Legion (Marvel Comics)

• 1. Introduction

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  David Charles Haller, the Marvel Comics character known as Legion, may carry more than a thousand personalities in a single mind. Nobody knows the exact number, because his mind can create a new one whenever something shakes him, from outside or within. Every personality arrives with its own powers, and some of them reshape his body. Beneath them all sits a raw ability to alter reality and time on a cosmic scale. That makes him an antihero, a threat and a patient all at once. How did one person end up with a mind like this? What did it cost the people around him? And what happens when someone this powerful cannot trust his own thoughts?

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• 2. Notes in a Margin

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  In March 1985, Legion made his first appearance as a few lines in Moira MacTaggert's notes, tacked onto the end of The New Mutants #25. His full story followed one issue later, in The New Mutants #26 from April 1985. Writer Chris Claremont and artist Bill Sienkiewicz created him, and he usually shows up as an antagonist or supporting figure in stories about the X-Men and their allies.

  The name comes from scripture. In passages found in Mark 5 and Luke 8, Jesus asks a man possessed by many evil spirits what he is called. The man answers, "I am Legion, for we are many." The line suits a character whose head is crowded with other people.

  In 1991, Marvel planned to make Legion a co-star in the newly revamped X-Factor, as a member of the team. Writer Peter David was uncomfortable with the plan. Editor Bob Harras reached the same conclusion independently, and Legion was kept out of the series. David's objection was about believability. Readers already accept that strangers form a team, and adding a member too unstable to leave Muir Island was, in his words, "asking the reader to bend so far he will break."

  The character who could not fit into a team eventually carried his own comics, including a run of X-Men Legacy and a five-issue series collected as Legion: Trauma.

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• 3. Son of Xavier

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  Charles Xavier was working in an Israeli psychiatric facility when he met a patient named Gabrielle Haller. The two had an affair that ended on friendly terms. Gabrielle became pregnant with David and never told Charles. David grew up in Paris with his mother and his godfather, Daniel Shomron.

  An attack by anti-Semitic terrorists in Paris ended that childhood by killing Daniel. In the shock, David's mutant powers appeared for the first time, and he incinerated the minds of the attackers. He also absorbed the mind of their leader, Jemail Karami, by accident. David then spent years catatonic.

  On Muir Island, Moira MacTaggert took David into her care as he recovered. The trauma, perhaps combined with his powers, left him with dissociative identity disorder. Each of his alters showed different mutant abilities. Karami, who was telepathic, spent years trying to pull his consciousness away from David's and to merge the other alters. Some resisted him. Jack Wayne was a swaggering telekinetic adventurer, and Cyndi was a temperamental, rebellious pyrokinetic girl.

  Jack Wayne's telekinesis once saved Moira and Wolfsbane from a fatal accident. The rescue let Wayne seize David's body and leave the island. The New Mutants tracked him down and persuaded him to hand control back. Soon afterward, the Shadow King possessed David. Under that influence he killed Destiny and destroyed two thirds of Muir Island. After the X-Men and X-Factor defeated the Shadow King, David lay in a coma.

  Killing Destiny had one more consequence nobody expected, because David absorbed her psyche in the act.

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• 4. Rewriting Time

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  Destiny's psyche spoke to David after he woke from the coma, vaguely describing a great world that could exist "if only, years ago, Professor X had been given a real chance to fulfill his dream." David believed his mind was fully healed. He took her words as an order to travel back in time and kill Magneto, Xavier's greatest adversary, so that humans and mutants could live together.

  He jumped twenty years into the past and accidentally dragged the X-Men along. When he tried to kill Magneto, Xavier stepped in and died. That erased Legion from existence and produced the timeline known as the Age of Apocalypse. Bishop later repaired it. He enlisted the new reality's X-Men and traveled to the moment of Xavier's murder. There he trapped Legion in a psionic loop that showed the damage his actions would cause. David let the energy incinerate him, and in his last moments he apologized.

  He did not stay gone. David had been carried to Otherplace, a timeless limbo between dimensions, where he manifested thousands of alternate personalities. Magik, who can travel across dimensions, contacted one of those alters, called The Legion, who can alter reality at a cosmic scale. She offered to guide it home if it would destroy her nemeses, the Elder Gods.

  When David returned to the physical world, his other alters had imprisoned his primary personality in his mindscape. The more malicious alters ran his body. One killed and absorbed a young girl named Marci Sobol, who became another alter. Legion battled the X-Men until Karma and Magik helped him regain control. He was placed in the care of Professor X, Doctor Nemesis, Danger and Rogue. Weeks later, Magik brought the Elder Gods to Earth and caused catastrophic destruction. Karma woke The Legion to hold up its end of the bargain, and it erased the Gods and reset the world.

  Doctor Nemesis believed David would heal if his alters were quarantined, so he began to catalog and contain them. David's mind read this as an attack and produced a "psychic antibody," a powerful new personality with some of his reality-altering ability. She took the appearance of Moira and built a pocket reality in which Legion was the hero he always wanted to be.

  That reality was the Age of X, a dystopia where mutants were nearly hunted to extinction. Legion's team, the Force Warriors, kept them alive behind a force wall that repelled human attackers. Most of the mutants brought there believed they had always lived in it. When Legion learned the truth, the false Moira offered to create as many universes for him as he wanted. He absorbed her instead and erased the Age of X, returning its inhabitants to Earth-616.

  Professor X now faced a harder question, which was how to treat a mind able to build entire worlds.

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• 5. Cost of Control

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  Professor X's answer after the Age of X was to teach David to live alongside his alters rather than wall them off. Doctor Nemesis, Madison Jeffries and Reed Richards designed the Neural Switchboard Wristband, which let David borrow an alter's powers for several seconds without being overwhelmed. The device backfired when six alters escaped his mind. While tracking them down, David accidentally absorbed Rogue and suffered severe nervous damage when he released her. He soon abandoned the wristband in favor of a more organic kind of control.

  Merzah, a powerful empath and telepath who ran a Himalayan monastery, took David in to aid his recovery. Under Merzah's teaching, David built a facility in his mind where his alters could be kept and controlled. Then Professor X was killed. Sensing it, David released a catastrophic burst of energy that killed Merzah and everyone else at the monastery. At the full extent of his powers, David erased himself from existence.

  For unknown reasons, he survived, and his mind fragmented again. Among the new alters was a malicious one named Lord Trauma, who wanted to absorb every other personality and take over David's body. David sought out the psychotherapist Hannah Jones. She helped him defeat Trauma, but her psyche stayed trapped in his mind while her body lay in a vegetative state. To thank her, Legion put her psyche into a dream state where she reached her biggest goals.

  In the story called X-Men Disassembled, hundreds of Jamie Madrox duplicates were causing havoc across the world when Legion arrived at the X-Mansion, apparently in control of his powers. Jean Grey and Psylocke worked to purge whatever force controlled the duplicates. They found the prime Madrox imprisoned below, and he explained that Legion had locked him up and implanted alters and powers into the duplicates. With that control broken, Legion went berserk, attacked the young X-Men and ranted about a vision of the future. He took on the whole team until he and Jean Grey went head to head. He said he was trying to prevent the arrival of the Horsemen of Salvation. Just as he named them, they arrived.

  After the X-Men established Krakoa as a mutant nation, the group called Orchis captured Legion and built a psychic weapon to manipulate Krakoa's mutants. Nightcrawler rescued him and learned the weapon was a restored Onslaught. After the Hellfire Gala, Legion joined the Scarlet Witch and Proteus to enhance Cerebro. They gave it the power to copy the minds of mutants who died before its creation, and of potential mutants who died before their X-Gene activated. That made their resurrection possible.

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• 6. The Crowd Inside

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  Legion ranks as an Omega-level mutant, and the label rests on his underlying power to alter reality and time at will. In practice, his abilities depend on which personality is in charge. Each alter's powers come from David's subconscious reshaping of reality. David himself generally shows no mutant abilities. He has to access other personalities to use their powers, and he sometimes loses himself to them. A few alters even transform his body, giving him a prehensile tongue, turning him into a woman or making him a werewolf.

  Some personalities carry numbers. Number 5, The Legion, claims to be his real self, and Magik nicknamed it the God-Mutant. Sally, number 67, has immense strength. Lucas, number 115, channels sound into energy blasts. Number 186, Johnny Gomorrah, transmutes objects into salt. Number 762 is a pirate who generates acidic gas, and number 898 is a centaur. Delphic, number 1012, is a blue-skinned seer who will answer any three questions from supplicants.

  Styx, number 666, is the one David considers most dangerous. He is clever, cruel and extremely ambitious. Anyone he touches has their consciousness absorbed, and their body becomes a shell he controls. There seems to be no limit to how many people he can run at once. Styx became independent as a desiccated corpse and tried to seize Legion himself, hoping to remake the world with Legion's reality-altering powers. Legion used his Chain personality, effectively a human virus, to trick and reabsorb him.

  Many other alters have no number at all. Origamist is a reality-warping sumo wrestler who can fold spacetime to teleport any object anywhere. Hypnobloke wears a top hat, carries a pocket watch and hypnotizes with swirling eyes. Ksenia Nadejda Panov is a Moscovite heiress, discus-throwing champion and caviar exporter who grows ionic scalpels from her fingers. The Delusionaut is a train driver with a billow stack for a head, and his smoke creates realistic illusions. Chronodon is a dinosaur with a clock on its face. Non-Newtonian Annie wears a "zero-tau nullskin" that amplifies any kinetic energy hitting it and sends it straight back at the source.

  Gestalt began as a defense. Several personalities merged with David's core self to repel an attack on his mind, letting their powers work together under his control. Tyrannix the Abominoid, a small Cthulhu-like creature, was the first to volunteer. Mycolojester, Protozoan Porter and the Delusionaut joined him.

  The strangest alter may be the Weaver, a large arachnid wreathed in bright light. It turns out to be either David's core self or a mirror of him. When the two unite, David can observe and alter all time and space at will. Aware of what that meant, he tried to unmake himself by erasing his own birth. The attempt failed, for unknown reasons, and it created Lord Trauma.

  His control tracks his confidence. The better David feels about himself, the more command he has, yet he often suffers self-doubt and self-recrimination. His first appearance also described him as autistic, but that label has not returned. A television series would later give him a different diagnosis altogether.

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• 7. Screens and Other Worlds

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  From 2017 to 2019, the FX series Legion starred Dan Stevens as the adult David, with several young actors playing him at earlier ages. This version was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his reality-warping abilities were often mistaken for psionic powers such as telepathy and telekinesis. In the first season, he begins a relationship with Sydney Barrett, a body-swapping mutant. He also discovers that the Shadow King has lived in his mind since childhood, before the Shadow King possesses another psychic mutant, Oliver Bird.

  In the second season, David pursues the Shadow King, then joins forces with him to avert a future plague and grows more psychopathic. In the third season, he starts a cult and recruits Switch, a mutant with time-traveling capabilities, to warn his parents, Professor X and Gabrielle Haller. He puts his mother into a catatonic state. He eventually confronts his father, then tries to kill the Shadow King for ruining his life. Instead he reconciles with him, creating a new timeline in the process. A separate alternate-reality David resembling the comic book version appears in the episode "Chapter 18," also played by Stevens.

  Animation reshaped him differently. The X-Men: Evolution episode "Sins of the Son" features Legion, voiced by Kyle Labine, with David, Lucas and an original personality named Ian, a mute boy with pyrokinesis. His body transforms to match whichever personality is in control, and his link to Professor X is toned down for a younger audience. In Marvel Anime: X-Men, a character partly based on him named Takeo Sasaki is Professor X's son. Atsushi Abe voices him in Japanese and Steve Staley in the English dub. Legion himself does not appear, but he is blamed for creating "Demon-Hall Syndrome," an affliction that causes multiple personalities, uncontrolled physical mutations and psychological instability.

  Comic book alternatives exist too. The Ultimate Marvel version of Proteus is a composite with elements of Legion, named David Xavier and born to Moira MacTaggert and Charles Xavier. On Earth-6160, in Ultimate Wolverine, David Haller was killed in a landslide with his mother and moved his consciousness into computer code. Beast found him in cyberspace and convinced his personalities to cooperate. Working together as "The One" inside the Opposition's network, they treated psychological issues.

  Critics have also ranked him. In 2014, Entertainment Weekly placed Legion 21st in its list "Let's rank every X-Man ever." In 2018, Comic Book Resources put him 14th among X-Men kids cooler than their parents, and first in its list of the 20 most powerful mutants from the 1980s.

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