Following up on the aftermath of the battle is the Marvel NOW! Initiative, the relaunching and rebranding of several titles and debuts of others.
How come?
Because if history is any indication, slapping “#1” on the cover of a comic is like a siren’s call to collectors and those issues sell like crazy.
So, who cares if you’ve had one of the longest running series in history?
It’s more important to get that huge artificial sales burst and reset the numbering, because that makes the story automatically better, right?
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| You can’t see it, but this man is crying inside. |
While DC all but completely gutted their historical continuity in the wake of Flashpoint last year, Marvel is taking a slightly different approach by just renumbering things (again!) and not rebooting anything. I’ve written on multiple occasions my personal disdain for this tactic, but until I rise to power I can do nothing about it. But you just wait. My day will come.
Anyway, back in 1991 when Marvel launched X-Men #1 with Jim Lee and Chris Claremont it was a damn big deal and throughout the 1990s, that title became one of many spinoffs that had their genesis in the original Uncanny X-Men. But as of last week, it was the only one that survived the culling of X-Men titles while also managing to avoid a renumbering scheme.
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| Didn’t I warn this title no one would want to play with it if it got too old?! |
Well, that streak is over and last week’s X-Men: Legacy #275 was the final issue. But it’s coming back this month with X-Men: Legacy #1 and a completely different focus. While originally called X-Men in 1991, the title was briefly and temporarily renamed to New X-Men when Grant Morrison came aboard and then in the aftermath of The Messiah CompleX, it became X-Men: Legacy.
At first the focus was on Xavier’s recovery from another assassination attempt. Christ, Xavier, wear a frikkin’ helmet. You’d think a smart guy would learn after the amount of head shots he’s taken.
Once Xavier’s story wound down, the spotlight turned to Rogue as she became a team leader and mentor, mostly to mutants not featured prominently in the other titles.
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| Now? Well, step into the batter’s box, David Haller, you’re up to bat. But seriously, you’re gonna have to do something about that outfit first… |
I’ve gone into the origins of David Haller aka Legion, son of Charles Xavier, before and all this month, we’re going to go deeper into the character to see how X-Men: Legacy will differ in the new volume and examine two pivotal stories in Legion’s development.
The shift to Legion is an odd one, as the character has spent much of his existence divided between being in a coma and being out of his goddamn mind trying to end reality. There really doesn’t seem to be a happy medium with this guy.
Suffering from schizophrenia, with each personality having a different ability, Legion first debuted back in New Mutants #25 and was wildly erratic in nature.
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| Yes. Shocking, I know. |
After falling under the thrall of the Shadow King in the Muir Island Saga, he was left comatose until just before Legion Quest, during which he inadvertently created the Age of Apocalypse reality. And, then, like the offense of my New York Yankees in the playoffs, he was gone.
He reappeared in the latest, and recently concluded, volume of New Mutants and has sporadically been around, playing roles in Age of X and Second Coming, and parts of the latter half of Mike Carey’s X-Men: Legacy run. But now, the story is all about him, an interesting change for a character who has never been a lead, but is a fitting choice for the title given that he is the legacy of Charles Xavier.
Really, Chuck, that’s your legacy? An unstable powderkeg with unimaginable and uncontrollable power? You’d couldn’t have left us a nice watch or something?
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| Now THIS is an inheritance. |
Written by Steve Spurrier and illustrated by Tan Eng Huat, X-Men: Legacy is now going to feature Legion’s coming to terms with his father’s death while struggling to keep his fractured mind intact in this new world left after the war between the Avengers and X-Men. Promising to get to the core of who Legion really is deep down, there’s no doubt that X-Men: Legacy is going to be a very different book and it’s going to be interesting to see if Spurrier and company can make a character most often trotted out just to move a story along become the story himself.
Or themselves. The dude’s got like a cast of 100 in that head, mostly in the hair…
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| And he looks stable already! |
