Mike Carey has two X-Men stories out this week, the other being X-Men: Legacy #210. 

With this issue, Carey at least answers one of my fundamental questions about the title's new direction: what is the new direction?  Is it really going to be Xavier hallucinating ad infinitum?  Well, no, it isn't.  The new direction is that although Exodus has put Xavier's mind back together, he has gaps in his memory, and so he sets out to revisit people from his past in order to fill in the blanks.  The broader theme seems to involve Xavier learning how all these various people see him.

This is a fairly interesting idea, and I can now see how it works as an ongoing series - at least in the same way that Wolverine: Origins functions as an ongoing title.  There's a remarkably heavy emphasis on history and continuity here, to an extent that we haven't seen in the X-books - in fact, in Marvel generally - for several years.  This seems to have been earmarked as the book for hardcore X-Men fans who really care about seeing it all brought together.

Now, for readers like us, there's a lot to enjoy here.  But I'm not so sure what casual fans are supposed to make of a book which offhandedly blurts out montages of references to stories published 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago.  And given what I'm about to say about DC Universe Zero, I really have to address that point.

Here's the thing.  On the one hand, all you really need to know in order to follow this story is that Exodus is trying to convince Xavier to change his ways, by showing him images of things that went wrong as a result of his pacifist approach.  And casual readers will get that, because it's carefully explained at the end of the issue. 

But they might get a little lost along the way.  The opening page alone references X-Men: Deadly Genesis (twice), the "Danger" storyline from Astonishing X-Men, and the Legion arc from mid-1980s New Mutants.  Later in the issue, we get an out-of-context blast from Deadly Genesis again, followed another montage page with the Dark Phoenix Saga, and some panels which would be utterly meaningless unless you recognised them as scenes from Legacy Virus stories.  And the context isn't there to enable casual readers to do that.

I'd be terribly confused reading this comic as a newcomer, because I would assume - correctly - that large chunks of it were going over my head.  Now, as it happens, the bits the casual readers won't understand aren't particularly important.  They're simply examples of Exodus' general point.  But the casual reader doesn't know that.  Really, this is a book which cries out, if not for footnotes, then at least for a couple of paragraphs of notes on the letters page.

There's also a bizarre argument about the Sentinels which doesn't make any sense at all, even if you do know the story.  Exodus shows Xavier a clip of the original Silver Age Sentinel story followed by the destruction of Genosha at the start of Grant Morrison's New X-Men.  Then he complains that Xavier should have hunted down Bolivar Trask's family and killed them all, thus averting the attack on Genosha.  Er... what?  Leave aside the "would you shoot Hitler" moral argument - what possible reason did the X-Men have to think that Trask's family were a threat to anyone?  This is just baffling, and I can't help wondering whether the scene was originally based on a misunderstanding of Sentinel continuity, awkwardly fudged over in the final dialogue.

Anyway.  If you get a warm glow from continuity and - perhaps more to the point - from the sense that everything fits together into a bigger story, then this is the book for you.  I fall into that category, but then I'm the hardest of the hardcore.  I'm much more sceptical of the appeal which this book could hold to a less obsessive audience.

Rating: B

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