Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program
We’re running a few weeks behind here – the first Wolverines arc will be finished imminently, come to think of it – but let’s not allow Weapon X Program to completely pass us by. That said. we probably need to say a few worlds about Secret Wars first, don’t we?
The official line from Marvel is that Secret Wars represents the end of the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe, after which we’re going to get “Battleworld”, which seems to be some sort of mash-up of alternate worlds and such forth. This is, pretty obviously, what Jonathan Hickman has been building to in Avengers for a while, and also what Brian Bendis has been moving towards with all the stuff about time breaking down, as which of course forms the central premise of All-New X-Men.
Fairly obviously, Battleworld is not going to be a long-term status quo. A more immediate concern is that, from the looks of it, it’s going to sprawl across the entire line for several months. Marvel has a pretty bad track record of taking a vaguely cool concept and spreading it so thin that any halfway sensible reader grows to hate it by the time the story is halfway through, and warning bells are already ringing for me that this could be another case of the interminables. But leave that aside and let’s ask what comes next. The obvious implication is, if not a reboot, at least some sort of continuity streamlining.
Claiming that the Ultimate Universe is going to be folded into the Marvel Universe is not much of a selling point, because we all know what that means – it means the Marvel Universe with added Miles Morales. Aside from him, the Ultimate Universe is basically a shuffling corpse, and it’s hard to imagine a serious attempt to simply import these failed versions of the same characters. More likely, we’re going to get something that smushes a bunch of histories together and tries to fudge it all, Crisis-style, by claiming that the result is both a reboot and a continuation of what went before.
Remember, Crisis was not conceived specifically as a reboot, but as a folding of multiple continuities into one. The problems started mounting up when DC decided to completely rewrite the history of several major characters, screwing up the histories of those books that were trying to continue as before, ultimately resulting in a continuity train wreck that DC never really managed to sort out before eventually dynamiting the whole thing and starting over. Hopefully, if Marvel are going down the partial reboot route, they’ve planned it out more carefully. The fact that this has evidently been in the works for ages is promising in that regard. But we’ll see.
The other problem, once you announce something like Secret Wars, is how to stop the stories appearing now from looking like lame ducks that are marking time until the shake-up. Of course, if your story is actually building to the shake-up, as Avengers and All-New X-Men are (at least notionally) doing, that’s one thing. But – to bring us back to the notional topic of this post – something like killing Wolverine is in a trickier position. After all, it’s precisely the sort of supposedly universe-breaking stunt that you can do really quite easily if the universe itself is imminently heading for the reset button anyway.
Perhaps all you can do in these circumstances is work to convince the reader that you do have a story to tell, and you will be completing it with a proper ending rather than a cosmic reset button. Charles Soule wisely isn’t doing stories about people trying to bring Wolverine back from the dead; the characters in Weapon X Project barely know who he is and don’t greatly care whether he’s alive or not. Their story – which is about a bunch of Dr Cornelius’ experimental subjects escaping from his facility in the confusion after Wolverine’s death – is about things that have nothing much to do with wider Marvel Universe continuity at all, which at least promises that the story is likely to resolve on its own terms.
This series is largely an exercise in introducing five new main characters, and setting up the premise of the Wolverines series to follow, by introducing the organisation that sat behind Cornelius and was sponsoring his work. And the new cast are a fairly appealing bunch, with distinctive personalities and an intriguing group dynamic. They’re not really heroes so much as people stuck together by force of circumstances. Neuro is plainly an outright scheming villain who is only sticking around so long as it makes sense as an alliance of convenience, and by the end, everyone knows it. Sharp is the obvious hero, but stuck with a voice in his head that keeps trying to steer him in the wrong direction. Skel and Endo are likeable if confused. (Endo is probably the weakest of the characters thus far, in as much as she’s not really bringing anything to the table beyond bursts of panic.) And Junk seems to be the dark horse; a couple of references imply a fairly nasty criminal past which he wants to keep to himself, but unlike Neuro, he appears to be a genuine team player.
It’s pretty decent on the whole, and it’s a nice change for an X-book to commit unequivocally to telling stories about entirely new characters. Granted, it may have been a mistake to start the series by teasing that the voice in Sharp’s head is Wolverine. It works in terms of the book’s plot. It seems vaguely like something that could happen in the Marvel Universe, and the actual explanation (it’s a weakened Ogun who can’t quite possess Sharp and is trying to string him along) makes sense. But it also means that the book kicks off by teasing something that would have been entirely groan worthy – namely, bringing back Wolverine only a couple of weeks after he died – which isn’t a great way of setting the tone.
Oh, and while it starts off with Salvador Larroca on art, he vanishes after three issues, to be replaced by Angel Unzueta. The style is pretty consistent, though, and Unzueta’s work doesn’t feel rushed.
As five issue set-up arcs go, this is fine. If nothing else, it clearly achieves its main goal of establishing key concepts and giving us reasons to care about the characters. There have been better Wolverine stories than Soule is writing, but considering the tricky remit he’s been landed with, the fact that he’s landing consistently in the B+ range is no small achievement.
A nasty thought occurred to me just how . . . we’re all taking it for granted that Bendis’ X-MEN is leading into SECRET WARS, built off AGE OF ULTRON as one of the catalyzing events. But WHAT IF it turns out that the stories don’t have anything to do with each other and we’ve been giving them more credit than they deserve. Ha ha ha.
With Bendis, that is all too likely.
Yeah, I don’t think Bendis’s plot has anything to do with Remender’s at all.
Honestly, I think the number of new ongoing books Marvel is launching in the months leading up to SW – Uncanny Avengers v2, Uncanny Inhumans, Silk, Spider-Gwen, Hawkeye, Howard the Duck, etc. – makes any significant continuity revision unlikely at best. But we’ll see, I guess.
I picked up the first couple of issues of WOLVERINES more or less on a whim and they’re a pleasingly diverting way to pass the time. There’s not a lot of room to set out more than the broadest strokes of the characters, and there are a couple of plot points from the Weapon X series that are taken for granted as audience knowledge, but for what’s basically a two-issue fight sequence they’re quite entertaining. Nick Bradshaw’s art on his issue appears to be something of a rush job (and has a fill-in for two pages), which is a bit on the weird side given that it’s the launch issue, but it’s not enough to drag it down (and even rushed Bradshaw is still pretty good).
The end result of importing the Ultimate Universe over to the 616 will probably be Miles Morales *plus* a bunch of teen characters who can die messily to prove that this event is srs bizness. Seems to be the standard fate for young, surplus superheroes.
@Suzene If Dan Dido was at Marvel I would be very worried about the Ultimate Universe’s teen characters. But you right, some teen characters will be meet an untimely demise. I have a feeling Ganke and Bombshell will make the transition along with Miles.
I would not be surprised if Wolverines continued through summer. If the characters are popular enough and sales warrant, I could see some iteration of the team continuing. Besides we know that various iterations of Logan will be populating Battleworld.
@Mo I’m no fan of DC, but offing the new IP isn’t territory exclusive to Didio. Ultimatum, the New X-Men, Young X-Men, Avengers Arena…Marvel’s done its share.
“Honestly, I think the number of new ongoing books Marvel is launching in the months leading up to SW – Uncanny Avengers v2, Uncanny Inhumans, Silk, Spider-Gwen, Hawkeye, Howard the Duck, etc. – makes any significant continuity revision unlikely at best. But we’ll see, I guess.”
DC did it right with Flashpoint right after they did Brightest Day that should have resulted in major changes that were wiped out with Flashpoint
@Suzene Touche. What is it about DC and Marvel Executives killing teen characters. It must be some kind of power trip.
“The end result of importing the Ultimate Universe over to the 616 will probably be Miles Morales *plus* a bunch of teen characters who can die messily to prove that this event is srs bizness.”
Probably at least one ‘big’ Marvel character will be replaced with an Ultimate version, only to be reverted years later due to fans turning their backs to the idea.
Is Ultimate Wolverine alive? What if 616 Wolverine is dead because Marvel felt that they’d be able to replace him with Ultimate Wolverine, both to keep a Wolverine in action and to sell the idea that the merger is more than Miles Moralez+cannon fodder? And if so, then how long before Marvel realizes fans wouldn’t accept the replacement?
@Scott “DC did it right with Flashpoint right after they did Brightest Day that should have resulted in major changes that were wiped out with Flashpoint.”
I don’t think anyone disputes that New 52 was a hastily slapped-together effort and that the unresolved Brightest Day cliffhangers are proof of that, but there were no new ongoing books from DC for most of 2011 so that comparison doesn’t quite hold up.
Basically, either Marvel is lying about Secret Wars and its ramifications having been planned well in advance and All-New Marvel is an even more rushed effort than the New 52, or all these #1s are an elaborate smokescreen to conceal their actual relaunch plans… or All-New Marvel Now isn’t actually as big a deal as they want people to believe, and won’t entail any linewide relaunch or significant changes to existing continuity.
I know which of those scenarios I’d bet on.
Yay, a new bunch of X-character introduced who will go off into comic book limbo once this series is canceled, unless they end up being cannon fodder for a writer who needs a body count to make his/her story legit.
As for Miles Moralez…until Marvel kills of 616 Peter and starts having Spider-man movies with him as the main character, he really is pointless in a merged universe. Well, besides allowing Marvel to pat themselves on the back for being progressive or some dumb shit like that.
“What is it about DC and Marvel Executives killing teen characters. It must be some kind of power trip.”
You do realize these characters are fictional, yes? And it’s not just teen characters that get killed off, yes? Wolverine? Nick Fury? Future’s End fodder? You’re projecting your own disturbing concern for fictional characters.
The death of teenaged characters regards the issue of how time flows in the “illusion of change” universes of superhero comics. Adult heroes, over time, have events happen, but don’t seem to really age (otherwise, new ‘generations’ of readers would not be able to read about them). The problem comes into play when teen-aged characters are introduced and follow the teen-age script of going through high school and such – one that usually proceeds to actually age them. Over time, this will necessitate making them into adults or showing too clearly the illusion at play (“tenth grade AGAIN!?”), so those characters are often written out or used as the cannon fodder needed for events – because they’re now liabilities.
Consider the backlog of ‘generations’ of young X-Men characters behind the New Mutants who, themselves, have been stuck at around early twenties at best due to the fixed age of other characters. Likewise, look at how many generations of New Titans/Teen Titans/Young Justice at DC have had the same problem when the Justice League is locked into their thirties – how many Robins can you fit into the lifetime of a Batman who won’t age? These young deaths in many cases not only provide a an answer for how to preserve a homeostasis (the ultimate “putting them on the bus”), but it often actually gives greater meaning to a more minor character that would otherwise fade away (and, being superhero comics, death in a minor obstacle to bringing said character back if needed – and then the age issue can be fixed however needed in many cases). ‘Fans’ on the Internet often ascribe downright inhuman characteristics to those behind the books that they read, not realizing the issues at play – such as, in this case, the matters inherent in the way that superhero universes attempt to use the illusion of change while preserving the eternal now AND introducing new generations of characters…
“…ultimately resulting in a continuity train wreck that DC never really managed to sort out before eventually dynamiting the whole thing and starting over.”
Wait, there’s been another continuity shuffling over at DC after the whole Flashpoint reboot?
At least two, as a matter of fact, Mike: Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis.
Oh, wait, you mean after Flashpoint?
Not overtly. But there were a lot of soft reboots or just plain loose plots, IMO.
For instance, I don’t think we are at all clear on what happened to the Legion Lost, or even of which Earth they came from. And Lobo has gone through at least three incarnations with little to no explanation, I hear.
The Legion Lost are still in the present, they just showed up in JLU.
“Consider the backlog of ‘generations’ of young X-Men characters behind the New Mutants who, themselves, have been stuck at around early twenties at best due to the fixed age of other characters.”
Going by the old rule of thumb where 4 or 5 years of Marvel comics represented 1 year for the characters, the New Mutants debuted at…16? And are now about 7 years older. That works fine, and if it works for them it certainly works for the later X-kids.