INTERVIEW: Peter Milligan Takes X-Men Fans Inside Legion's Psychedelic Mind Scape

David Haller is the most unpredictable and dangerous mutant in the Marvel Universe. The mentally ill son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier, his consciousness houses a multitude of alternate identities, or “alters,” each one with their own mutant power. Haller's illness lead him to being given the moniker Legion, and over the years he's been both a foe and an ally to the X-Men. In 2013-2014, he starred in a volume of X-Men: Legacy written by Simon Spurrier. and last year the FX network debuted a highly acclaimed television adaptation of Legion with Dan Stevens in the title role.

This week, Haller returned to comics with an all-new Legion miniseries by writer Peter Milligan and artist Wilfredo Torres. In the story David Haller seeks out a celebrated psychologist to help him confront and contain one of his out of control and malevolent alters. CBR spoke with Milligan about the book, the alter that's causing so much trouble for David Haller, the psychologist he's hoping will help him, and the psychedelic world of Legion's mind scape.

CBR: What's your take on the core David Haller personality in Legion? Which aspects of his character are you interested in exploring in this story?

Peter Milligan: Well, he's clearly got deep problems. Obviously he had what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder and is now called D.I.D.; Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Though it’s important that David isn’t just defined by his illness – he’s also quite funny and is basically a decent guy – his madness does tend to dominate his character, but one of the things I learned while researching mental health issues was that conditions are rarely static. They tend to be quite fluid.

So when we meet David he's reached a crisis point in his mental health journey. He's in trouble, and though I don't want to go into too much detail here the source of this trouble is an “alter”. This alter is incredibly powerful and is a threat not only to David Haller but to his own Alters. In short, David Haller is in real existential trouble. So he has to find someone to help him. Our story is about him finding this someone and trying to deal with this personality that's threatening to destroy him.

What can you tell us about this rival personality?

His name is Lord Trauma. He's an incredibly powerful personality that lives inside David Haller's consciousness and wants to take over wheel David Haller to become the dominant personality.

Until David has achieved a kind of psychological integrity. a lot of his alternate identities have tended to become secondary. So what Lord Trauma wants is to, of course, become #1.

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Assisting David in his struggle with Lord Trauma is a new character named Doctor Hannah Jones. What inspired her creation?

I'm quite interested in characters who come up or progress from a different world. Hannah’s black and from a working class district in London, and through hard work and brains she's worked her to the top of her profession. Now she's living in New York, and she's known as “The psychologist to the stars.” A lot of her patients are celebrities. She appears on talk shows and has a book deal.

So she's living this fantastic life and is doing great – and then a lunatic appears on her door step asking for her help and turning everything crazy.

Her first instinct is, “This is too insane! One of my colleagues can help you.”

Her second instinct is, “Bloody hell, if I crack this case my legacy is assured!”

So David and Hannah are taking a journey into his mind. Does this mean we'll meet some of the other identities that live there?

Yes, we won't just be meeting other identities though. This journey will allow me to explore parts of David's consciousness, and for us to see how these aspects of his mind might manifest themselves.

To cure David, Hannah is going to have to enter his “mind space.” To reach this place and deal with Lord Trauma her psyche literally has to enter the mind of mad man. And she’ll meet the alters – good and bad – who exist there.

She's an experienced psychologist, but this is way beyond anything she's seen or any text book could prepare her for. This story is about her reasons for going in there and helping David, and whether or not she can help him—before she herself is destroyed.

You're working with Wilfredo Torres on this mini-series who's most recent Marvel work was on Black Panther. What I like about his work there is he's great at drawing really expressive characters, and strange and unusual beings.

Yeah, that’s completely right.

There are a lot of characters in this story – A lot of alters live in David's mind scape. So it's important they all have a sense of character and really live. Wilfredo's really good at that, and he's also really good at the crazy stuff. One of the things we talked about and he was excited about was doing some Shade the Changing Man style craziness, and to just really let things rip. But this only works if it's grounded in some really and in good characterization.

It sounds like the story you and Wilfredo are telling primarily revolves around new things in David Haller's world.

Yes, much of it is new, but the past realities we've seen about David Haller still exist. Readers well-versed in the Legion story will recognize references and the world--but you can also come to this book knowing nothing about Legion and still understand it and get what the story is about.

Finally, if I could only pick one adjective to describe how the story sounds I would have to go with psychedelic. Is that what you're aiming for with Legion?

Psychedelic with a big heart. Beyond all the weirdness – and there’s plenty of weirdness – this is a story about a desperate young man and the woman who tries to help him—a woman who ends up having to face traumas of her own.