It’s been a few years since DC Comics convinced longtime Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis to defect, but parent company Warner Bros. is clearly still invested in keeping the guy happy—so invested, apparently, that it went to Bendis and asked if there’s anything he’d like to make for HBO Max, seemingly giving him carte blanche to pitch literally anything. His response, courtesy of his most recent newsletter: “I may have yelled the word LEGION louder than you want to in a normal adult person business meeting.”
In that newsletter (via Bleeding Cool), Bendis explains that he’s now developing an animated series for HBO Max based on DC’s Legion Of Superheroes characters, specifically the current iteration that he’s working on with Ryan Sook. The Legion Of Superheroes isn’t a household name, as far as superhero teams go, but they have intersected with more mainstream stuff like the Supergirl TV show.
The basic gist is that they’re a group of heroes in the far future, like the original version of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy team, and they only really relate to the mainline Justice League-type characters when time travel nonsense gets involved (again, like the old Guardians Of The Galaxy). The Legion also tends to skew a little more toward weirdo characters, like Arm-Fall-Off-Boy (the guy Nathan Fillion’s The Suicide Squad character was based on).
Bendis has a more high-minded take, though, explaining that the Legion is “among the greatest franchises in the history of comics” and that he’s has honored to be working with them as he was when he was writing for Spider-Man. His goal with this animated series, like the comics he’s writing, is to push “all the ideas of superheroes forward in every direction.”
This is all very early, with Bendis even noting that “animation takes a loooong time” and that “you may not hear anything about this for a while,” but it will reportedly be an “adult animated show” whenever it does happen. (So, not like HBO Max’s Aquaman: King Of Atlantis, even though that is very good and everyone should check it out.)