{"id":8575,"date":"2022-12-18T21:52:21","date_gmt":"2022-12-18T21:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8575"},"modified":"2022-12-18T21:52:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-18T21:52:36","slug":"8575","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8575","title":{"rendered":"X-Men Legends #3-4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN LEGENDS vol 2 #3-4<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ann Nocenti<\/strong>
\nArtist: Javier Pina<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong>
\nColourist: Jim Campbell<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can’t say\u00a0X-Men Legends<\/em> lacks range. The previous arc was Roy Thomas doing mid-70s continuity patching. The next arc is Whilce Portacio doing the early 90s. And here we have Ann Nocenti revisiting Longshot<\/em>. Those are three very, very different creators. In fact, you have to wonder what the market is, beyond completists like me, for a book whose premise boils down to “literally anything from over 25 years ago”.<\/p>\n

Although Ann Nocenti was the X-Men’s editor for most of the 1980s, her own writing was always very unusual – technically within the bounds of the superhero genre, but satirical, brittle and almost abstract at times. Nocenti is a writer of ideas, and her stories often function more as concept delivery systems than as character studies. The original\u00a0Longshot<\/em> series is very much like that, the core being the contrast between the pure and naive Longshot whose luck powers distort the plot in his favour, and the grotesque Mojo. Both of them are rather one note characters, but it’s the way they react with one another.<\/p>\n

Longshot and Mojo both became incorporated into the X-Men, with Mojo settling into the role of media satire. \u00a0That’s certainly an element in the original series – Mojo makes movies, Longshot is a reluctant stuntman – but Mojo started off as a somewhat broader force of anti-life. The stuff about flowers dying in his presence has been largely forgotten over the years, but it makes a return here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If there’s a continuity bridge being performed here, it’s to get Mojo to the point where he’s developed an interest in the X-books – sorry, the X-Men – but that’s kind of secondary. A major reason why the movie angle was played up so much in the late Claremont period was that Marvel were, at the time, owned by New World Pictures, and so Mojo represented Marvel’s owners. That’s why Mojo was expanding the line to the point of absurdity by creating the X-Babies. And Mojo is very much in that role here, as he enlists Longshot, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine for his latest war movie. (Don’t worry, continuity fans, there’s a mindwipe.)<\/p>\n

You might wonder whether this take on Mojo is drifting behind the times. But really, the character has aged remarkably well. He is surrounded by long-suffering hangers on trying their best to steer him away from his worst impulses or to do something creative within the limits allowed by the ludicrous framework that he sets. He doesn’t care about quality, or rather, he doesn’t understand quality as a concept distinguishable from popularity. He thinks appeals to basic standards of reason and logic are elitist and pretentious. He’s a powerful, capricious, talentless moron who believes his own hype and thinks his success is evidence of genius. He doesn’t trust people talking where he can’t hear them and he demands that everyone sit with him and “have fun”. And he has recently entered the field of social media. He literally could not be more topical.<\/p>\n

Javier Pina does a wonderfully grotesque Mojo; the character has become a little over-familiar down the years, but there’s a nice sense of horror to him here that I haven’t seen in a while. He seems more distended than usual. There’s something nicely understated about his Spiral and his Major Domo, as well – and this is really their story, for all that we do the usual routine of sending captive heroes to appear in his films. Major Domo represents the people in management who understand what a moron this guy is but are content to play along while quietly appreciating something better in their own time. Spiral is plainly Nocenti – and of course, she’s Ricochet Rita, who was drawn to resemble Nocenti – doing the actual hard work of turning Mojo’s hazy ideas into something actually coherent and (in theory) finding a way to get something interesting in there anyway. (Spiral also objects to Longshot, whose luck powers generate ridiculous plot logic in other ways.)<\/p>\n

Still, it’s Mojo’s blunt dismissal of the whole concept of quality that really sticks. Pressed for some detail about the actual plot\u00a0<\/em>of his film, he replies\u00a0“It’s a war movie. They fight. They die. How do the characters change? They’re alive at the beginning of the film and dead at the end. That enough change for you?”<\/p>\n

All this is very funny. Whether it adds up to a particularly satisfying story is maybe another matter. By the very nature of a Mojo story – where the core premise is that Mojo can’t write – stuff just kind of happens, and then after a while it stops happening. Most Mojo stories are about the captured heroes and what all this says about them; but here there’s a sense of going through the motions with the heroes being a bit confused for a while before shaking it off. Wolverine throws himself into the war role a bit more enthusiastically than everyone else, but the in-movie scenes aren’t all that satisfying – nor is it really obvious that Spiral actually\u00a0does<\/em> make any changes that make the end result more interesting. Very vaguely, the experience is meant to give Kitty some motivation to feel that she could be a leader in future, but that comes across as a bit tacked on.<\/p>\n

So, this is a two-parter that I admire in theory, and that has moments I really enjoyed, but that feels rather half-formed as an actual story. For better and worse, it really is all about the ideas.<\/p>\n

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

X-MEN LEGENDS vol 2 #3-4 Writer: Ann Nocenti Artist: Javier Pina Letterer: Joe Caramagna Colourist: Jim Campbell Editor: Mark Basso You can’t say\u00a0X-Men Legends lacks range. The previous arc was Roy Thomas doing mid-70s continuity patching. The next arc is Whilce Portacio doing the early 90s. And here we have Ann Nocenti revisiting Longshot. Those […]<\/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-8575","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\/8575","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=8575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8578,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8575\/revisions\/8578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}