest legend of all time and formed a club of heroes. One day these Children of Tomorrow came back in time and invited that legend to join them…
And thus began the vast and epic saga of the Legion of Super-Heroes, as first envisioned by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino in the landmark Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958). Since that time the fortunes and popularity of the Legion have perpetually waxed and waned, with their future history tweaked and rebooted, retconned and unwritten over and again to comply with editorial diktat and popular whim.
The current trend is to re-embrace the innocent, silly, joyous, stirring and utterly compelling pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths tales but to shade them with contemporary sensibilities and with this in mind Geoff Johns has been gradually reinstituting the Lore of the Legion in a number of his assignments. Beginning most notably with Justice League of America: the Lightning Saga and culminating in the ongoing New Krypton and War against Brainiac sagas the Legion are back and once more carving out a splendid niche in the DC Universe.
Along the way came this superb, nostalgia-enhanced cracker of a tale which reestablished direct contact between the futuristic paladins and the Man of Tomorrow…
Collecting Action Comics #858-863, this chronicle finds the Legion back in the 21st century, summoning Superman to save Tomorrow’s World once more. Long ago the Legion had regularly visited: spiriting the young Kryptonian to a place and time where he didn’t have to hide his true nature. However, once he began his public career, the visits ceased and his memories were suppressed to safeguard the integrity of history and the inviolability of the time-line.
Now a desperate squad of Legionnaires must reawaken those memories since the Man of Steel is the last hope for a world on the edge of destruction. In the millennium since his debut Superman has become a beacon of justice and tolerance throughout the Utopian Universe, but a radical, xenophobic anti-alien movement has swept Earth, marginalising, interning and even killing all non-Terrans. Moreover, a super-powered team of Legion rejects has formed a Justice League of Earth to lead a crusade against all extraterrestrial immigrants, claiming Superman was actually a true-born Earthling, and declaring him their spiritual leader…
Of course Kal-El of Krypton must travel to the future and not only save the day but clean the racist stain from his name – a task made infinitely more difficult because Earth-Man, psychotic xenophobe leader of the Earth-First faction, has turned our yellow sun a power-sapping red…
Bold, thrilling and absolutely enthralling, the last-ditch struggle of a few brave aliens against a racist, fascistic and completely ruthless totalitarian tomorrow is the stuff of pure comic-book dreams. Superman strives to unravel a poisonous future where all his hopes and aspirations have been twisted, with only his truest childhood friends to aid him, and the incredibly intense and hyper-realistic art of Gary Frank and Jon Sibal makes it all seem not only plausible but inevitable…
With this kind of material, the new-old may well be back for all time…
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