Apparently we're meant to call the post-"Messiah Complex" stories "Divided We Stand."  It's easy to forget, as the DWS logo is the size of a postage stamp and tends to get lost on the cover.

But the last DWS title is X-Men: Legacy #208, the first issue of Mike Carey's retitled X-Men series.  Reading between the lines, it seems that part of the aim here is to draw a clearer distinction between the various X-Men titles and explain why we need three of them.  But we plainly don't need three monthly X-Men titles, and so X-Men has now become... something else.

Quite what exactly, I'm not sure.  I can tell you what's in this issue.  At the end of "Messiah Complex", Professor X was shot in the head.  It turns out that the Acolytes spirited his body away, and they're trying to save his life, on the reasonable grounds that the surviving mutants can't afford to lose such a major player.  But Xavier's mind is a bit of a mess now that a bullet's been through it, and so Exodus is trying his best to put it back together.

The resulting story is a mixture of Xavier having semi-random flashbacks about the early days of the X-Men, and the Acolytes standing around in one of those chrome-and-concrete bases that villains are so fond of these days.  Considering that these people like dressing up in brightly-coloured leotards, you'd think they'd have some more interesting taste in interior decor.  But I digress.

John Romita draws the flashback scenes, while Scot Eaton covers the Acolytes.  This isn't simply an allocation of pages; at times, the art swaps back and forth from panel to panel.  It's sensible casting; Eaton is an acceptable house-style superhero artist, who provides a solid contrast for Romita's more expressive work.  And in fairness to Eaton, he does get some variation into a string of conversation scenes.

The central idea is to present us with a series of flashbacks that cast doubt on Xavier's motivations for forming the team - or at least suggest that Xavier is doubting himself.  It's not an exercise in wholesale revisionism, so much as a gentle teasing out of the inconsistencies in the original idea.  Despite his talk about peace and harmony, all Xavier actually does to achieve it is to set up a private army.  The suggestion is that, at least to some extent, Xavier has been indulging his own ego and creating his own myth; and now, over the last couple of years, it's all fallen apart.

Incidentally, as Carey promised in interviews, the story is light on actual continuity.  Nothing here depends on specific stories; it's all based on very familiar aspects of continuity, all of which are explained clearly enough for new readers.  The only arguable exception is a passing allusion to Cyclops' history with Mr Sinister, but new readers won't be lost.

Now, this is certainly an interesting direction for the character.  There have been problems with the idea of Xavier as a saint ever since 1970, and the ill-conceived "I was hiding in the basement all the time" retcon - which wasn't supposed to make him a heartless bastard, but unintentionally did.  Xavier's not perfect, and the idea of the X-Men moving on without him, leaving him without his accustomed role, has plenty of story potential.  I'm intrigued as to where Carey is heading with this plot.

What I don't get is X-Men: Legacy as a title.  It surely can't be an entire ongoing series about Professor X having flashbacks, can it?   Is it an all-purpose dumping ground for backwards-looking stories?  I'm just a bit lost as to what the premise is meant to be, once we get beyond the immediate story.

But we can worry about the bigger picture when we get there.  Carey's interest in the X-Men's mythology (and even, most unfashionably, its continuity) has been a notable feature of his stories, and he's probably been the most successful of the current writers in building on what came before.  For the old-school X-Men fan, this looks like being a great story.

Rating: A-

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