{"id":7727,"date":"2022-03-31T22:05:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T21:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7727"},"modified":"2022-03-31T22:05:48","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T21:05:48","slug":"x-men-legends-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7727","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Legends #12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN LEGENDS #12<\/strong>
\n“Start Again”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Chris Claremont<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Scot Eaton<\/strong>
\nInker: Lorenzo Ruggiero<\/strong>
\nColourist: Rachelle Rosenberg<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong><\/p>\n

With hindsight, the tricky thing about the\u00a0X-Men Legends<\/em> format is that it’s trying to bring back former creators to do something that recalls their original run, but in most cases those original runs had ongoing soap opera storylines. So a one-off short story is already a bit off model. Fabian Nicieza got round that problem with his arc by simply resolving an actual dropped plot; Larry Hama just did an episodic story. And other stories have kind of invented a gap for the sake of plugging it.<\/p>\n

This is kind of in that territory. It fills a gap between the end of Fall of the Mutants (when Nightcrawler comes out of his coma, just as the X-Men are believed dead in Dallas) and Excalibur Special Edition<\/em> #1, the origin story of the spin-off team\u00a0Excalibur<\/em>. It’s a real gap, but it’s not exactly one that was crying out to be filled – nobody at the time felt that we were skipping over important stuff. But then again, if you’re looking for potential gaps, this isn’t a bad choice. It’s a big moment for Kurt and Kitty and you can do a little bit of work here to set them up for their return to action.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kitty and Kurt wake up to find that they’ve been hauled to a mysterious location by Destiny, who wants them to stop Mystique from killing Forge in revenge for the death of Rogue. According to Destiny, this would be a catastrophic event for the timeline, and since these are the only X-Men left, she’s asking them to sort it out. As the story starts, Kurt is more than willing to get back into costume. Kitty wants nothing to do with it, but won’t leave Kurt alone either.<\/p>\n

At which point the Harriers show up. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the Harriers – they never took off, and although they seem to get dusted off every few years, it doesn’t feel like they’re ever going to. They’re a slightly gimmicky team of soldiers, and they were an early example of Claremont’s latter-day tendency to introduce teams of characters distinguished largely by codename. Really, they’re GI Joe – the guy with the bombs called Timebomb, the one with a bow called Longbow, you get the idea. Except the main characters of GI Joe<\/em> had fairly strong personalities, and this bunch feel like they’ve got an average of half a personality trait each. Claremont seems to like them and I can’t help feeling that in his mind they’re this bunch of wonderfully rounded and developed characters with fascinating individual back stories. But if so, it’s not on the page.<\/p>\n

Having them get beaten up almost singlehandedly by Nightcrawler when he’s just out of a coma doesn’t exactly help their cause either. Still, Scot Eaton lays out the hunting sequences well enough; it’s perfectly solid storytelling, and he does do a good Nightcrawler. Kurt doing his thing alone does have a certain charm to it, I can’t deny that.<\/p>\n

The Harriers are actually meant to be guarding Forge, so the whole fight is really just a misunderstanding. Mystique does indeed show up, but she gets talked out of it fairly quickly, because at this point Mystique is meant to be genuinely reforming as the leader of Freedom Force. There’s a nice angle here where Kurt and Kitty see themselves as on one last mission which marks the coda of their career, and almost as handing over to Mystique to take over the hero mantle. Mystique then demands that Forge help Kitty and Kurt with some of the problems they’ve been having with their powers, since that gives us a bit more closure and gets them ready for Excalibur.<\/p>\n

It’s perfectly fine; it’s not a story anyone particularly needed, but sure, it smoothes things over a little bit. Perhaps more to the point, though, is that it does recapture something of the sense of Claremont writing these two characters in the late 1980s, which is the real draw here. It’s an entirely respectable revisit, which is ultimately what it’s here to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN LEGENDS #12 “Start Again” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciller: Scot Eaton Inker: Lorenzo Ruggiero Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg Letterer: Joe Caramagna With hindsight, the tricky thing about the\u00a0X-Men Legends format is that it’s trying to bring back former creators to do something that recalls their original run, but in most cases those original runs had ongoing […]<\/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-7727","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\/7727","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=7727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7730,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7727\/revisions\/7730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}