X-men Legacy #272 - Too Much Talking and Not Enough Awesome

When it comes to a comic book that has fucked itself like a triple-jointed nymphomaniac acrobat, I'm usually pretty forgiving. I'm no fucking Gandhi, but I am a reasonable drunk if nothing else. I'm always willing to offer a second chance, whether it's with a comic or with someone who is sincerely sorry they smoked all my weed and took a shit on my couch. Now I've yet to see a comic book ever outright apologize for shitty issues. Marvel has never shown even the slightest remorse for shit like the Clone Saga or Chuck Austin's Uncanny X-men run. DC isn't much better, who still haven't apologized for that shitty Superboy Prime continuity punch. But I'm of the opinion that the best way for a comic to make up for shitty issues is to make the next issue extra awesome.

This extra awesome is vital for a series like X-men Legacy and not just because it's one of the many titles relaunching under the Marvel NOW! initiative. Anyone who read my review of X-men Legacy #271 should still have their assholes clenched at the thought of how fucked this title has become. At the onset of the Avengers vs. X-men tie-ins, X-men Legacy was the early gold standard. Now it's standards are lower than the producers of the Jersey Shore. It's one thing to just tell a shitty story. It's quite another to take an awesome character like Rogue and essentially cast her out from the shit storm that is AvX into some crazy world where a bunch of cat-people offer to bone her (both literally and figuratively). It was quite possibly the most forgettable tie-in in the history of tie-ins. I mean how the fuck do you go from fighting cosmic forces to fending off cat people that want to bone you? There isn't a magic mushroom in the world magical enough to conjure that shit.

But I am more than willing to give X-men Legacy #272 a shot. X-men Legacy has had it's ups and downs before, but it has a history of fighting it's way back, kicking my ass, and doing it in a way that gives me a serious boner (amongst other things). Now I'm not expecting an apology from Marvel or pictures of the asshole that lost the bar fight that led to this issue (although they would be much appreciated). But I would at least expect a story that is somewhat more memorable and somehow relevant in way that can't be forgotten with a single bong hit. That may be asking a lot. Then again, this is X-men Legacy. It does have a legacy to hold up and not just in name alone.

X-men Legacy #272 picks up after the overly predictable ending in the previous issue. Actually, it picks up AFTER that overly predictable ending hinted at some action. In the phantom pages between the end of X-men Legacy #271 and the first pages of X-men Legacy #272, Rogue is subdued by the cat people's arch enemies, the Swarm. We don't get to see the struggle. We don't get to see much of anything aside from the the king of the cat people thinking this pretty girl who they offered their finest studs wasn't as good as her rack made her out to be. The only action we get is when we catch up with Rogue while she's being marched away with the Swarm while they try to influence her with their hive mind. She tries to break free, but fails without much of a battle. It's as exciting as it sounds.

If you thought it couldn't get more predictable, then clearly you have awesome weed because the first thing the Swarm does is take Rogue to their queen and the source of the hive mind. That's like giving North Korean gangsters your passport and credit card info. Shit is not going to turn out well. The queen tries force her into the Swarm's hive mind (again). And (again) she fails miserably and Rogue fights her way out. Since she doesn't have her Miss Marvel powers, there's nothing really spectacular about it. It's just a hot girl running from a pack of monsters. You can pretty much get the same shit from EVERY slasher movie ever made.

Since she's not armed with the same power as before, the Swarm subdues her (yet again). At this point, no amount of weed is enough to make you overlook the growing trend here. The queen tries (yet again) to bring Rogue into their collective hive mind. But instead of another epic struggle, we get something that different that actually ends up being more boring if you can believe that.

The queen takes Rogue into a psychic journey of sorts that's about as exciting as a staring contest between a couple of dead fish. She explains with some very shitty visuals the joys of being part of a hive mind. It's pretty much everything you hear from North Korean propaganda. Everybody is on the same team. There are no secrets. Everybody has a common goal. Nobody is better than everybody else except for some great leader who probably jerks off behind the scenes while everyone else suffers. It's not quite as vile as Nazi collectivism and to the credit of the queen, she tries to paint it as a good thing. But it's all just needlessly wordy and any reader that isn't part of a Mormon cult won't take it seriously.

Rogue responds with an equally wordy, equally predictable rebuttal. It basically amounts to "being a mindless drone sucks" and "thinking for yourself is awesome." It all sounds so nice, like something you would see in a Mitt Romney add, minus the subtle racism. But again, it's so painfully predictable and bland that you really don't even have to read it. You can just assume Rogue reads from a script of every evil empire vs. freedom loving hero story ever made and it's pretty much the same thing. Rogue doesn't say anything that stands out aside from the queen, the great leader of the hive mind, keeping secrets. They're probably not as bad as Kim Jong Ill's porno collection, but to make the queen ditch the whole "free will is overrated debate." It's probably for the best.

The queen orders the Swarm to attack Rogue and the one other Swarm that tried to corrupt her earlier, who may have overheard the queen's dirty little secret. So he/she or whatever the fuck qualifies as a gender for these things is like the guy who walked in on Sadam Hussein while he was masturbating to pictures of Hillary Clinton. He might as well not exist. The attack isn't all that spectacular. Instead of fighting back this time, Rogue just decides to play dead and allows herself and the unfortunate Swarm to fall into a canyon. Of course they survive because this comic just wasn't predictable enough I guess. If you're still awake at this point, consider yourself lucky.

After the rest of the Swarm are confident they're dead, Rogue and the now excommunicated Swarm break out. Rogue is even nice enough to completely cut his link from the hive mind. This is probably as traumatic as cutting off a teenage girl from her Facebook account. This helps reveal a secret that really shouldn't be very startling. This whole war between the cat people and the Swarm is nothing more than a theater between a couple of power-hungry monarchs. It would be a great twist if there was at least some indication that there was a mystery behind it. That shit was never even hinted at so when you find out, it has about as much impact as another sex scandal involving a gay-bashing politician and male prostitute.

So all we really find out in this debate between individualism and collectivism is that authority figures are dicks and war is just one big joke. It's almost as if Rogue was nothing more than a prop in that joke. This doesn't really feel like her journey anymore. It's a sci-fi cookie cutter story that offers nothing new or compelling. Rogue now has to stop a war between two alien races and it has absolutely nothing to do with the events of Avengers vs. X-men. If this issue was meant to rescue the series from obscurity and make up for the previous issue, it failed miserably.

When I finished reading the last issue, my first response was to bang my head against the wall and swallow copious amounts of sleeping pills. My reaction to this issue was similar, but I didn't need the sleeping pills. This issue was dull and boring enough to be a fucking Ambien commercial. Rogue was yanked out of Avengers vs. X-men and thrust into the middle of an alien war. Yet this issue made it look as though she was in the middle of a republican primary debate. It was mostly talk, a philosophical debate on the merits of collectivism vs. individualism. Of freedom vs. order. Now I'm all for philosophical debates after ingesting a certain amount of LSD, but shit like this has no place in a fucking comic book arc about an alien war. It's not like a new twist was put on this argument either. Being in a collective is boring. Being individualistic is chaotic. The connections between this and Avengers vs. X-men were more loose than the shit in an Indian public restroom. That makes this issue all the more forgettable and only half as nauseating.

At least with the previous issue, we had some funny and memorable moments. I still laugh when I recall the look on Rogue's face when she was offered to bone some of the finest studs the cat people have to offer. But this issue had no boning, no hints at boning, and embarrassing moments for Rogue. It was just her talking and getting the two opposing sides to talk. That's about as exciting as it sounds. There's not a single memorable moment or a memorable piece of dialog. You could probably take the speech of any Republican politician, minus the racist, anti-gay, and anti-woman innuendo, and paste it into Rogue's dialog here on the merits of individual free will and there won't be much difference. You would think Rogue would at least show some of her trademark sass in the face of an alien war, but we get none of that shit here.

Now I'm not giving up on X-men Legacy. I still love this series, but I'm ready for this fucking arc to be over. This issue and the previous issue were boring, forgettable, and dull. The only good thing I can say about them is that they haven't butchered any characters or done any major damage to the rest of X-men Legacy or the X-books as a whole. In that sense, it's nowhere nearly as fucked up as every Ultimate title at the moment. It's just completely useless and not worth picking up. And with no cat people dongs to save it, I can only give X-men Legacy #272 a 1.5 out of 5. It's boring. It's dull. There's really no reason for this issue or this arc to exist other than trying to subtly influence comic fans into voting Republican. In that sense, comics like this aren't just bad. They're a Republican conspiracy. Nuff said!

X-men Legacy #271 - Utterly Forgettable (Except For Naked Cat Men)

When I was in high school, I missed my share of awesome parties for a number of extremely unawesome reasons. One time some dick-cheese who probably got sick of me beating his ass at beer pong once slipped roofies into my whiskey. Not only did I miss the party, I woke up naked in my high school locker spooning a tuba that I stole from the music department. Sometimes I missed a party for reasons that resulted in much less brain damage. One time in college, my stoner roommate gave me the wrong directions to a party and we ended up on a Mormon compound with this crazy preacher guy saying that we'll find god in his rectum. I'm not sure if that's exactly what he said, but he was speaking in tongues so I'm pretty sure his rectum was part of it. My point is, if there's any point to begin with, is that missing a party sucks balls and that extends to comics.

X-men Legacy has delivered some damn good tie-ins with Avengers vs. X-men so far. We've seen Frenzy butcher a bunch of ruthless African warlords while dealing with some unresolved childhood issues in the process. We've also seen Rogue and Miss Marvel fight in a ways that could only have been more awesome if they did so in their underwear. In the last issue, Rogue's unwavering support of the Phoenix Five finally caught up to her when she found out they were imprisoning Avengers in a little slice of Limbo run by Magik. That's like making Ted Bundy the head of a sorority house. It was pretty fucking gruesome, but Rogue only ended up screwing herself out of the party when she attempted to free Miss Marvel and tell her she was right.

This led to Magik, being a merciful teenage girl with god-like power after all, to cast Rogue into some pocket dimension that James Cameron probably birthed when he was high on shrooms. It's an effective way of dealing with someone who wasn't afriad to get naked with Magneto. But at the same time, it takes Rogue and X-men Legacy by default out of the Avenger vs. X-men story. It's like being in the middle of open heart surgery and stopping to do a pap smear for Courtney Love. One isn't related to the other and each can be equally disastrous. Now I love seeing Rogue shine in crazy alternate worlds, but not during the middle of a big story. It's like taking a shit and jerking off at the same time. One sort of defeats the other.

Never-the-less, X-men Legacy #271 promises to show off Rogue's trademark awesome in all the right ways. It has her landing right in the middle of a battle between a couple of stereotypical alien hoards. Okay, so maybe stereotypical is a loaded term when you're referring to hoards. One looks like a hoard of disgusting insects. One looks like a hoard of Thundercats ripoffs. Since the insects don't have anyone nearly as hot as Cheetara, it's probably safe to assume that the cat people are the good guys.

As is the case for any hero that gets caught up in an alien war, they don't know which side to root for at this point. They usually have to wait until some hulking monster attacks them and decides for them. Well if you were hoping for this comic to buck the tend, go back to hoping they'll have gay marriage in Saudi Arabia because there's nothing surprising here. A very bland and very generic green hulking monster that looks like a prototype version of Swamp Thing (that or a very large glob of Hulk's semen) attacks Rogue and since she's still armed with Miss Marvel's powers, she blasts right through it and doesn't even get her hair messy. In an issue of X-men Legacy, we just can't have that now can we?

But Rogue doesn't stick around to find out who else the Hulk rip-off was attacking. She opts for some peace in quiet in what looks like an LSD trip into Wonderland. There's some light inner monologue here, but it's nothing too memorable. She just thinks the same shit anyone would think if they ended up on an alien planet, minus the part where they shit their pants. There isn't much talk about the events of Avengers vs. X-men. Hell, you wouldn't even know that shit is still going on if you were careless and/or high. If that weren't bad enough, the story continues to be overly predictable. Rogue is attacked yet again, this time by one of the cat people. He's no Cheetara or Lion-O, but I guess Marvel is saving their pet fetishes for the next big event featuring Squirrel Girl.

Rogue and her attacker exchange a few blows. The attacker is speaking an alien language so she doesn't know what the fuck he's saying. Probably something along the lines of "Whoever shaved that pussy must have been messed up." Or maybe that's just what an alien would think after seeing Kathey Bates get a fresh Brazilian. Either way, Rogue breaks the guys sword when he strikes her and he happens to conveniently graze her in the process, allowing her to absorb the creature enough to learn his language. It's nice that Gage takes the time to do those little things that most writers overlooked since there was a time when every comic writer thought the universe spoke English. But it's pretty fucking convenient and predictable in a comic that already has plenty of that shit.

The guy whose sword she just broke in a totally non-dick joke way is upset, but then one of his associates calls him off. Seeing someone break a sword and learn a language in a second is something that apparently impresses these creatures. He was among those who saw her kick that green monsters ass and the king of their little cat-race (whose not named Lion-O I imagine), was so impressed that he sent out a search party to find her. Rogue's new cat friend explains that they're in the middle of a war (as if that shit wasn't already apparent enough) with a race called the Swarm. It's as unoriginal as it sounds. They're basically just uglier versions of the Borg in that they try to assimilate minds into a collective hive. Apparently, these creatures have a problem with that and are at war trying to stop them. He asks Rogue for her help and she's reluctant at first, but then he says his people have some mystical shit that could help get her back home. That sure gets her attention and she agrees to help. Again, none of this shit should surprise anyone who has read more than three comic books in their life.

Rogue is brought back to their base. She meets the king, who is kind of a dick to her. But then again, what ruler isn't these days? His subordinate says she's an Alpha, which is their version of a badass warrior that you want to follow when you're at war with a bunch of creepy insects. The king still doesn't seem convinced and decides to give Rogue. Her new biggest fan takes her to a private room where she can rest. This leads to one of the only entertaining aspects of the issue in that in addition to the bed, she offers her the pick of the litter in terms of studs. He even has them whip out their dongs to prove their worth. Rogue, being too polite or not in touch with her inner cat fetish, respectfully declines. You have to imagine that if it was a man in her place and he was offered his pick of beautiful cat-women, he would fuck them regardless of whether or not he had a cat fetish.

Now I forgot pretty much all the events in the pages preceding this one, but this one is definitely memorable in a special way. Rogue, who has always attracted some crazy characters from Magneto to Gambit, has a way of making sexy entertaining in a way that'll make you laugh and give you a boner. As I speak, there are probably fanfiction writers out there working on a story that has Rogue in an orgy of cat-men. That's how you now you've got a memorable scene and in a comic that's been pretty boring thus far, it's a welcome sight.

Unfortunately, that's the only part of the comic that's worth remembering. Not much else happens. Once Rogues goes to sleep without partaking in cat-man dong, some of the insect creatures sneak into her bedroom and attack (with no explanation mind you). She begins fighting them off, but runs out of Miss Marvel power in the process. So she's essentially screwed and the comic ends on a cliffhanger. Again, if any part of that surprises you, see a doctor. You've clearly had one too many concussions and a blood vessel may have just popped.

After reading this issue, only two questions went through my mind. "What the fuck does this have to do with Avengers vs. X-men" and "Who the fuck drank all my whiskey?" I have some solid leads on the latter, but I'm utterly stumped on the former. This is exactly what I feared after the last issue of X-men Legacy. Behind running out of booze and weed, a comic series that crashes and burns in the middle of a big event is always one of my greatest fears. Granted, this is just a tie-in, but since this series had made for some really solid tie-ins to date this issue is a major kick in the balls. Rogue makes friends with some aliens and kicks a very small amount of ass and she gets a chance to channel her inner cat fetish. That's about it.

There are a lot of things wrong with this issue. The inner monologue is bland. The dialog is mediocre. Rogue's sassy nature does show, but it sure as hell doesn't shine like it usually does in an issue of X-men Legacy. The whole alien conflict is bland and generic without so much as a hint of there being a twist of sorts. Hell, it might as well have been ripped from an episode of Star Trek or the Green Lantern cartoon. It's like Gage got stoned and watched Thundercats reruns for inspiration. I'm all for ripping off quality shows, but I would at least try to make it so it's more interesting. Aside from some of those cat warriors showing off their dongs for Rogue, there was nothing compelling about this premise.

This issue fails for the same reason the John Carter movie failed, minus the shitty marketing and overbloated budget. It tries to be epic, but lacks the substance behind it to be epic. At least John Carter had flashy visuals that you can watch while stoned and still have a good time. I got stoned and read this comic and about halfway through I set it aside to get some Twinkies. When a comic can't hold the interest of someone who's stoned, something done gone horribly wrong. Rogue still kicked some ass and she got to have a humorous LOL moment with the cat warrior studs. But this is an utterly forgettable issue that has no effect on Avengers vs. X-men and offers little chance for character development. I give X-men Legacy a 1.5 out of 5. Unless your a Furrey or into bestiality, you have no reason to pick up this issue. Of course if you're either, I'm sure there are other outlets for your interests and I'd rather not know about them. Nuff said!