Legion of X #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
LEGION OF X #8
“Family Ties”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1: Mother Righteous, surrounded by images of the cast (and focussing in particular on the transformed Nightcrawler. She isn’t actually in the issue, but her influence is apparent. We saw her with these sorts of viewing globes in the previous issue.
PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute page.
PAGE 3. Chamber and Husk waver over whether to go into the room.
We’re picking up here from the cliffhanger, where Nightcrawler, Dr Nemesis and Pixie showed up at Archangel’s office only to find him demonically transformed and locked in battle with the Black Knight. At the start of the previous issue, Nightcrawler despatched Chamber and Husk to visit Archangel, in response to a “hazy” request for an investigation. This is them showing up separately.
“I’m not gonna blow the bloody doors off.” Referencing a line from the 1969 British comedy film The Italian Job, which is pretty much universally known in the UK and probably means nothing to Americans. The implication is that Chamber’s door removal efforts tend to take most of the room with it.
“Your old billionaire boyfriend…” Husk and Warren were a couple in Chuck Austen’s Uncanny X-Men run.
“I had a run-in with Doc Nemesis recently – sort of incinerated his arm a bit…” Issue #4, while fighting Switch. Historically, it’s not really true that Chamber relies entirely on energy blasts – he’s got the generic range of psi-powers too – but it is the thing that makes him stand out.
“Concupiscent” means lustful. Chamber and Husk were a couple in Generation X.
PAGES 4-7. Everyone fights Angel, and he escapes.
Nightcrawler’s loss of self-control is new – he was behaving normally in the previous issue, despite his change of appearance.
Interestingly, it’s Pixie who starts giving orders with Nightcrawler out of the picture, rather than Dr Nemesis (perhaps because she’s giving sensible practical directions, and he only really does mad science).
PAGE 8. Data page on the history of the new Black Knight – written by the Beast, but a fairly straight recap nonetheless. She was introduced in Spurrier’s Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade miniseries last year, which is where most of the back story comes from. The “extradimensional silliness” is the Death of Dr Strange: X-Men / Black Knight one-shot, also written by Spurrier, from earlier this year; the Peregrine Child is the antagonist of the whole Death of Dr Strange event. That’s also where Jean Grey and Synch identified that Jackie is a mutant.
PAGE 9. Recap and credits.
PAGE 10. Juggernaut, Lost and Forget-Me-Not arrive at the Narthex.
The Narthex. It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Nightcrawler’s windowless home, which gets a name here (and we’ll establish shortly that there’s a Krakoan gate that lets you get inside). As Cypher says, the word “narthex” literally means a type of giant fennel. The bit about “fire of the gods” relates to the fact that the giant fennel has a hollow stalk which burned very slowly, meaning that it could be used to transport fire.
More relevantly to Nightcrawler, a narthex is also the lobby of a church.
Forget-Me-Not. The devices that prevent people from forgetting about him were mentioned back in issue #1. He clarifies here for the first time that people do retain their memories of meeting him, but simply can’t access them. Presumably this means that the devices allow people to recover their memories of all their encounters with him.
PAGES 11-12. Vox Ignis addresses the group.
Vox Ignis already addressed Nightcrawler while he was awaiting resurrection in the previous issue, but I think this is the first time that he’s shown his new powers directly to regular Krakoans.
His “benefactor” is Mother Righteous. When we saw her last issue, she noticed that something (“a hitchhiker”) had entered Warlock while he was in the Altar.
PAGE 13. The gates run away.
Warlock has been integrated with the island since day 1 of the Krakoan era, as revealed during Inferno. As Cypher says, they did that in order to keep an eye on Professor X, and they were ultimately vindicated when they learned about Moira.
Warlock and Cypher spent some time in the previous issue talking about their “soulbonding”, although it’s clearly something more than mere physical separation that generates this reaction – we’ve seen them separated before, and even had Warlock lamenting being displaced by Bei. Warlock also explained last issue that although his mutant nature helped him resist the normal urges of his race, it was his bonding with Cypher that gave him understanding and such forth – so separating them is bad news.
PAGE 14. Data page. An unspecified Sorcerer Supreme – almost certainly Dr Strange, since that’s his window emblem at the top – writes about the Spirit of Variance. It’s a rebel Spirit of Vengeance from Ghost Rider. For the wider themes of this book, the key point is that the Spirit of Variance rejects not just vengeance but all forms of retribution, which plays in to Kurt’s attempt to create something more nebulously progressive in the form of his Legion.
PAGES 15-17. The Black Knight recaps why she was visiting Warren.
Basically, she has the power to make other people temporarily develop mutant powers and register as mutants. Apparently Orchis have started marketing mutant tests, which she’s been using to test herself, but which are obviously intended by Orchis to allow other people to expose mutants; hence Warren’s interest in knowing that they can be fooled. Black Knight interprets him as being motivated by money, although what he actually says suggests that he’s more interested in embarrassing Orchis.
The identity of the woman in her vision isn’t clear (obviously), though Mother Righteous would be a natural contender.
Mythomancy is an invented term, but the suggestion is that it allows whoever’s responsible to bend reality to accord with people’s preconceptions.
PAGES 18-20. Blindfold visits Professor X.
“Blindfold? But I thought you were d—“ Professor X seems unaware that Blindfold has been resurrected, even though the rule against resurrecting precognitives was presumably dropped after Inferno. It might be that Legion (or Nightcrawler) arranged for her resurrection behind his back, but it could also simply be that the minor names on the resurrection list are simply beneath his notice.
Blindfold’s eccentric speech patterns are dropped when she’s on the astral plane.
“The kind words of a dead hero.” Magneto’s endorsement in issue #6.
Professor X’s skull comes from Way of X #4, where Legion killed everyone in the Green Lagoon in order to contain Onslaught. He collected a skull at the end of the scene, though it wasn’t completely explicit that it had belonged to the Professor.
“I wasn’t aware he existed…” Professor X is making the point I’ve made in previous annotations: that in traditional continuity he didn’t actually have all that much opportunity to form a relationship with Legion. Professor X didn’t learn that Legion existed until around New Mutants #26, and there are relatively few subsequent periods where (a) Professor X is on Earth and (b) Legion is not in a coma. However, Powers of X #6 strongly implies that Xavier and Moira MacTaggert deliberately identified Legions’ mother Gabrielle Haller as someone with whom Xavier was likely to have an Omega mutant child. If that’s correct, then it doesn’t entirely prove that Xavier knew he had actually fathered a child by Gabrielle Haller, but it certainly makes it seem unlikely that he wouldn’t have kept some sort of eye on matters. Which would imply that he’s lying to Blindfold.
PAGE 21. Nightcrawler and co arrive in Bavaria.
“The things I have seen…” Nightcrawler may be referring here to the “painting with truth” portrait that Zsen left him in issue #5, which we didn’t see, but was apparently disturbing in some way.
PAGE 22-23. The locals panic.
Ingolstadt is a real city in Germany. It’s also the setting for part of Frankenstein, and generally taken to be the place where the monster was created.
The woman on the last page is Nightcrawler’s adoptive mother Margali Szardos, or Margali of the Winding Way. She’s a sorceress, and apparently she’s back to doing circus work.
PAGE 24. Trailers.
Re: the Spirt of Variance- I think the idea is that the Spirit of Variance was essentially a mutant of its kind and it became obsessed with change. And since the hearts Essex clone was “programmed” to be magically inclined and the original Nathaniel Essex was obsessed with mutants and evolution, the two were naturally drawn to each other. And the clone eventually became Mother Righteous. But we’ll see.
Ruth says that Xavier SHOULD have known Legion was alive since he was constantly scanning for mutants with Cerebro. But that isn’t how Cerebro usually works. It just detects mutants and identifies their powers. It doesn’t tell who a mutant’s parents or relatives are. Xavier wasn’t sure who Rachel was related to when he first met her. He wasn’t sure if Wanda and Pietro were or weren’t related to Magneto (although this might be the High Evolutionary’s meddling). He didn’t know if Cable was Scott’s son. Spurrier is completely changing the way that Cerebro usually works to justify his “Xavier as horrible father” plot.
Paul, will you be reviewing the Dark Web:X-Men series?
As the review points out though, Spurrier doesn’t need to work to make “Xavier as a horrible person” work within the context of Hickman’s ret-con.
It’s probably best, if Xavier is to be kept as a redeemable character moving past the Krakoan-era, that “Xavier raped his patient trying to create an Omega-level mutant reality-shaper for the purpose of using him in his plan” is downplayed.
We do know that Xavier used two mindwipes in the past. Maybe one of those had to do with forgetting what he was trying to do with Gabrielle. So, maybe Xavier really never knew if he succeeded in impregnating Gabrielle and realized the enormity of his actions at the behest of Moira, so he wiped that aspect of the plan from his mind. Then, he never realized that he had sired Legion until during New Mutants.
This series has a really bad problem of making every other character do quips, even the ones who feel out of character for
Cerebro might not be able to tell who Legion’s father is, but if Xavier using it discovered a mutant child of a certain age living with Gabrielle Haller, it’d take willful denial not to put the obvious 2 and 2 together.
Michael: I’ll review the Dark Web: X-Men mini once its complete, but I’m not doing annotations for it. It’s principally a Spider-Man book and I’m generally not going to do individual issues of minis unless they’re particularly worth doing (like the Sabretooth books).
This is another book that I suspect might be coming to an end soon. This current story arc takes us all the way to issue 10 (2 trades). Then, this books continues as a 3-issue ‘Nightcrawlers’ mini-series for the Sins of Sinister crossover.
Post-SOS, Immortal X-Men and X-Men Red will return with issue 11 in May 2023. I suspect Legion of X will not be with them. The sales on this are not as strong as the other two and the X-Office is launching a number of new titles that they need to make space for – Captain Britain, Bishop, R&G, X-23, Hellfire Gala 2023, Uncanny Avengers?
That said, it’s entirely possible Spurrier will get to continue his Nightcrawler/Legion story in a new book launched sometime next year.
I like this book, but it does not feel much like an ongoing to me. The plots and even the setup have a transitional quality to them.
Maybe it is Si Spurrier’s style to write situations that tend to resolve themselves?
It’ll be pretty to discredit the “Legion is a eugenics experiment” idea. The only evidence is Moira’s journal, and right now she’s a traitorous genocidal robot who’s so evil she’d make Mephisto blush.
They could even blame Xavier not knowing his ex has a powerful mutant son living on Muir Island under the care of his closest ally by saying Moira deliberately concealed him.
For some reason my full comment didn’t go in last night: I was gonna say it feels very much like a late-run “done for a paycheck” Warren Ellis comic, and I don’t say that as a compliment.
If this were Ellis phoning it in, it’d be suffering from a bad case of decompression, where there’d be pages going by without any dialogue and a “to be continued” after the equivalence of one scene. There’s enough content and script in this one issue to pad out three issues of the worst tendencies for Ellis. Plus, all of the characters would come across as unbearably, completely cynical.
Fair point, I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of some of his more recent Image/Avatar stuff.
The bit about “fire of the gods” relates to the fact that the giant fennel has a hollow stalk which burned very slowly, meaning that it could be used to transport fire.
And I’d guess more specifically that Prometheus is supposed to have done so.
It’s comical how the origins of the Spirit of Variance is supposed to be shrouded in mystery according to this issue’s data page, only for us to receive a narrative info-dump outlining exactly what it is. Feel like we’ve been getting a lot of these types of “mystery” data pages lately.
Gotta love the explicit references to Frankenstein’s monster here. The parallels with Kurt go back to his very first appearance and even panel, when he was fleeing from the angry mobs. Spurrier also includes the name “Daedalus” and, as noted, a sly reference to Prometheus (which also refers to the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s book).
Luis Dantas: I thought the Daedalus reference was to put Legion in the role of Icarus, the child who died because he didn’t heed his father’s advice.
My hope for this book is that Spurrier brings his plots to a conclusion before it’s canceled. It’s been a good read since issue 6, and I’d hate to see it sputter out.