Legion of Superheroes: The Great Darkness Saga with Case Aiken
We’re back with another episode of Trade School! This time, we’re talking about Legion of Superheroes: The Great Darkness Saga! Our host this week is Case Aiken!
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Edited by Case Aiken
Scored by Bret Eagleston
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⏱️ YouTube Chapters
00:00 – Introduction: Why Trade School Exists
00:28 – Why The Great Darkness Saga Matters
02:00 – The Famous Darkseid Reveal
03:27 – Why Darkseid Feels So Dangerous Here
05:03 – Major Legion Lore & Lasting Consequences
06:02 – Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen & a Legendary Run
08:01 – Why the Legion of Super-Heroes Is Hard to Get Into
10:00 – The Many Reboots of the Legion
12:03 – Why This Story Became Essential Reading
13:01 – Why the Legion Finally Clicked for Me
14:01 – Is The Great Darkness Saga the Best Legion Story?
16:03 – Trade School, Community & Reader Submissions
17:06 – Outro & Word From Tomorrow Promo
Transcription
00:00
Welcome to Certain Point of View's Trade School, where each episode a different host talks about a comic book trade paperback that they loved and why they love it. Hey, everyone, I'm Case Aiken. And yeah, I'm back on Trade School because I love trade paperbacks. I love comic books. I love talking about them. They meant a lot to me over the course of my life. And that is why this series exists. It exists to collect the stories of why stories matter to people. And today in large part because we just got the announcement officially that a new Legion of Superheroes book was coming out. I wanted to talk about one of the really big Legion of Superheroes stories. I wanted to talk about the Great Darkness Saga. This is a huge work.
00:44
It is considered one of the high watermarks for the Legion of Superheroes for good reason, because it's really good. So for those of you not familiar with the Legion of Superheroes, it is about a super team set in the 30th and now the 31st century of DC Comics. It's always 1000 years in the future and it is about fairly over the top kind of concept of superheroes existing in a relatively utopian future. Some versions have played it a little bit darker, but generally speaking, we're. We're looking more Star Trek than say, Dune in terms of the presentation of what the. The future looks like. And it's always been a really fun series that I've enjoyed picking up Scattershot. I, I got into comics when the reboot era was really big. And so that was my Legion, how I was first introduced to them.
01:32
But I had picked up stories over the years, collected the Burn run of Superman, which included a crossover with the Legion in a story that has pros and cons that I've talked about a lot. But. But here this is one of the truly great stories. And when it was finally published, it was a chance to collect a story that had been lauded and in some ways mythologized in. In the field of comics. It was talked about in these hushed tones as being like one of these great works with also one of these. It's that people are really frustrated about because the last issue of the arc is a huge spoiler. Like the COVID is a giant spoiler if you hadn't actually been reading the whole arc.
02:15
And unfortunately the trade paperback uses the last issues cover as the basis for the COVID of it, which reveals. And here's a spoiler for those of you not familiar with the Great Darkness Saga, a series that came out literally the Year I was born. The main villain of the series is a recurring villain from the 20th century DC Comics. It is Darkseid. And he is a character who prior to this point had never had any associations with the Legion. And really, when you get into it and think about it, this is 1984 when the story initially came out. Darkseid is not that old of a character at this point. Now he's established like he's 10 years into being like one of the top dogs of DC villains.
02:55
But he was introduced in the 70s, so this is a very different kind of period versus, like where we'd be looking at now where Darkseid has been so established in DC lore, Darkseid could still surprise you. You might not realize that he was the villain of the story. And the book does a really good job obfuscating who the main villain is. Darkseid operates in a more clandestine way throughout the majority of the book because he's coming off of being weakened and being trapped and finally freed at the start of the series. And he slowly amasses forces that are really put the Legion to the test. And not just the Legion like the broader 30th century world of DC Comics, he puts to the test.
03:38
And that is incredibly impressive when you consider the number of crazy powerful beings that exist in the Legion of Superheroes. The. The team itself has so many crazy heavy hitters. I mean, obviously it has Superboy, Supergirl, Mon El, Ultra Boy, it's Starboy, Wildfire. And then you get into the peripheral characters, you have Duplicate Boy, you've got Dev M, the Knave of Krypton, You've got incredibly powerful beings out there that Darkseid has no problem handling. He, he does a very good job just making the Legion feel like they are incapable of measuring up to the great evil that they are facing off against. And it really shows the team come together in this incredible way as the stakes keep getting bigger and bigger throughout the story.
04:28
It really just does this incredible job of making the tension rise and it makes it look like it is an impossible task to win at the end of the day. And of course, this is a superhero book from the 80s. The Heroes win, but it is not without cost. And there are interesting ramifications that have lingering impacts on Legion lore that we talk about to this day. Like this is where the establishment of Validus, one of the longt Legion villains, being the child of Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, gets established.
05:03
This is a story where we get to see just wonderful elements of the Legion lore really come together and I just wanted to talk about it because it's a really cool story and it is what it didn't get me into the Legion, but it definitely cemented the 30th century as a setting in DC Comics that I really wanted to spend time in, if that makes any sense. It's always been an era that I was like vaguely interested in, but this is the period, this is the book that really showed off just how strong, especially in the 80s era of the Legion of Superheroes was. Like the Legion of Superheroes is a. Is a time honored series in DC Comics that many great creators cut their teeth on. Jim Shooter cut his teeth on it.
05:47
And in this case, Paul Levitz was the writer here, working with Keith Giffen and a ton of other creatives. But Levitz and Giffen had an amazing run in the 80s that is comparable to the Claremont era X Men and is comparable to the Perez Wolfman era New Teen Titans. So we're talking about a really strong book here. And this is without a doubt the big arc. Like if you ask any Legion of Superheroes fan what is the biggest arc of the Legion of Superheroes, they will reference the Great Darkness Saga. Unless they are explicitly trying to avoid referencing the Great Darkness Saga. That is what is so cool about the Great Darkness Saga. It is doing a really cool twist. Like the Legion of Superheroes often exists very much divorced from the 20th century.
06:31
D. I mean, when you consider for example, in our modern era, we're not too far removed from being exactly a thousand years from the Norman Conquest. So like in terms of history and so forth, like we're so. We're very far removed from the period where Old English existed. And we are roughly the same distance from when French was influenced in English and made Middle English a thing. It's a thousand years is a lot of time. So a thousand years in the. Is not surprising that there aren't that many characters or crossover points, elements of the DCU that persist to that era.
07:13
And to bring back a villain like Darkseid who had not really made his presence known in the 30th century, who had been established as being so powerful and so omnipresent and so long lasting in the 20th century, it finally answered the question of where he was and what the Legion could do against him. And the Legion ultimately pulls it together and WINS because again, 80s superhero book. But, but man, this. It's such an incredible story of it and it was such an interesting twist because The Legion typically didn't do things like that. Now we've seen other stories since that have brought in elements from the 20th century, for better or for worse. There's a lot of fans who really don't want any 20th century elements being brought in unless they are established things like the. The connection with Superman or things like that.
08:03
But, but this was a really clever use of it. And Darkseid doesn't operate as just Darkseid. He's not leading Apocalypse. He doesn't have his normal, like, cachet. His normal entourage of new Gods. This is a book that features him coming up with new forces, doing really cool stuff. He. He creates these clones of superheroes from throughout time and space. Superheroes from all different planets, including Superman, including a clone of Orion, including a clone of one of the Guardians. Like, he has access to DNA from characters all throughout time and space because he's Darkseid. He's this immortal, terrifying threat, and he's able to create these twisted, horrible servants that just go off and do his bidding. And that's this. This gnarly element of it. And that's his first salvo. Like, that's not even when he, like, really upgrades his forces.
08:59
And that is what is so cool about this. It's so creative and so tense and the stakes get so big and then the stakes matter again. Like, he curses Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl and he. He is the reason why Validus is a villain like that. That is so cool. That ties all these things together in this really creative and complex way. That. That's very fun. And the Legion. Well, it. Like I said, it's always. It's always meant something to me in the abstract, but this is the book that really brought it together and. And the Legion of gone on to be a book that I. I really have just. Just a lot of love for you. You know, it's Byzantine in its history. There. There's so many reboots now. It's mostly associated because of the. The original sin of.
09:48
Well, of Zero Hour, but. But of the repeated reboots of Crisis on Infinite Earths really messing up their continuity. Zero Hour trying to just not streamline it, but to reboot it in a way that made sense. And then since then, everyone trying to either reboot it into their own version of with the Bendis run or to chase the dream of the old guard, like the Geoff Johns retro boot era for the team. So it's a team that's really hard to sort of explain because it's gotten so complex and so weird. But it used to have this really straightforward continuity. It used to be a series that had characters progress in age and slowly develop from their roots in the 50s going into the 80s.
10:31
And it's only really with Crisis on Infinite Earths and even then, really only with Zero Hour, where that period actually comes to an end. So this is one of the high watermarks of. Of that golden age. The Levitz run, I maintain, is one of the strongest runs in. In comic books. We're talking about one of the true classics in comics. And this is, without a doubt one of the biggest arcs for that. And it's a really accessible arc. It's available as a trade paperback for the Great Darkness Saga. You can also go on the DC app where they have it collected. They're not entirely the same, the specific issues, and the app has more issues in play because it has full issues, whereas the. The trade paperback had only, like, scenes from some of the issues that were.
11:14
Were not really dedicated to parts of the story. For the Great Darkness Saga, the Legion of Superheroes, particularly under Levitz, is really known for a type of plotting where there's consistent A, B, C, D plots that advance as issues go on so that you always have an A plot as the starting point for the story and then B plots being seeded and C plots being seeded so that when the A plot resolves, the B plot can become the new A plot and so forth. Forth. So Legion of Superheroes books typically show a lot of stories that are developing because they have such a huge cast of characters. And the. The fact of the matter is that there are.
11:52
There's going to be issues that are very important to this arc that the majority of the issue actually isn't related to the Ark, such as the awakening of Dark side happens at the beginning of this. Of. Of the book. But it. It's just a scene that happens in a. In a issue that has other stuff going on. So if you can find the trade that. It's a really more. It's a more concise, streamlined way of reading it. But the app is totally fine. It's. It's great material. You're just going to read a bunch of Legion stuff that you might not know the context for, but that's fine. Like, it's comics. Like, you're supposed to jump in with any issue. And. And Levitz is a great writer who makes things extremely accessible.
12:31
So I don't want to, like, make the app version of it seem like the lesser choice. I'm just. Just here to talk about the trade paperback, because that's the nature of the show that we're here to talk about. Trade paperbacks. And again, I wanted to talk about this one because the Legion of Superheroes is coming back, and I'm really excited about them coming back. It looks really cool. It seems like they've got a lot of love for the property in the new run. So, you know, wanted to just express some of my excitement about this franchise because it's a franchise that means a lot to me. It has slowly wormed its way into my heart as one of my favorite comic properties. It is such a wonderful combination of optimism with gritty realism at times with growing stakes with maturing characters.
13:20
There's so much that exists to love about the Legion of Superheroes, and I'm excited for any chance I get to see. See the material with those characters, even if it is subpar, like some runs that have occurred more recently. But. But here, hey, like, the new one looks pretty good. And if nothing else, it gave me the excuse to talk about one of the best iterations of the book. The Levitz era is considered one of the greats in Legion history, and this is probably the best arc in. In that whole run. Even though there are plenty of great arcs that. That come before and after this. This is really hard not to say it's. It's up there. Again, if you ask a Legion fan what is the most famous or. Or best arc of the series, they.
14:11
They're going to say the Great Darkness Saga, unless they're actively trying not to say the Great Darkness Saga. So that is. That. That's the Great Darkness Saga. It's. It's a really great book that I, I just can't help but praise enough and I. I hope you have a chance to check it out. And after that, you should head on over to certainpov.com where we have a robust community that is talking about the Legion of Superheroes on our Discord server, which you can find a link to on our website. And you can check out all the other great shows like Long Live the Legion, which is a Legion of Superheroes fan show that we are putting out. Jim and Jay, the host of that are great hosts and are super knowledgeable about the team. So just again, want to shout out that.
14:52
That show and then shout out all the stuff that I work on. So again, it's all certain pov, but in particular, Men of Steel is my Superman and Superman Jason show. We have talked about the Great Darkness Saga on that. Then there is another pass which is my movie analysis show There is the Word from Tomorrow, which is our reread of Trans Metropolitan. So if you're looking for a sci fi thing that isn't the Legion of Superheroes that might be up your alley. Otherwise, you can find me on the Internet at most places at Case Aiken with the exception of Instagram where I'm holding on to my AIM screen name for dear life.
15:30
And that is Quetzalcoatl5q u e t Z A L C o a T L5 the 5 is a Brainiac 5 reference because I was a Legion of Superheroes nerd even in high school when I adopted the same screen name. It was so long ago that the 5 was not required. I could have just been Quetzalcoatl if I wanted to. And I chose five because I was a Legion of Superheroes nerd. Yeah, that there's that. So anyway, that is all the things that I wanted to talk about today, but I hope you enjoyed this episode of Trade School and I hope you tune in next time. We are always looking for people to submit. By the way, if you are interested in doing something like this for a trade paperback, please reach out to me.
16:12
You can find me again on most platforms at Case Aiken or you can email me@case.aikenmail.com so those are all great ways to get in touch with me if you like this format and want to participate in it. I'm actively trying to collect stories about the comic books that we love. Collecting the stories about why we care about stories is very important to me at least, and so I want to keep this project going. So please reach out. I I I would love to hear your stories and otherwise if you just want to listen, I I thank you for listening. I I really appreciate it. I I hope you subscribe to the podcast if you're not already a subscriber and if you are a subscriber, thank you. And with that I don't have much more to say.
16:57
So I I just hope you all have a great week and happy reading. The world is getting stranger every day and somehow Trans Metropolitan saw nearly all of it coming. From weaponized misinformation to political theater to tech that reshapes our lives faster than we can process, the series future feels uncomfortably familiar. The Word From Tomorrow is a new read along podcast Digging into Batman Uncanny Prescience. Hosted by Case Aiken and Keith Letinen. Each episode welcomes a guest to explore how Warren Ellis and Derek Robertson's dystopian satire mirrors the world we're living in now. Across 10 episodes, we walk through the entire series, its politics, its media chaos, its dark humor, and the way it continues to hit with starling clarity. Listen@ certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Cpov certainpov. Com.