There’s a concept in literary theory called paratext, which (as I understand it) is basically everything that isn’t strictly part of the text proper, but still frames the text, and affects the way you read it.  The packaging, the promotion, the design, that sort of thing.  All things that can prime you to respond to the story in a certain way.

Event stories like “Death of Wolverine” are all about the paratext.  If Charles Soule’s four-part story had simply appeared, without prior publicity, in issue #whatever of an ongoing Wolverine series, and if the continuation of that story had just appeared in issue #whatever+1 of that same series, all without any pretext of cancellation, the audience reaction to the final page would be very different – it would, pretty much, be that the story’s clearly not over, so I wonder how Wolverine is going to get out of this one.

And so a vast amount of work goes into priming the audience to respond differently.  In a sense, of course, people are still wondering how Wolverine is going to get out of this one – nobody expects this to be anything more than an extended hiatus of the sort that’s been done with several characters before.  But they do at least expect him to be gone for a while.  You achieve this by loudly telling everyone that it’s a massively important story, by clearly labelling the story Death of Wolverine in what might conventionally be considered a massive spoiler, and by generally going through all the established signifiers that the story is a big one that people will be talking about.

The thing to note is that this sort of promotion is not external to the storytelling.  It is the storytelling; it is part of getting the audience to accept the story as the one that Marvel wants it to be.

Part of this exercise, in 2014, is to signal the story as a big and important one by surrounding it with a cloud of tie-ins.  I suspect there are two main concepts at work here – first, that in an era where continuity is often downplayed and writers regularly feel free to ignore or summarily reverse earlier stories, they send a firm message that this is a story which other people will be expected to honour.  And second, it’s been done so often for big stories that until somebody comes up with a more imaginative way to send the right signals (or, better yet, more imaginative signals to send), you just have to do it in order to avoid making your story look B-list.

Also, the accountants probably like it.

So here we have Death of Wolverine: Deadpool and Captain America, and Death of Wolverine: Life After Logan (a title that sounds like some sort of demented Archie crossover, but tragically isn’t), both of which served their primary purpose simply by existing at all, thereby demonstrating how important the death of Wolverine is.

In theory, this could be potentially liberating for the creative teams, since – precisely because the books fulfilled their remit at the moment of solicitation – it doesn’t actually matter what they contain, and so there’s no pressing reason why it can’t be something interesting.  In practice, despite largely solid creators, they’re both forgettable affairs.

Deadpool and Captain America is by regular Deadpool writer Gerry Duggan, and artist Scott Kolins.  It’s effectively a bonus issue of Deadpool (which is otherwise occupied right now with an Axis tie-in).  From what little I’ve seen of that book lately, Duggan is steering Deadpool back in the direction of being a vaguely functional anti-hero who the actual heroes will grudgingly tolerate having around – the Axis tie-in is actually pretty good.  But without being up to speed on where the character is currently sitting, this story just reads rather oddly, since it takes as its starting point the idea that Steve Rogers would ask Deadpool to help him out as an important mission, and offers no explanation whatsoever of why that might be so.

There’s the glimmer of an interesting idea in here – the one thing that Deadpool and Captain America both have in common with Wolverine is that all three were the product of experiments to create a super-soldier.  Cap is the one who worked out great, Deadpool is the one who emphatically didn’t, and Wolverine was somewhere between the two.

But having thrown that idea out there, the story just meanders off into a filler story in which Deadpool and the now-aged Steve Rogers try to retrieve a knife with Wolverine’s blood on it, as part of a project to stop people cloning him.  This doesn’t really make sense as a premise to begin with – if you were a mad scientist who was minded to clone Wolverine in the first place, why would you wait till he was dead?  X-23’s creators didn’t.  Beyond that, it’s a fairly generic runaround; it’s possible the interplay with Cap works better for people following Deadpool’s development in his own series, but for those of us just dropping in, there’s not much here.  Oddly, the final page sets up a dangling subplot – Deadpool winds up with the sample and considers using it to make his own Wolverine clone – but it feels more like something to be picked up in Deadpool.

Life After Logan is an anthology of, well, people mourning Wolverine.  There’s a fairly obvious format for this sort of story – character X is mourning, character X has an insight about how Wolverine would want to be remembered which helps him come to terms with Wolverine’s death, character X starts to move on – and there’s only so many times you can read it.  And we already had it in Nightcrawler.

Jeff Loveness and Mario Del Pennino do a Cyclops story in which he whines a lot and then pays tribute to Wolverine by getting into a bar fight.  That last bit is quite good, but the rest is decidedly overwrought, and strays into having Cyclops openly question whether he’s ruined the X-Men – territory best left until Bendis is ready to go there.  There’s some fairly routine stuff about their relationship, and not really enough about how Cyclops feels about not resolving their differences before he died.

Joshua Hale Fialkov and Iban Coello have Nightcrawler and Colossus taking up Wolverine’s annual pilgrimage to Mariko Yashida’s grave, which is a more interesting starting point.  The story then singularly fails to identify anywhere to go from there.  Yes, going to Japan and getting into a fight is indeed the sort of thing Wolverine would do; it’s hardly a revelation.

Finally, Rex Ogle and Patrick Scherberger go back to the stock mourning arc, as Hellion offers hopelessly tactless “support” to Armor.  Since there were occasional attempts to play up Armor as Wolverine’s next girl sidekick (such as the Alpha & Omega miniseries), she’s a sensible character to check in on.  Unfortunately, the story has some wonky ideas about Armor’s powers that should have been straightened out by the editors.  Its big concept is that Armor felt it when Wolverine died, because his spirit joined the ghosts that empower her armour.  That’s a nice idea, except for (a) how’s that going to work when he inevitably comes back from the dead, (b) the idea that Armor is powered by the spirits of the dead comes from a Daniel Way Astonishing X-Men story which established that the spirits in question are those of her family, something this story doesn’t seem to be aware of, and (c) when Wolverine died, Armor was tied up in a Wolverine and the X-Men subplot about her powers not working, a point also picked up in that book when it did its own scene of her reacting to Wolverine’s death.  So, oops.

Oh, and it does the exact same “bar fight” angle as the first story.  At least the second story went for “Japanese fight”.  Not exactly a fabulous testimony to the multi-faceted nature of the character, though, is it?

So, yeah – we’re firmly in completist-only territory with this stuff.  None of it’s horrible, exactly, but all you really need to know about any of it is that it exists at all.