What is in the Legion Canon?

You know, it's been a while since I wrote about print comics, but, hell, it's not like anyone cares anyway.

The Legion of Super-Heroes debuted in 1958, and since then it's gone through a number of incarnations. Let's start out with the three most basic versions for the sake of simplicity:

1958-1994, 2009-present: Pre-Zero Hour
1994-2004: Post-Zero Hour (or reboot)
2004-2009: Post-Infinite Crisis (or Threeboot)

Each of these three exist in their own continuity. A couple of characters from the reboot Legion got bumped into the main version, but, for the most part, the latter versions have essentially been excised from continuity, so they don't count.

But that was the easy part, because there are a bunch of stories in the pre-Zero Hour Legion that didn't happen. As far as I can tell, basically every comic up until the first Crisis is okay, as DC went out of their way to plug in the current Supergirl in the place of the pre-Crisis one. Based on a cursory glance, that would mean that the first comic that really couldn't have happened is Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #16 from 1985, where Brainiac 5 gets bummed that Supergirl died 1000 years in the past in the first Crisis.

From that point on, there are a whole bunch of stories that don't make sense in the new continuity: Cosmic Boy finding out the past has been tempered with, the whole Pocket Universe saga, and Brainiac 5 supposing that Sensor Girl was really Supergirl. So, the rest of Legion of Super-Heroes v3 doesn't count.

And if that doesn't count, there's no way that the "Five Years Later" Legion counts either.

So, realistically speaking, every Legion comic from 1985 to 2009 (Lightning Saga notwithstanding) doesn't count. Never happened. Why? Because it was so fucking important to bring back those old stories that no one under 30 has any emotional connection to. I wonder if, twenty years from now, we'll be looking at Geoff Johns the way that people look at mid-90s comics today.