DC’s Legends of Tomorrow – or a version of the team, at least – is coming to DC Comics.
The Legends, a team of B-, C-, and D-list superheroes and villains, gathered on TV under the initial leadership of Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill), and fought time-traveling threats for seven seasons on The CW. When the network was sold, and budgets for original programming got slashed, Legends was one of the shows that didn’t survive the transition, ending on a cliffhanger in 2022.
Now, series co-creator Marc Guggenheim seemingly has plans to continue the story, at least in spirit. The team’s “timeship,” the Waverider, appears in the pages of this week’s Justice League: Dark Tomorrow #1, captained by a costumed being calling themself only “Legend.”
Guggenheim had teased the arrival of the Waverider, and noted the phrase “Legends of Tomorrow” in his most recent Substack post.
Spoilers past this point, but Justice League: Dark Tomorrow opens with the DC Comics hero Waverider, as well as a number of other time-traveling characters, being killed by Darkseid’s Omega Demons, a variation on the Anti-Monitor’s Shadow Demons with ties to DC’s Absolute Universe. Later, Legend makes sure to establish that the timeship has no official tie to the hero of the same name.
The team of Legends assembled in Dark Tomorrow includes Batman Beyond, aka Terry McGinnis, Jonah Hex, The Earth-2 Huntress, Marilyn Moonlight, and Gold Beetle. In-story, the character of Legend wears a suit of armor similar to the one worn by Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) on the TV show, with a full-facial mask that obscures their identity.
The character appears to be male, but Supergirl refers to Legend as “them.” And while Legend presents as male throughout the issue, and wears armor that features a male “body sculpt,” they do make a joke at one point that they have no history with Marilyn Moonlight, but “don’t blame a girl for wishing,” suggesting DC is leaving their options open as to the final identity of the time-traveler.
Legend also says that they have history (get it?) with both the Waverider timeship and with Jonah Hex, which raises questions. Hex, after all, appeared in a number of episodes of the Arrowverse series, and can be said to have history with a number of characters on the show. Whether that means Legend is actually from the Arrowverse timeline, or whether it’s just a tip of the (cowboy) hat to those episodes, is anybody’s guess.
Launched in 2016, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow used cast-off characters from Arrow and The Flash, creating The CW’s first super-team show. Pitched as the Arrowverse’s answer to The Avengers, it quickly became clear that the show’s lesser-known characters and quirky sensibilities made it more like Guardians of the Galaxy.
After the series ended, fans launched online and in-person campaigns to save it, flying banners over the Warner Bros. lot and running billboards in Times Square. DC Studios chief James Gunn, who had praised the show during its run, acknowledged those fan campaigns shortly after taking the job – but told fans that he wasn’t going to be looking backwards in the early days of his tenure. That means projects like the Joel Schumacher cut of Batman Forever and the David Ayer cut of Suicide Squad are on the back burner, along with giving Arrowverse fans a happier (and more complete) ending for the Legends.
While DC previously had a 1980s crossover series called Legends, the TV show represented the first time there was ever a team bearing that name in DC’s roster. Aside from a couple of appearances in Arrowverse-related comics and novels, the Legends have never existed in print before, and there is no one-to-one comics corollary for the team.
A comic book miniseries called DC’s Legends of Tomorrow was published in 2016, but rather than featuring the Legends, it was an all-star anthology series in which big-name creators told stories centered on B-list characters. Firestorm, who was a member of the Legends for the first three seasons of the show, was the only Arrowverse Legend to appear in the comic.
The characters will, according to the Dark Tomorrow one-shot, show up in upcoming issues of Justice League Unlimited and DC K.O. At this point, it’s impossible to know DC’s long-term plans for the Legends team (and brand), but it certainly seems plausible that the team will spin off into their own miniseries after the events of DC K.O.
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