I’ve been trying—over and over—to approach the question of “What the hell is wrong with DC Comics?” for a while now and it’s been a process of me hitting my head against a wall over and over. A minor footnote in the larger conversation of DC’s madness is that they recently cancelled Legion of Super-Heroes, one of those long-standing recurring infections of the super-hero genre. I am a Legion nerd. I can still remember my first issue. It’s a future story: inspired by the example of Superboy (Superman when he was a boy!), a bunch of teenagers in the Thirtieth Century—more recently the Thirty-First, because even DC’s future has a dumb sliding scale timeline—put on costumes and fight crime. They’re also typically jerks, because it started in the Silver Age. And because of it being comics, the Legion went back in time to meet their inspiration and take him to the future without consideration of time paradoxes. I mean, certainly, I’d probably go back in time and drag Dorothy Parker with me, promising martinis and no consequences to her disappearance from the timeline.
I wrote a piece for the Boom Tube this week on how much I’d love to see DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes property reimagined with more non-het, genderqueer characters–all centered on a teenaged clone of Superman coming to terms with her identity as a trans person.