X-Men Legends #3 // Review
Far back in the mid-1980s, writer/editor Ann Nocenti had worked with artist Arthur Adams on a very popular mini-series called Longshot. The intention may have been to lead into a regular Longshot series. It was certainly popular enough. Nocenti got a little side-tracked. She’d intended on getting back to Longshot in a couple of years but ended up getting lost in other work for nearly four decades. A lot had happened. There was an extended run on Daredevil. Another on Catwoman. There was an editorship at High Times. There were...a hell of a lot of other projects. Now she’s ready to get reacquainted with the character in X-Men Legends #3. This time Nocenti teams up with artist Javier Pina and colorist Jim Campbell. It’s exciting to see her getting back to the character she co-created a long time ago...if only for a few issues.
The chapter picks up right after the end of the 1980s mini-series. The amnesiac known as Longshot has regained his memory and plunged himself into a portal to chase his arch-enemy Mojo back to his own world. It’s a world in which Mojo serves as the god-producer of big-budget action films. Longshot was quite a star. He was also a slave. Now he remembers it all. And he’s ready to bring on the revolution against the mega-fascist director. Mojo’s still too wrapped up in his work as an auteur director to take the revolution seriously. He treats it like everything else: turns it into a movie.
Nocenti’s dialogue has improved A LOT over the course of the past few decades. She’s savvy enough with the script of the issue to make it fit more or less perfectly into the moments right after the end of a mini-series that was written decades ago but does so in a way that fully embraces a general audience that is much more knowledgeable about motion pictures than it was back in the 1980s. The comic book superhero fandom is obsessed with film. Nocenti is giving them what they want. (She even places Wolverine in the edges of the panel as a guest star.)
It would have been nice to have Art Adams continue the series as the artist in the exact same style he was using back in the mid-1980s, but that would have been too much to ask. (He IS doing a variant cover, though.) Pina’s art fits the style of Longshot, Mojo, and the rest of the cast quite well in a chapter that mixes weird satire with cleverly-executed action that feels like it wouldn’t have been at all out of place in the mid-1980s when the follow-up SHOULD have happened. Pina captures all the right elements of Adams’s style in spirit, mood, motion, and emotion.
Also featured in the cast are Kitty Pryde, Lockheed, and Spiral. And it’s really nice to see Spiral stand up to Mojo as best as she can. The story continues next month with the next issue of X-Men Legends. It isn’t going to run for a whole lot longer, though. The contemporary comic book audience has grown into a fervor over disgusting real-world Mojo types like Zack Snyder and James Cameron. Nocenti’s working in a contemporary era that follows every last detail from Disney and Warner Brothers. Would it be too much to ask for Nocenti to be allowed to run an extended satire on the current superhero film culture with a new Longshot series? Please?
