Writer: Joshua Williamson
Artist: Hayden Sherman
DC Comics, November 2026
Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief, the late Jim Shooter, once described it as the only comic he ever paid money to read. The title was only one of two (the other being the best selling New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez) to be upgraded with great fanfare to DC Comics’ innovative Baxter paper format in 1984 (to put that into perspective, even Batman missed out). And Paul Levitz’ and Keith Giffin’s The Great Darkness Saga, published in 1982, featuring every Legion of Super-Heroes character (a monumental effort of scripting) is widely regarded as one of DC Comics’ best superhero epics.
The Legion of Super-Heroes has been through some ups and downs since it was established in 1958 (see for example our commentary on the group’s sixtieth anniversary: https://worldcomicbookreview.com/2018/04/11/happy-sixtieth-birthday-legion-of-superheroes/ and our unhappy review of Brian Michael Bendis’ reboot from 2019: https://worldcomicbookreview.com/2019/09/10/legion-of-super-heroes-millennium-1-of-2-review/ ).
Here is yet another backwards slide.
DC Comics’ promotional blurb is set out below, and a sub-editor should be chastised for giving away the entire issue:
One thousand years after the Last Son of Krypton’s rocket crashed on the Kent Farm comes a new future inspired by the Man of Tomorrow!
But this new future is in danger! Superheroes are outlawed! Deadly enforcers known as the Persuaders keep the populace of the United Planets in check! Worlds are at war! And this dark tomorrow’s last glimmer of hope, R.J. Brande, has been brutally murdered.
Can the mysterious Brainiac 1 of 5 solve Brande’s murder? To restore hope to the universe, he must assemble a legion of gifted young rebels from across the cosmos! But they are scattered across the universe!
Witness the dawn of a new future in DC Comics architect Joshua Williamson and Eisner-winning superstar artist Hayden Sherman’s Legion of Super-Heroes… you will never look at tomorrow the same way again!
Mr Williamson is plainly out of fresh ideas. The Legion’s old enemy, The Persuader, has been rebottled and mass-produced as a corps of thought police. The Legion’s wealthy benefactor, RJ Brande, has been murdered off panel in this first issue. Brainiac Five is now Brainiac 1 of 5, using the nomenclature of the Borg drones from Star Trek: Voyager. Superheroes are banned, but there is a giant statue of Superman sitting in the middle of Superlopolis, the capital of Earth. The Legion symbol is now a spray-painted indicia of resistance. It is pretty tiresome stuff.
Other Legion members are briefly reintroduced: Lightning Lad, Lightning Lass, Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Matter-Eater Lad, most of whom are given loose origin stories in the space of three pages a piece. There is a hint of the twinned future menaces of Darkseid (whose dance card is very full. What is Trigon up to nowadays?) and the original evil world-shrinking robot Brainiac.
Hayden Sherman’s art is a saving grace. The characters’ renditions seem fresh and, curiously, all of the art is contained in panels of concentrated circles and arcs, save for the sequences with Lightning Lad which feel more like funhouse mirrors. We found this very innovative and wonder if it is meant to represent some future way of observing existence. (Rectangular panels are so 21st century.)
But no one is going to be happy with this title. It could have picked up on the traditional Legion characters and storylines, and thereby roped in those readers who remember the Legion from its heyday. Or it could have gone along the path of a deeply alien Dune-esque future, where the world of 3026 is just as strange to us as 2026 would be to someone living in the eleventh century. Instead, it is saccharine and froth.
For the purposes of the Comic Book Round-up’s scoring system, we give this title 2/5.