Now that X-Men: Legacy has settled into its groove, we can see that it's a very unusual book for the Marvel of 2008.  The last decade or so has seen a major shift of emphasis, away from viewing each title as an ongoing saga, and de-emphasising continuity, at least in the sense of references to old stories.

Legacy is an anomaly.  Although Mike Carey is still writing it in a relatively modern style, the book is overwhelmed with flashbacks, some of them quite peripheral to the action.  And the stories seem unusually concerned with tying up loose ends, and bringing them together into a coherent mythology.

"Sins of the Father", for example, sees Carey digging into the various stories about Alamagordo.  This mostly amounts to some passing references in the mid-sixties, and some scattered stories by Fabian Nicieza in the nineties, some of which appeared in the long-cancelled Gambit solo title. 

Now, Alamagordo does have a rather confused history.  When Stan Lee first mentioned that Xavier's father had worked at Alamagordo, he was presumably thinking of the atomic bomb tests in 1945.  By the 1990s, that no longer worked for the timeline, but the name lingered on as a curious anomaly, arbitrarily recast as a genetic research facility.  In this story, Carey is trying simultaneously to bring together the various scattered threads of characters connected to Alamagordo (including obscurities like Hazard and Black Womb), and to tell a story about Mr Sinister trying to find a new host body to replace the one that just got killed.

I'm all in favour of Carey's attempts to bring back an overall plan - even if it's one that he's having to impose on the material after the fact.  Traditionally, this sort of thing has always been a major part of the appeal of the superhero genre.  It was one of the big selling points of Chris Claremont's run in the 1980s, it drove the books through most of the nineties, and it's rather been lost sight of in recent years - partly because of a trade off with creative freedom.  There's something to be said for trying to recapture the sense of it all fitting together.

But in practice, the result is a very dense read, where the plot is smothered under the weight of continuity references.  It's really a bit too much - X-Men: Legacy ought to use history as a springboard for new stories, but instead it seems to use new stories as a device to explore history.  The book is rather dry.  And the story feels like it's merely exploring continuity for its own sake - an obscure backwater of continuity, at that.

I still think this is a basically promising idea for a series; it's just a matter of getting the balance right.  I'm sure Carey will get there in the end.  This story, though... not quite right.

Rating: B-

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