1999-2001: Legion Damned & Lost era

With the December 1999 issues, a new creative team (Dan Abnett, Andy Lannng, and Oliver Coipel)) took the Legion in a considerably darker direction. Four successive story arcs—Legion fo the Damned, Widening Rifts, Legion Lost, and Legion Worlds—chronicled the collapse of the United Planets and the Legion into unrelieved despair and hopelessness. One group of Legionnaires were banished to a horrific distant galaxy; others were stranded on various worlds of the formerly-United Planets by technological failure and economic collapse. Mercifully, the interlude ended in 2001

This era also included the Elseworlds series Superboy's Legion, a completely different re-imagining of the Legion mythos.