A Guide to the Actual Legion Comic Characters the Series Is Based On
Our best guesses for who’s who in Legion comic characters
Last year, FX premiered its X-Men franchise series Legion, about a mental patient who may actually be the most powerful mutant on the planet. Now in its second season, Legion has proven itself to be more than just your typical comic series. It’s beautiful and strange and completely unafraid to take risks. And it doesn’t set itself up to be a comic series, either. Sure, there are mutants. But it isn’t like we’ll ever see Wolverine in all his yellow and blue spandex glory. In fact, Marvel confirmed only two of Legion’s characters are based on X-Men characters.. The rest have only loose inspiration among existing characters. But with our deductive reasoning skills, we’ve managed to narrow down who exactly we think the Legion comic characters line up with on screen.David Haller
David Haller is a schizophrenic mutant who may actually be the most powerful psychic on the planet. He’s spent time in an institution, so we know he’s crazy. We just don’t actually know how crazy he is.
Although if we’re to take anything from those memory flashbacks/dream sequences, it’s a goddam lot.
Legion
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David’s immense supply of powers comes in part from his ability to psychically absorb others’ consciousness when they die. It’s this ability that led to the character’s split personality disorder, in which each separate personality is in control of a separate power.
We’ve yet to see this exact aspect of Haller on Legion, but there have definitely been a few hints that it’s coming.
Amahl Farouk
One of the oldest (he came to be sometime in the early 19th century) and strongest psychic mutants, Amahl’s power seems to come from his ability to parasitically implant himself into other psychic mutants.
For the majority of season 1, he looked like the creepiest Mr. Potato Head on the f—ing planet. Because apparently, psychic parasites are also really into kids’ toys.
The Shadow King
Actually, the FX version of Amahl Farouk/the Shadow King is pretty close to the one presented in comics. He’s a psychic parasite, requiring a host to continue living. He’s also quite fond of food, which is a trait he passes along to each of his hosts.
Because seeing some of our favorite X-Men turn into obese blobs on account of possession is always a super fun comic-y twist!