The supe­hero genre is final­ly grow­ing up, but not where you think

Does an R‑rating auto­mat­i­cal­ly sig­ni­fy adult con­tent? In the case of com­ic book movies, the big ​‘R’ has been the great hope for fans crav­ing some­thing mature and often more in keep­ing with the source mate­r­i­al. Their col­lec­tive wish was grant­ed with 2016’s Dead­pool, a film hailed as the water­shed moment where the com­ic book genre final­ly grew up. This claim dis­re­gards ear­li­er films like Kick-Ass and Super, but Dead­pool gets the cred­it because of its mas­sive inter­na­tion­al box office haul of $783 million.

Of course, Dead­pool is a long way from most people’s def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘mature’. It excels at being juve­nile, with its high lev­els of pro­fan­i­ty and exces­sive gore. Logan, the final out­ing for Hugh Jack­man as Wolver­ine, suf­fers from a sim­i­lar iden­ti­ty cri­sis with exces­sive vio­lence damp­en­ing its earnest attempt to be thought­ful. But it’s true that the com­ic book genre is grow­ing up – it’s just not hap­pen­ing on the big screen.

The FX/​Marvel series Legion, based on writer Chris Clare­mont and artist Bill Sienkiewicz’s X‑Men char­ac­ter, focus­es on David Haller (Dan Stephens), who is diag­nosed with schiz­o­phre­nia and spends his youth in and out of psy­chi­atric facil­i­ties. When Heller meets Syd (Rachel Keller), he’s con­front­ed with the pos­si­bil­i­ty that his men­tal health issues are linked to mutant abilities.

Legion does for com­ic book adap­ta­tions what Han­ni­bal did for police pro­ce­du­rals. Under the guid­ance of the show’s cre­ator, Noah Haw­ley (the brains behind the TV update of Far­go), Legion presents Haller’s point of view as unre­li­able – bor­der­ing on unhinged – as the show sticks to non­lin­ear sto­ry­telling, trip­py visu­als and sub­lim­i­nal flash­es of its protagonist’s life. It lives in the same twist­ed head­space as Hannibal’s Will Gra­ham only with few­er blood geysers.

All is not what it seems with Haller, but Haw­ley isn’t inter­est­ed in lay­ing out the sto­ry in for­mu­la­ic fash­ion. There are no sky beams, labored ori­gin sto­ries or ​‘first time out with pow­ers’ sequences. Legion makes us work for it. Deci­pher­ing Haller’s life is the great mys­tery of the show and each frame is full of bread­crumbs. It’s refresh­ing to watch some­thing based on a super­hero com­ic book that befud­dles as much as it wows. That’s where Legion matures most as a com­ic book adap­tion – it demands a lot from the view­er and treats its audi­ence like adults.

Legion also tack­les the issue of men­tal health, a top­ic most com­ic book adap­ta­tions keep well away from in order to retain as wide an appeal as pos­si­ble (a sad but true reflec­tion of the state of things). Not one Bat­man movie stops to con­sid­er the deep psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma Bruce Wayne has endured – the clos­est the Dark Knight ever got to a psychiatrist’s chair was Bat­man For­ev­er, but then in the same film Jim Carrey’s Rid­dler beams tele­vi­sion into people’s minds so he can steal their brain­pow­er, effec­tive­ly negat­ing any such pro­found meditation.

Even the recent adap­ta­tion of Doc­tor Strange was light on ideas despite the film’s ​‘open your mind’ tagline. Legion con­sid­ers how men­tal health is often demonised and mis­un­der­stood. Giv­en the cen­tral metaphor of mutants being ostra­cized by soci­ety, the X‑Men have always been ripe for address­ing social issues such as racism and homo­pho­bia. Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by cre­at­ed the X‑Men in the 1960s amid the Amer­i­can Civ­il Rights Move­ment and some of the best ear­ly sto­ry­lines riff on tur­bu­lent times and themes of persecution.

Legion puts the bite back into the X‑Men uni­verse on screen. It posits that Haller could eas­i­ly become a vil­lain as a con­se­quence of being reject­ed by soci­ety. Ear­ly on in the series there’s a 50/50 chance of him going either way, but Haw­ley seems set on keep­ing Haller fixed in the grey area of anti-herodom. In this case of this unbal­anced super­hero, as with so many peo­ple suf­fer­ing from men­tal health issues, sim­ply cop­ing may be the best that he can hope for.