Judgment comes to David Haller as the world starts to burn. Given Legion’s recent defeat at the hand of Uranos, and his inability to save the people of Arakko, how good are his chances? Find out how David makes his case to Earth’s newest god in Legion of X #6, written by Si Spurrier, drawn by Rafael Pimentel, colored by Federico Blee and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Armaan Babu: Y’know, given how much the previous five issues have been about manufactured godhood, it’s weird to me that there’s pretty much nothing to be said about AXE: Judgment Day’s own manufactured god. Instead, Legion of X #6 is a pretty David-centric issue, as he tries to explain to the Progenitor why he should get the divine thumbs up, in a tie-in that feels like one of the more indulgent issues we’ve seen from the series so far. What are your first thoughts?
Ari Bard: Honestly? It’s my favorite issue yet. Simon Spurrier can do a few things very well, and one of them is writing the troubled inner musings of a White man with too much power. It is, for all intents and purposes, honest from David’s point of view. It is heartfelt and emotional and the vulnerability that I’ve appreciated from Spurrier’s other, previous takes on the troubled powerful White man character in things like Hellblazer and Alienated.
Armaan: I do have a lot of love for both those series. Let’s dive in, you may actually turn me around on this issue as we go through it.
Crushed Multiverses in Potentia
Armaan: We begin with a recap, of sorts, for those who haven’t been paying attention to the main event: Uranus attacked and nearly wiped out all of Arakko, Isca the Unbeaten turned against her own people (for more on this, catch up on X-Men: Red), and Nightcrawler used a little trickery with her infallible powers to, if not beat her, at least remove her from the board.
While Nightcrawler moves on to try and save as many people as possible, our reality-warping shirtless hero David goes up against our big bad, Uranos, who apparently is even more powerful than previous issues have led us to believe. We get a lot of Spurrier-babble about the kinds of machines Uranos has brought against Arakko — throwaway descriptions to show us that Uranos is operating on a conceptually higher level than most superhero brawls tend to involve.
The two face each other, sizing each other up, each thinking several moves ahead on many conceptual levels. It reminded me of the fight between Black Panther and Doctor Doom in Secret Wars, when the two had godlike powers of their own. At a certain power level, fights become a lot more than just throwing giant blasts of energy at each other, and that’s the level Legion and Uranos are apparently operating at — which feels like news to me. I mean, I know both opponents are powerful, but this powerful?
Ari: Okay, so the biggest gripe I have with Legion of X #6 is the structure. I think that the issue is supposed to be a cheeky play on the whole, “Well, here is what really happened” sort of thing that you see in self-contained heist and high school drama stories framed around first-person narration from an arrogant protagonist. Hopefully, you get what I’m talking about. Those are the most common instances, I feel, of this sort of playful “filling in the cracks of something prior” structure. The biggest problem with that, however, is that these events happened like two months ago. That’s old news, Simon. Comics isn’t a medium where this works nearly as well.
As far as the fight itself, the machine-focused Spurrier-babble is completely disposable, as you said, but artist Rafael Pimental’s art is most definitely not. I really appreciated the detail and layering of different Davids and Uranoses (Uranosi?) fighting it out in different forms, including a sing off. This isn’t two characters floating in some intangible, amorphous minds-place impossible for us to comprehend. These battles are recognizable and detailed with colors that explode off the page, and I appreciate those pages all the more for it. As for the power levels, it’s Big Two comics. I just sort of roll with it. The neat art was worth any scaling that had to be done in my eyes.
Armaan: The biggest reason it bothers me is that if Legion truly was as much of a reality warper, in control of his powers, as Legion of X #6 implies…it should have been a snap to heal Magneto before he died of his wounds. In one comic we have Magneto pushing his powers to the limit just to keep his heart beating, and in another, we have David spending an admittedly gorgeous page envisioning about the potential of his power — and then being distracted from actually using it.
I will say, I did enjoy this: that out of all the ways Uranos could have defeated David in battle, it’s the smallness of bringing up David’s issues with his father. For as much growth as Spurrier has given David, Charles Xavier is still an extremely sore wound. David doesn’t know whether he wants to replace his father and do a better job at leading Krakoa, or to just have his dad be proud of him for once. All he knows is that, despite all his power, his biggest fear is that he’s somehow little more than a disappointment. Mix in the fact that David is maintaining a connection with Nightcrawler to boost Kurt’s powers, and Uranos has his opening: he smugly prods and pokes at David’s fears until David snaps.
Uranos strikes, but is saved at the last minute by our Ghost Riding Banshee. I mentioned last issue that the Ghost Rider/Banshee stuff was only getting in the way of the stories already being told there. If he had been removed entirely from the earlier sections of the book…this moment here would have been a hell (no pun intended) of an introduction for the character.
Ari: I will not pretend to know the intricacies of gargantuanly large power scaling and the ability to bring back those from the dead, or even heal them I guess, even though your logic appears sound. This is where I reveal that I am quite behind on this event, and thus do not know if Magneto was kept alive some other way or if he is truly dead. If the latter, for how long, I wonder?
Armaan: Magneto was keeping himself alive — using the iron in his blood to keep his heart beating, until he unleashed an attack on Uranos that forced him to drop that concentration completely.
Ari: Nevertheless, there is a power even greater and more inescapable than death, and that is the power of disappointment from shitty fathers. A tale as old as time inside of Big Two comics (and outside them), David falls victim to this classic trap once again. It’s a good bit, and a good breaking point, even if it does lead to a bizarre rescue. Ghost Riding Banshee is an extremely weird deus ex machina here. I suppose the seeds had to be laid earlier so we would recognize who this is and who he’s talking about when he mentions the higher power he serves. It didn’t clear too much up because I still don’t know how this Ghost Riding Banshee was able to get to David or knew where he was, but at least I have some idea of what’s going on and why.
Magneto Was Right
Armaan: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a quote from Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Uncle Iroh: “Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”
David desperately wants to be the hero of the story. To swoop in, defeat the big bad, and have his father finally acknowledge everything David is capable of with pride rather than fear. It’s a desire born of ego, and it’s David’s ego that ultimately gets in the way, allowing Uranos to gain the upper hand.
When the Altar is attacked, though, David is forced to put that aside, throwing everything he is into the work of just keeping people alive. “Clumsy work. Slow work,” he calls it. It’s work done with the desperate slowness and care of a man who does not have the luxury of @$%&ing it up — not when he’s risking lives other than his own.
It’s extremely cool looking work. David is drawn as a desperate dream, holding the Altar up, one one page drawing himself up to the height of his powers to hold things together, another fragmenting himself to keep the shadows at bay.
And then he does it all again, at the request of Magneto.
Ari: Yeah, this is where Legion of X #6 really gets good. It’s funny because Si Spurrier is really preaching the importance of taking preventative measures and preparing good societal infrastructure. There’s nothing glamorous about taking all the precautions you can and laying out all of the necessary safeguards for something like a natural disaster or a global pandemic, but anything done prior is a lot more heroic than the smaller number of people you may be able to rescue after the disaster has been unleashed. It’s thankless, sure, but I like that David seems to have grown to appreciate it in his reflection. Sure, ego drives a lot of his thoughts. But there’s a self-acknowledgement here that’s really written well.
Armaan: There’s a lot of envy in David for those who seem, to his eyes, to have more control over their narratives than David feels he has over his. Envy, and all the complicated tangle of emotions that come with that. At the end of X-Men Legacy, we saw David at peace as he writes his own ending. That ending has somehow been undone (and is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it referenced here), and David seems to have wanted to write himself an ending again; martyring himself to save the day.
Magneto has pretty solidly stolen that spotlight away (check out X-Men Red for more) — but in return, has given David not something David wanted, but what he needs: faith. Magneto puts his faith in David, in asking him to save the people, to fight off the last of Uranos’ machines, and in doing so, to survive. With no hesitation, Magneto believes David can do this, and ultimately, well…Magneto was right.
Ari: If there’s a tale even older than the disappointed dad, it is that of the proud dad, and in Legion of X #6 we get the best of those two worlds. Spurrier does a great job keeping this downtrodden, exhausted tone from David throughout the latter half of this issue using a mix of pauses and shorter sentence structures. It’s rare you get this sort of very human feeling of emptiness and of a character with godlike powers being truly spent, but it felt honest here.
David really does want to matter at the end of the day. All this power and he still struggles with insignificance the most, which is I think what Spurrier wants to get at through this whole run. I think that in Legion of X #6, more than any other, David feels the most honest, and that’s why I like it the most. It’s amazing what Spurrier can accomplish when he throws convoluted structure and a character he can’t write well (Nightcrawler) to the wayside in favor of speaking from the heart.
Armaan: I find it extremely interesting that the Progenitor gave David the thumbs up here. Throughout “Judgment Day”, we’ve seen that the Progenitor judges people not by its standards, but by theirs. To me, this means that on some level, David knows he did the right thing by fighting to survive, instead of fighting to die. By being constructive rather than heroic — which tracks, given how much he’s been shown to disdain conventional heroism despite longing for the prestige it bestows.
If David was looking for closure with that thumbs up, though, he receives none of it. Having to live with your choices is always a lot harder than dying for them. I don’t want to undermine Magneto’s sacrifice — Magneto was not left with much of a choice. He wasn’t looking for glory in death the same way Legion was.
Ultimately, what David is left with is the discomfort of knowing that choosing to live is the right thing to do, but it’s the harder choice, all the same.
I think I’m turned around on this comic after all, dammit, that’s a great ending.
Altared Records
- Despite David rejecting her gifts, Mother Righteous clearly still favors Legion. She’s a transactional goddess, so did she just save David’s life here for free, or is there a cost to come?
- I regret not seeing a cosmic pun-off. I demand an AXE: Judgment Day What If one-shot featuring the pun-off.
- Nightcrawler’s trickery feels true to the character, his nervousness and cringeworthy “Such win! Wow!” does not. This week’s Immortal X-Men is a much better read for Nightcrawler fans.
Armaan is obsessed with the way stories are told. From video games to theater, TTRPGs to comics, he has written for, and about, them all. He will not stop, actually; believe us, we've tried.
Ari Bard is a huge comic fan studying Mechanical Engineering so he can finally figure out how the Batmobile works.
