Despite beginning from a standing start, Mike Carey has managed to turn Legacy into something genuinely different. Although the tale is obviously destined to be collected as a hardcover once the fourteen issue story is complete, the writer has still managed to deliver enough plot each month to satisfy those purchasing the title as an ongoing. However, issues with the introduction of new story threads are still holding the book back. Having put his pre X-Men house in order, Charles Xavier feels ready to face his more recent actions, confronting Cyclops over their past dealings and what he’s recently discovered about Sinister’s manipulations of their lives. Unsurprisingly given his focus on “building the future”, Summers doesn’t take kindly to the professor’s raking over old ground, but it’s his old mentor’s dealings with the deceased Dr Essex which really alarm the X-Men’s leader…

It’s a reasonable story, although a key plot point of Xavier psychically manipulating Summers to attend their meeting is rather forced. Given the exchanges between these two characters in Messiah Complex, it’s hard to believe that Xavier would regard this as a good idea, and this nagging difficulty undermines much of the discussion that follows. This issue does provide a good summary of the disagreements which have arisen between the two men, and the central idea of an introspective professor interrupting Cyclops’ construction of the new X-base is a clever metaphor for the character’s limited relevance to the franchise as it stands. There’s little that is genuinely new here, but as part one of this particular episode in the Legacy storyline, it’s a reasonable decision by the writer to leave the resolution of these issues to next month.

As I mentioned earlier, the main problem with the title is the secondary story strands which serve to advance plots which the Professor will undoubtedly encounter later. As usual, we are given snippets of Sebastian Shaw and Rogue’s doings, gradually advancing each of their stories. Instead of skilful foreshadowing, chunks of a later story are artificially broken off and served up in advance. Carey is obviously trying to mimic Ed Brubaker’s work on Captain America, but the multiple elements here are much less organic, interrupting the action without ever feeling a part of the same story. Another weakness concerns the villain whose “Legacy” the title of the book now appears to refer to. While most of the X-men’s core villains have grown intellectually over the last one hundred issues or so of the franchise, Sinister hasn’t really been developed, staying true to his early nineties Saturday-morning cartoon persona. The character sorely needs depth to be convincing, and there’s yet no sign of it being supplied here. Just as Grant Morrison tore down Magneto and Peter Miligan & Fabian Nicieza retooled Apocalypse, Essex sorely needs adjustment before he can fit with the franchise as it stands. Carey is obviously having fun playing with the character’s impact on the X-Men’s history, but the book is undeniably limited by being built around such a two-dimensional element.