The best Legion of Super-Heroes stories of all time - kellyfalwye85

The advisable Legion of Super-Heroes stories of totally clip

Legion of Super-Heroes (Picture credit: DC)

The Legion of A-one-Heroes is a big break u of the DC mythos, and although the teen team from the future put on't currently experience a book on the shelves, they are return to challenge their 21st-C counterparts, the Justice League.

Betwixt their impending crossover with the Judicature League, writer Brian Michael Bendis' planned 'Gilded Lantern Saga,' and the concurrent tease for a revisit of 'The Great Dark Saga' by Darkseid in the recent Infinite Frontier series, there's a lot for Legion fans to be hopeful for.

So thereupon in mind, Newsarama is digging back through the chronological record of the DC Universe to present the best Legion of Comprehensive-Heroes stories of whol time.

Legion of Extremely-Heroes #0

1994 marked a unequalled street corner for the Legion of Super-Heroes. Though the team had been restructured in front (more on that soon), the aftermath of the DC World-altering Zero Hour brought an end to the classic era of the Legion and introduced an entirely new team - unmatchable that was supported the original group of characters, but with entirely different (and at the fourth dimension more modern) sensibilities.

For this major reboot, DC introduced the rebranded team of redesigned, renamed classic Legionaries with Mark Waid, Tom McCraw, and Gilbert Charles Stuart Immonen's Legion of Topnotch-Heroes #0, a retelling of the team's origin that reframed the marrow troika of Lightning Lad (renamed Sharpie), Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy with different motivations and a whole new philosophy.

The one-dig launched an on-going Legion of Super-Heroes series and a sister Legionaries title, defining a still fan-popular post-Vertigo return on the off-kelter heroes.

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Legion of Three Worlds

One of the hallmarks of the Legion of Super-Heroes is their ever so-changing status quo. Firstly old ahead in 1984 with a five-year-parachute that radically altered the team, the Horde had its first full-of-the-moon-on reboot in 1994 as a consequence of No Hour, which rewrote parts of DC history. The team rebooted again in 2004, with a third condition quo and new versions of many an characters introduced once again.

Though flying under the Final Crisis banner, the biggest connection Legion of Three Worlds has to that history is that IT attempts to reconcile and ray-guild these different Legions into a sensible structure that accounts for, well, everything.

Whether it succeeds is almost likewise tortuous a question to answer without getting into the minutiae of the plat, but the most important affair is, this story doesn't antimonopoly beget the Horde right, it gets three opposite versions of the Legion on the page and offers some level of closure to fans of the different eras of the team.

Longhand by Geoff Jasper Johns with art by George Perez, Legion of Three Worlds delves into not only the schism of the three different versions of the Legion, simply the closed book of their overaged opposition the Sentence Trapper, whose surprising secret identity sets the stage for one and only of the weirdest epilogues ever to cross the pages of a contemporary DC comic book - a throwback to the wild and wooly nature of the tales that influenced this off-beat story.

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An Eye for an Eye

Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, and Steve Lightle's 'An Eye For An Eye' launched a new era and a new volume of the Horde in a 6-part chronicle that reunited the Legion of First-rate-Villains in a brutal pact to each kill a Legionnaire - with same hero even falling at their hands.

Kicking off a new volume of Legion of Super-Heroes, this narration at once upends the status quos of numerous characters, digging deeper into the burgeoning fully grown relationships of the at one time teen Legionnaires and once over again throwing a wrench in the politics of the 30th Century.

Culminating in a massive battle 'tween the Legion of Super-Heroes and their Super-Villain counterparts, 'An Eyeball For An Eye' also marks one of the Legion's most tragic stories, with Karate Kid sacrificing himself not but to save his teammates and the world, but to foil the plans of his once friend Nemesis Tike, ultimately a treasonist to the Legion.

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Earthwar

In the large conflict of 'Earthwar,' the Legion becomes entangled in a solid conflict 'tween numerous distance empires in the District of Columbia Universe which ran from Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #241 to #245 .

Caught in the crossfire between the Khunds, the Dominators, the Dark Circle, and the Unified Planets - all ultimately manipulated by their old foe Mordru - the Legion desperately tried to preclude the entire galaxy from devolving into full-scale war.

With increasingly higher stakes, dramatic twists and turns, and identity reveals that shake the story, 'Earthwar' is somewhat emblematic of the often amazingly political nature of the Horde of A-one-Heroes.

Additionally, 'Earthwar' was written by Paul Levitz, penciled by Henry James Sherman and Joe Staton, and inked by Bob McLeod - a perfect snapshot fictive team of the Legion's highschool-intrigue Bronzy Era adventures.

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The Rootage of the Legion

Superboy #147 International Relations and Security Network't the forward Legion chronicle, but IT is the first telling of the complete (and completely unique) origin of the Legion.

Told by E. Nelson Bridwell and Pete Costanza, the tale of the Legion (erstwhile explained as simply having been inspired past Superboy) presented a incomparable-of-a-gentle tale of three aspirational teenager heroes - Large Boy, Lightning Lad, and Saturn Girl - who band together to save the wealthy philanthropist R.J. Brande who in bout decides to store the teens as they form the Legion of Super-Heroes, weirdly making the Legion one of the first corporate-sponsored teams in comic books.

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Mordru the Merciless!

In Risky venture Comics #369, Jim Shooter and Curt Swan created a new Nemesis for the Legion World Health Organization would happen to occupy a key place in DC lore, menacing quadruplicate teams for thousands of years of DC history.

'Mordu the Merciless' - the statute title of the story and name of the villain in question - pitted Superboy, and then still a fixture of the Legion, against one of his only weaknesses: magic. The magic of Mordru, to be specific - WHO was an archaic wizard who had conquered his homeworld of witching users and was set connected fetching the rest of the beetleweed.

Mordru was future retooled as a Lord of Chaos - one of the morose counterparts to Doctor Fate's Nabu and the other Lords of Order - menacing the Justice Society and even Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.

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Legion Lost

Legion Lost is the name of two Legion of Superintendent-Heroes titles, the first - written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning with art from Lanning, Olivier Coipel, and Pascal Alixe - which ran for 12 issues from 2000-2001 is the unmatchable that makes this list.

In this serial publication, a small group of Legionnaires is displaced in space and time by a strange rift, where they meet new characters reminiscent of old faces (in the tradition of the Legion at the clock) and explored territory the Legion of Superintendent-Heroes has rarely crossed - both in terms of story and social structure.

Horde Lost pitted that core group of Legionnaires against an evil Empire best-known as the Issue - ultimately light-emitting diode by one of their most disgraceful foes e'er.

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Death of Ferro Lad

Many of the Host of Big-Heroes' early Metal Years tales fall through dupe to the same silly tropes that bring i similar superhero fare of the day charming but less unforgettable than many another modern tales. However, 'The Death of Ferro Lad,' a multi-part story concentrated on the Fatal Five - a guilty quintet World Health Organization would decease on to threat the Legion for decades - defied the sunny trappings of the Silver Age and stained them with the bloodline of a Legionnaire.

Written by legendary Legion scribe Jim Shooter (who first began written material the teen team as a teenager himself) with art from none other than Curt Swear, 'The Death of Ferro Lad' actually forces a ragtag and bobtail radical of Legionnaires to phone call on the Fatal Little Phoeb, the Galax urceolata's just about wished-for criminals, to help fend sour a Sun-Eater that threatens to destroy the Earth.

At first agreeing to team up (with the Fateful Five persistently examination the bounds of the Legion's morality), the ii teams at last defeat the Solarize-Eater only at the cost of the animation of Ferro Boy, who is obliterated when he sacrifices himself to detonate a bomb calorimeter that destroys information technology, opening the door for the villains to sta the heroes and then each other.

A shockingly complex clean tale in an historic period of illegal-and-white heroism, 'The Death of Ferro Cus' strikes a stark chord in the Legion's history that would set the tone of their frequently angsty stories for decades later.

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Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's 'Superman and the Legion of Ace-Heroes' ran as a part of Johns' extended tenure on Legal action Comics and was initially meant to lead to a Johns-enclosed revival, but plans changed after publication.

However, if this tale is any indication of what their Legion May have been like, Jasper Johns and Frank would have carved an iconic chapter in one of DC's oldest sagas. Here, they merely scrape the surface of what could have been, though regular this brief run has everything majuscule around Demigod, the Legion, and even the DC Universe packed in.

Centralised connected the idea of a future where Superman's bequest has been stained by in favour of-Earth xenophobes, 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds and the Host of Super-Heroes' brings Supes to the future again - only when to depower him under the low-cal of a red sun.

Packed with action, heart, comedy, and even many of the best Legion Rejects moments in the team's whole history, this single-loudness story is a perfect glimpse into a legal brief window when the post-Crisis Superman's history with the team up was not antitrust intact, simply celebrated.

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The Great Darkness Saga

'The Great Darkness Saga' from every-clock time-great Legion of Super-Heroes creative team Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, and Larry Mahlstedt isn't just widely regarded as the best Legion of Super-Heroes story ever, IT's a great deal placed among the sterling DC stories of complete prison term.

Spanning nearly the entire cast of the Legion, 'The Great Dark Saga' pitted the expansive squad against a renewed threat of Darkseid and the Anti-Life equating subordinate the guise of a mysterious "Master" to alarming death cultists.

An epic unto itself, the 'Dandy Darkness Saga' brought classic elements of the DC Universe forward to the Legion's future setting, at once re-contextualizing concepts such as Jack Kirby's Fourth World in a wildly different context while also further foundation the Legion in the history of the DCU.

'Great Darkness Saga' encompassed the veracious spirit of the Legion, interspersing the violent drama of a dark divinity's upgrade with the personal politics of Horde elections, butterfly, and intrigue.

In the end, 'Great Darkness Saga' exchanged the Legion forever, altering its trajectory, its membership, and its kinetics while proving that equal in the future Darkseid is peerless of the DCU's most powerful foes.

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