X-Men: Legends #4 // Review
Longshot’s just watched his whole squad get taken out by General Logan. The only one left on his side is General Pryde. War is hell. Only this isn’t war. It’s a film. Somebody better tell Logan that. He’s the best there is at what he does. And what he does...isn’t acting. Writer Ann Nocenti concludes her two-part story in X-Men: Legends #4. Artist Jim Campbell puts Longshot, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde through the motions in a story set just after the Longshot mini-series of the mid-1980s. It lacks the kind of depth it could have had, but a story with a concept like Nocenti’s really needs an ongoing series to properly breathe.
Logan truly believes that he’s in a war. And in a sense, he’s not exactly wrong. There’s a revolution to be fought on the set of the sinister filmmaker known as Mojo. Longshot isn’t in a good place right now. He knows that he’s on a film set, but he’s not really certain that he knows how to deal with it. His ally Kitty Pryde doesn’t exactly know what’s going on either. Meanwhile, Mojo is viewing it all with delight from behind the scenes. Longshot might have a chance to free Wolverine. He’s had some success working his way through his own amnesia just prior to arriving in this two-parter.
Nocenti is working with themes that were a major preoccupation of X-Men writer Chris Claremont, who Nocenti worked with extensively as an editor. The idea of heroes losing their grip on reality to fit into fabricated realities had been a device that Claremont used quite a lot over the course of the 1980s. It’s fun to see that on the page again under the pen of someone who helped popularize it, but Nocenti is missing an opportunity for some deeper satire...largely due to the fact that she needs to set up and resolve the premise in two thin issues. It’s too bad she wasn’t given more room to explore the themes of Longshot and Mojo.
Campbell has a detailed art style that suits the character of Longshot quite well. The action and drama hit the page with a poise and precision that never quite overcomes the impact it needs to deliver the right intensity. The strange contrast between the reality of war and the reality of the film set could have been a bit more amplified in Campbell’s art as Kitty and Logan deal with the illusion of the world that Mojo has created for them. Overall, though, the action and drama flow across the page quite gracefully in Campbell’s hands.
Though it lacks the kind of wit it might have had, it IS nice to see a story almost perfectly matching themes that echoed through X-Men comics in the second half of the 1980s. There is so much more that could have been done with Mojo in the era that never quite had a chance to develop as various events whipped around the Marvel Universe, sweeping it into the 1990s. With the right momentum, an extended Longshot series might still work out with a writer who has a chance to build it into a more complicated satire. As for X-Men: Legends...next month, it shuffles forward to 1992 to pursue an adventure set between X-Factor #75 and #76.
