X-Men Legacy #16-18 – “Wear the Grudge Like a Crown”
There’s a podcast this weekend! No, really! You can find it just one post down from here.
Meantime… X-Men Legacy #16-18. This week’s issue might not obviously look like the end of a storyline, but according to the solicitations, it is indeed the cut-off point for the end of the third trade. (That trade, incidentally, is entitled “Revenants”, despite the Revenants being the entirely unrelated baddies over in Uncanny X-Force. Left hand, meet right hand. You must have so much to talk about.)
Legacy is a book with an uneasy relationship to superheroes. On the one hand, the character is firmly rooted in a lot of X-Men baggage. On the other, the book’s central schtick is to have Legion reject the X-Men’s approach and looking for a different and supposedly more proactive approach, which perhaps inevitably casts the X-Men as slightly clueless throwbacks. You can read that as Legion’s take on the team – he is the narrator, after all – but it generally feels as if writer Si Spurrier is using Legion to express, shall we say, a fair degree of ambivalence about the whole genre.
This issue sees Legion track down Cyclops’ team of X-Men, seemingly to confront Scott for killing his father. This being X-Men Legacy, there is of course a twist, which is that Legion is actually engineering a scenario designed to draw Luca into the open in order to get rid of him. But the centrepiece of the whole thing is Legion challenging Scott to a no-powers fistfight, a fabulously absurd exercise given that (as Legion’s narration acknowledged) he’s got no training and therefore shouldn’t last very long at all. Really, you’ve got to strain credibility to imagine this exercise going much further than thirty seconds. Ultimately, of course, Legion cheats and uses his powers; this whole idea of a fair fight is, to him, ridiculous nonsense spouted by superheroes.
The story does everything it can to distance the fight from superhero cliche – it both deglamourises it, rendering it as two people punching one another in the rain, and also plays it up as classic myth, a clash between Xavier’s two rival “sons”. The overall impression is that Legion does indeed hate Scott, but not because he killed Xavier – after all, Legion did it himself once. No, it’s more about the X-Men as a whole, and Scott in particular, having usurped his rightful place as Xavier’s heir.
For its own thematic reasons, the arc wants to cast Scott’s team as the traditional superheroes. And while that may be true in comparison with Legion, it still reads oddly when they’re being portrayed in their own book as loose cannon rebels. The need to give Legion the upper hand over them also results in some of them looking a bit stupid, though I do love the idea of beating Magik by simply hypnotising her into thinking that there’s no such thing as magic. And they do ultimately get the upper hand – the pay-off here, and the lead into the next arc, is that Legion has not anticipated everything the X-Men had to offer. Expecting him to be too much for the team to handle, the X-Men have resorted to infecting him with a telepathic virus that, by the end of the issue, is dutifully dismantling his mind and bringing his carefully constructed “prison” mindscape crashing down around him, thus letting the “evil Xavier” persona out into the wider world.
I’m unsure whether the whole arc is playing fair with the audience. Twist endings are par for the course in this book, but the first chapter is really going to great lengths with its first person narration to suggest that Legion is going after Scott for the reasons he claims, and I don’t find that entirely satisfying. And the art is competent but never a great deal more than that; there’s a decided lack of atmosphere or sense of location for much of this, and fans of vaguely rendered background office blocks will be right at home.
Still, while Legacy is often a flawed book, it’s rarely less than interesting, with its own very skewed and distinctive approach to the whole mythos. It makes Legion work as a character, but in stories like this one it also offers an alternative slant on the X-Men themselves, one that doesn’t buy wholeheartedly into the idea that they’re achieving anything much. That perspective goes a long way to earn the book its place in the line.
Good review. And it actually clarifies something of the dissatisfaction I’ve felt towards the “core” X-Men titles for a while – the “peripheral” titles like Legacy and Cable & X-Force seem not only more interesting, but more just plain coherent, than the fill-in-the-adjective X-Men books have been lately. Yes, Uncanny X-Men is supposedly the book about Scott’s “renegade,” “revolutionary” team – but given that they’ve done nothing that any X-Men team before them hasn’t done, what actually makes them special or noteworthy? And if Legacy implies that their “revolutionary” approach is tired and cliche (an approach which basically entails doing the same things every other X-team has ever done, only with more leather straps), how much more of an indictment is that of Wolverine and the rest of them, who are still going through the motions of “let’s hole up in a mansion, train a random crop of kids to be superheroes, and wait for baddies to attack us”?
This bland lack of narrative diversity is all too apparent in the current crossover, which is nearly finished, but which has yet to explain exactly what the various factions are fighting about. There are good X-Men and bad X-Men in the future, apparently, and they disagree over whether or not to futz around with the past – but their actual motives remain frustratingly obscure, despite pages and pages mostly spent on dialogue and exposition (you can tell it’s a Bendis event because most of it is spent talking – even the first major “fight” consists of a group of telepaths talking snottily at each other). So even in the future, the differences between groups of rival X-Men apparently remain too vague for the writers to satisfactorily spell out.
Contrast this to books like Legacy and Cable & X-Force, which, for all their faults, have clear premises that they’re sticking to and following through on. It doesn’t say much for the strength of the line as a whole that the most distinct – and I’d argue, interesting – books right now are the ones that are supposedly peripheral.
Paul O> And the art is competent but never a great deal more than that; there’s a decided lack of atmosphere or sense of location for much of this, and fans of vaguely rendered background office blocks will be right at home.
I’m really unclear on why Marvel continue to employ Khoi Pham. His X-Factor issues a good five years or so ago didn’t show much promise, with slightly awkward drawings and too many close-ups, that leave his strips without a sense of place, or panels that flow well one to the other, and judging from this he hasn’t improved much. Surely there are better artists they could afford, even for the lower-selling “peripheral” X-books.
moose n squirrel> Good review. And it actually clarifies something of the dissatisfaction I’ve felt towards the “core” X-Men titles for a while – the “peripheral” titles like Legacy and Cable & X-Force seem not only more interesting, but more just plain coherent, than the fill-in-the-adjective X-Men books have been lately.
That’s been mostly the case for the past decade-plus though (which doesn’t say much for the editors!). All that’s really happened since is that the periphery has been squeezed a lot in favour of double-shipping the higher-selling books, and a lot more books are now called “X-Men” and “Avengers” (in the late 90s or even early 2000s, a book like this would never have had “X-Men” in the title. Of course, DC’s trademarks mean it could never have been called “Legion”, but they wouldn’t have risked devaluing the brand in the slightly desperate way they do now.)
“Left hand, meet right hand. You must have so much to talk about.”
I had no idea this already completed 18 issues. That’s pretty impressive for a Legion solo title, no?
Yeah, I have to say that I enjoy this book.
It doesn’t entirely play fair with the audience but its strengths outweigh its flaws by a factor of 10 to 1.
The covers to this book are something else. I’ve loved pretty much every one of them and I can’t even remember the covers to most of the X-books I come across.
And yes. What a wonderful title for an arc. Well done Mr. Spurrier.
Agreed, this title has on the whole been very enjoyable. (Though its faults, particularly the exagerrated accents, or Legion’s Scottish identity in general, continue to bug me.) I suppose the Tool quote used as a title for this arc is fitting but it kind of rubs me the wrong way as well. Then again I wonder how many readers even notice such things…
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