{"id":2411,"date":"2014-02-15T23:25:15","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T23:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2411"},"modified":"2014-09-14T21:11:59","modified_gmt":"2014-09-14T20:11:59","slug":"x-men-legacy-19-24-for-we-are-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2411","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Legacy #19-24 – “For We Are Many”"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the second wave of Marvel NOW launches hits the stands, one of the more interesting products of the first wave draws to a conclusion. \u00a0While the sales of\u00a0X-Men Legacy<\/em> rather suggest that it would not have been long for this world anyway, it feels as if Simon Spurrier’s story has come to its natural conclusion anyway. \u00a0There’s no sense here of things being cut short; on the contrary, this seems to be the pay-off of everything the series has been building to this point.<\/p>\n

The previous volume ended with Legion’s precarious mental stability having been wrecked yet again by a telepathic attack from X-Men, also unleashing the evil Xavier persona that lives inside him. \u00a0In this volume, Legion confronts that persona, literally pulls himself together, briefly gets to inherit his father’s role as the leader of mutant kind – and it all goes wrong anyway, as he duly turns into the predicted “World Worm”, which will absorb all mutants into an even bigger gestalt.<\/p>\n

The final resolution is genuinely surprising – though Legion does finally get control of all his various powers, he also comes to the conclusion that he’s simply too dangerous to live, and wipes himself from history, surviving as a memory that only Blindfold retains. \u00a0It’s presented as a final act of defiance from somebody refusing to submit to his destiny in the only way he can.<\/p>\n

Leave aside the continuity issues that flow from that ending. \u00a0(The most obvious is “How did the Age of Apocalypse happen without him?”, but that story was a time-travel paradox to start with, so what the heck.) \u00a0Spurrier’s afterward acknowledges that some people will hate the ending because it’s a self-cancelling story, and thus one that doesn’t “matter”. \u00a0As he points out, many readers have been trained to judge stories by how much impact they have on later stories.<\/p>\n

But it’s worth remembering where that attitude came from. \u00a0Traditionally, one of the basic features of a story is that the characters should be changed by their experiences. \u00a0In ongoing series, that poses a problem: Spider-Man can’t be meaningfully changed by his experiences month after month. \u00a0So many a story appears which purports to matter but in fact is never mentioned again, and its failure to have the promised impact in the later narrative cheapens it in retrospect. \u00a0This is the (basically valid) idea that became garbled into the belief that a good story was one that got mentioned lots. \u00a0Of course, there are plenty of ways of doing stories that matter to the characters without them being vital in continuity. \u00a0They can matter to a minor character who’s never heard of again; a common ploy in 1980s fill-ins. \u00a0They can matter to a supporting character or villain whose status quo\u00a0can<\/em> change over time, or even to a disposable member of the starring team who doesn’t have to be locked into a status quo.<\/p>\n

Or you can do something like this, where Legion’s overall story may turn out to be self-cancelling, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that he’s been through a – god, there has to be a better word for this – journey of self-discovery along the way. \u00a0Legion’s self-negation (the story is terribly keen not to cast it as suicide, but it effectively is) is the result of a quest for self-control culminating in the most drastic act of self-control he can muster. \u00a0It works.<\/p>\n

And these final issues are nicely constructed on a number of levels. \u00a0Legion’s narrative monologue about the meaning of death in issue #20 is nicely placed to set up his feelings on the topic several issues before his decision arises, but without seeming forced. \u00a0The idea of the fake Xavier persona as Legion’s symbolic son, and Legion absorbing outside mutants into an even greater “multiple personality”, all contribute to the sense that his final brief triumph comes in the context of an inversion of the story’s core themes, and one that will surely prove temporary.<\/p>\n

You can certainly make a case that Legion’s narration often verges on preachy, and maybe spells out the subtext a bit more blatantly than it needs to. \u00a0I run hot and cold on Tan Eng Huat’s art; sometimes there are clever jagged images, such as Legion and Blindfold’s astral forms in the final two issues, but there are also confused visuals like the World Worm itself, and a tendency towards generic blandness in the real world backgrounds. \u00a0And while the more garish colouring is presumably intended to symbolise Legion’s mental turmoil, the book sure isn’t easy on the eye.<\/p>\n

But this version of\u00a0X-Men Legacy\u00a0<\/em>has to go down as a success. \u00a0Legion has been around since the 1980s, but until this series, he was a plot device far more often than he was a character, and certainly not somebody you would have thought of as a potential protagonist. \u00a0With this book, he’s been retooled into a viable lead, and given a story of his own that still built on the chaotic history he had accumulated. \u00a0It’s good to know that Marvel remains interested in the more eccentric versions of their genre, but more surprising, and impressive, that\u00a0Legacy<\/em> so often made this unlikely premise work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the second wave of Marvel NOW launches hits the stands, one of the more interesting products of the first wave draws to a conclusion. \u00a0While the sales of\u00a0X-Men Legacy rather suggest that it would not have been long for this world anyway, it feels as if Simon Spurrier’s story has come to its natural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2411","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\/2411","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=2411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2412,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2411\/revisions\/2412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}