LSH: Millennium #2 annotations: The Future Ain't What It Used to Be (part 2)

This is not a Legion book, it’s a book that walks Rose & Thorn through the various time points in DC future history such that she ends up in the 31st century with the Legion. It’s the 1000 years leading up to the Legion from now.

Issue 2 regular cover by Sook, looking through the flight ring; the variant cover is the second half of the large Cheung group shot. There was also a New York Comic Con 2019 (NYCC19) cover variant has both halves in a foil wraparound cover.


Another version of the cover that was NOT released had Bouncing Boy and Lightning Lad's races reversed. Changing them caused the delay in releasing Superman #14 and Supergirl #33.

Listen to us talk about it at the Legion of Substitute Podcasters: http://paulfrench.ca/losp/?p=1930

Issue solicitation:

Get on board for a journey through the future like no other! A gallery of all-star artists join our mysterious guide as they continue their 1000-year journey toward the 31st century, inspiring Booster Gold to time travel, debating fighting techniques with OMAC, and making their way to the front door of the Legion of Super-Heroes. The DC event of the future starts now!

You'll recall from my issue 1 annotations this table of all of DC's future settings between "now" and the Legion, I've copied some of that here just showing what we see in these two issues (go back to see the much bigger table).

Earth-AD:  OMAC and the Global Police Agency, then a nuclear war in 1986, then the Atomic Knights & Hercules Unbound, then Kamandi (who was revealed to be OMAC’s grandson).	late 20th century
Batman Beyond (revealed to be Earth-12, later introduced as the future of mainstream DCU as Prime Earth)	circa 2040
Tommy Tomorrow (retconned to be Earth-54)	circa 2050
Booster Gold, who stole a Legion flight ring, Brainiac 5's force field belt, Rip Hunter's time sphere, and a flying robot named Skeets from the Space Museum and traveled back to the 20th century	2462
The Legion of Super-Heroes (Rebirth version)	31st (?) century

Each chapter in the two issues here is presented in (presumably) chronological order.

Issue 2, chapter 1 – Space Museum and Booster Gold (art by Nicola Stott)

• The Space Museum is an institution on 25th century Earth that primarily holds exhibits dealing with the history of space exploration and colonization by Earth people since its beginning in the 20th century. The Space Museum also contains displays dealing with Earth's superheroes of the 20th century.
• Appeared in issues of Strange Adventures from 1959-1964
• Retconned into being where Michael Jon Carter was employed as a janitor before he stole Rip Hunter’s time sphere, Brainiac 5’s force belt, and a Legion flight ring and went back to 1986 to become Booster Gold (as recounted in Booster Gold #8-9)
• The heroes are legends, and legends always have some exaggeration built in (like the panel showing everyone flying)
• Carter: “the 20th century’s completely responsible for everything that happened. Those idiots had scientists screaming at the top of their lungs, they had a thing called the world wide web… they knew the world was gonna die, and they still let it happen. .. can you imagine how far we’d be as a culture if we didn’t have to start over twice?” 
• The idea that they had to start over again twice is new, they had to start over after the Great Disaster, but what else? Note that the timeline doesn’t fit here, Booster was from the year 2462, and the Electric Warriors series is in 2735, in the aftermath of the recovery from the time of the Great Disaster. From what we see in the rest of the issue, there’s a long way to go between Booster, OMAC, and the Legion, and not a long time to get there. 
• Carter gets the idea to go back in time to be a superhero
• His janitor uniform of purple and blue with the hat is straight out of Booster’s origin story in “Booster Gold” #6, this takes place shortly after (although in his original origin, he was just looking for fame and fortune)

Issue 2, chapter 2 – OMAC (art by Jim Cheung)

• If this is all in sequential order, they’ve moved OMAC around , he used to be Kamandi’s grandfather (as seen in Kamandi #50). 
• All this meshes pretty well with the Kirby version from the early 70s that was set on Earth-AD – a field enforcement agent for the Global Peace Agency. Originally the GPA was just a worldwide police force, but they were retconned in the OMAC backup story by Starlin in “Warlord” #37 to be aliens who could scientifically predict the future with 98% accuracy. One of these aliens, called Visionaries, foretold the rise of seven giant global corporations  whose battles would lead to the downfall of mankind in a Great Disaster, to be replaced with advanced animals. So the GPA became their law enforcement cartel and helped create Brother Eye. (Spoiler alert: it happened just like they said it would, despite their trying to make it not so.)
• Note the scene with the woman in the box, with her head, arms, and legs sticking out - that's from the cover to OMAC #1.
• Thorn: “it’s frustrating to see the world get its stuff together again only to let the greedy rich squeeze all the joy and life out of it. Again. And again. And every time we had to fight back like animals just to regain our basic human dignity. And to have to sit and watch it happen all around you. It’s insanity. … I looked around and there ain’t no Superman coming around this time. The heroes are so long gone no one even talks about them anymore. It’s just us.”

Issue 2 chapter 3 – deep space (art by Jeff Dekal)

• Vignettes of wandering space and struggling between Rose and Thorn
• Wakes up in the Vega system, which had been at one time or another the home of the Citadel, the Omega Men, the Psions, a base for the Spider Guild, Lady Styx and her army of Darkstars, and Tamaran
• “But the purpose thing is still kicking my ass. All this way and why? Why me? How much farther do I have to go before someone tells me why? … I made a promise to myself I wouldn’t come back home to earth until I figured out my purpose. But then, literally just like that, it completely revealed itself. And the universe just sort of locked into place around me. My path was suddenly obvious, and kind of perfect.”
• Aside from the mention of Vega, is this time period one we’ve seen before?

Issue 2 chapter 4 – the Legion (art by Ryan Sook)

• New Earth – looks like the domes of the 5YL run, explains the bit about nobody having seen the oceans in a long time (which is a plot point from the upcoming LSH #1)
• Group shot, which was the promo first seen on Seth Meyers back in July 2019
• Cosmic Boy is pushing Element Lad, not pulling him back to avoid Invisible Kid (who’s on the far right) like some people thought
• By this time, Superboy has left the 21st century and joined the Legion, but it’s more like at the creation of the team: the official founding of the Legion already has all these characters
• Bottom right corner is not the photographer, it’s Rose

And a couple of long quotes from a recent CBR interview:

CBR: With this, you're reimagining a lot of characters while still keeping them true to form.

Some people want to know about our choices, why we didn't go full retro or just rehash all the old costumes; Legion can't be about retro. It's got to be about future-forward sci-fi. When people read those original stories, they were as future-forward as those authors could come up with and they blew everyone's minds. So our job is not just to do what they did but to do the spiritual version of what they did. Let's roll up our sleeves and come up with sci-fi that blows our minds, right?

And our job is much harder than the original one because sci-fi has become so much more than it was when Legion first debuted but that's the part of the equation that I got the most excited about. What can we do with science fiction and what can we put back into it that is unique to DC, that is unique to this book, that is unique to these characters? Maybe we'll come up with a whole pile of sci-fi ideas that we haven't seen before like our heroes did.

One of the things in Millennium #2 that pre-Booster Gold Michael Carter mentions is that civilization had to pick itself back up from the ashes twice. I assume one of those times is from Kamandi. Is Booster's future beyond the Legion's?

No, we have a whole document but there are things between the chapters as well. There's Kamandi, but someone blew up that world, like, what happened to Kamandi's world? There's more to say about that and that little chapter itself [with Booster Gold] was a great little exciting thing. 

Yes, as far as this Superman and this entire story, the Legion has never existed before. This is the first time we're ever meeting them. There is no other version, there is no other timeline. This is the Legion of Super-Heroes' first appearance in the DC Universe as far as all these characters are concerned. How it tees up with Doomsday Clock and all the other stuff, I promise it will all land but I don't want to spoil anything but it will all land.

You've got some post-apocalyptic, some cyber-punk, some cyber-noir. How are these seeming disparate threads going to tie into the bright, hopeful future of the Legion?

I think that when you turn the page and see the group of them, you can kind of see hints and pieces of everything that ever came before. Like, you can see all the influence and how it's going to be moving forward; that was what the premise of turning the page was. There it all is, there's everything [Rose] witnessed, both in the hopeful version of the package she could get and just that these kids have taken away from what she perceives as experience and a huge, epic event and all that experience is to keep these kids on track. It all happens so that these kids can stay feeling the way they do right now even though she knows the universe is much more complicated.