The Newsboy Legion

1931 - a group of homeless Newsboys, when they are confronted for protection money by local organized crime, choose to stand up to them with all sorts of hijinks. They are assisted by Jim Harper in his identity as the Guardian, a new vigilante, who dubs them the Newsboy Legion.
Membership: 12-year-old Tommy Thompkins, 12-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, 13-year-old Anthony Rodriguez, 10-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & 25-year-old Jim Harper

1933 - Jim Harper's identity as the Guardian is discovered by the Newsboy Legion, who agree to keep it secret.
Membership: 14-year-old Tommy Thompkins, 14-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, 15-year-old Anthony Rodriguez, 12-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & 27-year-old Jim Harper

1937 - Jim Harper and the Newsboy Legion stand up to Intergang.
Membership: 18-year-old Tommy Thompkins, 18-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, 19-year-old Anthony Rodriguez, 16-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & 31-year-old Jim Harper

1938 - Anthony Rodriguez earns a full-ride scholarship to Metropolis University.
Membership: 19-year-old Tommy Thompkins, 19-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, 20-year-old Anthony Rodriguez, 17-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & 32-year-old Jim Harper

1940 - Tommy Thompkins & Johnny Gabrielli are drafted, and Patrick MacGuire volunteers for service. Anthony Rodriguez wants to leave school to enlist along with the other Newsboys, but they insist he stays and contributes through his work in the sciences. Jim Harper goes through Officer Candidate School and becomes a second lieutenant.
Membership: 21-year-old Tommy Thompkins, 21-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, 22-year-old Anthony Rodriguez, 19-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & 34-year-old Jim Harper

1946 - 40-year-old Jim Harper & 28-year-old Anthony Rodriguez meet after the war and drink to the memory of the Newsboy Legion, but discover that there are new groups of kids thriving in Suicide Slums using the name.

1951 - 33-year-old Anthony Rodriguez purchases several buildings in Metropolis Suicide Slums, building up their subbasements so the Newsboy Legion can use them as headquarters to start their underground newspaper The Guardian.

1964 - 46-year-old Anthony Rodriguez leaves his estate to the Newsboy Legion.

Gabby

The Newsboy Legion is such a weird little corner of DC history. They're a simple enough concept from a time when comics were infinitely playful and definitely for kids, and then went on to feature in one of the more esoterically weird narrative threads that just becomes incredibly satisfying to unravel. We wanted to include a very simple, fun version of these characters that sort of honors their original concept, and in doing so, we think create a very simple but solid story within our timeline. We don't wind up using the stranger content from their history, but even still, it's a lot of fun to explore.

The Newsboy Legion's Comic History

There's a weird phenomenon that happened in comics in 1942. While kid sidekicks had been around for a few years, 1942 saw a few different comics introduce small teams of juvenile delinquents. More than one of them came from Jack Kirby, who would also go on to create the Yancy Street Gang over in Marvel and say it was based on his own childhood in the Manhattan Lower East Side, so when he created groups like the Newsboy Legion, with it's cast of street tough prepubescent scamps and their rollicking adventures in truancy, you're left kind of marveling at what Kirby's childhood must have looked like.

The Newsboy Legion took over as the cover feature of Star Spangled Comics and held if for a pretty impressive five years. While they had their very own superhero to pal around with (someone so similar to another shield-bearing creation of Kirby and partner Joe Simon that they could conceivably sue themselves), and while he does engage in a lot of classic superheroics, the Newsboys themselves are just as often the focus of the story.

Jack Kirby returned to DC in 1970, starting to work in Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Pal #133, in which he immediately reintroduces the Newsboy Legion, which has to say something about his affection for them. They are supposedly the children of the originals, and have built a new super vehicle called the Whiz Wagon, which allows them to head into "The Wild Area". Kirby introduces all sorts of whimsical new ideas to their world, to the point where I don't think I'll be able to adequately summarize it. In a nutshell, they venture into the Wild Area which becomes a sort of Russian nesting doll of constantly revealed new strange ideas until they discover "the Project", a vast secret underground scientific facility where a group of scientists, who turn out to actually be the original Newsboys, now adults and experts at various scientific and medical fields, have unlocked the secrets of cloning, and have among other things created a new cloned version of the Guardian. This is the same sort of expansive worldbuilding Kirby used in the Fourth World where it kind of made more sense, as opposed to being hidden somewhere outside Metropolis.

Still, it's very easy to love the raw imagination at play here. Later, post-crisis, as Superman's world was being completely rewritten almost all of this was lovingly recreated, with the further inclusion of the idea that the young Newsboys were also clones. They continued to be loveable background characters through that whole era of Superman stories.

Our Newsboy Legion Story

The challenge before us here is to come up with an idealized version of the Newsboy Legion. The Cadmus Project is absolutely part of the world of Superman, but I don't actually know if either it or the Newsboy Legion are better versions of themselves by association. I think the Cadmus Project can safely just be part of the world of Superman, and the Newsboys can be a throwback story that happened in the thirties.

That actually leads into what is really the hardest part of getting the Newboys right, because a really important part of their whole deal is that they are sort of locked in this perpetual youth. Their story isn't a story about adults. It's about these four kids and the endless adventure of their childhood. If we're going to give them an actual timeline, we're sort of left with this task of figuring out how their stories END, and that's just hard to do with characters who seem like they should always be kids. If we're going to have to see the ends of their lives, then it needed to feel like it was important, like it mattered, and that in a way it kind of gave them that sense of being forever young. We made them all heroes of World War II, finding ways for them to have served as the heroes they spent their whole childhood becoming.

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