#26: “Legion” (April 1985)




Focus Character and Theme: Love child, never meant to be

The Story: In a five page prologue, Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander are hanging out on Muir Island when an explosion sends them into a catatonic state. Its source is David, a teen resident of Moira’s facility who displays fire and telekinetic powers.



The next day, Professor Xavier arrives on the island with Dani, Rahne, Doug, and Warlock in tow. Xavier has been called to probe the mind of Moira’s patient David, whose mother Gabrielle Haller is a former lover of Xavier. We know, but Xavier does not, that David Charles Haller is Charles Xavier’s son. Xavier attempts to enter David’s mind but is forcefully ejected after seeing a screaming young Middle Eastern man.

A two page sequence at the Massachusetts Academy shows Emma Frost disciplining Empath for messing with Firestar’s mind. Emma pretends to be enthralled by Empath’s emotion-manipulating powers. As he swoops in to kiss her on the lips, she delivers a throat punch and a threat that he’d better toe the line in the future.



Down on the quay of a nearby mainland village, the four kids have a brief but unpleasant encounter with Rahne’s former guardian Reverend Craig flanked by a dour mob. He has some choice “Spawn of Satan!” invective for Rahne. The teens decide not to go ashore after all and return to Muir Island.



On R’lyeh in the Bermuda Triangle, Magneto has a nightmare (about his previous adventure with Xavier and Gabrielle Haller?) which causes him to levitate his bed outside the building, threatening to drop him “a thousand feet” into the sea. Lee Forrester intervenes and saves him. The two of them begin kissing passionately, and things go from there.



Rahne is jealous of Moira giving attention and affection to Sean Cassidy. Later that night, Rahne sneaks out of bed to Moira’s lab, in need of a pep talk from her mother-figure. They suffer an explosion like the one that incapacitated Tom and Sharon earlier, as the vision of a boy appears before them with a futile warning in Arabic which they cannot understand.



My Two Cents: Gabrielle Haller debuted in the flashback issue X-Men #161, which depicted Xavier and Magneto fighting side by side to prevent Hydra from stealing Nazi gold. This issue was a key step in Chris Claremont’s rehabilitation of Magneto into a tragic hero. It also showed Xavier falling in love with a young Israeli woman who had PTSD from her experiences in the Dachau concentration camp. So Claremont has been setting up the Legion storyline for quite a while. In fact, we already saw Gabrielle confess David’s paternity to Moira and Illyana back in New Mutants #1. Pretty bold of Gabrielle to spill her secrets in front of a teenaged girl! Not telling Xavier this crucial information before he begins the psi-probe of David is the height of lunacy.

Claremont is in full-on soap opera mode, with pages of dense text conversations establishing motive, backstory, and the character’s many thoughts about each other and themselves.




This is the second time that one of Xavier’s old girlfriends has a son who becomes out to be a mutant menace, the first one being Proteus. This time, Claremont adds on the “secret paternity of the hero” trope. But Claremont turns this repeated story into a plot point; Gabrielle Haller says that she avoided calling Xavier about David, for fear that the X-Men would blaze in and kill him like they did Moira’s son.

Corsi and Friedlander are still Native Americans in body but not mind. He’s able to powerlift half a ton; she is said to be a paragon of physical perfection as well, but we see no evidence of this. At first, it seemed that they would be Peter Corbeau/Lee Forrester type recurring characters, but I guess they are just red shirts, fodder for the villain to show how bad he is.

Why did Xavier bring any students to Muir Island? Rahne makes sense, because Moira was (and probably still is) her legal guardian. I suppose Warlock came because Moira and Xavier were already analyzing him in Westchester during the Cloak and Dagger storyline. Warlock is too alien to take offense at being a lab rat. There’s also a two page background gag in which he prattles in pictogram about a black bird before revealing that he thinks the Blackbird airplane is sentient.



Sienkiewicz’ version of “Warlock tries to look human” is far more disturbing and likely than Bob McLeod’s perfect specimen in the New Mutants Annual was.



Doug’s presence is more difficult to explain. He’s now called one of “Xavier’s novice students,” though we never saw Xavier invite him to the school. He was just Kitty’s townie boyfriend who got invited by Sam to help once with Warlock, then got dragged to the Dyson Sphere by accident. Doug’s thoughts on all he’s seen: “This is great! It’s been one adventure after another! I can’t wait to see what happens next!” He hasn’t seen any of his friends hurt and suffering yet. After Doug is taken aback by Madrox, Dani sarcastically tells him, “Some adventure, huh Doug?” I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

As usual, comic books get an “F” in psychiatry. Claremont’s description of David Haller mixes autism (a lack of empathy and human relationship) with schizophrenia (hallucinations and lack of ordered thinking) with dissociative personality disorder (the split personality disease so common in fiction but not real life). Also, Xavier talks about “the trauma that made him autistic” at age ten. Autism doesn’t work that way; it’s congenital, becoming obvious when the child fails to socialize normally as a toddler.
Bible literacy is not what it was thirty-five years ago, but most readers at the time would have immediately recognized Legion’s name as a reference to a deranged superman in the Gospels:


Speaking of disturbing, Empath’s scene with Emma frost is shocking for several reasons. First, that Empath thought he could control Emma. Second, that he would use that supposed control to attempt to rape her. Third, that she lets this predator off with just a punch and a warning. If he’s confident enough to do this to her, how many of his fellow students has he already victimized besides Firestar? And, this being the early 80s, how many STDs is he carrying? “Empath gets AIDS” would have been an interesting story.

And finally, who is “Firestar”? We’ll talk about her cartoon origins later, but this was her first Marvel Universe mention as far as I know. Clearly this issue was supposed to tie in with the Firestar mini-series which finally made its debut in March 1986. Obviously something went very wrong in the Marvel production offices to cause this massive continuity disjunction, which also included X-Men #193. We also learn that Empath is an entitled brat from the upper echelons of Spanish society: “Nobody addresses a De La Rocha in such a manner. We do not obey - We are not lackies – We command!”

Emma Frost on the other hand comes off better than usual, berating Empath’s “cruelty,” albeit she’s mostly mad that her own designs for Firestar have been undone by his blundering. Still, it’s the beginnings of the journey that Emma would take from villain to conflicted hero.

The Reverend Craig scene takes place on the docks of Ullapool a city said to be “on the western coast of Scotland.” Eh, sort of. It actually sits halfway down on a long inlet, Loch Broom, along the jagged northwest coast of Scotland. Isle Martin nearby is about 0.25 square miles in area and has no village; that’s probably “Muir Island.”

Throughout the issue, Xavier encounters a huge wall of regular bricks inside David Haller’s mind. These images could not have easily been generated a couple of years earlier, but in January 1984, Mac Paint was released for the first generation of Macintosh personal computers, featuring a “fill paint” feature that could generate highly detailed and regular patterns along a handful of presets. Guess what one of them was? Yep, brick wall. If that's how Sienkiewicz generated the brick walls here, then this is one of the first examples of computer graphics in mainstream comic books.




Meanwhile in X-Men (#192): Kitty and Logan return from Japan. Warlock’s father Magus arrives on earth and tangles with Rogue. Months later around Christmas, Xavier is assaulted after giving a lecture at Columbia University. The aftermath of this assault is what has Xavier feeling weakened in this month’s issue of New Mutants.