Book Of The Month: Legion Of Super-Heroes - 1,050 Years Of The Future

Legion Of Super-Heroes: 1,050 Years Of The Future is a celebration of 50 years of "everyone's favourite super-team of tomorrow".

The 224-page trade paperback from DC is a collection of Legion tales from throughout the team's five decade history - starting with the very first Legion story from 1958, by Otto Binder, where Cosmic Boy, Lightning Boy and Saturn Girl travel back to the '50s to visit Superboy in Smallvile and induct him into their "super-hero club".

This started the Legion's first run, up until the mid-90s and DC's Zero Hour event, which reset continuity across its titles. The Legion then got a second reboot in 2005, when Mark Waid and Barry Kitson took over the title.

We follow the Legion through time, watching as artists and writers change, bringing new ideas on futuristic technology to the 30th Century; the Legion start off using clunky jet packs and fish-bowl space helmets and over the years we gradually see the introduction of the famous Legion flight rings and their 'transparent space suits'.

Highlights of this eclectic assemblage of tales include the issue 300 celebration, by Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen, and a host of guest artists, as Brainiac 5 explores the dreams of a mysterious patient who imagines alternate realities where the Legion's history has been tweaked to greater or lesser degrees.

There are also tales from Jim Shooter, who began writing the Legion at the ridiculously young age of 13 and is, once again, the current scribe on the series - although it is due to wrap up shortly.

Other tit-bits include a summary of the Legion Constituion, single panel profiles of the main members of the group and an overview of their headquarters.

The three different incarnations of the Legion (the original, those spawned by Zero Hour and the current) are, of course, also the stars of the superb Final Crisis tie-in Legion Of 3 Worlds, in the safe hands of Geoff Johns and George Perez.

Legion Of Super-Heroes: 1,050 Years Of The Future doesn't feature any of these newer tales as the most recent run was still a going concern at the time, and all those adventures are available in separate trades, and Final Crisis hadn't even begun to rock the DC Universe when this collection was published last year.