As I did for the original continuity, let’s analyze how much the Legion membership varies during the 5YL years.
For the final count, seee here.
THE BASICS
To keep a better track, I’m following the membership by the main book: if a change happens elsewhere (Legionnaires and Valor mostly), it’s reflected in the count in the issue published immediately afterwards.
That’s one of the reasons why the membership counted here is different from what you can see at the bottom of each review; the other being that I had to make A TON of revisions to add changes I initially forgot.
Because of reasons I’ve explained before, I count the very beginning of this era as having 44 resigned members and 8 deceased members.
ACTIVE MEMBERS
The Legion is officially reformed in LSH #14, with 7 members.
Membership is quite low until LSH #25, topping at only 12 members… and then skyrocketing with LSH #26 all the way up to 31 members, thanks to the mass arrival of the SW6 Legionnaires.
It never drops below 26 members until the end; it peaks at an astounding 40 members with LSH #61, then plummets to only 3 members at the very end.
You can click on this graph to see a larger version; the same applies to all the graphs of this post.
DEAD & REBOOTED MEMBERS
But how do these membership numbers decrease?
This era inherits 8 dead Legionnaires, which slowly creep up to 17 by the end of the Giffen era.
The highest number of dead Legionnaires is 23, then decreasing to 21 at the very end (thanks to the resurrections of Phantom Girl and Superboy, right before they’re rebooted).
The final Zero Hour issue reboots a staggering 57 Legionnaires.
RESERVES AND INACTIVE
These two categories are barely present throughout the era, and don’t show up before #23.
The reserves never get any higher than 5.
The various inactive status… mostly sick leave and presumed dead… are even lower.
TOTAL LEGIONNAIRES
The previous era ended with 52 historic members (excluding those removed from continuity).
The first 25 issues bring this to 58 members, and with issue 26 the total skyrockets to 77 members thanks to the addition of the SW6 Batch.
- Least active members: 3 Legionnaires in the final issue (3% of all historic members); the previous lowest was 7 Legionnaires (13%) right after the team was resurrected, from #14 to #15
- Most active members: 40 Legionnaires in #60 (43%), preceded by 37 members in #59 (41%).
- Most reserve members: 5 (6% of all historic members). Between issues #23 and #25, the 3 reserves represented 25% of active members.
- Most resigned members: 44 Legionnaires were resigned at the beginning of the era; that’s 85% of all historic members!!!
- Deceased members: jumped from 8 dead Legionnaires (15% of all historic members) all the way up to 23. That represents a depressing 25% of all historic members.
- Rebooted members: 57 Legionnaires, 62% of all historic members
At the beginning of the era:
At the end of the Giffen era:
In the next-to-last issue:
Last issue:
REJECTS
There are very few additions to the rejected members; they’re either from Legionnaires or from continuity inserts. And yet we still increase the count from 51 to 68.
The highest percentage of rejects was 115% (58 rejects against 52 historic members).
The lowest percentage of rejects was 71% (62 rejects against 87 historic members).
At the end of the era, it’s 74% (68 rejects against 92 historic members).
BOYS AND GIRLS
And finally: what’s the female membership? Last time I noticed that the Legion had an unusually high percentage of girls when compared to most superhero teams.
I’m not going to analyze how the percentage changes within this era, because tracking everything else has been a colossal headache that would make this a nightmare… but it’s still interesting to check.
I’m considering Proty to be male since he has Lightning Lad’s body when he’s a Legionnaire, and like last time I’m counting Quislet as male because as the only one without a gender his percentage would not be visible.
With a total 27 girls and 65 guys, the girls are 29% of the total historic members.
By an amazing coincidence, that’s the SAME percentage of the previous volume, at the end of which we had 13 girls and 32 guys.
Well, if we round up… technically speaking Volume 3 is at 23.9%.. but still impressive that the proportion is still basically the same despite the huge increase in members.
That was… A LOT more complicated than I expected it to be.
Next up, my personal raking of ALL 92 Legionnaires!
Are you counting Tellos as male? Has that ever been addressed?
While it’s entirely possible his species doesn’t have male and females, during Volume 3 the Legionnaires refer to him as masculine, and unlike Quislet there’s no mention of any ambiguity on the subject.
Even more telling, during Legion Lost volume 2, Tellus manifests a human avatar that is unambiguously male.