Legion (Marvel Comics)

Legion
Cover to X-Men #40. Art by Andy Kubert. Cover to X-Men #40 (1995). Art by Andy Kubert.
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
First appearance	New Mutants Vol. 1 #25 (Mar 1985)
Created by	Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz
In-story information
Alter ego	David Charles Haller
Species	Human Mutant
Team affiliations	Muir Island X-Men
Notable aliases	Daniel Haller
Abilities	The mutant ability to absorb a person's psyche into his as an alternate personality, and manifest their superhuman abilities when they are dominant, including: Telepathy Telekinesis Pyrokinesis Time travel

Legion (David Charles Haller) is a Marvel Comics character, created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Bill Sienkiewicz.

David is the mutant son of Charles Xavier and Israeli Holocaust survivor Gabrielle Haller. He has severe mental illness, including a form of dissociative identity disorder (more commonly known as multiple personality disorder), with each of his personas controlling one of his many superpowers.

His stories typically revolve around bitterness towards his father, and in Legion Quest, a misplaced attempt to redeem himself in his father's eyes.

Fictional character biography

Charles Xavier met Gabrielle Haller while working in an Israeli mental facility where she was one of his patients. Xavier was secretly using his psychic powers to ease the pain of Holocaust survivors institutionalized there. The two had an affair that resulted in the birth of a son David, in Haifa. However, Xavier is unaware of this, and Gabrielle never told him.

Powers manifest

When he was very young, David was among the victims of a terrorist attack, in which he was the only survivor. The trauma of the situation caused David to manifest his mutant powers, incinerating the minds of the terrorists. In the process, he absorbed the mind of the terrorist leader, Jemail Karami, into his own. Being linked to so many others at their time of death, he was rendered catatonic, and remained in the care of Moira MacTaggert at the Muir Island mutant research facility. The trauma caused David's personality to splinter, with each of the personalities controlling a different aspect of his psionic power.

Struggle from within

Karami struggled for years to separate his consciousness from David's. Using David's telepathic abilities, he reintegrated the multiple personalities into David's core personality. Some of the personalities resisted Karami, and two proved to be formidable opponents: Jack Wayne, a swaggering adventurer, who commands David's telekinetic power, and Cyndi, a temperamental, rebellious girl who controls David's pyrokinetic power. Wayne intended to destroy Karami's consciousness to preserve his own independent existence within David's mind. Neither personality succeeds, and Karami, Wayne, and Cyndi continue as David's dominant personalities.

During his time at Muir Island, David emerged from his catatonia. Soon after, David was possessed by the Shadow King, who used his powers to psychically increase the amount of hatred in the world and feed on the malignant energy. During this time the Shadow King, as David, killed the mutant Destiny. The X-Men and X-Factor fought the Shadow King, and as a result, David was left in a coma.

Legion Quest/Age of Apocalypse

When Mystique tracked down David years later to get revenge for "his" murder of Destiny, he awakened with his fractured mind healed. David had a new goal, to help his father realize his dream of human-mutant coexistence by killing Magneto, Xavier's greatest opponent, before he has a chance to amass power. He traveled twenty years into the past, when Xavier and Magneto were orderlies at the mental hospital. In the process, he loses his memory. Magneto then accidentally triggers his memory, causing David to go on a rampage, attacking Magneto and revealing the existence of mutants to the public decades too early. Several X-Men who were pulled back in time with him were unable to prevent him from attacking Magneto. Xavier, however, leaped into the path of the psi-knife (the focused totality of Legion's psionic powers) being killed in Magneto's place, causing the formation of the Age of Apocalypse timeline.

Due to being trapped in the past by David's actions, Bishop enlisted the aid of the new reality's X-Men to travel back in time to confront Legion again. Bishop seized Legion's psi-blade and drove it into his own chest, allowing Legion to see the future that he caused. In his last moments, David apologized for what he did. David's mother, Gabrielle Haller, described having a "maternal loss" afterward implying David had never been conceived.

While David was considered deceased, some of his alternate personalities remained trapped between life and death, manifesting as spirits. When the spirits started terrorizing Israel, Excalibur was called to stop them. After learning that the spirits were refusing death, Meggan used her empathy to calm their rage, convincing them to go "towards the light."

Return

Sometime later, Legion is discovered alive and trapped in a concrete box by the reformed New Mutants as they are investigating a possible mutant case in Westcliffe, Colorado. After accidentally absorbing Karma and trying to protect a little girl called Marci, who is trapped within his mind as well. David, now beset with an army of split personalities, tries to take control of his body through a doll named Moira. After escaping his cell David flies off to kill Dani Moonstar. One of Legion's split personalities revealed that when Bishop used Legion's psychic blade, David was transported to the Age of Apocalypse timeline where he was caught and made a slave, however didn't reveal how Legion managed to return to the present timeline. When Magik is absorbed into his mind as well, she begins killing off the other personalities to get to Karma and Marci. Eventually Marci leads the girls to David, who has been locked away by the other personalities. They then manage to get a hold of the doll that controls his body and Karma and Magik return to their bodies and David is taken into the care of the X-Men.

Following the aftermath of Utopia, the X-Club, along with Rogue and Danger are repairing David's mind by erasing the other personalities one by one, much to the delight of David. It is revealed by Karma, during a session with Kavita Rao that Marci was a little girl who helped David by keeping him company when he came back from the Age of Apocalypse but one of the other personalities wanted to play with her and murdered her. She then became trapped within his mind. Before Karma and Magik left his mind, Karma killed the man who murdered Marci using Magik's soulsword. Both lie to Kavita, saying Magik killed him.

Utopia

Legion is being cared for by Danger, who is assessing his personalities and has sedated him in the prison section of Utopia, along with Sebastian Shaw, Empath, and Donald Pierce.

Second Coming

Legion appears in X-Men: Second Coming as one of the X-Men fighting Bastion's Nimrod Sentinels. With the Nimrod Army relentlessly appearing from a portal hellbent on destroying the mutants on Utopia, Charles Xavier is tasked with mobilizing his son to aid in their battle against the sentinels. This is because of the X-Men's need to employ Legion's unique powers, despite his apparent instability due to his multiple personality disorder. Legion is airdropped into battle, employing two of his many personalities, each containing a different power.

Powers and abilities

Legion is an Omega-level mutant that has multiple personalities. At least the first, Jemail, was the mind of a terrorist that David somehow absorbed into himself. According to Karma, the only way he can absorb other people into his mind is if he is right next to them when they die or through psychic powers like telepathy. While two others, Jack Wayne and Cyndi made themselves known, it is unknown how many other personalities there were or could have been. The manifestations of Legion's individual powers are generally associated with his different personalities, with each personality controlling a different power. The cumulative powers of all his personalities make him one of the strongest mutants in existence.

He has manifested the powers of telepathy through the personality of Jemail Karami, telekinesis through the personality of Jack Wayne, pyrokinesis through the personality of Cyndi and teleportation through another unknown personality. Apparently, Legion's core personality finally took control of his splinter personalities' powers, since he manifested psionic abilities when he traveled back in time.

In the current New Mutants run, Legion is shown as inhabited by thousands of personalities, each with its own superhuman ability, some of which have physical manifestations that manifest such as lycanthropy and a prehensile tongue. According to Cannonball, this is a new part of his power. Some of the other powers he manifests include super speed, flight, x-ray vision, heat absorption, super strength, matter animation and sonic screams. Dr. Nemesis reveals that because his mind has become so fractured due to the many personalities, he instinctively created a doll named Moira, when one personality gets hold of the doll, it controls his body.

Mentality

Legion has also been described as both autistic and schizophrenic by a number of writers.

Origin of name

Legion is named after the Biblical demon Legion. A man possessed by many evil spirits was asked by Jesus what his name was, to which he replied "Our name is Legion, for we are many".

Other versions

Ultimate Proteus

The Ultimate incarnation of Proteus is a combination of Legion and Proteus from the mainstream comics. While he possesses Proteus' reality warping power and has the same mother Moira MacTaggert, he is named David Xavier and his father is Charles Xavier.

Other media

Television

• Legion appears in the X-Men: Evolution episode "Sins of the Son" voiced by Kyle Labine. Legion's backstory remains mostly unchanged, although David Haller is a fairly normal boy with no visible mutant powers. In the episode, David appears to be kidnapped by a Scottish goth/punk named Lucas, but in reality Lucas is David. David's body can somehow change to match whichever of his multiple personalities is dominant, with personality and body shifts sometimes happening at random. The mechanism behind this ability is never fully explained, although it is possible that David is using strong psionic abilities to alter people's perception of his appearance rather than actually changing as Mastermind had done when first trying to avoid being discovered. His personalities sometimes appeared in two places at once, supporting the control-of-perception theory. Only three personalities were shown. As David has no obvious powers of his own, Lucas possesses telepathic and telekinetic powers, as well as pyrokinetics while Ian is a young mute boy who can create fire. As Lucas is shown capable of both telepathic and pyrokinetic powers, it is possible the Lucas persona may have access to the powers of other personalities (if any beyond these three exist). Lucas lured Professor Xavier to Scotland and tricked him into locking David's other personalities away, leaving Lucas free to be himself. It was never explained what Lucas's goals were after this. The show was canceled before his storyline could be further explored..

References

• Legion at Marvel.com
• UncannyXmen.Net