After last month's strong start, X-Men: Legacy is now confusing me a bit.

Issue #208, you may recall, consisted of the Acolytes trying to wake up Professor X, interspersed with dream flashbacks to his earlier days.  Most of them concerned why he'd formed the X-Men and whether he had any ulterior motives.  And the dream scenes were drawn by John Romita Jr, which made for a nice contrast with Scot Eaton's more typical art for the real world.

This issue, Magneto shows up, and we get some fairly generic flashbacks of scenes from their past - many of which, I suspect, won't make a great deal of sense unless you have a fairly decent knowledge of X-Men continuity.  There's even a scene which seems to be a snippet from X-Men #-1, the Flashback Month issue. 

Frankly, none of this adds a great deal to what we already knew about the relationship between Xavier and Magneto.  The payoff is that (once Xavier has been woken), they agree that neither of them won - M-Day made the whole thing irrelevant.  But that's been pretty much self-evident for a few years now, and we seem to be no closer to answering the question "So where now, then?" 

Instead, we have Exodus floating around the edges of the story, presumably representing the zealot who can't adjust to the reality that things have changed.  This is all very well, but once again I come back to a repeated theme: these are the stories that the X-books should have been telling two years ago.  We should be way past this point by now.  I'm still inclined to believe that Carey is heading in the right direction, but I am bored with the M-Day storyline, and I want to see some long overdue progress.

In an odd move, John Romita Jr is gone from this issue.  Instead, the flashback art is drawn by Billy Tan.  This rather defeats the point, because Tan's style isn't much different from Eaton's.  Both are perfectly decent artist, but the visual signposting that worked so well in the previous issue is pretty much gone.

I'm rather disappointed by this issue.  I mean, it's fine, it's still something a little different, and I have enough faith in Carey to believe that this must surely be heading somewhere - even if that isn't exactly apparent on the page.  But it doesn't pick up on the more interesting aspects of the previous issue, the art's a step down, and we seem to be back treading overfamiliar ground.

Rating: B

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