17 Years Ago, DC Gave Fans the Last Crossover They Ever Expected

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This crossover brought together the three disparate versions of one of the most important teen superteams in the history of comics, the Legion of Superheroes. The Legion of Superheroes is extremely complicated, and at the time was riding high in the post-Infinite Crisis DC Multiverse. The story saw Superman pulled to the Legion’s future, where Superboy-Prime was thrown after Countdown to Final Crisis and would reform the Legion of Supervillains. This led to a crossover that revealed the truth about one of the weirdest parts of DC’s wonky continuity.

Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds Brought Together the Various Versions of the Legion

Image Courtesy of DC Comics

The Legion of Superheroes has always been a somewhat confusing team, but back in the day, that was mostly because there were so many members of the group. Everyone thinks of the X-Men as the first team to make the “superhero soap opera” popular, but it was the Legion who did it first (and X-Men legend Dave Cockrum used Legion ideas to design new X-Men characters). The team had an intricate history and this made it hard for fans to get into. Then Crisis on Infinite Earths happened and changed everything.

Superboy was an important part of Legion history, and Crisis took Superboy out of DC history. The Legion soldiered on, but creators weren’t able to make their new origins make sense, and this led to the first major Legion reboot after Zero Hour. A new version of the team, one with a different non-Superboy oriented origin, appeared, taking old characters and making them modern. This version lasted from 1995 to 2004, and 2005 saw yet another version of the team show up, with this one lasting until about 2007 before Infinite Crisis brought the original version back.

DC never really explained how the whole three different Legions worked, but it seemed as if the old versions just stopped existing. However, Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds showed all three Legions teaming up because the other two were from different Earths. The “original” Legion was from the main Earth and the other two Legions were from others. It made the whole situation make sense, and readers finally got to see all three versions of the team together battling evil.

Legion history was always strange and the team’s fans had gotten used to the reboots and losing versions of the characters that they had enjoyed. However, this new idea allowed DC to bring back the previous versions of the team, and it helped make sense of the future of the Legion, as there would be three more versions of the team introduced over the next 17 years, each of them from another Earth in the multiverse. Readers got to see all three versions of the team together for the first (and last) time, which wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card for 2008.

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