Wolverine and the X-Men vol 2 – “Death of Wolverine”
The first volume of Jason Latour’s Wolverine and the X-Men run was pretty much an outright catastrophe. The main problem was an excessively complicated plot, which didn’t entirely make sense to start with, and which was told in a massively confusing way. So whatever good ideas were in there got lost in a welter of confusion.
Given such a disastrous start, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that Latour’s second volume is his last. In fact, he doesn’t even make it to the end of the volume, with the final issue – originally solicited with his name – turning out to be written by Frank Tieri instead.
His final five issues do at least avoid the basic comprehensibility problems of their predecessors. In large part, that’s because they swing off in the other direction and keep the plots somewhere between basic and rudimentary. There are still some stray subplots floating around that add nothing much to anything – though to be fair, they may originally have been intended to pay off down the line – but for the most part Latour keeps it basic in these issues, which at least gives the point an opportunity to get across.
So this is an improvement. But while Latour undoubtedly has ideas, that isn’t to say that they’re particularly compelling ideas. In fairness, it must have become obvious in the course of writing these issues that whatever long term plans Latour had in mind were never going to get the chance to come to fruition. (The greatest impact of the run is probably to leave Quentin Quire with a new status quo, from which one suspects future writers will move swiftly to extricate him.) On top of that, as the title of the collected edition suggests, this is a classic example of a dying book trying to cling on to a bigger storyline. So issues #10-11 are official tie-ins to “Death of Wolverine”, and issue #12 is an Axis crossover.
Issues #7-9 aren’t officially crossovers, but Wolverine’s imminent death hangs heavily over those issues too. It’s perhaps understandable that a book with Wolverine’s name in the title feels obliged to do something to write him out, and since the actual story is taking place elsewhere, that doesn’t leave much option but to operate in its margins. Still, the result is that the book spends the better part of five issues lamenting a story which is going on somewhere else. Issues #7-9 are titled as a three-parter called “No Future?”, but they’re really a set of issues that are at best thematically related, trying to set up a parallel between Wolverine and Quentin.
The idea, broadly, is that both are coming to terms with the lack of a meaningful future. Wolverine knows that without his healing powers, which, after all, have basically kept him alive until this point, he’s bound to die pretty soon, and so he’s putting his affairs in order – and also serving a cease and desist notice to stop Melita Garner from writing a biography that she envisages as a definitive statement of what he stands for. Wolverine doesn’t particularly want to be turned into an icon and, from the looks of it, would rather simply fade away. (After his death, the two official tie-ins see her reviving the project at Beast’s invitation, providing a helpful framing sequence for lots of characters to reminisce about the dearly departed.)
Issue #8 takes advantage of the idea that time moves differently within The World to pack Wolverine and Storm off there to spend a year together. This is probably the strongest issue, in as much as it forces some space to properly resolve the subplot of their relationship. I’m not wild about shoehorning that amount of material into somebody else’s story, though. Giving Wolverine a whole year in relative isolation from the Marvel Universe to come to terms with his situation and make the decision to return and confront the real world kind of feels like it sits awkwardly with the character arc in Wolverine proper – and that sort of tension is a definite problem when the premise of your story is premised on piggybacking on events in that series. Still, at least it does something to offer resolution to a plot thread that would otherwise have been irritatingly aborted, and on its own terms, it’s a sweet little story.
Then we have Quentin (and for that matter Idie), who are both deeply depressed as a result of the events in the previous story. The basic idea, in both cases, is that they’ve seen the future, they know it turns out disastrously for Quentin in particular, and Quentin seems to see his life as being on rails. So there’s a degree of general raging at the world, combined with a heavy dose of fatalism on his part.
Now, this doesn’t work, for two main reasons. First, there’s the purely logical: the basic premise that the future is set in stone is obviously wrong in X-Men mythology, and that ought to be fairly obvious to Quentin. The X-Men cast already includes Rachel Grey, whose whole schtick is that she comes from a future that was averted. More directly, the whole bloody point of the Phoenix Corporation trying to separate Quentin from the X-Men in volume 1 was to alter his personal history. So Quentin’s future has already been altered by the mere fact of his taking on his new status quo in the Phoenix Corporation (and now the Hellfire Club). His angst point here ought to be whether he embraces his destiny as a hero and risks putting himself back on the path to self-destruction – not whether he has the choice at all.
Second, mopey Quentin isn’t a very interesting character to read about. I can understand why Latour wants to evolve the character beyond his established set-up, which can very easily teeter into a thirty-something writer’s one-note parody of a rebellious teenager. He’s certainly a character who would benefit from a bit more nuance. But at the same time, his brattish anarchist nihilism, and the question of exactly how seriously he really holds any of those views, is at the heart of the character’s appeal. What we really end up with here is basically the same character with less fun.
Issues #10-11 are a “Death of Wolverine” tie-in, in which Melita revives her book plan, and goes around interviewing various people. This allows for two vaguely indie artist jam issue, though not one with any big names. The theme here is that there are tons of disparate interpretations of Wolverine and that Melita’s role is to help shape the way he’s remembered. It’s an attempt to acknowledge all the facets of a vastly divergent character and try to find some sort of common thread. There’s some very patchy art in here, though; most of it is really quite good, but an ugly few page with a ludicrously off-model Evan should never have made it into print. A sequence with Nightcrawler toasting Wolverine for some “friends” in the local bar who we’ve never seen before is a nice idea but falls flat; the sequence just doesn’t land Kurt’s voice, giving the whole thing a presumably unintended undercurrent of menace, and a bunch of nameless strangers in a bar just won’t pass as a gathering of Wolverine’s close friends. The closing sequence with Quentin making his own private tribute to Wolverine makes some sense in terms of his own arc, but it doesn’t really cohere in terms of what came before.
And then… we have a random fill-in issue by Frank Tieri to round things off, officially serving as the book’s Axis tie-in. This was originally solicited as a Jason Latour story in which Quentin returned to the Mansion, which would presumably have furthered his arc. Instead, we have a story in which an inverted Quentin is visited at the Hellfire Club by an inverted Storm – a completely different story, which one rather suspects was developed around the fact that they had already committed to an Axis tie-in with Storm and Quentin on the cover.
The issue is marred by what appears to be a massive continuity error – where issue #9 simply asserted that Quentin’s Phoenix Corporation had taken over the Hellfire Club, issue #12 shows him as having joined Kade Kilgore’s Inner Circle. You know, the one that was already defeated and disbanded at the end of Aaron’s run, which is why two of them wound up as pupils at the X-Men’s school. By all appearances neither Tieri nor his editors were remotely aware of that fact, which is excusable in Tieri’s case (it’s not like he’s been writing any of the books during this period) but just baffling in the case of the editors.
Tieri at least has a reasonable go at finding something to do with the inversion gimmick beyond “good/evil”. Inverted Storm isn’t exactly evil so much as manipulative and scheming to get her way. Inverted Quentin is a more difficult proposition since he was never clear-cut good or evil to start with; the approach, reasonably enough, is to take away his urge to make grand gestures and give him a desire to reconcile with his friends, but the mopey way he’s been written in preceding issues rather undermines the contrast. At any rate, it’s error-riddled filler, though at least it was trying to do something with the remit.
And there ends the short and thuddingly unsuccessful second run of Wolverine and the X-Men. It’s a shame that I can’t be more positive about this book, because at least Latour seemed to have ambition. That’s more than can be said for X-Men or Amazing X-Men, neither of which seems to be gunning for anything beyond basic competence. But for all that I can applaud Latour for setting his sights higher, there’s no getting away from the fact that he misses far more often than he hits.
I was really disappointed by this run. I was skeptical when Latour took over Winter Soldier from the departing Ed Brubaker, but he quickly won me over by absolutely nailing it. So when they announced he was taking over another writer’s signature book, I had hopes that he could do it again.
Instead, it quickly turned into an utter mess that I was already planning to drop before it was announced as cancelled.
I’d say the Death of Wolverine issues were a great improvement, at least. I kind of like the idea that Kurt and Logan have local drinking buddies they only see at Harry’s, which should ring true to anyone who has ‘bar’ friends. It’s not like you’d invite them to the mansion. My biggest problem with the jam issues is that Melita changes so much. Presumably Latour could have drawn up a character model and everyone sticks to it, but instead we have a woman of color, (African/Mexican-American) whose look constantly fluctuates.
As for the Tieri issue, who knows what was going on. Terrible way to end a series (even though it’s getting relaunched as Spider-Man and the X-men after Axis). I was baffled by the Hellfire Club’s reappearance, since last time we saw those two they were at the Academy. I guess Marts doesn’t read his own books.
Dafuq? Spider-Man and the X-men?
I looked it up and yes, it’s real! But why??
Well, one can argue that Wolverine used to be in every single team book and almost in every comic marvel would publish, and that spider-man has been doing the same thing for a while now, but in plot terms, it makes no sense! Peter parker is now a scientist, a business man and a hero, when would he fit the time to be there as well?
Besides, with the Spider-verse event, we are already starting to feel fatigue with the overexposure of spider-man. He sells comics yes, but only in moderation can this continue to be effective
I rarely, if ever, say this kinda thing, but I wish I hadn’t picked up this series. I find it confusing, convoluted, uninteresting, noncompelling, and bland from start to finish. I would have enjoyed the last issue were it not a continuity clusterbomb.
Horrible comic. The only issue I vaguely enjoyed was with Logan and Storm in The World. I haven’t enjoyed a single X-men comic since Jason Aaron left. I tried picking up the ANXM arc that brought in X-23 & Last Will and I can’t handle Bendis writing the X-men. I didn’t make it to the end of those arcs.
Only Hickman’s 2 Avengers comics are on my list anymore. Once he’s done, I’m not sure what I’ll be reading. Might be another break coming up.
“I guess Marts doesn’t read his own books.”
Did he ever?
As for Spider-Man and the X-men, there is a reason why he is there, besides the teaching…but yes, it does seem driven more by marketing than anything else.
@The original Matt
I’ve stopped buying most Marvel books at this point (though I can easily recommend She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Hawkeye, and a handful of other Marvel Now titles that have been really phenomenal.)
IMAGE has really been putting out great work, including Saga, Lazarus, Velvet, East of West, Manhattan Projects, Alex + Ada, Low, Sex Criminals, Deadly Class, The Fade Out, Zero… If you’re taking a break from super-heroes I’d suggest having a look at what’s going on at Image.
And of course there’s an in-story rationale for Spider-Man and the X-men, but I won’t be picking it up. Perhaps they’re trying to trade on nostalgia for Spider-Man and his amazing friends, and I can see why bouncing SM off of the students could work, but the Bendis/Marts era of X-men titles has lost me at this point.
Seconding Joseph: Image has a raft of great titles out right now and pretty good genre variety, along with Oni, Archia, and Boom. With the exception of a couple of Vertigo titles, I find it’s a better bet that I’ll get my SF/fantasy/horror itch scratched looking outside the Big Two.
I probably will give “Spider-Man and the X-Men” a chance, though. I keep hoping that the X-Line will spit out another teen hero book I can enjoy, even if it has been a swing and a miss on that front since Young X-Men.
Appreciate the suggestions, guys. I’ve heard some good things about some of these titles, and may indeed check them out at some point. (Likely the kind of stuff I’ll buy in collected volumes). I do have 1 question, though: do the Image books take place in a shared universe? (I’m hoping not).
IDW have a bunch of Godzilla stuff out. As a huge Godzilla fan I really should buy those collected volumes.
I wonder how much notice Latour was given about Wolverine’s death? From the moment this volume of WATX was announced I felt like it was place holder on Marvel’s schedule. I was hoping that Latour could have kept up the Bendis/Aaron two rival mutant schools thing. It is always tough when someone who is still relatively new to high profile titles takes over for a popular creator.
@The Original Matt
Generally speaking, ach Image title is a creative team telling a contained story. Their titles are creator owned and usually completely unrelated to each other. Hickman’s East of West won’t be crossing over with BKV’s Saga or anything like that.
The occasional exception seems to be when the old founders (and Kirkman) attempt a superhero crossover with Invincible, Youngblood, Savage Dragon, etc. but those are easy enough to ignore.
This book was awful.
And just to echo the above complaints, Bendis on X-Men had been everything i feared it would be.
Is Bendis’s X-Men worse than his Avengers? I don’t see how it could be. I’m just curious to see if it is even heading close to that level of nonsense. Last I heard the Bendis books were just poorly paced and had some weird characterization, but were otherwise non-offensive.
I’d also add that Jason Latour and Jason Aaron’s Southern Bastards (image) is excellent.
As for Bendis… I’ll admit there’s certainly something that keeps me going back. I always look guests to reading his books, if only because his characters have distinct voices (if nonsensical if you care about continuity) and because the decompressed pace leaves you wanting more. It doesnt necessarily ever pay off, though, is full of abandoned subplots and weak resolutions. The art has been pretty great though, especially Immonen but Bachalo has been doing good mostly legible work as well. As much as some things don’t make sense, seeing the interactions betwern Kitty and Illyana, Illyana and Scott, young Jean and everybody, has been rewarding. Young Bobby has great lines, Warren and Laura gives both characters something refreshing to do, and the new characters on uncanny are not half bad, they have distinct personalities (even if we don’t see enough of them)
Oh, BKV and Marcos Martin’s pwyc digital comic, designed for laptop viewing, is one of the best comics I’ve ever read. It’s excellent. Read it, just download the debut for free. Panel syndicate.com
Bendis’ characters have distinct voices? From my experience, they all have one voice… and finish each other’s sentences with it.
My least favorite thing about Bendis’ team books is how Marvel lets him have the pick of the litter as far as artists go. Immonen made All-New X-Men much more enjoyable that it should have been for the first few years. Andrea Sorrentino is doing his first Marvel book on Bendis’ X-Men annuals and it doesn’t sound like he’ll be going anywhere else soon. I was most annoyed when they pulled Bachalo off of WatXM so he could help them deliver another hit X-title, which was partly what led to the sillier tone in the series afterwards. Please release Bachalo from Bendis! I want him on a title worth buying!
I was happy for Bendis to have Bachalo. His art does nothing for me. Deodato Is my super hero guy of choice.
As an aside, I did enjoy Bendis more when Deadato did art for him, come to think of it….
Bendis’ X-Men is only slightly better than his Avengers, since stuff arguably happens. It’s just all meaningless fluff, though, and the subplots (not even sure they can legitimately count as subplots) don’t go anywhere.
Did the mutants ever get around to revolutioning? Or explaining what the hell the mutant revolution would entail, and how it would be any different?
@Matt, not really, no. there’s been some mild conflict with Shield (and flirting with Maria Hill?) but no revolution. presumably this current arc in UXM is going somewhere, but I won’t get my hopes up.
I stand by my statement on voices. The Cuckoos, for better or worse, even have distinct personalities at this point. I agree that many of his voices bleed into one another, but one would never mistake young Jean for anyone other than Jean (Bendis’s young Jean, but still.) And though Illyan and Emma’s costumes and general looks are much too close, their voices (and bangs)are unique. And again, young Bobby and young Hank both have clear voices as well. I’m still quite critical of Bendis’ take on the X-Men, but it could be a lot worse.
I’m really looking forward to the Andrea Sorrentino story about Tempus, though again I’m not getting my hopes up. I think they’re waited far too long to follow up on her disappearance back in Tabula Rasa.
I’ll agree that the voices are distinct, but I still wince whenever I hear his X-23 speak. It’s just not the character I was previously invested in.
Agree, I don’t know why he even bothered to.bring her into the book at all. I’m glad dinnertime is doing something with her, and I even like the idea of am awkward relationship with angel, but yeah, she’s way off. I have to say I do enjoy his Kitty though although her departure at the end of BotA was botched
I’d say he also generally writes a pretty good Cyclops, which is good because he’s the lead character in UXM. I haven’t enjoyed his Emma Frost very much though — she’s just doesn’t have the same bite she had under writers like Morrison, Whedon, and Gillen.