Did I Miss The Name-Dropping?

Justice League 18
DC Comics
Geoff Johns, writer
Jesus Saiz and Gary Frank, artists

This was an interesting little one-off issue of Justice League. In the wake of the battle against Atlantis, the League decides it needs to beef up its numbers. On his own initiative, Cyborg called in a number of non-members to help the League toward the end of that battle. All of those participants, plus a few others, are invited to the League's base to be considered for membership.

I find it interesting that this decision to add new members is not longer. Between the Darkseid arc, the formation of the team, and the Graves arc, when things jump ahead five years to the current time, the League had decided to add new members with disastrous results. We don't know much about that time as we've only heard about it as a past event with few known details, but it is brought up as a reason to keep the League at its current seven members every other time someone suggests adding to the ranks. Not so this time.

Anyway, all of these prospective new members are invited via The Grid, an invention of Cyborg's that allows him to connect with any and all electronic devices anywhere on the planet to not only send messages but "watch" everyone, too. Kinda creepy, in an NSA sort of way, but it also moves Victor into very much the role that Oracle used to play for the superhero community in the previous DC Universe. Unfortunately, it also gives the bad guys of the quickly forming Secret Society of Super-Villains a way to gain access to the League by simply traveling back along the same pathways Cyborg is using.

And that brings us to the title of this post. Apparently, all of this villain recruiting is not leading to a new version of the Legion of Doom as I theorized. You can understand why I might have thought that name would be used: a Legion of Doom version was part of the Flashpoint crossover that led directly into the formation of this DCnU reality, and the members we know of so far include Cheetah, Black Manta and Scarecrow, all members of the original Legion of Doom from the "SuperFriends" television show along with Luthor, Brainiac, Bizarro, Grodd, Giganta, the Riddler, Sinestro, Toyman, Solomon Grundy and Captain Cold. It just seemed a natural fit. Of course, the name Secret Society has been used a lot in the past 10 years or so, too, so I'm not upset by that choice for the name exactly. I just don't know when the name became common knowledge. It is used by the heroes of the League in this issue as a fact, but I don't recall any of the villains we've seen so far use the name, so how do the heroes know it. Doesn't sound like much of a secret, really, except maybe from the readers.