Who is Legion?

I haven’t done one of these comic trivia things in awhile so here we go. During the Super Bowl, there were a lot of ads for the new TV show Legion. Who or what is he? I don’t know how closely the show will hew to the comics but I can tell you who Legion was in the comics I remember.

Legion is David Charles Haller, the illegitimate son of Professor X. His mother is Gabrielle Haller, a woman Charles Xavier had an affair with in his pre-X-Men days while he and Magneto were active in Israel. Xavier was unaware of his child’s existence until David was a teenager and Gabrielle asked him to help their son in New Mutants #26 in 1985, in a story written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by the appropriately bizarre, trippy work of Bill Sienkiewicz.

As a child, David survived a terrorist attack. The trauma of the attack caused his mutant powers to arise and he defeated his attackers and absorbed the mind of the ringleader, Jemail Karami, into his own mind. His mind splintered and he developed multiple personalities, several of which had their own mutant powers. Jack Wayne appeared to be a cowboy-type all-American who had telekinesis. Cyndi was a snarky teenage girl who had pyrokinesis.

Professor X and the New Mutants arrived at Muir Isle to help David and soon after they became drawn into his mindscape, a hellish recreation of Paris and Beirut as destroyed by terrorist attacks. The New Mutants fought to gain access to David’s mind and restore his psyche, while Jack Wayne convinced them the Arabic Jemail was their enemy. However, Wayne turned out to be the real enemy, while Jemail was working to integrate Legion’s fractured psyche and help the kid. The story ended with Legion in a somewhat better place and reunited with his father, but still disturbed. 

The combination of telepathy, telekinesis and pyrokinesis made Legion a powerful force and he challenged the New Mutants and his father on a few occasions. On one instance, he traveled back in time intending to kill Magneto to prevent some of the strife Magneto caused by instead accidentally killed Professor X, who took the figurative bullet instead. In the ensuing time paradox, Legion was never born, Professor X never formed the X-Men and it was left to Magneto to fight an ascendant Apocalypse. So it was thanks to Legion that we got the Age of Apocalypse timeline.

One constant with Legion is that he’s always depicted with black hair standing straight up in the air, as if he stuck a fork into an electrical outlet.