There’s a podcast this weekend! \u00a0No, really! \u00a0You can find it just one post down from here.<\/p>\n
Meantime… X-Men Legacy<\/em> #16-18. \u00a0This 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. \u00a0(That trade, incidentally, is entitled “Revenants”, despite the Revenants being the entirely unrelated baddies over in\u00a0Uncanny X-Force<\/em>. \u00a0Left hand, meet right hand. \u00a0You must have so much to talk about.)<\/p>\n Legacy<\/em> is a book with an uneasy relationship to superheroes. \u00a0On the one hand, the character is firmly rooted in a lot of X-Men baggage. \u00a0On 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. \u00a0You 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.<\/p>\n This issue sees Legion track down Cyclops’ team of X-Men, seemingly to confront Scott for killing his father. \u00a0This being\u00a0X-Men Legacy<\/em>, there is of course a twist, which is that Legion is\u00a0actually<\/em> engineering a scenario designed to draw Luca into the open in order to get rid of him. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0Really, you’ve got to strain credibility to imagine this exercise going much further than thirty seconds. \u00a0Ultimately, of course, Legion cheats and uses his powers; this whole idea of a fair fight is, to him, ridiculous nonsense spouted by superheroes.<\/p>\n 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”. \u00a0The overall impression is that Legion does indeed hate Scott, but not because he killed Xavier – after all, Legion did it himself once. \u00a0No, it’s more about the X-Men as a whole, and Scott in particular, having usurped his rightful place as Xavier’s heir.<\/p>\n For its own thematic reasons, the arc wants to cast Scott’s team as the traditional superheroes. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0Expecting 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.<\/p>\n I’m unsure whether the whole arc is playing fair with the audience. \u00a0Twist 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. \u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n Still, while\u00a0Legacy<\/em> is often a flawed book, it’s rarely less than interesting, with its own very skewed and distinctive approach to the whole mythos. \u00a0It 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. \u00a0That perspective goes a long way to earn the book its place in the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a podcast this weekend! \u00a0No, really! \u00a0You can find it just one post down from here. Meantime… X-Men Legacy #16-18. \u00a0This 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. \u00a0(That trade, incidentally, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2238,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions\/2238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}