X-Men Legacy #2

            Dead parents are about as common as colds in the Marvel and DC universes, to the point where it’s (quite literally) overkill. Everybody has a dad, or a mom or both that have died tragically, and they’ve all gained strength and purpose from it and so on and so forth. It’s barely worth noting at this point.

            But David Haller is different. His dad wasn’t just rich or virtuous; his dad was Charles fucking Xavier. And David Haller wasn’t just some rich kid or one with a spider bite, he’s a mind-numbingly (again… pretty literally) powerful mutant with the more psychological problems than Freud could ever pretend to solve, and needless to say, when he hears of his father’s passing, things do not go well.

            X-Men Legacy #2 is essentially an exploration of what happens when a mutant who has spent the majority of his life working to control his mind that is too layered and mighty for its own good loses his father and his guru in the same day. And things go really, really poorly.

            And not only that, but done pretty artfully by Simon Spurrier. The book is, and this isn’t a bad thing, very confusing. There are parts when the reader is really going to have trouble differentiating what is actually happening from what is going on inside Legion’s head. By the end, most ends are tied up and things are moving along smoothly, but Spurrier doesn’t pass up the opportunity to use Legion’s powers and struggles to paint an abstract and messy landscape that ends up being enthralling.

            The end of this book appears to be pointing towards where the rest of the series is going, and there were a million ways to end up where Spurrier wanted, but this was one of the more inventive and interesting ways to do it, I’d imagine. This book is odd, it’s scary, it’s sad and it’s meaningful. It has depth, weight and lucidity. More than that, it has an incredible amount of promise.

            I touched on this in my review of X-Men Legacy #1, but the art is absolutely incredible, the cover of this issue is gorgeous and breathtaking, and the art contained within is an absolute treat. That’s all that really needs to be said.

            There are a lot of X-Men books out there, and there are a lot of really good ones, but this one is making a case for its name being near the top of that list. It’s a character study on being more powerful than one knows what to do with, and a very good one at that.