Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes What if the Legionnaires had Secret Identities?

What would they be?

How would it work?

I would think Chameleon Boy & Princess Projectra would be the easiest to have/maintain a secret identity, with Saturn Girl also having an advantage in the secret identity game.

I imagine Montress would be the hardest to have a secret identity. Tellus, Gates, Blok, Quislet, Brainiac 5, Shadow Lass, and Dawnstar would be a tough sell. Although they all come from races of similar looking sentients, they seem basically the only representative of their people on Earth.

We did see some secret identities in the Legion on the Run storyline.

They have on occasion tried to disguise themselves, either by adopting a low profile and civilian clothes (the first Universo story), taking on other civilian identities (when they infiltrated the revolutionaries on Lahum) or other superhero identities (Legion on the Run). In the Adventure era, it seemed like someone was putting on a full-face mask to disguise themselves in every other issue.

We know they can now disguise themselves with 31st century technology, taking on a whole different appearance (as they did on Panoptes). I don't see them maintaining a whole different life, like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne; when would they have time to be Legionnaires? But for a period of time, or on a mission, or for reasons of betrayal (!), it could probably be easy enough to fake an identity. They'd probably have to hack into the government data systems as well.

Or would the Legion identity be the deception, and they'd be murky vigilantes? They might have tried secret identities when Earth was at its height of xenophobia.

Star Boy's secret identity is a major plot point in his first appearance.

It seems to me that the dual identity aspect of super-heroes tends to be one big standard super-hero trope that's missing from the Legion.

I just wonder how radically it would change the nature of the series if they did have them. Would we have Rokk Krinn, magnoball player by day, secretly Cosmic Boy by night? Or would that just be too obvious to keep secret?

That espionage squad would have to have ... no real identities ... but many aliases.

I imagine (personally) the Legion now as a police force, with some more public/popular members, lots of fly under the radar people, and the enigmatic espionage squad.

Although in the comics they seem more like rock stars where part of their effectiveness is a crime prevention technique due to the impending threat of the Legion putting the smack down on you.

I think some characters powers depend on them having a secret identity .. Projctra ... Cham ...

If not the Legion, there could be another group of heroes in the Legion's time that maintain secret identities. I wonder how the Legion would react?

It would have been nearly impossible in the Post-Zero Hour Legion's early continuity, as the Legion was created as a UP organization. Only after the fall of Chu could they do it - M'Onel kept his Valor identity secret until the end so we know it could be done by simply not speaking to the press.

I guess masks would become standard for the Legion's costumes, too.

It actually would've made a lot of sense with the threeboot, and possibly with the early days of the preboot Legion, before they became as entangled with the U.P. as they later became.

We also see Cosmic Boy and the Espionage Squad maintaining secret identities during Legion Worlds. I would like to have seen more of that.

In Superboy's Legion, I remember Ferro Lad was rejected for not being willing to remove his mask. I guess Superboy didn't want there to be any secret identities either.

Chances are, they'd never know. The very nature of having a secret identity means no one else would have to know, including a competing organization.

One of the things I've always enjoyed about the Legion is that they didn't need secret identities. Perhaps this was a reflection of how much society has changed between the 20th/21st centuries and the 30th/31st centuries. Just as people of a thousand years ago may have felt it necessary to hide their ethnicity or religion or national origin in order to blend in with the mainstream society of whatever country they were in, maybe, in the Legion's time, it's no longer necessary for heroes to hide who they really are.

A bit unrealistic, I know. There's nothing to stop The Persuader from going after Rokk's parents if he thinks doing so would give him leverage or revenge. (And, in fact, Colossal Boy's parents were once targeted by the founders of the LSV.) But no more unrealistic, I think, than anything else involved with the Legion (teens with powers forming a club that regularly saves the universe).

If the Legionnaires did have secret identities, I imagine the only real difference is that it would make things a lot more complicated for the writers, who would have to remember the secret IDs of 20-odd characters and find some way of including them in stories.

That would be my quibble, too.

It's already proving difficult to get DC to write stories about a 20+ person team without constant failed attempts to trim them down, one way or another, having each character *also* have a secret ID / civilian life that begs to be explored seems like total overload and, even with writers and editors who are copacetic with the notions, would lead to reduced pagecount for entire other characters, functionally doing the same thing, reducing the number of Legionnaires we get to see.

Even in other team books, with a paltry seven members, like the Avengers or Justice League, we don't really get to see much of what Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Steven Rogers or Dr. Blake are up to, comparitively to those characters solo titles.

If, on the other hand, Chameleon Boy or Sensor Girl got their own solo mini, there'd be plenty of room to showcase Orandan court intrigues or Cham's many covert identities and shady contacts he's made in the noir-esque Metropolis underworld / black market.