Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes No Cockrum, no more Legion after 1972. Until...?

I once said jokingly that, had it not been for Dave Cockrum, the Legion would probably have been canceled in the early 1970s, and then gotten an arty-farty, deconstructive hipster revival sometime in the late 1980s after Crisis on Infinite Earths.

But more recently, I've been thinking, would that necessarily have been a bad thing?

With the right creative team, it could have been a pleasant surprise which would have gone on to hold up better than I feel the vast majority of the Preboot Legion of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s does.

Not sure if I agree with the basic premise that without Cockrum they would've been cancelled, but my guess is that they would've been back much sooner, though perhaps as an "adult" team. Maybe the JLA/JSA/LSH teamup would have brought them back?

EDE, I think that in order for the JLA/JSA/LSH crossover to work, it would've had to be 3 issues instead of 2, and needed a much better script. Bringing them back, like you suggested, as the Adult Legion does have potential.

And I think if Cockrum hadn't drawn the Legion, maybe a few more short stories would've trickled out, but I can easily see the feature being pulled from Superboy by issue 191.

A deconstructive, Silver Age focused book based in part by everyone thinking Watchmen was super cool, is what we got in the TMK volume. You could have run that volume based on what had gone before Cockrum.

Since the Legion survived both the loss of being the title characters of Adventure Comics and the mostly subpar backup feature of Action Comics, I think there was enough of a demand for new Legion stories that, without Cockrum, they would've simply received a different artist.
Obviously it would've been a vastly different Legion from a visual standpoint, but they survived the loss of Cockrum anyway.

But even if the Legion had been cancelled after Cockrum, there's absolutely no way the revival would have waited the post-Crisis era at the very least for one reason: New Teen Titans.
The Wolfman/Perez series was such a massive hit, there is no way DC would've waited that long before giving another shot at their other "young heroes team".

Yeah, but I'd like to have seen how a different creative team (with an editor less enamored of the Silver Age than Waid) would have executed it. I haven't read Twilight yet, but I did purchase it recently precisely because of what I've been thinking about lately. We shall see whether Chaykin's vision of the future appeals to me more than TMK's. At the very least it has Garcia Lopez art, and he's never let me down.


That's a very good point, and I'll admit it slipped my mind. But I hope that Giffen would have had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

If I understood correctly your scenario has the post-Silver Age Legion failing so badly in the early 70s that it completely disappears until the late 80s, right? If that's the case, the only successful Legion prior to this relaunch would've been the Silver Age version.
So no matter who relaunches it, it would be based on the Silver Age way more than any other version we've seen. Because it would've been the only thing to keep as a basis.

If you want a more "modern" version to show up in the 80s or 90s, what you need is something in the 70s that is more popular than the Silver Age.
Practical example: Batman.
The O'Neil version of the 70s is more popular than the campy 60s version for the majority of readers, once the Adam West craze dies down. So you get every following version of Batman taking inspiration from that instead of the Silver Age.
Admittedly the modern Batman is a bit of an exception... we've been stuck with the "Bat-God" for so long that I keep waiting for him to be taken down a peg... but I think this holds true for the vast majority of other franchises.

C_A, I agree with you wholeheartedly on "Batgod."

As for the Silver Age, what I meant was that ideally the editor would not have their own, excessively reverent, agenda as I now believe Waid did.

After sleeping on it, and then thinking about it some more after breakfast, everything became clear to me!

1982: Following the success of New Teen Titans, the Legion of Super-Heroes is put on the fast track for a relaunch.

1983: "Crisis 1,000 Years In the Future," this year's JLA/JSA team-up, manages to be even more awesome than the previous year's epic JLA/JSA/All-Star Squadron team-up!

1984: Along with New Teen Titans Baxter, the New Legion of Super-Heroes is the big launch of this summer!

I finally have a new fan fiction project to write! My thanks to Eryk Davis Ester, Comics_Archeology, and Thoth Lad. You guys are awesome.