{"id":4162,"date":"2018-06-04T21:14:11","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T20:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4162"},"modified":"2018-06-04T21:14:11","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T20:14:11","slug":"legion-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4162","title":{"rendered":"Legion: “Trauma”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given the success of the\u00a0Legion<\/em> TV series (which I’ve never actually seen), it’s unsurprising that Marvel would figure that a\u00a0Legion<\/em> mini made sense. \u00a0Except of course that the\u00a0Legion<\/em> TV show is on FX, as part of the X-Men rights package, to which Marvel’s attitude in recent years has been… whatever the opposite of corporate synergy is. \u00a0That.<\/p>\n

X-Men: Legacy<\/em> ended with Legion more or less wiping himself from history, which is not an ideal starting point. \u00a0Legion<\/em> deals with that little problem by ignoring it entirely. \u00a0On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop you plugging it into history as a flashback story if you want, so let’s run with that.<\/p>\n

Peter Milligan’s superhero work can be patchy, even if it’s usually at least interesting. \u00a0But he’s a natural choice for something like this. \u00a0It’s not just that\u00a0Legion<\/em> isn’t really a superhero book; Milligan’s done literalised versions of madness before in\u00a0Shade the Changing Man<\/em>, and that was one of the high points of his career. \u00a0Artist Wilfredo Torres wouldn’t have been out of place in the later years of that series, either. \u00a0The ghost of\u00a0Shade<\/em> hangs rather heavily over this, especially when you get taxi seats turning into octopuses and such like.<\/p>\n

Not that David is acting as a Shade stand-in here; it’s more a question of general vibe. \u00a0But it’s also the case that this he’s more of the backdrop to this story than its protagonist. \u00a0The story opens with him careering around Pennsylvania, on the run from a rogue personality called “Lord Trauma”, who is pretty much what it says on the tin. \u00a0Some later issues tell us that Trauma has grown from a traumatic event back during the Muir Island Saga, which is an odd choice – after all, Legion’s origin story literally involves his mind being shattered by a traumatic childhood event, while his plot role in the Shadow King arc is not so well remembered.<\/p>\n

But in another sense, we’re going back to the\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> era approach where the alternate personalities are not meant to be rounded personas in their own right, but rather embodiments of sides of David’s personality. \u00a0Trauma is actually trying to consume and destroy other alternate personalities, but the story makes a point of suggesting that he isn’t trying in any coherent way to take over David’s’ mind; he’s simply an embodiment of David’s urge to self-annihilation.<\/p>\n

Since Trauma is both a problem for himself and a danger to those around him, David enthusiastically recruits celebrity psychologist Hannah Jones. \u00a0Hannah is an east end girl from a council estate who has risen to the top. \u00a0The general set-up is that she’s very good at what she does, but still might ultimately driven more by her own status issues, and the professional triumph of beating a good challenge. \u00a0She doesn’t seem to be cynical or exploitative towards her clients, but nor is she driven by altruism alone.\u00a0So while she initially doesn’t want to go within a mile of helping David, the possible effects on her reputation of curing him tip the balance.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the series is then Hannah going inside David’s mind to try to rally the alternate personalities, while the rather naive David protects her body from Trauma in the real world. \u00a0There’s a lot of literal renditions of personality traits here – literal paranoia storms and so forth – but most of the alters we see are pointedly one dimensional. \u00a0The obvious exception is Tami, who bills herself as “a nightclub singer and occasional good-time girl”, yet is pretty clearly rendered as Legion’s much stabler, if utterly defeatist, female counterpart.<\/p>\n

Hannah’s entirely sensible plan is to try to rally the remaining Legion personalities to work together, in the hope that this will get David’s mind under control. \u00a0By this point, it’s fairly clear that Hannah has taken over David’s role as the series protagonist, since David is mostly reduced to holding Trauma at bay so that she can get on with it. \u00a0And the final issue cements that, as it’s mainly Hannah being confronted with a symbolic traumatic event from her own past, which – well, naturally – leads her to confront her own motivations for being in this story at all. \u00a0This is all set up perfectly well, since there’s no actual mystery about Hannah’s motivations – she tells us perfectly clearly in issue #2 why she decides to help David, she just doesn’t attach so much weight to it at the time.<\/p>\n

Is it a Legion story? \u00a0In as much as he’s essential to the plot, sure. \u00a0But it’s mainly a Hannah Jones story, and that’s something that only really comes to the fore in the second half. \u00a0And it’s a fairly roundabout way of making a pretty straightforward point: Hannah will get real happiness from coming to terms with upsetting events in her past, not by ignoring them and becoming rich and famous, even if she starts the story thinking otherwise.<\/p>\n

But I did enjoy it more on a second reading, for the largely-understated quirkiness of the thing if nothing else. \u00a0In X-Men terms it’s a footnote, but there’s some definite charm here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given the success of the\u00a0Legion TV series (which I’ve never actually seen), it’s unsurprising that Marvel would figure that a\u00a0Legion mini made sense. \u00a0Except of course that the\u00a0Legion TV show is on FX, as part of the X-Men rights package, to which Marvel’s attitude in recent years has been… whatever the opposite of corporate synergy […]<\/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-4162","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\/4162","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=4162"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4164,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4162\/revisions\/4164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}