{"id":7719,"date":"2022-03-29T21:04:03","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T20:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7719"},"modified":"2022-03-29T21:04:03","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T20:04:03","slug":"x-men-legends-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7719","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Legends #11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN LEGENDS #11<\/strong>
\n“Monsters”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Louise Simonson<\/strong>
\nArtist: Walter Simonson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Edgar Delgado<\/strong>
\nLetterer: John Workman<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Monsters” is the second\u00a0X-Men Legends<\/em> issue by Louise and Walter Simonson, and takes place at around the same time as their previous story. The two aren’t really connected, though, or at least only by slenderest of margins. The previous issue was basically an issue of\u00a0X-Factor<\/em>, the book they worked on together back in the 1980s. This is a\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> story, a book which Louise Simonson wrote, but which was being drawn around that point by Bret Blevins.<\/p>\n

If the premise of this book is to recapture something of a classic run… well, Bret Blevins and Walt Simonson are very different artists. Blevins’\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> run veered to the spindly and grotesque, and it has to be said that his costume designs were a bit of a mess. (I always liked Mirage costume, but that’s very much the exception.) Perhaps that’s one reason why this story revolves around villains from\u00a0X-Factor<\/em>, namely the original Horsemen of Apocalypse.<\/p>\n

It’s a slender premise. This is the point in time when Caliban was hanging around with Apocalypse, accepting the big guy’s offer of power so that he could avenge the Morlock Massacre. The Horsemen are down two members right now, with only War and Famine left. So Caliban decides to return to the Morlock tunnels for a bit of recruitment. War and Famine are decidedly unimpressed, but Caliban points out – not unreasonably – that the Morlocks who\u00a0survived<\/em> the massacre are, by definition, the strong. Exactly what Apocalypse wants!<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Caliban, he’s so put out by the Horsemen’s scepticism that he insists on bringing them along so that they can do a bit of testing. Quite understandably, the remaining Morlocks immediately decide that the Marauders have returned and fly into a panic. The New Mutants get involved because… well, they happened to be passing, I guess. Plus some of them have a history with Caliban. A completely pointless fight ensues, which the Horsemen lose, and naturally nobody wants to listen to Caliban’s sales pitch after that. And that’s pretty much it; instead of drawing the lesson that he might be on the wrong side here, Caliban concludes that the moral of the story is to show less initiative in future.<\/p>\n

It’s not exactly a story that desperately needed to be told. The big draw here is really the art; the original Horsemen always had great designs and it’s nice to see a long-forgotten villain like War given a bit of a spotlight. Mind you, it also feels pretty rough at times, and it doesn’t have some of the big geometric impacts that the Simonsons’ previous issue had. There’s a\u00a0bit<\/em> of that, but then it wouldn’t be as suitable for a story in the Morlock tunnels. The boldness is there, and there’s something rather appealing in the way that Walt Simonson’s art is so visibly and conspicuously\u00a0drawn<\/em> – the hand lettering is a particularly nice touch.<\/p>\n

There’s some weirdly clunky writing in here, though. I have no idea why the New Mutants are just wandering around town in full costume at the start of the issue (and the script seems pretty confused about it too). Dani’s “Throw that and we all die!” bit is way, way over the top, and generally it doesn’t feel like this story really needed all of the New Mutants running about – it’s really about the Horsemen and the Morlocks.<\/p>\n

I suppose this is the sort of story where there was scope for a bit of smoothing over with the modern Krakoa set-up. Caliban treats Apocalypse as a wise mentor whose concerns about readying the world for the arrival of the Celestials are to be taken seriously. In the late 80s this made him a gullible nitwit. In 2022 it makes him a Krakoan citizen ahead of his time – all the more so when Apocalypse’s future prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Rictor is in the story. There’s maybe a better version of this story where it’s just Rictor who gets sucked in to the events. You could have done something where 1980s Caliban has a version of the relationship that Rictor would have in due course, and Rictor not getting it yet. You could show 80s Apocalypse through the prism of the Krakoan interpretation and make Caliban’s loyalty to him seem more understandable.<\/p>\n

Then again, that’s not the project of\u00a0X-Men Legends<\/em>. It’s a book designed to recapture something of a bygone era, not to rewrite it in the light of the present day. That’s fair enough, I guess. But the result is very slight.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN LEGENDS #11 “Monsters” Writer: Louise Simonson Artist: Walter Simonson Colourist: Edgar Delgado Letterer: John Workman Editor: Mark Basso “Monsters” is the second\u00a0X-Men Legends issue by Louise and Walter Simonson, and takes place at around the same time as their previous story. The two aren’t really connected, though, or at least only by slenderest of […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7719","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\/7719","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=7719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7721,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7719\/revisions\/7721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}