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Jan 18

Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy

Posted on Sunday, January 18, 2015 by Paul in x-axis

The exigencies of event storytelling (and shared-universe storytelling more generally) can lead to some weird ways of constructing stories; a format that sees the same overall story pursued through multiple parallel narratives that aren’t even appearing in chronological sequence would normally be regarded as at least an interesting creative choice.

In this case, we have a rather odd transition going on between what are in effect two versions of the ongoing Wolverine series – the Death of Wolverine mini, and the Wolverines weekly.  Bridging the gap between those titles are two separate minis, each serving to introduce (or at least set up) half of the cast of the weekly, and to collectively establish the premise: a bunch of characters, some established and some new, have all been the victim of potentially fatal experimentation by Dr Cornelius, and must join forces to find a cure.

Logan Legacy deals with the established half of the cast – X-23, Sabretooth, Daken, Lady Deathstrike and, somewhat incongruously, Mystique.  The other book, Weapon X Project, deals with the new characters – experimental subjects who escape from Cornelius’ base in the confusion immediately after Wolverine’s death.  That book started and finished second, but takes place first, thus allowing the same characters to appear as mystery villains in Logan Legacy when they’re kidnapping the other half of the  cast.  (In their own book, of course, they’re rather more sympathetic.)  Complicating matters still further, the seven-issue Logan Legacy actually consists of a two-issue framing sequence, which surrounds five flashback one-shots in which different guest creative teams establish the status quo of each of the five cast members as Wolverines begins.

The issues that actually matter in plot terms are the framing sequence and the Mystique issue.  In fact, the framing sequence is probably the least convincing at this stage, partly because the first issue grinds to a halt in order to meticulously advertise the stories to come in issues #2-6, but mainly because the premise of Wolverines is a wildly contrived one of which Charles Soule has yet to fully convince me.

Let’s leave aside the awkwardness of elevating Cornelius to master villain status, which is a bit like referencing the Silver Age X-Men stories and claiming that the archenemy of the piece was the Toad.  There are practical reasons why Soule had to use Cornelius – essentially, that the alternatives would have involved needlessly complicating matters by bringing back dead characters only to kill them off again immediately – so while it’s not an ideal choice, I can see why it’s been made.  Cornelius, we’re told, was obsessed with trying to healing powers and at some indeterminate point kidnapped and experimented on all of the cast members.  None of them remember this, but there is a precedent for Weapon X using memory alteration, so that’s not too much of a stretch – though it doesn’t explain why he released them back into the wild after.

At any rate, we’re told that as a control mechanism, Cornelius has implanted all five with post-hypnotic control words that allow anyone (such as the Weapon X Project cast) to control them, put them to sleep, kill them, or erase the programming on the spot.  The Project cast members are going to die as a result of their own experiments unless a cure is found; if the established characters help them, in return they’ll erase the programming.  Alternatively, of course, they could just force them to help, but that wouldn’t be as effective because they’d all be reduced to minions with no initiative.

The whole concept of control words that can kill characters on the spot is silly, in a way that doesn’t seem to fit very neatly with a story that generally feels as if it’s taking itself desperately seriously.  I suspect, to be fair, that the story was going for a sort of deadpan over-the-topness, but I’m not sure that’s the tone it’s actually hit.  It ends up feeling self-consciously grim in a very mid-nineties way.  Nor is there a very coherent idea of how the Legacy characters are actually supposed to help the Project ones.  The early issues of Wolverine suggest that the idea is to retrieve Wolverine’s body and experiment on that, but quite how that’s supposed to help is entirely unclear.

In fairness, the Project cast are working from information in Cornelius’ files, and Cornelius never had time to update them to reflect the fact that Wolverine had lost his healing factor.  So perhaps the idea is that it will indeed turn out to be a wasted effort.  But the Legacy characters do know that he had lost his powers, so you’d think it would have come up somewhere.  Still, there’s enough evidence of planning in terms of the interaction between the various stories to suggest that I ought to give it at least a little more opportunity to set out its stall in these areas.

At any rate, while the framing sequence isn’t altogether persuasive, the one-shots are more interesting.  For the most part, they do succeed in establishing pretty clearly each character’s agenda and status quo at the outset of this story.  Whether what’s established is in any way coherent with anything that came before is, in some cases, rather more doubtful.  But we are at least left with a very clear idea of the position as this story is going to take it, and if you’re prepared to run with that, the individual issues aren’t bad at all.

The X-23 story, by Tim Seeley and Ariela Kristantina, takes as its starting point the idea that she’s devastated by Wolverine’s death and processes it as the death of a father figure who, being immortal and all, she had trusted to always be there for her.  That leads her to bitterly reject him as a supposed larger than life legend who turned out to be just a guy in a silly costume, only for her to cross paths with an outrageously low-level superhero (the former Alpha Flight member Windshear, of all people) and come to appreciate the importance of the symbolism even at his lowly point on the superhero pecking order.

Parts of her reaction don’t really make logical sense, but in this case I think it’s the right kind of irrationality.  We never saw X-23 develop any sort of significant relationship with Wolverine, but it’s not too hard to believe that it was quietly important to her in her own mind, and that she never knew how to take it any further.  More dubious is a scene in a bar where a guy tries to pick her up as a prostitute and she responds by giving him a moral lecture.  Yes, the story makes pretty clear that he’s a pathetic schlub who would take no for an answer (and that he’s still trying to take advantage of the desperate and confused, whether he knows it or not) – but for X-23 to react to him with anything other than outright contempt, let alone give him a speech about her feelings, strikes me as calling for a level of empathy that the character is fundamentally incapable of showing.

Still, the core idea of the story works, and the villains – a bunch of angst-ridden kids who are shooting up nightclubs in what they conceive to be some sort of performance art point about emotional pain – feels like something that could have wandered out of a Steve Gerber comic.  It’s an unexpectedly odd thing to find in this series, and fits in quite neatly as a parody of self-pity taken to ludicrous extremes.  Kristiana’s art is good stuff, with strong character work helped by subtle colouring  from Sonia Oback (though she does sometimes seem a bit awkward in rendering Windshear’s grand heroic gestures), and I’d be happy to see her back.

The Sabretooth issue, by Kyle Higgins and Jonathan Marks, is basically Sabretooth sulking around Mogadishu where he’s supposed to be helping out a bunch of rebel fighters.  In reality, he’s taking out his frustration at never having managed to prove his point that Wolverine is a mere pale copy of him, by picking off guys who could pass for Wolverine if you squint really, really hard, dressing them in a makeshift Wolverine costume, and then killing them.  The largely monochrome colouring is atmospheric but the art has some serious intelligibility problems where action is concerned, and the basic concept manages to combine being Sabretooth 101 with failing to flow convincingly either from Paul Cornell’s depiction of the character, or Soule’s own take in Death of Wolverine, which weren’t compatible with each other either.

In fairness to Higgins, this may be because there’s nothing to usefully set up with Sabretooth.  His flashback story plainly takes place before Axis, but it’s strongly hinted in Wolverines that the main story takes place after.  If so, the take here seems to be that we’re looking at the inverted Sabretooth but that he’s keeping up the appearances of being the old character in order to maintain his intimidation factor as a matter of self-preservation.  That’s actually a more interesting take on the concept than Uncanny Avengers would seem to promise.

(Higgins’ story also seems to be under the impression that Mogadishu is still in a state of civil war, though.  In fact, while it’s still one of the most dangerous cities on earth, the actual rebel forces were driven out over three years ago.)

Issue #4, with Lady Deathstrike, is by Marguerite Bennett and Juan Doe – so it’s nothing if not visually stylish.  Whether it makes a great deal of sense is more debatable; the central set piece is something about a fight with a demon thingy that manifests through nano-technology tattoos on three henchmen, which is both a confusing idea and confusingly depicted.  The idea seems to be that you beat it by taking out the henchmen, but it’s not well conveyed.  Broadly, the angle here seems to be since her quest for revenge on Wolverine has been rendered academic, Deathstrike needs a new purpose in life and fixes on taking over his role in keeping the Tokyo underworld in check (which it turns out he was doing a lot of – who knew?).  This makes a certain kind of sense, since it gives her a function and it’s plausibly driven by a desire to prove some kind of point by at least taking over Wolverine’s role and doing it better.  But it’s one of two stories where the grinding of gears is glaringly evident as a character is forcibly repositioned for the requirements of the upcoming series.

The Daken story, by Ray Fawkes (co-writer of Wolverines) and Elia Bonetti, is the other.  The cover art shows pretty clearly that the editors were well aware that Daken was last seen as a blue-skinned henchman of the Apocalypse Twins in Uncanny Avengers, but the actual stories ignore that entirely (possibly, to be fair, because his time as an experimental subject must logically have happened since then, so there’s a gap to be filled in due course).  On this version, Daken is apparently driven to protect his late father’s honour by hunting down and killing people who are selling Wolverine memorabilia on the underworld.  This is sort of plausible as a development of the character, who was never on good terms with his father but was at least obsessed with him in some degree.  You can make a case for Daken being the sort of character who would, in turn, become equally obsessed with control of his father’s legacy.  Weirdly, though, the story seems to be convinced that Daken has hitherto been a fighter who works on instinct alone (when he’s been written for years as a scheming manipulator), and he’s generally written in these stories in a vaguely sympathetic way that seems largely off character.  It wouldn’t be a bad story if it was persuasive as a take on Daken as previously established, but it really isn’t.

Finally, James Tynion IV and Andy Clarke get the Mystique issue, which is both a whopping retcon and a crucial part of the larger plot – leaving them the least freedom of all the creative teams, you would assume.  For all that, they do an excellent job of using her shape-changing powers in creative ways and selling what she can do in terms of usurping people’s identities or simply causing confusion by hiding in plain sight among her opponents.  The big plot idea here is that she and Wolverine are long-time arch-enemies going back decades (er, what?), and that way back even before his Weapon X days he had routinely thwarted her schemes for domination (er, even more what?).  Destiny, being Destiny, foresaw the current story years ago but didn’t tell Mystique about it because it would have led to her trying to accelerate Wolverine’s death and getting beaten yet again.  Now that it’s happened without her, Mystique can finally be given the advice that Destiny recorded long ago on how to make sure that she comes out of the upcoming story as the winner.

Obviously, that’s pretty important to Wolverines.  But the idea of Wolverine as some sort of century-long arch-enemy for Mystique is a glaringly contrived retcon; it’s not an established part of their relationship and it sits unconvincingly with Wolverine’s own character arc, where he only becomes consistently a hero after hitting bottom post Weapon X and rebuilding himself with Alpha Flight and the X-Men.  It’s not so much that it’s an inherently bad idea as that you can see the strings a mile off.

A mixed bag, then.  But there are points of genuine interest in here, and if some of these approaches to the characters do become embedded as orthodox, then a lot of the problems here will fade with hindsight.  Not entirely convincing at this stage, but it’s got something.

 

 

 

Bring on the comments

  1. Chris says:

    Given how Bendis retconned the events of THE THANOS IMPERATIVE it looks like a reboot more than a relaunch.

    Prior to Bendis Rocket Raccoon was not a psychotic kill-crazy criminal.

  2. wwk5d says:

    But he gave Rocket Raccoon a kewl catchphrase! Or tried to, anyway.

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